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Detroit farm school for teen moms has been saved

Catherine Ferguson Academy, the awesome urban farm high school for pregnant and parenting teens, has risen from the ashes. Michigan's emergency financial manager decided last week to shutter the school, which has a 90 percent graduation rate. But it's been rescued by a company called Evans Solutions and will continue as a charter school, which will be open to all Detroit public school students.

New map of NYC shows how much you could save with solar

Solar power in New York could meet half of the city's peak energy demands. The city's been fully assessed for solar capability, using a plane-mounted radar system called Lidar that checks out whether rooftops are suitable for solar panels. Turns out a full 66 percent of them are, and the city and its inhabitants could be saving a buttload of money and energy by making use of that fact. If New York could harness all its rooftop potential, it would triple the amount of solar energy currently installed nationwide.

German rooftop solar price *averages* less than $4 per watt

This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. Earlier this spring I shared a graphic illustrating the dramatic fall in distributed solar PV prices in Germany, down to $4.11 per Watt installed, for rooftop systems under 100 kilowatts.  As it turns out, the graphic was […]

Geothermal power is heating up worldwide

Geothermal power has grown at just 3 percent annually over the last decade, but the pace is set to pick up substantially, with close to 9,000 megawatts of new capacity projected for 2015.

Dying to save the rainforest

At the end of May, José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, Mario do Espírito Santo, were killed. Both lived in Brazil's Amazon rainforest and had fought back against loggers illegally harvesting wood. Da Silva had expected death for a long time, but said he wouldn’t let that stop him: “[M]y fear does not silence me. As long as I have the strength to walk I will denounce all of those who damage the forest."

That same week, another activist, Adelino Ramos, was shot and killed. The week after that, an activist identified only as Marcos was shot. When witnesses tried to take him to the hospital, gunmen stopped them on the way and killed the wounded man.

A few brave conservatives speak up for climate sanity

Conservative D.R. Tucker and David Roberts spoke on Brad Friedman's radio show on how the right and enviros can find common ground on climate change.

How oil and gas companies that deny climate change are adapting to it anyway

Next to agriculture, the industry most vulnerable to climate change is, arguably, the extraction of the very fossil fuels that are causing it, says Michael Cote at GOOD. And while this industry is spending millions to deny that climate change even exists and to block efforts to deal with it, it's also going to need to spend billions to cope with its effects.

Sure, climate change sucks harder than a collapsed star, but at least it's leading to ironies so vast that only particles of sputtering dumbfoundedness can escape.

Cardboard bike helmets are safer than plastic

Yeah, it sounds a little Calvin & Hobbes, but riding around with corrugated cardboard on your head can actually be safer than the plastic and Styrofoam concoctions you get at the bike store. The Kranium cardboard bike helmet absorbs four times more impact energy than equivalent polystyrene. One helmet was smashed five times in a row and still had enough muscle to pass a standard safety test. And yeah, it's waterproof.

How we’ll get ultra-efficient solar cells by copying plants' 'quantum biology'

Some day solar cells will be as cheap as house paint, and the renewables vs. fossil fuel debate will seem as quaint as Whigs vs. Jacksonian Democrats. Getting there has inspired all kinds of crazy ideas, and the craziest, perhaps, is to do it exactly like plants do.

Thing is, your average plant turns out to be exploiting tricks of physics that most scientists used to think were only possible inside a lab, under high vacuum, at the intersection of a bunch of laser beams cooling a handful of atoms to near absolute zero.

This clean air ad was deemed too hot for Boston public transit

Man, is this ad from 350.org ever edgy! First, it has a big picture of Scott Brown -- granted, just his face, not even his pecs or anything, but you know what's implied by a picture of a congressman. Rowr! And just look at those naked facts, parading themselves around so shamelessly. No wonder the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority refuses to post it on trains.