Latest Articles
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A well-fed world is a vegetarian world
Samuel Fromartz doesn't like genetically modified food, but not for the reasons you think. We don't need more food, he argues in the Atlantic, but better access to food — there's actually plenty of food in the world for everyone to have enough, but most people can't get at it. GMOs don't do anything to […]
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Friends help you move; real friends help you dispose of dead bodies in an eco-friendly manner
Think you get to stop being green just because you kicked the compost bucket? With land space for burial at a premium and crematoriums pumping potentially dubious people-smuts into the sky, you have got to be kidding. Stop slacking off, corpses: If you can't live green, it's time to start dying green. Short of a […]
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For sheer deadliness, nuclear can’t hold a candle to coal
Chart: Seth Godin Relative to watts produced, coal kills 4,000 times more people than nuclear power. Our pervasive sense that nuclear is more dangerous, when the opposite is so clearly true, comes at least in part from a cognitive bias called the "availability heuristic" — memorable events that are easier to think of, like nuclear […]
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Police apologize to cyclist for all the wrong reasons
Well, this is a first: On Tuesday, New York City-dwelling cyclists who were ticketed for speeding in Central Park got their tickets retracted and personal apology visits from the police. But the police were only apologizing because of a trivial breach of protocol, when in fact the tickets were apparently unfair from start to finish. […]
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Solving solar's variability with more solar
This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. The solution to the variability of solar power is more solar. It’s true that individual solar power plants can experience significant variation in power output, especially on days with mixed sun and clouds. “Output of multi-MW […]
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Why is no one talking about how bad the Japan nuke disaster could be?
Let’s hope the future doesn’t hold this. This is adapted from a post at TomDispatch; you can read the longer version here. “Not as bad as Chernobyl”? It might be better to describe the situation at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant as “remarkably unlike Chernobyl” in rural Ukraine, where, almost 25 years ago, a single uncontained […]
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New David Koch building gets energy upgrade — courtesy of the climate program he loves to hate
Image: Positioning GreenCross-posted from Positioning Green. Billionaire conservative financier David Koch doesn’t know it, but the cutting-edge energy-saving technologies included in a brand new $211 million research lab that bears his name were partly funded through a government program to reduce global warming pollution. It happens to be the very same program under a blistering […]
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Obama administration announces massive coal mining expansion
The future’s looking sooty.Photo: Tami Heilemann, DOIInterior Secretary Ken Salazar announced yesterday an enormous expansion in coal mining that threatens to increase U.S. climate pollution by an amount equivalent to more than half of what the United States currently emits in a year. A statement from Wild Earth Guardians, Sierra Club, and Defenders of Wildlife […]
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Introducing … the Vegan/Omnivore Alliance against Animal Factories
Every day, Americans eat more than a half pound of meat per capita — one of the highest rates on the planet. The vast majority of it is produced with methods that abuse the environment, animals, workers, and public health as a matter of course. The handful of companies that dominate U.S. meat production suck […]
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Can the United States feed China?
China is worried — and rightfully so — that it might not be able to feed itself.Photo: Jerrold BennettIn 1994, I wrote an article in World Watch magazine entitled “Who Will Feed China?” that was later expanded into a book of the same title. When the article was published in late August, the press conference […]
