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Your Time 100 Energy and Environment Influencers

It’s that time of year again—and no, I don’t mean International Jugglers Day, or even worse, Newspaper Columnists Day. It’s the annual unveiling of the TIME 100 list, our roundup of the most interesting and influential people in the world. It’s a group that ranges from Presidents to pop stars. It’s triggered a dance off [...]

Barry Austin

Population Studies: Birthrates Are Declining. For the Earth — and a Lot of People — That’s Not a Bad Thing

I worked in Japan for a year as a journalist for TIME in 2006 and ’07, and here’s what I realized: the Japanese do everything first. Camera phones, Zen Buddhism, little fuel-efficient cars, huge public debt, a stagnant economy, the literary acceptance of comic books — what happens first in Japan eventually makes its way to the rest [...]

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 [...]

Carbon Capture Isn’t Dangerous. But Is It Worth It?

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 [...]

Oil Spill: How the Gulf Cleaned Itself—The Bacterial Way

Over on the TIME.com mainpage, I have a piece about the growing number of scientific studies that have examined the Gulf of Mexico since oil spill, and found a surprising fact. Most of the oil and other hydrocarbons released by the blown Macondo well seem to have vanished, broken down and digested by bacteria. It’s [...]