Latest Articles

Smaller breasts are better, and other advice for holiday-bird quandaries

In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries. Lettuce know what food worries keep you up at night. May I suggest a nice ham this year?   Dear Checkout Line, Let’s talk turkey. I want to green my Thanksgiving table, but […]

Emanuel, tapped as Obama’s chief of staff, has a respectable green record

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) has accepted Barack Obama’s offer to serve as his chief of staff. As chair of the Democratic Caucus, Emanuel is the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House. Before his election to the House in 2003, he was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton. The chief of staff is essentially charged with […]

IEA: Oil price to rebound to $100 when economy recovers, then soar to $200 by 2030

The staid International Energy Agency is poised to bring a note of sanity back to the oil discussion next week, according to the Financial Times: Oil prices will rebound to more than $100 a barrel as soon as the world economy recovers, and will exceed $200 by 2030, the International Energy Agency will say in […]

E.U. greenhouse-gas goal will be tough to meet, says IEA

A European Union goal to keep global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius will be, um, hard to do, says the International Energy Agency. “The scale of the challenge … is immense,” says a report to be published next week. “The technology shift, if achievable, would certainly be unprecedented in scale and speed […]

After landslide victory for Prop. 2, national farm industry squawks

California’s Proposition 2 — deftly profiled by Carol Ness — passed in a landslide on Tuesday. The new law is simple and hardly earth-shaking; it requires that "calves raised for veal, egg-laying hens, and pregnant pigs be confined only in ways that allow these animals to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and […]

A real path to energy independence

Proposition 1A passed 53 percent to 47 percent in California on Tuesday. The network will eventually extend from Sacramento through San Francisco and L.A., to San Diego. The bonds authorized by the proposition provide for about $10 billion or one-third of the cost for the whole system. In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, […]

GM will keep investing in electric-car R&D

Even as it strives to cut costs and keep its head above water, General Motors will push forward with investment in electric vehicles, according to ever-elusive “sources with knowledge of the plan.”

John Doerr recommends Bill Joy for chief technologist

Clean energy investor John Doerr advises Barack Obama to hire Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, as the nation’s first chief technology officer (a position Obama has said he’ll create). Doerr also says “the most important thing [Obama]’s got to do is kick-start a huge amount of research and innovation in energy.” Here’s Bill Joy […]

We already have 750,000 green jobs and the potential for ample green investments

This post was originally published at the NRDC blog, Switchboard, before the presidential election. —– You can’t miss the fact that both Time and Newsweek chose the week of the presidential election to run pieces on how the economic downturn will affect efforts to solve global warming. Yes, most eyes are on the election through […]

Hurricane Ike cleanup still ongoing

Nearly two months after Hurricane Ike reared its head on the Texas and Louisiana coast, workers are still cleaning up what may be a record amount of debris. The wee bright side: only some 15 percent of the wreckage is headed to the landfill, while the rest is reused or recycled.