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U.S. consumers have the least "green" habits in the world in terms of energy use, transportation, travel, and goods, according to National Geographic and polling firm GlobeScan.

Blame the American appetite for large, two-car, gadget-packed homes located far from work, along with a general disregard for conservation and eco-friendly products, the report says.

The Greendex results, released Wednesday, are based on online surveys taken earlier this year examining the shopping habits and attitudes of 14,000 consumers in 14 countries.

Among Americans' un-green daily habits, 59 percent said they drive alone, and a trifling 5 percent use … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Al Gore is wrong about how to stave off ecological catastrophe. So is President George W. Bush. But don't look to Europe or clean-tech entrepreneurs to save the planet either; neither regulations nor free market capitalism alone will prevent the fast and furious acceleration of global warming.

That's according to Michael Shellenberger, who with Ted Nordhaus in 2004 proclaimed the "Death of Environmentalism" in a notorious essay that infuriated people of nearly every political stripe and argued that the tactics of mainstream "green" groups were off the mark.

Shellenberger and … Read more

A correction was made to this story. Read below for details.

4.2 billion.

That's how many rooftops you'd have to cover with solar panels to displace a cubic mile of oil (CMO), a measure of energy consumption, according to Ripudaman Malhotra, who oversees research on fossil fuels at SRI International. The electricity captured in those hypothetical solar panels in a year (2.1 kilowatts each) would roughly equal the energy in a CMO. The world consumes a little over 1 CMO of oil a year right now and about 3 CMOs of energy from all sources.

Put … Read more

In 2005, MIT professor Kerry Emanuel wrote a research paper that described historical links between climate change and an increasing intensity of hurricanes.

Three weeks later, Hurricane Katrina hit.

A new study out of MIT further strengthens the connection between climate change and the intensity and duration of hurricanes, although many unanswered questions remain.

The study, by postdoctoral fellow Ragoth Sundararajan and graduate student John Williams, uses a new technique that adds finer detail to computer simulations of global weather patterns. Emanuel's original study analyzed records of tropical cyclones--commonly called hurricanes or typhoons--from the middle of the 20th century … Read more

President Bush on Wednesday set a goal of halting the growth of greenhouse gases by 2025, calling for elimination of clean-energy international trade barriers but stopping short of specific proposals to mandate carbon emissions caps.

Delivering a speech at the White House Rose Garden, Bush said national greenhouse gas emissions growth should peak within 10 to 15 years, stop in 2025, and then decline.

He said the nationwide strategy would build on existing policies to accelerate development of energy-efficiency technologies, cellulosic ethanol, nuclear power, and renewable energy like wind and solar.

Bush said the U.S.--which has been accused … Read more

Shell is filling cable channels with commercials for GTL, or gas-to-liquids, and someone asked me about it, so here's your answer:

GTL is a type of liquid fuel produced from natural gas. It isn't classic liquefied natural gas, which is natural gas cooled to the point where it turns into a fluid. Instead, methane from underground is cracked by catalysts and heat, turned into synthetic gases, and then transformed into a liquid similar to diesel. The process resembles the coal-to-liquid Fischer-Tropsch process devised in the 1920s.

Shell already makes token amounts of GTL in a plant in Indonesia; … Read more

Rising temperatures on the planet are killing off the equivalent of a mid-sized city every year.

The World Heath Organization attributes about 150,000 global deaths a year, according to the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, in a report released today. Malnutrition due to crop shortages is having an impact, but so is the spread of infectious diseases like malaria. Mosquitoes carrying malaria have now been found in traditionally cooler climates like South Korea. Increases in asthma can additionally be linked to warming.

Summer heat waves are also taking their toll and expect to see refugees increase … Read more

The U.S. does not recycle nuclear waste from power plants because it could be used for weapons, but that might change.

Pete Domenici, the Republican Senator from New Mexico, said the country should start to examine the benefits of recycling fuel, according to the Las Vegas Sun.

France and most other nuclear energy-producing countries recycle fuel. Doing so cuts down the amount of fuel that needs to be mined, as well as the amount of nuclear waste that needs to get buried. Recycling, however, leads to byproducts that can be used to build bombs.

Domenici also said he wants … Read more

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts say forget about cellulosic ethanol. They can make regular gas out of plant matter.

Professor George Huber and grad students Torren Carlson and Tushar Vispute have come up with a way to cook plant matter in the presence of a solid, reusable catalyst to produce a liquid that contains compounds like naphthalene and toluene that are found in gasoline. The liquid can be further processed to produce gas or burned as is.

It might be 10 years before gas made from the process appears at the pump, but conceivably it could be used more … Read more