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Cut trash with tiny trash cans

We tend to associate the "everything bigger" approach with wastefulness -- oversized cars guzzle gas, McMansions drive up electricity bills, 72-ounce challenge steaks never get fully eaten. So it makes sense to think that downsizing trash cans might help downsize trash. That's what they're finding at Dartmouth College, anyway, where trash cans as small as quart-size yogurt containers (that's my ineptly 'shopped comparison above) are cutting down on waste.

When is it time to break up with your utility?

Boulder ends its franchise agreement with Xcel Energy and looks into independent, renewable options instead.

New solar cells can be printed on paper or fabric

Finally, your dream of solar pants (that don't look douchey) can come true! MIT researchers have devised solar panels that can be printed directly onto fabric, plastic, or paper, as easily as printing from an inkjet. The result is a flexible, malleable solar panel with enough juice to power ... well, okay, barely any juice at all right now. But it's still in the early stages of development! Besides, once you pair your solar pants with a solar shirt, tie, bag, fedora, and shoes, it'll start to add up, and you will also look very snappy.

Fight climate change by following the speed limit

Bay Area drivers could get a friendly push from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission to fight climate change through "smart driving." This means: going easy on fuel consumption by avoiding sudden acceleration, keeping their tires inflated, ditching the golf clubs in the truck, keeping their cars tuned up, and most of all, following the goddamn speed limit.

Spanish city lets you trade in your car for a lifetime pass on public transit

The Spanish city of Murcia offered its residents a lifetime of free trolley rides if they would only give up their cars.

Toronto women's shelter starts bike-sharing program

When you're broke and scared and used to not being in charge of your own life, regaining autonomy is a step-by-step process. Getting on a bike can help with all that.

Zero-energy lighting for poor communities requires only water and bleach

It can get pretty dark under the corrugated metal roofs of Manila’s slums. Millions of families in the Philippines go without electric light, and those who have it can be at risk of fires from faulty wiring. But thanks to an innovation developed at MIT and distributed by the Liter of Light project, that problem […]

So much for GOP's lightbulb bill

Whether they decided they had more important things to worry about than saving the inefficient lightbulb, or whether they were scared of enraging the ghost of Thomas Edison, House members put the kibosh on a bill that would have repealed lightbulb efficiency standards.

Coal company: 'Birth defects aren't from mining, they're because you're inbred hicks'

Babies born in areas with mountaintop-removal mining have higher rates of birth defects -- we know that from a study that came out last month. But, say coal companies, that doesn't mean the mining CAUSES the birth defects! They could easily be caused by something else -- like, say, rampant inbreeding.

Critical List: It’s hot; 2.7 million Americans work in clean energy

It's hot. It's hot. It's hooooottttt.

You want green jobs? Here are your green jobs: 2.7 million Americans are employed in the clean energy economy, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution.

But that could all end with a drop-off in government subsidies across the world.