French solar roadway
Credit: TreeHugger

Over the next five years, France will install some 621 miles (1,000km) of solar roadway using Colas’ Wattway solar pavement.

Solar freakin’ roadways! No, this is not the crowdfunded solar road project that blew up the internet a few years ago, but is a collaboration between Colas, a transport infrastructure company, and INES (France’s National Institute for Solar Energy), and sanctioned by France’s Agency of Environment and Energy Management, which promises to bring solar power to hundreds of miles of roads in the country over the next five years.

One major difference between this solar freakin’ roadway and that other solar freakin’ roadway is that the new Wattway system doesn’t replace the road itself or require removal of road surfaces, but instead is designed to be glued onto the top of existing pavement. The Wattway system is also built in layers of materials “that ensure resistance and tire grip,” and is just 7 mm thick, which is radically different from that other design that uses thick glass panels (and […]

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Republican governor of Michigan Rick Snyder.

While attorneys have subpoenaed all emails and communications between Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) over the ongoing Flint water crisis, a few details have been released showing what can only be described as depraved indifference on the part of state workers to the plight of Flint citizens.

The Republican governor released some staff emails on Jan. 20, showing that he was well aware that Flint citizens were slowly being poisoned following a decision by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to force them to live with lead-tainted water.

Those emails, however, were heavily redacted, including one dated over two years ago — on January 3, 2014 — that was completely blacked out by the governor’s advisers over both pages.

Out of over 270 pages of communications released, one comment was stunning in its admission of how shabbily complaints over the water were treated by state workers.

According to the NY Times, Snyder […]

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Credit: Shutterstock

Oxfam’s latest report claims that income inequality has reached a new global extreme, exceeding even its predictions from the previous year. The figures behind this claim are striking – just 62 individuals now hold the same wealth as the bottom half of humanity, compared to 80 in 2014 and 388 in 2010. It appears not only has the financial crisis been weathered by the global elite, but that their fortunes have collectively improved.

Our objections to inequality, the report notes, are not driven simply by a desire to improve our own material standard of living. Rising inequality is one of the surest signs of the failure of economic growth to make things better for us all. The accompanying decline in the income shares of the bottom 50% since 2010 suggests that although governments across the world have been quick to tout their role in bringing about a global “recovery”, its rewards have been very selectively spread.

It would be foolish to pretend that wealth inequality is a product of the […]

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Norwegian town

Some years ago, I faced up to the futility of reporting truths about America’s disastrous wars, and so I left Afghanistan for another mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family.

It’s true that they didn’t work much–not by American standards, anyway. In the United States, full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20 percent clocking more than 60. These people, on the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they weren’t away on long paid vacations. At the end of the workday, about four in the afternoon (perhaps three during the summer), they had time to enjoy a hike in the forest, a swim with the kids, or a beer with friends—which helps explain why, unlike so many Americans, they are pleased with their jobs.

Often I was invited to go along. I found it refreshing to hike and ski in a country with no land mines, and […]

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Miami streets see heavy flooding from rain in September 2014. Some neighborhoods flood regularly during deluges or extreme high tides.
Credit: AP Photo/Lynne Sladky

An unusual January storm bent palm trees and turned city sidewalks into creeks as a small group of Miami-area mayors and administrators huddled in Pinecrest, one of Miami-Dade County’s 34 municipalities. They had come at the invitation of Pinecrest’s mayor to discuss rising sea levels, long predicted by climate change scientists and now regularly inundating their towns. The mood in the room was somewhere between pessimism and panic.

On the agenda: making flood prediction maps to help prioritize which roads, schools and hospitals to save as waters rise; how to keep saltwater from leaching into the aquifer; and what to do about 1.6 million septic tanks whose failure could create a Third World sanitation challenge. Someone also brought up the alarming possibility of the sea engulfing the nearby Turkey […]

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