Latest Articles

Yesterday’s fracking blowout: What happened, and will it happen again?

Yesterday, on the one-year anniversary of the BP oil spill, a natural gas well in Bradford County, Pennsylvania — perhaps suffering from an overload of irony — ruptured and leaked "thousands and thousands of gallons" of fracking fluid over the surrounding farmland and into a nearby creek. Officials say no gas was released, but local […]

Stocking the Broke-Ass pantry, and the magical three-day chicken

Making great meals from bubkes is easy when you do it the Broke-Ass way!Broke-Ass has often been asked how she feeds her family of five on bubkes. The answer is: Shop as little as possible, and buy what only what you must, as cheaply as possible. Cutting down on marketing means you not only have […]

The best sperm delivery system ever

Speeding to its destination.Photo: Mikael Colville-AndersenSo the Danes do bicycles better than just about anybody else in the whole wide world. We knew that already, thanks in large part to the efforts of Mikael Colville-Andersen, who blogs at Copenhagen Bicycle Chic and Copenhagenize, documenting his city’s stylish and sensible bicycling populace. The latest entry on […]

The future of green computing is dunking your computer in mineral oil

As seemingly every aspect of our lives moves online, the giant building-size computers that power the web suck up ever more energy. Cooling can eat as much as a third of the energy required to run these "data centers," so fixing their heat problem (modern processors produce a lot of it) isn't just a matter […]

Not So Starry-Eyed Anymore

Oh why can’t you see It’s my life that’s at stake When you sell out our world You are stealing my future. Can you look in my eyes As you gamble our lives? When will you stop the lies So that we can survive? If you represent me Not the fossil fuel industry You must […]

Underground environmentalism in communist East Germany

When I had a free afternoon during my recent trip to Berlin, I headed down Unter den Linden (I love German street names — my hotel was on the Albrechtstraße, which is a whole meal in a word) to the relatively new DDR Museum, which showcases ordinary life under socialist rule in East Germany. It’s […]

‘BP hasn’t made people whole’

The Gulf oil disaster largely disappeared from the headlines last August, after the well was finally capped and the federal government declared that most of the oil was “gone.” For Gulf coast residents, though, the nightmare was just beginning. A year later, business hasn’t come back for many in fishing and tourism, and the compensation […]

Will Richard Daley, Chicago’s outgoing ‘green’ mayor, help quash coal pollution?

Will Richard Daley’s last month in office be marred by two old coal plants?Photo: Kate GardinerCross-posted from Midwest Energy News. A long-stalled Chicago ordinance that could force the city’s two aging coal-burning power plants to greatly reduce emissions or shut down now has enough backing to pass at the city council’s next meeting. But proponents […]

Hope Butter churns out the good stuff in rural Minnesota [VIDEO]

One of the only independent creameries in Minnesota, Hope Butter, is a century-old business that continues to make butter the old-fashioned way. There have been strong years and slow years, but the last 10 have been increasingly successful. Featured at many of the top restaurants, at the Co-ops as well as in regular grocery stores, […]

How much could climate change cost your state?

No idea why they got someone's dad to narrate this video, but the information in it is pretty startling. According to this group, the American Security Project, costs racked up by climate change could include: $9.3 billion a year in lost agriculture revenues in the Plains states $3.6-$6.1 billion over 20 years in infrastructure costs […]