What separates a good leader from the merely adequate? The question stalks the business section of bookshops and motivates no end of teeth-grindingly-awful podcasts. In the latest addition to this canon, Tony Blair’s new book draws some lessons on leadership from his decade as prime minister of the UK. His …
Read More »The Outrageous Scheme to Capture and Sell Greenland’s Meltwater
Fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce in many countries, but not in Greenland. Its ice sheet contains around 6.5 percent of the world’s fresh water, and over 350 trillion liters are estimated to run into the ocean annually. And with climate change accelerating Arctic melting, more and more of Greenland’s …
Read More »The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It
Moqadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he’d left his home on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, for his job as a security guard, he’d had to turn around twice, having forgotten first his watch and then his cigarettes. He had reason to be nervous. His supervisor …
Read More »Elon Musk Is No Climate Hero
WIRED has been writing about Elon Musk—he of the electric cars, space rockets, tunnel-boring machines, implantable brain interfaces, Mars mission, and internet shitposting—for a long time. He’s always been unpredictable. And yet the most shocking part of his two-hour interview with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, broadcast live on X …
Read More »As Skies Fill With Space Junk, Nonprofit Urges US to Pause StarLink Launches
A new report by a consumer advocacy group calls for a renewed push to review the environmental effects of low-Earth-orbit satellites like the ones operated by StarLink. These are satellites that scoot around in orbit, somewhere between 300 and 1,200 miles from Earth’s surface. For most of humanity’s ventures into …
Read More »Project 2025 Wants to Propel America Into Environmental Catastrophe
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. As delegates arrived at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in mid-July to officially nominate former president Donald Trump as their 2024 candidate, a right-wing policy think tank held an all-day event nearby. The Heritage Foundation, …
Read More »AI's Energy Demands Are Out of Control. Welcome to the Internet's Hyper-Consumption Era
Right now, generative artificial intelligence is impossible to ignore online. An AI-generated summary may randomly appear at the top of the results whenever you do a Google search. Or you might be prompted to try Meta’s AI tool while browsing Facebook. And that ever-present sparkle emoji continues to haunt my …
Read More »Each of the Past 12 Months Broke Temperature Records
June 2023 did not seem like an exceptional month at the time. It was the warmest June in the instrumental temperature record, but monthly records haven't exactly been unusual in a period where the top 10 warmest years on record all occurred in the past 15 years. And monthly records …
Read More »Searching for 'Forever Chemicals' From an Endless Landfill Fire
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When Danielle Cusimano brought her newborn baby, Saylor, home from the hospital in December 2022, it was hard to keep the smoke out. The Cusimano family lived a few miles from the site of …
Read More »The World’s E-Waste Has Reached a Crisis Point
The phone or computer you’re reading this on may not be long for this world. Maybe you’ll drop it in water, or your dog will make a chew toy of it, or it’ll reach obsolescence. If you can’t repair it and have to discard it, the device will become e-waste, …
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