Though you wouldn’t know it from the words chosen by angry American politicians—who can’t stop talking about the company’s Englishness—BP’s name doesn’t actually stand for British Petroleum anymore. The name was changed back in 2001, a few years after what was then British Petroleum—which in its early years had been the British …
Industrial Farming Slows Climate Change?
That’s the conclusion from a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Two Stanford researchers looked at the effects of the Green Revolution—the half-century old transition to more intensified agriculture, with more fertilizers and more irrigation—to see what impact the shift might have had on global …
Thinking Outside the Box on the Oil Spill
If there were ever a time and place for “so crazy it might just work” ideas, it’s the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. More than 50 days after the Deepwater Horizon exploded, the finest minds in the offshore oil industry are still trying to figure out a way to plug the leak for good. Even as the joint BP/government brain trust in Houston …
Will Afghanistan become an electric-car superpower?
Lithium—it’s not just my second-favorite song in the Nirvana catalog. The soft and silvery metal is the key ingredient in making the long-lived lithium-ion batteries needed to build workable electric cars. All the big electrics—the Tesla Roadster, the Nissan Leaf, the Chevrolet (yes, not Chevy) Volt—use lithium-ion batteries, as …
Meanwhile, in Greenland
While the world can’t take its eyes off the slow motion train wreck in the Gulf, environmentalists and politicians in more northerly climes are getting increasingly cold feet about plans for offshore drilling in their own icy waters.
Canada’s Environment Minister Jim Prentice plans to station a supervisor on an upcoming drilling …
BP Mendacity Watch: #1
From the beginning of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, there have been questions over just how much crude really is bleeding out of BP’s well. The first figure—supplied by the company—was 1,000 barrels a day. The government later upped that to 5,000 barrels, a number that stood despite the skepticism of a raft of outside experts. …
Revisiting that Sinking Feeling
The conventional wisdom that Asia and the Pacific’s thousands of low-slung islands will be swimming with the fishes by the end of this century is getting a second look. A recent study of 27 Pacific islands featured in New Scientist reports that many — including the infamously doomed Tuvalu — have remained stable in size or even …
Obama Gets Tough(er) on BP
From the beginning of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill—which has now resulted in at least 50 million gallons oil spewing into the ocean, if not far more—President Barack Obama has been in an awkward position. The energy giant BP is financially responsible for the spill, but it is also the only company that has the technology, expertise …
An Ecocentric Introduction
I turned 32 yesterday. As periods of time go, not that long—according to the actuarial tables of the Social Security Administration I’m just 41.6% through my life, which actually looks depressing when you write it out. But the world has undergone immense changes over those years—explosions, really—and that growth forms the …
TIME and Climate Change
About 20 years ago, a group of TIME writers and editors had lunch with Stephen Schneider, who was then and remains a leading climate scientist. At one point during the meeting, Schneider made a plea: “You really should be covering global warming every week. That’s how important it is.”
The journalists looked at each other awkwardly. …