Latest Articles

Critical List: John Bryson’s green credentials; biodegradable cups end as methane

John Bryson, Obama's new pick for commerce secretary, is a dyed-green-in-the-wool environmentalist (he co-founded NRDC), who's taken a swing through the corporate world. The U.N. carbon market shrunk for the first time since it was founded in 2005. Who's to blame? The U.S. Senate, of course! (Well, among others, but we have the most fun […]

Mom-and-pop vs. big-box stores in the food desert

A locally owned grocery in Pleasantville, Iowa. Photo: Ashton B Crew, wikimedia commonsA few weeks ago, when the Obama administration released its Food Desert Locator, many of us realized that a once-good idea has spoiled like a bag of old bread. If you go online and find that your family lives in a food desert, […]

Apollo and BlueGreen Alliance merge — a smart move at a time of clean-energy trouble

Last week, the Apollo Alliance and the BlueGreen Alliance, two of the most important national nonprofits supporting clean energy development and good jobs, announced that as of July 1, they would merge. The much larger Minneapolis-based BlueGreen Alliance, a five-year-old collaboration of big green groups and unions, will become the parent of San Francisco-based Apollo, which […]

Megacity mayors leading the fight for sustainable survival at the C40 summit

The megacity of Sao Paulo, Brazil.Photo: Luiz Henrique Varga AssuncaoCross-posted from ThinkProgress. Leaders of the world’s megacities are meeting in Sao Paulo this week for a major climate summit, the fourth meeting of the C40 Climate Leadership Group. From Michael Bloomberg of New York City to Kuma Demeksa of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the mayors and […]

A yarn bomb in Hell’s Kitchen [VIDEO]

Yarn bombing — covering stuff on the street with crocheted or knitted cozies — has become a common enough practice that it merited the dreaded “trend” treatment in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago. That doesn’t mean that it can’t still be very cool. And this little video is about an especially […]

Rejecting high-speed rail is not a good political move

Hey, it turns out people don't want to get divorced and die because of long car commutes! Actually, we're just guessing about that (makes sense, though, right?), but what's clear is that constituents won't thank you for nixing rail projects. Gas 2.0 checked in with the biggest rail refusenik governors, and they're all faltering in […]

Manhattanhenge makes life in the city a little more magical

Today is Manhattanhenge, one of the two days a year when the setting sun lines up perfectly with the New York City street grid. Next to Central Park and possibly the High Line, it might be the best demonstration that living in the city doesn't rule out natural beauty … it just maybe makes it […]

Suburban corporate campuses are going out of fashion

Is the corporate suburban stampede finally reversing? Photo: KevinCross-posted from the Natural Resources Defense Council. In the late 1990s, when Don Chen, Matt Raimi, and I were researching our book, Once There Were Greenfields, we lamented the flight of business from America’s central cities to increasingly outer suburbs and farmland. In that book we frequently […]

The wind money windfall in Sherman County, Oregon

Residents of Oregon's Sherman County used to hate on the strong winds endemic to the area. But now they pull in $590 per year, per household, just for tolerating the wind and the many wind turbines marring their viewshed. It’s like the oil payout for living in Alaska, only it’s not blood money from cannibalizing […]

Canada omitted 20 percent increase in oil-sands emissions from U.N. report

Canada reported to the United Nations that the country's greenhouse-gas emissions were dropping, down 6 percent in the last year. But the government left out one teensy little detail in its report. The emissions from the oil-sands industry, which extracts hard-to-reach oil from tar sands, increased by 20 percent in 2009. Pollution from the oil […]