Photo: Nissan After Incentives, That Is... Nissan made big waves by announcing that its LEAF electric car would be sold for about $25k in the US (after federal incentives, and in some states there's an extra $5k rebate). Now the automaker is announcing that the European version of the LEAF will be sold for under 30,000 Euros in most European countries after government incentives. Read on to find out more pricing details for specific EU countrie...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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photo: Michelle Tribe/Creative Commons via flickr An interesting new study from scientists at the University of Montreal and Harvard University has found a connection between exposure to organophosphate pesticides, at levels common among US children, and increased risk of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder....Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Image via video BigBelly Solar Trash Cans have been around for years - we wrote about them all the way back in 2005. They're waste bins that use solar power to run compactors so that they don't have to be emptied as often, making them perfect for areas like parks and beaches that are short on staff. But now, they've learned a new trick making them even easier to tend to in places short on maintenance staff. They can text sanitation crews to say they're full and...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Photos via G1 Biologists stationed in the Foja Mountains of Indonesia were fortunate enough to uncover a number of animals previously unknown to science, including one frog with an impressive schnoz. The frog's nose, which has earned it the nickname Pinocchio, reportedly inflates while the creature sings. But unlike the other animals uncovered, the frog may have actually discovered the biologists. They noticed him sitting on a bag of rice at the team's campsite....Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Image credit: World Development Movement/Flickr The guest post was written by Richard Greene, host of the radio talk-show Hollywood CLOUT! Senators Bill Nelson, Menendez and Lautenberg may have introduced the most important environmental legislative ever on Thursday. A great reason, of course, for Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski to object to its passage by consent. "The Big Oil Bailout Prevention Act" is the beginning of the end for dirty energy and the beginning of the beginning of economic viability for clean energy....Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Last year at ICCF the material du jour was felt; while its presence is still being, well, felt, this year the stuff that dreams are made of is cork. And not just thin sheets of cork but big honking blocks of the stuff. It is post-industrial recycled cork (what is left after the wine corks are cut out), ground up and compressed with a polyurethane binder. The importers, Ecosupply, have been using Suberra Cork for kitchen counters for years. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Photo: Ford EPA Certification Just Came Out... Slightly more fuel-efficient cars are not a solution. What we need are alternatives to cars and vehicles that are orders of magnitude cleaner (in construction, operation, and disposal). But while we work on these things, more fuel-efficient cars are certainly a step in the right direction. It wasn't so long ago that there were almost no high-quality gas-sippers in the US, but they're slowly coming and the Ford Fiesta (a best-seller in Europe) is setting ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Watch CBS News Videos Online Here's another piece of video you really need to see to get a handle on the BP oil...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Images via evolo We've seen some fairly terrible ideas for "eco benches" in the past, but this one is intriguing. The bench, a design by Steven Ma, is not only a bench, but also a planter, a street light, and a power generator. That's a lot to incorporate into one small circular spot to sit! Add to that the fact that it is made entirely from recycled materials and this concept has our attention. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Credit: USGS. An ancient, jelly-like invasive organism from Japan has been discovered along Oregon's coast. It's being called "very, very scary" by an invasive species specialist and can smother shellfish beds and coat boat hulls, docks and water intakes, The Oregonian reports. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Image via Technology Review OLED televisions are on their way as an option for highly vivid colors while (eventually) using less energy than the current king of energy efficiency - LED backlit LCD displays. However, the bigger an OLED display, the more expensive it is to manufacture. Televisions on the market now are a relatively tiny 15" for the largest versions, and they're running around $2700.00. Companies are interested in printing OLEDs in long rolls to help bring down...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Happy pigweed and lambsquarters enjoying themselves in a soybean field. Image by pawpaw67 via Flickr The road to hell is paved with unintended consequences. I'm convinced that, if we don't get our act together, this slight edit on the old adage about good intentions will be humanity's downfall. Oops, we didn't mean for BPA to do that! PCB and DDT are accumula...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Image credit: Jeff Martone/Flickr Around the world, hunting and fishing is typically controlled through quotas—systems that place limits on the number of trophies each permit holder can take. The number of permits issued and quota for each permit are based on population surveys from the previous year. But, this system, according to new research, may jeopardize animal populations....Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Photo via Patch Together For anyone who's ever wished they could experience the joy and comfort of being eaten by a stuffed shark, one designer has created a menacing-looking sleeping bag that will make short work of the sandman. Dubbed the ChumBuddy, the 7 foot long stuffed killing-machine is sure to delight all who become ensnared in the shark's plush, gapping mouth, or who nestle in its soft, fleece bowels. Just imagine the joy of tucking your child in the shark's throat each and every night while reading them a b...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Cerulean warbler photo: Eddie Callaway via flickr. A new report from Partners in Flight shows that about 17% of North American land bird species (148 of 882 species) are facing rapid declines, due not in small part due to habitat loss in their winter grounds in Mexico--84% of the imperiled species spend much of their time. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Photo by CRhyne Scientists have been investigating how to mimic spider silk for years. The seemingly delicate threads actually have a tensile strength five times greater than steel, and the possibilities for using a similar material in everything from buildings to bridges to cars and even clothing, are practically infinite. The only problem is, the stuff seems to be impossible to replicate. However, researchers have uncovered a key aspect in how spiders make silk, and they may be one step closer to man-made spider silk. Of course, the color pink alone isn't very c...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Raj Patel is one of the few people who has both worked at the World Bank, and been tear gassed protesting against it. An activist scholar, and author of Stuffed and Starved, Patel argues that markets are a beautiful thing, but that modern capitalism has gotten it all wrong. Patel's new book, The Value of Nothing, aims to explain why Wall Street salaries rocket ever-skyward while 60 million Americans went hungry over Christmas. Patel also reflects on why climate change can't be fixed by putting a price on pollution, and how the perks of becoming an American citizen include the freedom to get arrested for what you believe in.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

