The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has—how to put this—not been a friend of environmental legislation or regulation. The Chamber—which represents more than 3 million U.S. businesses—spent millions to lead the successful fight against carbon cap-and-trade legislation, along with health care reform and most of President Obama’s other …
The First Nuclear Battery?
This week I wrote a piece for the magazine on what many energy analysts believe to be the future of the nuclear industry: small modular reactors.
These mini reactors, which generate up to 300 megawatts compared to 1500 megawatts for traditional large nuclear power plants, are all the rage because they are versatile and cheap. …
5 Easy Ways to Reduce Your Cell Phone Exposure
I have a post over on Healthland looking at the recent study showing that cell phone radiation does indeed affect brain activity. The cancer question is still an open one—but I describe a few easy steps to reducing radiation exposure just in case you’re the safer rather than sorrier type.
Check out the post here.
The New Science of Telecoupling Shows Just How Connected the World Is—For Better and For Worse
I’ve got one more tidbit from last weekend’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and it’s nothing less than a new scientific concept: telecoupling.
This is not, as you might expect, a particular risqué form of conference call. Telecoupling refers to how connections between nature and human …
Heavy Metal: 12 Million Tons of Chinese Rice Contaminated
Ugh. Hong Kong’s English daily South China Morning Post has a distinctly unsavory dispatch from the Chinese media this morning: Government scientists have released research that millions of acres of Chinese agricultural land and over 12 million tons of Chinese grain are contaminated by toxic metal pollution, according to this …
Get Out the Kleenex—Climate Change Lengthens Allergy Season
Crossposted from TIME’s Healthland:
For about 36 million Americans with seasonal allergies, torture time is just around the corner. As spring flowers, the pollen will flow, resulting in nasal congestion, red itchy eyes and overall awfulness. It’s not just cosmetic either—for an estimated 23 million Americans with asthma, …
Worried about the Federal Debt? Then You Should Be Worried About the Natural Debt Too
I have a Going Green column on the Time.com mainpage about the similarities between the federal debt every politician in Washington claims to be worried about, and the debt to nature that almost no one is talking about. They’re remarkable similar. As a country, we’ve run up a massive federal debt in part because we’ve lived beyond our …
Are Humans Increasingly to Blame for Whales Strandings?
As authorities scrambled to pick up the pieces after a deadly earthquake hit the southern New Zealand town of Christchurch on Tuesday, government workers further south had just finished handling an altogether different kind of natural disaster. Over the weekend, more than 100 pilot whales were found on a remote beach on Stewart Island …
Why Men Are Worse for the Planet
A guest post from TIME’s Tara Kelly:
There’s a long history of research that reveals women are the greener gender-at least when it comes to their attitudes and preferences. But now a study published by France’s National Institute of Statistics and Economics shows that the fairer sex’s environmental conscience may actually …
Shoring Up the Elements of a Clean Tech Economy
Heard of germanium? How about neodymium? Or terbium? Or rhenium? They’re not extras from a Star Trek film—these are real world elements are some of the rarest members of the periodic table. But as hard as they are to find, these substances are increasingly important to green tech, clean tech and high tech—and the U.S. doesn’t have …