Animals
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Critical List: Climate change is shrinking animals; Mexico could export water to the U.S.
Climate change is shrinking animals, like sheep and salamanders, and fruits too.
Mexico could start exporting water into the United States.
One partner in the Macondo well is ponying up $4 billion to settle with BP over last year's oil spill.
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Critical List: Texas drought creating baby animal shortage; Keystone XL doc on Oscar shortlist
The Texas drought has meant fewer births of adorable baby animals. Maybe the new climate lobby can include all of the internet.
Also joining the climate fight: yuppies and freelancers. Starbucks is worried about the future of its business model, as rising temperatures threaten coffee crops.
Democrats aren't the only ones who back clean energy projects that don't end up saving the world. Orrin Hatch, for instance, backed a company trying to develop a hybrid Hummer, which collapsed under the weight of its own irony.
China wants to dominate the global wind-turbine market, as well as the solar market.
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Wrestling baby bears stop traffic
This is why we have national parks, people: So there's one place in the country where "share the road" means "stop your damn car so baby bears can have a little tussle."
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How to save rhinos and tigers: Shoot the crap out of poachers
In India's Kaziranga National Park, rhinos and tigers are thriving, because poachers are dying instead. When it comes to poachers, the park's rangers have a license to kill, and they do. It gets results:
In 2010, only five rhinos were shot in Kaziranga, while nine poachers were killed, the first time poacher deaths surpassed rhinos. (For comparison, in South Africa, where rangers fire only in self-defense, five poachers were killed in 2010, while 333 rhinos were poached.)
These guys were breaking the law and killing endangered species. But the moral calculus here isn't so clear-cut. In the park's region, jobs are scarce. Park animals eats crops and kill farm animals, and poaching pays better than any other pursuit. Shooting poachers on sight is apparently the most effective way to conserve the park’s threatened animals, but how does that stack up against human injustice? It’s a complicated calculation.
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Save the whales, put them in the Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle is just sitting around making ships and planes disappear. Why not put it to work for something useful, like a whale sanctuary? Because when you want to save something, you definitely store it in a place where stuff mysteriously vanishes. That's why I keep my passport in the dryer.
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GOP says ban on invasive snakes is 'job killer'
The Obama administration wants to strangle job growth in America like some kind of giant, prosperity-choking python, mostly by banning the importation of said pythons, says a new GOP report.
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Hey, we found a new dolphin species!
We all know the Earth still has more and stranger species than we've discovered, or at least it will until we clear-cut and climate-bomb them right into extinction. But you usually figure these fragile exotic lifeforms are hanging out in caves under Madagascar, or somewhere else that's tough to get to. Turns out, though, that at least some of them have been chiling near Melbourne, Australia, where researchers have discovered a new species of dolphin just basically right under their noses.
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Obama's Job: Protect Us from Pollution [video]
While Obama’s jobs speech is being framed as a turning point for his tenure as President, there is another job I would respectively suggest he concentrate on: his own. Here’s a quick video ad that I think gets right to point: Late last week the President blocked reforms to the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to […]
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Bear steals Prius
Here's a cautionary tale for hybrid owners: A Prius-owning family in California lost its car to a joy-riding bear.