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Here we go again... a pipeline owned by Enbridge Energy Partners has leaked 800,000-840,000 gallons of oil into a creek flowing into the Kalamazoo River near Battle Creek, Michigan. On a more positive note, the Zephyr solar plane finally landed this week at the US Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona after 14 days and 24 minutes, setting a new record. In BP oil spill news, a new report by The Center for Public Integrity reveals that, in the hours after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig caught on fire, the US Coast Guard failed to follow its own internal firefighting procedures, potentially causing the rig to sin...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Bedbug. Image credit:wikipedia Bedbugs are are becoming quite the urban plague again, resurgent and causing much misery in US cities after decades of being a relatively rare problem. Some methods of being rid of bed bugs, these days, are pretty awful from an environmental standpoint: like cooking an entire apartment building to bake them out, repeatedly washing all cloths and linens in hot water, and paying for multiple (often ineffective) pesticide applications. It gets worse....Read the full story on TreeHugger

Cleaning the supply chain is one of the challenges of Walmart's sustainability project. Image credit: williamcho/Flickr This guest post was written by Rand Waddoups, senior manager of sustainability at Walmart. Last July, we announced that we would lead in the creation of a Sustainable Product Index—a tool that will help manufacturers, merchants, customers and other retailers make more sustainable purchasing decisions. During the last 12 months, we have learned this process is g...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Photo via Free Extras According to some of the mainstream media, anyway After taking a look back to assess the media's coverage of the BP spill this week, I think only one internet-born acronym will suffice to convey my opinion. And that, of course, is WTF. It seems like we've been bombarded with headlines and stories that were cranked out directly by BP's PR machine -- only way rosier than BP would likely venture. Stories about how all that dern oil has just up and vanished! How BP must be doing an amazing job of skimming, and how all of us silly worrywarts were up in arms over nothin...Read the full story on TreeHugger

photo: jurveston via flickr Algae biofuels are probably the most touted future hope to replace large amounts of petroleum-based liquid fuels with a renewable source. However, a new study in Energy and Fuels shows that when you grow that algae in bioreactors made up of clear tubes, so much energy is required that the carbon footprint of the biofuel is o...Read the full story on TreeHugger

The Chevy Volt will soon be launched commercially, and so GM is intensifying its campaign to convince potential buyers. Here are only some of the recent Volt news items to hit the wire: a Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image credit: AP Photo/NOAA The Sapphire Princess, a cruise ship operated by Princess Cruises, struck a 43 foot long female humpback whale on Wednesday, causing it to become lodged in an undersea protuberance of the bow. The ship, en route to Juneau, Alaska, was forced to make a detour to Douglas Island, where the whale was removed from the bow and taken into the custody of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A necropsy will be performed to determine the cause of death....Read the full story on TreeHugger

photo: Franco Folini via flickr Even though it often seems that even mentioning climate change or pricing carbon on a national basis is an utter nonstarter, here's another example of how states aren't waiting for the Feds to get their act together: The Sacramento Bee reports on progress with the Western Climate Initiative. Specifically, California and 10 ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

They may seem like two disparate topics: climate change and an archaic Senate procedural rule. But they have more in common than you might think. Thanks to the Senate filibuster rule, essentially any piece of legislation needs 60 votes, a super-majority, if it hopes to pass. This is one of the reasons that the climate bill was killed in the Senate -- it could only muster a normal majority, like 55 votes. In a true democracy, that should be enough to fly. But in our political culture, it's still miles away, and reason enough to sound a deat...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Tourists meet Tortoise. Credit Brian Merchant Yesterday Brian wrote Galapagos Islands Moved Off Endangered Sites List, concluding: If anything, the problems have only grown more complex and fundamental -- there's now a growing island population that must learn to live sustainably with severely limited resources, and a bevy of threats from other invasive species remain at large. Three TreeHuggers, Brian Merchant, myself and founder Graham Hill have been to the Galapagos in three consecutive years, and w...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Making a slow boat look fast... photo: Neal McQ via flickr. Having assessed the overall picture of how our patterns of global shipping and global aviation use tons of fuel, leave a high environmental footprint, and how technological changes can help but perhaps not fully solve the problem, let's move on to how we can change ourselves and our habits. Remember, we want to keep as much of the benefits of gl...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Michael Graham Richard The Little Car that Could The Toyota Prius hybrid has been sold in the U.S. for 10 years (even longer in Japan, where it was first introduced in 1997), and during that decade this car went from a small niche player considered 'weird' by most people (I remember back when the #1 question was "do you have to plug it in?") to a best-seller halo car whose technology has found its way in many other models, including vehicles made by Toyota's competitors. During that decade in the U.S., Toyota has sold about 900,000 Prius hybrids there, and about 1.8 million w...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Container ship photo: Daniel Ramirez; airliner photo: Bob MacInnes Two things which I think are worth keeping front and center when discussing how we wean ourselves off our petroleum addiction: Travel between nations is good; trade between nations is good. It's easy to point out specific incidences where less-than-savory outcomes r...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo via DC Kaleidoscope You probably haven't seen many Amoco gas stations on the side of the road for a while. That's because BP merged with the 'American Oil Co.' in the 90s, the British company's logo and namesake took over. As a result, all Amoco stations were converted to BP stations, leaving Amoco stations nowhere to be found. But that could change very soon -- in a major rebranding effort launched to sidestep the bad reputation that's sprouted from having caused the biggest environmental catastrophe in US history, BP is considering renaming all of its statesid...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image via Ecorazzi. In upstate New York this weekend, former first child Chelsea Clinton will marry investment banker Marc Mezvinsky, and green blogs are abuzz with leaked details about the vegan menu at the wedding and rehearsal dinner. Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI) Stargazing has been popular since that day our ancestors learned to look up at the sky and wonder, "what's out there?" Now, thanks to modern developments like space telescopes, orbiting satellites, high-tech space stations and observatories, we can see the universe (and our earthly home) like never before. These stunning images of far away galaxies and other astronomical beauties -- and the fascinating stories behind them -- are for those wh...Read the full story on TreeHugger

I've taken to writing with some frequency about the mainstream media's failure to cover climate change. Among the many reasons I do so is, well, because of the mainstream media's persistent and rather abhorrent failure to cover climate change. Make sense? Thought so. And while I did dole out some blame to the media for helping to kill the climate bill, I feel that the subject warrants a post of its own. Here's how the media is still failing in its climate coverage, and how that failure helped directly kill our hopes of climate legislation....Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image Credit: Survival It seems that even though "Avatar" is finally out of theaters, its environmental message and memorable imagery have taken root. Protest groups have used the movie's themes to raise awareness of causes that range from Israeli policy to the war...Read the full story on TreeHugger

John Bowron's Off-Grid Cottage Scott Huler, author of On the Grid, makes a very important point in a guest post on The Infrastructurist : Nobody is really off the grid. Well, maybe the Amish, but almost nobody. Everyone else is part of an enormous mesh of grids that every back-to-the-land off-gridder is dependent on....Read the full story on TreeHugger