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Nature is amazing. Take the humble leaf—it’s capable of absorbing the sunlight and converting it into the chemical energy that fuels the growth of plants. Photosynthesis is one of the fundamental forces of life, and it’s far superior to our technological efforts to harness sunlight. A photovoltaic solar panel can transform sunlight to electricity, [...]
Bjorn Lomborg’s middle name is not actually “controversial,” but maybe it should be. The Danish economist—and TIME 100 selection—gained notoriety for books like The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It that called into question the basic green assumptions that the world is getting worse and that climate change is an existential threat to the human race. In recent years [...]
Environmentalists here in the U.S. are not happy with President Obama, in part because he pulled back on a promise to tighten ground-level ozone and smog standards for air pollution. But American greens should remember: much of the rest of the world has it far, far, far worse. That’s one takeaway from a new report [...]
I’ll be honest—I don’t pay close attention to space weather. I’m busy enough trying to figure out how scared I should be—and how scared I should make you—of regular old Earth weather, like hurricanes, floods and droughts. But maybe I should start keeping tabs on what’s going on above us. On September 24 the sun [...]
When Wangari Maathai, who died of cancer on Sept. 25 in a Nairobi hospital, won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, not everyone was happy. Maathai was the first African woman to win a Nobel, chiefly for her work creating the Green Belt Movement — a (literally) grassroots effort to empower rural women in Kenya to [...]
The story around Solyndra—the failed solar company that took hundreds of millions in government loan guarantees—is not getting better for greens. Earlier this week Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison let Congress know through his lawyers that he wouldn’t be answering any questions at a House investigation hearing set forFriday. “Mr. Harrison intends to invoke his Fifth [...]
The watchword for the week at the Clinton Global Initiative‘s (CGI) annual summit in Manhattan this week has been “efficiency.” (It narrowly beats out “traffic,” which is what you’ll be caught in trying to get anywhere in the city for the next few days.) I wrote about an industry consortium led by the Carbon War [...]
It’s ClimateWeek in New York City, which overruns with the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly and the yearly summit of the Clinton Global Initiative. In other words, don’t even try to take a taxi in Manhattan this week. We’ll also see plenty of bold policy announcements and generous philanthropic commitments, along with the [...]
Commercial whaling has been banned since 1986, but some still flout international standards by hunting the animals. Japan gets nearly all the attention—and the reality TV shows—in part because it usually takes more than 1,000 whales a year, but it’s not alone. Both Norway and Iceland also hunt a few hundred whales commercially, mostly for [...]
If you want to see global warming in action, head to the Arctic. The seasonal shrinking of the sea ice over the North Pole is one of the most visible symptoms of the gradual warming of the planet. Every winter, Arctic ice builds up in the polar darkness, and then in the summer, it melts. [...]
