Latest Articles
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Home Energy Score could be a much-needed MPG for houses
The score gives a simple 1-10 rating of a home's energy performance and then -- this is the exciting part! -- a higher score owners might achieve if they take recommended steps like adding insulation, installing a programmable thermostat, shutting down the steel refinery in their basement, etc. So a home might achieve a 6 and have an expected upgraded score of 8.
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Feed-in tariff champion Hermann Scheer leaves big legacy
The recent death of German renewable energy advocate Hermann Scheer -- dubbed the sun king or even the Stalin of renewables -- is a unique opportunity to reflect on his largest legacy, the feed-in tariff, a policy responsible for the rise of the renewable energy industry.
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The smart grid could help you be smarter about your home electricity use
The smart grid, we?re told, will integrate renewable energy and decentralize power production. But what?s in it for you and me?
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Do we really have a food-safety crisis?
In this first installment in our debate over the Food Safety Modernization Act, our experts lock horns over food-borne-illness data and whether the problems we have with the food system are about dirty, bumpy vegetables -- or dirty, buggy cattle.
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Webcast: What is livability anyway?
On Thursday the electronics giant Philips offers a webcast on that aims to sketch out more of what livability means. It's got some interesting guests, including former London Mayor Ken Livingstone and Creative Class theorist Richard Florida.
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Boulder schools remove the stigma from free school lunches
Fortunately, gone are the days when students had to identify themselves as too poor to buy lunch in order to get fed.
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Oil spill investigator says no corners were cut to save money
BP's critics are incredulous at the conclusion that people on the doomed oil rig weren't motivated by cost-cutting to take risks.
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Ask Umbra's Book Club announces Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom' is next book
Ask Umbra decides to take on fiction and the Oprah Book Club in this month's Ask Umbra Book Club selection. Read about the book and find out when the conversation begins here!
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King Coal wins the midterms
In the final year of his remarkable life, Robert C. Byrd, the longest serving senator in US history, did one more remarkable thing. He called for serious dialogue on coal, climate change and the effects of mountaintop removal mining. “To deny the mounting science of climate change is to stick our heads in the sand and say 'deal me out,'” Byrd told his fellow West Virginians late in 2009. And on the EPA’s efforts to rein in the most egregious damage from mountaintop removal, he said, “West Virginians may demonstrate anger towards the EPA…but we risk the very probable consequence of shouting ourselves out of any productive dialogue.” Briefly, there was hope that the mountain state’s elder statesman might pull local politics away from a dead-end logic. Very briefly. Sen. Byrd died in June. By October, the man who would replace him in the Senate thumbed his nose at Byrd’s desire for reasoned discourse and picked up a gun.
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The post-election outlook for regional cap-and-trade
It's a toxic phrase in pundit-land, but cap-and-trade is humming along in the Northeast and preparing to launch in California (and maybe other Western states). A Midwestern program is probably dead after victories by clean-energy-hostile Republicans.
