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Your guide to a great green weekend in Portland

Portland’s swanky Sapphire Hotel.Photo: Sarah Gilbert Can you think of a greener city than Portland? Nope, didn’t think so. The City of Roses occupies a warm, squishy spot in the hearts of many a biker, climate hawk, and nature-lovah. We asked you to share your fave local breweries, organic cafés, and green hangouts, and compiled […]

Rolls Royce electric car will let blue-bloods go green

  Here’s what needs to happen for electric cars to become the new industry standard: They need to be seen as sexier, manlier, and more upscale than original fossil-fuel flavor. We know, we know, but don’t shoot the messenger. Fortunately, Rolls Royce is now making inroads into the last one (and maybe the first) by […]

Montanans rally against mega-loads to the tar sands

Activists in Montana and Idaho are fighting back against these monstrosities.Iconic authors and outdoorsmen David James Duncan and Rick Bass have an important new book that they wrote in response to the notorious “haul” this month of gargantuan machines (“mega-loads”) to Alberta, Canada, constructed in South Korea for use in the tar sands. Besides the […]

The Climate Post: Tension over Middle East oil

Will Gaddafi sabotage Libya’s oil pipelines to spite protesters?Photo: Crethi PlethiOver the past week, the unrest in the Middle East deepened, with growing protests in Bahrain and Libya, and more draconian measures by the countries’ leaders to quash the opposition. Libya is a significant oil exporter, and the first member of the Organization of the […]

Meet the members of Congress who sided with corporate polluters over children and your health

May not be safe to enter.Cross-posted from the Natural Resources Defense Council. For the first time in the 40 year history of the Clean Air Act, a majority of the House of Representatives has voted to block EPA from implementing and enforcing standards to sharply reduce mercury and other toxic air emissions from a polluting […]

Guy who punked Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is running for Congress as Green Party candidate

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} The story of Ian Murphy — the editor of the Buffalo Beast who convinced Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) that he was billionaire David Koch and then recorded their union-bashing, possibly illegal phone conversation — just keeps getting better. Murphy just revealed to Samantha Henig of […]

Male-dominated Big Ag woos women with paternalistic marketing blitz

Marketing campaigns aside, the face of industrial-scale farming is male. Big Ag is big business — and big profits. And when anyone raises questions about the billions of tax dollars lavished on the largest industrial growers of corn, soybeans, and other commodity crops or points out the harm that these perverse incentives do to the […]

Big Oil lobby announces it will start donating directly to candidates

Apparently their current amount of influence isn’t good enough.Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. The American Petroleum Institute (API), Big Oil’s chief lobbying organization, will start directly backing political candidates in the second quarter of this year. API, whose membership includes oil giants like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, already spends tens of millions of dollars every year on […]

Why do people in cars hate people on bikes so much?

If you’ve ever been behind the wheel of a car, you’ve felt it: The dead certainty that everyone around you is a complete idiot who should get the hell out of your way. If you’ve spent much time riding a bicycle, you have been the target of that wrath. And without the protective metal-and-glass bubble […]

Why it’s hard to make polluters pay for their own messes

Scoffing at the idea of externalities is a lot easier when wearing a gas mask.Industrial boilers and incinerators currently receive an enormous public subsidy. They emit toxic air pollutants like mercury, cadmium, and acid gases, which even in extremely small amounts cause a range of health maladies from asthma to heart attacks to premature death, […]