Tomorrow, Friday, May 16, is Endangered Species Day. To celebrate, the Bush Administration has made the historic decision to list the polar bear as endangered while promising to do absolutely nothing substantive about it. Here is what Leda Huta, executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition, had to say about it on their Stop Extinction […]
Environment
350: The number the whole world needs to know
The problem: 350. One great solution: 350.org. 350. I should write it 350 times. We should all write it 350 times. Everyone on the earth should get out a pen, write down the number 350, and send it to their head of state. 350 times. Now let me explain. For the next two or three […]
Who needs appliances anyway?
Yesterday, we talked about whether replacing old but perfectly good and working appliances with new, more energy-efficient models made sense (see here). We crunched numbers to do with the “embodied energy” and environmental impact of the manufacture of the new appliances versus the amount of energy potentially saved. [This just in: I majorly screwed up […]
When to turf out an old appliance for the energy efficient model–The New York Times is wrong [Except that I made a big mistake in my calculations so they may be right]
[This just in on May 13: I majorly screwed up yesterday’s calculations causing the embodied energies of the steel to be over-estimated by a factor of five and therefore throwing this whole post off. Ugh. So sorry. The argument is not as straightforward as I had hoped and I will have to look into it more for the […]
Try
We need a peaceful revolution in thinking and living. The problem is that the revolutionaries are otherwise engaged. They’re delivering Fedex packages, waiting tables, driving taxis, entering data and countless other tasks–including, yes, writing books and blogs–for 12 hours a day. They’re working their butts off to afford the gas and the car payments and […]
The worst and the of best corporate efforts on climate change
Climate Counts, a non-profit that scores the commitment to reversing climate change of 56 major corporations in well-known consumer sectors–from apparel to electronics to fast food–today released their second annual company scorecard (read the full report here and the summary here). Climate Counts gives scores from 0 to 100, based on 22 criteria used to […]
Bottlemania
An excellent new book tells the story of our drinking water crisis by focusing, in particular, on the bitter dispute that erupted between the townspeople of Fryeburg, Maine, and Nestle’s Poland Spring, which wanted to bottle their water. Bottlemania, by Garbage Land author Elizabeth Royte, will be out in bookstores in the coming weeks (you […]
More species extinction means more global warming
A week or two ago, I wrote about how if environmental damage is hurting other species, it’s hurting us. I wrote about how the massive number of extinctions that are occurring–some 20 to 50% of our species are expected to be gone within 100 years–cannot occur without fundamentally weakening the planetary systems we depend upon […]