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This story was originally published by CityLab and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The federal gas tax that pays for America’s highways hasn’t been raised in decades, but that doesn’t stop some determined lawmakers from trying. The latest effort comes via Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, who has introduced a plan to raise the tax four cents a......read more
Our world of cheap, disposable hosuehold goods is a sad state of affairs. Think about it. You buy, say, a new toaster, which lasts maybe three years before kicking the bucket. It's probably not hard to fix but it's easier to buy another cheap one, so you get rid of it (hopefully at an electronics recycler). And on it goes. French product designer Gaspard Tiné-Berè intercedes in......read more
By Christopher Solomon Several years ago a mapping expert pinpointed the most remote place in the Lower 48 states. The spot was in the southeast corner of Yellowstone National Park, 20 miles from the nearest road. Roman Dial read the news and wasn’t much impressed. To him, 20 miles — the distance a hungry man could walk in a long day — didn’t seem very remote at......read more
Margo T. Oge for The Huffington Post: It's the end of 2014, and we are enjoying a remarkable convergence. Gas prices are down, the auto industry is booming and we have the most environmentally clean vehicle fleet ever. In fact, if we'd been listening to industry over the past several decades, this should be an impossible confluence of events. These industries repeatedly told Americans that......read more
Richard Gaston, a 23 year-old photographer from Glasgow, Scotland, will awaken your inner wanderlust with these evocative images shot on adventures in the Scottish Highlands and on the coast. Shooting on a Canon AE-1 and a Yashica T4, Richard documents his travels in the great outdoors where he captures stunning shots of lakes, mountains and time spent with friends. "The majority of my work is......read more
Kate Galbraith for The New York Times: Geothermal energy — tapping into heat deep underground and using it to produce power — is sometimes described as a forgotten renewable. It languishes in the shadows of better-known sources like wind and the sun, and in 2011 it accounted for less than 1 percent of electric power worldwide, according to last year’s World Energy Outlook. Yet......read more
Natural gas, a key component of the Obama administration's plan for American energy independence, is highly problematic in terms of climate change. Though it has significant less carbon emissions than either coal or oil, natural gas fields "leak" methane into the atmosphere -- and methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Now key Obama advisors have revealed a government-wide strategy aimed at cutting......read more
For the third consecutive year, greenhouse gas emissions fell in the nine Northeastern states participating in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI (pronounced "Reggie"), a market-based cap-and-trade program. Carbon emissions in the states dropped six percent between 2012 and 2013, from 92 million to 86 million tons. States in the RGGI program turned to lower emitting electricity......read more
Based in Los Altos, CA, Linda Gass is an artist and activist focused on creating awareness of the struggle over water resources in the American West. For this series of art quilts, Gass stitched together hand-painted silk crepe de chine to create colorful aerial representations of San Francisco Bay. The saturated images of salt ponds, woven on cozy quilts, use "the lure of beauty" to encourage......read more
Landfills, dairy farms and sewage plants produce clean-burning, totally renewable methane as a waste by-product. Now, thanks to Clean Energy Fuels, that biofuel has entered the retail market. The company, backed by oil giant T. Boone Pickens, is the first commercial distributor of biogas for cars, trucks and buses. There are 35 public Clean Energy stations in California selling the fuel,......read more
