China currently releases more carbon emissions than any other country — leading many to believe it bears the greatest responsibility for climate change. However, the situation is more complex than it seems.  In 2019, China emitted 10.2 billion metric tons of CO2 — nearly twice as much as the United States (5.3 billion metric tons) […]

Improved battery technology is lowering costs, leaving existing owners with overly expensive models no one will want secondhand. Would you still buy an electric car if you knew you wouldn’t be able to resell it in the future? That’s the latest hurdle potential buyers are contending with, and it’s bound to become a big driver of demand.   The […]

Some Asian cities are just as densely packed and yet the coronavirus has been kept in check. New York has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. As of this writing, it has about 40% of the confirmed cases in the country, much more than any other state: Asian countries such as […]

The hand-washing and sanitation precautions that will be permanently incorporated into American culture will diminish flu deaths in 2020, in 2021, in 2022, and perpetually.  Rather than 25,000–70,000 flu deaths annually, the numbers may drop by tens of thousands, even in 2020.  The spreading of America’s sanitation obsession will impact not only its own population, but that […]

Germany has set some of the most ambitious goals of any nation for shifting from fossil fuels to greener energy. Now the centerpiece of that push—onshore wind power—is slumping, prompting the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and the bankruptcies of wind-power developers and turbine manufacturers. Wind power, often seen as a clean, abundant […]

Behind the tap-of-your-phone convenience of hailing an Uber or Lyft lies an inconvenient truth: Such rides generate more carbon emissions than simply driving yourself. The increased pollution comes primarily from “deadheading,” that is, drivers traveling to pick up a passenger or cruising the streets while waiting for a ride request. Deadheading accounts for about 40% […]

Municipal officials expected to save money by recycling trash instead of burying or burning it. Now that recycling has turned out to be ruinously expensive while achieving little or no environmental benefit, some local officials—the pragmatic ones, anyway—are once again sending trash straight to landfills and incinerators. More than 100 countries now restrict single-use plastic bags, […]

A Tesla Model 3 is touted as a zero-emissions car by government regulators, but it actually results in more carbon dioxide than a comparable diesel-powered car, according to a recent study. When the CO2 emissions from battery production is included, electric cars, like Teslas, are “in the best case, slightly higher than those of a […]

Waiting for treatment has become a defining characteristic of Canadian health care. Specialist physicians surveyed report a median waiting time of 20.9 weeks between referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment—longer than the wait of 19.8 weeks reported in 2018. Patients wait longest between a GP referral and orthopaedic surgery (39.1 weeks), while […]

In America today, more than 500,000 of us are homeless, about 40 million of us are living in poverty, 50 percent of all workers make less than $33,000 a year, and 70 percent of us have cried about money. At this point, you have to go back to 2005 to find the last year in which the U.S. […]