Latest Articles

GM bets Volt will move Californians to buy American

Chevy hopes the Volt takes California by storm.Photo: Todd WoodyIf you happened by an empty parking lot near San Francisco’s waterfront baseball park Tuesday morning, you would have seen some people  putting a low-slung black sedan through its paces on a makeshift track outlined by fluorescent orange pylons. What was remarkable was not so much […]

Tea Party helps pass carbon tax

Maryland’s Montgomery County Council passed the nation’s first county-level carbon tax on Wednesday thanks in part to a little heckling from a group of rowdy Tea Party protesters. It would be hard to dream up a more delightful twist to cap off a campaign that was about as dramatic as they come in the world […]

BP: The gulf between image and reality

The devastating and escalating events in the Gulf of Mexico underscore an amazing collection of problems: reliance on polluting energy, absence of a coherent national energy plan, the problems with lax government oversight, and dozens of others. Perhaps most clearly, it shows the gulf we should have seen years ago between the image of BP […]

Safety ‘#1 priority,’ coal chief Blankenship assures Congress

Poor Don Blankenship. The Massey Energy CEO had to sit quietly through a Senate hearing yesterday while the head of the United Mine Workers called his company’s safety performance “deplorable,” and West Virginia’s finger-wagging, Democratic senator, Robert Byrd cried “shame” on Massey’s “alarming record.” But in his first appearance before Congress since 29 Massey miners […]

Love, in the Time of Blasting

This is the scene, when the coal-fired electricity that lights up New York City’s neon theatre district lowers on stage: We are inside the home of Marie and Hovie, a young couple living in the mountain holler of Eagle Creek. With their family’s 150-year-old homestead threatened by a planned mountaintop removal strip-mining operation, Hovie, a […]

Where are the oil protests? In New Orleans, they’ve finally begun

A few days ago, Dave asked a question that seemed to strike a chord with readers. In the face of coal miner deaths, the Gulf oil leak, the corrupt regulators that enabled it, and freak weather such as the Nashville flood, he asked:      And yet where are the protests? Where are the people in the […]

Remembering my last oil spill

It’s been three years since a container ship, the COSCO Busan, spilled 53,500 gallons of bunker fuel into San Francisco Bay, just after my return home to live on the bay by the sea that I love. Remnant oil still sometimes surfaces after it rains and the bay’s herring fishery has yet to recover.  Ten […]

The three stupidest things said about the BP oil spill

Since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig went down in the Gulf last month, there have been two unstoppable gushes: one from the ocean floor and the other from the mouth of BP’s top executive, Tony Hayward. Here are three of his worst: 1. “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of […]

Lessons from Berkeley schools: The truth about kids and vegetables

Typical breakfast in a DC public school(Ed Bruske photos)The conclusion of Cafeteria Confidential: Berkeley, in which Ed Bruske reports on his recent week-long, firsthand look at how Berkeley, Calif., schools part ways from the typical school diet of frozen, industrially processed convenience foods. Cross-posted from The Slow Cook. Might as well say it straight up: […]

Order up: Readers’ fave sandwich shops [PHOTOS]

(Jess Steinitz photo)We asked readers to nominate their favorite sustainable, locally owned sandwich shops — the ones sourcing their ingredients directly from nearby farms and turning them into “consistently and mind-blowingly good sandwiches,” as Grist’s Tom Philpott put it. Dozens of you shared your suggestions in the comments, but only two — Jess Steinitz and […]