EcocentricEcocentric
As terrible floods rage simultaneously around the world—inundating half of Australia, killing more than 50 people in the Philippines and hundreds in Brazil—it’s natural to want a scapegoat. Well, you can blame the “little girl”—the weather phenomenon known as La Nina, which many meteorologists are blaming for the …
EcocentricPolitics
Over on the mainpage, I have a piece pegged to Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to the U.S.—and how Washington and Beijing can find valuable common ground on energy and climate, assuming short-term politics don’t get in the way. Check it out here.
EcocentricUncategorized
I’m in Abu Dhabi right now, attending the World Future Energy Summit and getting a chance to check out the first finished buildings in Masdar City. I’ll have more on the summit and the city tomorrow, but I wanted to focus on something else today. I often write on this blog about rapidly the planet has developed over the past few decades, …
EcocentricHealth
On the main page I have a piece on a fascinating Science study that showed how scientists were able to genetically engineer chickens to make them virtually unable to pass on avian flu. That could have major implications for influenza—birds can spread new flu viruses to human beings—and for veterinary disease, if researchers can …
EcocentricCoal
In a decision that could have a major impact on both the mining industry and the Obama Administration’s relationship with conservatives, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today that it was vetoing the largest single mountaintop mining removal permit in West Virginia history. In using its authority under the Clean Water …
EcocentricEcocentric
New Yorkers like myself awoke this morning to a fluffy layer of fresh snow. (And the sound of scores of plows sweeping the streets clean, as our billionaire mayor tries to make us forget about the Blizzard of 2009.) New Englanders are being walloped with a full-on major snowstorm—though hardened Bostonians just shrug it off—while the …
EcocentricEcocentric
One of the surprising facts about the devastating earthquake in Haiti, which struck the island country a year ago today, is that by seismic standards it wasn’t all that big. The temblor was 7.0 on the Richter scale—strong, but hardly record-breaking. The earthquake that hit Chile a month and a half later was an 8.8—some 500 times …
EcocentricWildlife
Even before the earthquake a year ago that killed at least 220,000 people, Haiti was an ecological nightmare. Large-scale deforestation has left less than 2% of the original forest cover standing—a fact that is starkly apparent when flying between Haiti and its neighboring country the Dominican Republic, which has conserved far …
EcocentricOil
It won’t surprise readers of this blog that I agree with the BP Oil Spill Commission that there are serious safety problems with offshore drilling that need to be tackled to prevent another Deepwater Horizon. But the oil industry doesn’t quite see it that way. From the American Petroleum Institute’s (API) response to the commission’s …
EcocentricOil
My time.com piece on the Gulf oil spill report—and the impact it will have on the deepwater drilling industry—is up on the main page. Check it out here.
