Latest Articles

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 […]

Portland, Maine, to save 50,000 gallons of oil a year with geothermal heating and cooling

Portland, Maine's new airport expansion is to be the first in the country to use a dead-simple but often overlooked technology to significantly reduce its heating and cooling bills. They're calling it a geothermal system, but it's not like the kind that produce power in Iceland; it's more properly called a "ground-source heat pump." The […]

Care about the forest? Here’s what you can do

Who cares about the forest? That’s the question author/artist Franke James explores in this creative personal story commissioned by the Forest Stewardship Council of Canada. Check out the visual essay below, or watch it as an animated video.

Meet the world’s most high-tech bike

It's pretty impressive that we're still chugging along on human-powered vehicles only a step more high-tech than a velocipede — olde-tyme bikes look basically like the ones we've got today. Why improve on perfection, right? Well, maybe just for the sheer badassery of it. At least, that seems to be the theory behind the Alpha, […]

Tim Pawlenty doesn’t understand how gas prices work

Presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty doesn't like high gas prices. Unfortunately, he apparently has no idea where they come from. Well, Tim, when a congressional GOP loves an oil industry very much … Pawlenty complained that Obama is "proposing is a tax increase on energy at a time when the gas is $4 a gallon," adding that […]

Coke, BPA, and the limits of ‘green capitalism’

Don’t drink the Coca-Cola Kool-AidPhoto: Oleg Sklyanchuk“Coca-Cola goes green,” announced a 2010 Forbes article. Indeed, the beverages giant maintains partnerships with Big Green groups like Conservation International and World Wildlife Fund. It recently even completed its takeover of Honest Tea, an organic bottled-tea company. It would clearly like to be seen as a paragon of […]

Report: Homebuyers willing to pay premium for solar

Okay, I’m a little slow on the uptake on this but I’ve been pursing a recent report from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory on the effect of installing a rooftop solar array on the sale price of homes in California. (It makes for dense reading and unless you’re really into “hedonic pricing models” and “difference-in-difference model,” you […]

Top climate scientist on monster tornadoes: ‘It’d be irresponsible not to mention climate change’

“Climate change is present in every single meteorological event,” says scientist Michael Mann.Photo: Tom VanNortwickCross-posted from the Wonk Room. Throughout human history, the climate system has been a source of life and death, the sun and rain capable of feeding our crops and bringing us comfort, or unleashing terrible devastation in wind, fire, drought, storm, […]