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Obama’s ‘director of game changers’ talks energy breakthroughs

Arun Majumdar, director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, spoke at the University of Washington last Friday on the need to fund ambitious energy research.Grist photo/Jonathan Hiskes When the Soviet Sputnik beat American satellites into space in 1957, the U.S. tried to reclaim its technological edge by creating the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which […]

Seattle to go carbon neutral?

Over at top-notch young Seattle news site Publicola, Erica Barnett brings news of what could be a momentous decision by the Seattle City Council: to set about making Seattle a carbon-neutral city. From the Council’s 2010 Priorities: CARBON NEUTRALITY Adopt a carbon neutral goal for Seattle with specific milestones and implementation steps, along with a […]

Cleveland, worker-owned co-ops, and new ideas for a flailing economy

Is the way forward for our ailing economy to be found along the banks of Lake Erie? Despite talk of a recovery, the national economy remains in shambles. In Sunday’s New York Times, reporter Peter Goodman brought devastating news: Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing […]

What the heck is a Bloom Box and will it solve the world’s energy problems?

The internet loves mysterious product unveilings, especially those promising to revolutionize the world and how we live in it. (Think Apple’s iPhone.) But few (except for maybe the iPhone) actually live up to the hype. (Or so I hear. Anyone wanna get me an iPhone?) CEO K.R. Sridhar is starting to peel back the layers […]

Newsweek plays fast and loose with facts in climate story

Another day, another major media outlet libels Michael Mann — and James Hansen. In a new black eye for Newsweek, their lengthy attack on climate scientists has been exposed as relying on massaged data and tawdry innuendo. While they have already corrected a number of mistakes, they left a bunch in, and decided not to […]

Sen. Mark Udall: “I think it’s crucial to price carbon”

Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.)Mark Udall — son of legendary enviro-friendly Arizona Rep. Morris “Mo” Udall — had been a member of Colorado’s House delegation for 10 years when he won the race to replace retiring senator Wayne Allard. Just 17 days into his first term, Colorado’s other senator, Ken Salazar, left to head up Obama’s […]

Energy Secretary Steven Chu posts his nuclear rationale on Facebook

Originally posted at Inventing Green. Following the Department of Energy’s announcement of a loan guarantee for a new nuclear plant, the Nobel Prize-winning head of the agency, Steven Chu, laid out his rationale for nuclear in clear and plain language. It’s a pretty conventional argument: 1) “no single technology will provide all of the answers,” […]

Seoul reengineers a freeway into a stream [VIDEO]

Photo: Fast Company Most metropolis’ are so busy building the future that they don’t have time to re-think the past. Not so with Seoul, South Korea. In 2003, the city demolished a downtown freeway to restore an ancient stream that once flowed beneath the thoroughfare. More than 75 percent of the scrap material from the […]

Getting China wrong

It’s been a long time since Copenhagen. A few weeks after it ended, chatting to a friend about some stupid comments I’d overhead during that long last night, he said that “everyone gets a pass for anything they said during the first week.”  The first week after Copenhagen is what he meant — a time […]

Organic grain miller goes employee-owned

In “Chewing the Scenery,” we round up interesting food-related video from around the Web. ————- Miller’s crossing: Bob Moore creates a progressive institution. For years, Oregon-based Bob’s Red Mill products have a been a staple of food co-ops and natural-food supermarkets. The company puts out a variety of top-quality, stone-ground organic grain products: from flours […]