Latest Articles

Climate Every Mountain

Move over, NASDAQ. Watch out, NYSE. Here comes the Chicago Climate Exchange, the nation’s first greenhouse-gas trading program. Announced yesterday by a coalition of corporations and government entities including DuPont, Ford Motor Company, Motorola, and the city of Chicago, the exchange will permit companies to reduce (on paper, at least) their emissions of carbon dioxide […]

Basin and Strange

Since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has claimed that strict environmental laws are hindering oil and gas exploration in the West — thereby compromising national security by forcing ongoing dependence on foreign energy sources. But a new federal study undermines that claim by showing that most oil and gas reserves on Western federal lands could […]

Umbra on student activism

Dear Umbra, I may be asking the wrong person, but I hope you can help out. I am a student at the University of North Carolina and my group, the Student Environmental Action Coalition, is undertaking an ambitious campaign to raise student fees by $4 per semester in order to bring renewable energy to our […]

Umbra on mercury in compact fluorescent lights

Dear Umbra, Here in Texas, where it is very hot in the summer (granted, we deserve to be in hell for having produced George Bush), some of us have been enthusiastically switching our light bulbs to cooler compact fluorescents. Is this a bad thing due to the mercury they contain? Lisa Smithville, Texas Dearest Lisa, […]

Umbra on turning off fluorescent lights

Dear Umbra, You’d be so proud of us! We just had an hour-long meeting about conservation and environmentalism here in our office. In the course of our discussion, the topic of leaving the lights on came up. I am a religious light-switcher, meaning I turn lights off in the bathroom or wherever they’re left on. […]

Range Bedfellows

Energy exploration has been part of Western landscape and culture for decades — but it seems the thrill of the drill may finally be wearing off. As the Bush administration pushes for further exploitation of Western resources (such as coal-bed methane mining in Wyoming and Montana and oil and natural gas drilling in the Rocky […]

You’re in the Army Now

Environmentalists and the Pentagon have never been the best of friends — in fact, the folks at the Department of Defense are currently trying to wiggle out of complying with as many environmental regulations as possible in the name of national security — but it would seem that military leaders can think green when it […]

Dolorous Haze

Emissions that contribute to smog in the Los Angeles area are drastically worse than previously estimated, air-quality officials admitted yesterday. The announcement marked a reversal of the usual optimistic rhetoric about California air quality, which has been steadily improving since the late 1980s. Now it seems that progress in eliminating the two most common pollutants […]

Great Build

It’s not clear if the problem is one of economics or one of spin, but either way, environmentally conscious building design is a concept that hasn’t quite caught on. The technology and expertise to build “green” structures have been around for decades; now, a movement is underway to sell developers on the economic benefits of […]

Oil and Accuracy Don’t Mix

The public owes much of its knowledge about the environment to journalists on the green beat — but what happens when those journalists get it systematically wrong? That’s what has happened with reporting on Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, according to a new study funded by the U.S. EPA and published in the journal Annual […]