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  • XKCD illustrates the cost of electricity

    The webcomic XKCD usually has pretty stripped-down images, and saves its complexity for the jokes. But when creator Randall Munroe gets his hands on some data, he can make an infographic you could get lost in. The above (click to embiggen) is just a tiny section of his epic chart comparing how much money gets spent […]

  • Occupy your money

    The Occupy movement has been going green, so why not make your green get Occupied? Occupy George has some pretty stark money-based infographics, and templates for printing them onto your own bills. Chances are any bill in your possession will eventually end up in the pocket of the 1 percent, so why not let it […]

  • Owning a car is like having a second mortgage

    Auckland Transport Blog points out a sobering calculation from the book The Option of Urbanism: The financial cost of owning and maintaining a car is equivalent to the cost of owning a small house. (Well, a small house in a cheap area. But still.) AAA calculated that the average cost of car ownership and maintenance […]

  • Billionaire carves his name on island

    Hamad bin Hamdan al Ahyan is a real-life Chairface Chippendale. He owns a private island near Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, but what fun is that if everyone doesn't know it's yours? So he wrote his name on it, in letters a third of a mile long that are visible from space.

  • The $50,000 playhouse that oil built

    Ever wonder what oil executives do with all the money they make from wrecking the planet? Well, take a tour with me through the playhouse that oil exec John Schiller ($7.7 million in compensation in 2010, including a $2.6 million bonus) had built for his 4-year-old. That's an artist's conception above, not the actual blueprint, but all the features -- air conditioning, running water, fireplace, 32-inch flat-screen TV -- are for real. (The New York Times has pictures, too.)

  • We should all have plastic money like Canada

    Canada has unveiled new polymer bills, which will replace paper $100 bills and, by 2012, paper 50s and 20s. They're super slick and futurey-looking (even though they still feature pictures of the prime minister from 1911). More importantly, they're designed to prevent fraud and will be better for the environment than paper money.

  • Want local communities to support wind? Put them in charge

    Let’s turn NIMBYs into YIMBYs.Photo: Eddie CodelThis post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. Last month, Grist’s Jess Zimmerman noted sarcastically that “Money is a miracle cure for ‘wind turbine syndrome.'” It is. And environmental advocates frustrated by the (spurious?) health and aesthetic complaints raised […]

  • Green doesn’t sell to mouth-breathing Americans, says CEO of GE

    GE is making billions of dollars selling the world wind turbines and energy-efficient technology, so it's a little surprising to hear that the biggest regret of its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, is all that hippy-dippy talk at the center of the company's Ecomagination campaign. "If I had one thing to do over again I would not […]

  • How to profit from the coming ecopocalypse

    While a quarter of Americans have a net worth of zero, Jeremy Grantham controls a hedge fund worth $107 billion, and he has a message for the world: Resource scarcity, peak oil, and climate change could mean big bucks for those who can get out ahead of the disaster. Well, okay, not BIG bucks — […]