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Josh Kilmer Purcell and Brent Ridge were ready to make a run for it, break out of Manhattan and get back to the land, so they literally bought the farm. Tricky part is, they knew nothing about raising crops, tending pigs, or staying afloat as biodynamic agrarians. Planet Green's new series, The Fabulous Beekman Boys, is their story. Josh, a former drag queen turned ad exec, and Brent, a doctor and MBA, find themselves struggling to thrive on Beekman Farm.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

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When he was just in his mid-20s, Denis Hayes was made national coordinator of the very first Earth Day. That was forty years ago, and a lot has changed. Over his career as a lawyer, technologist, investor, and advocate, Hayes has watched Earth Day become a global phenomenon, aggregating the efforts of myriad causes in many places (occasionally co-opted by corporations). Hayes shares his thoughts on the current significance of Earth Day, Obama's weaknesses and strengths, the future of cleantech, and what real climate legislation should look like.

For more on Earth Month, check out our dedicated page.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

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Since Annie Leonard created The Story of Stuff, the short web film has been watched some ten million times. But the twenty-minute film was twenty years in the making. So Leonard decided to write a book, telling the tale of her explorations through the cycle of extraction, creation, and disposal that rules so much of the world around us, and our own lives.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

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How do you draw the world's attention to a deadly global scourge? Call up your friends and climb a mountain (it could help if your friends are mega-celebrities and MTV wants to make a film about it.) This is how Kenna set out to illuminate the global clean water crisis. Calling it Summit on the Summit, the Grammy-nominated recording artist assembled a team of celebs, activists, and experts, including Jessica Biel, Emile Hirsch, Lupe Fiasco, Santogold, Alexandra Cousteau, and plenty more, to scale the punishing peak of Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest mountain.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

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Image: Planet Green

To Homaro Cantu-the mad-scientist chef behind Chicago's Moto Restaurant-a complete meal is like an opera. But Cantu's opera involves exploding s'more bombs, a food replicator, and miracle berries. Part contemporary restaurant, part culinary R&D lab, Moto is the focus of Planet Green's new Future Food series. In our interview, Cantu walks us through some of the wonders of his lab and explains how he hopes to uproot world hunger.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

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Image: PBS

Brad Pitt's vision for a green rebuild of the Lower Ninth Ward is being realized by Make It Right, an innovative organization whose cutting-edge designs, sculpted by world-class architects, are both stunning and controversial. Tom Darden is the executive director of Make It Right. He explains how the vision came to be, how he works with the residents who lost their homes, and reflects on the similarities between the destruction in NOLA and the earthquake in Haiti.

