Latest Articles

Despite recession, Californians install solar panels at record-breaking pace

While the drill-baby-drill contingent was bitching about reliance on foreign oil, that hacky-sack full of smelly Nancy-Pelosi-electing hippies known as California quietly installed more solar in 2010 than any other state, ever.

500 MW of distributed solar could have prevented blackout that affected 55 million

The massive blackout of 2003, which affected 45 million people in the northeast United States and 10 million more in Ontario, could have been prevented by just 500 megawatts of distributed solar, says John Farrell of the Institute for Local Self Reliance. For reference, California installed almost 200 megawatts of distributed solar in 2010 alone.

Limitless supply of rare earth elements found in ocean — if we can get them

The seabed of the Pacific ocean contains 1,000 times as much tonnage of rare earth elements as all the deposits on land, says a new paper published in Nature Geoscience. The elements, which are key to cleantech innovations like solar panels, batteries and electric motors, have been in short supply lately as China, pretty much the world's sole supplier, clamps down on exports.

Ranchers are clearing the Amazon rainforest with Agent Orange

In Brazil, ranchers are opting to use Agent Orange -- one of the most toxic herbicides ever concocted, infamous for its use as a defoliant and de facto weapon during the Vietnam War -- to clear acres of rainforest. It's illegal to clear the forest, but by spraying swaths of trees with Agent Orange, deployed by helicopter, ranchers stand less chance of detection than if they cleared the land by bulldozing or cutting down trees.

Stock up on wine and bacon before climate change gets worse

Hippies have been fighting for awareness and action on global warming for a long time, but now yuppies and hipsters will have to join in. In the last week we've gotten news that bacon prices will soar and California wines will suffer due to inhospitable crop-growing conditions. It's one thing to live in a slowly crumbling world, but to live in it without bacon or wine? Now it's SERIOUS.

ExxonMobil, historic flooding join forces to spread oil through Yellowstone River

The oil leaking from an ExxonMobil pipe into the Yellowstone River in Montana spread farther than the company said it anticipated. The reason, according to ExxonMobil’s spokespeople, is historic levels of flooding on the river. By Tuesday, Exxon had 280 people on the case, but still hadn’t managed to fight through floodwaters to reach the break in the pipeline. Exxon says the river is preventing its clean-up crews from going out on foot or in boats to look for oil on the river's banks.

Exxon did shut down the busted pipeline, but not before spilling more than 40,000 gallons of oil that they say it’s not yet safe to clean up, due to the floods. The company had been warned twice that it needed to check the pipeline for corrosion and update its emergency plans -- but now that there is actually a broken pipeline and an emergency, it’s obviously all the river’s fault.

Is Los Angeles Metro throwing bus riders under the bus?

What does the elimination of a bus line serving mostly Latino domestic workers say about the Los Angeles transit system?

Believing in climate change gets you votes

Here's good news if the phrase "President Bachmann" sends you into a twitching, frothing fit: For candidates on both sides of the aisle, the best vote-getting strategy is to take climate change seriously. 

Rising Temperatures Melting Away Global Food Security

Heat waves clearly can destroy crop harvests. The world saw high heat decimate Russian wheat in 2010. Crop ecologists have found that each 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum can reduce grain harvests by 10 percent. But the indirect effects of higher temperatures on our food supply are no less serious.  Rising temperatures are […]

WWF leaflet campaign reaches 285,142 people with one piece of paper

As certified genius Mitch Hedberg once said, when someone hands you a flyer on the street, it's like they're saying "here, YOU throw this away." But the panda-suited chuggers in this World Wildlife Fund leaflet campaign are saying "here, YOU read this on your way up the escalator where it will be collected by another panda and distributed to the next person who will then bring it back down the escalator to be re-collected and re-distributed by the original panda." It's a little more complicated, but it involves a lot less waste.