This week’s greenwash is a double-whammy: greenwash meets astro-turf. If you’re not familiar with that last term, it refers to a “grassroots” organization that’s actually the phony creation of a powerful, moneyed interest group. As reported by the good people over at PR Watch and the Asbury Park Press, Exelon, a New Jersey nuclear power provider, [...]

Via Campus Progress.

Grassroots resistance is building against mountaintop removal. Coalfield and environmental groups have been challenging coal extraction in the public and private sectors. King Coal runs rampant over the coalfields like a 19th century robber baron. Behind the scenes of the coal industry are Wall Street banks like Citi, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase [...]

This report just in from Christy in Toronto: Activists, polar bears and caribou paid a special visit Grand & Toy in downtown Toronto on Saturday.

Last week, RAN’s new agribusiness campaign put ADM chief executive officer Patricia A. Woertz on notice. In a two page letter we let her know that RAN has fundamental concerns about her company’s role in the expansion of soy and palm oil plantations throughout South America, Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Africa. The letter is our [...]

As noted by Mother Jones and the New York Times, among others, the Bush administration will issue a regulation tomorrow allowing the expansion of a hugely destructive practice known as mountain-top removal mining, or MTR. This is bad news for mountain communities, the environment, and pretty much everything that’s not a coal company. This includes [...]

BP . . . bp . . . bP? However they capitalize it, BP is the winner of our nearly-weekly “Greenwash of the Week” award. Why? 1. Because they put a revolting ad in my local paper today explaining that thanks to to BP we can all look forward to solving global warming by using hydrogen. 2. Because their [...]

An editorial in Sunday’s edition of The Los Angeles Times provides a sobering examination of the widely-touted ethanol solution to our oil addiction. The Times does a great job of laying out the tremendous ecological and economic costs associated with large-scale ethanol production (including a growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico the size of [...]

I just stayed up late to listen to “Sculpted by Fire” on public radio here in San Francisco. It’s an hour-long radio feature by Barbara Berstein at the Media Project in Portland. Definitely give it a listen online if you missed it on your local station (link). It’s the most concise, rational discussion I’ve heard (or [...]

During the first part of the 20th century, Mahatma Gandhi abstained from eating for long periods, using fasting as a form of political protest. A pioneer of Satyagraha — the resistance of tyranny through mass civil disobedience, firmly founded upon total non-violence– Gandhi defied the largest most powerful empire of his time by integrating [...]