The 10 Most Air-Polluted Cities in the World

Environmentalists here in the U.S. are not happy with President Obama, in part because he pulled back on a promise to tighten ground-level ozone and smog standards for air pollution. But American greens should remember: much of the rest of the world has it far, far, far worse. That’s one takeaway from a new report [...]

Ranking North America’s Greenest Cities

In part because we have a political press obsessed with Washington, we tend to gauge the success of climate and energy legislation only through the national lens. And the picture from Capitol Hill is deeply depressing. One party completely ignores the science of climate change and only wants to engage on fossil fuels, and that [...]

An Urban President Hails America’s Great Outdoors

This afternoon, President Obama took time out of what has already become a bruising budget battle to announce the release of a new report on America’s Great Outdoors Initiative. It’s a program the White House launched last year to preserve parks and open space across the country. (Access the report, which gathered the opinion of [...]

Weather: How the Troubled Response to the Blizzard Is Just the Beginning for a Warmer World

Yesterday afternoon, as we were closing this week’s issue of Time, I ended up in a debate with one of my editors over how the air travel system had responded to a December of terrible weather. I’d written a short piece coming out in the magazine describing the travel Armageddon the storm had created for [...]

Cities: A Walled Green Utopia Rises in the Middle East

In Sunday’s New York Times—which I consumed along with a bagel on my iPhone—architecture critic Nicolai Ourousoff has a report from Masdar, the zero-carbon, ultra-sustainable city growing up in the deserts outside of Abu Dhabi. The Masdar project is the result of a government initiative by the sultans who control Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich capital [...]