Copyright © 2006 Earth Policy Institute
When Austin Energy, the publicly owned utility in Austin, Texas, launched its GreenChoice program in 2000, customers opting for green electricity paid a premium. During the fall of 2005, climbing natural gas prices pulled conventional electricity costs above those of wind-generated electricity, the source of most green power. This crossing of the cost lines in Austin and several other communities is a milestone in the U.S. shift to a renewable energy economy.
Austin Energy buys wind-generated electricity under 10-year, fixed-
Read moreGREENLAND: Some 130,000 years ago, in a period just slightly warmer than today, much of the region's ice cap melted away. AP/FILE
Global warming appears to be pushing vast reservoirs of ice on Greenland and Antarctica toward a significant, long-term meltdown. The world may have as little as a decade to take the steps to avoid this scenario.
Those are the implications of new studies that looked to climate history for clues about how the planet's major ice sheets might respond to human-triggered climate change.
Already, temperatures in the Arctic are close to those that
Read moreWASHINGTON, DC, March 22, 2006 (ENS) - Seventy-one congressional representatives are urging increased financial support for the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) sustainable energy programs in a letter being delivered this week to the members of the House of Representatives' Committee on Appropriations.
The letter, led by Representatives Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, and Roscoe Bartlett, a Maryland Republican, was signed by 64 Democrats and seven Republicans.
It stresses the need to restore funding for the geothermal, hydropower, and key energy efficiency accounts targeted
Read moreMEXICO CITY, Mexico, March 22, 2006 (ENS) - An international meeting on the future of the world's fresh water resources is marking World Water Day today with a renewed effort to ensure that more clean drinking water reaches the 1.1 billion people who do not have access to safe water, but the crisis is complicated by the impacts of a warming climate, an world renowned atmospheric chemist told delegates.
In addition to drinking water scarcity, about 2.6 billion people, four out of every 10, lack access to sanitation. This situation is a humanitarian crisis - dealing with it
Read moreLate last year in Goldfield, Iowa, a refinery began pumping out a
stream of ethanol, which supporters call the clean, renewable fuel of
the future.
There's just one twist: The plant is burning 300 tons of coal a day to
turn corn into ethanol - the first US plant of its kind to use coal
instead of cleaner natural gas.
An hour south of Goldfield, another coal-fired ethanol plant is under
construction in Nevada, Iowa. At least three other such refineries are
being built in Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota.
The trend, which is expected to
Read moreIn March, 2002, NASA and the Deutsches Zentrum für Luftund Raumfahrt, the German aerospace agency, launched a pair of satellites from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, a former intercontinental-ballistic-missile site in northern Russia, to map changes in the earth's surface. The satellites, nicknamed Tom and Jerry, have been chasing each other around the globe ever since.
Separated by a gap of approximately a hundred and thirty-seven miles, they sometimes pull apart, only to draw closer again. By monitoring their relative positions to the fantastic exactitude of one micron one-fiftieth the
Read moreDETROIT, March 17 - For Janna Jensen, it was the dirty looks and nasty gestures from other drivers that finally persuaded her to give up the family's $55,000 Hummer H2. Her husband, Michael, meanwhile, was tired of the $300 monthly gasoline cost and the quality problems that began soon after they bought it.
So the Jensens of Reno, Nev., dumped the sport utility vehicle this year for a more modest Honda Element, still an S.U.V. but one with better gasoline mileage and a lower profile than the H2. And they are not alone.
Luxury sport utilities are becoming decidedly less cool
Read moreLOWVILLE, N.Y. - William and Patricia Burke have lived in their white Colonial-style farmhouse on the edge of the Tug Hill plateau for 36 years. And for 35 of those years they have cursed the winter wind as it whistled through every crack and hole in the house.
But this season they welcome the sound of the wind, because it represents their newfound security.
The Burkes' old farmhouse is now surrounded by a forest of 120 huge windmills. Each one, called a wind turbine, is 320 feet tall, about the same height as Big Ben in London or the same length as the football field at
Read morePlease circulate widely!!
Dear Sisters and Brothers,
Mid-March, 2006
An historic March for Peace, Justice and Democracy is taking place on April 29th in New York City.
We are writing as environmental activists to urge you to join us in helping to spread the word and make this a huge success. A unique coalition of labor, peace, environmental, environmental justice, women's, civil rights, community-based, veterans and youth/student groups initiated the organizing for this action. It is being organized because our lives depend on it.
In 2006, Bush's
Read moreWASHINGTON, Mar 14 (IPS) - In a new sign of growing concern about the impact of global warming on the health of the U.S. economy, the insurance commissioners of the 50 U.S. states last week voted unanimously to establish a task force on the possible impact of climate change on the insurance industry and its consumers.
The decision, taken by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, came during the same week that the world's biggest insurance broker, Marsh & McLennan, briefed its corporate clients, which include roughly 75 percent of the "Fortune 500" biggest companies
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