It’s The Year of Living Dangerously all over again.
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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.
So often politicians obscure their message with caveats, euphemisms and wonky references to elaborately named legislation.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) took the conversation a different direction yesterday when speaking to student activists assembled for an online teleconference Tuesday night sponsored by Consequence09.org.
If you worked a four-day work week, you’d be gearing up to knock off about now, as I write this on a Thursday.
Of course you wouldn’t know I was writing this, because you’d be so darn productive during your four-day work week that you’d never crack a peek at anything on the Internet beyond your work-related reading.
Even if you weren’t loyally plowing away at your desk, you’d still be statistically more likely to read this at home, because you’d be home more. (And if you used your new-found at-home time away from home, well, that’s none of our business now is it?)
Let’s just say that a four-day workweek — whether it was composed of four 8-hour days or four 10-hour days — would provide more leisure time, potentially a very good thing for stressed out Americans with their comparatively higher rates heart disease and health issues. This, in itself, would be enough justification to consider a shorter workweek.
Palm Oil, an ingredient found in most processed food, has been the subject of much environmental debate in recent years over its role in deforestation. It is commonly found in cooking oil and as an ingredient in cosmetics, soaps, detergents, and some plastics. Palm oil also has been considered for use in the production of biodiesel.
There have been many attempts to make palm oil sustainable. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was even established in 2003 to do just that. Unfortunately, six years later, there is still no system that can effectively trace palm oil beyond the processor to the plantation level. Companies that manufacture products using palm oil have little way of knowing where the controversial substance originated — which leaves the question of whether and to what degree palm oil is sustainably farmed up in the air.
You can debate whether certain off-road vehicle incursions into wild areas are eco-friendly, but you can’t really argue with Polaris’s decision to make a greener All-Terrain Vehicle.
The new RANGER EV, a side-by-side that operates on a battery pack, trumps gas-fueled ATVs when it comes to cleaning up emissions.
And, Polaris reports in a news release, the vehicle has the longest range of any electric midsize vehicle (50 miles), which at top speed (25 mph) would provide two hours of riding time between charges.
It is also cheaper to operate, costing an estimated 3 cents per mile to run compared to 9 cents per mile for a comparable gas vehicle, according to Polaris.
Americans may be dopes about a lot of things, but they recognize a good shopping deal when it comes their way.
Given the opportunity to receive thousands of dollars to jettison their rusted out, gas-hog cars, they said yes. In fact, they googled the nearest dealership and ran off to trade in those pick-ups and sport vehicles, apparently sucking up nearly all of the $1 billion set aside for the Cash for Clunkers program in a mere two weeks.
San Francisco-based Wells Fargo said this past week that its business customers have made enough deposits on via the Internet that they surpassed $1 trillion during the year’s second quarter.
As of May 1, Wells Fargo business customers – excluding those from the former Wachovia Corporation – had electronically deposited 468 million-plus checks worth $1,003,355,000, according to a news release.
Prince Charles launched a new Internet initiative The Prince’s Rainforest Project Campaign at the National Geographic’s store in London on Tuesday. The Prince also released a webcast drawing attention to deforestation.
The Prince attended a showing of a 90 second public awareness film. Celebrities such as Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig, and the Dalai Lama joined Prince Charles and his sons Princes William and Harry to raise awareness of the organization and the loss of tropical rainforests.
Environmentalists, community activists and some state legislators are calling for a temporary moratorium on coal plants in Texas, where 12 coal-fired power plants are proposed.
The opponents gathered at the capitol in Austin today, saying that halting construction of the plants would help fight climate change and protect the health of local communities by cutting out coal’s toxic wastes and emissions, according to advocacy group Public Citizen.
“The evidence is now abundantly clear: Climate change is already affecting Texans and impacts will only increase in severity if we fail to act quickly. Texas already leads the nation in global warming gases. If we were our own country, Texas would rank eighth in the world among carbon emitters,” said Tom “Smitty” Smith, director of Public Citizen’s Texas office, in a press release.
Scientists have been studying a certain type of rock as a potential way to soak up carbon emissions. These ultramafic rocks, found in the United States, the Middle East and other locations, naturally react with carbon dioxide over thousands of years, turning the gas into solid minerals.
Geologists are exploring ways to exploit this natural tendency of the rock, and hurry it up a bit to help clean our carbon-addled atmosphere. The researchers include Columbia University graduate student Sam Krevor (and colleagues) who recently mapped the ultramafic rocks in the United States for his doctoral dissertation. The map shows a bounty of rock that they say could be enough to stash more than 500 years of U.S. CO2 production. That’s carbon scrubbing on an unheard-of scale.
Seeking to show that proposed new U.S. coal plants would exact a high environmental toll even beyond their carbon air pollution, the Natural Resources Defense Council issued a list today of the states that would bear the greatest burden from coal waste.
Texas, with eight proposed plants, topped the NRDC’s “Filthy 15″ list. It was followed by South Dakota, Florida, Nevada and Montana, Illinois, South Carolina, Ohio, Wyoming, Michigan, Kentucky, Missouri , Wisconsin, Georgia and West Virginia.
Those states have 54 proposed coal plants awaiting permitting. Across the nation, there are 80 proposed plants that would dump an estimated 18 million tons of dangerous coal combustion waste annually into various dump sites, largely unmonitored by the federal government.
Most of us would love to find a car that got 75 miles per gallon. 150 mpg would make us think we’d died and gone to high-efficiency heaven. But thousands of miles per gallon?
That’s the goal of a group of students at Halifax, Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University, who have already cruised hundreds of miles on a single gallon of juice. Of course, they’re not driving sedans: The mechanical engineering team led by Matthew Harding have built sleek, Kevlar-coated shells that can barely carry a full-sized human being, much less two sacks of groceries and a car seat for your kid.
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