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Your guide to a great green weekend in Portland
Portland’s swanky Sapphire Hotel.Photo: Sarah Gilbert Can you think of a greener city than Portland? Nope, didn’t think so. The City of Roses occupies a warm, squishy spot in the hearts of many a biker, climate hawk, and nature-lovah. We asked you to share your fave local breweries, organic cafés, and green hangouts, and compiled […]
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Rolls Royce electric car will let blue-bloods go green
  Here’s what needs to happen for electric cars to become the new industry standard: They need to be seen as sexier, manlier, and more upscale than original fossil-fuel flavor. We know, we know, but don’t shoot the messenger. Fortunately, Rolls Royce is now making inroads into the last one (and maybe the first) by […]
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Big Oil lobby announces it will start donating directly to candidates
Apparently their current amount of influence isn’t good enough.Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. The American Petroleum Institute (API), Big Oil’s chief lobbying organization, will start directly backing political candidates in the second quarter of this year. API, whose membership includes oil giants like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, already spends tens of millions of dollars every year on […]
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Sitting in traffic triggers more heart attacks than eating, alcohol, cocaine, and sex
Running your car in an enclosed garage is one way to kill yourself — so why do it outside?Photo: Simone RamellaSomeday our descendants will get around solely by hover-monorail and electric car, and it will blow their cybernetically-enhanced minds that there ever lived a race backward enough to huff automobile exhaust for an hour a […]
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Do you live in one of the nation’s ‘smartest regions for transportation’?
You might not see much similarity between More people walk to work in Boston than in any other city in the country.Photo: Steve MinorYolo County, Calif., with its open farmland and small cities, and the densely packed streets of New York City. But both are on the Natural Resource Defense Council’s list of “America’s Smartest […]
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Report: Californians paying too high a price for renewable energy
Is solar costing Californians a wad more than it should?Photo: Emergency Dentists USAAre Californians forking over too much green for green energy? A new report [PDF] from a ratepayers advocacy group found that the price of electricity in 59 percent of renewable energy contracts signed by the state’s three big utilities exceeded the market price […]
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It’s like Gadhafi is telling us to get off oil or something
Self-congratulatory poster of Gadhafi in Green Square in Tripoli, LibyaPhoto: QuigiboMoammar Gadhafi is a crazy dictator who is murdering his populace and needs to get a cruise missile shat down his neck, but what we all really want to know is: how are the actions of this homicidal crazypants going to affect our summer vacation? […]
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Reflecting on a century of economic progress and environmental problems
As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close, the problem of the commons is more important to our lives — and more central to economics — than a century ago when the first issue of the American Economic Review appeared, with an examination by Professor Katharine Coman of Wellesley College of […]
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Another Silicon Valley solar startup to build a factory in Oregon
A SolarWorld worker making panels. Photo: SolarWorldAnother Silicon Valley startup is planting a tree in Portlandia’s solar forest, thanks to a United States Department of Energy loan guarantee. SoloPower, a San Jose, Calif., company that makes thin-film photovoltaic models, on Thursday snagged a $197 million federal loan guarantee to build a factory in Wilson, Ore., […]
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China to blow the doors off Obama’s namby-pamby electric car program
China’s BYD e6 all-electric sedan.Photo: BYD HAHAHAHAHA! — China China just announced plans to build 1 million electric cars per year. Let’s put that in perspective: In Obama’s State of the Union Address, he said the U.S. should shoot for 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015, total. Here’s the really crazy part […]
