Britain Passes One Week Without Coal Power For First Time Since 1882
Britain has gone a week without using coal to generate electricity for the first time since 1882. The landmark follows a government pledge to phase out coal-fired electricity by 2025.
How Big Oil And Big Soda Kept A Global Environmental Calamity A Secret For Decades
With new legislation, Sen. Tom Udall is attempting to marshal Washington into a confrontation with the plastics industry, and to force companies that profit from plastics to take accountability for the waste they create. Big Plastic isn’t a single entity. It’s more like a corporate supergroup: Big Oil meets Big Soda.
The Last Giraffes On Earth
The planet’s tallest animal is in far greater danger than people might think. Until recently, giraffes have suffered from surprising scientific neglect. Few researchers have studied them in the wild, so even basic aspects of their lives remain mysterious.
How To Cut Your Laundry Cost In Half In An Eco-Friendly Way
Life Without Plastic’s Dilutable Laundry Bar, packaged in a recyclable paper sleeve, can be broken down and dissolved in a 64-ounce bottle you already have on hand, filled with water from your own tap. The resultant mixture will handle up to 125 loads, the company says.
A Frozen Graveyard: The Sad Tales Of Antarctica’s Deaths
Even with all our technology and knowledge of the dangers of Antarctica, it can remain deadly for anyone who goes there. Inland, temperatures can plummet to nearly -90C (-130F). Beneath layers of snow and ice on the world’s coldest continent, there may be hundreds of people buried forever.
What Will An Ice-Free Arctic Look Like?
Several years in the past decade have reached new lows for summer sea ice extent, raising questions about what will happen in this new Arctic as the ice declines and retreats. How will the ecosystem respond? Can treaties keep fishing in the central Arctic in check?
The Climate Activists Who Dismiss Meat Consumption Are Wrong
All too frequently, activists, politicians, and scientists reduce the all-consuming crisis of global warming to a question of greenhouse gas emissions: what drives them up, and how best to bring them down. The natural world and its nonhuman inhabitants are reduced to a series of models and equations.
Invasion: In An Era Of Reconciliation, Indigenous Land Is Being Taken At Gunpoint
Invasion is a film about the Unist’ot’en Camp, Gidimt’en checkpoint and the larger Wet’suwet’en Nation standing up to the Canadian government and corporations who continue colonial violence against Indigenous people.
The End Of Farming?
Over the past 20 years or so, ad hoc coalitions of politicians, activists and conscience-stricken billionaires, have rewilded millions of acres of mostly failed agricultural and grazing land. Their guiding philosophy upends the long-dominant view that land should be cleared, plowed and wrung ever more efficiently for food.
Yemen’s Deadly Ghost Ship
Five miles off the coast of Yemen lies a floating bomb. An oil storage vessel called the FSO Safer has been sitting more or less unattended in the Red Sea for half a decade. The abandoned oil tanker with over a million barrels of oil on board is an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen.
The Healing Power of Gardens
Oliver Sacks on the Psychological and Physiological Consolations of Nature: “In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.”
When The Sahara Was Green
The climate of the Sahara was completely different thousands of years ago. And we’re not talking about just a few years of extra rain. We’re talking about a climate that was so wet for so long that animals and humans alike made themselves at home in the middle of the Sahara.
As Warming Waters Make Shellfish Toxic, A Way Of Life Becomes Deadly For Alaskans
Coastal states have developed statewide systems to keep their recreational and subsistence harvesters safe from paralytic shellfish poisoning. Alaska has no such system. State environmental health officials say the sheer length of its coast makes monitoring shellfish for the toxin impossible.
The Daring Journey Inside The World’s Deepest Cave
The Veryovkina Cave is the deepest known cave on Earth. It took half a century and about 30 expeditions for Russian cave explorers to reach its record depth of 2,212 meters. Speleologists still think there is more to be discovered.
These Pics Are Composed Of As Many Pixels As There Are Animals Still Alive In These Species
A brilliant 2008 campaign by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has been resurfacing. The campaign, called WWF Japan – Population by pixel, was created by the agency Hakuhodo C&D / Tokyo. Inspired by their work, Imgurian JJSmooth44 made a follow-up to their project and it’s just as powerful as the original.
Antarctica Melting: Climate Change And The Journey To The ‘Doomsday Glacier’
Icefin has reached the point at which the warm ocean water meets the wall of ice at the front of the mighty Thwaites glacier – the point where this vast body of ice begins to melt. Glaciologists have described Thwaites as the “most important” glacier in the world, the “riskiest” glacier, even the “doomsday” glacier.
Chasing Colombia’s ‘Cocaine Hippos’
After the Colombian National Police killed Escobar in 1993, zoos and private collectors acquired the animals, all except the hippopotamuses. They are only hippos in the wild outside Africa. Escobar started with four hippos. Today, a UC San Diego biologist estimates there are 80 to 100.
Sea Level Rise: A Small California Town Embraces Managed Retreat
At a time when Del Mar, Pacifica and other coastal cities are fighting to defend their homes and roads from the rising sea, Marina has embarked on a path less traveled. Here in this Army turned university town, residents are learning how to adjust with the ocean as the water moves inland.
Russian Startup Wants To Put Huge Ads In Space
The first of StartRocket’s space-based ads could go up by 2021. The ads — a bit like skytyping, only in low-Earth orbit rather than in the atmosphere — would be visible only at night but could be seen from just about anywhere on the planet.
The Climate Crisis Isn’t Coming, It’s Already Here
The climate crises will spell our doom, a disaster that’s not merely on its way—it’s already here. Rosecrans Baldwin embeds with the government agents and the doomsday experts preparing now for the plagues, and the panics, and the fast-approaching day when life on our warming planet finally falls apart.
Can We Survive Extreme Heat?
As the climate warms, heat waves are growing longer, hotter, and more frequent. Since the 1960s, the average number of annual heat waves in 50 major American cities has tripled. They are also becoming more deadly. Humans have never lived on a planet this hot, and we’re totally unprepared for what’s to come.