EcocentricEcocentric
I have a piece in today’s magazine about General Electric’s big solar bet. The multinational behemoth—which has already built a $6 billion-plus wind turbine business—is now looking to move into solar manufacturing as well. That might be bad news for competitors like First Solar, but it’s good news for those who want to see solar …
EcocentricResearch
Maybe, like Al Gore, you believe we are our own worst enemies in battling climate change. You too might think politicians manufacture denial-rhetoric to appease special interest groups, that industries are stubborn and cowardly in their resistance to the facts, and that the media sees science as a playground for concocting deception …
Stunning images put space into a never-before-seen perspective.
EcocentricUncategorized
The emerald ash borer is on the most-wanted list in Ulster County, New York. This jewel-green beetle’s appetite for the inner bark of ash trees has proven deadly for forests and cityscapes, leaving ash trees by the millions ravaged. In this video, TIME meets Foresters Jeff Rider and Michael Cullen, who are working to discover the …
EcocentricOil
The first time the U.S. released oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) was in January 1991, as American bombers began the first Gulf War and gas prices spiked. The second release was on September 2, 2005, after Hurricane Katrina smashed refineries and pipelines along the Gulf coast. A war in the Middle East and a natural …
EcocentricWeather
The start of summer officially kicked off on Tuesday at 1.16 pm ET with the beginning of the summer solstice and the Northern Hemisphere’s longest day of the year. That day, the Northern Hemisphere absorbed more sunlight than it has or will have on any other day of 2011. Our planet will release that sunlight in the coming weeks in …
EcocentricPolitics
Chances are you’ve heard about—if not read—Al Gore’s 7,000-word essay in Rolling Stone on America’s ongoing failure to act on the climate crisis. (If the whole piece is a bit too much for your Wednesday lunch hour, Mother Jones has a nice summary.) The media, unsurprisingly, has focused Gore’s criticism of President Obama’s inaction …
EcocentricHealth
How do you decide which environmental issues to pursue? I know I definitely put too much store in social context: what my friends, the media, and my favorite politicians – and, embarrassingly, celebrities – are talking about. If people are talking about climate change and factory farming over lunch, then that’s got to be the …
EcocentricCoal
Tritium is one of those elements that just sounds bad. There’s something about the name that simply feels radioactive even before you know what the stuff is. That’s one of the reasons people have been so spooked by a new investigation the Associated Press conducted of Nuclear Regulatory Commission records, revealing that tritium has …
EcocentricRegulation
Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, isn’t really known for his eloquence. The former Colorado senator spends much of his time now wrestling over efforts to expand oil and gas drilling on federal lands and water—important work, of course, but not exactly the sort of thing that launches speechwriters on spiraling flights of …
