One of my responsibilities at The Conversation is to originate and coordinate series of articles on an important topic. Among the ones this year was a series on plastic, the material that’s been boon to modern life but a very damaging one as well. Below are a few highlights from the series. Our complicated relationship with plastic: 5 essential reads Plastics are hard to avoid in daily life. European Parliament, CC BY-NC-ND Martin LaMonica, The…
Earlier this year, the Energy Information Administration announced that the U.S. now pollutes more from transportation than the electricity sector. Embedded in this dry government statistic is a host of complex questions, not least of which is how the U.S. is ever going to make serious progress on climate change while we remain in love with giant vehicles. To some degree, the news revealed some good news: greenhouse gas emissions from electricity is going down…
The worst experience I’ve ever had with wildfires was smoke impinging on a vacation to New Mexico. But for people who live in the western US, wildfires are a part of life. As an editor at The Conversation, I’ve commissioned a few articles to explore the theme of adapting to intense wildfires in the West. For starters, wildfires in the West are getting worse. Anthony LeRoy Westering from UC Merced wrote a paper ten years…
2015, the year that was: environment and energy Martin LaMonica, The Conversation As we approach 2016, we look back at the big – even world-changing – stories of The Conversation’s environment and energy coverage this year. The biggest story of 2105 from the environment and energy desk is a clear choice but, paradoxically, its impact is still murky. The COP21 United Nations climate summit in December yielded the Paris Agreement, which includes pledges from nearly…
Several months ago, I ran across a TED talk by Andrew Jaspan, a former editor at The Age in Australia who talked about an experiment in journalism. In spending time at a university, he saw a parallel to news rooms: much like there are beat reporters in different topics, university departments have experts in their areas of research. What if the academics wrote articles themselves, rather than published in academic journals or provided quotes on news…
Anybody who follows energy knows that the biggest story, by far, is fracking. The combination of the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and horizontal drilling has opened up huge reserves of natural gas, oil, and other hydrocarbons in the U.S. It’s pushed the U.S. closer toward the once-fanciful notion of energy independence and is bringing massive investment as chemical companies seek to take advantage of cheap natural gas. It’s no wonder other countries…