EcocentricCoal
When I lived in Hong Kong, I used to travel across the border into the People’s Republic, mostly for stories—like this one about the sex toy king of China—or for simple travel. (Particularly memorable were the all-night raves on the Great Wall of China which, sadly, have since been banned.) When I’d flip through my photos after I …
EcocentricEcocentric
Year by year, the evidence that the planet is getting warmer—and that humans are the main driver—keeps adding up. Today the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) released its State of the Climate in 2010 report, and researchers found that 2010 was tried with 2005 as the warmest year on …
EcocentricEcocentric
In part because we have a political press obsessed with Washington, we tend to gauge the success of climate and energy legislation only through the national lens. And the picture from Capitol Hill is deeply depressing. One party completely ignores the science of climate change and only wants to engage on fossil fuels, and that doesn’t …
EcocentricOceans
This week we learned that bad planning in the face of climate change isn’t a particularly new phenomenon: the Vikings did it too. The collapse of the Norse settlements in West Greenland was caused, in part, by the Vikings’ poor adaptation to cooler conditions and extensive sea ice over 1,000 years ago, which severely affected …
EcocentricPolitics
There ought to be a special place in honesty jail for people who say presposterously wrong things publicly — and know full well they’re doing so. If such a place exists, it’s time to turn down Newt Gringrich’s bed and place a mint on his pillow, because he’s headed there for a long stay.
Last week, on a tour of New Hampshire, the …
EcocentricEnergy
Yesterday the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with an early summary of a new report projecting the future of renewable energy. As with many international studies of the sort, readers were free to use parts of the results towards whichever conclusion they’d already reached on alternative power and climate …
EcocentricFood
The hidden story of 2011 has been the record-breaking rise in global food prices. Global corn prices doubled between April 2010 and April 2011, while wheat prices are up some 60 to 80%. Exactly why food has gotten so expensive in recent months is the subject of an ongoing debate—biofuel policy, inflation, oil prices, natural …
EcocentricWeather
The South is reeling from what could be one of the deadliest tornado systems in U.S. history. Yesterday storms and tornadoes ripped through Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia and Virginia, killing as many as 200 people, and potentially far more. At least 139 separate tornadoes were reported yesterday. That number is almost certain …
EcocentricEcocentric
There are storms and then there is what happened to the town of Sanford, North Carolina on the night of April 16. A boisterous storm system had begun in Oklahoma on April 14, bringing flash floods, tornadoes and thunderstorms from the Midwest through the Southeast, part of a massive weather system that could be felt as far as the New …
EcocentricPolitics
Last March, President Barack Obama gave a speech on energy security at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. In it, Obama offered what might be called a “grand compromise” on energy—in exchange for expanded offshore drilling, including in previously untouched areas like north Alaska and the Atlantic, he called for support of …
