Articles by Christopher Mims

We might have to geoengineer the planet to save ourselves from renewable energy

Mark Lynas, an author whose pop-sci books about climate change are scrupulous enough to get favorable reviews from the likes of climate scientist Eric Steig, proposed a funny little thought experiment on his blog: Could switching to renewables strip the planet of its sun-protective smog? And if so, will we need to replace it with artificial smog instead?

What we could have bought with the $4 trillion we spent on Iraq and Afghanistan

Americans like us some war, but to the tune of $4 trillion? In adjusted dollars, that's just short of what it cost us to whup the Nazis.

Here's a look at what we could have done with that money, had we spent it on something besides stoking Americans' confusion over whether or not the world's 1.5 billion 'Muslims' are in fact a monolithic group whose every member is a terrorist.

Top 5 animals going extinct because some guy can't get it up

Madagascar's tortoises are being wiped out by a "tortoise mafia" that authorities are powerless to stop. One reason: their shells are prized as an aphrodisiac in some parts of Asia. You might ask, "well, what hasn't been touted as the hidden folk-medical secret to letting old men impregnate everything in a five-mile radius?" The answer is: hardly anything.

Google's plan for cleantech world dominance says government policy is essential

Google set out to discover the effects of technological breakthroughs, and in the process discovered that strong government policies are key to accelerating their penetration into the market. Radical new battery technology and solar panels are great, but regular consumers don’t pick them up unless they're nudged in the right direction. In other words, the internet’s most successful capitalists say that the free market is all well and good, but we really need government regulation.