We have enough clean water worldwide, we're just not using it well, a new study says. The report, produced by the Challenge Program on Water and Food, looked at 10 river basins, from the Ganges to the Nile to the Andes, and found that, "There is clearly sufficient water to sustain food, energy, industrial and environmental needs during the 21st century." When you dig in here, it quickly becomes overwhelmingly academic. But the takeaway is: we can grow more food, for more people, if we're a little smarter about managing our resources. And we're going to need to be, so …

The Department of Energy, always picking winners, you know? The first Quadrennial Technology Review, to be released today, favors technologies that could come into commercial use in 10 years — i.e. consumer goods you can spend money for. This could mean DOE favors EVs over new clean energy technologies. This company, Renmatix, will probably make it under the wire, though. It says it has the right technology to make commercially viable biofuels from biomass and just opened a plant to forward development of the technique. The natural gas boom comes to Ohio. Although Beijing usually gets a bad rap on …

The Great Australian Bight has all of the hallmarks of a place you really don't want to mess with — incredible marine diversity, endangered whales, awesome natural beauty. But the Australian government decided that this would also be a good place to let BP prospect for oil, and gave the company a tax break to ease their way on that project. As Australia's ABC Environment points out: Even the method used to hunt for oil reserves is destructive for sea life. Seismic testing is used by oil and gas companies to explore beneath the ocean floor for oil and gas …

In India's Kaziranga National Park, rhinos and tigers are thriving, because poachers are dying instead. When it comes to poachers, the park's rangers have a license to kill, and they do. It gets results: In 2010, only five rhinos were shot in Kaziranga, while nine poachers were killed, the first time poacher deaths surpassed rhinos. (For comparison, in South Africa, where rangers fire only in self-­defense, five poachers were killed in 2010, while 333 rhinos were poached.) These guys were breaking the law and killing endangered species. But the moral calculus here isn't so clear-cut. In the park's region, jobs …

Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel peace prize for her work planting trees, passed away. She was the first African woman to win the prize and the first Kenyan woman to earn a Ph.D. Around the world, thousands of people met in more than 2,000 demonstrations to rally for a Moving Planet. That massive NASA satellite managed to plop back to earth without killing anyone. The North Dakota oil boom means that a spot to park a trailer runs $1,000 per month. Like a hydra, but slimier, an injured jellyfish spawned hundreds of clones of itself.

Even if the Obama administration approves the Keystone XL pipeline, Canadians won't be able to sell the carbon-intensive tar-sands oil to one very big energy consumer: the Obama administration. Back in 2007, the federal government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, passed a law that forbade it from buying oil that's dirtier than conventional oil. And tar-sands oil is. The Canadian government has been trying for years to wiggle its way around that restriction. The U.S Chamber of Commerce has also tried to free the Department of Defense from its shackles. But as of right now, the federal government …

The Maldives are going to crowdsource their carbon-cutting plan. (They’re asking international experts, not just letting any citizen drive policy. Not sure how that would work in the Maldives, but in the U.S. you’d get a lot of “shine lamps on solar panels for infinite energy!”) Should the new poster child for global warming be the city mayor who has to deal with unexpected weather extremes? Usually you hear about buyer's remorse, but New Yorkers are having sellers' remorse about turning over drilling rights to natural gas companies. Maybe the government should stop trying to "pick winners" and invest in …

Starting next week, everything you eat, breathe, use, and touch will put you further in debt to the planet. Each year, humans consume more resources than the planet can produce, putting us into "ecological debt" to the planet. Unlike monetary debt, this over-budget spending can't be forgiven or wiped away. Since the 1970s, humanity's been using more than we have available, and "pretty soon, you run out of savings, " according to Mathis Wackernagel, the awesomely-named president of the Global Footprint Network, which tallies these things. Who's most culpable for this over-consumption? Americans, of course. We are champion overspenders in …

British people now have a greater stake in fighting against hydrofracking: turns out their country has a lot of shale gas. Luckily, though, they live in Europe, where gas executives admit that, at the very least, drilling should become safer. The U.S. could be the biggest market for solar power in the world. Which is all fine and good, but it would be nice if Barack Obama would say something about climate change besides that dealing with it will be “not impossible, but difficult.” Maybe everyone would feel kinder towards plants if they had to spend 48 hours in an …

If you got all warm and fuzzy reading our previous post about the revitalization of the Howe Sound, and if you want to keep that feeling, don't read this post. Because it is the exact opposite story, one in which humans mess up the environment and can never, ever take it back. In Scotland, from 1963 to 1984, a nuclear plant leaked lethal-if-ingested radioactive waste. That waste got all over beaches and other lovely sea-side resources. A while back, the Scottish version of the EPA recommended that someone make this right and return the area to a "pristine condition." But …