Latest Articles

Cities as software, and hacking the urban landscape

What if saving a rundown city wasn’t about building expensive new infrastructure — hardware, so to speak — but instead reprogramming the existing infrastructure? Changing the software of the place? That’s the analogy used by Marcus Westbury, founder of Renew Newcastle, an innovative initiative that has breathed life into the vacant downtown of that Australian […]

Hasta la vista, Arnie: Can the climate movement afford to lose Arnold Schwarzenegger?

He’s a colossal jerk, but do we still need him?Photo: Steve JurvetsonThe most prominent Republican voice for climate action is now in the (hound)doghouse. Turns out the Sperminator has been pumping more than iron. If you’re as revolted as I am, you might be tempted to toss the bum permanently overboard — but can we […]

Get ready for solar airplanes

There’s nothing that exciting about a plane that uses no fuel and emits no CO2 — I’ve been folding those since the fourth grade. A plane that uses no fuel, emits no CO2, has the same wingspan as an Airbus A340, and can transport people on international flights, though: That’s a big deal. And that’s […]

Why the environmental justice lawsuit against California’s climate law is misguided

Environmental justice is a noble cause, but the lawsuit against AB 32 is misguided.On May 20, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ernest Goldsmith ruled that the California Air Resources Board had not adequately explained its choice of a market-based mechanism — a cap-and-trade system — to achieve approximately 20 percent of targeted emissions reductions by […]

How the Feds saved enough water for a whole city with just a little bit of cash

The Department of the Interior's WaterSMART program will save enough water for a smallish city — 400,000 people — yet it cost only $24 million. As Tina Casey reports at CleanTechnica, the program works by going for the low-hanging fruit: 54 separate programs that address everything from farm irrigation to water distribution infrastructure. At $60 […]

The coming decline of accurate hurricane forecasts

NOAA put out this summer's hurricane forecast late last week, and it looks like it's going to be another doozy of a storm season. And that’s probably all we’re going to get in terms of forecasting. NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco took the opportunity to point out that, in the last round of budget cuts, Congress […]

Air pollution hurts motorists more than cyclists

If the thought of sucking down bus exhaust has you hesitating to take up that bicycle commute, you're in luck: It turns out you're better off on two wheels than four, even if it means breathing more particulate matter. That's the finding of a study conducted in the Netherlands, comparing the lung function of car […]

Maybe fracked natural gas isn’t dirtier than coal, after all

The climate story on natural gas is gnarlier than ever. First there was a paper from Robert Howarth of Cornell claiming that natural gas from fracking is worse than coal, as far as net warming effect on the earth. Now the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has fired back, sort of, with […]

Feral camels are coming to eat your air conditioner

… if you live in Australia, that is. Perhaps as a punishment for making me think about giant snakes, Australia is suffering yet another attempted takeover by non-native species, which periodically come in and disrupt the continent's carefully balanced ecosystem of massively deadly freaks of nature. This time, it’s feral camels. And they eat air […]

Can barcodes enforce sustainable logging in Liberia?

Liberia, semi-miraculously, is still covered in rainforest, even though at one point in its history, warlord Charles Taylor was more or less giving arms traffickers logging tracts in exchange for weapons. The U.N. eventually noticed this problem and ended up saving the country's forests by putting an embargo on the country's "logs of war.” But […]