The shining promise of ethanol doesn’t add up for farmers

No one can begrudge corn farmers their share of euphoria over the recent ethanol boom. Until very recently, their plight...

People Still Read Those Things?

Newspaper and magazine companies seek to lessen environmental impact A handful of large publishers are beginning to think about the...

Here So Suin’?

Courts see “boomlet” of climate-change-related lawsuits Climate-change-related lawsuits are the new black. At least 16 cases are pending in federal...

Will the latest corporate sustainability reporting guidelines herald a brave new world?

What a swell party it was. The first week of October saw a crowd of 1,150 people from 65 countries...

Slate and TH challenge readers to lose 2.5 tons apiece

Slate and fellow green blog TreeHugger have just launched an eight-week Green Challenge carbon diet. The goal: to get readers to cut their carbon emissions 20 percent through the usual variety of actions. The kicker: an interactive "my emissions" evaluation tool that friends can use to challenge one another. Nothing like a little competition to spice things up.

(I'd love to share my results, especially since this week's theme is transportation, but it's not yet working for me. Anyone else?)

What climate scientists have learned from Western wildfires

Many wildland firefighters carry an instrument called a sling psychrometer. It consists of two encased thermometers, and is swung above...

Umbra on battling cockroaches

Dear Umbra, Help! I’m having a mysterious cockroach problem. I found four in my apartment in two weeks, and not...

Go for Choke

Deliberate forest fires cause choking haze in Southeast Asia Southeast Asia has been suffering through hellish smog over the last...

A new essay

What follows is a new essay by Bill McKibben, addressing -- in the context of reviewing five new books -- just how close we are to ecological catastrophe, and what reasons there are for hope.

The essay will appear in the Nov. 16 edition of the New York Review of Books. The NYRB editors gave Tom Engelhardt's excellent TomDispatch permission to publish it in advance; he in turn gave me permission to run it here. Thanks to Tom and to the NYRB editors.

Don't miss this one.