In the race for top carbon emissions polluter, the United States is still Number One, but China is sprinting forward and could soon edge into the lead. The current Olympics host nation accounted for a “staggering 57 percent of the growth of emissions” worldwide this century, and will likely surpass the U.S. as the single [...]

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By Diane Porter
They could all be fine.
Or they could suffer allergic reactions, coughs, asthma attacks, respiratory infections, oxygen debt and cramps. Their performances could slip,

Photo: Frank Wechsel / triathlon.org
 
Jason Shoemaker competes at the 2007 BG Triathlon World Cup
their chances for world records could suffer. And predicting medal winners could prove more difficult than usual, [...]

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Weather experts are predicting that some 17 Atlantic storms — about seven more than average — will pack enough strength they’ll reach tropical storm strength in 2008, earning the right to be named and carrying the potential to reach hurricane status.
The best guess for the number of hurricanes, according to weather forecasters at the Colorado [...]

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By Shermakaye Bass
When legislators cross party lines and governors publicly plead for water reform, you know the country’s water crunch has reached a new degree of direness.
And yet, some conservationists ask, who’s really listening?
In late July an Opinion column appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other California newspapers. In it, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, [...]

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By Harriet Blake
Mainstream, affordable solar power is not just pie (or energy) in the sky. So say MIT researchers who have devised a process to store solar energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine.

Photo: Donna Coveney
 
MIT professor Dan Nocera
Massachusetts Institute of Technology energy professor Dan Nocera and post-doctoral fellow Matthew Kanan have found a [...]

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The Alliance to Save Energy, a 30-year-old coalition of business, political, consumer and environmental leaders, today urged the U.S. Senate to adopt a bill that would grant or extend tax credits to consumers for energy-saving home improvements, while also potentially stimulating the economy.
The bill, The Jobs, Energy, Families & Disaster Relief Act of 2008, would [...]

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By Harriet Blake
The climate change bill may be stuck in Congress but green initiatives march on. From the coasts to the heartland, states are taking matters into their own hands with many governors leading the way.
Among the most prominent “Green Govs” today are Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Democrat Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. [...]

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By John DeFore

Here’s a mad-scientist fantasy for those who favor controlling carbon as part of the solution to climate change: Learn to love typhoons (well, one aspect of them).
But researchers from Ohio State University have made discoveries about those storms that, as a university report puts it, “could help scientists make better estimates of how much carbon [...]

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By John DeFore

Proposals to solve the planet’s CO2 woes through sequestering the problematic emissions — pumping them into some hole in the ground where they can’t affect the atmosphere — raise numerous concerns for skeptics. Won’t the stuff leak out, wasting the fortune we spent on sequestering, and leaving us worse off than we would [...]

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By John DeFore
It must be a bittersweet moment to be Darrell Hammond.

Every talk Al Gore gives, after all, continues to prove the Saturday Night Live veteran’s brilliance at honing in on the speech patterns of public figures; if Gore can’t tweak his style after years of mockery, then clearly Hammond caught something elemental.
But in [...]

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By Harriet Blake

An engineering team at MIT has developed a new solar concentrator that doubles as a window and generates more electricity with fewer solar cells than typical solar panels — moving toward the day when on-site solar power might make fiscal sense for homeowners.

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By Barbara Kessler
The upside of high gas prices is becoming evident as Americans flock to dealers of small and hybrid cars, revealing that we can, if whacked in the wallet, lower our greenhouse gas emissions.
There’s another silver lining not so readily apparent, but quite compelling. According to researchers at the University of Alabama in [...]

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