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Oil is the bad boyfriend of the international economy: we can’t live with it, and we can’t live without it. We complain about the price of gas—which really is crippling middle-class America—and worry about the threat of oil spills and all the greenhouse gases released by the 30 some billion barrels of oil we burn [...]
‘Tis the season to keep propping up the consumer electronics industry and swap out your old phones and tablets and computers in favor of slightly better, slightly more expensive new versions. Whether it’s an iPad 2 replacing an iPad, an iPhone 4s replacing an iPhone 4, or whether you just received an Kindle Fire tablet [...]
The sun will set early in Haiti tonight. By 5:23 PM, night will have come to the island nation, and while night comes to virtually every part of the world virtually everyday, throughout much of Haiti, the darkness will be much deeper. It’s been nearly two years since the January 12, 2010 earthquake that killed [...]
How quickly have Americans forgotten about the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill? Fast enough that that last week BP launched an advertising blitz aimed at giving a “progress report” on the company’s cleanup efforts. It’s nothing new for the company—BP started bombarding the country with its widely derided “BP Cares” ads while the oil [...]
We are the products of our environment — and that goes for egrets and elephants as much as human beings. The history of all life on this planet has been one of change and adaptation. The environment changes, and life adapts. That’s evolution in a nutshell. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that as the [...]
How serious should the penalties for an oil spill be? In early November, Chevron and its drilling partner Transocean accidentally spilled some 3,000 barrels of oil into the ocean off the coast of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. As oil spill go, it was relatively minor—although it is a sign of how hard offshore drilling [...]
At the start of the fall, greens were not happy with President Obama. There was lingering disappointment about the failure of climate legislation a year before—a failure that many environmentalists blamed on insufficient action from the White House. That was bad enough, but at the beginning of September Obama shocked many of his environmental allies [...]
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator LISA JACKSON, in a statement announcing the release of the EPA’s long-awaited rules on mercury and other air toxics. The regulations—which have been in the works for two decades—are the first to restrict emissions of mercury, a potent neurotoxin, from power plants. According to the EPA, the new rules—with which [...]
In the days before Amazon Prime, your Christmas gift-giving options were somewhat more limited. So it that the three wise men in the Biblical account brought local gifts to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem: gold, frankincense and myrhh, each a proper offering for a king—if, perhaps, not all that useful for an infant. (Maybe someone [...]
Depending on the calculations, air travel accounts for perhaps 3 to 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions, far below sources like deforestation, coal-fired electricity and automobiles. Yet I’ve always thought that airplanes play an outsized symbolic role in climate change—and in the challenge of actually stopping it. You can substitute coal for renewables or nuclear, and [...]
