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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 [...]
Last week I wrote about a study that said something unusual—climate change may not turn out to be as serious as our worst fears. Well, there was a reason why that study was such an outlier—most of the science on climate change is dire and getting direr. Case in point: a new article in this [...]
On the basics, the science of climate change is pretty straightforward. Carbon dioxide released into the air—whether through the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation or other natural causes—adds to the greenhouse effect, which traps more solar energy in the atmosphere and warms the planet. But just how this will happen—how fast and exactly how the [...]
My Going Green column this week covers a new study that contains the strongest independent scientific case yet that shale-gas production can contaminate nearby water wells. A team of Duke researchers examined groundwater wells in northeastern Pennsylvania and New York state—the gasland I visited for our recent cover story on shale—and found evidence that methane [...]
Natural gas is riding high. Long an overlooked energy source, gas is suddenly front and center in the energy picture—in a presidential address, in the business world, on the cover of Time magazine. That’s mostly due to shale gas—new deposits of natural gas found throughout much of the country, and tapped via hydraulic fracturing. By [...]
Flatulent cows are not a laughing matter. (Pause.) OK, they are a laughing matter. And flatulent sheep and goats are almost as funny — though not to the chickens and pigs in the pen next door. But pull-my-hoof livestock are a problem too. The emissions produced by nature’s woodwind section contain a nasty mix of [...]
