Florida’s coastal populations and its economy face serious threats from rising sea levels caused by global climate change. The state’s response could set an example for other nations around the world.
Packed but greener than many: The mass transit system in Delhi contributes to its lower-than-average carbon footprint ranking.
Stephan Rebernik
Emerging research looks at new ways to measure the ecological footprint of cities, a key step to making them more environmentally benign and perhaps more livable.
The first commercial-scale carbon capture and storage operation at a coal power plant went online last year in Canada.
SaskPower
Carbon capture and storage – pumping CO2 from power plants underground – is required for dramatic cuts on CO2 emissions. Why is adoption of this technology losing steam?
Students on college campuses in a number of college campuses are pressuring universities to divest from fossil fuel companies. Will professors follow?
maisa_nyc/Flickr
At a crossroads with its chairman leaving, the UN’s IPCC looks to engage more social scientists and representatives from developing countries.
Police authorities in Malta have taken steps to curtail bird hunting, including this enforcement in 2007, but illegal hunting continues.
Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters
When conservationists use war metaphors – as in the battle to halt bird hunting in Malta – they hurt their cause by closing down paths to negotiation.
Extreme weather events, such as droughts, will impact businesses in many industries, particularly those that rely on natural resources.
Jeff Tuttle/Reuters
Industry is on the front lines of responding to the effects of climate change and forward-looking businesses are trying to shape policy – before more stringent measures are imposed.
Lack of rain and poor management of land and water caused the most severe drought in Syria in 100 years and led to a mass migration to cities that contributed to country’s civil war.
Khaled Al Hariri/Reuters
Americans have never rated climate change as an urgent political issue, but young voters and other “rising American electorate” groups could change that.
A depot used to store pipes for Transcanada Corp’s planned Keystone XL oil pipeline.
Andrew Cullen/Reuters
A roundtable of energy experts weigh in on the significance of Obama’s veto — the economics, the politics and the environmental — as well as what’s next.
What kind of coffee you buy matters a lot to birds — key indicators of biodiversity in the tropics which likely provide many environmental and economic services.
Ocean acidification from CO2 in the atmosphere will have an economic impact on communities that rely on shellfish.
Breville USA/Flickr
An iconic North American migration is in jeopardy. The monarch butterfly migrates back and forth from Mexico to Canada every year, its orange and black sails peppering blue skies. In the past 20 years…
Why is the eastern US getting so much Arctic weather this winter?
Stuart Rankin/Flickr
Everyone loves to talk about the weather, and this winter Mother Nature has served up a feast to chew on. Few parts of the US have been spared her wrath. Severe drought and abnormally warm conditions continue…
The Uvas Reservoir near Silicon Valley in California, photographed about one year ago.
Ian Abbot/ Flickr
Let’s start with some old news. Earth’s climate is warming, human activities are causing it, and as long as we continue to dump greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, the impacts on climate and…
Whether man-made sources of mercury are contributing to the mercury levels in open-ocean fish has been the subject of hot debate for many years. My colleagues Carl Lamborg, Marty Horgan and I analyzed…
The concept: a solar-powered fuel or chemical factory.
Brendan Cruz Colón
Photosynthesis – turning the sun’s energy into food for plants – is the biological system that feeds the world. But despite its awesome power, the process is extremely inefficient. We can’t really blame…
The Boston-area transit authority has had major disruptions and shut-downs this winter.
MaxVT/Flickr
Despite the Patriots winning the Super Bowl, January and February were not kind months for the people of Boston and New England. By February 10th, more than 60 inches of snow in 30 days fell on the city…
Falling oil prices threaten to slow the US drilling boom. The downturn has also increased calls to lift the ban on exporting oil and natural gas from the US – an outdated policy that should be changed…
To avoid a ‘food versus fuel’ conflict, researchers are exploring bioenergy crops optimized for biofuel.
Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center
Over the past decade, there have numerous efforts to replace petroleum-based fuels with fuel made from plants, or biofuels. One challenge to commercializing biofuel made from non-food sources — called…
Nuclear power plants, like this one in Tennessee, supply almost 20 percent of the electricity in the US.
Nuclear Regulatory Comission
It’s been almost two decades since a new nuclear plant opened for business in the United States. But that’s about to change as construction wraps up on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 2…
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska has for decades been a center of debate on the tradeoffs between environmental protection and oil drilling.
Alaska Region US Fish & Wildlife Service
In a few months, we will mark the five-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The accident released millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, causing extensive impacts on the marine…
Welcome to Boston - and two feet of snow from one storm.
Peter Eimon/Flickr
As first glance, asking whether global warming results in more snow may seem like a silly question because obviously, if it gets warm enough, there is no snow. Consequently, deniers of climate change have…
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
In the early morning hours of Sunday, December 14th last year, climate negotiators in Lima, Peru concluded the COP-20 talks with an agreement among 195 countries. The Lima Call for Climate Action, or Lima…