Music from Molly Fitzpatrick

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For thirteen seasons, King of the Hill cast its lens on a conservative, red meat-loving, pickup-truck driving Texas family. John Altschuler, along with Dave Krinsky and Mike Judge (the team also responsible for Beavis and Butthead and the film Office Space) now has us TreeHuggers directly in his sights. The Goode Family is the next chapter in this adult animation legacy, telling the story of an American family struggling to live green and hold hands with the schizophrenic world around them.

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Gather up agricultural leftovers, blast them with pyrolysis (high heat, low oxygen), and what you get is a crumbly, black matter that could save the world. Making biochar generates clean energy, and at the same time sequesters carbon dioxide in a charcoal-like substance that just happens to work fertile wonders on crops and gardens. Jason Aramburu is the young whit behind Re:Char, a fledgling startup developing micro-scale reactors, which he hopes to see pumping out biochar on every continent. (He also provided TreeHugger with a special report on mountaintop removal last June.) Jason was a Social Innovation Fellow at this year's Pop!Tech conference, which is where we caught up with him and got the scoop on biochar and his new venture.

Special thanks to Pop!Tech for making this interview possible.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

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Image: Casajuntoalrio

Willie Smits long ago abandoned the customary role of the microbiologist. After working in the Indonesian rainforest for three decades (and marrying a tribal queen), he has taken it upon himself to regrow the delicate ecosystems ravaged by ruthless forestry, save the orangutans (OrangutanOutreach.org) and invent a hi-tech system for harvesting sustainable ethanol from sugar palms (without even cutting down the plant, or "harvesting its organs," as he puts it).
Indonesia is now the world's third-largest emitter of greenhouse gasses and the largest producer of palm oil, a dubious substance that ends up as ethanol and cheap food additives. Smits' alternative not only produces sustainable ethanol, but dries food, pumps out clean energy and water, and offers satellite telecommunications to local farmers.

Special thanks to Pop!Tech for making this interview possible.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

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The climate summit in Denkmark, known as Cop15, has drawn to a cloudy close. Now it's time to try and make sense of what actually happened, who did what, and how the results will shape our troubled relationship with the planetary climate. This week, two of our corespondents talk with TreeHugger Radio about what they saw in Copenhagen. Alex Pasternack reports on what took place within the tense summit meetings, and focuses special attention on the weighty role played by China (Alex has lived in Beijing at length). April Streeter reflects on what went on around the summit amid the swirling buzz of NGOs, activists, and other climate pilgrims. She also tells us about some of the inspiring demonstration projects, like the Copenhagen Wheel, that were unveiled, and describes the not-altogether-friendly interactions between police and demonstrators.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

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Not your typical architecture firm, Sheila Kennedy and her cohorts at KVA MATx are stripping apart the built environment and reassembling it with an eye for flexibility. Her vision: a world of distributed power in which solar potential is woven into the fabric of daily life, from high design in Germany to African tailors and boda-bodas (bicycle taxis). Her malleable solar light technology, dubbed the Portable Light Project, is already out there, meshing with local need and know-how to bring renewable energy into diverse niches of the world. She spoke with TreeHugger Radio about FLAP (Flexible Light And Power--a collaboration with Timbuk2 that turned goers of the Pop!Tech conference into beta testers), her vision for the "Soft House," and the future of design.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

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When people describe their first time seeing mountaintop removal coal mining, the response is invariably the same: dropped jaws and sunken hearts. Along with her prolific work in film and television (ER, Raising the Bar), Gloria Reuben is a tireless backer of clean energy, global public health, and climate sanity. She talks with TreeHugger Radio about the myth of clean coal, the grim tale of mountaintop removal, and her hopes for Copenhagen.
Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download. Music from Stars.

