Articles by Christopher Mims
Christopher Mims's dystopian non-fiction is sought after by an ever-growing roster of publications.
All Articles
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Disappearing American bats are worth up to $53 billion
Bats eat a lot of bugs. Here are some living under a bridge in Austin, Texas that eat millions of pounds of pests every season. What happens if those bats are wiped out in a few years — as it looks like they could be — by a combination of wind turbines and a fungal […]
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Europe to turn Africans into fuel
After discovering the disastrous consequences of turning its own food crops into fuel, China has turned to cassava — mostly from southeast Asia — as a source for biofuels. Europe, meanwhile, is buying up tracts of "marginal land" in Africa in order to grow jatropha for biofuels. In the U.S., of course, it's corn for […]
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Climate change breaks NASA temperature chart
The temperature anomaly in the Arctic — the amount that current temperatures differ from historical norms — is now so severe that NASA's James Hansen had to add a new color to his charts in order to accurately depict it: Hot pink. In other words, last winter the Arctic was more than 10 degrees C […]
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New wind now costs the same as new coal — the tiebreaker is one of them kills you
The radical environmentalists at Bloomberg have declared that the world's best new wind projects now produce electricity that costs about the same as electricity produced from new coal-fired power plants. A lot goes into these calculations, but here's the bottom line: wind costs $65 a megawatt-hour, while power from new coal-fired power plants costs about […]
