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Want to save the planet? Al Gore has an app for that

An Inconvenient Truth started out as a book and became an Oscar-winning movie. Al Gore’s follow-up book, Our Choice, has now gone multimedia too, but in a whole new way, as a first-of-its-kind app complete with documentary footage and even a trailer set to swelling, melodramatic music. Watch it here: After Our Choice was published […]

Monsanto-tied scientist abruptly quits key USDA research post

Roger Beachy: back from whence he came. On a slow Friday afternoon, a surprising bit of news came down the pike: Roger Beachy, head of  National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the main research arm of the USDA, has officially resigned his post, effective May 20. Who is Beachy? When Obama hired Beachy in […]

Chamber of Commerce and auto dealer group lose last-gasp lawsuit to stop clean cars

Cross-posted from the Natural Resources Defense Council. The federal court of appeals in Washington today rejected the last legal attack on California’s landmark greenhouse-gas standards for new cars built in model years 2012-16.  The National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sought to overturn EPA’s waiver giving California the green light […]

Is the future of solar centralized or distributed?

Solar power produces only a tiny fraction of America's energy, but that hasn't stopped greens — who are always up for expending at least as much energy fighting each other as fighting fossil fuels — from commencing a debate that we'll probably be having for decades, if not centuries to come: Is it better to […]

Coca-Cola adds BPA to list of ways it doesn’t care about your health

Did you hear? The science around BPA — a substance that the government of Canada has declared "toxic" and has banned in baby bottles — "just isn't there," according to the CEO of Coca-Cola. If this kind of through-the-looking glass denial of science sounds familiar, it's because it's happened before, with tobacco and climate change […]

China may have bankrupted itself building high-speed rail

We're all about high-speed rail, but not if it's going to bankrupt the world's second largest economy. Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University and a longtime critic of high-speed rail, said he worries that the cost of [the country's high speed rail] project might have created a hidden debt bomb that threatens China’s […]

Is Walmart our best hope for food policy reform?

Photo: Code PoetTwo years into the Obama administration, most of the energy around food-policy reform resides in the East Wing, in the form of the first lady’s Let’s Move! campaign. So far, Let’s Move has been about Michelle Obama pursuing what I have called a “soft power” campaign — that is, using her stature to […]

Donning stilettos, Beyonce says: Let’s Move your booties, kids [VIDEO]

As a fan of R&B divas — I stand second to no one in my admiration for Erykah Badu and Amy Winehouse — I found this Beyonce video irresistible. Produced on behalf of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign to improve children’s health, the choreography and staging dazzle, Beyonce plays the camera like it’s a fiddle, […]

Extreme weather costs lives, health, economy — and could be here to stay

A wildfire burns out of control in Texas earlier this month.Photo: Texas Military ForcesCross-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, and Ben Kaldunski, a former intern with the Energy Team at American Progress. “April is the cruelest […]

Holy crap: giant oil company buys giant solar company

What's Exxon going to do with this years' record-breaking profits? If you said "buy a 60 percent stake in America's largest solar panel manufacturing company," you have wildly underestimated the degree to which its CEO would find that profoundly emasculating. Cheese-eating surrender-monkeys have no such qualms, however, which is why French oil giant Total just […]