The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the agency that controls government-owned land that isn’t a forest, has put a two-year moratorium on new solar power plants to study the impact plants have on the local environment. Note, no such moratorium is being made to study the impact of Mountain Top removal mining, a form of strip mining where the tops of mountains are blown off, and the resulting fill is simply dumped into the local rivers. More »

To date, the oil barons that profit from our dependence on gas have succeeded in stifling the rise of fuel efficient vehicles. Their influence on American automakers has led to the production of fuel efficient cars so bland that only the hemp-soap-using, Birkenstock-wearing population would dare to be caught driving. And while most of us concede that environmentally friendly vehicles aren’t cool, the students at Royal College of Art have worked to debunk the myth, designing green concept cars so fresh they’d make Batman wanna plug up the BatMobile. See them here.

When John McCain proposed lifting the federal ban on offshore drilling of the Outer Continental Shelf, 3 to 200 miles off the United States coast, President Bush jumped on the bandwagon. Bush said, “roughly the equivalent of two decades of imported oil from Saudi Arabia” are waiting for us under the currently banned areas in Alaska alone. With those, and the untapped reserves in the Gulf of Mexico, Bush and McCain hopes that America can become “energy independent.” Analysts, scientists and environmentalists have rightfully called it bullshit. More »

I live in west Harlem. The neighborhood has seen a lot of changes over the years, much like the rest of New York, and it’s going through another one right now. At the moment, the neighborhood is predominantly black and Latino (mostly Dominican, but there are lots of other nationalities, too). But, as rents rise elsewhere and Columbia University buys huge pieces of lower Harlem for its students, the gentrification in New York is inching its way northward. More »

The old maxim “Leave it to the experts” is familiar because it’s usually good advice. We wouldn’t let anyone but highly trained doctors perform surgery on us. But sometimes even the most elite of experts must be called into question when they get carried away. Let’s say, a group of world-class physicists wanted to use a machine that would unlock the secrets of the universe, but it was also capable of destroying the planet. Some might think it’s time to take those experts down a few notches, right? More »

It’s time to start looking at our diets and their implications honestly. Our excessive consumption of meat isn’t just costing us our health, but our environment, as well. To top off the list of grievances, factory farming is one of the leading direct and indirect causes of air pollution in the world. More »

Americans have been astonished to see food prices soaring over the past few months, rising 3.9% in May 2008 alone. Everything from eggs to hamburgers is jumping as gas breaks $4.00 a gallon, making the expense of shipping food from farm to store much higher. During this phenomenon, the interesting note is Americans are changing their summer transportation habits to save money on gas, which makes up about 4% of their average budget. And while food makes up about 15% of our spending, few are considering changing diets to save money. More »

The East Coast is experiencing its first heat wave of the summer much earlier than expected. With temperatures of 100 in some places, and people from Georgia to Connecticut are looking grimly forward to a grueling summer season. If these high temperatures are any indication of what is to come, the eastern seaboard can expect higher temperatures for months to come, and the power outages that come with them. More »

The past month has been bursting with human suffering. There were terrible storms in the American midwest. There was a cyclone that killed tens of thousands in Myanmar, and there was an earthquake that resulted in thousands of deaths and thousands of more disappearances. It seems that the news has become a virtual parade of human suffering. And none of this is out of the ordinary. We have gotten used to it in recent years. More »

I’ve been having issues lately with the lack of manners in New York. No surprise there, since New Yorkers are infamous for rudeness, but sometimes people go beyond the call of being New Yorkers. I try not ask for perfect etiquette from everybody in a city as crowded as this one, but personally, I try to respect the people around me, if for no other reason than that it’s practical. More »