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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 […]

Verizon sponsors climate-change-denying mountaintop-removal rally?

UPDATE, Sept. 2: The folks over at Credo Action are encouraging Verizon customers to communicate their displeasure with the company’s sponsorship — via Twitter, Facebook and Email. — Verizon Wireless needs to reconsider its “Friends and Family” feature–or, more pointedly, withdraw its support for Massey Energy’s outrageously bogus “Friends of America” rally on Labor Day […]

Four years after Katrina: Lessons from the Gulf Coast

Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. As the Gulf Coast struggled to keep its head above water, the rest of us were glued to the news — astounded at first by the awful destruction, and then by the inadequate response to so much human suffering. 
 In those days, our TV sets became […]

Friday music blogging: Gomez

Gomez is one of those bands that for a brief moment in the late ’90s and early ’00s aaalmost reached the big time, and then … didn’t. But when their moment of almost-fame passed, they didn’t quit. They’ve soldiered on ever since as a solid second-tier draw, touring incessantly and releasing a modest-selling album every […]

Coal lobby claims their grassroots support is “more organic” than green groups’

“This is the truest form of grass-roots there is. We don’t charge people to be members of the Citizen Army, so if anything, it’s more organic than what some of the environmental groups do. We allow these people to express their own opinions on these issues.” — Joe Lucas, senior vice president for communications at […]

Climate plus security minus hyperbole still scary

The impact of climate change on national security has finally moved above the fold. And as the December Copenhagen climate change negotiations approach, politicians and experts alike are being forced to examine the complex effects of natural and social change on security. They must also walk a linguistic tightrope between hyperbole and uncertainty, working to […]

Could we replace the nation’s pavement with solar panels?

Solar Roadways A while back I mentioned Solar Roadways, a clean-energy idea that appears kind of kooky, at least on the surface. (See what I did there?) The notion is to replace paved surfaces with rugged, specially built solar panels. The Solar Road Panels would contain not just solar panels but LED lighting (to enable […]