Latest Articles

Why wasting food wastes nature, too

Waste not, want not: In order to meet global food demand, we should decrease food waste instead of expanding agriculture.Photo: Christoph LupprichCross-posted from Cool Green Science. A new report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations finds that globally, roughly one-third of all food produced for human consumption is wasted. But […]

Bachelorette contestant, Charlie Sheen add wattage to NYC solar campaign

The Bachelorette‘s Ryan Park. Photo: Karina Marchese of REC Solar What do GE, Charlie Sheen, and the most promising bachelor on The Bachelorette have in common? They all are playing a role in bringing solar to New York. The New York Solar Jobs Act is an effort to bring 5 gigawatts of solar to the […]

Why Republicans are fighting Obama’s commerce pick

President Obama nominated long-time successful energy executive John Bryson to be secretary of commerce yesterday, in a move representative Darrell Issa calls "deeply out of touch with our current energy challenge." Wait, what? See, before Bryson was the president of the California Public Utilities Commission, or the CEO of Edison International, or the director of […]

Chris Christie takes a helicopter to a baseball game

I was going to put a joke in the headline, but is it really necessary? I mean, here are the facts without jokes: Chris Christie, the transit-killing, mall-building, climate-initiative-withdrawing governor of New Jersey, hopped on a state helicopter to go to his kid's baseball game — and once he alit, a private car took him […]

How solar power will become cheaper than fossil fuels in three to five years

Are you ready to flip the bird at your utility company? Lord knows you probably will be after you get the bill for what's shaping up to be an especially hot June. Luckily, a whole host of companies working on improving a novel solar technology would like to help you do it. The new tech […]

Japanese workers wear Hawaiian shirts to save energy

To prevent rolling blackouts as a result of the failure of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant, the Japanese government is mandating that all offices set their thermostats at 82 degrees F this summer. Combined with the usual salaryman armor — a dark business suit — that sounds a little like the eighth circle of hell (the […]

Roads cause traffic

Yeah, it actually does need to be said. Folks with an investment in expanding highway infrastructure like to act as though the only way to relieve congestion is to build more roads for those cars to ride on. But a soon-to-be-published study shows that traffic expands to fill the space allotted. More roads don't mean […]

New NASA map shows how much carbon is stored in global forests

NASA has just released a new map which shows the carbon stored in the forests around the world.  While it doesn’t show us exactly which forests are at risk of deforestation – thus turning the current stored carbon into carbon pollution that causes global warming – it does provide us with a visual of what […]

The nuclear industry has powerful backers and weak opponents in D.C.

This is part two in a series on the United States and nuclear power. Read parts one, three, and four. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) is the lobby association for the entire process chain of the nuclear industry in the U.S., from uranium mining to the manufacture of the reactors and the supply of nuclear […]

Once and for all, do cell phones cause cancer?

Maybe. The World Health Organization has released a report [PDF] on the connections between cell phone use and cancer. It concluded that cell phones are a "possible" carcinogen, and there was much out-freaking. But what does this really mean? It does not, it turns out, mean that cell phones definitely or even likely cause cancer. It […]