Articles by Jess Zimmerman

How to solve car emissions, hunger, and overpopulation simultaneously

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has a modest proposal.

Give 7-Up to your baby!

Hey, whatever else is wrong with our current cultural relationship with sugar water, at least nobody's pushing it as a baby formula alternative anymore, right? This 1956 ad says that 7-Up is "so wholesome" that "lots of mothers" give it to their babies. The company's evidence for this wholesomeness? They list the ingredients, even though they don't have to!

Top 10 greenest cities in North America

It seems like we get a new list of greenest, most climate-change-prepared, most bike-friendly etc. cities every week or so. But we never really get tired of looking at these rankings, and checking them against each other to decide where we should fantasize about moving. Today, it's a list of the top greenest cities in North America from Siemens and the Economist Intelligence Unit. This ranking takes into account carbon emissions, land use, transportation, energy usage, buildings, water and air quality, waste, and environmental governance.

Drumroll please for the top 10:

Severe weather costs us $485 billion per year

According to estimates from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the baseline cost of extreme weather (which has always been with us, but which is steadily getting worse due to climate change) in the United States is $485 billion a year -- 3.4 percent of the country's GDP.