Latest Articles
-
Corn tries to look a little too sweet
This week's $4.8 billion merger of Corn Products International and Bunge Ltd. probably didn't catch your eye, but with revenues projected to increase 29 percent this year to $4 billion, you might consider paying attention -- for the sake of your belly and the environment.
Corn syrup manufacturers are going on the offensive -- and that includes a charm offensive. The Corn Refiners Association -- an industry trade group -- launched a new marketing campaign yesterday that coincided with the announcement of the multi-billion dollar merger.
-
Airlines must pay for emissions, E.U. says
All flights into, out of, and within the European Union will be included in the bloc’s emissions-trading scheme as of 2012, the E.U. Parliament decided Thursday. If the plan is given final approval, airlines will have to cut emissions 3 percent in 2012 and 5 percent per year from 2013 on. Airlines would buy 15 […]
-
McCain touts energy plan in another new ad
John McCain has a new ad promoting his “Lexington Project” to move the country toward energy independence: As with previous ads, this one shows footage of windmills and solar panels, but I don’t see any nuclear reactors. Odd, considering his love of nuclear energy and his plan to build 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030.
-
Feds freeze new solar projects on public land, pending review
The Bush administration has put a moratorium on new solar projects on public land pending large-scale study of their environmental impacts, a process which could take about two years. Since 2005, over 130 solar-plant proposals have been filed for large-scale solar projects that together would cover some 1 million acres of BLM land, if approved. […]
-
Appeals court won’t force EPA to speed up CO2 decision
A federal appeals court has decided not to force the Bush administration to speed up its decision on whether carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health or welfare. The administration’s decision on CO2 is a necessary step in the process of regulating U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions from vehicles and industrial sources. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court […]
-
BLM contemplates two-year moratorium on solar power plant construction in the West
Oh, now they care about careful environmental assessment? Oil and gas development is spreading over the American West like a cancer, but this, this solar stuff … it’s a bridge too far! So Congress and the feds are going to let the solar investment tax credit lapse and institute a moratorium on deployment in the […]
-
Delaware to have offshore wind farm in 2012
The following post is by Earl Killian, guest blogger at Climate Progress.
-----
On Tuesday, the utility Delmarva announced a 25-year contract with Bluewater Wind Delaware, a subsidiary of the Babcock & Brown, to purchase 200 megawatts of power from a wind farm that would be constructed 11.5 miles in the Atlantic off Delaware's Rehoboth Beach. First power is expected in 2012. The contract locks in the price Delmarva will pay per kilowatt-hour. Bluewater has previously built offshore energy near Denmark.The wind farm will be located in ocean waters 75 feet deep. The turbine mounts will extend 90 feet into the sea floor and 250 feet above he waterline. Each of the three blades will be 150 feet long.
-
Newt thinking on energy arousal (and domestic oil production)
"... when the American people are aroused, they can in fact coerce the Congress ..."
-- Newt Gingrich on "Energy Independence Day"
-
Select Committee hears testimony on Bush administration’s proposals for fuel economy standards
Amid a flurry of votes on energy issues in the House today, the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing on the role of automobile fuel economy as gas prices continue to increase. “Because 70 percent of oil goes into transportation, any solutions to the oil crisis must focus on the […]
-
Living on the ice shelf
This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission.
-----
Farewell to the Holocene
Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.
This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.
The London Society is the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth's history as preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the "golden spikes" of mass extinctions, speciation events, and abrupt changes in atmospheric chemistry.
In geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex, controversial art and the most bitter feud in 19th-century British science -- still known as the "Great Devonian Controversy" -- was fought over competing interpretations of homely Welsh Graywackes and English Old Red Sandstone. More recently, geologists have feuded over how to stratigraphically demarcate ice age oscillations over the last 2.8 million years. Some have never accepted that the most recent inter-glacial warm interval -- the Holocene -- should be distinguished as an "epoch" in its own right just because it encompasses the history of civilization.
