Climate Buildings

Teenager builds tiny home to avoid mortgage trap

Sixteen-year-old Austin Hay of Santa Rosa, Calif., has been sleeping in a work-in-progress 130 square foot “tiny home” in his parents' backyard for months. The project came about because "like every teenager, I want to move out," says Hay.

Critical List: East Coast prepares for Irene; Inhofe gets on Romney’s case

With Hurricane Irene on its way, New Yorkers head to Trader Joe's and make jokes (I think they're jokes?) about the proper amount to tip delivery guys who come out during a hurricane. 

Why does a super-walkable condo building in Denver include eight floors of parking spaces? (Answer: There's no good answer.)

So weird: Even Sen. Jim Inhofe wants Mitt Romney to stop waffling on climate change. This may be the only issue Inhofe and environmentalists have ever agreed on.

Russia to build $100 billion rail tunnel connecting Alaska and Siberia

Ever since Tsar Nicholas II, Russians have dreamed of connecting Siberia to North America via a rail tunnel. Now, apparently, the Kremlin has green-lighted the connection, which would be the world's longest, and twice as long as the England-to-France "Chunnel."

Northeast Corridor is getting better rail

Apparently you gotta have rail to make rail. The Northeast Corridor, the one area of the country with high-speed rail service (Acela) and the only part where Amtrak's not just borrowing the tracks from freight companies, is getting $745 million from the Department of Transportation for rail upgrades. 

Trying to make China's planned cities livable

Two brothers, an architect and a developer, team up to make new Chinese cities more people-friendly, easing the transition from rural to urban living.

Breaking free from the infrastructure cult of roads

A report from the American Society of Civil Engineers touts misguided and outdated strategies for infrastructure spending.

Wall Street Journal uses infrastructure as excuse to tell Tea Party to shove it

If you thought the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal couldn't possibly become any more backward or retrograde, the good news is, you're right! Today, the editors of the only newspaper opinion section to occasionally defeat Fox News in terms of sheer mendacity finally turned the corner and found a reason to break with the Tea Party notion that government should just go away already, so the country can turn into Somalia or Pakistan as quickly as possible.

The surprisingly powerful op-ed, written by Ed Rendell (Democrat, former governor of Pennsylvania) and Scott Smith (Republican mayor of Mesa, Ariz.), advances the notion that transportation is the one thing our government should be spending money on, even in this economic climate.

How cities can get carbon down to zero

Seattle looks at an ambitious scenario involving changes in travel modes, more energy-efficient buildings, and shifts to alternative energy sources.

A pop-up urban experiment: The BMW Guggenheim Lab

On Houston Street in New York, the BMW Guggenheim Lab hopes to incubate ideas and solutions for the modern urban world. What will come of it?

Want to save energy? Stop wasting water

Turns out one of the single biggest sources of energy use in your home doesn't even show up in the electricity section of your utility bill.