Latest Articles
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Seoul tears down an urban highway and the city can breathe again
This downtown green space in Seoul was once a looming, congested elevated freeway.Photo: Kyle NishiokaCross-posted from Sightline’s Daily Score blog. As a sustainability-loving transportation planner, I was thrilled to learn that Dr. Kee Yeon Hwang would be visiting Vancouver and talking about the project that has made Seoul, Korea a legend in urban planning circles: […]
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How does your supermarket stack up to the world’s greenest grocery store?
The Whole Foods in Dedham, Mass. is bringing new meaning to the word “greengrocer.” It’s a showcase facility, which means it basically tries out all the company’s environmental best practices to see how they work in the wild. The result is a store with an inspiring combination of architectural and procedural innovations: The building’s steel […]
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Downplaying or remaining silent about climate change was and is a blunder for progressives
Progressives shouldn’t keep quiet.Photo: Jennifer MooSome of the best pollsters have known for years that progressives can and should talk about climate change. Mark Mellman calls the polling that suggests one shouldn’t talk about global warming, a “politically naïve, methodologically flawed, and factually inaccurate.” Sure, if you talk about any subject in a clumsy fashion […]
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In face of ‘peak everything,’ governments shrug at environmental cost of energy
Less than a year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the U.S. government has begun issuing new permits for deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Pundits think that despite a pause in the "nuclear renaissance," the same thing could happen to nuclear power plants in the wake of Fukushima, at least outside the U.S. The […]
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By 2015, it will be illegal for New Yorkers to throw electronics in the trash
If you thought forcing restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus was an intrusion by the nanny state, get ready for the Mary F'in Poppins of regulations: To prepare consumers and businesses for the arrival of a 2015 law that will ban the disposal of electronics in the trash, New York state is forcing […]
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The coal power industry’s willfully deceptive picture of EPA rules
Every Republican who’s come within shouting distance of a microphone in the past year has charged the EPA with out-of-control, unconstitutional job-killing malefaction — “regulatory overreach” for short. More than a few conservative Dems, led by the crudely pandering Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have followed suit. This is their way of advocating for […]
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Environmental groups to be penalized for winning lawsuits
Two GOP-sponsored bills introduced last week would impose a penalty on environmental groups that sue the government under the Equal Access to Justice Act or the Endangered Species Act. That’s typical of the GOP, right — they’re all about tort reform? Yeah, well, these bills would penalize successful suits, by making it impossible for the […]
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The drugstore chains that ate America’s suburbs [VIDEO]
What is the fabric of the modern American community? Well, a big part of it consists of an endless parade of chain drugstores selling the kind of stuff chain drugstores sell (including booze!). That’s the landscape that Chris Weagel shows us from his hometown of St. Clair Shores, Mich. It is also a landscape that […]
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New reality show is ‘Ice Road Truckers’ for coal miners
The Spike network is set to run a show about coal miners, in the mold of Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers — gritty dudes fighting their way through the world’s hardest jobs. This has the potential to expose coal’s seamy underbelly, or to glamorize it beyond repair (at least in the minds of Spike-watching […]
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Japanese utility baffled that nuclear plant leak couldn’t be plugged with shredded newspaper
Newest terrifying thing at the Fukushima Daiichi plant: A breach in a trench is leaking highly radioactive water into the surrounding ocean. Japanese utility TEPCO tried over the weekend to use concrete to plug the leak. When that failed, they went for the next most logical solution: a mixture of "132 pounds of sawdust, 18 […]