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Image: Local Motors

Here's how it works: designers submit their concepts online, the community votes, then Local Motors works with the winners to bring these cars to life. This process, says founder Jay Rogers, has more in common with the way Mozilla makes Firefox and American Idol picks stars than the way Detroit has traditionally made automobiles. Rogers tells TreeHugger Radio about the first crowdsourced car, the Rally Fighter, and what Local Motors can mean for sustainability.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download. Special thanks to the Pop!Tech conference for helping arrange this interview.

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A healthy and high-tech green collar economy has been a great promise of the Obama administration. On the front lines of the fight to create green jobs and spur the economy is the Apollo Alliance, an amalgam of labor, business, and environmental groups. Jerome Ringo, President of Apollo, speaks with TreeHugger Radio about his group's "moonshot mission," the vitriol of Glenn Beck and Fox News, the resignation of Van Jones, and the role of African Americans in the climate fight.

Ringo was a keynote speaker at this year's Bioneers conference, and we thank the conference organizers for helping arrange this interview.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download. Full text is available after the jump.

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Amanda Little built a journalistic career decrying the pains and convulsions of our petrol-obsessed society, but it wasn't until she embarked on a very personal quest did the story of oil become illuminated in human terms. Amanda tells TreeHugger Radio how, to write her first book, Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells--Our Ride to the Renewable Future, she went inside the Pentagon and the Talladega Superspeedway, visited corn farmers and rode along with T. Boone Pickens, witnessed a boob job and landed on a Gulf Coast oil rig. Through it all, she learned a new-found respect for the hydrocarbon, and a renewed vision for a green future.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

Also check out our text interview in which Amanda talks about her recent move to Nashville.

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Photo: George Whiteside

Margaret Atwood is one of the most respected authors of our time, with dozens of books of poetry and fiction to her name, among them Cat's Eye, The Handmaid's Tale, and Oryx and Crake. Her latest book, The Year of the Flood, is set in a fallen future: society has crumbled, climate change and pandemics ravage the planet, and people are forced to rediscover their relationship with the land. Miss Atwood chats with TreeHugger about the God's Gardeners (the book's rooftop-gardening eco cult), her pantheon of ecological saints, and the greening of her book tour and her own life. (Our apologies for the sound quality--we did our best.)

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download. Music from Piers Faccini.

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If, in the United States, you happen to decided you'd like to earn your PhD in chemistry, you may notice that at no point are you required to take a course in toxicology. This is partly the reason we're now being assaulted by a growing mob of dangerous substances as they float through our oceans and bloodstreams. So says science journalist Elizabeth Grossman whose new book, Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry, is a sleuth job into the world of synthetic estrogens, carcinogens, nanoparticles, and other man-made poisons that may be making us fat, angry, stupid, and dead.

Listen to the podcast of our interview with Elizabeth Grossman via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.
Music credit: Stereolab

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It wasn't easy. In fact, Newsweek's Deputy Editor Kathy Deveny admits that if she knew how hard it would be, she probably wouldn't have. But what's done is done: Newsweek spent more than a year vetting the 500 biggest companies in America and ranking them from greenest to brownest. Deveny breaks down the grueling process for us, explaining why the winners won and the losers lost.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

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The world has been watching Colin Beavan--better known as No Impact Man--for some time. Now, his year of no-impact living at an end, he is sharing the ups and downs, the laughter and nail-biting, and all the lessons that came from what The New York Times dubbed "the year without toilet paper." No Impact Man is now a film, a book, and a nonprofit (NoImpactProject.org), and the critics are scurrying about trying to make sense of it all.

Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download.

Music credit: Andrew Bird

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