Latest Articles
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From Cleavage to Coasters
She’s no boob Keeley Hazell isn’t just a pretty face — she’s also pretty green. (Literally, and not-safe-for-work-ly.) The “owner of Britain’s most famous cleavage” rides a scooter, buys organic, and said nay to breast implants. Way to nip those emissions in the bud. Photo: Action Images / WireImage.com Lemon rickety: a series of fortune-ate […]
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Brown to make green
NYT has a story today about some prominent "green-tech" venture capitalists who are investing in fossil-fuel development, making them more "brown-tech."
Defense of this muddying of the green-tech profile rests on our collective worship of the profit motive ("I'm here to make the kind of green my limited partners can spend"). But what made me laugh out loud (even as my stomach was turning) was this quote by Joseph Lacob, a managing partner at Kleiner Perkins, which is investing heavily in Terralliance, an oil and gas exploration company: "If we can improve the efficiencies of the oil and gas exploration, in some ways that's a green message as well."
Please, please please tell me how expansion of oil and gas development is a "green message"?
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And They’re Off
As ministers gather in Potsdam, Germans still fuming over speed-limit idea The G8 environment ministers are spending two days in Potsdam, Germany, chewing over the world’s post-Kyoto possibilities with their developing-country counterparts. “We are going to speak about the barriers that have until now held back international climate-change negotiations and how to break them,” said […]
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Sequester Requester
Coal sequestration a near-future necessity; one utility gets a jump start If coal’s going to be viable in an emissions-regulated future, we need to hurry up and learn the how-tos of carbon sequestration, says a new study from MIT. The U.S. should take the lead and fund three to five emissions-burying demo projects within the […]
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Turnip Out is Fair Play
FDA issues voluntary produce-safety guidelines If you’ve shied away from spinach since last year’s widespread E. coli outbreak, this should give you comfort: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued voluntary guidelines this week to help keep fresh-cut produce safe. What, the “voluntary” part gives you pause? Pshaw. Pointing out that voluntary guidelines for production […]
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Cap-and-trade has ugly local effects
Because there is always a short end of the cap-and-trade stick, the concern about concentrating emissions is not theoretical:
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Defense in the NYT
A letter to the editor in today’s NYT: Discussions and action on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions anywhere and everywhere in the world are hugely important. But when referring to electricity and natural gas use at Mr. Gore’s Tennessee home, it’s unreasonable to contrast them with use in an “average” American home. Obviously anyone […]
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Before and after shots of mountaintop-removal in Google Earth.
Back in January, Grist's InterActivist column featured John Amos, the head of SkyTruth. SkyTruth uses satellite photos and digital mapping technologies to reveal what is difficult to see from the highway: just how exactly we're changing our planet. Seeing a clearcut or a mine from a bird's-eye perspective often adds a visceral dimension to an otherwise rather abstract-seeming issue.
One especially useful application for this sort of imagery: showing the extent of the havoc wrought by companies doing mountaintop-removal mining. Recently a coalition of Appalachian grassroots organizations, ILoveMountains.org, released a series of overlays for Google Earth showing "before" and "after" landscapes in several heavily-mined regions.
What really boggles my brain is that some of the mine footprints are visible in a view of the entire eastern half of the United States.
The Google Earth file is available here. A tutorial on how to download and use Google Earth to view the overlays is here.
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