Latest Articles

Reagan helped save the ozone layer but ruined America’s leadership in clean energy

The clean energy “culprit in chief.”Sunday was the 100th anniversary of President Reagan’s birth. As ThinkProgress points out, the right-wing hagiography of the Gipper leaves out the fact that he was “a serial tax raiser” and “nearly tripled the federal budget deficit” and “gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants.” His overall environmental legacy as […]

What Obama should know about ending oil subsidies

This post originally appeared on the Great Energy Challenge blog, in partnership with National Geographic and Planet Forward.  Despite my seriously mixed feelings about the State of the Union speeches, I tuned in to this year’s speech for the first time in several years. Like many, I was disappointed if not surprised that President Obama […]

The (not so) New Agtivist: Organic movement leader Bob Scowcroft looks back

Bob Scowcroft in 2008, in one of his signature shirts.Photo: Bart NagelAfter nearly three decades at the center of organic food and farming world, Bob Scowcroft recently retired as head of the Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF). Scowcroft was California Certified Organic Farmers‘ first executive director in 1987, then went on to cofound and lead […]

Distributed renewable generation = big numbers

Distributed renewable energy comes in small bites, but it makes mouthfuls — gigawatts — of renewable energy capacity. Americans tend think big, but it is countries that built small that are hitting big renewable energy targets. Take Germany. In 2009, it installed 3,000 megawatts (MW) of solar PV, more than three times all the solar […]

‘Mom, can we get the kind of car that we keep at our house?’

But everybody else does it!Photo: Mario KlingemannOn a recent, rather brisk, walk to church, my 3-year-old daughter, Rosa, asked, “Mom, can we get the kind of car that we keep at our house?” As opposed, that is, to the kind we use for a few hours and then return. I wasn’t especially surprised by the […]

H&M wants the clothes you throw out to be more sustainable

It’s recycling! I recycled David Byrne’s jacket and Shakespeare’s pants.Is disposable-clothes giant H&M still trying to save face from the time it got caught with its pants down, shredded, and thrown in a dumpster in Herald Square? The clothing company, long a purveyor of one-season clothing for teenyboppers and underpaid professionals, is making a move […]

Four things you can do to defend organic against the GMO alfalfa threat

Members of the sustainable food movement are furious and, frankly, we have a right to be. Last month’s decision by the USDA to fully deregulate GE alfalfa isn’t just a minor skirmish in a long and exhausting battle. It threatens the existence of organic farming and organic food, and flies in the face of USDA’s […]

How a lie enters the political bloodstream

Pants on fire …I get the Energy IssueWatch Newsletter from Congress rag The Hill. In last Friday’s edition, reporter Ben Geman wrote, “Advocates of limiting emissions say it’s inaccurate to compare EPA rules to cap-and-trade proposals that collapsed on Capitol Hill last year.” This is, I suppose, progress. It’s a “she said” to the “he […]

Why sustainable design sucks

Recycling gone awry.Photo: Rosenfeld MediaEverything you think you know about sustainable design is wrong. That’s the message of one of the most compelling and potentially disruptive essays on the subject since Buckminster Fuller unleashed his special brand of crazy on a world that was just waking up to design as a weapon in the war […]

Keep the Solar Decathlon on the National Mall!

The Solar Decathlon on the National Mall in 2009.Photo: NREL Solar DecathlonThe National Mall has long served as the nation’s front yard, a place where citizens can gather and display what’s important to them — whether it’s a protest to end wars, a rally to restore sanity, or even a celebration of mid-Atlantic maritime communities. […]