Latest Articles

This summer, form a family nature club

Don’t miss another sunset. In past decades, when summer rolled around, parents told their children, “Go outside, and don’t come home ’til the street lights come on.” In most neighborhoods, those days are unlikely to return anytime soon. Today, parents fear strangers and strange lawyers and nature itself. Though some of this trepidation is warranted, […]

U.S. officials dither while antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains creep into our pork supply

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. The good news is that people are earnestly trying to figure out if a deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria strain is infecting our nation’s vast supply of pork. The bad news is, they don’t work for a government regulator with the power […]

Green groups sue feds to protect polar bears from oil-drilling effects

Two green groups are suing the Interior Department over its refusal to limit the impacts of drilling on polar bears, which were listed as threatened last month. The Bush administration has tried its darnedest to ensure that listing the bears wouldn’t limit oil and gas exploration in their Alaskan habitat, but Pacific Environment and the […]

First deal inked for maker of modular, utility-scale solar thermal power plants

In the transition to a clean, green economy, one milestone promises to be the most symbolically powerful. It’s the one adopted as an official target by Google: renewable energy cheaper than coal, or RE<C. When it announced its campaign, Google also announced the recipients of its initial investments. One was eSolar, a Pasadena, Calif.-based company […]

Science academies of 13 nations urge G8 to tackle climate change

Ahead of the G8 summit in Japan next month, the science academies of 13 nations, including the United States, urged the G8 nations as well as Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa (G8+5) to agree to cut world greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2050. “We urge G8+5 leaders to make maximum efforts to carry […]

Putting a price on carbon is only the first step in energy policy

There’s certainly a great deal of logic to what Ezra says here — it would be nice if an upstream price on carbon would automatically rejigger the price of everything, right down to chips and candy bars. What could be a more gratifying solution than moving the behavior of every single consumer in a rational […]

Gus Speth chats about his new book and increasingly radical green views

Gus Speth. When Gus Speth gets radical, it’s time to start digging bunkers. For more than 30 years, Speth has labored as the consummate environmental insider, having founded an environmental think tank (World Resources Institute), co-founded a major green group (Natural Resources Defense Council), advised a president (Clinton), administered a United Nations agency (U.N. Development […]

Fossil interests plow money into Congress

Rich and thin is passé. What's hot now is rich and dirty.

Why is a smart energy and climate policy so elusive for this country? In three words -- money, money, money.

The nation's energy bill is now about a trillion dollars. That means the super-rich fossil fuel companies have enormous profits they can spend on lobbying to ensure their continued dominance. How much? Jeff Goodell has the answer here:

In the first quarter of 2008, Big Coal's new front group, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, spent a record-breaking $1.9 million in federal lobbying expenses. To put that in perspective, in the same period, the Solar Energies Industries Association spent all of $75,000 ...

Individual coal companies have been even more generous to our nation's cash-starved policymakers:

Say goodbye to the lungs of the earth

Amazon deforestation exploding. The agrofuels lobby assures us that it has nothing to do with them.

Energy prices

Conservatives want to terrify voters at the prospect of climate policy raising energy prices. Meanwhile: “Wealth Evaporates as Gas Prices Clobber McMansions.” How long will we stay on this sinking ship?