Credit: www.vernkummersplumbing.com

Seven out of 10 people on earth can count on running water to be available in their homes. That means it’s always there when we need it, whatever we need it for.

Until it isn’t: Cape Town, London, Sao Paulo, Jakarta, Istanbul, Tokyo, and Mexico City could be facing “Day Zero” — meaning they will run out of water — in the next few decades unless their water use radically changes.

Less than 1 percent of the world’s water supply is readily available for human use (the rest is salty, frozen at the poles, or trapped underground). Yet we use it in wildly inefficient ways: We lose it to leaky pipes. We dump waste in it. We try to grow some of our most water-intensive crops in the desert. Really.

So how have we built a world where we don’t have enough of its most valuable resource? What happens when we run out? And what can we do to solve the problem now?

Vox tackled these questions on this week’s episode of our Netflix show, Explained. We have new episodes every Wednesday on […]

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Young hogs at an industrial animal-feeding operation in North Carolina. As Hurricane Florence approached, many farmers near the facilities were expected to evacuate, leaving the animals behind.
Credit: Gerry Broome / AP

On any given day, there are about six million hogs in North Carolina. The vast majority of them are confined in buildings, in what are known as concentrated animal-feeding operations. According to research conducted by Mark Sobsey, a professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, farmed hogs, which can weigh in excess of two hundred and fifty pounds, create as much as ten times the fecal waste produced by humans. (The hog industry disputes Sobsey’s conclusion.) Other environmental groups say that hogs only create five times as much shit. Regardless, eastern North Carolina, which is being drenched to unprecedented levels by Hurricane Florence this week, is “literally the cesspool of the United States,” Rick Dove, a senior adviser to the Waterkeeper Alliance, a nonprofit environmental group, told me. “You can’t describe it […]

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Paul Krugman
Credit: Businessweek

While there is plenty of blame to go around for the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis and the failure of U.S. policymakers to sufficiently respond to the crisis, Paul Krugman argued Thursday in the New York Times that the Republican Party deserves the bulk of the condemnation for the extensive job losses and economic sluggishness under President Barack Obama’s two terms.

“We avoided utter disaster, but nonetheless experienced a huge, sustained employment slump, one that inflicted immense human and economic cost — and may well have helped set the stage for our current constitutional crisis,” he said. “Why did the slump go on so long?”

He continued: “There are multiple answers, but the most important factor was politics — cynical, bad-faith obstructionism on the part of the Republican Party.”

President Barack Obama was able to pass a massive stimulus bill that helped avert a calamity on the scale of the Great Depression. But, as Krugman argued at the time, it wasn’t nearly big enough to avoid nearly a decade of unnecessary joblessness. And Republicans refused to lift a finger to help.

“[The] most important reason the […]

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California governor Jerry Brown announced plans to launch a satellite to pinpoint the source of global warming emissions.
Credit: Eric Risberg/AP

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — California is set to launch a satellite to track greenhouse gases, as former US Secretary of State John Kerry and island nation leaders warned that the world is far off course to avoid the worst effects of rising temperatures.

Gov. Jerry Brown announced plans for the satellite on the last day of a climate change summit hosted by San Francisco, in a final rebuke to President Donald Trump’s denial of man-made warming.

“With science still under attack,” Brown said “we’re going to launch our own satellite, our own damn satellite, to figure out where the pollution is.” Brown said the satellite will help pinpoint the source of planet-warming emissions.

California will team up with Planet Labs, a company run by ex-Nasa scientists. The data collected, including […]

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Credit: Daily Beast

Eight years ago, a team of top scientists and engineers warned North Carolina’s government that the state faced a potentially cataclysmic rise in sea levels that would bury billions of dollars in real estate under a meter of water.

Armed with this information, the Republicans in charge chose to bury their heads in sand instead.

Nearly a decade later, as Hurricane Florence makes landfall on the state’s Atlantic coast, the decision by North Carolina leaders to ignore that sea-level assessment are being criticized as a short-sighted bid to appease developers—which may leave more than 300 miles of coastline exposed to the ravages of climate change.

Numerous state governments—to say nothing of the current administration—have scoffed at the notion of an anthropogenic factor in sea level rise and climate change. In neighboring South Carolina, where the state’s northeastern coast, including Myrtle Beach, is under a flash flood watch in anticipation of Florence dropping up to 25 inches of rain on the spring break resort town, Gov. […]

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