Latest Articles

Water Shipped Down

To the dismay of environmentalists, the U.S. Interior Department approved yesterday a $1 billion, 50-year project to store water beneath the Mojave Desert, in what would be one of California’s largest water storage facilities. Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District would store surplus Colorado River water in an aquifer under the desert; during dry years, the […]

Sweet!

Along with emissions from power plants, pollution from vehicles is the major air-pollution culprit. But that could change if cars ran on sugar, as a team of scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison has proposed. In a paper published in yesterday’s edition of the journal Nature, the scientists detailed a technique for breaking […]

Hazing Ritual

It might be officially nicknamed the Golden State, but sometimes, it’s more like the Yellowish-Brown State: California continues to lead the U.S. in dirty air, with nearly twice as many “smog days” as any other state in the union, a recent report by an environmental group found. According to the study of government air-quality data […]

Another Anderson Scandal

A court in India has rejected efforts to reduce the charges against Warren Anderson, the former chair of the U.S.-based company Union Carbide, which was responsible for a 1984 gas leak in Bhopal that killed 3,000 people and sickened tens of thousands more. The leak from a pesticide plant in the central Indian city was […]

The Empire Strikes Back

Apparently sick of playing the bad guy at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the U.S. struck back yesterday, proclaiming itself “the world’s leader in sustainable development.” To bolster that claim, U.S. delegates in Johannesburg announced joint government and private-sector initiatives, including a $53 million effort to protect forests in the Congo Basin and $43 […]

Marketing the revolution in clean energy

Last month, 10 solar-powered race cars zipped around a 1.5-mile NASCAR track at the legendary Texas Motor Speedway, some of them reaching the dizzying speed of 35 miles per hour. With all its technological novelty and timely political implications, the Dell and Winston Solar Challenge (named for the computer and cigarette companies that sponsored it) […]

Sprawl Together Now

A new culprit has been named in the drought that has plagued more than a third of the U.S. this summer: urban sprawl. A report released yesterday by American Rivers, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Smart Growth America found that the rapid expansion of pavement and developed land in metropolitan areas amounts to a […]

Quite a Pear

There have been wars fought over oil and opium, spices and sugarcane — and now it seems there is a war brewing in Washington state over pears. The battle was touched off when the Seattle-based Washington Environmental Council sent a letter to an irrigation district in the eastern part of the state threatening legal actions […]

To Market, to Market

Can capitalism and environmentalism go hand in hand? A new breed of financiers thinks so, and is making money by treating air pollution as a commodity. Here’s how it works: Companies are required to cut their emissions to a certain level; if they do better than those targets, they can sell pollution credits to other […]

Week Links

The first week of the World Summit on Sustainable Development has seen a mix of surprising twists and predictable problems. On the surprising end: Two very different organizations, Greenpeace International and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, have agreed to join forces to combat climate change. The two groups plan to work together to […]