New Ford Police Interceptor 25% More Fuel Efficient Than Crown Vic, No V8 Option
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

Photo: Ford

It’s Also More Powerful and Has Optional All-Wheel Drive
On Friday, Ford unveiled its new purpose-built Police Interceptor car. It has a bunch of useful features for law-enforcement agencies, including better safety characteristics (f.ex. a side-curtain air bag rollover protection system helps protect front and rear outboard passengers in both rollover and side-impact crashes). But what interests us here is that it will also be more significantly more fuel-efficient than the venerable Ford Crown Vic, the workhorse of most police departments in North-America….Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Invading Worms Menacing Hardwood Forests
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

Alex notes that earthworms are a hot topic in the forums; the Spring issue of Ontario Nature Magazine looks at the subject of invading European earthworms, and Sharon Oosthoek writes that the very trait that makes the works the darling of gardeners everywhere makes them a menace in the forests. Evidently they are much better at munching through leaf litter, causing nutrients to leach away in the rain instead of binding them up in organic matter. …Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Should We Spend Money to Save the Dodo Bird?
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Declaring extinction is a move conservationists make with trepidation. Once a species has received the label, preservation efforts—and the money that supports them—end quickly. If a premature declaration is made, this can push a critically endangered species over the brink. If conservationists wait too long, however, they risk wasting precious time and money on a lost cause.

Now, a new model—being tested with the Dodo bird—is helping to simplify this decision with quantitative analysis….Read the full story on TreeHugger

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The 2012 Menace May Be Real, Like Sarah Palin
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

Credit: Flickr via Michael Francis McCarthy.

2012 is a movie, the end of the Mayan calendar, maybe the end of the Earth. But, thankfully, it’s all a myth. Or is it? The 2012 phenomenon gets a new spin from Lawrence M. Krauss in the March 2010 issue of Scientific American. The bottom line: 2012 could be the beginning of the end if we don’t take steps to combat climate change, and call out naysayers like Sarah “<a href="http://www.cs…Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Good News: EU Is On Track To Meet Its Renewable Goals
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

photo via flickr

There’s a lot of grim climate news, of course, but the EU keeps moving forward. On Friday, the European Commission announced that the EU, which is made up 27 member countries, is on track to meet its goal of generating 20 percent of its energy from renewable resources by 2020. The Commission also says the EU will meet its other two goals of increasing energy efficiency by 20 percent and decreasing emissions by 20 percent of 1990 levels….Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Ethical Fashion Finds at Arboretum Apparel
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

Whether you’re located in Healdsburg, California or virtually–like I am in NYC–visit Arboretum for ethical fashion finds. Olsenhaus‘ Elizabeth Olsen told us about the boutique; they were the first to place an order for her delectable vegan shoes nearly two years ago. Click through for more green designers in store:

…Read the full story on TreeHugger

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World’s Scientists to Carry Out Independent Review of IPCC
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

Photo via FreeSpeech

Ban Ki-moon has announced that a comprehensive, independent review of the IPCC is to be carried out, after calls from world governments were made to do so. The Secretary General for the UN said that scientists from academies around the world will take part in the review, which will be headed by the Inter-Academy Council–and it will be conducted completely independently of the United Nations. …Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Mining Methane From A Rwandan Lake Offers to More Than Double Nation’s Electric Capacity
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

photo: Wikipedia

This is one you definitely don’t hear about too often: Over at Green Biz Marc Gunther is highlighting the efforts of Contour Global to extract methane from Lake Kivu, on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Here’s how they are doing it:…Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Dying for a Cookie: Seemingly Harmless Foods That Aren’t
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

Michael Pollan’s first food rule is simple: Eat Food, which he considers to be a different thing than what he calls edible foodlike substances, or “highly processed concoctions designed by food scientists, consisting mostly of ingredients derived from corn and soy that no normal person keeps in the pantry, and contain chemical additives with which the human body has not been long acquainted.”

1. Palm Oil

Many of those substances are bad for our health, bad for our planet and show up in really surprising places. One of the most blatant examples is palm oil, which is now found in just about everything; alm…Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Interview and Video: Director of VBS.tv’s "Heimo’s Arctic Refuge" On the Most Far Out Americans
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

Survivalism may be going mainstream, what will all the new cave men and off-gridders. But for Heimo and Edna Korth, survival in the wild has been a way of life for three decades. The last humans to be living in the 19.5-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and living 130 miles above the Arctic Circle, they are quite possibly the most remote Ameri…Read the full story on TreeHugger

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The Cove Documentary Set To Become A TV Series on Animal Planet
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

Photo via The Cove

The Cove has made a tremendous impact on people when it comes to raising awareness about the slaughter of dolphins and the dark story of whale meat in the fish market. It has changed lives, riled people up, won its Oscar, and now it just might turn into a new TV Series on Animal Planet starting this fall. …Read the full story on TreeHugger

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No More Downcycling? Breakthrough Organic Catalyst = More Effective PET Plastic Recycling
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

Photo: Monica M. Davey/Feature Photo Service for IBM

13 Billion PET Plastic Bottles are Thrown Away Each Year
Certain things are harder to recycle than others. While it’s relatively easy to make a new aluminum can out of an old aluminum can, making a new plastic bottle out of an old one is a lot harder. Currently, most recycled plastic is not truly recycled, but rather downcycled to a lesser use. But thanks to a breakthrough in green chemistry by IBM and Stanford researchers, this might be about to change!…Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Breakthrough Producing Hydrogen from Water + Sunlight
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

Image: Angewandte Chemie, Wiley

Sunlight + Water = Hydrogen Gas
Scientists at the University of East Anglia, led by Dr. Thomas Nann, report a breakthrough in the production of hydrogen from water using the energy of sunlight. Amidst all the hype about a potential hydrogen economy, which would rely upon the highly energetic and clean burning hydrogen atom, one of the big questions has been whether sufficient hydrog…Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Controversy Erupts Over Planning Reform in Israel
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

A building under renovation in Tel Aviv – Jaffa. Photo by Jesse Fox.

Israel’s planning system is inefficient, and long overdue for a reform – on this, almost everyone agrees. What kind of reform? On this there is no consensus, but plenty of ideas are floating around. In the meantime, an expeditious attempt to reform the system has ignited a storm of controversy, and even the High Court has been drawn into the dispute, issuing an injunction last week temporarily preventing the government from even discussing the matter.

What is it about planning reform that has so many people in Israel in an uproar?…Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Hand-Powered Log Splitter: A Safe Alternative to the Axe (Video)
Category: Environmental>Tree Hugger

Image credit: Smart Log Splitter

From effective masonry heaters to beautiful Danish wood stoves, the Scandinavians know a thing or two about heating with wood. And as Collin stated in his post on wood stoves vs pellet stoves, with trees being a near carbon neutral source of energy, efficient wood burn…Read the full story on TreeHugger

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