Latest Articles

Ask Umbra on judging greenness

Send your question to Umbra! Q. Dear Umbra, I consider myself to live simply and in an environmentally conscious way. I have been having trouble with those who also are “green” but seem to be smug about it, ostentatious even, maybe hypocritical when judging others who appear “un-green” based on superficial things like my clothes. […]

New Year's resolution: Mountaintop removal ends in 2010

This year we begin the just transition in the coalfields with a real commitment to sustainable economic development for a clean energy future.

Rationality, welfare, and public policy

In response (I think) to my post on efficiency and economists, Matt Yglesias cautions against abandoning the presumption of rationality just because people don’t consistently maximize profit. It may be rational in some circumstances to sacrifice profit for gains in time and attention. There’s more to personal welfare than money. Anyone who advocates efficiency runs […]

Ammonia-treated burgers, tainted with E. coli!

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. ——— Few who saw the documentary Food Inc. will forget the scene involving Beef Products Inc., a South Dakota company that makes a widely used hamburger filler product. No other industrial-meat company allowed director Robert Kenner to enter the shop […]

The earth’s decade

Generations from now, long after the last Twitter follower has unfriended the last Facebook user, this decade will be remembered and felt for its impact on Nature: the species that were saved and those that were lost; the heating of the planet; the forests cut down and those that remain to provide oxygen to our […]

France rejects carbon pricing policy

One of the purported advantages of a carbon tax over cap-and-trade is that it would be simple, as simple as grandma and apple pie and just as hard to frak with. That view has taken a bit of a blow from the latest news out of France. The French Constitutional Council has rejected a tax […]

John Mackey and the limits of “conscious capitalism”

John Mackey: will the unfettered market bring him down? Photo: JOEM500, via Flickr Author’s note: In the original version of this post, I mistakenly wrote that Mackey had resigned from the Whole Foods board. Actually, he resigned from the chairmanship of the board, but retained his seat on the board. I regret the error. ———– […]

Battery in the House

This is huge. Cross posted from Biodiversivist According to Physorg, Panasonic will market a battery for home use beginning next year. They claim it will  power a house for a week, which does not tell us much. Your average American house consumes far more energy than your average Japanese house. At some point they will […]

Soybeans threaten Amazon rainforest

Photo courtesy Kanko* via FlickrSome 3,000 years ago, farmers in eastern China domesticated the soybean. In 1765, the first soybeans were planted in North America. Today the soybean occupies more U.S. cropland than wheat. And in Brazil, where it spread even more rapidly, the soybean is invading the Amazon rainforest. For close to two centuries […]

A conversation with Indian youth activist Ruchi Jain

Ruchi Jain, 23, was working as a marketer in Mumbai, India, when she left her job to become a full-time climate activist. Today she works with the Indian Youth Climate Network and 350.org, and she traveled to Copenhagen in December to participate in the climate talks. I followed Jain during the two-week conference as she […]