Environment and Health
A Fossil-Fueled Bombshell
Royal Dutch Shell buried a bombshell in its recently released 2013 annual report. Amid 200 pages of predictably and mind-numbingly dry text, the world's seventh-largest oil company foreshadowed something big. Here are the exact words, which Shell buried in the...
Republicans Can’t Win by Attacking Health Care in 2014
For me, the fact that Republicans keep using the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – as a political football is a tragedy. Sure, the law has problems, but it is already saving lives and improving the health of millions of Americans. Thankfully, it seems that Republicans...
The Great American Experiment
There are more than 1,000 chemicals known to be toxic to the brains of animals in lab experiments. Yet we only know of 214 for humans, and just 12 for developing fetuses and infants, a recent study revealed. Why are these numbers so far apart? Is it because lab...
Poetic Justice Strikes the CEO of ExxonMobil
Rex Tillerson is mad. Fracking mad. The 61-year old farmer from Bartonville, Texas is another victim of the fracking boom that has invaded people's homes and lives nationwide, from upstate New York to Southern California. Millions of Americans have experienced...
A Recipe for Better Disaster Movies
It's hard not to love mediocre, bad, or even awful movies that portray a post-apocalyptic or utterly dysfunctional future. If you've watched Logan's Run, Water World, The Day After Tomorrow, AI, or Soylent Green more than once, you'll know what we mean. But there's...
The Secret Affair Your Lawmaker Wants to Hide from You
How bad will it get? The public approval rating for Congress has sunk to 9 percent, the lowest level since Gallup began to ask us about it. But your lawmakers are bound to get even more unpopular. Willing legislators have begun a scandalous relationship with corporate...
Rebuilding the American Dream, One Insurance Policy at a Time
The Republicans give lots of reasons for their opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Only two really matter. One is politics. The other is money. More precisely, big-business money. Like Social Security and Medicare, the expansion of health insurance coverage is...
Messing with Our Beer Supply
OK, climate change deniers. This has gone too far. You've gone from just being annoying know-nothings to now posing a serious threat to an essential good that embodies humankind's finest collaboration with nature: beer. It's one thing for the science denial cult to...
Saving Our Blue Future
Have you heard? The world is running out of accessible clean water. Humanity is polluting, mismanaging, and displacing our finite freshwater sources at an alarming rate. Since 1990, half the rivers in China have disappeared. The Ogallala Aquifer that supplies the U.S....
Corporate America Needs to Change Our Diapers
As you probably know, disposable diapers sit in a landfill, undecayed, for generations. They're convenient for parents and caregivers but deadly for Mother Earth. Maybe you didn't know about another big problem. There's evidence that most popular brands of disposable...
