Latest Articles

Whose Fault Is It, Anyway?

Carmakers, nuclear plant halt operations after Japan quake Aftershocks from Monday’s earthquake in Japan continue to be felt — and not the kind that shake the ground. Yesterday, officials ordered the nuclear plant that was damaged in the quake to shut down indefinitely while operators assess and fix some 53 problems discovered over the course […]

Swine By Us

Court rules against green groups, lets factory farms off the hook Some 2,600 livestock companies are participating in a sweet deal from the U.S. EPA. In exchange for paying a minimal fee and agreeing to participate in an air-quality data-collection program, factory farms can basically be exempt from Clean Air Act requirements for 30 months. […]

Use the Task Force, Dick

Members of mysterious energy task force finally revealed You might want to sit down for this: the Bush administration’s national energy policy was heavily influenced by Big Industry. Shocking, we know. In 2001, a task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney met with various entities to discuss energy policy; since then, the administration has […]

Just When You Thought It Was Safe-ish

Rush-hour steam-pipe explosion rattles Manhattan An 83-year-old underground steam pipe exploded near New York City’s Grand Central Terminal during rush hour yesterday, causing one death, more than 40 injuries, and a lot of rattled nerves. After the initial explosion — a plume as high as the Chrysler Building that onlookers compared to a volcano, the […]

It was only a matter of time

Remember when Umbra wrote about offsetting flatulence in 2005? Turns out she was ahead of her time.

The continuing quest to find something, anything to bash Gore with

People magazine reports that Al Gore’s daughter Sarah just got married, revealing in the course of the article that Chilean sea bass was served at the rehearsal dinner. In the Daily Telegraph, Australian Humane Society Rebecca Keeble writes that “only one week after Live Earth, Al Gore’s green credentials slipped.” Why? Because Chilean sea bass […]

Unsustainability in the water

Poor African countries have been selling their fishing rights to richer countries for years, and now they can neither catch enough fish for their populations nor protect their fisheries from collapsing. In today's Wall Street Journal (behind a subscriber wall), the grim state of affairs is laid out:

Wealthy countries subsidize their commercial fishermen to the tune of about $30 billion a year. Their goal is to keep their fishermen on the water. China, for example, provides $2 billion a year in fuel subsidies; the European Union and its member nations provide more than $7 billion of subsidies a year. Such policies boost the number of working boats, increase the global catch, and drive down fish prices. That makes it more difficult for fishermen in poor nations like Mauritania, who get no subsidies, to compete.

The end result: African waters are losing fish stock rapidly, with ramifications both to the economies of Africa's coastal nations and to the world's ocean ecology. Over the past three decades, the amount of fish in West African waters has declined by up to 50 percent, according to Daniel Pauly, a researcher at the University of British Columbia.

Or should that be get fast trashed?

In college I wrote my honors thesis on the connection between running and spirituality. And I like the idea of eco-running as a combining-of-passions sort of idea. Except I’m not really into combining my passions a la eco-runner Samuel, by picking up trash while I run. Because I’m training for a marathon, and I live […]

This week’s coal-sucks update

I just realized it’s been almost a week since I’ve published a coal-bashing post! This cannot stand. I’ll have to dig back a bit … ah, here we go: a new study from the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center (CEIC) concludes that investing in plug-in hybrids would be much more sensible, in terms of both […]

Shell and Nat Geo team up to create 5.4 million pieces of trash

A rant: I'm a big National Geographic dork, so it pains me to kvetch about the ton of crap that comes with each issue. Once relieved of its "recyclable" plastic baggie, the fumes usually make me want to hang it on the clothesline for a while to air out, and I would, except a zillion junky inserts would festoon the lawn (excepting the sometimes great map supplement).

But this month's garbage haul topped it all, as a promotional DVD tumbled to the kitchen floor. Called "Eureka," it's a slick nine-minute commercial for Shell Oil dressed up as a movie, complete with a Hollywood score and gauzy cinematography, wherein our hero, the troubled but lovable petroleum engineer with receding hairline, struggles mightily with the problem of how to get more precious oil out of the earth without disturbing a nearby coral reef system, and remains stumped until he looks into his heart and is given the key by a child. Really. And that's not all.