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Boeing to build recyclable 787’s with 100% renewable energy

The 10 acre roof of the new Boeing 787 airplane factory in North Charleston, South Carolina will be covered with enough thin-film solar panels to provide a fifth of the plant's power. The rest will come from a nearby biomass facility, which will be powered by shrub and tree waste. The key to keeping costs […]

Amazon says America is buying green

We can learn two things from this map, based on Amazon.com's purchasing data: One, many parts of the country are at least buying green products and books about sustainability and conservation, which is a start. Two, Amazon needs a proofreader. There are more charts, too, breaking down who's buying books and products for water conservation, […]

Charles Manson does his best to kill green credibility

Boy, the green movement is just racking up the valuable allies these days, isn't it? Apparently cult leader/murderer/#1 Beatles fan Charles Manson has incorporated global warming into his particular brand of crazy, telling Spanish Vanity Fair: "Everyone's God and if we don't wake up to that there's going to be no weather because our polar […]

When you’re in love with a broken city

Baltimore in black and white.Photo: Callie NeylanCross-posted from 1934. Yesterday, I read the saddest thing I’ve ever read in my life. In an interview with Bill Moyers, David Simon, creator of “The Wire” — for which he won a MacArthur Genius Award — talks about loving Baltimore and the futility of the drug war. His answer to […]

Germans happily pay more for clean energy. Why don’t Americans?

In the U.S., any policy that raises taxes on anyone or causes anyone to pay more for anything — at least in a way that’s visible or traceable — has become verboten. It’s axiomatic in American politics that you can’t do it. The populace will revolt, right-wingers will demagogue you, you’ll be driven from office. […]

Faces from the Gulf Coast, one year after the BP disaster

It’s now been a year since the BP gusher started gushing. The leak was plugged up, but the mess isn’t gone. Meet some of the people whose lives have been turned upside-down by the BP disaster. Photos and audio came out of a collaboration between the Natural Resources Defense Council, StoryCorps, and Bridge the Gulf. […]

Fossil fuel industries kill and injure an awful lot of their workers

Oil production and oil refining has killed 77 workers and injured over 7,000 in the last 40 years.Cross-posted from the Center for American Progress. This post was coauthored by Valeri Vasquez, special assistant for energy policy at the Center for American Progress. On the one-year anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and the […]

A global green economy: ‘Let no man say it cannot be done’

America was able to convert from a peacetime to a wartime economy at a stunning speed.We need an economy for the 21st century, one that is in sync with the Earth and its natural support systems, not one that is destroying them. The fossil fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy that evolved in Western industrial societies is no […]

10 reasons to still be pissed off about the BP disaster

BP is gunning to get back to drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. When the Department of Interior issued its first deepwater permit since the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it was for a well that BP owns half of. Earlier this month, company officials also announced that they are seeking an agreement with the U.S. government to resume drilling […]

Visiting a house in Germany that generates more energy than it uses

During my trip to Germany last week, one of my hosts from the Böll Foundation and I took a morning commuter train up to Borgsdorf, north of Berlin, to visit an experimental passivhaus built by architect Oliver Jirka for his own family. Here’s your faithful correspondent on the scene: Digital readouts show hourly/daily/weekly output of […]