Latest Articles
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Record global glacial melt
"Record Glacier Thinning Means No Time to Waste on Agreeing New International Climate Regime," said the U.N. Environment Programme on Sunday.
That statement is based on the data of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, which "has been tracking the fate of glaciers for over a century. Continuous data series of annual mass balance, expressed as thickness change, are available for 30 reference glaciers since 1980." Here's the mean annual specific net balance:
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On the oddity of privatizing nature
Given the uncertainty accruing to traditional investments in today's economy, here's a trend to consider: the monetizing of ecosystem services. One of the first public discussions of this, the Biodiversity & Ecosystem Finance Summit taking place in New York this weekend, aims to answer this question: how can financiers and corporations take a lead in biodiversity and ecosystem conservation? (I can think of a few ways, yes.)
Welcome to the developing area of "biodiversity finance," which seeks to monetize biodiversity and ecosystem assets like wetlands, rainforests, reefs, and so forth so they can then be protected -- at a profit. Sounds spooky, right? But there are examples out there already, and not just the conservation-minded hobby ranches à la Ted Turner that we're seeing all over the Rocky Mountain West. Take this example [PDF] from Virginia, where private equity has bought the last large piece of the Great Dismal Swamp:
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EDF + CEOs: C&T A-OK
Here’s the new Environmental Defense Fund ad — on which they spent $2 million — featuring CEOs stumping for a cap-and-trade bill. Apparently the director told them: “I don’t care what you do, as long as you make some kind of hand gesture.”
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Bush aide: Slightly less than doubling of GDP is ‘recessionary’
Need more proof that Bush will never, ever, in a million gazillion years, sign a decent climate bill? Here’s what his right-hand hack Jim Connaughton had to say ($ub. req’d) about the relatively tepid Lieberman-Warner bill: James Connaughton, the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, cited EPA’s worst-case modeling projections for the […]
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In Brief
• Greens are urging the British government to clamp down on airlines that fly “ghost flights” — long-haul flights with no passengers on board. • The Maine lobster industry is seeking sustainable-seafood certification. • Conservationist Richard Leakey has given qualified support for South Africa’s plan to manage its elephant population by killing some elephants. • […]
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Protests in Tibet partially spurred by environmental resentment
Violent protests that rose this week against Chinese rule in Tibet were spurred in part by anger about environmental destruction in the Himalayas, an area that Tibetans consider sacred. A Beijing-to-Lhasa railway opened by the Chinese in 2006 has provided easy access for Chinese miners to the pristine Tibetan highlands, where they’ve begun digging up […]
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How to green your pet
Without pets, the world would be such a pale, less playful version of itself. No Wallace and Gromit videos. No Fluffy purring in our laps or Fido fetching his Frisbee. No cheerful creatures welcoming us home and adoring us unconditionally. (OK, we’d still have mom.) So we love them, there’s no getting around it. But […]
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Word
James Howard Kunstler, who has a new post-peak-oil novel out this week (World Made by Hand, which I hope to review soon) hits the nail on the head in his weekly commentary:
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Global warming could thaw relations between enviros and those who live closest to ‘the environment’
I wasn't particularly planning to continue on the culture war beat, but then, I wasn't expecting Orion Magazine to publish exactly the type of article of which I'd like to see more. In "One Nation Under Elvis," author and environmentalist Rebecca Solnit uses music -- specifically country music -- as a jumping off point to examine the cultural and class markers that divide a movement from itself.
It's become a bit trite to say that climate change isn't (or shouldn't be) a left-right issue. But political coalitions in the U.S. really did once look quite different than they do now. In the '30s, the progressive movement "saw farmers, loggers, fisheries workers, and miners as its central constituency along with longshoremen and factory workers." According to Solnit, this constituency frayed in the postwar period, and blasted apart in the 1960s:
