Latest Articles
-
![]()
![]()
‘Mad Men’ star Vincent Kartheiser wants to sell the country on high-speed rail [VIDEO]
Mad Men‘s Vincent Kartheiser is really, really excited about high-speed rail. “I’m just amped up about it, you can tell,” he told me yesterday. “I’m going a million miles an hour. I’m going as fast as high-speed rail.” Kartheiser was on the phone with me to talk about the new video he and fellow Mad […]
-
![]()
![]()
Debunking the stubborn myth that only industrial ag can ‘feed the world’
Hold the agrichemicals: Organic ag could keep markets brimming with food. I’ve written about it once already, but I want to return to The Economist’s recent special series about how industrial agriculture is the true and only way to feed the 9 billion people who will inhabit the world by 2050. The framing, I think, […]
-
Inhofe, Horner, McIntyre and Watts fabricate another “despicable smear” against Michael
Let’s see if any of the serial disinformers have the minimal human decency to put up a full retraction of their falsehoods. I have Mann’s response at the end. Last month we saw the umpteenth exhaustive investigation of the stolen emails that ended up vindicating the science and the scientists, this time by NOAA’s IG. […]
-
![]()
![]()
Your next bike could be made out of nylon and 3D-printed at home
Okay, so this isn’t something you can do with your home printer … yet. But this gorgeous hunk of bike might represent the new wave of bike manufacturing. It’s made using 3D printing technology, which adds nylon powder in thin layers to achieve the desired shape. In this case, that shape can be perfectly tailored […]
-
![]()
![]()
How to not buy anything ever again
Photo: Toban BlackNeither a borrower nor a lender be? Stuff it, old man. Shareable has collected a primer on “collaborative consumption,” i.e. the fine art of consensual mooching. At the risk of sounding like a dangerous commie: It turns out there’s basically no reason to be the sole owner of anything ever again. Among the […]
-
In defense of progress: pushing back the ideologues
Progress is a slog. It always is: occasionally pushed forward by a burst of energy; often knocked backward by opposition. In politics, it’s an evolutionary process that depends on gradual re-alignment and re-consideration of views. Consider pollution. At the beginning of the 20th century, the new factories driving the Industrial Revolution emitted a constant stream […]
-
![]()
![]()
Where do the greenest commuters live? Not Portland
New Yorkers on the evening commute.Photo: Mo RizaQuick: Who are the loneliest commuters in the nation? That would be the residents of Southgate, Mich., where 91.6 percent of workers drive alone. The city with the most pedestrian commuters? That’s Ithaca, N.Y., where 41.8 percent of commuters walk to work (particularly impressive given upstate New York’s […]
-
![]()
![]()
Is the Bloom Box cheaper than solar?
This is part of a series on distributed renewable energy posted to Grist. It originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. The Bloom Box has received a lot of media attention for its plug-and-play approach to electricity from fuel cells. The 100 kilowatt boxes generate electricity […]
-
![]()
![]()
Oil prices soar in spite of sharp increase in U.S. production under Obama
U.S. oil production last year rose to its highest level in almost a decade … As a result, analysts believe the U.S. was the largest contributor to the increase in global oil supplies last year over 2009, and is on track to increase domestic production by 25 percent by the second half of the decade. […]
-
![]()
![]()
How to save the world’s oysters — and eat them, too
Consider the oyster — carefully. Photo: Wally GobetzCross-posted from Cool Green Science. The headlines were enough to make you throw away your shucking knife: “More than 85 percent of [oyster] reefs have been lost due to overfishing, according to a new study,” said The Independent. Foodie bloggers panicked over the news — was it suddenly […]
