The Powder River Basin in southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming can be as beautiful as its name suggests, but that’s not why mining companies call it home. The region has one of the richest deposits of coal in the …
EcocentricCoal
China
EcocentricCoal
EcocentricChina
Soaring to Sinking: How Building Up Is Bringing Shanghai Down
As land-subsidence concerns sweep across more than 50 cities in China, the country’s most populous metropolis remains among the most vulnerable
EcocentricSolar Power
Solar: U.S. Slaps Tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels, But the Trade War May Be on Hold
The solar industry in the U.S. has been holding its breath over a much-delayed review by the Commerce Department over allegedly unfair trade practices by Chinese solar panel makers. A few solar manufacturers—notably SolarWorld, …
EcocentricEcocentric
Raring to Fight: The U.S. Tangles with China over Rare-Earth Exports
President Obama has been talking tough about what he sees as unfair Chinese trade policy since at least this year’s State of the Union speech, when the President boasted that his Administration had brought up trade cases against …
EcocentricEcocentric
Political Pollution: How Bad Air is Slowly Changing China
China confirmed this week that the number of its citizens living in cities has surpassed the rural population for the first time in its history. That massive urbanization — 690.79 million people are now city-dwellers according …
EcocentricEnergy
The Global Energy Supply Is Getting Greener. It’s Just Not Happening Fast Enough
With President Obama’s rejection (for now) of the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline fresh in everyone’s mind—and conservatives and the oil industry already hammering him, even as greens sing his praises—you can be sure
…
EcocentricSolar Power
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 …
EcocentricCoal
How Chinese Babies Pay the Price for Chinese Pollution
It’s a very good thing that neural tube defects are relatively rare in the U.S., because they are very cruel conditions for a newborn to suffer. The two most common types of such birth defects are spina bifida – in which the backbone and spinal canal do not close properly — and anencephaly, in which a large portion of the brain …
EcocentricPolitics
The Dark Side of Steve Jobs’s Dream
I missed the all-night, stop-the-presses TIME session last week that put together an amazing and entirely new issue to commemorate the death of Apple’s Steve Jobs. I don’t have much more to add, other than the fact that like so many other people, I found out the news on an Apple product and am writing this on another one. Outside …
EcocentricEnergy
Amid Paeans to Energy Efficiency, the World Is Getting Less Efficient
The watchword for the week at the Clinton Global Initiative‘s (CGI) annual summit in Manhattan this week has been “efficiency.” (It narrowly beats out “traffic,” which is what you’ll be caught in trying to get anywhere in the city for the next few days.) I wrote about an industry consortium led by the Carbon War Room that will …