[Update 10/29/10: Halliburton has responded to the commission’s report—and unsurprisingly, the company deflects the blame and places the responsibility back on BP’s shoulders. Halliburton questioned the commission’s tests, arguing that the panel’s investigators used a different cement mixture than the one that eventually went into the …
Health: Scientists Come Out Against Chemical Flame Retardants in Ordinary Products
I have a new environmental health post over at TIME’s Healthland on chemical safety. Check it out here
Water: Taking the Phosphates Out of Detergent Leaves a Cleaner Planet—But Are the Dishes Dirtier?
The Spokane river had a soap scum problem. Over the years the runoff of nutrients like phosphorous into the eastern Washington state waterway has encouraged the growth of algae, leading to green, icky waters in a process science teachers would call eutrophication and swimmers would call icky. As the algae proliferates and then dies, …
Climate: Scrambled Eggs Could Be a Climate Solution
As it becomes increasingly clear that legislating carbon emission cuts will be almost impossible in the immediate future—while counting on research for new energy solutions is an inevitable gamble—the possibility of geoengineering is going from a pipe dream to a last-ditch weapon. Most geoengineering schemes would involve trying to …
Wildlife: Biodiversity Is Declining Fast—But It Would Be Even Worse Without Conservation Efforts
As the meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) continues in Nagoya (tip for attendees—check out Los Tacos!), hopes are dwindling for any kind of broad, global deal to aggressively protect nature. That’s partially due to the fact that diplomats are locked over contentious arguments about how to divide up the world’s …
Oil Spill: A Damning Indictment of BP’s Safety Culture
New BP CEO Bob Dudley isn’t happy with me. Well, not just me—all of the reporters who dug into BP’s past safety problems and raised questions about the mistakes the company made on the road to the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. And he’s also mad at the environmentalists and scientists who raised the alarm in the wake of the spill, and …
The Green Cost of The New Great Game
In 2007, James Graff wrote a cover story for TIME that looked at the new “great game” developing in the arctic. Global warming is melting the arctic ice cap, opening a scramble for control of a short passage between Asia and Europe. But now a new study has underlined how the new great game may come with a high ecological cost.
Climate: India Is Still a Long Way from Cutting Carbon
You’ll hear it over and over again in the debates over the global climate negotiations: while the U.S. has put more carbon overall into the atmosphere than any other nation (and is still the number two emitter overall), the lion’s share of future carbon emissions will come from the big developing nations. China, now the world’s …
Trash Talk: Hong Kongers Produce the Most Garbage in the World
When you first get to Hong Kong, there are a few clues that this city might have a trash problem on its hands — like the fact that people seem to live off takeaway food, which all comes in plastic containers that are then wrapped in a paper bag, wrapped in a plastic bag. Or how at global chains like Pret A Manger, the nice people …
Transportation: The White House Puts Out Fuel Efficiency Standards for Heavy Vehicles
Though Congress has been (self-)stymied on climate change this term, the Obama Administration has taken steps of its own to deal with rising U.S. carbon emissions. And nowhere have they been more aggressive than in promoting—mandating, really—better fuel efficiency on our roads, as I wrote earlier this month:
…
