by Kit Stolz

Posted 3 weeks, 1 day ago In the past, before Rupert Murdoch's $5.6 billion acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, the paper was greatly respected by its peers for its news coverage, even on climate issues. This year that has changed. Read More

Posted 1 month ago This month Harper's magazine turns its lead essay over to Stephen Stoll, a historian, who in "The Cold We Caused," delves into the history of climate to show how "nearly incoherent" are the arguments of the likes of climate change denier James Inhofe, Senator from Oklahoma, who continues to insist against the facts that we are in a "cooling period."

Inhofe concedes that the globe did warm after the Industrial Revolution, but doubts whether this warming was caused by "man-made gases, anthropogenic gases, CO2, methane."

Stoll turns the question around, asking: What would happen to carbon dioxide and… Read More

Posted 6 months, 3 weeks ago In one of her first interviews with the national press since being named to office, EPA chief Lisa Jackson started well in her defense of the need for government action to regulate the emission of greenhouse gases.  But as the interview with NPR progressed, her arguments grew weaker. Read More

Posted 7 months, 1 week ago Henry David Thoreau went to the woods because, he wrote in Walden, he wanted to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life."

Yet in the book Thoreau didn't mention the fact that a year earlier, he had accidentally set the woods near his home town of Concord on fire, causing a 300-acre blaze, a near disaster, and costing the town  $2,000, at the time a considerable sum.

In Walden he famously scorned those who would live "lives of quiet desperation," but he didn't mention after the fire that he himself was scorned in Concord as a "woodsburner."

Is it… Read More

Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago Climate change-driven drought in Australia is leaving depression, despair, and suicide in its wake. The U.S. doesn't get this. Yet. Read More

Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago Medical researchers in the United Kingdom have found evidence that "friendly" bacteria found in soil may activate the immune system, produce the brain compound serotonin, and help ward off depression. Read More

Posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago As if we didn't have enough problems with the atmosphere, now along come economists to rip off the rhetoric of climatology. Or so I argue in an op-ed in the Ventura County Star. Here's the "nut graph," as they say in journalism:

The more we discuss the economic crisis in terms of the physical world, the less we discuss the climate crisis itself, even though restoring balance in the atmosphere will be far more difficult than reviving the faltering economy. It's an alarming irony. As we worry about our melting savings and our vanishing jobs, we forget about melting… Read More

Posted 10 months ago

Andy Lipkis founded one of the largest independent nonprofit environmental groups in Southern California, TreePeople, which is famous in Los Angeles for helping battle the floods of 1978 and 1980, planting a million trees in the 1980s, helping teach the city to recycle in the 1990s, and, recently, working to green its schools. Lipkis just returned from a briefing trip to Washington, which he took because he and his team at TreePeople are concerned that President Obama's vaunted economic stimulus program will go mostly towards roads, bridges, and… Read More

Posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago During a session called "Sustainability and Growth: How Can a City Develop Sustainably When its Identity is Built on Growth?" at the American Meteorological Society convention, a development expert named Grady Grammage colorfully dispelled some myths and revealed some little-known truths about Phoenix.

One myth: Phoenix is unsustainable because it imports water. Virtually all cities import water, Grammage pointed out, even New York, not to mention countless other necessities for urban life, such as food, fuel, and steel. Phoenix arguably has a more stable supply of water than numerous other cities, such as San Diego, because Phoenix imports its… Read More

Posted 11 months ago Break Up the Concrete is a new record by Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders; Rolling Stone and numerous other reviewers have called it her best in years.

Hynde has been singing about environmental themes for decades (remember My City Was Gone?) But the title song off the new album, which sounds to me like a rewrite of "I Fought the Law," for once is not a wistful yearning for a lost paradise or a complaint about the authorities. It's a demand for real change, right here, right now.

Given that the Urban Heat Index is in… Read More