OK, fine. It’s not quite the case—as you might have concluded from my Going Green piece earlier this week—that the U.N. climate negotiations, now under way in Durban, are completely useless. On Tuesday negotiators agreed on …
Are Electric Cars Safe?
The makers of electric cars have a serious challenge before them. Right now electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf or the Tesla Roadster offer significantly inferior range at much higher prices than conventional cars. Of course, …
The China-U.S. Solar War Heats Up
You might remember that a few weeks ago the U.S. Commerce Department opened up an investigation into alleged unfair trade practices by Chinese solar manufacturers. The investigation — instigated at the behest of some, though …
Life in the Time of the Great Dying
Earth history is different from ordinary history: it’s much harder to nail down specific dates when everything happened millions of years ago and over huge, slow timescales. But it can be done, as shown by paleontologists who …
New Study Suggests Climate Change May Be (Slightly) Less Severe Than Feared
Earlier this week unknown hackers—following up from a similar attack two years ago—released a cache of stolen emails from climate scientists. Climate skeptics—just as they did two years ago—jumped on the emails hacked
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How to Avoid Food Waste This Holiday Season
Does anyone else think it’s strange that Thanksgiving—a holiday meant to commemorate the moment when white settlers in America were essentially saved from starvation—now involves the biggest day of overeating in the calendar? …
Is Shark Fin Slowly Becoming Passé in Hong Kong?
It was the go-to soup for emperors of centuries past — a tradition revered in Chinese culture that ultimately symbolized wealth, status and prestige. But as China has gotten richer, shark fin soup consumption has increased. And …
Climategate 2: A Weak Sequel
There are exactly two lessons I can immediately draw from what’s being called Climategate 2, the apparent hack and release of thousands of emails between climate scientists.
One: get a better email password! This cache of …
Stopping Bushmeat Is Good for Conservation—and Bad for Hunger
I wrote a piece recently for the paper magazine—sadly behind the paymoat—on the viral ecologist Nathan Wolfe. Wolfe’s Global Viral Forecasting group has set up research teams in hotspots around the world—places like central …
Political Fractures Over Fracking
The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC)—a five-member committee that governs the water resources around the Delaware River—was supposed to meet today to decide on whether hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, should be …