Since the Kyoto Protocol was developed in 1997, an unlikely new global partnership of bankers and environmentalists has emerged. I call it the Carbon Coalition, and while it seems like a very 21st century development, I actually trace its emergence back to the arrival of Reaganism in the 1980s.

Under...

There is currently no more powerful word in the business world than "innovation." President Obama used it 11 times in his State if the Union Address. Corporations are paying all kinds of non-corporate people goodly sums of money to parachute in and tell them how to innovate. CEOs scribble the...

As expected Cars 2 has hit movie theaters and legions of 7-year-olds have put it on top of the box office. But the world has changed in the 10 years since the first Cars movie, and automotive culture -- the adrenalin rush of horsepower, the thrill of...

As I've been writing for six months now at the Shifting Gears blog for Slate's business and finance site, The Big Money, 2010 is the Year of the Electric Car. I've debated electric cars with the New York Times' Jim Motavalli. I've driven electric...

Here is what we know about Tiger Woods. We know that he has routinely vaporized whole fields of competition. We know that he can strike the golf ball with a kind of violent integrity bordering on inhuman grace. We know that he has, in the decade and half he has...

I will not talk about Tiger Woods' mistresses, some of who actually seem like pretty nice women whose feelings were genuinely hurt by the Striped One and his randy ways. I will not talk about Tiger's perhaps soon-to-be-ex-wife, Elin Nordegren, who has apparently taken off the gloves along with her...

Consider Michelle Wie. Now 20-years-old, the phenom from Hawaii burst onto the professional golf scene in the period between 2003-2005. By her sixteenth birthday, she had already played an event on the men's PGA Tour twice. She then turned pro, signed with Nike, and promptly almost won a women's professional...

The 2009 pro golf season (mercifully) officially ended this past weekend, with the Tour Championship in Georgia. On the course where Bobby Jones learned to play golf, East Lake, Tiger Woods won the controversial FedEx Cup, and Phil Mickelson won the tournament. Tiger took home $10 million and salvaged a...

No one tuning in to the U.S. Open men's and women's semifinals and finals this weekend is going to want to hear this, but I have bad news: the vaunted American "tennis boom" of the 1970s and '80s was a fluke. We were supposed to see tennis broken out of...

Andy Roddick will win the 2009 Wimbledon final 7-6 6-7 7-6 6-7 9-7, defeating Roger Federer in his bid to reclaim his All England Club crown and surpass Pete Sampras' record of 14 Grand Slam titles. You heard it here first!

Actually, my predicted score line is the only...

There's some debate on this, but many, many fans, journalist, and writers agree that John McPhee's 1969 book, Levels of the Game, is the greatest sports book ever written. Using an extremely intimate and carefully paced narrative style, McPhee recounts a deceptively important tennis match: a semifinal at the...

The U.S. Open is back at the Bethpage Black course on Long Island for the second time. It last hosted the tournament in 2002, in the aftermath of 9/11. Tiger Woods won (naturally), re-christening the U.S. Open the "people's championship" because it had been staged not on a country club...

When I wrote about the Kentucky Derby earlier this month, I wasn't sure horse racing could get any weirder. And then it got weirder. Here's what happened.

Mine That Bird, a 50-1 longshot, won the Derby. Now obviously, if there's to be a 2009 Triple Crown winner, Mine That...

I'm serious. There's probably no more analyzed, scrutinized, and deconstructed action in all sport. Michael Jordan's jump shop? Obscure. Michael Phelps' butterfly? Unknown. Roger Federer's forehand? Unexplored. In fact, I'd suggest that Tiger Woods' golf swing in the most assiduously pondered movement a human being has ever made. There are...

The 135th running of the Kentucky Derby takes place today, which mean that for more than a century Americans have been annually treated to one of the most bizarre and deranged sporting events ever devised. The Derby is a full-on freak show, encased in a bubble of ersatz southern elegance....

Have you been watching The Golf Channel's wonderful series "The Haney Project: Charles Barkley"? If you haven't, you should be. It's great stuff.

A little background. Hank Haney is Tiger Woods' coach and a highly regarded guru of the golf swing. (To get technical, he's a strong advocate of...

Tiger Woods is a smart guy. He's the only professional golfer I've ever heard effortlessly deploy the word "caveat." But he's now thrown his weight behind a fairly stupid idea: golf as an Olympic sport.

According to USA Today, Woods is "supporting the International Golf Federation's (IGF) bid to be...

After a crazy, dazzling, wildly unpredictable 2009 Masters, we could all be forgiven for wanting a little breather before the next major championship in golf, the U.S Open in June.

Not gonna happen!

It's game on now, and the next biggie is the Players Championship, recently rechristened, annoyingly, just...

The automobile business has never been in worse shape. Two of Detroit's Big Three, Chrysler and General Motors, have been bailed out by the taxpayers and are on the verge of bankruptcy. Even it doesn't come to that, both carmakers, along with Ford, are all facing declining market share, anemic...

Man, what a rich, full, and yeasty Masters 2009 delivered! One feels bad for Kenny Perry, who had it won--and the record for oldest Masters winner ever locked up at age 48--but who after a brilliant shot on the 16th hole finished bogey-bogey to drop into a tie with Chad...