Latest Articles

Sharing and caring: the implications of collaborative consumption

Rachel Botsman wants you to share.Lots of the most interesting changes in the direction of sustainability are happening outside green politics (i.e., the stuff I’m always writing about). One that’s always fascinated me is the spread of sharing economies, or “collaborative consumption.” Grist had Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, authors of What’s Mine Is Yours: […]

Me and my beard, talking clean energy in Germany [VIDEO]

A few weeks ago, I visited Germany to learn more about its clean energy programs and progress. The folks at EnergyNow! called me up to chat about some of the things I saw, lessons I learned, and schnitzel I ate. Here’s the video: If you’re keen to read more, here are the posts that came […]

Better Place taps China in bid to take over the world, more or less

If a supervillain wanted to roll out a plan to turn the planet's car infrastructure on its head, he could hardly do better than the deal that Israeli company Better Place just announced with the China Southern Power Grid Co. Better Place is a company that wants to replace filling stations with battery swapping stations. […]

Building the economic case for climate action

The Economics for Equity and the Environment Network convened a recent meeting of economists [PDF] at the Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to discuss the role of economics in building support for climate action in the U.S. The economists who convened view climate change as a civilizational challenge that demands immediate action to […]

World population projected to hit 7 billion on Oct. 31

      Image: National GeographicToday, the United Nations announced that the world’s population will reach an historic 7 billion people on Oct. 31, 2011. World population hit 1 billion people in 1804. It took 123 years to add the next billion, but less than a century to cruise past the next four billion — from 2 billion […]

New Chernobyl sarcophagus will dismantle itself from the inside

The "sarcophagus" that encases the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was only ever supposed to be temporary, but it's been left in place for 25 years. It's no surprise that the thing could crumble if you looked at it funny (and a LOT of people look at it funny). So a new containment structure […]

Discovery of Fukushima contamination in areas identified by Greenpeace

TEPCO, the owners of the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, just announced that they found contamination levels 100 to 1,000 times higher than normal in sediment from the Fukushima coast. TEPCO did the sediment testing late last week — in areas Greenpeace identified for testing in our research plan — after we were […]

Turn a month of trash into a month of treasure

A couple of Austrian design students have issued a challenge — to themselves, but you can get in on it. They're posting an upcycling project every day for 30 days, and for every guest submission they post, they'll extend the project one day. Send in your upcycling ideas and help them rehabilitate a month — or […]

Why the ‘coming housing calamity’ shouldn’t have to be calamitous

The housing market is changing. It’s time to move on from sprawl development.Photo: jcbonbonLast week, I wrote about the mind-bending case of a developer who is giving away cars in order to convince people to buy houses in a far-flung exurban development. It’s kind of like giving away cigarettes to sell funeral plots. The absurdity […]

Canada elects first Green Party MP; everything else sucks

Well, yesterday's elections ended with Stephen "Kyoto is a socialist plot" Harper and his Conservative cronies controlling a majority government, with Jack "Trustache" Layton and the New Democratic Party nipping at their heels. Canadian Twitter this morning sounds like U.S. Twitter would have sounded in 2004 if we'd had Twitter then. Oh, Canada, we're sorry […]