In order to become environmentally conscious you have to start somewhere. Why not start at home? It is true that the first step to any lifestyle change has to start with yourself. Going green is no different. Often the initial expense of making updates to our homes causes us to hesitate. But the truth is that while going green may take some initial expenses, in (more…)

Methane measurements collected during a scientist’s road trip across the U.S. indicate that local emissions of the potent greenhouse gas are higher than previously known in many regions.

Using a gas chromatograph mounted to the roof of a rented camper, Ira Leifer of the University of (more…)

Belo Monte Dam is a controversial mega dam being built in the Amazon on Indigenous land. The old project conceived during the military dictatorship (1964-1985), and which was revived by the Lula government, is the bête noire of Brazilian environmentalists due to the damage it will cause to a pristine region in the Amazon. It will pave the way to tens of other dams in (more…)

Who doesn’t wish they had invested in Apple when it was $16 a share? Quite often, timing the market is more intuition than science. Those who know analog to digital inflection points are watching LEDs. Get it right, and enormous wealth can be created. Time it wrong and you’re left in the dust, like Polaroid. (more…)

The glaciers on Mount Everest and the surrounding region have shrunk by 13 percent in the last five decades as temperatures have risen and snowfall has declined in that section of the Himalaya, according to a new study.

Using satellite imagery and topographic maps, a (more…)

Each day, our industry sits down and whittles the unsightly knots off the tree we call solar energy. We, as a group, spend more time than we should pointing to one of a growing number of reasons why solar energy isn’t taking hold in America: that perhaps our government incentives were cut too quickly, that our state’s SREC program is broken, that the net metering (more…)

Geoengineering is the deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climatic system with the aim of reducing global warming. Who should do it and when? Anything done has the possibility of affecting everybody so who should be consulted? Who decides such world spanning concepts? A new study investigated these concerns. The findings are the (more…)

With the year nearly half done, here’s the solar scoreboard–updates from things we’ve been working on, and a selection of other notable solar victories.

New state solar programs

New York is our biggest market-building campaign in the East. Last month the Senate unanimously (more…)

We fret about turning off the lights to save pennies on energy. Meanwhile, electricity worth billions of dollars gets lost or stolen on the world’s power grids every year.

In industry jargon, the problem is known as ‘line loss.’ A certain amount of electricity generated by a power plant never makes it to the consumer – or at least (more…)

How often do we hear warnings for people with respiratory conditions to stay inside to avoid high levels of poor or toxic air in their communities? There are good reasons for those warnings. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sees how damaging these sky-high air pollutant levels can be and, as a result, are focusing more closely on urban air quality (more…)