For some, the global climate change crisis has been a call to action, the occasion for some of the biggest environmental movements of our time. For others, it’s a business opportunity.

In Greenland, that’s meant rushing to mine and drill the Arctic. For the Israelis, it’s been a chance to market their mastery of artificial snowmaking (look for their techniques at work during the Sochi Olympics). The Dutch, no strangers to floods, are farming out their services to create sea-level-rise barriers, including to a post-Sandy New York. Major financial institutions in New York and London have recognized increased preciousness of water rights and farmland, and have invested their money accordingly.

Journalist McKenzie Funk spent the past six years traveling the world to document ‘the booming business of global warming.” He spoke with Salon about the resulting book, ‘Windfall,” which makes the compelling case that the effects of climate change are even more unequal than we’ve been led to believe. This interview has been lightly edited for space and clarity.

Profiting off the very thing that’s bringing us down – in some ways, you make global warming sound a lot like the financial crisis. Do you see the people you interviewed as being as […]

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A train carrying fuel oil, fertilizer, methanol derailed in southeast Mississippi Friday morning, forcing a local evacuation, officials said.

There was no fire or explosion, but 50 people living within a half-mile radius were evacuated, and a nearby highway was shut down as a precaution. ‘They’ve got these spills pretty much contained and secured, and we’re working on starting the cleanup process at this point,” local sheriff Jimmy Dale Smith said from the scene. ‘Hopefully we can get everything cleaned up this afternoon and get people in their homes tonight.”

The train – owner and operated by Canadian National Railway Company – was running from from Jackson, Mississippi to Mobile, Alabama, when it derailed near a mobile home park outside the town of New Augusta around 9am Friday morning. Various reports state the pileup involved anywhere from 18 tot 21 cars, and that four to eight of the cars were leaking at some point. No injuries have so far been reported.

As North American crude oil production boomed in 2013, fuel-by-rail has doubled. Spills are the luckier of the possible derailment scenarios. 2013 saw a number of rail crashes in the U.S. and Canada that ended in flames. These included derailments in Alabama, […]

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It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.

-Aldous Huxley, nearing death

There is a penumbra over the land. People are in a foul mood and no one is smiling. Almost everyone is embarrassed by what we have recently witnessed in America.

As I write during the third week of October 2013, our government has just resumed full operations after being partially shut down because of the failure to agree on how the country’s funds should be spent. The dispute originally took the form of a demand to defund and therefore cripple the Affordable Care Act, but soon morphed into so many additional ultimatums no one could keep track of them. The pathetic deal that has just been reached will finance the government only through January 15 and lift the nation’s debt ceiling only through February 7, at which time we will have the opportunity to experience this farce all over again.1

Although they are now streaming back to work, around 40% of the nation’s 2 million federal workers have been furloughed for more than 2 weeks. The consequences to the nation’s public health […]

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From the moment Barack Obama appeared on the national stage, conservatives have been searching for the best way to describe the danger he poses to America’s traditional way of life. Secularism? Check. Socialism? Sure. A tendency to apologize for America’s greatness overseas? That, too. But how to tie them all together?

Gradually, a unifying theme took hold. “At the heart of the debate over Obama’s program,” declared Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru in an influential 2010 National Review cover story, is “the survival of American exceptionalism.” Finally, a term broad and historically resonant enough to capture the magnitude of the threat. A year later, Newt Gingrich published A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters, in which he warned that “our government has strayed alarmingly” from the principles that made America special. Mitt Romney deployed the phrase frequently in his 2012 campaign, asserting that President Obama “doesn’t have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do.” The term, which according to Factiva appeared in global English-language publications fewer than 3,000 times during the Bush Administration, has already appeared more than 10,000 times since Obama became president.
Ironically, the people most responsible for eroding American exceptionalism are the very conservatives […]

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The State of Kansas could often be said to be one of those places where torturing your residents just makes sense. While the work against women, children, the disabled, schools and others continues, the state of Kansas Legislatures took on a new target: Stop Google Fiber. And not just google fiber, make sure that cities cannot invest in any broadband network technologies.

Except with regard to unserved areas, a municipality may not, directly or indirectly:

(1) Offer to provide to one or more subscribers, video, telecommunications or broadband service; or

(2) purchase, lease, construct, maintain or operate any facility for the purpose of enabling a private business or entity to offer, provide, carry, or deliver video, telecommunications or broadband service to one or more subscribers.

Let me explain what this means. When a new provider comes into a market, they generally want some assurances; the right of way from a city, use of public right of ways, and yes, they in many cases will go for city buy ins, like tax incentives or the use […]

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