By Shermakaye Bass
Green Right Now
It’s The Year of Living Dangerously all over again.
[caption id="attachment_6862" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="Orangutan (Photo: Tom Theodore/Dreamstime)"]
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On Tuesday, two journalists were arrested in Sumatra while covering a politically sensitive topic – palm oil harvesting and the ensuing decimation of Southeast Asia’s old-growth, carbon-capturing rainforests, and the subsequent release of giant CO2 pockets that lie beneath the forests and their peat swamps.
More disturbing than the reporters’ deportation, though, is how little we consumers seem to realize that, not only are we what we eat, but when it comes to palm oil, we are eating our own lifeblood. We’re ‘eating’ our oxygen, we’re ‘eating’ our fellow species. We’re consuming our own future by driving up carbon emissions much faster than we can offset them. We are the snake eating its own tail.
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Natural gas, it’s green, but in what sense?
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
Pity the American public trying to figure out where to stand on natural gas. There’s a cacophony of appeals to our patriotism, pocketbooks and desire to be eco-correct.
The latest twist comes from politicians in Congress, accompanied by oilman and clean energy trumpeter T. Boone Pickens, who are promoting big tax [...]
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Tags: · BarbaraKesslerBlog, carbon pollution, compressed natural gas, domestic fuel, Fossil Fuels, gas drilling, groundwater, Harry Reid, methane gas, natural gas, Orrin Hatch, pollution, Robert Menendez, Southern Methodist University, T.Boone Pickens, US gas
Could future cars consume, not produce, greenhouse gases?
By John DeFore
Green Right Now
File this under Sounds Too Good To Be True: Researchers using nanomaterials at Penn State are experimenting with a device that changes carbon dioxide into methane that can be used as transportation fuel.
Chronicling their experiments in the journal Nano Letters, team leader Craig Grimes describes an array of nanotubes that were coated with catalyst layers of platinum and/or copper, then stuck in a stainless steel chamber with some CO2-loaded water vapor and placed in the sun. After a few hours, the catalyst had turned some of the carbon dioxide into methane.
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Tags: · Alternative Fuel, carbon pollution, carbon recapture, Methane, nanotechnology, Penn State University
Coal protest planned for the Capitol
By Diane Porter
Green Right Now
Next Monday, in what is billed as the largest mass civil disobedience rally for the climate in U.S. history, organizers expect thousands of people to join in a protest at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C. Hoping to bring attention to the issues of climate change and green jobs to the new administration and new Congress, the protestors are expected from around the country, spurred on by support and videos from actress and activist Susan Sarandon and NASA’s James Hansen.
“We want to send a clear message to Congress and the Obama administration that Americans aren’t satisfied with the action that’s been taken on climate yet,” said Mike Crocker, a spokesperson for Greenpeace. “We need robust policies in place as soon as possible, certainly in time for (the next United Nations Climate Talks) in Copenhagen in December 2009.”
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Tags: · Capitol Power Plant, carbon pollution, Greenhouse Gases, Greenpeace, James Hansen, Pew Center for Global and Climate Change, protest, Susan Sarandon, Washington DC
