Features

The Republican old guard is gone, and with new Democratic majorities in both houses, there’s finally hope for serious legislation on energy and climate. But many hurdles remain—and do the pending bills go far enough?

One of the most common questions about alternative energy vehicles is, "How do they drive?" The reality is that most carmakers try as much as possible to make their experimental vehicles "transparent" to the driver, erasing any indication of the exotic or unusual.

Did General Motors intentionally sabotage sales of its electric EV-1? That’s the contention of Chris Paine’s popular 2006 film Who Killed the Electric Car?

Ever wondered how a Toyota Prius ended up as Larry David’s vehicle of choice on Curb Your Enthusiasm? Read on and his very environmentally involved wife Laurie will explain it all to you.

Window-sticker fuel economy is almost always hopelessly optimistic. If the sticker says 30 mpg on the highway, expect 25 when headed down a mountain with a tailwind. But now the information is being updated for more realistic results.

Across the U.S., an urban agriculture movement is flowering as a growing number of people become more interested in the process of growing their own food. Urban farms and gardens are taking root in areas where previously only concrete and asphalt thrived.

Lindsay Suter, a green architect in Connecticut, made a vow. He wasn’t going to design mega mansions or outsized additions. Instead, he was going to devote 100 percent of his practice to environmentally themed designs. It’s a promise he kept.

In 2002, William McDonough and Michael Braungart published Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (Northpoint Press). They identify two fundamental problems. The first is that we design products to be thrown "away" when, in fact, there is no "away," and cradle-to-grave designs foul our own nest. The Earth is a finite, closed, living system, and the things we produce are not beamed to a distant galaxy but stay right here and affect the health of our planet.

As the construction industry "goes global," the amazing diversity of the world’s architecture has suffered. In the last 30 to 50 years, new buildings in New York, London and Beijing have started to look the same.