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I haven’t written much about the California solar company Solyndra, which recently went bankrupt after receiving over $500 million in taxpayer money as part of the Department of Energy’s program of loan guarantees for renewable energy companies. Short story: the sudden demise of the California-based company—which went out of business on Aug. 31, costing more [...]
Personally, I was in the bathroom in TIME’s midtown Manhattan office building, and I didn’t feel a thing—until I got on Twitter. The news moved faster digitally than it did geologically: southwestern Virginia had suffered a 5.8-magnitude earthquake, one apparently strong enough to be felt from Georgia up to Ontario. [Update: USGS downgraded quake to [...]
There are many questions surrounding the practice of shale gas drilling—and especially the hydraulic fracturing methods used to get the gas. But it really all boils down to one issue: trust. Do Americans trust gas companies to drill in a responsible way and minimize the risk of any accidents or contamination? And perhaps more importantly, [...]
Chances are you’ve heard about—if not read—Al Gore’s 7,000-word essay in Rolling Stone on America’s ongoing failure to act on the climate crisis. (If the whole piece is a bit too much for your Wednesday lunch hour, Mother Jones has a nice summary.) The media, unsurprisingly, has focused Gore’s criticism of President Obama’s inaction on [...]
Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, isn’t really known for his eloquence. The former Colorado senator spends much of his time now wrestling over efforts to expand oil and gas drilling on federal lands and water—important work, of course, but not exactly the sort of thing that launches speechwriters on spiraling flights of eloquence. [...]
I was fortunate enough to have the chance to lead a symposium on the future of climate policy back in April for the progressive periodical Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The transcript has just been published. I had great panelists: Joe Aldy, an assistant professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the former White House adviser [...]
Speaking at George Washington University today on the nation’s finances, President Obama drew a line in the sand, promising to protect Medicare and Medicaid from Republican budget cuts. But at the same time, Obama didn’t play down the severity of the country’s debt woes, pledging to cut a combined $4 trillion from the U.S. budget [...]
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson—who has emerged as the Republicans’ favorite target as the party looks to dismantle environmental protections—sat down with us for a 10 Questions in this week’s issue. That interview was condensed to fit one page—click below for the full transcript:
More frequent readers of this blog know that I’m obsessed with two things: Philadelphia sports and Asian carp. I even see some similarities between the two—Phillies fans, like Asian carp, are seen by some as an invading horde infiltrating territory that doesn’t belong to them. (Like the Asian carp, the fans are generally peaceful but [...]
I’m in DC for the AAAS annual meeting, and while this gathering of the world’s smartest people (and the journalists who write about them) is big news in the science world, the real action is a few blocks away at the Capitol. There Democrats and Republicans are in a knife fight over the budget—and just [...]
