Newsweek: Environment

The Oil Spill's Effects on the Deep-Sea Ecology

Mon, 24 May 2010 18:01:41 GMT

The deep water of the ocean is the largest habitat on earth but it's also the least understood, making the effects of this deep-sea spill without precedent.

How Robots Help Stop the Gulf Oil Spill

Wed, 19 May 2010 19:38:17 GMT

Deep beneath the gulf, robots are the key to stopping the oil spill.

Why Setting Oil Spill Ablaze Is Best Option

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:32:09 GMT

An oil spill in the ocean is bad, but it's infinitely worse if it reaches the shore.

How the Icelandic Volcano Rocked Global Business

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 21:54:05 GMT

With a huff and a puff, mother nature grounded the global economy—and pointed up the need to fix our fragile system.

How Much Oil Is Really off the Atlantic Coast?

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 23:16:23 GMT

Obama's decision to open the Atlantic Ocean to drilling may not yield the results everyone imagines.

Steven Chu on Obama's Green Agenda

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:45:18 GMT

America's green czar is counting on big breakthroughs.

Mistakes Revealed in IPCC Sea-Level Measurements

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:44:53 GMT

Imagine another IPCC mistake. Where's the outrage when the agency lowballs the threat?

Leading America's Fight Against Climate Change

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:41:56 GMT

Washington, D.C., is littered with the careers of well-meaning public servants who came to do good but fell victim to politics. Lisa Jackson is determined not to become one of them. As head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, she oversees the quality of America's air and water and monitors pollution levels. It's a job that endears her to green activists (and anyone who likes clean air and water)—but it puts her at odds with some of the nation's largest, richest industries.

Does Going Green Make You Less Virtuous?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:10:53 GMT

A new study shows that people are more likely to cheat and steal after buying green products.

Jane Goodall Tells Stories for Climate Change

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:17:53 GMT

How to protect small communities, preserve wildlife, and mitigate climate change? For one leading researcher, it all starts in the forest.

China Is Becoming a Green Leader

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:31:18 GMT

Back in the 1990s, when diplomats were designing the Kyoto treaty on global warming, they exempted China from any requirement to control emissions. The country was too poor, the thinking went, and had many more urgent priorities to tend to. A decade later, that thinking has changed. Having surpassed the United States as the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse pollutant, China is now seen as a laggard.

Why Being Green Can Be Good for Business

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:46:17 GMT

Can business save the planet? Champions of an environmental New Deal have often cast the corporation as the enemy in the struggle against global warming. But the more than 800 corporate leaders who've signed the -Copenhagen Communiqué on Climate Change argue the opposite line: the business community wants—and needs—an ambitious global agreement that will spur the creation of a low-carbon economy. Five of those leaders spoke with NEWSWEEK'S William Underhill: Ian Cheshire, CEO of Kingfisher, an international home-improvement retail chain; Noel Morrin, VP for sustainability and green construction at Skanska, an international construction company based in Sweden; James Smith, chairman of Shell U.K.; -Reinoldo -Poernbacher, CEO of Klabin S.A., Brazil's biggest paper producer, exporter, and recycler; and Jeffrey Swartz, CEO of Timberland. Excerpts:

The Truth About the ClimateGate E-Mails: Begley

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:12:36 GMT

Hacked e-mails have compromised scientists—but not the science itself.

The Copenhagen Communiqué on Climate Change

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:15:00 GMT

This communiqué calls for an ambitious, robust, and equitable global deal on climate change that responds credibly to the scale and urgency of the crises facing the world today.

Bees, Trees Enter the Global Economy

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:19:43 GMT

For a keynote speaker at a conference on wilderness conservation, Pavan Sukhdev possessed a strange job title: banker. Sukhdev, a high-ranking executive of Deutsche Bank who helped build India's modern financial markets, had a fiscal message to deliver. The loss of forests is costing the global economy between $2.5 trillion and $4.5 trillion a year, he said. Many trillions more in costs arise from the loss of vegetation to filter water, bees to pollinate crops, microbes to break down toxins, and dozens of other "ecosystem services."

The True Cost of Fixing the Climate

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:15:18 GMT

Despite the brouhaha over stolen e-mails from the University of East Anglia, the science of climate change is well enough established by now that we can move on to the essential question: what's the damage going to be?

U.S. Now the World's Climate Laggard

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:12:16 GMT

The hardest thing about being Barack Obama may be handling the high expectations of voters and world leaders. The gap between fantasies of Obama fixing all the world's problems and the reality of American politics is particularly wide on global warming. Even before leaders sit down at Copenhagen, where they are charged with forging a new agreement on climate, we know the summit will be a bust.

Compromise Won't Fix Global Warming: James Hansen

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:06:05 GMT

Politicians are fiddling while the planet burns. What's a voter to do?

Prince Charles: Act Now on Global Climate Change

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:59:37 GMT

As climate change accelerates, so too will hunger, poverty, and perhaps even social unrest.

Geo-Engineering: Quick, Cheap Way to Cool Planet?

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:25:10 GMT

There will be no climate treaty to emerge from the conference in Copenhagen this month, global leaders now concede. But there may be alternative ways to help combat global warming. Various methods of geo--engineering employ unorthodox means to cool the planet. Advocates say that some of these proposals could be implemented quickly and cheaply. One concept is known as stratospheric aerosol insertion. A primer: