Farmers can't plant much more land because almost every accessible acre of arable soil is already in use. Nor can the use of fertilizer be increased: it is already being overused everywhere except some parts of Africa, and the runoff is polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans.
You know how in movies the new president comes in and promises to perform sweeping actions with a stroke of a pen? The Administrative Procedure Act is designed to thwart this sort of maneuver.
The legal fight over climate change begins in the United States with the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977. Under the Act, the E.P.A. is required to publish a list of 'stationary sources' of air pollution, of which the most important are power plants.
A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.
Cash-strapped cities in nations from Argentina to Albania have begun to turn over their municipal water systems to Big Water, often under lease arrangements that can continue in force for decades.
Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.
Historically, large-scale global trade has served two functions: 1) the exchange of goods between willing sellers and buyers described in Econ 101 textbooks; 2) as a tool of state aggrandizement, in which the private parties are stand-ins for governmental interests.
There are several types of greenhouse gasses, but carbon dioxide is the most important.
Major power and telephone grids have long been controlled by computer networks, but now similar systems are embedded in such mundane objects as electric meters, alarm clocks, home refrigerators and thermostats, video cameras, bathroom scales, and Christmas-tree lights - all of which are, or soon will be, accessible remotely.
Americans are willing to cheer on politicians who denounce bureaucratic overreach and job-killing red tape in abstract terms. But they turn out to like specific regulations against toxic chemicals in their drinking water.
By the 1980s, businesses had realized that environmental issues had a price tag. Increasingly, they balked. Reflexively, the anticorporate Left pivoted; Earth Day, erstwhile snow job, became an opportunity to denounce capitalist greed.
So many wells have been dug in Changzhou that its groundwater has been over-exploited, and the local ground level has sunk by two feet. The city has officially banned new wells and mandated the installation of pollution controls, but China's endemic corruption ensures that neither measure has much meaning.
The queue of activists, interest groups, and ordinary people wringing their hands over what a President Donald Trump might do in office is long, and environmentalists are at the front of the line.
Artificial lighting, air-conditioning, and automobiles, all powered by fossil fuels, swaddle us in our giddy modernity. In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon.
Scientists have established huge numbers of links between particular diseases and snippets of DNA, but in the great majority of cases, this has not yet been translated into treatments that can help cure patients. These treatments will come - tomorrow, or the day after.
A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road.
Canceling the climate pact will loudly demonstrate Trump's willingness to fight - an important step for the White House because, on a concrete level, few tools are available to revive the coal industry.
The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.
As an issue, climate change was unlucky: when nonspecialists first became aware of it in the 1990s, environmental attitudes had already become tribal political markers.
Prediction is a mug's game, but taking the side of water polluters has not been a winning political strategy for 50 years. Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II all undertook to weaken water regulations in the name of economic growth. They left office; the regulations remained.
