Oil Paintings, 13th Street NE, March 12

One year ago, the D.C. Republican Committee gave Ward 3 Councilmember Mary M. Cheh a hard time about her constituent newsletter. Chairman Bob Kabel and Executive Director Paul Craney jabbed the green-minded legislator for neglecting to note the publication's greenness.
"You recently mailed Ward 3 residents an unsolicited newsletter that failed to indicate if it [...]

This is a snow melter. Its purpose, you might guess, is to melt snow. Earlier this month, the District saw much snow. This snow melter melted none of it. Rather, it sat, not melting snow, on a city lot.

In case you didn't notice, there's a lot of water decorating the District of Colombia these days—many inches of it, frozen into piles on every street and beside every sidewalk. With sunshine and temperatures headed into the 40s later this week, the water's about to make its way into the city sewer system.
That's the province [...]

Awhile ago, we brought you a story about recycling that routinely gets tossed out with the trash. Well, as you can imagine, we thought this was pretty surprising news: that loads of plastics, paper, bottles and cans dutifully dumped into recycling bins around the city were still ending up at the landfill. The culprits? Some [...]

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Yes, that Benin. Bear with me on this one, folks. It's going to take a minute, but I'll get there.
1. WTOP reported this morning on the Census Bureau's research on travel patterns in the D.C. metro area. The findings: of the region's 2.2 million workers, about 1.5 million commute alone, and about 600,000 [...]

Here is a little “news analysis” I think our City Paper constituency can appreciate.
Yesterday, beer lovers were devastated to hear global warming is hurting beer production. While that news was bad, the Washington Post followed up with a dispatch today suggesting that we can solve global warming if we stop having kids.
Put the two news items [...]

George Washington University has pulled up its grade in a national environmental group's annual college ranking. Then again, there really was no place to go but up after last year, when the Sierra Club named G.W. one of the five least sustainable universities in the country, the student-run GW Hatchet, pointed out in its front [...]

After a few weeks of micro-blogging, I think I’ve figured out what Twitter is good for: all manner of information whizzing by haphazardly. I miss 90 percent of this stream-of-consciousness info. stream, what with real work to do.  But when I take the time, there is usually some funky item worth crowing about. 
Check out this set [...]

Going to the beach these days is like taking a dip in an open sewer, according to a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The NRDC found the nation’s beaches are befouled by raw sewerage and floating debris that is not just seriously gross but a serious health hazard. This is the 19th year that [...]

The New York Times has a story today about farmed salmon from Chile that makes a few pretty scary points:

Chile used almost 350 times more antibiotics in its farmed salmon in 2008 than Norway, its chief competitor.
Chile is the biggest supplier of salmon supplier to the United States. So, if you’ve purchased the pretty pinkish [...]

The terms "carbon footprint" and "locavore" have just been added to the dictionary. Then again, so has "flash mob,” according to this story in The Huffington Post. Could this be just a "flash in the pan" or signs that “green” thinking is hitting the mainstream?

A new study casts yet more doubt on the notion that biofuels are going to save the planet from global warming and us from paying high gas prices. The report just published by the Government Accountability Office, found much ballyhooed “next-generation” biofuels are likely to have the same kinds of pitfalls plaguing the last.
By now, [...]

The House of Representatives just passed cap and trade legislation to combat global warming.
The final tally – webcast live on C-SPAN – was 219 to 212, largely along party lines, though more than three-dozen Democrats defected to vote against the legislation. 

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 comes three years after the world scientific [...]

The coal industry is having a tough week. Yesterday, the environmental and human toll of mountaintop removal coal mining was the subject of a Senate hearing. Today, the DC government announced a $2,500 fine to anyone using coal tar in pavement projects. 
Staring Jul. 1, DC will no longer issue construction permits for roadway and driveway builds involving [...]