Obama’s Nobel prize-winning green guru and US Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu claims that painting your roof white can help reduce global warming significantly.   Speaking yesterday from London prior to a conference on climate change, Dr. Chu said that making the planet's roofs and pavement a lighter color could result in the ...

June 5 marks World Environment Day, and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is celebrating this year’s event with the Twitter for Trees campaign. For every Twitter follower of UNEP and You between now and June 5, UNEP will plant one tree. The goal of the campaign is to plant 100,000 trees for 100,000 followers (although more trees will ...

Last week MIT hosted a panel of nuclear power industry experts to address nuclear waste recycling and disposal options. Considered by many analysts to be the chief barrier to building a new generation of nuclear power plants, the debate around what to do with high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants continues to be the industry’s ...

In December, world leaders will converge on Copenhagen to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012. Leading up to the new agreement governing global action on climate change, the World Business Summit on Climate Change kicked off yesterday in Copenhagen to bring together business and science leaders for a three-day ...

Some encouraging statistics emerged from U.S. environmental data recently, as carbon dioxide emissions related to energy use dropped 2.8 percent for the year 2008. If the estimate, released by the Energy Information Administration, is accurate, it would represent the single largest annual decline in carbon dioxide output since 1982. Analysts ...

A joint report from Yale University and George Mason University, has shown that there is still significant resistance to the issue of global warming. The report (PDF) was recently highlighted on the website of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. Slightly more than half (51%, to be exact) of American adults fall into the ...

If you haven’t heard about Copenhagen 2009, listen up. In December of this year, global minds will meet in Copenhagen to make an action plan to address climate change for when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. The conference will be the latest in the annual UN meetings that stem from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio; the original summit that ...

The prospect of a war fought over water has loomed on the horizon for decades. But, for most people, a water war still sounds like something that could only happen in the distant future. That may change in a hurry, as we may be on the cusp of the first full-blown water war of the modern era. Madhya Pradesh, a state in central India, is currently ...

Water authorities in San Diego approved a $320 million desalination plant this week, a test move that optimists hope will put an end to the fragility of California’s drinking water infrastructure without causing imbalances in local ecosystems. The plant will be built near Carlsbad, just north of San Diego, and will be the first of its kind on the ...

Even the creation of green energy isn’t without its dark side. While biofuel is seen as an alternate green energy fuel source, the act of acquiring through palm oil plantations seems to far outweigh its benefits. Large swathes of tropical rain forest in Jakarta, Indonesia are being clear cut so that palm oil plantations can be created. Palm oil ...