The U.S. a 'New Middle East'?; Bees Are Big Business

This article is from the archive of our partner .

Fresh news and ideas about our planet's future
See full coverage

The New York Times on the U.S.'s energy boom Once it was thought that North America was doomed to dependence on foreign oil. But from offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico to oil sands in Canada and hydraulic fracking for natural gas everywhere, the United States may be on the verge of an energy boom with the potential of making America a "new Middle East," according to one analysts, as the New York Times' Jad Mouawad reports. The consequences, both economic and environmental, of an abundance of cheap, carbon-based energy are many. While more natural gas and oil mean less investment in much dirtier coal, environmentalists are worried that Gulf drilling can cause more Deepwater Horizon-like oil spills and hydraulic fracking will pollute drinking water -- not to mention, of course, the Earth-warming carbon dioxide the burning of any fossil fuel inevitably releases. Meanwhile, businesses are adapting by adopting the natural gas in shipping and manufacturing.

The Guardian on the business of bees The threat to the world's bee populations due to pesticides isn't strictly an ecological problem. It's also an economic one. "How valuable are bees?" asks Damian Carrington at The Guardian. "In the UK, about £1.8bn a year, according to new research on the cost of hand-pollinating the many crops bees service for free." Noting that already half of the United Kingdom's honey bees are managed by humans, Carrington identifies factors suppressing bee populations: fewer flowery meadows, outbreaks of parasites and disease, and most notably pesticides used on crops, which recent studies suggest act as nerve agents in bees. Carrington asks the British government to stop being stubborn and act to ban the pesticides, lest it hurt, rather than help, crop production.

The New York Times on the near-death of nuclear There is a silver lining for environmental types reading The Times today. The paper's Matthew L. Wald offers an assessment of the state of nuclear power and how it's trying to endure the PR hit it took in the U.S. from the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Reactors are still being built in South Carolina and Georgia, using safer technology called "AP1000 model," which would have likely prevented a meltdown at Fukushima after the earthquake and tsunami had it been in place. Also to the advantage of nuclear's image: it doesn't produce carbon emissions. Still, with stiff competition from the growing natural gas business, other plans to build nuclear facilities have been shelved.

AccuWeather on the icebergs still out there Given our current fit of Titanic nostalgia, it's important to remember something: there are still lot of icebergs out there in the Atlantic, posing threats to to oceangoing vessels. Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski, writing for AccuWeather, runs down the science of icebergs for us laymen. In the Atlantic, they form from broken-off pieces of glaciers in Greenland and drift into open waters on a series of ocean currents. Warmer global temperatures and faster ocean currents are giving birth to more Greenland icebergs than since the 1930s, particularly smaller ones, less detectable and thus more dangerous to ships (and, today, oil platforms). "So while research, technology and patrols over the past 100 years have made the sea less perilous in terms of striking the big icebergs, significant risks continue for coming in contact with the smaller, yet potentially destructive growlers and bergy bits," Sosnowski writes.

The Associated Press on how to count seals In order to address any climate-change problem, there has to be some agreement on how large that problem is. That's what's prompting a team of researchers to log 30,000 nautical miles flying over the Alaskan and Russian coasts of the Bering Sea in order to count the populations of ringed and bearded seals. Activists and one government agency, the NOAA, want the two species listed as threatened, since climate change is melting the seasonal ice on which the seals reproduce. "Scientists hope to obtain significant results beginning this week by combining thermal imaging with high-resolution photography," writes the AP's Dan Joling -- thermal imaging to count the seals and photos to identify each seal's species.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”