Latest Articles

Jay Leno Earth Day videos

Because I’m a video hu-a and will basically embed anything anybody sends me, I give you this from NBC:

Snippets from the news

• Airline slows down to help climate. • Wal-Mart rations rice. • Nalgene sued for downplaying health risks. • National parks and coal plants may get cozy. • Arctic ice melting faster than anticipated.

Northwest sea lions granted stay of execution

Sea lions all set to gobble their last salmon supper at a Northwest dam have been granted a stay of execution by a U.S. appeals court. Judges granted an injunction, requested by the Humane Society, that a lower court had denied last week. It’s only a partial victory for the Humane Society, however, as the […]

Thoughts on the farm bill and the skyrocketing cost of food

The rising cost of food worldwide is more complex than portrayed in recent articles in The New York Times and the Washington Post.

Like a magician revealing his secrets, the once-invisible farm and food system is drawing scrutiny from the media, policymakers, and the public as we realize how intertwined our farm and food system is with the energy sector and global markets.

But how did we get here? How did our modern, abundant, and affordable food system run aground? In a sector that is global in reach, absolutely essential (we must eat, after all), and includes the politics of saving family farms and ending hunger, there is no simple, singular answer. A lot of it has to do with economics and politics. Most of it has to do with what goes into making a box of cereal, and why we even have boxed cereal.

Are fixing the climate and the ozone layer mutually exclusive?

A geoengineering scheme to solve climate change could hurt the Antarctic ozone layer, while recovery of the ozone hole could increase Antarctic warming, new research suggests. A study published Thursday in Science decries suggestions to solve climate change by spewing sulfur into the atmosphere, saying that such a scheme would wipe out the Arctic ozone […]

Spendy mercury-free LED bulb supposedly lasts 50,000 hours

Somewhere, in school or on the job, every engineer learns about tradeoffs -- that there is no free lunch, and that, once a design is at all reasonable, gains in one dimension come at the cost of compromises in others.

The shorthand statement of this is the pithy evergreen in design classes: "Good, fast, and cheap. Pick two!"

There's a new bulb out: a 13-watt LED array bulb with an integral diffuser, so you don't see the annoying space-craft look of little tiny rows of LEDs like the first-generation LED lamps offer. It has no mercury, a boon, and lasts about five times longer than its 13-watt compact-florescent competitors, while being much faster-acting and producing a warmer light.

It costs a boatload, at least now ($90). But I still have my first compact florescent bulbs from 1989: huge, heavy ballasts, barely "compact" at all. I'll buy one of these whenever I need a new bulb and gradually switch over all the hard-to-reach spots.

An interesting video comparison with 100-watt incandescent bulbs and 13-watt compact florescent bulbs is available at the link.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane rise sharply in 2007

The news from NOAA is that all our dawdling on climate action this decade is having real impact on the atmosphere:

• Concentrations of CO2 jumped 2.4 ppm in 2007, taking us to 385 ppm (preindustrial levels hovered around 280 through 1850).
• That is an increase of 0.6 percent (or 19 billion tons). If we stay at that growth rate, we'll be at 465 ppm by 2050 -- and that assumes (improbably) that the various carbon sinks don't keep saturating (see here and here).
• Levels of methane (a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) rose last year for the first time since 1998, perhaps an early indication of thawing permafrost.

Here’s a dressing that passes muster without cutting the mustard

Now that spring is well and truly here, I can’t wait for local produce to appear in the farmers’ markets. In New England, that moment is still many weeks away, sadly, but at least now it seems possible — unlike in the winter, when the farmers’ markets I frequent show off piles of dirty snow, […]

Renewable energy standard passed in Ohio

Ohio gets 87 percent of its electricity from coal (and the rest is mostly nukes), putting it in the upper echelon of coal-using states in the nation (No. 2 behind Texas, to be precise).

And that, friends, is about to change, because yesterday the Ohio Legislature passed a renewable energy standard requiring utilities to provide 12.5 percent of Ohio's electricity from clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar by 2025. This bill has a solar-specific requirement that will result in about 594 MW of solar in the Buckeye State. Not too shabby! Kudos to Environment Ohio and the thousands of other activists that worked hard to make it happen.

Next, the bill lands on Gov. Strickland's desk. If you like, take a moment to email the governor to thank him for making clean energy a top priority and encourage him to take the final step of signing this bill into law.

Green groups announce support for Senate campaigns

A coalition of large green groups has pledged to support Mark Udall, Tom Udall, and Jeanne Shaheen in their campaigns to become senators in 2008. Colorado Representative Mark Udall and his cousin, New Mexico Representative Tom Udall, will run for Senate seats in their respective states; Shaheen is the former governor of New Hampshire, and […]