Reality check: What's the largest single source of U.S. carbon emissions today?

You didn't say cars, did you? It's electricity generation, which is really a shocker, since the solution - beginning to cut carbon from our personal or business electricity use - is a no-brainer.

Or...

Averting the climate crisis may seem like moving a mountain - seemingly impossible with a single shove, but not impossible with a million shovels.

Many of us want politicians to step up and grab the shovels, instead of shoving each other back and forth to see who will...

Remember sometime back in the roaring '90s when the idea of electronically controlled "smart" homes first popped up? Back then it seemed pie-in-the-sky and Jetson like.

But the advent of smart metering and ongoing work to create a smart grid truly are first steps to that fabled smart...

There's obviously something wrong with a food system when farmers don't make a living yet huge industrial farm corporations do, producing lower-quality foods, and getting billions in subsidies to produce corn and soybeans. We don't need more tofu and high fructose corn syrup.

What we do need...

Zero waste is not an impossible goal.

But Americans generated 254 billion tons of waste last year -- that's a 300% increase over the past 50 years.

Many cities are determined to do their part, however, both in the U.S. -- San Francisco, Seattle, and Sedona, Arizona,...

Volvo has spent a decade designing a radar-and-camera system called Pedestrian Detection that, hidden in the grille of a car, can recognize human beings up ahead and step on the brakes if the driver doesn't.

This innovation is designed to work in city traffic, at speeds of...

In New Zealand, the tiny political party Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party (ALCP) promotes a platform that it says can "reverse" damaging climate change by planting hundreds of thousands of hectares of cannabis hemp, ALCP says, at a density of around 300 plants per square meter, to replace...

Human beings have left their traces on the earth from back in the days when huge mounds of mussel and clam shells and broken shards of pottery announced consumption patterns.

So it takes a bit of a mind stretch to imagine how billions of us can go "no...

Once you start using a bike to get around, you see cities in an entirely new way.

David Byrne, in his forthcoming book Bicycle Diaries uses his bike trips on a folding Montague bike in cities around the globe as a jumping-off point for musings on...

Well-developed high-speed trains could take a lot of domestic travel out of the hands of airlines.

Which has the airlines crying, "That's insane."

British Airlines expressed its skepticism in a Guardian article: "High-speed rail cannot be a complete substitute for flying," the company said. "There are...

Portions of the Web were abuzz with Alan Dangour and his team's review of 50 years of studies regarding nutrient content of organic foods versus conventionally-produced foods, funded by the U.K.'s Food Standards Agency (FSA).

"We have concluded that there's no good evidence that consumption of organic...

Because it is summer, cyclists are out in force. That means more encounters and chances for anti-cyclist road rage or other unfortunate incidents, like the Colorado man shot this week for riding with his child on a busy street.

If you love the freedom of using...

Ever wondered if those little placards on your hotel room sink, exhorting you to use less water or fewer towels 'for the environment' actually work?

The answer is, not very well. Robert Cialdini, a professor at Arizona State University, studied these hotel hints and found the following: asking...

Paul McCartney and his daughters aren't trying to make us all full-time vegetarians, though they themselves eschew meat.

"It's an environmental conversation, not a vegetarian one. It's ok to just give up meat for one day. It doesn't make you a vegetarian if you hate vegetarians....

While it's hard to ignore the bad news about fish stocks - U.N. statistics show 75% of wild fish stocks are depleted or exploited - the world's clamoring for protein sources is increasingly loud.

That's why a long-term sustainable fish farming experiment with a fish...

The German town of Dorentrup originally turned out the street lamps because it felt it couldn't afford to pay the electric bill. A frustrated citizen suggested that residents should have some way to turn on the lights when they needed to, and the county council in nearby...

"The poor are world traffic's victims," read a recent headline in a Swedish newspaper. The UN World Health Organization's latest report is a country-by-country survey of traffic injuries and deaths, and the results are sobering.

Traffic is deadly -- 1.2 million people are killed annually in...

Amidst the massive algae blooms and the strange invasions of non-native fish, in the Baltic Sea there's a bit of good news this year - seriously threatened cod stocks are experiencing something of an unexpected comeback.

Otherwise, it's a bit hard to find good news...

The sun's still got maybe 2.3 billion habitable years, scientists have recently stated. It helps to put our climate troubles in a bigger perspective.

While climate woes are real and we need to respond to them, there are other reasons to rethink how we now are in...

Amazingly, one in eight Americans is still 'food insecure' which means they don't have enough of it to feel like they can be sure where the next meal is coming from. Forty thousand food banks exist in the U.S., but most aren't well known.

And on the...