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Real talk: when it comes to dealing with climate change—and reducing carbon emissions, the top man-made cause of warming—the international community is doing a crap job. The U.N. process is bogged down, with ambitions that seem to shrink each year even as the summits themselves grow longer and longer. Europe’s emissions trading scheme (ETS)—the biggest [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
As an environment writer, I’m constantly sent pitches highlighting companies that are going green, getting more efficient, shrinking their carbon footprint—and few industries talk a bigger game than the airlines. Companies like American Airlines hype their new, more fuel-efficient fleets, while other corporations like to talk about their work with experimental biofuels. Just a couple [...]
If you’re eating a food that came in a wrapper while reading this, you probably eating palm oil — at least there’s a 50/50 chance you are. About half the packaged food found in a supermarket contains palm oil, according to the World Wildlife Fund, and a lot of that product comes from the lush [...]
It’s not hard to imagine the damage weird weather inflicts on our planet. Hurricane Katrina, for example, obliterated coastal communities, wiped out businesses and left hundreds of dead bodies in its wake. Quantifying the cost of such a one-off (we hope) event is pretty easy too: Katrina left us with a bill of $81 billion, [...]
Back in the day, before Al Gore informed us about a certain inconvenient truth, before we started to calculate our commutes in carbon, and before people in the South Pacific had to start heading for higher land, there were beach clean ups. People walked along the sand — maybe sometimes only on Earth Day, like [...]
Feral camels have never gotten much love in the Australian bush. Considered to be an invasive species, they graze native plants to the point of local extinction. They walk across roads in the middle of the night. They trample fences. Now one Australian company has a plan to get rid of the camel scourge once [...]
As I’ve traveled around Europe, I’ve learned that nuclear energy is seen very much through cultural lenses. The French jealously guard their force de frappe nuclear weapons and slurp up nuclear power with no heartburn or concern. Next door in Germany, where fear of the atomkraft helped form the country’s powerful Green party in the [...]
