Latest Articles

Boycotting Whole Foods won’t help

The health care reform debate has provoked any number of crazy opinions, including the far-right fantasies of death panels or that Medicare isn’t a government-funded program. Two weeks ago, Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey added his own musings to the list with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal condemning “Obamacare” and any […]

Water utilities lack proper filters for weed-killer

This story was written by Danielle Ivory. Results from a federal drinking water monitoring program show that many public water companies are ineffective at removing a widely used weed-killer from their water supplies. As the Huffington Post Investigative Fund reported earlier this week, the Environmental Protection Agency has failed to notify the public about data […]

Carl Pope says 350 ppm not strong enough, endorses carbon pricing and global tax & dividend!

In the Sept/Oct issue of Sierra Club Magazine, Club Chairman Carl Pope details four “fallacies about solving global warming” that must be scrapped in order to achieve “the transformational global deal we need to save our planet” in Copenhagen. Put in positive terms, and looking only at the specifics, Pope outlines the following platform. 1. […]

More on No Impact Man and personal eco-behavior

The other day I highlighted a new piece from Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, which was critical of No Impact Man and other “stunts” in hyper-green living. Mainly I used it as an excuse to point to my old piece on the civic sphere, which, ahem, you should read. I should have made it […]

FACES of Coal are iStockphotos?!

The new coal industry front group “FACES” has yet to come forward with a list of their members. Well, thanks to a few new-media gumshoes, including Appalachian Voices’ Jamie Goodman and our friends at DeSmogBlog, we’ve learned that not only is FACES hosted by a K-Street firm called Adfero, but all of the FACES of […]

Army Corps urged to honor Obama’s priority of restoring New Orleans area wetlands

Louisiana’s threatened wetlands provide a critical barrier to hurricanes and flooding.With the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaching, a coalition of 17 advocacy groups called on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to promptly honor President Obama’s pledge “to restore nature’s barriers — the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and […]

Thoreau, Walden and civil disobedience in the age of climate change

On a frigid January night some years ago, a friend and I snuck into a Massachusetts state preserve, stripped naked, and charged into Walden Pond. For a few exhilarating, painful moments we swam, and I imagined some hard-to-name kinship with the pond’s most famous neighbor, the 19th century eccentric Henry David Thoreau. It was a […]

Sen. Tom Coburn has scientific document reading training

“I am not the smartest man in the world, but I have been trained to read scientific documents, and [anthropogenic climate change] is malarkey.” — Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who also explained why Jesus would oppose a public option in health care reform

Netroots Nation panel on blogging and climate change [VIDEO!!1!]

On Aug. 13, at the Netroots Nation conference for progressive bloggers, journalists, and activists, I was part of a panel called “A Warming Web: The Blogosphere and Climate Change.” Also present: Kevin Grandia of DeSmogBlog Brentin Mock of The American Prospect (and elsewhere) Brad Johnson of Think Progress Kate Sheppard of pure awesomeness Tim Lange, […]

Hollywood’s next green generation

We know. There’s nothing green about owning a 20,000-square foot house, or flying in a private jet, or stocking a wardrobe the size of a studio apartment. Famous actors indisputably leave a much larger carbon footprint than the average citizen. But their celebrity gives them a far greater ability to influence others, so their efforts […]