A fascinating new poll by the NY Times/CBS found that a majority of Americans are willing to support a gas tax increase if it will reduce our dependence on foreign oil or global warming. <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/national/28gas.html?_r=1&oref=slogin The poll is quite clear. When asked straight up whether they would support a gas tax increase 85% were opposed. But when you asked then whether they would support a gas tax increase if it reduced our dependence on oil, 55% were supportive,
Read moreIt is time for the American people to send a wake-up call to the domestic auto industry (General Motors, Ford Motor Company and DaimlerChrysler). Backlogged engineering advances well suited for commercial application and widespread diffusion are ready for use. Unfortunately, today, as was the case 40 years ago, auto company management stands in the way of benign and efficient automotive technology.
With few exceptions, a vast wasteland of technological stagnation and junk engineering from domestic automakers has destroyed over three decades of opportunities for increasing the health
Read moreQUESNEL, B.C. -- Millions of acres of Canada's lush green forests are turning red in spasms of death. A voracious beetle, whose population has exploded with the warming climate, is killing more trees than wildfires or logging.
The mountain pine beetle has infested an area three times the size of Maryland, devastating swaths of lodgepole pines and reshaping the future of the forest and the communities in it.
"It's pretty gut-wrenching," said Allan Carroll, a research scientist at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria, whose studies tracked a lock step between warmer winters
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Americans Are Cautiously Open to Gas Tax Rise, Poll Shows
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/national/28gas.html?_r=1&oref=slogin>
By Louis Uchitelle and Megan Thee
The New York Times, February 28, 2006.
Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to a higher federal gasoline tax, but a significant number would go along with an increase if it reduced global warming or made the United
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 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
Read morePERKINSTON, Miss. -- David Fazio's dairy farm rises like an oasis from the wind-shattered woods. Fields of green ryegrass, shade oak trees, and pink and red magnolias bespeak order amid the twisted, gray wilderness wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
Even here, 30 miles north of Mississippi's Gulf Coast, the lives of things that grow and sprout -- and of the people who tend them -- were not spared by the hurricane.
Among Fazio's neighbors, 14 of 20 dairy farmers have abandoned their herds and homesteads. Fazio himself lost 110 of 180 cows after the Aug. 29 storm, which did $125,000
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