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Coal coloring book teaches kids all about dirty energy

Update below The coal-industry group Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy, which doesn’t actually allow families to join, has a wonderfully crappy coloring book for children. Let’s have a look! Plot, character development, and drawings that kids would actually want to color don’t seem to be priorities for “Eyes for Frosty.” At least it […]

Families not allowed in ‘families for coal’ group

The word “family” serves as code so often in political discourse that it can be tough to know what it really means. In the case of a Pennsylvania coal-industry group, it seems to mean, quite clearly, “not families.” Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy (FORCE, naturally) does not allow families to join, according to […]

GM: Innovators or crackheads?

Some assembly required.GM.comAt one of our news meetings last week, I mentioned a story I had seen. “GM says the Chevy Volt will get 230 miles per gallon,” I told my fellow editors. The number struck me funny because it was ludicrously far beyond any current mpg rating, and because GM acknowledged that the Volt, […]

‘The Cove’ pulls no punches in documenting Japanese dolphin hunt

The Cove documents a the hunting of dolphins in one Japanese fishing village.Early on in The Cove, director Louie Psihoyos describes how he assembled an “Ocean’s Eleven”-like team of specialists to infiltrate and expose a secret, brutal, for-profit dolphin-killing operation in Japan. The description fits the film, which is structured more like an action thriller […]

Ask Umbra on dream trips

Send your question to Umbra! Q. Dear Umbra, Like any married couple, my husband and I occasionally fantasize about what we’ll do with our life in our retirement years. We’ve had the typical RV fantasy as we do love to travel, but we worry about the gas consumption and resulting emissions that would come of […]

India says: Take this mine and shove it

Last fall, Tom Zeller at the New York Times Green Inc. blog wrote an eye-opening piece on a possible Indian government and corporate venture in Appalachia’s coal mines. And as the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope pointed out, an even bigger coal story took place this week in India. Members of parliament from various political parties […]

More anti-climate-bill letters forged under names of senior-citizen groups

More fake letters opposing climate legislation have come to light, with this latest batch being falsely attributed to senior-citizen organizations. As we’ve reported previously, forged letters were sent to three U.S. representatives from Bonner and Associates, a Washington, D.C.-based group that specializes in astroturfing. Bonner was subcontracted by the PR firm Hawthorn Group to do […]

We are all from Wise County

Want to get really angry about health care and global warming? Not the ginned-up rage of the Obama-was-really-born-in-Kenya crowd, but an anger that fires you up to take action in the name of justice? Anger like the rage felt by so many white Northerners and Southerners in 1963 when they saw Birmingham’s fire hoses turned […]

The top 10 sources for energy

Jacobson the power-ful.stanford.eduI was disappointed when I discovered that the list of experts at last week’s Clean Energy Summit would not include Stanford University’s Mark Jacobson. Of course, no individual is indispensable at such a summit. But as the day went by I felt his absence more and more keenly. That’s because Jacobson is one […]

Global warming triggers more disasters

This piece was co-written with Erica Goad, an intern with the Energy team at the Center for American Progress, which originally published this post. Wildfires blaze near San Diego.Photo: slworking2Hurricane Claudette hit the Florida panhandle Sunday, lashing it with heavy rains. Hurricane Bill is gathering strength in the Atlantic, and is “poised to grow into […]