Environment & Climate
The Organic Revolution: Change the System, Not the Climate
What if there were an organic technology that could cut greenhouse emissions in half and literally suck down and sequester carbon dioxide in living soil - bringing the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere down to 350 ppm - the level scientists warn us we must acheive in order to avert a climate catastrophe?
Cook Organic, Not the Planet. Boycott Factory-Farmed Foods.
There are few titans remaining in the environmental world -- figures that command respect not only inside the movement but in the larger global political milieu as well. Lester Brown is one of them. In 1974, he founded the Worldwatch Institute, one of the first think tanks to focus on the global environmental situation (its agenda-setting yearly reports, State of the World, remain required reading among the green set). In 2001, he left Worldwatch to start the Earth Policy Institute, a small outfit dedicated to envisioning an "eco-economy" and figuring out how to get there.
Lester
Read moreTwo field workers who gave birth to deformed babies were illegally exposed to pesticides more than 20 times each while they picked tomatoes in Eastern North Carolina, the state's Department of Agriculture data show.
A third worker, who spent most of her pregnancy working in Florida, was exposed four times during the less than six weeks that she worked in North Carolina, the data show.
All worked for Ag-Mart, a tomato-grower based in Florida, and they were illegally exposed to chemicals as often as three times a week, the documents show. Three of the 15 chemicals are linked to
Read moreWE'RE IN FOR A WILD RIDE, say Oceanus' 13-person crew, salts old and young, most of them Cape Codders with lifelong careers on the water. Consequently, many of the 12 members of the scientific team-oceanographers, science technicians, and graduate students, along with this observer-scatter across the ship's three decks in the moments before we sail, seeking privacy for our last cell phone calls home, backs turned to the rain, shouting against the wind. At 177 feet and more than 1,000 tons, R/V (research vessel) Oceanus is the smallest ship in the long-range fleet of the Woods Hole
Read moreOn the West Virginia-Ohio border, the tread of the county's coal-burning power industry is expanding, digging into the Appalachian Mountains and kicking up clouds of pollution. While small towns choked by power plants hear the promise of new "clean coal" technologies, mining communities know there is no technological remedy for the destruction the industry is wreaking in their communities.
Though most people probably associate coal with the bygone Industrial Age, the Bush administration considers it an essential part of the nation's energy mix. At least 114 new coal-
Read moreThe state Department of Environmental Protection proposed yesterday the nation's toughest standard for perchlorate, a chemical used in explosives that was found in 10 public water sources in 2004. The drinking water limit of 2 parts per billion would be dramatically stricter than a proposed level of 24.5 parts per billion, announced by the US Environmental Protection Agency in January.
The Department of Environmental Protection commissioner, Robert W. Golledge Jr., said the federal limit does not take into account that people can ingest perchlorate from other sources, such as
Read moreAs the border organizer for Sierra Club's Environmental Justice program, I bounce back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border supporting grassroots environmental activists. More than the food, language, or currency, the biggest difference from one side to the other is what issues are considered "environmental." Perhaps nowhere else on earth is there such a long border between such a rich country and such a struggling one, and this disparity seems to carry over to which issues take priority.
For example, Laguna La Escondida in Reynosa, Mexico, a water source for the surrounding
Read moreThe news of Greenland's melting ice cap is the latest in a long list of scientific warnings. In 1992, hundreds of the world's leading scientists, including the majority of living Nobel laureates, signed a joint declaration titled "The World Scientists' Warning to Humanity." These 1,600 scientists accurately predicted the magnitude of global warming, species extinction, and destruction of the earth's complex ecosystems. Their words went largely unheard and unheeded.
Fourteen years later, the consequences these scientists predicted are becoming more and more evident and alarming. The
Read moreMichael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil, both available in paperback from Owl Books.
It's official: the era of resource wars is upon us. In a major London address, British Defense Secretary John Reid warned that global climate change and dwindling natural resources are combining to increase the likelihood of violent conflict over land, water and energy. Climate change, he indicated, "will make scarce resources, clean water, viable agricultural land even scarcer more rather than
Read moreexpected to increase to about 210,000 megawatts from today's installed total of about 59,000 megawatts, a study by the German Wind Energy Institute (DEWI) showed.
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - The global wind energy industry is expected to enjoy continued strong growth in coming years with total installed capacity seen more than tripling from current levels by 2014, an industry survey showed on Tuesday.
Over the next eight years, international installed capacity is expected to
increase to
BOSTON, March 9 (UPI) -- Alternative energy sources, including wind turbines and solar photovoltaic panels, are being talked up in Congress, but clean energy isn't yet seen as a job-producing industry.
A movement is emerging, however, to present alternative energies as having the potential to create jobs in the production of major component parts of wind turbines and large-scale retrofitting projects to increase energy efficiency in residential areas.
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has compared the drive for use of alternative energy to other national movements in America's
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