Environment
- Environment
Detroit's urban farming movement is thriving, supplying fresh produce, jobs and revived communities. Desiree Cooper examines this new food-based economy and the issues holding it back.
Seeds of progress
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Illegal gold mining in the Amazon
With the price of gold at an all-time high, veteran war photographer Ron Haviv documents the environmental destruction illegal gold mining has caused in the Peruvian Amazon.Cleaning up Nigeria’s oily mess
According to a new U.N. report, decades of oil pollution in the Niger Delta may require the world's biggest ever cleanup.
Differing views on fracking’s impact
Studies conducted on the counties above the Marcellus and Barnett Shale for example — where extensive drilling has already taken place — present mixed economic results.
Too much solar energy?
By Andrew Curry | Slate It’s been a long, dark winter in Germany. In fact, there hasn’t been this little sun since people started tracking such things back in the early 1950s. Easter is around the corner, and the streets of Berlin are still covered in ice and snow. But spring will come, and when […]
Energy nominee has industry ties
Justin Elliott, ProPublica | March 20, 2013 When President Obama nominated Ernest Moniz to be energy secretary earlier this month, he hailed the nuclear physicist as a “brilliant scientist” who, among his many talents, had effectively brought together “prominent thinkers and energy companies” in the continuing effort to figure out a safe and economically sound energy […]
Is the next Fukushima in your backyard?
Tim McDonnell, Climate Desk Two years ago today, floodwaters from a massive, deadly earthquake/tsunami combo in Japan knocked out cooling equipment at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, resulting in what experts were quick to deign the second-worst nuclear disaster in history (after Chernobyl), after radioactive contamination touched everything from tuna to baby formula to butterflies. […]
After Sandy, government lends to rebuild in flood zones
by Robert Lewis, Special to ProPublica, and Al Shaw, ProPublica, March 6, 2013, 4 a.m. This story is being co-published with New York public radio’s WNYC. If Staten Island’s Great Kills Marina Café is able to reopen this spring after Sandy ripped apart its interior 2013 blowing out windows and punching through walls 2013 it […]
News from a “Lost Boy”
In January 2011 Need to Know sent reporter George Lerner to southern Sudan to report on one former refugee’s efforts to help rebuild his homeland in anticipation of a vote for independence. Salva Dut, one of the “Lost Boys” (a name given to the more than 20,000 children displaced by warfare in Sudan since 1983) […]
Moving fast on renewables
Germany’s green energy goal now stands at 65 percent renewables on the grid by 2040 and 80 percent — the most the country believes it can achieve with existing technology — by 2050.
Need to Know: January 18, 2013: Ending paralysis: New Jersey and Germany
Need to Know” anchor Jeff Greenfield explores why it now takes nearly four times as long to complete infrastructure projects in the United States than it did in the 1970’s.
Germany’s green revolution
What would it take to transform the whole country’s electric grid–to shut down all of its old power plants, and move to a system that generates electricity exclusively from renewable resources?
Update: Tainted drywall law weakened
The bill doesn’t actually set preventative standards. Instead, it asks an industry association committee comprised mostly of drywall manufacturers and builders to develop voluntary limits on sulfur content in drywall for the government to enforce.
