Latest Articles

Push is on to strengthen climate bill

A coalition of more than 300 organizations including faith, human rights, social justice and environmental groups will deliver letters to the local offices of U.S. senators this week calling on them to strengthen climate legislation narrowly passed by the House of Representatives in June. The effort is part of a broader grassroots initiative that aims […]

California students take Refract House to Solar Decathlon

The Refract team recycled used billboards to create waterproof walls for the home.Courtesy Santa Clara University Adjacent to a three-story parking garage on the Silicon Valley campus of Santa Clara University, workers are busy building a contemporary wood-clad home that wouldn’t look out of place in the pages of Dwell or another shelter magazine for […]

If you’re not worried about melting permafrost, you should be

“If we lost just 1 percent of the carbon in permafrost today, we’d be close to a year’s contributions from industrial sources. I don’t think policymakers have woken up to this. It’s not in their risk assessments.” — Permafrost expert Chris Burn of Carleton Universiy

Washington Post gives polluters a free pass on dirty money and lies

In today’s Washington Post, David Fahrenthold’s front-page story spends its first 15 paragraphs detailing Big Oil’s massive campaign against clean energy while incredibly avoiding any mention of one little detail: money. In fact, to believe the first 15 paragraphs, the reason polluters have such a strong voice in the national debate is because conservation groups […]

NYT reads the future: Senate Dems consider maybe doing something in 2010

What do they know that we don’t?A scoop in The New York Times doesn’t surprise me. A scoop from nine months into the future does. This morning the Times Environment page featured a ClimateWire story dated May 15, 2010. “Senators Spend Recess Fine-Tuning Messages on Cap and Trade” finds Senate Democrats still hand-wringing over the […]

EPA reveals almost twice as many dangerous coal ash dumps as previously known

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released information showing there are 584 coal ash dump sites across the country — almost twice as many as previously identified. The facilities are located in 35 states and concentrated in Appalachia, the Southeast, Midwest and Intermountain West. The release [PDF] came late last Friday in response to a […]

Expedition to link students in support of climate action

From right to left: Tim Bromfield, Lynn Morris, and Will Lorimer. The three are tracing the 1-meter countour around the Atlantic Ocean in hopes of educating British students about communities threatened by rising sea levels.Courtesy Atlantic RisingAtlantic Rising is a new charity backed by Britain’s Royal Geographical Society. We are a three-person team creating a […]

Can we make it?

More than once over the last several years I have talked with people who understand the deep hole humankind has dug for itself because of our reliance on fossil fuels and the dominant system’s environmentally destructive model of  “development.” They have difficulty seeing a way that we will ever get out of this hole. Intuitively, […]

VIDEO: Weeklong Mountaintop-removal Tree-sit Ends

For a joyously peaceful week, residents beneath Massey Energy’s Edwight mountaintop-removal site in the Pettry Bottom community in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia have received a reprieve from reckless blasting, fly rock, silica-dust showers, and potential flooding–thanks to tree-sitter Nick Stocks, who voluntarily came down at 10:00 a.m. on Monday. The seventh day […]

1, 461 MPG (e)

I gave Jo Borras over on Gas2.0 a rough time in my last post, but he really made up for it with his latest article. Go read it here. In a nutshell, MPG ratings are inadequate to measure electric and plug-in electric car energy consumption. The guys at X Prize put together a free spreadsheet […]