The Ferris Files

The Unstoppable….Solar Lobby?!? A skirmish this week in Arizona revealed that the solar industry, while still adolescent, is developing some political brawn. A bill in the state legislature proposed expanding the definition of “renewable” to include nuclear power, a move that would have allowed the state’s lone nuclear plant to fulfill Arizona’s mandate to receive [...]

As Europe announced it would reach its goal of 20 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020, the U.S.’s climate soap opera entered a new chapter. President Obama converted his energy bill into a hybrid in hopes of driving it through Congress. To get the Senate to agree to a cap on emissions, he [...]

President Obama turned his attention to energy this week, and in a rapid-fire series of announcements scrambled the prospects of the entire industry. Just days after pledging the U.S. government to a 28 percent reduction in energy consumption by 2020, Obama proposed a 2011 budget that boosted every sort of energy but the fossil kind.
On [...]

In a last-ditch effort to save climate legislation this year, a consortium of clean-energy groups met today in Washington and kicked off a week of intense planning and lobbying.
The notion of Clean Energy Week was born only a few weeks ago, when several groups realized they had planned events in the capital at the same [...]

A few days ago Anjali and I trekked into the Canadian Rockies to a campsite on the Athabasca River. The water ran swift and silent and a strange chalky blue color. Dust suspended in water, made from glacier grinding against rock miles upstream.

We found our assigned campsite on a patch of riverbank so pristine that [...]

Yesterday, on a 106-degree afternoon in Portland, Oregon, I met two food enthusiasts and searched for something to eat among the sidewalk weeds.
Urban foraging, as it’s called, is the latest wave in the local food movement, where “local” can mean a crack in the asphalt, and one adopts a relaxed definition of “food.” My guides [...]

The chore I most enjoy in my New York apartment is carrying the trash across the hallway to the refuse room. I drop the bag down the trash chute, and instead of walking away, I hold the door open and listen.
The bag bangs and rattles down the chute in a loud and satisfying way. It [...]

The battle for New York City’s green future arrived in my mailbox last week. It took the form of a fundraising appeal from MillionTreesNYC, a campaign to plant 100,000 trees every year for a decade. It bore the signature of that eminent environmentalist, Bette Midler.
Which immediately brought questions to mind. Who made the star of [...]

Last year New York’s Museum of Arts and Design moved into a gleaming white cube on Columbus Circle,  giving no hint of its former identity as the American Craft Museum. But this popsicle-stick-and-glitter past helped me make sense of the current exhibit called “Second Lives.”
It demonstrates new uses for everyday things, and had me look [...]

In winter the New York streets are a gray asphalt tundra. Then one day in April…Daffodils! They nod at you on the sidewalk, bright as sunlight, gentle as Easter. Surrounding them is a tiny, valiant iron fence.
I saw a woman on 65th Street reach past the fence with one hand – the other held a [...]