The Best of TreeHugger: Fat Cars, Vegan Robots, and The World’s Coolest Subway Maps

Each week, we’ll be doing a round-up of some of our favorite stories from our friends over at TreeHugger. Likewise, a weekly Infrastructurist digest will be kicking off soon at TH. -Jebediah

This week, TreeHugger wondered to what extent poor public transportation was to blame for America’s obesity epidemic–not as much as evolution is, according to two new books on America’s fatness. But evolution never accounted for soft drinks, the most consumed food by calories in the United States. If the average American drank water instead, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less.

Given the obesity epidemic, we probably don’t want to start making edible houses–but that’s what some Aussie architects did (on a small scale, anyway). A better idea might be growing your own building. Then again, after learning that the US has enough empty houses now to contain the population of the U.K., maybe we should “digest” that surplus first.

The military’s newest reconnaissance robot, EATR, is eating well: it consumes organic material for energy (fortunately, it’s a vegetarian). If the robot ever learns how to build buildings though, it might want to check out Collin’s slideshow on geodesic domes for growing your own food.

The Air Force is looking leaner, thanks to the “green” budget cuts approved by the Senate this week. But American automobiles remain awfully fat, as gas mileage has remain fairly constant since the 1970s, in spite of better efficiency. The House of Representatives, recognizing that the U.S. only has about 1/100th of the world’s clean natural gas-burning vehicles, is backing a national natural gas fueling infrastructure, to the tune of $150 million.

In NYC, which has fewer cars per capita than any other US city, people only need charge up their MTA fare cards to get around on one of the world’s coolest subways–not to be confused, of course, with the coolest subway maps.

Right near an A train stop on the west side of Manhattan, the US Postal Service has opened the largest green roof in New York, atop its Morgan mail processing facility. The garden-like space will help reduce the city’s heat index, thus, it is hoped, saving 30 percent of the building’s energy usage by 2015.

Green roofs are entirely sane — but here’s this from the department of insanities: an off-duty firefighter in Ashville, NC, shot a bicyclist in the head, apparently just for riding with a small child in tow. Fortunately, the victim was wearing a helmet, which stopped the bullet.

TreeHugger’s TreeHuggerist column is a weekly Tuesday affair.