Latest Articles

Developer to make sprawl slightly less bad by putting solar panels on it

Oh man, one more of these and it's a New York Times trend story: First it was sprawl developers who had to give away cars in order to sell their McMansions in the eighth circle of exurban hell, now it's some developer in Phoenix who wants to attract baby boomers to purchase 11,200 new homes by […]

Arcimoto is an electric car for the Facebook generation

Marketers are learning that kids don't want cars anymore. They blame it on Facebook — kids don't need cars to socialize — instead of facing up to the reality: cars suck. They are boring and dirty and no longer integral to teenage courtship rituals. This car, however, does not suck: Announced just last week, the Arcimoto […]

The solution to the parking problem is charging through the nose for it

Normally, when a resource is scarce, we let the market set its price. So why not do the same with parking? That's what the city of San Francisco has decided to to, because it is populated with geniuses who own iPads and still manage to get a tan. By using “demand pricing” — in which […]

Chernobyl, 25 years later

Today is the 25th anniversary of the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Here's part one of a spooky-as-hell film showing scientists venturing inside the plant's cement sarcophagus, which keeps its nuclear material contained (for now). A few other things to look at today: What's the ecology of Chernobyl today? Some wildlife has returned, but […]

Ezra Klein: ‘Obama, based on his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s’

Klein writes, “as Democrats moved to the right to pick up Republican votes, Republicans moved to the right to oppose Democratic proposals.”Photo: The White HouseThe Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein has a terrific column that places the failed climate bill into the political context that has been missing from so much of the recent debate: If you put […]

Boehner supports cutting oil subsidies for five whole minutes

Apparently the whole "we support handing out bags full of money to the rich because we care about the little guy" act is harder to keep up than we'd realized. Put John Boehner under a little pressure about oil company subsidies and he buckles like a belt. ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl got the speaker […]

Court strikes down federal overreach on transmission lines

With the federal Energy Policy Act of 2005, Congress gave broad powers to the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to identify “congested” transmission corridors.  The goal was to prioritize new high-voltage transmission development and to provide higher financial returns to transmission development companies.  The decision created a lot of controversy, […]

Desperate sprawl developer gives away cars with houses

Desperate measures.My head nearly exploded at the breakfast table on Saturday morning. I was reading a piece in The New York Times about an Illinois developer who has finally found a way to unload the new houses he has built some 50 miles from downtown Chicago, in a place he has seen fit to dub […]

API shocker: Oil makes money!

In a transparent attempt to blunt impending justified rage over this week's profit reports from Big Oil, the latest piece of spin to emerge from the well-paid creative minds at the American Petroleum Institute is a real classic. The gist, in a nutshell, is that oil makes money -- a lot of money.

Unsure about nuclear power? Here are the five questions you must answer to decide

Chernobyl begs a lot of questions 25 years later.Photo: Pedro Moura PinheiroCross-posted from The Guardian. Containing the elemental forces that rage inside a nuclear reactor is one of the great achievements of science, but losing control, as happened 25 years ago today at Chernobyl, is one of its greatest failures. So what to think of nuclear […]