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A roundup of news snippets

• Americans cut back on driving in 2007 for the first time in 20 years. • Merrill Lynch launches a global carbon index. • London Mayor Ken Livingstone gets jiggy with greenness in his reelection campaign. • Canada’s annual seal hunt starts Friday.

Joe Cool

He looks so young!

Water problem? What water problem?

There’s no water problem. Dean Kamen solved it: More details here.

A roundup of news snippets

• Washington State is poised to set the nation’s toughest restrictions on toxics in toys. • Nearly 20,000 South Africans have been displaced by a heavily polluting platinum mine. • The Humane Society has filed suit to keep Oregon and Washington State from killing sea lions. • Some 40,000 tourists will visit Antarctica this year. […]

Amphibian dieoffs not caused by climate change, says study

A mysterious dieoff of amphibian species is likely not being caused by global warming, as had been hypothesized, says new research. Not in doubt: Amphibians are being afflicted by the rapidly spreading chytrid fungus, and humans are in some way responsible.

Soot pollution may be big contributor to climate change, and more

Read the news items highlighted in this week’s podcast: World Citizen McCain Now That’s Richardson West Virginia, Mountain Drama ‘Don’t Soot’: the Messenger Of Ice and Mendacity ‘Paign, Management Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Nasty Namaste Ash Ask Nader on the Record

Mass die-off of bats in U.S. Northeast worries and puzzles researchers

Photo: Michael Grace A mass die-off of tens of thousands of bats in the U.S. Northeast is confounding researchers and worrying wildlife advocates. The phenomenon has been dubbed white nose syndrome since many of the dead and dying bats show a white fungus on their nose. However, the fungus itself is believed to be a […]

Green group files lawsuit to protect 681 species

Environmentalists filed suit last week against the U.S. Interior Department, seeking to force the agency to review and issue findings on the status of 681 species vulnerable to extinction. WildEarth Guardians, which filed the suit, contends that the Bush administration has deliberately stalled Endangered Species Act listing decisions to appease developers and other interests; the […]

A roundup of news snippets

• Barack Obama talks about timber and liquefied natural gas in Oregon. • The culling of Yellowstone bison rises ire. • Malthusian fears are bubbling up again, says a front-page Wall Street Journal article. • Illegal trade in polar bear skins may be rising in Russia. • The FDA relied heavily on industry studies when […]

Do humans deserve to find life on other planets?

An explosion in our ability to detect planets in other solar systems has made astronomers increasingly confident that it's only a matter of time until we discover life on other planets. Astronomers just discovered methane on a planet 63 light-years from Earth -- a sign that life just might exist. Here's what Carl B. Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, said following the discovery in this fascinating Washington Post article by Marc Kaufman.

There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy and probably a hundred billion other galaxies with as many stars as ours, so it seems highly unlikely that there are not Earth-like planets orbiting some of them out there, waiting to be discovered.

I find the idea of life on other planets enormously uplifting: life is a miracle. But the idea of our civilization finding life on other planets fills me with apprehension. After all, civilization "discovering" new worlds teeming with life is nothing new to us: we've been doing it since agricultural civilization started expanding from Mesopotamia millennia ago.

But for as long as we've been discovering these new worlds, we've been destroying them, whether it was the Clovis people slaughtering the woolly mammoths, mastodons, and giant beavers that used to make North America home, the Sumerians turning wetlands and forests into wheat fields, or our own civilization slaughtering everything from the dodo to the bison to (just last year) the Baiji dolphin formerly of China's Yangtze River. And now we're turning our attention to the world's remaining tropical forests.