Politics

Climate Expert Peter Gleick Admits Deception in Obtaining Heartland Institute Papers

Last week the climate world was rocked — or at least, strongly buffeted — by the publication of memos that were allegedly from the Heartland Institute, a nonprofit research group that takes a strongly skeptical attitude toward climate science. The memos detailed budget information — including news that groups like the archconservative Koch Foundation and corporations like [...]

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State of the Union: From Climate to Clean Energy to…Fracking?

Well, he mentioned the ‘c’ word this year. Last year President Obama raised more than a few eyebrows when he failed to talk about climate change during his State of the Union—something even his Republican predecessor George W. Bush, no friend of the environment, usually managed to work in. But last night Obama did cite [...]

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Pipeline Politics: How an Oil Sands Project Has Become Key to Environmentalism

Given that there are already more than 2.3 million miles of pipelines in the U.S.—carrying petroleum products, chemicals and natural gas—it might seem odd that so much political energy has been expended on a proposed 1,700-mile pipeline. Yet the controversial Keystone XL pipeline—which would cross the upper Midwest to carry crude from Canadian oil sands [...]

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Plan B: When Politics Beat Science

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 [...]

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Flip-Flop: Jon Huntsman and Newt Gingrich Go Skeptical on Climate Change

There was a time—not that long ago—when climate change was almost a bipartisan issue. Both Barack Obama and John McCain said on the 2008 campaign trail that they were worried about the threat of climate change, and they both had relatively similar carbon cap-and-trade proposals. Seriously, this happened—I’m almost positive that I didn’t hallucinate the [...]

The E-Waste Blight Grows More Dangerous Than Ever

There’s nothing that thrills tech-lovers more than the latest Shiny New Thing. In the first three quarters of 2011 alone, 55 million iPhones were sold—and that was before the release of the 4s this month. That’s a lot of Shiny New Things. The problem is, Shiny New Things quickly become Familiar Old Things, and nothing [...]

Is Ecocide a Crime?

From TIME contributor Joe Jackson: As oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig in May 2010, and then CEO Tony Hayward made his infamous statement that he wanted his life back, he likely had little fear of it being taken in a court of law. But that reality could be [...]

The Dark Side of Steve Jobs’s Dream

I missed the all-night, stop-the-presses TIME session last week that put together an amazing and entirely new issue to commemorate the death of Apple’s Steve Jobs. I don’t have much more to add, other than the fact that like so many other people, I found out the news on an Apple product and am writing this [...]

Talking the New Energy Economy at SXSW Eco

I’m in Austin, Texas this week, attending the first-ever SXSW Eco conference—a green offshoot of the annual SXSW interactive, film and music festival held in the spring. You can follow along with the live stream here. It runs through Thursday—personally, I recommend Philippe Cousteau Jr.’s presentation at 2 PM Central on Thursday. I’ve already had [...]

Climate Change Caused Crises Half A Millennium Ago, Too

Al Gore’s televised, 24-hour PowerPoint extravaganza last month predictably sparked some hot debate – much of it not about the science itself, but about Gore as its mouthpiece (common themes: he’s a hero, he’s become irrelevant, he’s a hypocritical capitalist). But a key message within Gore’s Climate Reality Project was that our recent strange weather [...]