Latest Articles
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Make Our Green Day
Spare a little cash for your favorite eco-news site? Bravo on making it through another week. But have you made it through without succumbing to our sweet pleas for financial support? We count on you, dearest readers, to support our nonprofit butts. And we love you so much we’re offering fabulous prizes to those who […]
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Maybe Anne-Sophie Muttered
Tree used for violin bows gets U.N. protection, others slip through the cracks A threatened tree species used in high-quality violin bows gained new protections yesterday — and so did the violin bows. The U.N.’s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species added brazilwood to the list of nearly 40,000 species it regulates. Originally, the […]
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Find ITT on eBay
Ecuador offers to keep oil in the ground for compensation Ecuador offered to play “Let’s Make a Deal” this week, suggesting that it could afford to keep a pristine area from oil drilling if developed nations and green groups ponied up some cold, hard cash. “We are willing to do this sacrifice, but not for […]
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Sea Vous Plait
Study says Europe’s seas in trouble from fishing, farming, other threats In case you think Europe does everything right, a study shows that the continent’s seas are in sea-rious trouble. More than 100 scientists in 15 countries surveyed the Baltic, Black, and Mediterranean seas and the North Atlantic, finding that fishing, farming, shipping, and development […]
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A Jury Of Your Pyrrhus
G8 climate deal is failure or triumph, depending whom you ask Welcome to another installment of “Days of Our G8 Lives.” Yesterday, the G8 agreed to a climate deal it’s been fine-tuning for weeks. It notably did not commit to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s goal of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions 50 percent by 2050, but it […]
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Lots of fruits and bread in Sicily; lots of junk in North Carolina
There is a fascinating photo essay over on Time magazine's website. Using a format similar to that used by photojournalists who have posed families in front of their entire household possessions, this one shows what a few families around the world typically purchase to eat over the course of a week.
Not exactly a scientific survey, but revealing nonetheless.
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I’M IN UR PLANET, GETTIN ALL HOT N BOTHERED
Things that global warming is responsible for: Melting glaciers, skinny polar bears, disappearing coastlines, and rampant kitty sex. That’s right. We’re seeing an increase in hot pussy action as global warming gets America’s cats all hot and bothered. Climate change is expanding the kitty mating season and creating — you guessed it — more baby […]
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Wisdom from the heart of coal country
It's not news when I criticize Congress's proposals to subsidize coal-to-liquids (CTL). After all, my focus is avoiding serious global warming, which CTL would only make more likely.
But when two newspapers from traditional coal regions say "no" to CTL, that is a man-bites-dog story.
The Kentucky Herald-Leader has a great headline:
Liquid coal a new version of snake oil: Don't subsidize energy plans that would worsen global warming.
The Roanoke Times of the coal-region of Southwestern Virginia has an equally strong headline:
Billion-dollar boondoggle: Coal-to-liquid technology is expensive, harmful to the environment and inefficient. The federal government should take no part in subsidizing it.
Wisdom in the media on these issues is rare. Kudos to both papers for putting the long-term national interest above short-term local interests.
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Color me unimpressed
You can color me unimpressed by the big news today in the Globe and Mail: Quebec just became the first Canadian province to pass a carbon tax. For one thing, the tax is tiny, just 0.8 cents per liter of gasoline, and at comparably low levels on natural gas and diesel. (For non-metricized Americans, that's 3 cents per gallon.) So that makes Quebec's new approach not quite as aggressive as -- to pick just one example at random -- Idaho's 5 cent per gallon increase circa 1996.
Now in fairness to Quebec, the new carbon tax revenue, which weighs in at about $200 million, will be spent on seeking greenhouse gas reductions. That's a big improvement over previous gas taxes in the States, where the money normally gets shoveled back into roads.
Strangely, however, Quebec's government seems intent on preventing the tax from actually influencing consumer behavior. To wit:
Natural Resources Minister Claude Béchard called on the oil companies to be good corporate citizens and do their share to protect the environment by absorbing the cost of the new tax. "We call on their good faith and social responsibility."
Wait, what?
