If you are a regular consumer of environmental news and commentary, you are familiar with the narrative of humanity’s downfall. The story, we are told, looks like this. If we continue to ignore the danger signs while exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity, the future may get ugly. For the time being, we are on…Continue Reading…
The business journalist Marc Gunther has a really good article at the Guardian on yet another battle brewing on the GMO front. It’s about a food advocacy group’s campaign to stop McDonald’s from using new strains of a genetically modified potato, which as Gunther writes, are designed to deliver both environmental and health benefits. They…Continue Reading…
Guest post by Candace Sheppard Wind energy production in New York State is expected to double in the next five years. Photo by U.S. Department of Energy. A day after a study was released last week about wind turbines killing more than 600,000 bats in the United States in 2012, the Environment America Research Policy Center released its second report about…Continue Reading…
Guest post by Jess Scanlon Today millions of Americans gather for the traditional Thanksgiving harvest festival. At many of these celebrations the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving dinner is a roasted turkey. From an environmental standpoint, the turkey falls somewhere between chicken and eggs. A Cornell study shows it takes 14 units of fossil fuel to produce a…Continue Reading…
In 2012 Scientific American asked: Are Wind Turbines Getting More Bird and Bat-Friendly? In case you weren’t aware, wind energy has an ecological downside that’s hasn’t yet been smoothed out. As AP reporter Dina Cappiello wrote earlier this year, “the green industry is allowed to do not so green things”: It kills protected species with impunity and conceals the…Continue Reading…
Several weeks ago, this was the headline for a press release: Mayor Bloomberg announces New York City’s air quality has reached the cleanest levels in more than 50 years. That’s quite a claim. Most media outlets reporting this story cut and pasted from the press release; few bothered to delve into the report Bloomberg was…Continue Reading…
For those of us fortunate enough to be born into the right circumstances, life is good, with antibiotics, modern dentistry, vaccines, climate-controlled homes, big-screen TV’s, smart phones. The sum of this, however, is worrying to some: What is the toll to the planet, to the ecosystems that support us and the rich diversity of animals and…Continue Reading…
In a recent report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) lamented: The picture is as clear as it is disturbing: the carbon intensity of the global energy supply has barely changed in 20 years, despite successful efforts in deploying renewable energy. Another fact, noted in the IEA’s report, will disturb anyone concerned about climate change: The unremitting…Continue Reading…
Sometimes I think the climate debate remains stalled because those who are most concerned refuse to ask the pertinent questions. Instead, they keep refighting old battles that are no longer relevant to a constructive discourse. The latest example is this survey by John Cook et al that is getting a lot of undeserved attention in…Continue Reading…