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Jellyfish: they’re the worst. From the dollar bill-sized jellies that wash up along the New Jersey shore to the deadly box jelly—the most toxic creature on the planet—no one likes jellyfish. And the bad news is that they may be taking over: as we pull fish from the sea, the jellyfish are left to flourish. [...]
I haven’t written much about the California solar company Solyndra, which recently went bankrupt after receiving over $500 million in taxpayer money as part of the Department of Energy’s program of loan guarantees for renewable energy companies. Short story: the sudden demise of the California-based company—which went out of business on Aug. 31, costing more [...]
Federal investigators from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Resource Management and Enforcement (BOERME) finally issued their long-delayed report today on the causes of last year’s Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill. The results are not very surprising: BP, and to a lesser extent contractors like Transocean and Halliburton, made plenty of avoidable mistakes on the [...]
Al Gore is back. The former vice-president and Nobel laureaute—who had stepped back somewhat from the day-to-day battle over climate change in recent years—returns on September 14 with a 24-hour global PowerPointathon updating his famed global warming slide show. 24 one-hour presentations, in multiple languages delivered by multiple experts, will begin at 8 PM ET [...]
Solar, wind, biofuels and other renewable sources of energy get the hype, but there’s no getting around the fact that most of our electricity still comes from fossil fuels. About half the U.S.’s electricity and 40% of the world’s power comes from carbon-intensive coal. That’s bad news for the climate—coal is the single-biggest source of [...]
For a delicacy that can command such a high price—and which has caused so much devastation in the sea—shark-fin soup is practically tasteless. I’ve only eaten it once, during a reporting trip to the industrial Chinese city of Wenzhou more than nine years ago. I was writing about the sex toy king of China—king of [...]
Usually when Texas beats Oklahoma it’s something for the Lone Star state to celebrate, like when the Longhorns defeat the Sooners in college football’s storied Red River Rivalry. But not every record is worth holding. This year Texas set a new national record for the hottest months of June through August, besting a record formerly [...]
I’m beginning to think solving this global warming thing is going to be really, really hard. We all know that the burning of carbon-intensive coal is just about the single biggest source of manmade greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why groups like the Sierra Club are fighting so hard to get America off coal—whether or not [...]
President Obama will be making his much-anticipated speech on job creation this evening—though, fortunately, he won’t be interfering with the kickoff of the NFL season. But he still has to answer the question—where will those jobs come from? In the early months of his Presidency, Obama had an answer: the jobs of the future would [...]
Republicans will be holding their latest Presidential debate in California tonight, and this one will be more newsworthy than most. It marks the debut of Texas Governor Rick Perry, the laconic latecomer who is currently trouncing the rest of the field. I don’t expect the environment or climate change to be a major topic at the [...]
