When it comes to designing cars, Gordon Murray has few peers. The 65-year-old South African is a legendary Formula One racing engineer, who spent 20 years creating championship-winning cars for several teams. He topped that feat by going on to design one of the fastest—and loveliest—super sports cars ever made, the McLaren F1. Next, Murray designed the Mercedes SLR McLaren, another super sports car renowned for its beauty and power. The common challenge linking them all was devising ways to reduce their weight to increase their performance.

There is something distinctly pathos-inducing about a corn plant dying of thirst. Maybe that’s why coverage of the 2012 drought has focused on commodity crops, especially corn. Reading the reports, you almost expect Tom Joad to step out from between the brown-baked stalks, as if Steinbeck were writing the copy.

Ten of the nation’s top climate scientists released a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today, urging the State Department to conduct a serious review of the climate change impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline.

This past week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report linking climate change to some of the extreme weather events of 2011, like the devastating drought in Texas and record high temperatures in Britain.

Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. is making progress on climate change.

Americans are the the least likely to suffer from "green guilt" about their environmental impact, despite trailing the rest of the world in sustainable behavior, according to a new National Geographic survey.

A record-setting drought grips more than half of the contiguous United States. For farmers the drought is ruining harvests, but driving up the price of crops that do survive. Higher wholesale prices will soon translate into rising costs at the supermarket.

The United States is in the midst of a natural gas boom — about 200,000 gas wells have been drilled in the past decade. The boom has been fueled by the use of hydraulic fracturing — or fracking — which involves pumping a mixture of water and chemicals into the ground to get access to the gas.

Just when you thought Apple was really starting to go green—announcing plans to power its newest data center largely with renewable energy—the tech company took a big step backward last week, requesting that all of its products be removed from EPEAT, a registry of environmentally friendly electronics. What’s really strange is that Apple helped start EPEAT back in 2006, and now it’s just backing out without much of an explanation.

Apparently it wasn’t quite enough for the House Agriculture Committee to pass a version of the farm bill that made over $16 billion in cuts to food stamps and allowed for an open-ended expansion of crop insurance for Big Ag.