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Horses standing next to a car.

What Extremely Muscular Horses Teach Us About Climate Change

You can’t understand the history of American energy use without them. A new visual history puts them in context.
by Robinson Meyer via The Atlantic on December 8, 2020
Artistic photo of factory pollution

Endless Combustion

Three new books examine how the rise of coal, oil, and gas have permanently remade our world.
by Bill McKibben via The Nation on February 6, 2019
1908 forest fire in New Hampshire.
partner

The Burned-Over District

The Northeast caught fire this fall, in a way that recalls its past. History has some lessons about how to manage the region’s fire seasons to come.
by Stephen Pyne via HNN on December 10, 2024
Post card depicting coal miners in PA

When Did Americans Start Using Fossil Fuel?

The nineteenth-century establishment of mid-Atlantic coal mines and canals gave America its first taste of abundant fossil fuel energy.
by Livia Gershon, Christopher F. Jones via JSTOR Daily on October 11, 2023
Smoke coming from Exxon Mobil plant

Inside Exxon's Strategy To Downplay Climate Change

Internal documents show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately in the Tillerson era.
by Christopher Matthews, Collin Eaton via The Wall Street Journal on September 14, 2023
Front cover of Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling.

Underground Whales: An Energy Archaeology

On the history of whaling and how we understand energy consumption.
by Jamie L. Jones via UNC Press Blog on September 13, 2023
Trees burning in a forest fire.

We Are Witnessing the First Stages of Civilization’s Collapse

Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?
by Michael Klare via The Nation on August 22, 2023
Ronald Reagan with James Watt

Good Riddance to the Architect of the GOP’s Environmental Culture Wars

James Watt was a fiery evangelical, a cultural laughingstock—and instrumental in shaping modern GOP rhetoric on the environment.
by Liza Featherstone via The New Republic on June 16, 2023
Mountain with both living and dead trees.
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Did Montana Violate Its Residents’ Right To a Clean Environment?

A new lawsuit builds on 50 years of history in environmental activism.
by Scott Wasserman Stern via Made By History on June 12, 2023
President Obama wipes the sweat from his forehead at a press conference.

We Now Know the Full Extent of Obama’s Disastrous Apathy Toward the Climate Crisis

Obama’s official oral history contains new evidence of his indifference and foot-dragging on the most important issue of our time.
by Nathan J. Robinson via Current Affairs on June 5, 2023
Row of power lines

It Wasn’t Just Oil Companies Spreading Climate Denial

The electricity industry knew about the dangers of climate change 40 years ago. It denied them anyway.
by Robinson Meyer via The Atlantic on September 7, 2022
Collage of the U.S. Capitol, a factory, and the earth, connected by coins and price tag stickers.

How the Oil Industry Cast Climate Policy as an Economic Burden

For 30 years, the debate has largely ignored the soaring costs of inaction.
by Kate Yoder via Grist on April 7, 2022
Line of forest fire volunteers in Siberia

A Deranged Pyroscape: How Fires Across the World Have Grown Weirder

Fewer fires are burning worldwide than at any time since antiquity. But in banishing fire from sight, we have made its dangers stranger and less predictable.
by Daniel Immerwahr via The Guardian on February 3, 2022

How Bad Are Plastics, Really?

Plastic production just keeps expanding, and now is becoming a driving cause of climate change.
by Rebecca Altman via The Atlantic on January 3, 2022
Sign reading "One World" with a picture of Earth.

Climate Change Governance: Past, Present, and (Hopefully) Future

The 2015 Paris Agreement represented a shift in the climate regime towards "new governance," expanding the roles of nation-states and non-state actors alike.
by Jessica Green via Cambridge University Press on December 2, 2021
Picture of Joe Manchin

Joe Manchin’s Deep Corporate Ties

An underexamined aspect of Manchin’s pro-business positions in the Senate is his early membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council.
by Dan Kaufman via The New Yorker on October 26, 2021
Aerial view of a mining quarry

The Land Was Ours

Trump, Biden, and public lands.
by Nick Bowlin via The Drift on January 27, 2021

Sea Shanties and the Whale Oil Myth

Oil companies like to point to the demise of the whaling industry as an example of market-based energy solutions. The reality is much more complicated.
by Kate Aronoff via The New Republic on January 22, 2021

The Planet is Burning Around us: Is it Time to Declare the Pyrocene?

Wild, feral and fossil-fuelled, fire lights up the globe. Is it time to declare that humans have created a Pyrocene?
by Stephen Pyne via Aeon on November 20, 2019
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez speaks to an audience in front of a Green New Deal sign.
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The Federal Government Subsidized the Carbon Economy. Now it Should Subsidize a Greener One.

Why the Green New Deal fits right in with America’s energy economy.
by Ryan Driskell Tate via Made By History on April 26, 2019

How World War I Ushered in the Century of Oil

When the war was over, the developed world had little doubt that a nation’s future standing in the world was predicated on access to oil.
by Brian C. Black via The Conversation on April 3, 2017
Man reading paper about gas rationing in front of a sign that reads "sorry no gasoline."
partner

1973 – The Year That Changed Everything

The story of the oil shocks of 1973 and how they continue to shape the world we live in today.
via BackStory on January 9, 2015
Bill Clinton meeting with the Emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, in the White House.
partner

How Qatar Became a Major Middle East Power Broker

The history behind the country's role as a key American ally that also maintains warm relations with Iran and others.
by Allen Fromherz via Made By History on September 30, 2024
A collage of a Teflon pan frying an egg, surrounded by nuclear bombs and the molecular structure of Teflon.

The Long, Strange History of Teflon

First discovered in 1938, Teflon has been used for everything from helping to create the first atomic bomb to keeping your eggs from sticking to the pan.
by Rudy Molinek via Smithsonian on August 20, 2024
Collage art of Supreme Court Justices.

Science Historian Naomi Oreskes Schools the Supreme Court on Climate Change

Scientists and lawmakers in the 70s knew more than we think they did about climate change and the impacts of fossil fuel regulations.
by Naomi Oreskes, Jessica McKenzie via Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on August 15, 2024
Edmund Muskie with a concerned expression, next to a globe.

The Lost History of What Americans Knew About Climate Change in the 1960s

It wasn’t just scientists who were worried, but Congress, the White House, and even Sports Illustrated, newly unearthed documents show.
by Kate Yoder via Grist on August 5, 2024
An oil well at Signal Hill near Long Beach.

It’s Oil That Makes LA Boil

I never knew I lived in an oil town until I went looking for the concealed infrastructure of fossil fuel production.
by Jonathan S. Blake via Noema on July 30, 2024
The recycling symbol.

How the Recycling Symbol Got America Addicted to Plastic

Corporations sold Americans on the chasing arrows — while stripping the logo of its worth.
by Kate Yoder via Grist on June 12, 2024
Richard and Pat Nixon plant a tree on the White House lawn on Earth Day, 1970.

The “Carbon Dioxide Problem”: Nixon’s Inner Circle Debates the Climate Crisis

A collection of records from the Nixon Presidential Library and other sources on the internal debates Nixon advisors were having about climate change and environment.
by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Henry Kissinger, Hubert Heffner, U. Alexis Johnson, Rachel Santarsiero via National Security Archive on April 26, 2024
Old car holding up a mining chute on the over of the book “The Bootleg Coal Rebellion”

Rock-Fuel and Warlike People: On Mitch Troutman’s “The Bootleg Coal Rebellion”

Native son Jonah Walters finds something entirely too innocent about the tales told about the anthracite industry’s origins.
by Jonah Walters via Los Angeles Review of Books on March 21, 2024
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