Latest Articles

Umbra on winter biking

Dear Umbra, Here in Cleveland we recently endured the first snowstorm of winter. When I look out the window and see all that pretty white stuff, I can’t help but reach for my car keys instead of my bicycle helmet. Can you offer any suggestions for safe and warm winter riding? Jon B. Lakewood, Ohio […]

iPhone rideshare app coming soon

It’s the 21st century, folks — text with your hitchhiker’s thumb. An iPhone application called Avego will soon be available to hook up drivers with those who need rides, helpfully suggesting a safe place to pull over and calculating the split cost between driver and rider. No word on how it’ll go over in Ontario, […]

Are we nearing a breakthrough on electric cars?

Marc Gunther rounds up the evidence.

The trouble with clean-energy tax credits

Round about the time I got out of college, I (like seemingly everyone else) got a Leatherman — the Swiss Army knife cum pliers cum screwdriver that fit in your pocket. Since I was finally out of the dormitories and in my own apartment, it was handy to have a tool to assemble the odd […]

Exxon: Not the only profitable energy biz last quarter

ExxonMobil keeps making profits — another record one this last quarter — in the midst of meltdown everywhere else. But we here in New England had energy profits of our own: Coop Power, the regional renewable energy coop, had its first profitable quarter since it launched a couple years ago due largely to the number […]

NYT suckered by ExxonMobil in puff piece titled ‘Green is for Sissies’

Another nail in the coffin of the "liberal media" meme. The NYT has run a greenwashing press release from the oil giant masquerading as a major business news story. Yes, the print headline really is "Green is for Sissies," but as you’ll see, it isn’t some kind of postmodern Onion-esque irony (except maybe unintentionally). Here […]

BLM opens land near Alaska’s Bristol Bay to development

Some 2 million acres near Alaska’s Bristol Bay will be opened to development for the first time under a plan released Friday by the Bureau of Land Management. The agency’s decision to throw the door open for mining and drilling in the area, which is home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon run, is opposed […]

Upstream carbon prices will not substantially change downstream carbon-emitting behavior

With apologies to Little Milton. Good news: With the incoming Obama administration, we are finally going to get some sort of a greenhouse gas (GHG) bill. Bad news: We are still having an inane, economically uninformed conversation about GHG policy. Many of the ideas that pass for Serious GHG Policy are silly, not because they […]

Obama and McCain make nice and possibly talk climate and energy

Obama and McCain got together this morning in Chicago for their first post-election meeting, in which they discussed what they could work on together going forward. As many noted prior to the meeting, it’s likely that climate change and energy concerns came up, as Obama had said on the campaign trail that these might be […]

Will Democrats take the votes but ignore the voters in increasingly powerful Northern Virginia?

Northern Virginia voters solidified their reputation Nov. 4 as a virtual factory for Democratic victories. Collectively, the Virginia suburbs of D.C. broke for Obama in numbers exceeding 60 percent. The margin is comparable to such liberal bastions as California and New York. Given the results, and given that 1 in 3 Virginia voters now lives […]