Climate Change

The Limits of Climate Change Litigation

For two decades, climate scientists have been developing tools to pin the blame for hurricanes, floods, and heatwaves on fossil fuel companies. But judges say climate change is too big for court.

November 3, 2021

Jonathan Mingle

Reasons for Concern

The IPCC’s latest report, with warnings for supply chains and food security, may be the most suspense-filled document in human history.

March 9, 2022

Tim Flannery

In Hot Water

“The decline of coral reefs is accelerating so quickly that we may live to see the end of them.”

March 24, 2022 issue

Anna Louie Sussman

Conceiving the Future

The argument that reducing human populations will help curb climate change has obvious appeal, but it overlooks several inconvenient facts.

September 23, 2021 issue

Bill McKibben

The Future Is Electric

Because electricity is so much more efficient than combustion, totally electrifying our country would cut primary energy use about in half.

November 4, 2021 issue

Bill McKibben

It’s Not Science Fiction

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s anti-dystopian novel, climate change is the crisis that finally forces mankind to deal with global inequality.

December 17, 2020 issue

Regina Marler

The Emergency Everywhere

In Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea and Maxim Loskutoff’s Ruthie Fear, young women navigate danger from men and from themselves, against a backdrop of relentless climate catastrophe.

March 25, 2021 issue

Willa Glickman

The Future of Fracking

New technology has allowed access to more oil and gas in the US than ever expected. Will we be able to turn away from this dangerous windfall before it’s too late?

May 5, 2021

The Latest

Michelle Nijhuis

Must We Grow?

New books argue that life in a slower economy isn’t necessarily painful, and is likely to be healthier and more secure in many ways.

June 9, 2022 issue

Frederic Wehrey

The Lost Rivers of Owens Valley

Water—who owns it, who uses it—has shaped this landscape from the Paiutes’ irrigation canals to the Los Angeles aqueduct. And it is a history in which my own family played a part.

February 16, 2021

Jim Shultz

The Renewable Energy Rebels

In rural New York State, big wind and solar energy projects are running into determined local opposition. What is to be done?

December 3, 2020

Bill McKibben

Biden’s Most Daunting Adversary

October 31, 2020

San Francisco seen from Treasure Island as orange smoke and haze from multiple wildfires blankets the Bay Area, California, September 9, 2020

Anastasia Edel

The Big Smoke

It is hard not to think of California’s wildfire plight as a metaphor for America’s decline, though hopelessness is not the Californian way.

September 17, 2020

Bill McKibben

130 Degrees

This is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through now.

August 20, 2020 issue

Willa Glickman

New York's Rising Tides

Hurricane Sandy revealed just how poorly suited our system is to absorb the shock of climate change and particularly sea-level rise—and how unequally the effects are felt.

June 13, 2020

Monica Uszerowicz

Picturing Climate Crisis in Miami

FloodZone lays Miami’s underlying fractures bare: street-level billboard renderings of new apartments are fenced off by rain-weathered chain-link and sidewalks fractured by flooding.

May 23, 2020

An abandoned Standard Oil gas station, Tonalea, Arizona, 2008

Bill McKibben

Big Oil Runs Out of Gas

People used to worry that the fossil-fuel industry would hit “peak oil” and we’d run out of crude. It now seems far more likely that it’s going to run out of money instead.

May 12, 2020