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Lose three pounds instantly by getting rid of the Yellow Pages

Photo: Frank HebbertFinally, you can opt out of having several pounds of straight-to-the-bin dead tree matter show up at your door on the regular. Register at yellowpagesoptout.com, and you can elect to stop getting some or all of your phone directories (or sign up for more, I guess, if your version of green living involves […]

Ask Umbra Book Club: What makes a home?

Home is where the art is. And the war too.Photo: Stefano ADearest readers, Welcome to February’s book club conversation. I hope you’ve gotten some good couch time in at home to read At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson. If you haven’t been able to cozy up next to this “history […]

Costs of inaction: the price of ice

Click for a larger version.Image: NASAArctic sea ice extent averaged over Januray 2011 its lowest recorded levels since satellite records began in 1979. It was 19,300 square miles below the record low of 5.25 million square miles, set in 2006, and 490,000 square miles below the 1979 to 2000 average. Climate change, the crisis many […]

San Francisco descends into self-parody with a bike for every personality

Oh, San Francisco. You with your flowers-in-the-hair and bikes for every person. 

We need to start cleaning up space pollution

Image: European Space AgencyIt’s not just the Earth we’re junking up. There’s also a ton of man-made space-crud in orbit around the planet. Efforts to keep track of it are falling short — there are an estimated 600,000 pieces of stuff bigger than a centimeter in diameter, and fewer than 20,000 can be tracked — […]

Climate deniers look out, see catastrophic storms, attack Al Gore

Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. After a year of climate devastation in 2010, this year has begun with more extreme weather across the globe. In the southern hemisphere and along the equator, it is a summer of floods and storms — in Australia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Tonga, Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, as […]

On eco-architecture and urban farming: Are you kidding me with your f-ing farm skyscraper?

Find a place, do some work, grow some stuff: it ain’t rocket science.Photo: Tracie LeeJust last summer, Broke-Ass was invited to speak on a panel at the New York Horticultural Society with such luminaries of the environmental architectural movement as Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of WORK Architecture Co.; Fritz Haeg, artist, Edible Estates; and […]

Why America’s Sputnik moment should include trees

Last week the President unveiled his “Strategy for American Innovation” which details his approach to jumpstarting the American economy by investing in important areas such as clean energy, health care technology, and education.  This week he hits to road in an effort to get folks excited about   modernizing our infrastructure. As a climate champ, this […]

Real-life Darth Vader/ Emperor Palpatine duo now in charge of U.S. energy policy

The best government money can buy.Photo: Official Star Wars BlogThe bad news is that we now have a political climate in Congress that could only be more lethal to action on clean energy and climate change if it were made out of mustard gas. The worse news is that the reason things have gotten to […]

Sorry, Eminem: Mass transit creates jobs, not Detroit

“Did you see what Mother Jones said about this ad? I’m about to cry.”Chrysler’s Super Bowl spot may feature Eminem looking all tough, but here’s one way he’s helping the terrorists win: Compared to mass transit, cars suck at creating jobs. A new report analyzing stimulus spending shows that spending on public transportation and road […]