Latest Articles

Tea Party will protect humans from manatees

Rep. Rich Nugent (R-Fla.) proposes an amendment to the Interior and Environment appropriations bill that blocks the creation of a manatee refuge.

Could a carbon tax help solve our budget woes?

In addition to generating much-needed revenue, a carbon tax would force industries to pay for the pollution they create, instead of placing the burden on the public.

Green crush: How does your garden grow?

There's nothing quite contrary about Eagle Street Farm.

The plastics industry will do anything to keep you using plastic bags

Plastic bags are the genital warts of litter -- they're incredibly widespread, nearly impossible to get rid of, and can lead to much worse problems down the line. The only thing that works is prevention -- i.e. not using them in the first place. But the plastics industry doesn't take too kindly to that. Here's a sampling of the tactics the industry has used to keep people from weaning themselves off plastic bags:

British kids build greenhouse out of plastic bottles

What do you do with the empty plastic bottles that you really shouldn't have been drinking out of, anyway? These British school children spent a year and half collecting 1,500 of them and used the bottles to construct a greenhouse, in which they are very successfully growing tomatoes.

People living near mountaintop-removal mines have way more cancer

Mountaintop-removal mining is not only bad for the environment, it's bad -- very bad -- for the health of the people who are exposed to it. A new study, based on a door-to-door survey, found that in communities exposed to this type of mining, cancer rates were twice as high as in communities that weren’t exposed. That's after controlling for all of those other cancer-causing factors: age, sex, smoking, occupation, etc.

Destroying nature so people can look at nature in Yosemite Park

Yosemite National Park is a great place for appreciating nature, what with the mountains and the wildlife and so forth. But there's one thing spoiling the bucolic beauty for everyone: All those damn trees. They are so in the way! They're like the mist that comes up off Niagara Falls and ruins all your photographs. If only they'd cut them down, so we could get back to looking at nature!

After hundreds of earthquakes, Arkansas shuts down fracking disposal wells

Here's a novel idea: if your local extraction industry is causing hundreds of earthquakes, make them stop doing whatever it was that was causing the earthquakes.

That's exactly what the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission did yesterday, when its members voted to shut down a fracking fluid disposal well and ban the drilling of new ones. The Associated Press explains:

Introducing the world's first compostable bikini

Women hate swimsuit shopping, am I right? And we all know why: Because swimsuits do not disintegrate when buried underground for 180 days. Luckily, designer Linda Loudermilk has come out with the world's first line of compostable swimwear.

Conservative pundits deny existence of record-breaking heat wave

Rush Limbaugh says "almost no temperature records were broken" during the recent heat wave, and Newsbusters writer Noel Sheppard says there were "only 34 new all-time daily temperature records set." Only 34? Why, that's barely a record-breaking heat wave at all! Except for the fact that a) 34 records is nothing to sneeze at and b) by "34," Sheppard means "somewhere between 70 and 7,612."