Latest Articles
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Green Living and Paper or Plastic give shoppers cause — and pause
Food for thought. I found out not too long ago that I am a LOHAS. Or, I should say, I found out that a gaggle of people I’ve never met think I am a LOHAS. These initials, as you may well know, stand for “lifestyles of health and sustainability.” We LOHAS shoppers are, according to […]
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The question of whether to buy locally grown food is not as clear as it might appear.
When shopping for food, how important is it to buy local? This question isn't rhetorical: I no longer know quite what to think about this. Obviously, transporting food long distances requires fossil fuels and creates air pollution, among other ills. So all else being equal, it's better to buy local. But how much better, I'm just not sure.
Studies such as this one (reported on here by the BBC, blogged about here) suggest that, in terms of net environmental impact, it's even more important to buy local than to buy organic. The authors of the study didn't look at human health issues, but did attempt to quantify all sorts of environmental "externalities" -- i.e., costs not borne by the consumer -- resulting from food production. And they found that transportating food was far and away the largest component of external environmental costs. In other words, the closer to home the food is grown, the better it is for the planet.
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Arid Extra Dry
Desertification will be big bummer for hundreds of thousands worldwide Hundreds of thousands of people — some of them the world’s poorest — will be displaced in the next 30 years as the globe’s deserts expand, according to the latest report from the U.N.’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Climate change is likely to intensify droughts, heat […]
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Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Obrador’s Heaven
Ambitious new bus rapid-transit system hits the road in Mexico City Mexico City mayor and popular presidential hopeful Andrés Manuel López Obrador hopes to clear some of his city’s legendary smog and gridlock with an ambitious pilot transport project — a bus system with a hint o’ subway. Eighty new low-emission Volvo jumbo buses have […]
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We Love to Fly, and It Blows
British aviation industry promises to do better at curbing emissions Stung by new revelations that it is failing to meet its targeted reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, the European Union is looking around for new scapego… er, strategies. Of late, its bureaucratic gaze has fallen upon the aviation industry, with visions of fuel taxes dancing in […]
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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!
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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 […]
