Latest Articles

Watch a train run over a market (Everyone’s fine! They do this every day!)

Talk about dense living! At the Maeklong vegetable market in Thailand, retail and transportation are closely connected — like, really closely. The vendors lay out their wares so close to the train tracks that when the train comes through, it's literally sitting on top of the produce. Everyone just sort of puts up their awnings […]

U.S. marines save lives by ditching bottled water

You probably already know that bottled water is kind of the worst thing ever, but did you know it's getting people in supply convoys blown up? Like other heavy, bulky things our troops have to truck in (primarily fuel), bottled water makes Marines vulnerable to attack by improvised explosives. They don’t even have the luxury […]

New, ‘hidden’ source of renewable energy fights for tax breaks

Waste heat: It's everywhere, and we're wasting it. (Hence the name.) Giant industrial processes throw off enormous amounts of the stuff, all of it not quite hot enough to be usable in conventional power generation. That's where the waste heat industry comes in. Using liquids that boil at temperatures significantly lower than water, they've created […]

Three Gorges Dam has serious issues, China admits

When a country commits to any project as monstrous as China's Three Gorges Dam, it is bound to encounter occasional difficulties. The Chinese government, as governments are wont to do, has preferred to gloss over the dam's detriments and emphasize its attributes, like the 84 billion kilowatt hours of electricity it produced last year. But […]

L.A. Times: Obama is throwing ‘the environment and public health under a bus’ to get reelected

Photo: The White HouseThe L.A. Times has delivered a blistering editorial that everybody in the White House should read: In the 2012 campaign, environmentalists don’t matter That’s the message President Obama is sending as the administration caters to smokestack and other industries. Ouch. Here’s the whole thing: Shortly after his party’s “shellacking” in the midterm […]

Denmark’s government throws down the gauntlet: 100 percent renewables by 2050

Lots of people talk about the possibility of getting to 100 percent renewables by such and such a date — if every one of these reports came true, we'd be exporting surplus wind power to the asteroid belt by now. But few countries are actually doing it. Denmark is one. And Denmark would like you […]

Last seen in 1898, red-crested tree rat pokes its nose out

This is a very fuzzy, cute rodent, and no one has seen one like it since 1898. It's called a red-crested tree rat, or, more evocatively, a red-crested soft-furred spiny-rat. This one wandered up to two volunteers at Fundacións ProAves' El Dorado Nature Reserve in Colombia earlier this month and hung around for a couple […]

Turning over the new Leaf

How do the Leaf’s emissions stack up?Finally. If you don’t like being dependent on oil — but find that you do need to drive — you’ve got at least one decent option. The Nissan Leaf is the first mass-produced, mass-market electric vehicle to hit the U.S. sales floors in … well, essentially forever. (Yeah, I […]

Jon Stewart caused global warming

The Daily Show – Lisa P. Jackson Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook   EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson was on the Daily Show last night, where she promised she would not regulate Jon Stewart's breathing, even though he admitted that he emits carbon dioxide. UPDATE: EVIDENTLY I […]

Why environmentalists will survive Armageddon

Hate to break it to you, but if it's really the end of the world tomorrow (or tonight), as Harold Camping and his followers attest, you're almost certainly screwed. So what will ease your suffering in the post-Rapture world? A lot of the same things you're already doing to save the environment. Dense living. Apparently […]