Climate Agriculture
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Critical List: Operators say the grid can handle the heat; green tech investment down
Grid operators say they're ready to handle the extra load that air conditioners and other cooling devices will put on electricity supplies during the heat wave.
Venture capitalists invested less money on green tech projects last quarter; they're hot on "internet-specific" companies. (Think businesses like Twitter or Spotify.) So if you’ve got an internet-specific green startup idea burning a hole in your laptop cover, now may be the time.
Apparently it's cool with Republicans if the government interferes with private businesses' decisions, if those decisions would mean being involved in the E.U.'s airline carbon trading program. -
Urban gardens: The harvest is not just food, it's community
Community gardens have an almost magical power to change the urban landscape. Now many in New York City are safe in the hands of those who tend them.
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Organic farming is not really better for you or the planet [UPDATE: Or is it?]
Science writer Christie Wilcox lays out the top myths about organic farming in Scientific American, and they might surprise you:
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Would you eat mutant meat?
The FDA does Big Meat a solid by denying broader use of irradiation, which kills disease but leads to discolored and disfigured food.
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Hacking for the planet
Notorious hacker group Anonymous launches a campaign of cyber attacks in support of green causes. Monsanto fell. Are Canada's tar sands next?
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Michigan’s gangsta gardener gets off [VIDEO]
Julie Bass of Oak Park, Mich. no longer faces jail time for having a vegetable garden in her front yard.
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Jail time for gardening: Now officially a trend
Hey, remember the woman threatened with 93 days in jail for growing a garden in her front yard? She could have a cellmate! Dirk Becker of Lantzville, British Columbia turned his scraped-dry gravel pit of a property into a thriving organic farm, so of course he's facing six months of jail time. Why? Well, the thing is, this farm was full of DIRT. You can't have dirt in a yard! It's unsanitary.
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Why this drought will be way, way worse than the last one
A New York Times article about the current drought in the South compares it to a record-setting dry spell 60 years ago:
Climatologists say the great drought of 2011 is starting to look a lot like the one that hit the nation in the early to mid-1950s. That, too, dried a broad part of the southern tier of states into leather and remains a record breaker.
But this time, things are different in the drought belt. With states and towns short on cash and unemployment still high, the stress on the land and the people who rely on it for a living is being amplified by political and economic forces, state and local officials say. As a result, this drought is likely to have the cultural impact of the great 1930s drought, which hammered an already weakened nation.
But it's not just the economy that's worse now than it was in the 1950s. Water usage is also way, way up. This drought rivals the record-setting 1950s drought -- it's already breaking records in some states -- but it comes at a time when the population is double what it was in 1950, and total water use is more than twice as high.
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Going rogue: USDA may have just opened the GMO floodgates
Did the USDA just open the floodgates to unlimited, unregulated planting of new genetically engineered crops? It sure looks that way.
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Michigan woman could face jail time for growing a garden
The green movement doesn't have much use for lawns. Yeah, they make suburban enclaves look tidy and uniform, but really, would it be so effing bad if your house had something useful -- say, a vegetable garden -- instead of a high-maintenance water-hog outdoor carpet? What's the worst that could happen? Well, as Michigan woman Julie Bass discovered, if your city planner is certifiably power-crazy, you could be looking at 93 days in jail.