Latest Articles

Clothing from Britney’s guest role to be auctioned for NRDC

Fallen popstar Britney Spears has a guest starring role on tonight’s episode of How I Met Your Mother. And despite evidence that would predict otherwise, reviews suggest she pulls off the role fairly well. After the show, she’ll be pulling off her clothes … For charity, that is. Her wardrobe from the appearance — including […]

Voting is open for the Orion Readers’ Choice Award

Read a good green-themed book lately? The editors of Orion have, and in advance of their award of the annual Orion Book Award next month, for an outstanding book exploring the interaction of people and the natural world, they've just posted all the nominated books here for voting in a "people's choice" contest.

From The World Without Us to Blessed Unrest, it's an impressive list that makes me realize how many books I want to crack open. But after looking them over, I did at least take the time to vote for my own favorite of 2007. Hope you will, too.

New York’s new governor supports congestion pricing

Brand-spankin’-new New York Gov. David Paterson has announced his support for a controversial congestion pricing plan. The proposal, put forward by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and supported by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, would charge $8 to drivers entering Manhattan during peak hours. Said Paterson in a written statement, “Congestion pricing addresses two urgent […]

Interesting research findings on wealth and happiness

University of British Columbia researchers have put a price tag on happiness. The good news: It's available for the low price of $5.

The better news: You can't spend that money on yourself. Instead, to get the most smiles per dollar, you have to spend money on other people.

Dr. Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and colleagues found that [experimental subjects] report significantly greater happiness if they spend money "pro-socially" -- that is on gifts for others or on charitable donations -- rather than spending on themselves.

The researchers apparently looked at three different kinds of studies: a nationwide survey, a specific study of how employees spent their bonuses, and a controlled experiment on psychology undergrads. In all cases, the evidence showed that giving money away made people happier. In fact, donating as little as $5 was enough to boost happiness on any given day. But the amount of money people spent on themselves had no appreciable effect on how happy they were.

In short, new research confirms an old adage: it really is better to give than to receive.

But, on a somewhat more dismal note, there's another route to convert money into happiness: choose friends who aren't as wealthy as you are.

Do humans deserve to find life on other planets?

An explosion in our ability to detect planets in other solar systems has made astronomers increasingly confident that it's only a matter of time until we discover life on other planets. Astronomers just discovered methane on a planet 63 light-years from Earth -- a sign that life just might exist. Here's what Carl B. Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, said following the discovery in this fascinating Washington Post article by Marc Kaufman.

There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy and probably a hundred billion other galaxies with as many stars as ours, so it seems highly unlikely that there are not Earth-like planets orbiting some of them out there, waiting to be discovered.

I find the idea of life on other planets enormously uplifting: life is a miracle. But the idea of our civilization finding life on other planets fills me with apprehension. After all, civilization "discovering" new worlds teeming with life is nothing new to us: we've been doing it since agricultural civilization started expanding from Mesopotamia millennia ago.

But for as long as we've been discovering these new worlds, we've been destroying them, whether it was the Clovis people slaughtering the woolly mammoths, mastodons, and giant beavers that used to make North America home, the Sumerians turning wetlands and forests into wheat fields, or our own civilization slaughtering everything from the dodo to the bison to (just last year) the Baiji dolphin formerly of China's Yangtze River. And now we're turning our attention to the world's remaining tropical forests.

Truckers slowing down to increase fuel efficiency

You think filling up your car is a pain in the wallet? Try being a trucker. Most big rigs get less than 10 miles to the gallon, and diesel fuel is hovering near $4 a gallon in many places. “For every one-penny increase in the price of diesel, it costs our industry $391 million,” says […]

Umbra on toxic yoga mats

Dear Umbra, I own a yoga studio and our mats are wearing out and in need of replacement. What’s the best alternative for buying new mats? And if I do get new mats, what’s the best option for disposing of the old ones: donate to one of the many organizations that provide yoga for people […]

Dirty energy industry preemptively padding the pockets of key Democrats

The dirty energy industry sees big, important debates heading to a Democratic Congress, and it’s preparing by buying up "moderate" House Democrats ($ub. req’d): Moderate House Democrats — even freshmen with little obvious influence — have seen a surge of campaign contributions from the energy industry, whose giving patterns have long favored Republicans. Data compiled […]

‘Ahead of the Curve: Business Responds to Climate Change’

Here is an absolutely stellar video from Sea Studios productions called "Ahead of the Curve: Business Responds to Climate Change": (via Steve Clemons)

Notable quotable

“We need to create new jobs in this country — green collar jobs that can help our economy and our environment. And I’d like to point out that that’s my term — ‘green collar’ jobs. See, I can come up with exciting phrases.” — Hillary Clinton … at least according to The Onion.