New York Times

How bad? More than bad enough

Earlier today, Dan asked “How bad is the spill?” He quoted a New York Times story which suggested that concerns about the spill were overblown. Not so fast. Probably the only thing we can say with confidence right now is that it’s still too early to tell exactly how much environmental or economic damage the …

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New York Times Expands Its Green Blog

The New York Times announced yesterday that it’s changing the name of its environmental blog and expanding its coverage. The name change is small but symbolic:  from Green, Inc. to Green.  The reason for the change is that coverage is expanding. As the Times explains, Green is: broadening our lens to include not just the business …

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Birthing Respect

I was a whale lawyer for years (or, more correctly, a lawyer for people working to protect whales and their habitat).  I therefore can’t resist the urge to link to this terrific piece in the NY Times magazine on the developing relationship between gray whales and their human fans in Laguna San Ignacio, one of the few remaining gray …

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The 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 …

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“Nature,” not nature, makes us happier

Yale professor of psychology Paul Bloom published an essay this week in the New York Times Magazine arguing that the pleasure that “real natural habitats” provide to humans is a significant argument for “preservation” of these habitats.  The essay was deeply unsatisfying to me, as it avoided all the hard questions that anyone grappling with the …

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Customer Impacts From Waxman’s Cap & Trade? Let’s Not Exaggerate

In Wednesday’s New York Times, Felicia Barringer reports on pocketbook concerns related to the Waxman-Markey carbon cap and trade proposal as expressed by parishioners at St. Louis’ Greater Mount Carmel Baptist Church.  The article contains the following statement, attributed to a representative from the local electric utility: “Jaime Haro, Ameren UE’s director of asset management …

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New York City prepares for climate change’s impacts

New York City’s climate change task force report was released today.  This report, which discusses how climate change will affect the city’s infrastructure and residents, has attracted some media attention.  Notably, the New York Times has an article on the report.   This is important, given how little attention the impacts of climate change on cities’ infrastructure have received to …

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The future of coal-fired electric power

Tomorrow’s New York Times has an interesting article on the future of coal-fired electric power in the United States. Coal is responsible for fully 20% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.  “Clean coal,” meaning coal plants that result in no net emissions of carbon dioxide,  would be possible only …

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Dust Bowl Redux

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqiblXFlZuk]According to a story in Tuesday’s New York Times: The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, projects that if carbon dioxide concentrations peak at 600 ppm, several regions of the world — including southwestern North America, the Mediterranean and southern Africa — will face major droughts as bad or …

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