EcocentricOil
I’ve spent the last few days flying, coptering and driving around northern Alberta with the director James Cameron, taking a close look at the massive oil sands developments in the Canadian province. (As this 2008 piece from TIME shows, Alberta’s underground oil sands reserves have made Canada a world player on the global energy …
EcocentricEcocentric
The UN climate change negotiations have fallen off the news map since last year’s summit in Copenhagen ended in barely avoided disarray, but that doesn’t mean they’ve gone away. China will be hosting interim talks for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Tianjin starting on Oct. 4. That meeting will be …
EcocentricUncategorized
In Sunday’s New York Times—which I consumed along with a bagel on my iPhone—architecture critic Nicolai Ourousoff has a report from Masdar, the zero-carbon, ultra-sustainable city growing up in the deserts outside of Abu Dhabi. The Masdar project is the result of a government initiative by the sultans who control Abu Dhabi, the …
EcocentricUncategorized
If anyone would be receptive to the idea that cell phone radiation might play a role in cancer, it would be Dr. Devra Davis. The epidemiologist and toxicologist is an expert in environmental health, and she’s made a career out of the idea that cancer often has more to do with what’s happening to us than what’s going on inside our …
EcocentricEcocentric
After I sit down with Christiana Figueres, the energetic new chief UN diplomat on climate change, she asks me if I made it to last year’s global warming summit in Copenhagen, which was plagued with logistical problems. I tell her I had, and that the first day I’d waited outside in the Danish cold with thousands of other people …
EcocentricOceans
Over in the paper and iPad TIME magazine, I have a long story this week on the oceanographer Sylvia Earle and her mission to save the oceans. I’ve written about Sylvia before on Ecocentric, during our trip to Bermuda—no matter what you think about her very ambitious plan to created vast protected areas across much of the ocean, you …
EcocentricRegulation
These days, environmentalism has become synonymous with the fight against climate change. But good green campaigners know that more immediate environmental challenges still exist.
That reality hit home yesterday when the United Nations said it will send an emergency team to Nigeria, after 200 children died in an outbreak of lead …
EcocentricUncategorized
Ask Shai Agassi how his electric transportation startup Better Place is doing, and the Israeli-American entrepreneur will offer up an endless supply of good stories. The company’s trial in Tokyo—running several electric taxis in the Japanese capital, which can recharge and switch their batteries at a Better Place station—was recently …
EcocentricEnergy
Most of the focus on energy and climate in the developing world boils down to two words: India and China. The rapid growth of those two burgeoning economic giants is changing the pace of energy markets and adding much of the carbon that will be pumped into the atmosphere over the coming decades, speeding climate change. But there’s a …
EcocentricPolitics
The Heinz Family Foundation—set up in memory of the late Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania, who died in helicopter crash in 1991—today announced its 16th annual Heinz Awards, to honor heroes of the environment. (The awards are handled in part by Teresa Heinz, Sen. Heinz’s widow and now wife of Sen. John Kerry, who has emerged as a …
