Environment
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Peter Brabeck wonders if there is a fundamental problem with financial institutions dictating the framework of our outlook on the future. Read More
March 15, 2010
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Can New Green Building Codes Clear Up the Confusion?
With billions of dollars already invested in clean-energy jobs and manufacturing, the green revolution remains a work-in-progress. But while plenty of tax credits appear to be going to the right place, the lack of cohesive green regulations is making the whole concept a little elusive. But a new series of green building codes could finally be ushering in the kind of change many people have been waiting for. Read More
March 13, 2010
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New Report: Small Habits' Big Impact On Climate
In the 20th century, the greatest threats to civilization arose out of ecstatic emotions, especially when they united thousands of people. The last century's true believers rallied, wept and sang about superhuman faith, overwhelming feeling, single decisions that changed their lives and the world. They quivered to think of their heroes, who had "the power to raise up broken hearts and despairing souls." They believed that History was calling. Read More
March 12, 2010
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Remembering (or Forgetting) Copenhagen
Three months after the Copenhagen Climate Conference’s failure to reach a legally binding global emissions-reduction deal, there hasn’t been much talk of what the next step will be. But the Europeans, for whom Copenhagen was the ultimate disappointment, are now trying to get back on track – with or without the rest of the world. Read More
March 12, 2010
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To Green Your Electrons, Green Your Mind
Solar panels aren't born green. Their manufacture uses power, often generated in plants that burn coal or oil, and releases pollutants (including greenhouse gases) into the environment. The extent of this original sin depends on the kind of solar technology involved, but it's not trivial. According to Peter Owen of Linde Electronics, four years pass before the U.S. industry's typical solar panel has generated enough electricity to make up for the power used to make it. Read More
March 12, 2010
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Just Like Riding A Bike: Google Streamlines Your Green Commute
More evidence that Google runs the world: they’re planning your next bike ride for you. As of two days ago, their latest mapping feature includes bike lane tracking, so that you can log in from your computer or portable internet toy – I mean phone! – and find your best route in abou… Read More
March 12, 2010
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What Will the Apocalypse Actually Be Like?
When it comes to doomsday prophecies, millennialists and other wild-eyed types have hogged the stage for far too long. In a special series this week, Big Think rounds up a more clearheaded crew—including a nuclear terrorism expert, a paleontologist specializing in extinction events, and an astrophysicist who studies the long-term evolution of the universe—and asks: How Will the World Really End? Read More
March 11, 2010
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Climate Catastrophe and "Chaos Wars"
Pioneering environmentalist Stewart Brand lays out a doomsday scenario for global warming—and a best-case scenario that’s also “pretty grim.” So why is he still smiling? Read More
March 11, 2010
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We're Headed for a Hothouse World
The CO2 levels Peter Ward measured on a recent trip to Antarctica left him with a bleak view of the future of the planet. Read More
March 11, 2010
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From asteroids to worldwide hydrogen sulfide poisoning, extinction expert Peter Ward offers a diverse menu of scenarios for humanity’s demise. Read More
March 11, 2010
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Don't Take It From The FDA: New Environmental Health Podcast
For the most part, the FDA doesn’t require that the chemicals used in your shampoos, lipsticks, deodorants, and other personal care products be tested. Does that alarm you? It should. Monitoring the toxic load of what we put on our bodies is just as important as monitoring what we put in them, and don’t look first to the FDA for advice on what’s healthy for you in either regard. Instead, for environmental health news, look to the source, and check out Environmental Health Perspectives’ new Researcher’s Perspective series. Each month, the s… Read More
March 9, 2010
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The Priorities of Our Planet's Crisis
Is the sustainability discussion focused too heavily on a low carbon economy? Read More
March 8, 2010
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Humankind's Next Crisis: Water
Oil is not the biggest challenge that we have in store over the next decade. Read More
March 8, 2010
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Business has a new responsibility to lead consumers in a sustainable direction. Read More
March 8, 2010
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During the summers of 1970s, the English countryside would in parts turn to autumn. Across the fields from my school, mighty trees yellowed and browned and the leaves would fall off. The skeletons that emerged were all that remained of the English Elm, wiped out by a fungus-carrying beetle that had made its way across the Atlantic in logs from North America. Read More
March 7, 2010
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Your kindergarten teacher warned you not to look directly at the sun, but not to worry: now you can listen to it sing, instead. Scientists have long tracked the intensity and patterns of the sun’s “wind” through the solar system and around planets (solar wind is essentially a stream of very enthusiastic particles emitted by the sun), but they’ve done so with boring graphs and charts. Now, researchers at the University of Michigan have turned that data into sound, trading their dry charts in for an ethereal, pulse-quickening song, or “sonification” of … Read More
March 4, 2010
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Let It Snow - Scientists Still Say We're Warming
The weather outside may be frightful, but the planet is still warming, scientists are saying. Hard to believe when school systems across the nation are running out of snow days and DC has been buried for most of the winter, but according to a professor in Monash University’s Geography and Environmental Science department (Melbourne), this January was the ho… Read More
March 1, 2010
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Toxic Fire Retardants In Your Household Dust
Bad news for sporadic dust-busters: our dust bunnies may be killing us softly. It’s not what they say about our abysmal standards for household cleanliness, it’s what they’re doing to our health. Household dust has long been a known culprit when it comes to allergies and asthma, but a new study from the Silent Spring Institute found 66 endocrine-disrupting compounds in dust samples they tested. Remember endocrine disruptors, those nasty little toxins that act like estrogen in the body, have been linked to various cancers, a… Read More
February 28, 2010
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Van Jones To Teach At Princeton
Hold onto your pink slips – Van Jones is back. It was announced this week that President Obama’s former green jobs czar (who left the White House almost as soon as he’d arrived) will be emerging from his six-month departure from the limelight and joining Princeton University as a visiting fellow in the Center for African American Studies and in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson Sc… Read More
February 27, 2010
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Mountaintop Coal Mining Could Decimate Fish Populations
Three days ago, a Wake Forest professor of biology went to the US Senate, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, to give them all the disturbing news: we’re poisoning our fresh water fish stocks with destructive mountaintop removal coal mining. In a study of 78 stream samples in areas near mountaintop removal mining sites, Professor Dennis Lemly and his team found that 73 contained toxic levels of selenium. Read More
February 26, 2010
