Latest Articles

Meet the star of ‘No Impact Man’: No Impact Woman

In November 2006, Michelle Conlin began a year-long experiment in extreme sustainability, resolving to burn no fossil fuels, produce no trash, and eat only food grown within 250 miles of her Greenwich Village home. She gave up nearly all shopping and learned to use cloth diapers for her 2-year-old daughter. She took up bicycling and […]

Persistence stops a train — and global warming slowed

A massive new rail line planned to move millions of tons of low-grade coal from northeastern Wyoming to the Midwest has been stopped. For more than nine years Sierra Club and our allies have been battling plans by Dakota Minnesota & Eastern Railroad Corp. (DM&E) to build this new coal line, and late yesterday DM&E […]

California proposes new program for 1 GW of renewables

The California Public Utilities Commission issued a new proposal today designed to significantly increase the amount of solar energy installed in the state. It is kind of like a feed-in tariff, but different.  Call it a feed-in tariff v2.0. The proposed program would require utilities to purchase electricity from mid-size solar and other renewable energy […]

The Climate Post: A climate for monkey business

First Things First: The American “century” began 150 years ago today, when a salt water drill slipped into a crevice 69 feet below the surface, essentially striking oil for “Colonel” Edward Drake and the backers of his unlikely expedition. The find made Titusville, Penn., the first global capital of the oil industry. After Drake & […]

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 […]