Latest Articles
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Too much is not enough for The Edge’s green mansion
U2’s The Edge is planning a mansion complex that’s a metonymy for post-Joshua Tree U2: It means well, really, but it’s just way, way over the top. The five homes (!) averaging 10,500 square feet (!!) are supposed to be built to LEED Gold standards, so bravo to The Edge for that. But if you […]
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Solar-powered wind turbines not just a joke
April fools led to a bunch of fake posts that made us die a little inside, and at least one that seemed like kind of a good idea: the solar-powered wind turbine. Turns out that the notion of harvesting the maximum amount of energy from the immediate environment is good enough that the combo of […]
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Disappearing American bats are worth up to $53 billion
Bats eat a lot of bugs. Here are some living under a bridge in Austin, Texas that eat millions of pounds of pests every season. What happens if those bats are wiped out in a few years — as it looks like they could be — by a combination of wind turbines and a fungal […]
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You know who else hated bike lanes? Hitler.
Is this the one internet meme that never gets old? Okay, Godwin’s Law isn’t going to win the bike lane argument, but we could watch history’s most famous hater bitch about bike lanes all day. “The flowers make you feel like you’re riding through the countryside!” “THAT IS WHAT WEEKENDS ARE FOR!” Incidentally, Vancouver’s bike […]
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Europe to turn Africans into fuel
After discovering the disastrous consequences of turning its own food crops into fuel, China has turned to cassava — mostly from southeast Asia — as a source for biofuels. Europe, meanwhile, is buying up tracts of "marginal land" in Africa in order to grow jatropha for biofuels. In the U.S., of course, it's corn for […]
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Is coming out as childfree like coming out as gay?
As I’ve talked to and read about people coming to terms with their decisions not to have kids, the comparison has come up over and over. “I felt like a gay person must feel, coming out of the closet and having these people validating me.” — Jason Gill, quoted in a New York Times Magazine […]
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Republicans lose Senate vote on EPA, call it a win
The riders that would forbid the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases didn’t succeed in the Senate yesterday. (They’re likely to do very well in the House, thanks to the Republican majority and some very disappointing Democrats.) That hasn’t stopped Senate Republicans from declaring victory, though. There were four riders dealing with EPA powers; no single […]
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350.org and 1Sky merge into one mass climate movement
Let’s get together — yeah, yeah, yeah.We environmentalists hear this periodically from friends and family and other concerned citizens: “I wish there weren’t so many groups. It’s confusing. I don’t know who to volunteer for. Wouldn’t it work better if you all got together?” This isn’t quite as obvious as it sounds. Different groups have […]
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Should some pesticides be banned to protect bees? A USDA scientist dances around the question
Photo: Maury McCownAs I reported in January, the USDA’s top bee researcher, Jeffrey Pettis, has publicly revealed that he has completed research showing that Bayer’s blockbuster neonicotinoid pesticides, used on million of acres of crops across the country, harm honeybees even at extremely low doses. The revelation was significant because a growing number of U.S. […]
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America’s energy use, in one nifty chart
Periodically, it’s nice to step back and get reacquainted with some energy basics. There’s no better way to do it than with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s famed (or oughtta be famed) energy flow charts. Here’s the most recent, from 2009 (click for larger version): Chart: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory I’m not going to ruin the […]
