Bill McKibben has it in for Canada. In a new article in The New Republic, he calls it "one of the earth's most irresponsible nations," admonishes liberals that they need to find a new country to dream of emigrating to, and stops just short of calling Canadians (and Americans, but what else is new) giant hypocrites. What's pissing McKibben off? Tar sands, of course. Canada is pushing to become an "energy superpower," in the words of one government official, by mining its tar sands for oil. And, as Grist readers know, oil extracted from Canadian tar sands would dump a …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0UkH81NMTo YES. YES IT WILL.

U.S. politicians aren't just denying that climate change is happening, they're actively using their position and power to try to intimidate climate scientists into keeping silent on the subject, says Raymond S. Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In his new book, Global Warming and Political Intimidation: How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as the Earth Heated Up, Bradley recounts a tale that should be familiar to those have followed, for example, the travails of Michael E. Mann, a climatologist at Penn State who has been on the receiving end of a …

A 250 mile long coal seam discovered deep in the interior desert of Australia's Northern Territory appears to be the most gigantic coal deposit on planet Earth, and Central Petroleum Limited wants to burn it all. They project it will take them at least a century to go through the entire reserve, or right about until they’ve turned Australia’s notoriously harsh desert into an incomprehensibly lifeless hellscape populated by miners in climate controlled space-suits. Their approach is somewhat unconventional: Central Petroleum wants to liquefy the coal underground, turn it into a gas, and then transform that gas back into a …

Bougie concerns about comfort and convenience are sort of the bane of the environmental movement ... and the social justice movement ... and the general not-being-an-annoying-brat movement. But hey, we all have days when we know people are starving in Africa but also WHY IS THE INTERNET SO SLOW I AM TRYING TO UPDATE MY NETFLIX QUEUE. So here is a kid who sounds like MC Paul Barman borrowing a concept from MC Frontalot (i.e., the nerdiest of nerdcores), giving sarcastic voice to all your White Whines.

It hasn't rained in El Paso in 119 days, and its water manager says it doesn't much matter if it doesn't rain next year, either. "We're basically drought-proof," he told the Guardian. El Paso is a testament to just how little water we actually need, in contrast to how much we use when conservation is not a concern. In the past 20 years, water use per person in El Paso went from 167 gallons a day to 111. The average American uses almost 600 gallons.  How has El Paso made itself into a model of water conservation? It started with …

Japan's damaged Fukushima plant is now holding oceans of contaminated, radioactive water in its storage tanks, and that water keeps leaking out. Today, the country's Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency said that fifteen tons or so of water had leaked. Not all of the water is equally contaminated; the leak was said to be water with only low levels of radiation. But leaks have been an ongoing problem at the plant -- not a reassuring trend.

In Arizona, the wildfire is at the edge of Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has radioactive materials and other nasty stuff on the premises. It’s all safety stored, the government says. We’re also being told that everything’s cool at that nuclear plant in Nebraska that’s knee-deep in the flooded Missouri. China's going to run out of water within 30 years at current rates of consumption. More people want their own personal wind turbine, but it's not a status symbol. Yet. Poland's too deep into coal and too poor to go green. Michele Bachmann may hate the EPA, but she loves …

Fast food is already a lot like pollution -- it's bad for you, but it's more convenient than the alternative, so it's really really hard to get rid of. Also it shows up frequently on the sides of highways. Now, environmental nonprofit Clean Water Action has found that, at least in the San Francisco Bay area, these two dirty birds flock together. More than half of the litter in the four cities the group studied came from convenience foods at McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Starbucks, and 7-11. Some of these places are at least trying to cut down on their …

Researchers found more than 1,000 new species in New Guinea over the ten years from 1998 to 2008, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund. Previously unknown species -- including an 8-foot river shark, a frog with fangs, and pink dolphin -- were discovered at a rate of two a week. But New Guinea could lose half its forest to logging by 2020, and already some of these new species are so rare that they went onto the endangered list as soon as they were discovered. The WWF report, which the organization put out to mark its …