Latest Articles

Mimicking Big Tobacco, Big Soda blows smoke in Philadelphia

Big Soda can blow smoke with the best of ’em.Coke image: Andrew AtkinsonFor years now, numerous commentators (myself included) have made comparisons of the food industry with Big Tobacco. The most recent example should become the poster child for how the most egregious tactics of tobacco companies are alive and well. Last month came the […]

How to make energy savings info compelling

Over at the consistently interesting EnergySavvy.com, they’ve got a neat little post about the kind of cues that increase people’s participation in energy savings programs. They are helping the Department of Energy pilot test the new national Home Energy Score. You can read their post for all the details; I’ll just pass along the conclusions. […]

Future of Pennsylvania is dystopian wasteland studded with natural gas wells

Time's cover story "Could Shale Gas Power the World?" is all about how we're going to get ourselves out of our current energy crisis by turning the Marcellus shale formation into a hydrocarbon war zone pockmarked with loud, noxious natural gas wells. The reserves in question happen to be underneath some of the most densely […]

Like a magnifying glass to ants, concentrating PV a cost-effective distributed solar option

This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. Concentrating solar typical fills people energy nerds with visions of large fields of mirrors focusing sunlight to make heat/steam/electricity, but concentration technology is also available for photovoltaics (PV).  In fact, using lenses to focus sun onto […]

World Bank to the poor: ‘Coal’s good enough for you!’

The World Bank — famous for funding gobsmackingly huge, planet-killing coal-fired power plants — is changing its tune, sort of. Under a new set of proposed rules, the Bank would only be allowed to fund gobsmackingly huge, planet-killing coal-fired power plants in the world's poorest countries. Progress! Okay, that sounds dastardly, but it’s a little […]

Sen. Jim Inhofe hates planet, loves dictators

Okay, sit down for this one, because it’s just twisted. Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator who called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and who was most recently seen trying to castrate the EPA, is practically besties with Ivory Coast despot Laurent Gbagbo, basically because they go to the same […]

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: […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]