Latest Articles

Beware the pollution-dumping space tube

It has a way of really hamstringing environmental activism. (Image via the always-hilarious Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.)

Critical List: Senate could cut energy subsidies; organic lipsticks fail to meet criteria

Energy tax breaks are on trial in the Senate, amidst a weird vogue for Republicans opposing them. What are they planning?

People outside of Washington do believe in climate change, whatever their political  beliefs. They also overwhelmingly support bike lanes and expanded public transportation. Even people who vote Republican like this stuff. Congresspeople, take note.

Cheap natural gas is making it hard for money-minded people to invest in renewable energy.

How the West was lost to wildfires

See those massive columns of acrid smoke drifting eastward? It's a smoke signal warning us that a globally warming world is not a matter of some future worst-case scenario -- it's happening right here, right now.

SciAm op-ed: Kill biofuels to solve the food crisis

With the Senate successfully passing an amendment to end the 45-cent-per-gallon ethanol subsidy for American refiners and the 54-cent tariff on imported ethanol, I thought I'd point to this terrific op-ed in Scientific American on how to solve the food crisis. According to author Timothy Searchinger of Princeton University, it's the biofuels, stupid.

If the sun goes into 'hibernation,’ it won’t stop global warming

Climate change skeptics are ecstatic over an analysis that says by 2020, we might enter a period of low solar activity, which they spin as a mini ice age

Rebuilding New Orleans with urban farms and hot jazz [VIDEO]

This video tells the story of New Orleans residents who returned after Hurricane Katrina to rebuild the city and started growing food in abandoned lots

Don't ban raw milk because of the E. coli outbreak

Why is CNN trying to tie the recent European E. coli outbreak to raw milk?

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 […]