More than 400,000 climate protestors marching through Manhattan yesterday turned out because, as Bill McKibben, Eddie Bautista, and La Tonya Crisp-Sauray, wrote last week, the world has left the Holocene behind: scientists tell us that we’ve already raised the planet’s temperature almost one degree Celsius, and are on track for four or five more […]

Read more

  After the September 11 attacks, U.S. chemical facilities became a priority for security agencies like the FBI and the CIA. The manager of Washington, D.C.’s sewage treatment plant told a reporter that he couldn’t sleep at night knowing the facility stored ten 90-ton railcars of chlorine gas. Within three months, the plant was converted […]

Read more

  Baton Rouge, Louisiana The April 15 evening session of the Louisiana Senate began with a presiding officer working his way through a calendar of congratulatory resolutions. Senators wandered from the floor to the galleries adjacent to the art deco chamber, talking with staffers, conferring with lobbyists, and backslapping with visitors. The workaday chaos continued […]

Read more

  Amid 200 pages of predictably and mind-numbingly dry text, the world’s seventh-largest oil company foreshadowed something big. Here are the exact words, which Shell buried in the  report’s “risk factors” section: “If we are unable to find economically viable, as well as publicly acceptable, solutions that reduce our CO2 emissions for new and existing projects or […]

Read more

  On a brilliant fall day, Stan Pennington and Eric Hines ride out in a government Jeep, surveying the rolling hills of Carroll County, Maryland, but they come to a stop when the pastoral scene takes an ugly turn. Pennington, who grew up in the area and has worked with local farmers for more than […]

Read more