Co-published by Slate
Solar-panel installers workers are riding a “solarcoaster” — joining an industry that has provided jobs and opportunity to tens of thousands of workers — while also raising concerns about how fairly workers in a fast-growing, Wall Street-fueled industry are being treated.
Co-published by Grist
Last fall Valero, the Texas-based petroleum giant, asked a small refinery town in Northern California to approve a huge crude-by-rail project. The city council of Benicia, however, had other ideas.
Some experts argue that private-sector efforts to stop climate change have penetrated too deeply into the business world, and claimed too much capital, to be thwarted by any single federal administration.
We are suffering a period of extreme weather patterns that a German insurance company says could only happen because of climate change. Last year was the hottest year ever – tracking on 14 months in a row of record-breaking temperatures.
Just before the Oroville Dam became daily front page news, during what turned out to be a brief lull in this winter’s storms, one of my neighbors asked me if I thought the drought was over. “Nope, just an interlude,” I said.
Co-published by Fast Company
Tom Steyer and Donald Trump were both born in New York City, and both went on to legendary success in the business world. And that’s about where the similarities end.
As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt pinned his career on fighting laws and regulations that stood in the way of agricultural, mining or energy interests. Now he’s Trump’s pick to lead the EPA.
Today California legislators returned to their jobs in Sacramento, facing a new year and, for Democrats, a distressing new reality: their first session under the incoming presidency of Donald J. Trump.
Stories that survey a California whose residents are forced to drive for Uber or live in rooms with cardboard walls.
Six years ago, when I moved from a bungalow to a swank apartment near Venice Beach, I was dismayed to learn my building had no recycling bin. Instead, a single, beat-up dumpster sat behind the structure in an alleyway to receive unsorted trash from residents in all nine units.
On November 15 Mangan Park residents got more bad news. Homes near the neighborhood’s public gun range were discovered to also have been contaminated by lead, almost certainly from the facility. For Jeff Van Slooten, a retired lead expert, the testing came seven months too late.
Last April, residents of Sacramento’s working-class Mangan Park neighborhood were invited by city officials to a meeting to discuss a health scare involving the presence of lead particulate in their community.
If Bill McKibben was not optimistic about the future of the climate movement in the wake of the jarring U.S. presidential election, neither was he particularly sanguine before.
The elephant in the room at the presidential debates was climate change. According to a piece in Slate, this year the candidates spent a total of five minutes and 27 seconds on the subject. That’s better than 2012 when candidates didn’t mention it at all.
Everybody knows that sunflowers turn their heads toward the sun. But until now no one knew whether the movement simply followed the sun’s arc, or whether some internal rhythm guided the plants. Now we have a clue.
Dean Kuipers on why Sacramento punted on Cap-and-Trade.
Bill Raden reports how Big Oil is trying to scuttle California’s program to reduce greenhouse gases.
California’s deserts are blooming with windmills and solar farms and, according to a new University of California, Berkeley report, these large-scale projects are creating top quality jobs.
Activists wanting to solve the crisis of human-caused climate change face a serious dilemma. The threat appears neither close enough to get our sustained attention, nor distant enough to postpone doing something about it now.
The Grand Canyon, brought to you by Budweiser. Verizon signs throughout Yellowstone. The thought of advertising in our national parks is nauseating. But it could happen.