Replacing Oil With, Uh, More Oil

National Petroleum Council pictures life after conventional crude There’s a new voice in the crowd shrieking about waning oil supplies:...

15 Green Colleges and Universities

See which colleges got top marks from Grist, then grade our effort in the comments section at the bottom of...

‘Extreme localism’ in the New Yorker

Edible Media takes an occasional look at interesting or deplorable food journalism. Whatever else it has accomplished, the local-food movement...

15 Green Business Founders

Some of these eco-entrepreneurs you’ve likely heard of, some of them you surely haven’t, but all of them deserve kudos...

Measure, monitor, reduce, offset

Haven't had enough on offsets yet? Good. Romm's zeroth rule of carbon offsets is that you should "do everything reasonably possible to reduce your own emissions" before buying offsets. At first blush, this reads like a memo from Obviousland, a staunch statement in favor of apple pie. Pretty much every marketer of carbon offsets heavily stresses that offset purchases should go hand-in-hand with serious attempts at conservation, and I certainly agree.

So far, so good. But the rest of the post serves as a lesson in what can happen when common sense hardens into ideology. After making a bunch of points about how the worst thing you can do is actually feel good about purchasing offsets, Romm offers up Exhibit A of the wrong way to go about buying offsets: Google.

Umbra on radiant heating

Dear Umbra, We’re trying to build a really small house and be really economical as we do it. Radiant floor...

Umbra on installing solar power

Dear Umbra, I live on Long Island, N.Y., and am interested in getting solar power for my home. I am...

Nice job, Einstein

I'll give you some hints. Just a few days ago, a man walked on a stage a few hundred yards from where I sit to accept an honorary degree in science. Following is the speech that preceded the award:

As Einstein is to relativity you are to biodiversity -- the insight that our world is unimaginatively rich in its number of species, whose lives are inextricably woven together. This idea has powered much subsequent biological research and re-shaped forever human understanding of the world and our place within it. This intellectual journey began, as so often in science, with a child's curiosity -- in your case with the ants you collected in the series of Southern towns in which you were raised. Your fascination in the face of nature's detail led to your adult study of how species adapt to their surroundings and how genes and culture interact to affect social behavior. Most recently you have inspired the growing inquiry into the vast array of species with which we share this planet and into the delicate web that holds together all life. In doing so you have fathered the modern environmental movement and inspired countless scientists with the knowledge that there is so very much more of life to be discovered. Like Einstein you, too, are dedicated to unifying ideas across the disciplines -- to finding those areas in which science, humanities, and social sciences converge -- and to exploring how science can best inform religion, morality, and ethics. And, as relativity shaped so much of the human agenda of the Twentieth Century, so biodiversity stands poised to do in the Twenty-First -- providing head-spinning new insights along with the sober realization that upon the use we make of this knowledge hangs the very existence of human life.

I’m sure whoever has the best argument will win, right?

There’s an interesting piece today in CongressNow on the debate over auctioning vs. giving away credits in a cap-and-trade system....