Latest Articles

Take it back!

Electronics TakeBack Coalition runs a Times Square ad entreating Panasonic to take back TVs for recycling — on Panasonic jumbotron:

Unplugging

Holy moly. Looks like National Buy Nothing Day came early this year, and for the first time, also included electricity: An unexpected drop in U.S. electricity consumption has utility companies worried that the trend isn’t a byproduct of the economic downturn, and could reflect a permanent shift in consumption that will require sweeping change in […]

New country tune ‘Green’ boasts, ‘I was green before green was a thing’

Listen Play "Green," by Blake Shelton Blake Shelton is a popular country artist and the husband of another popular country artist, Miranda Lambert. This is the first song off his new album Startin’ Fires. It’s called "Green," and contains the immortal couplet, "I know a lot more about cane-pole fishin’ / than I ever will […]

Vatican goes solar

The 2,400 solar panels covering the roof of a giant concert hall in the Vatican were activated on Wednesday. And seeing that now the pope is open to solar systems, Galileo shook his fist in his grave.

West Virginia DEP approves permit to blast Coal River Mountain

We wrote this summer about Coal River Mountain, one of the last mountains in West Virginia’s Coal River Valley that hasn’t been destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining. Massey Energy is planning to blast off a 10-square-mile area of the mountain for mining, but activists in the the area were hoping to turn into a […]

The Great White Way goes green

Photo: goatopolis Broadway went green on Tuesday with the official announcement of the creatively named Broadway Goes Green effort. Think neon signs lit with energy-efficient bulbs, costumes washed with eco-friendly detergent, and programs printed with water-soluble ink. Oh, the drama!

Some leftovers to browse before T-Giving

I’ve got about 40 tabs open in my browser, and that’s no way to go into a holiday weekend. Time for an old-fashioned link-fest! —– I never managed to say anything about it, but novelist Ian McEwan had a delightfully literary and readable essay on Obama and climate change in The Guardian. Definitely worth reading. […]

With the food world’s eyes on farm policy, is the real action at Treasury?

Food-politics blogs and listservs are blowing up with speculation about whom Obama will tap as USDA chief. I’ve weighed in myself here and here. (Update: House Ag Committee chair Colin Peterson, tipped as a top contender for the USDA spot, says he’s not interested. Evidently, he calculates that his current post is the more powerful […]

Impoverished Africans can’t eat their own crops

From an interesting article by Dave Harcourt in Ecoworldly: The castor [oil], equivalent to 12,000 tons of oil, would actually be grown by 25,000 families [small African farmers] contracted by GEE and would have a value of around US$ 10 million [$400 per year or $1.10 per day per family]. … Ashenafi Chote was one […]

BLM backs off from plan to allow oil drilling near Utah national parks

The Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday partially backed off from unpopular plans to open land near Utah national parks to oil and gas drilling. BLM deferred leasing about one-third of the 93 tracts that the National Park Service had objected could contaminate parks with noise, water, and air pollution; the rest will still go […]