The awkwardly named Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has declared that burning wood is carbon neutral. In the eyes of the Trump regime, burning wood for energy is now just as environmentally friendly as wind and solar power, despite the fact that burning biomass releases greenhouse gases.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Monday that he is planning to introduce a statewide ban on plastic bags, saying, “The blight of plastic bags takes a devastating toll on our streets, our water, and our natural resources.”
Scott Pruitt, the increasingly scandal-mired, climate change-denying chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, met personally at the agency’s headquarters with a lobbyist who later gave him a sweetheart deal on an apartment, despite denials to the contrary.
Internal emails that revealed the Environmental Protection Agency has been pursuing a plan to restrict the type of scientific research the agency uses to write environmental policy have been removed from an online portal that made the documents publicly accessible.
Climate lawsuits have been piling up on the coasts. But a pioneering duo of Colorado counties and the city of Boulder have filed the first landlocked lawsuit against big oil earlier this week, suing Exxon and tar sands producer Suncor Energy.
The world’s largest hunk of ice, the Antarctic ice sheet, holds enough frozen water to put cities like Miami several hundred feet under. How much Antarctica shrinks in the future will depend on the balance between what’s melting away, and what’s being added when it snows.
Days after Donald Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, allegedly warned Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt to knock it off with all these goddamn scandals, the Associated Press reports that the full bill for the first year of Pruitt’s unprecedented travel and security expenses are now in the neighborhood…
Environmental Protection Agency chief and climate skeptic Scott Pruitt, who just months ago was widely rumored to be under consideration for a shift to the completely different role of attorney general, has seen his palace intrigue problems mount as more reports of wasteful behavior emerge.
The two most important words you need to know to understand the fate of our coastlines are “grounding line.” Those words describe where Antarctica’s voluminous ice shelves begin to float, holding back a wall of ice on land.
Stretching 3.5 million square miles across northern Africa, the vast sand dunes and rocky plateaus of the Sahara cover more ground than the continental United States. Now, a pair of scientists is making a provocative claim that the world’s largest desert has expanded 10 percent since the early 20th century,…
To say Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt doesn’t have many fans in the environmental justice, conservation, or climate communities is an understatement. On Wednesday, ten major environmental groups announced they’re totally done with Pruitt by launching a coordinated campaign to oust him under…
Soon after the glaciers melted at the end of the last Ice Age, our planet was vulnerable to abrupt and dramatic shifts in climate, including prolonged cold snaps that lasted for decades. New research suggests early hunter-gatherers living in the British Isles didn’t just manage to survive these harsh conditions—they…
CUSCO, PERU—British scientist Dan Metcalfe is attempting to take the clouds out of cloud forests. It sounds like something out of an Ian Fleming novel, but Metcalfe is no Bond villain, and his plan to remove clouds from a portion of forest in Peru with a giant cloud catching net is not part of some sinister plot.…
My apologies to anyone who doesn’t happen to live in the Northeastern United States. I don’t want you to feel bad for us. But I do want you to recognize the fact that we’ve been walloped with four enormous snowstorms in three weeks. Adding insult to injury, the most recent one occurred the day after spring “began.”
Rising CO2 levels aren’t just dissolving coral reefs. They might be causing squid to act all kinds of weird.
Washington, D.C. is famous for its cherry blossoms, but someday it could also be renowned for its palm trees. That’s according to a new study looking at how palm trees are expanding into northern parts of the world that have long been too cold for the iconic tropical trees.
We’re all fossil fuel junkies, and the dangerous byproduct of our habit—CO2—is killing the planet. We need to quit, but since we’re unlikely to go cold turkey, it’s probably time for an intervention.
By 2050, the world’s population will top ten billion people. As industrial capitalism evolves across the globe like no time in human history, will our planet’s ecosystem be able to sustain itself during this rapid transformation? Will human beings be able to support themselves with agriculture and survive on this…
In a remarkable development in what’s shaping up to be a high-profile legal battle, a U.S. District Court judge has ordered a first-of-its kind court hearing on the science of climate change. It’s already drawing comparisons to the famed 1920s Scopes Trial on teaching evolution in classrooms.
Stephen Hawking, renowned theoretical physicist and one of the brightest scientific minds of the last half century, died at age 76 this week. In a career spanning 50 years—and challenged by a crippling disease—Hawking set his mind to understanding the Universe. After decades of investigating everything from black…
