Latest Articles

GOP rep couldn’t have voted for oil subsidies, because they don’t exist, la la la

Bush killed Osama, the president was born in Kenya, and there's no such thing as oil subsidies. Not buying it? You just need practice. If you can believe six impossible things before breakfast every day, before you know it you'll be as adept as Utah Rep. Rob Bishop, who last week told a constituent that […]

Breaking: The earth is breaking … but how about that Royal Wedding?

One commenter pointed out that the (HuffPost) icon I used for the post on Bin Laden was actually a good symbol for the “Breaking Earth.” Obviously, large parts of the Earth are breaking up at an unprecedented rate — with dire implications for humanity: JPL bombshell: Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on […]

Tornadoes, extreme weather, and climate change

UPDATE:  It is unfortunate that NYT blogger Andy Revkin has chosen to inappropriately shorten and then take out of context the nuanced statements of a number of actual scientific experts, like Trenberth (cited bel0w).  Ironically, Revkin supports a too-little, too-late energy technology development strategy can’t possibly avert catastrophic global warming — nor can it generate […]

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 […]