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Up close, an electric vehicle is clearly cleaner than a gasoline-powered car. No matter how efficient a combustion engine becomes—and some gasoline-powered cars can be very efficient—it still, well, combusts, spewing carbon and other exhaust gases into the atmosphere. But nothing at all comes out the tailpipe of an electric car. It’s as clean as [...]
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 [...]
I spent a year in Canada as a teenager in 1993 and ’94, living in the metro Toronto neighborhood of Scarborough, which for some reason Canadians think is hilarious. Aside from the unfortunate 1993 World Series — damn you, Joe Carter — I loved it. I was from white-bread suburban Pennsylvania, and Toronto was one [...]
Back in 2008, former vice president Al Gore decided that it was time to take the fight against climate change to a new level. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, Gore said that the world had “reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience,” and called for young people to [...]
Many of President Obama’s progressive supports have soured on him in recent months, as the debt crisis and a Republican House has forced him to embrace deep spending cuts, and environmentalists are among them. There’s still unhappiness among greens over the White House’s perceived failure to push hard for carbon cap-and-trade legislation—legislation that was a major [...]
I’m on a deadline today for the magazine (that thing that shows up sometimes at your house), so blogging is going to brief. But wanted to link to a neat video from the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) on the true price of gas. CIR tallies up the environmental, climate, health and security costs of [...]
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 [...]
Krista Mahr posted a great item this morning on Japan’s decision to stop building new nuclear plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Atomic power already supplies some 30% of Japan’s electricity—considerably larger than nuclear’s share in the U.S.—and the Japanese government had plans on table to add another 14 reactors and up nuclear’s [...]
The Earth as one great organism has always been one of the most appealing metaphors of the green movement. From the moment environmentalist James Lovelock first articulated his so-called Gaia hypothesis—after the Greek goddess of the Earth—in the 1970s, the theory has continued to charm environmentalists. It doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, of course. [...]
A guest post from TIME’s Tara Kelly: There’s a long history of research that reveals women are the greener gender-at least when it comes to their attitudes and preferences. But now a study published by France’s National Institute of Statistics and Economics shows that the fairer sex’s environmental conscience may actually translate into action too. [...]
