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The safety of your cosmetics

Ever since a friend of mine went to aesthetician school and started talking about the safety -- or lack thereof -- of many beauty product ingredients, I've been obsessed with purging my makeup drawer of any and all dangerous goodies.

What do you see?

Some of the very corporations once vilified by environmentalists promised to reduce by 10 million tons annually their collective output of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, the World Wildlife Fund announced. Sony, Nike, IMB, Polaroid, building-materials giant Lafarge and seven other top multinationals said they would fulfill their carbon pledge by no […]

Friggin’ Nader

… he’s going to do it again.

How to stop the burning of the rainforests

Mongabay brings more news of a plan to compensate countries that still have tropical carbon sinks to keep them. An earlier post I did on this topic can be found here. Indonesia's minister of the environment tells us:

Preserving our forest means we can't exploit it for our economic benefits. We can't build roads or mines.

Which is true. We can't just ask them not to do it.

But we make an important contribution to the world by providing oxygen.

Which isn't true. The minister of the environment appears to think that there is a global oxygen shortage. Interestingly enough, this non-existent oxygen shortage was also mentioned in this post. But then, who am I to poke fun at the ignorance of a high ranking government official when our highest-ranking one makes this guy look like a rocket scientist?

Gore to testify to Congress

Here’s a handy political rule of thumb: don’t front on John Dingell. In recent weeks, House Speaker Pelosi moved to create a special committee on global warming chaired by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.). It won’t have subpoena powers, but it will call hearings. It was a shot across Dingell’s bow, letting him know he better […]

Or just a distraction

Adam Stein of TerraPass (a major offset provider) argues in favor of offsets on the basis of additionality. (An offset is a payment by a polluter to somebody else to reduce their emissions so the polluter does not have to. Additionality is the claim that we know how much pollution would have occurred without the payment.) It's very generous of him to contribute to a discussion which will probably lead to a drop in sales of his company's product.

The key points in this argument are that a) measures of additionality are imprecise, and b) that fact matters a great deal more than the same imprecision in other methods of putting a price on carbon.

Let's examine the first point -- that additionality cannot be measured with much certainty or precision.

The scoop on the new IPCC climate-change report

What is the IPCC, and what’s the deal with its new report? When climate change emerged as an important environmental issue in the late 1980s, the world governments’ first response was to establish an international body to produce summaries of scientific knowledge of climate change. That body is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The […]

The 411 on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Unless you’ve been living under a rock — if so, way to live simply! — you’ve probably heard a smidgen about the summary of a hefty climate report released to the public today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, you’ve probably heard the acronym “IPCC” bandied about with some regularity in the […]

Readers weigh in on trusting scientists, planting trees, the Super Bowl, and more

  Re: Whereof They Speak Dear Editor: Umbra, thanks for the discussion of the scientific process. It seems a good portion of the general public does not understand the rigor of science; progress in the field relies acutely on peer review. An idea won’t make it far unless it: a) has substantial quantitative support and […]

Beijing, London, and more on the Super Bowl

Because it’s Friday, I’m going to get a little crazy and bring you the green sports news in reverse chronological order. Brace yourselves. London has released a sustainable development strategy for its 2012 Olympics hosting, and it’s being billed as the greenest games in modern times. “The prize for hosting the 2012 Games will be […]