In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a carbon cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse emissions, delivering on a bi-national agreement he reached with President Obama in November 2014. The United States and China together account for one-third of global greenhouse emissions. In the United States, the process of reducing emissions to the agreed-upon 25-28 percent […]

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  In April 2013, an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, killed 15 people and decimated a community. This tragedy prompted President Obama to issue an Executive Order (EO) on August 1, 2013, directing federal agencies to establish new chemical-plant safety regulations. Two years later, serious questions remain about when the rules will […]

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  Seventy years ago today, on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico–known from that day in 1945 as the “Trinity Site.” Trinity was the code name for the first detonation, chosen by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the technical director of the Manhattan Project […]

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  I am a Southerner by both birth and heritage. I come from a long line of poor white cotton farmers on both sides of my family. Three of my four great-grandfathers fought in the Confederate Army. The fourth had been told by his parents that he could join the army when he turned 13; […]

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  During a mid-April meeting of the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee, Congressman Mo Brooks—an Alabama Republican best known for his nativist campaign against undocumented immigrants—was hectoring NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. One of seven climate-change deniers in the nine-member Republican majority on the subcommittee that authorizes NASA’s budget, Brooks was working a GOP meme […]

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