Beaver Creek Housing Cooperative

Photo via MotorTrend VW's 2011 Touareg Hybrid The 2010 Geneva Motor Show was filled with so many splashy auto announcements--Porsche's first ever plug-in hybrid, a new Aud...Read the full story on TreeHugger

The Riverdale Press
Wage battle begins
The Riverdale Press
Approximately 40 workers and politicians gathered at the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative Monday evening to rally in support of the bill. ...

Photo via Whatson The so-called "conventional wisdom" has been pretty unremitting in deeming any sort of comprehensive energy reform legislation dead in the water this year. But that's still not looking to be the case--some rather unlikely champions, including GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham and Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, have continued pushing for a bill that puts a price on car...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image credit: Good Times are tough for everyone—including municipal governments. One are that has suffered from diminished budgets is public transport. Across the country, transit workers are losing their jobs, making it that much harder to maintain the systems and schedules. Though there are some signs of economic recovery, more public transit jobs are expected to be lost before things get better....Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Public domain Other Truck Fleets, Pay Attention Did you know that replacing a pre-1994 diesel truck (or at least the engine) with a 2004-2006 model could cut soot pollution by about 2/3, and reduce smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions by more than half? Post 2007 diesel trucks are even better, with a reduction of soot particles by about 95% and NOx by at least 3/4. That's a pretty big difference (though it doesn't solve CO2 emissions), and it esp...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Trinity College, Dublin TreeHugger loves Product Service Systems, where you borrow and share instead of own. They are also called libraries, and Kris De Decker of No-Tech Magazine points us to a lovely post by Brian Kaller, a former newspaper reporter now living in rural Ireland. He loves his local library, but more importantly, writes about the principle beh...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Photo: Google Maps Loblaw Couldn't Resist Ontario's Generous Feed-in Tariff? Loblaw is announcing today that it will put solar panels on the roof of 4 supermarkets in a pilot program, with the ultimate goal of installing solar arrays on more than 100 stores in Ontario. This is not surprising considering how insanely generous the feed-in tariffs for solar power are in the province (between 53.9 and 80.2 ¢/kWh, with 20-year contracts). I just hope that measures have been taken to avoid repeating what happened in S...Read the full story on TreeHugger

The first Freakonomics book was a lot of fun; the second less so, as it sort of devolved into "if the scientific consensus and/or coast-hugging liberal elite are for it, we are against it" type of thing. Hence Freakonomics Watch; or perhaps it should be called James McWilliams Watch, since he appears to be the contributor to their blog with the most attitude about anything green. Now he is on about The Persistence of the Primitive Food Movement, where "Bicycles are losing gears, runners are afoot in shoes designed to create a barefoot sensation (some are even running barefoot), and m...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Cyclists assemble in Yerevan, Armenia, for a bike tour to Teghut Forest. Photo by Ruzanna Hovasapyan via ride-earth on Flickr. Armenian environmental activists fighting plans to build a copper mine in an endangered forest got a boost recently when former System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian, surely the world's most famous Armenian-American rock star, sent a me...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo via Andrew Evans of the National Geographic King Penguins are notorious for their prim, tuxedoed appearance--but a recently discovered all-black penguin seems unafraid to defy convention. In what has been described as a "one in a zillion kind of mutation," biologists say that the animal has lost control of it's Read the full story on TreeHugger

Designers, engineers, inventors, and crafty gadgeteers, it's time to get the brain juices percolating and submit for the 2010 James Dyson Award. The competition is put up by the James Dyson Foundation, founded by the British inventor responsible for the now-iconic Dyson vacuum cleaners, the Airblade hand dryer, Air Multip...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Image: MIT Could Store Power at 100x More Energy/Weight Than Lithium-Ion A team of scientists at MIT has discovered a new way to generate power with carbon nanotubes. In a paper titled "Chemically driven carbon-nanotube-guided thermopower waves" published in Nature Materials, they describe how they made "thermopower waves" flow through the nanotubes, generating a significant amount of power relative to the size of the nanotubes. This opens up new areas of research in energy gener...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons Until the 20th century, the Palos Verdes peninsula—a small spit of land south of Los Angeles—was the only home of the blue butterfly Glaucopsyche lygdamus palosverdesensis. Unchecked development, however, eroded this small habitat and nearly caused the extinction of the fickle butterfly. After years of work rebuilding the degraded ecosystem, conservationists released 80 Palos Verdes blue b...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo via Sheerman-Chase I can't wait to see the comments on this one. Really, I can't. But this is a concept that I think is important to think about, especially at a time when much of the media appears to be buying into the narrative that the science supporting climate change is being 'called into question'. As a result, we're seeing more calls for televised 'debate' than usual, especially from outlets already convinced that global warming is a big hoax. So what's a climate scientist to do when s/he's asked by a skeptic to appear on Fox News to defend the Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo via casers jean How do we keep fish on the menu? Chef Dan Barber asked this question at the recent TED 2010 event. Farmed fish is a problematic issue - sustainable fish farming is even more so. What's sustainable, and is farmed fish ever really sustainable? Are there any fish that we can keep on the menu and feel confident that we aren't eating our way towards a filthy ocean devoid of life? Barber gives a hilarious talk as he describes is journey to find out exactly how we can keep fish on restaurant menus, and cites a particularly perfect fish being raised through a ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image: massaud digg_url = 'http://www.treehugger.com/galleries/2010/03/are-zeppelins-the-future-of-air-travel.php'; Concocting crazy flying machines has long been a favorite hobby of mankind. Our generation, accustomed to being whisked to our destinations on commercial airliners, hardly gives a thought to some of the crazy inventions of earlier eras. But clouds are on the horizon. Whether du...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Credit: Giant Salamander Protection International It's polite to ask before eating the last cookie, or the last piece of cheese, or the last animal of its kind on Earth. Actually, you can't have permission for that last one: you can't eat endangered species. You're just asking for bad karma if you do. And hopefully guilty indigestion. Some cultures crave species that are disappearing from the planet, however, and groups out there are trying to put a stop to it. Here are seven animals that have the bad luck to be tasty:...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo via dieselboii e-Waste is finally starting to go mainstream and the issue is making its way to television viewers. While some examples of e-waste on TV are horrifying, like the Amazing Race episode that made light of dumps and the extremely hazardous environments in which e-waste "recyclers" work, other programs are diligently chipping away at the veil between gadget ...Read the full story on TreeHugger