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The night I slept with Jim Hansen

Students take a stand on Boston Common.Ian MacLellanIt seemed like I had just fallen asleep in my bivvy on the hard soil of the Boston Common on Sunday night, when I was rudely awakened around 1:00 a.m. by the voice of Craig Altemose, founder and driving force behind the Massachusetts Leadership Campaign, crackling through a […]

Feed the world sustainably by 2050? Yes, we can!

Adding a bit more data to food system reformers’ arguments, a new study led by Germany’s prestigious Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research takes on the question of whether we can “feed the world” while preserving the planet come 2050. Short answer: Yes! Researchers modeled various agricultural styles, growth patterns, and diets. Here’s what they […]

Biochemist Oliver Peoples explains how his polymer-producing microbes could transform the plastics i

Over at Seedmagazine.com, I have a brief interview with Oliver Peoples, a biochemist who hopes that his new bio-based plastic will upend the petroleum-based industry—and help clean up oceans and landfills in the process: Seed: So you’re turning corn into plastic in much the same way that the ethanol industry turns it into biofuels. As […]

Disappearing slave history

James Island’s grisly connections with the slave trade draw thousands of tourists to this shrinking patch of Gambia each year. In high season as many as a hundred tourists a day take small, motorized pirogues out to this tiny island and hire guides from nearby villages to explain the horrors once endured there. The island […]

Time for the mainstream media to face the factory farm-swine flu link

“Since last spring and the onset of the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza outbreak in humans, USDA has consistently asked that the media stop calling this “novel” pandemic virus “swine flu.” By continuing to mislabel the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza virus that is affecting human populations around the world, the media is causing undue and undeserved […]

‘Subprime carbon’: Risk or hype?

On the announcement that the Clean Energy Jobs (CEJ) bill cleared a key Senate committee last week, Friends of the Earth complained: The bill’s backbone is a poorly regulated carbon trading scheme that entrusts the Wall Street bankers who brought us the current economic crisis with the responsibility to solve global warming. Sheesh. Of course, […]

We have met the deniers, and they are us

Photo: Adam D. SacksJames Inhofe.Marc Morano.Richard Lindzen.Bjørn Lomborg.George W. Bush. Names of shame, ignominy, criminals against humanity, against planet Earth itself.  Agents of the lethal delays in our response to escalating, accelerating, catastrophic global warming. Yet, as deniers of climate change, they’re amateurs compared to us.  Us activists, environmentalists, scientists, and certainly Copenhagen politicians. Even […]

How the 40 year drop in the minimum wage helped cause obesity

I have written about the link between wages and obesity before — with wages dropping since the 60s and healthy food prices always going up, people eat more unhealthy food. But now two economists have drilled down into these issues and claim to have found a specific link between a drop in the minimum wage […]

Supermodels doing their part for the climate change cause

Apparently, a group of supermodels were on their way to a strip poker game when someone convinced them to say a few words in support of everyone’s favorite climate organization, 350.org.  Video here.    

Obama will go to Copenhagen — if he can seal a deal

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday he would travel to Copenhagen next month if a climate summit is on the verge of a framework deal and his presence there will make a difference in clinching it … “If I am confident that all of the countries involved are bargaining in good faith and we […]