Environment and Energy

BY JEAN-BAPTISTE LE MAROIS Most climate change awareness campaigns feature stranded polar bears on drifting ice sheets, or sea levels creeping over the island of Manhattan. But are these strategies convincing? The “protect the planet” approach has proven to be too weak of a public narrative to mobilize voters. Instead, imagine opening the newspaper to […]

With an economy long buoyed by oil, Saudi Arabia is beginning to feel the pinch for the first time in decades. The Saudi economy grew at a meager rate of 1.4% in 2016, as the war effort in Yemen and low global oil prices began to take their toll. This forced the government to raise $9 […]

He may be a political insider, but Hassan Rouhani ran his 2017 presidential campaign as an anti-establishment candidate. More than 40 million Iranians voted, and despite the close election President Rouhani won a second term in May with 57% of the votes. When the election results were announced, thousands of people spilled into the streets dancing, singing, […]

BY VIKRAM JANARDHAN Donald Trump has followed through with his promise to undo many Obama-era policies regarding energy and the environment. He has lifted the moratorium on mining coal on federal lands, and his proposed budget calls for a 31 percent cut in funding for the EPA, bringing the agency’s budget to its lowest level […]

BY DAVID HARARY It has become clear Democrats need a new strategy on passing climate change legislation. The new Administration’s budget proposal for 2018 is certainly not friendly towards climate change research or mitigation. Deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Department of Energy are just the beginning […]

BY LIZ HANSON Defining the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) seems like it should be fairly straightforward. It’s right there in the name: an agency to protect the environment. Of course, in a world of complex costs and benefits, and increasingly intense partisan rhetoric, nothing is quite so simple. Yet, I was still […]

Climate change has arrived. It is no longer simply a threat for the hypothetical future generations, but a problem for our generation, and particularly, our children’s generation. For the first time, 2015 saw the global average temperature hit 1°C above than the pre-industrial era, moving perilously closer to the 1.5°C limit that countries committed to […]

Water is the cornerstone of human life – but what happens to countries when they start running out of “blue gold”?

The Middle East is an arid region to begin with, but climate change is set to exacerbate the region’s water scarcity.

The Middle East is home to massive oil reserves, but some countries in the region are making headway in a very different field: renewable energy.

BY KATIE BURHKART AND NATALIE UNTERSTELL The Amazon rainforest and the Arctic Ocean both conjure images of frontier lands: the Arctic as a cold and desolate region inhabited by reindeer and polar bears, and threatened by a warming climate; the Amazon as a dense, humid forest teeming with wildlife and threatened by deforestation. Both are […]

On October 15, in Kigali, Rwanda, more than 170 countries signed a legally binding accord to phase out the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a powerful greenhouse gas commonly used in air conditioners and refrigerators. The deal could stop the equivalent of 70 billion tons of carbon dioxide from being emitted into the atmosphere, approximately twice […]