Hummer to China
At the close of last week's Congressional delegation trip to China to discuss, among other things, climate change commitments, Rep. Edward Markey had this to say about the upcoming Copenhagen talks and efforts to convince the Chinese to agree to GHG caps (as reported in the NYT): "This is going to be one of the most complex diplomatic negotiations in the history of the world." Not encouraging words. Today comes news that a Chinese manufacturer is buying Hummer from...
CONTINUE READINGSave the Tuna!
Amid concerns about the possible exhaustion of tuna stocks, Science reports on a positive step: Representatives of Western Pacific island nations last week put the finishing touches on a series of bold new measures aimed at saving the world's last great tuna stocks. Last May, the group decided to bar fishing in two huge pockets of international waters, creating the largest ever no-fishing zone. Fishing in the rest of the Western Pacific is regulated by the Western and ...
CONTINUE READINGNew and Noteworthy in the Eco-Blogosphere
For the environmental world at large, here are some noteworthy posts: Africa needs substantially scaled-up finance, technology and capacity-building to combat climate change 2009 Hurricane Names to Watch for, as Season Begins After a record-breaking 2008 hurricane season, the first storm has formed before the official June 1 start to the 2009 season. The hydrogen road rally hits the West Coast Confronting Slow Rate of Auto Technology Change Legal Risk of Build...
CONTINUE READINGNorth Korea and the Environment
Like most people, I knew that North Korea was short on food. What I didn't realize is that this is largely due to environmental degradation. According to a 2004 U.N. report,"Major crop yields fell by almost two thirds during the 1990s due to land degradation caused by loss of forest, droughts, floods and tidal waves, acidification due to over-use of chemicals, as well as shortages of fertiliser, farm machinery and oil." Strangely, despite its general pariah/rogue ...
CONTINUE READINGReturn to Chernobyl
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU5yrdofbw0&feature=player_embedded] This is from a site dedicated to developments at Chernobyl....
CONTINUE READINGNo Butts About It
The New York Times has reported on a stealth environmental crisis, one that the public has heretofore regarded as the mere detritus of a serious public health controversy. But discarded cigarette butts constitute a major environmental crisis as well, and public attention to that crisis is long overdue. In its recent story, the Times notes the omnipresent nature of discarded cigarette butts in the human environment. In the U.S., cigarette butts constitute nearly one-...
CONTINUE READINGEntropy to the Max!
I've been learning from my ERG colleague John Harte about a statistical technique called MaxEnt. For many environmental problems -- most notably climate change -- we are not only unable to provide a reliable estimate of harm, but we don't even know the shape of the probability distribution. MaxEnt is a way of constructing a curve that fits whatever we do know (such as the mean or variance of the distribution) without implicitly making any other assumptions about the ...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Refugees
The NY Times had an important article yesterday about the issue of climate refugees. Because climate change poses an existential threat to some nations and a threat to international stability elsewhere, it appears that the U.N. is inching closer to making climate change a security issue under the jurisdiction of the Security Council. Since the Security Council is the only part of the U.N. with any real teeth, this could be a very significant development in the lo...
CONTINUE READINGThe Nuclear Option
In the 1960s, when legendary environmentalist David Brower expressed his opposition to nuclear power, he exposed a rift among his Sierra Club colleagues, many of whom saw “too cheap to meter” nuclear power as the solution to air pollution problems. Brower and others focused on the danger of nuclear accidents, security issues, and the difficulty of securing high-level radioactive waste for long-term storage. The surge in nuclear power development in the 60s and 70...
CONTINUE READINGIdle Chatter
WBUR’s Here and Now radio show recently covered the story of George Pakenham, the self-named “Verdant Vigilante.” Pakenham roams the streets of New York City engaging in citizen enforcement of the city’s anti-idling law. The law, which has been on the books in various forms since 1971, prohibits idling for greater than 3 minutes (1 minute in front of schools). The problem is, according to Pakenham’s informal research, three quarters of the drivers in th...
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