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My weekly Going Green column is up on the Time.com mainpage, and I take on the worrying state of the U.S. renewable energy industry. It’s not worrying now—2011, like the last few years, has been great for the wind and solar industries, as prices drop and installations spread. But that growth was driven in part by [...]
PETER KENT, Canada’s environment minister, announcing the country’s formal withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. Canada—unlike the U.S.—signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which required the country to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 6% below 1990 levels by 2012. But successive Canadian governments did little to cut emissions as the oil and gas industry exploded, and today [...]
Our Krista Mahr has a post over at Global Spin on news that nearly $30 million worth of Japanese post-tsunami aid is going to the country’s controversial whaling industry. Ironically, one of the (few) positive effects of the massive earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan this past March was that it slowed the whaling trade, [...]
We already know that hydraulic fracturing—the process of injecting millions of gallons of water and chemicals deep into the earth to exploit the natural gas trapped inside rock—can likely help cause earthquakes. The British energy company Cuadrilla Resources admitted earlier this year that fracking operations caused a series of small quakes in Lancashire, and scientists [...]
There are deals and then there are deals. That’s my takeaway from the U.N. climate negotiations in the South African city of Durban, which finally concluded early Sunday local time — more than a day after the talks had been scheduled to end. Exhausted negotiators — seriously, look at these poor guys — managed to reach an [...]
In this week’s international edition of TIME—which is thankfully not behind the paywall—I have a piece on Ecuador’s innovative plan to forswear drilling for oil in the Yasuni National Park in exchange for funding from the international community. Yasuni is in the western reaches of the Amazon rain forest, and it may be the most [...]
President Obama came into office promising to restore scientific integrity to policymaking, but his Administration has allowed politics to trump science several times—including with this week’s move to keep the emergency contraceptive Plan B from being sold without a prescription. But science—in climate change and in other areas—can only tell us so much. Ethics and [...]
If you report on the environmental issues surrounding hydraulic fracturing and shale natural gas, you’ll hear a certain line from gas industry representatives over and over: there has never been a documented case of groundwater contamination by fracking. There are angry homeowners who say that fracking has spoiled their water supply, and suspicious incidents across [...]
ABIGAIL BORAH, 21-year-old Middlebury College junior, interrupting U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern at the U.N. climate change summit in Durban, South Africa. The U.S. has come under sharp criticism from the international community and environmentalists for standing in the way of further action on global warming, though Stern indicated that the U.S. [...]
It’s nearly the end of the year, which mean’s there’s no escape—the Top 10 lists are on their way. We at TIME magazine pride ourselves on creating the Top 10 of Everything, and while technically that’s probably not true, we certainly produce a lot. Click here to get the master lists—everything from top comebacks to [...]
