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A few weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, triggering the biggest oil spill in U.S. history, I wrote the first cover story for TIME on the accident. We called it “The Meaning of the Mess,” and while I spent a few pages recounting how the explosion had occurred, [...]
Can you put a price on a tree? How about a babbling brook? Or an unspoiled mountain vista? It turns out you can—and this is not a Mastercard commercial. Early this morning at the Nagoya meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the United Nations released The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study, [...]
Day two of the European Future Energy Forum in London and today I wanted to get a sense of the state of venture capital investment in cleantech and renewables in Europe. Specifically, how does it compare to the U.S? Before he took the stage for a panel discussion titled “Low Carbon Financing in Europe—State of [...]
India has launched a new “green” court this week in the latest push from Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh to toughen up the nation’s environmental laws. The National Green Tribunal, as it’s called, will be composed of 20 judiciary and environmental expert members who will hear cases regarding environmental protection and rights around the country, and [...]
I just spent an interesting morning at the European Future Energy Forum in London. The opening panel debate—titled “Movers and Shakers”—included representatives from European governments, industry and NGOs. A full line-up can be found here. The conversation was fast-paced but seemed to orbit around what will happen if the next round of international climate negotiations—scheduled [...]
As we wrote yesterday, the meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya has a long agenda. That’s what happens when you convene a global meeting to save wildlife on the planet Earth. But beyond the dire warnings about disappearing animals and emptying seas—and the grand, if fuzzy promises governments will make—there’s some [...]
The Hoover Dam may be the Eighth Wonder of the World, but to me the more impressive achievement has always been Lake Mead, the man-made reservoir—which can contain nearly 10 trillion gallons of water—that the dam holds back. Lake Mead is a vast, living tank of water in the middle of the Nevada desert, as [...]
The story of non-human life on the planet Earth over the past few decades is a simple one: loss. While there are always a few bright spots—including the recovery of threatened animals like the brown pelican, thanks to the quietly revolutionary Endangered Species Act—on a planetary scale biodiversity is steadily marching backwards, with [...]
Last month, after China and Japan locked horns over Tokyo’s arrest of a Chinese fishing captain whose boat collided with the Japanese Coast Guard, shipments of rare earths from China to Japan started to dry up at over 30 different Japanese companies. Since then, Beijing has stuck to its story – that the [...]
Renewable energy may be clean, but the international politics behind it are getting dirtier by the day. A little more than a month after the United Steelworkers (USW) filed a compliant with U.S. trade officials over what the union saw as China’s unfair subsidies for its clean-technology sector, the Obama Administration announced that it would [...]
