Climate Culture

Strip-Trees

Humans are gobbling up too much of the sun’s energy

The energy of the sun, captured by plants and passed on to animals, powers everything in our world — dolphins leaping out of the ocean, geese moving across the sky, […]

Irish Eyes Are Smiling

The Irish government has okayed plans to build the world’s largest offshore wind farm. The $630 million project will have three times the electricity-generating capacity of all current offshore wind […]

Blood Is Thicker Than Water

It was a family affair, but the significance was national: President Bush and his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, signed an agreement yesterday to guarantee that water captured by […]

Retirement Party

Utah Republican Jim Hansen, who has served 11 terms in the U.S. House, most recently as chair of the Resources Committee, announced yesterday that he will not seek reelection this […]

The Old Year’s Resolutions

Gluttony at home is not necessary for victory abroad

My grandmother, the family provider in World War II’s market of scarcity, pleaded — or was it flirted? — with the butcher for meat. My father, who couldn’t hit his […]

Elizabeth Grossman reviews Affluenza and Red

There's been a tendency since Sept. 11 to reconsider everything in light of that horrific tragedy. I've tried to resist that inclination, but I had read both Affluenza and Red before that day and could not ignore the way the attacks highlighted the importance of the books' divergent subject matters: our desire for the good life, which has made us the greatest consumers on earth; and the need to protect the wild places which that pattern of consumption threatens.

Now that's a reason to be jolly

This holiday season, we’re bombing Afghanistan, and perhaps contributing to mass starvation there. We stand apart from the rest of the world on climate change, ignoring the melting ice at […]

On Bjorn Lomborg's hidden agenda

Here is Denmark, that harmonious northern country known for its curiously vanilla accomplishments (comprehensive social welfare, pastry, Hans Christian Anderson), and here is its latest export, Bjorn Lomborg, come to announce the good news that we live in a fairy-tale world.