Latest Articles
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Not your father’s backyard garden
Is there an urban, suburban, or peri-urban garden in your community, where you can sustainably produce or buy fresh local produce? Well, I think there should be, and I'm not alone.
As part of my interest in "eating local," I have embarked on a mission to try to increase the amount of sustainable agriculture in my own neighborhood. Since I live on an island (admittedly a rather large one called Long Island), I would include the whole thing as my neighborhood, but the west end has already got a big head-start and the east end hasn't yet become as "well developed," so I'm going to concentrate a little narrower and stick to my home county, Nassau.
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Demanding action on elementary school below coal slurry pond
Gristmill readers have heard before about Marsh Fork Elementary school, in Raleigh County, West Virginia, perched about 300 feet downhill from a massive, leaking coal refuse dam holding back billions of gallons of toxic coal slurry (click below the fold for a picture). As we speak, a group of about 60 activists has occupied the […]
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Facts alone will never cut it
I want to tear my %$#@! hair out. On Wed. night in New York City, there was a formal debate. At issue was the statement, "global warming is not a crisis." David Biello sets the scene: Arguing for the motion were the folksy (and tall) Michael Crichton, the soft-spoken Richard Lindzen and the passionate Philip […]
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But aren’t those things mutually exclusive?
A hopeful Friday note: a significant downloadable report (PDF) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. It was just brought to my attention, but it's from 2004. Its message bears repeating: energy efficiency/technologies have the potential to dramatically reduce energy use while supporting economic growth.
This European agency estimates that the E.U. could accommodate a 65 percent increase in energy services by 2050, yet simultaneously use two-thirds less energy than today. In the U.S., the estimate is that we could reduce energy demand to one-sixth of our use today through more efficient technologies.
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NRDC report on military and sea habitats
The interplay between the U.S. military and the environment is fascinating. On land, many military policies have actually been beneficial to the environment -- the military has been a good steward of many endangered habitats.
Out at sea, the reality is not quite as good. The sonar systems employed by the Navy are increasingly implicated as a source of major damage to marine mammals from whales to dolphins, as this new NRDC piece outlines. This issue will continue to heat up and should be watched closely.
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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 […]
