Latest Articles
-
Move over, Big Apple.
One thing that the sustainability rankings didn't take into account was cost of living in a particular city, and perhaps rightly so. But cost of living is likely to have more of an effect on where people choose to live than any sort of sustainability ranking. And it turns out that the Big Apple, while still the most expensive city in the US, is not such a heavyweight when compared to the rest of the world's cities. In the Mercer Human Resource Consulting annual cost of living report, which you can download here, New York City ranked 13th, while Japan's top two cities, Tokyo and Osaka, grabbed the top two world slots.
-
“Africa: Up In Smoke?”
Many of the effects of global warming will fall disproportionately on those nations that
- contributed to it least, and
- are the least able to adapt to it.
-
Life in the suburbs.
At the presentations I attended last week, one of the speakers made a comment to the effect of, "everyone wants to go home to their leafy green suburbs."
Needless to say, it really jumped out at me. If everyone wants to go home to their leafy green suburbs, where does that leave cities?
Even if cities are sufficiently leafy green, there's a bigger issue here. It's about individual decision making vs. group decision making. The line of thinking often goes: while it may be fine for me to live in a city instead of a suburb, and deal with some of the resulting inconveniences or grittiness, and bike to work, and only eat (and pay extra for) local, organic food, this isn't really a reasonable thing to expect from other people. In particular, this isn't really a reasonable thing to expect from a potential mate or my offspring.
-
His critics speak.
I'm pleased to announce that ABC News' This Week has also joined the list of news outlets covering global warming. In addition to the energy bill, roundtable panelists debated climate change, in response to George Will's position that we shouldn't believe the overwhelming scientific evidence because the "same" scientists warned us in the 1970s that the next global ice age was imminent due to global cooling.
If those pesky scientists were wrong about global cooling then they got to be wrong about global warming, right? Gotta love that logic!
Fortunately, George's colleagues pointed out that mayors from around the country are taking the issue seriously (which he scoffed at), as well as major corporations.
And This Week's viewers didn't let George off the hook easily either. Let's get these people on Gristmill!
-
Al Norman, anti-Wal-Mart activist, answers questions
Al Norman. With what environmental organization are you affiliated? I’m founder of Sprawl-Busters. What does your organization do? We help community groups fight off big-box sprawl — strategize their battles, understand key objectives, and develop a game plan. What, in a perfect world, would constitute “mission accomplished”? Getting people to stop shopping at these giant […]
-
Umbra on eco-conscious fashion
Dear Umbra, I need some new clothes! But besides shopping consignment and used clothing shops and hunting through labels looking for “Made in USA” tags, are there online sources of organic- or sustainable-fabric clothes that are guaranteed sweatshop-free? I would not mind investing in some decent duds that look nice and last. Lorna VogtSalt Lake […]
-
Wind beauty
Treehugger has announced the winner of their "Beauty or Blight?" wind turbine photo contest. It's a beut. Go check it out.
-
The Piltz Effect
For those of you not sick to death of the Philip Cooney/document editing/whistleblower Piltz story, Chris Mooney has a nice wrap-up in The American Prospect. He says that Piltz may just have set real changes in motion:
What hath Rick Piltz wrought? It's too soon to tell, but there's a new feeling in the air about global warming. It's a sense that the Bush administration may finally be held to account, by the media and by Congress, for four years of obstruction and denial while a planetary problem steadily worsened.
Sounds almost like the tipping point we keep talking about. Let's hope it's not wishful thinking.
-
Storm Affront
Global warming to cause X-treme hurricanes; Sprite sponsorship in works Coming soon to our warming globe: extreme hurricanes. Research just published in the journal Science suggests that as higher temperatures draw more ocean water into the atmosphere, hurricanes and typhoons will intensify. Over the course of the 20th century, water vapor over the oceans increased […]
