Editor's note: Every Sunday Fortune publishes a favorite story from its magazine archives.  In light of the polar vortex causing freezing temperature across the county this week, we turn to a 2004 article predicting the Pentagon's worst enemy: Mother Nature. 

The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.

By David Stipp

... Read more »

There is an abandoned house in Alberta, Canada, where Alain Labrecque used to live. Tucked in the farming community of Peace River, it is a place brimming with personal history, rooted to his grandfather’s land where his parents and eight aunts and uncles grew up, and where Alain’s own children were born. Now, Alain’s property and the surrounding area are primarily home to large, black cylinders of oil.

The oil is from Alberta’s much-famed tar sands, a large area of land that contains clay, bitumen, and a good deal of sand. Inside the tanks, heavy crude from the sands is heated, until it becomes viscous enough to transport. Many of those tanks currently vent freely into the atmosphere.

As the third-largest proven crude oil reserve in the world and the key ingredient of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, and with production value that is expected to nearly triple by 2018, the Canadian tar sands have become an unseen symbol in America. For some, that symbol represe ... Read more »

Billionaire Tom Steyer, of the environmental nonprofit NextGen Climate Action, is scaling up the role of climate change in the 2014 elections, with plans to spend as much as $100 million on attack ads against climate deniers and other anti-environment politicians.

Steyer’s already demonstrated his willingness and ability to help sway elections — last year, he spent millions helping Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe get elected as governor of Virginia on a climate change platform. But this is Koch brother-level political advocacy we’re talking about. ... Read more »

Big Oil Is Gaming the System to Raise Domestic U.S. Prices

Bloomberg notes:

Completion of the entire [Keystone] pipeline would raise prices at the pump in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains 10 to 20 cents a gallon, Verleger, the Colorado consultant, said in an e-mail message.The higher crude prices also would erase the discount enjoyed by cities including Chicago, Cheyenne and Denver, Verleger said.

CNN Money reports:

Gas prices might go up, not down: Right now, a lot of oil being produced in Canada and North Dakota has trouble reaching the refineries and terminals on the Gulf. Since that supply can’t be sold abroad, it redu ... Read more »

[This is the first in a two part series]

Fukushima’s missing melted cores and radioactive gushers continue to fester in secret.

Japan’s harsh dictatorial censorship has been matched by a global corporate media blackout aimed—successfully—at keeping Fukushima out of the public eye.

But that doesn’t keep the actual radiation out of our ecosystem, our markets … or our bodies.

Speculation on the ultimate impact ranges from the utterly harmless to the intensely ... Read more »

Nick Brown does not look like your average student. He's 53 for a start and at 6ft 4in with a bushy moustache and an expression that jackknifes between sceptical and alarmed, he is reminiscent of a mid-period John Cleese. He can even sound a bit like the great comedian when he embarks on an extended sardonic riff, which he is prone to do if the subject rouses his intellectual suspicion.

A couple of years ago that suspicion began to grow while he sat in a lecture at the University of East London, where he was taking a postgraduate course in applied positive psychology. There was a slide showing a butterfly graph – the branch of mathematica ... Read more »