Basically, a carbon offset is something you buy, or invest in, to counterbalance your own personal negative environmental impact, or carbon footprint, on the world. Most carbon offsets fall into one of these 4 categories:
Reforestation (planting trees)
Energy efficiency and conservation (using less fossil-fueled power)
Renewable energy (energy that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels at all)
Methane capture (helps prevent evil methane from entering the atmosphere)
It used to be so final: flush the toilet, and waste be gone.
But on Nov. 30, for millions of people here in Orange County, pulling the lever will be the start of a long, intense process to purify the sewage into drinking water — after a hard scrubbing with filters, screens, chemicals and ultraviolet light and the passage of time underground.
4. 10 Solutions for Climate Change from Scientific American
Forego Fossil Fuels; Infrastructure Upgrade; Move Closer to Work; Consume Less; Be Efficient; Eat Smart, Go Vegetarian?; Stop Cutting Down Trees; Unplug; One Child; Future Fuels
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has souped up its Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize Competition, offering $260,000 worth of prizes. The MIT $100K Business Plan Competition and the Ignite Clean Energy competition have joined forces and are working with the Department of Energy and Massachusetts energy company NStar. The DOE and NStar have each ponied up $100,000 for the competition’s grand prize.
Photoclima, a new photography book project produced by Greenpeace Spain, is a call to action for countries globally to examine and address the impact of global warming and climate change both locally and internationally. Photoclima features the eye-opening photographs of Pedro Armestre and Mario Gómez as a means to highlight the varied topography and rich landscape of Spain’s agricultural, coastal resort, and national park ecosystems. The beauty of the book’s images is subverted by a series of before and after photomontage shots of regions that might be impacted by catastrophic environmental alterations.
Snow plows are making their way down the national highway in the West African country of Mauritania. But they aren’t clearing snow; they’re clearing sand.
Mauritania is getting buried under sand as Saharan dunes shift 3 to 4 km (2 to 3 miles) per year. Whole houses have been consumed, and entire cities have been abandoned.
Part of the long tradition of sending your kids back to the old country when they are being naughty.
From the Times UK:
Scores of British school children are being sent away to take their GCSEs in Ghana, exchanging truancy and gang culture for traditional teaching and strong discipline, including the cane.
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For the parents it is a chance to save their children from the thuggery that has seen 21 teenagers shot or stabbed to death in London alone this year. Abena and three other British pupils at her school now believe they are receiving a rigorous education that was lacking in Britain.
“When your friends know that you’ve gone to Ghana they know that you’re going to get straightened up,” said Sienam, 17, from Edgware, north London, who has been at school in Accra for three years.
The Forest Ministry of Indonesia announces plans to plant 79 million trees in anticipation of a conference on global climate change in December. The move is part of a United Nations campaign to plant a billion trees around the world. Indonesia has been criticized for its failure to stem deforestation.
Universities across China are buzzing with green activity, says Peng Li. From book swaps and fashion shows, to climate conferences and the Live Earth concerts, student green groups are leading the way.
THE heinously overcrowded patch of delta that is Bangladesh found itself in a painful and familiar position on Monday November 19th. The country is struggling to cope with the aftermath of a natural calamity—in this case cyclonic winds that tore across the southern coastline four days before, killing several thousand people.
The government estimates that over 3,000 people have been killed, although many afflicted areas are still out of reach to rescuers. The Bangladeshi Red Crescent society predicts that the toll will climb above 10,000. The government also estimates that around 3m victims of the storm will need feeding and rehousing.
NEW DELHI — Eight thousand miles from Manhattan, barefoot, shirtless, whip-thin men rippled with muscle were forging prosaic pieces of the urban jigsaw puzzle: manhole covers.
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Manhole covers manufactured in India can be anywhere from 20 to 60 percent cheaper than those made in the United States, said Alfred Spada, the editor and publisher of Modern Casting magazine and the spokesman for the American Foundry Society. Workers at foundries in India are paid the equivalent of a few dollars a day, while foundry workers in the United States earn about $25 an hour.
The men making New York City’s manhole covers seemed proud of their work and pleased to be photographed doing it.
China will likely achieve-and may even exceed-its target to obtain 15 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020, according to a new report released by the Worldwatch Institute.
Acid rain and air pollution, mainly from the burning of coal, have contributed to the degradation of more than 80 percent of China’s 33 designated World Heritage sites, according to the Associated Press.
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But China’s rising energy demand isn’t just leaving its mark on the country’s heritage. Every 30 seconds, an infant with birth defects is born in China, according to Jiang Fan, deputy head of the country’s National Population and Family Planning Commission. The rate of birth defects nationwide has soared 40 percent in the past five years, from 105 defects per 10,000 births in 2001 to nearly 146 in 2006.
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Birth defect rates are highest in the northern province of Shanxi, an area that is also home to some of China’s richest coal resources.
Chocolate is a wonderful thing, but how can it help combat global climate change? Cacao trees — the source of chocolate — grow well in rainforests, and rainforests store carbon. So researchers are working to help preserve the forest and to grow more chocolate.
A total of 46 nations and 2.7 billion people are now at high risk of being overwhelmed by armed conflict and war because of climate change. A further 56 countries face political destabilisation, affecting another 1.2 billion individuals.
The top environmental official in the Mexico City government, Martha Delgado Peralta, said recently the city was launching a new water sustainability policy to guarantee self-sufficiency and supply for future generations. The target is ambitious — to reach self-sufficiency by 2020 — and the government faces many serious hurdles.
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The pressures on the water system are such that the city’s burgeoning population now extracts water from its aquifers more than twice as fast as they are replenished. As a result, the city is sinking on top of the aquifer that supplies it. It has fallen nearly 30 feet in the last century and drops as much as 15 inches a year in some areas.
Bona fide examples of poetic justice in politics, where the innocent are vindicated and the wicked get their just deserts, are about as rare in real life as they have been commonplace in popular culture, dating at least as far back as “The Count of Monte Cristo.” And yet to the extent that such things do occur, the political triumph of Michelle Bachelet, the current president of Chile — and the first woman in South America who can be said to have earned the title on her own merits — has been just such an event. The woman who was, as a 23-year-old medical student, briefly imprisoned along with her mother by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and whose father, Air Force Gen. Alberto Bachelet, was tortured and died in military custody in 1974, is now Chile’s chief of state — while the dictator died, his reputation in tatters, shortly after she took office.
The idea of this site is to provide proof that Africa stands for a lot more than the press – sorry folk, the U.S. press – gives it credit for. Africa’s a complicated place, a much more complex game than its highlight reel. When one concentrates on the final push, the bottom line, we’ll only see the extremes.
I pointed this out a few weeks ago: Using a simple search method at the New York Times, the terms “AIDS” + “Africa” brought back 250 stories published in the past year. What I didn’t say was that searching the terms “Africa” + “fun” returned 91 hits. (The greatest ranked section: sports!). In the same vein, searching “Africa” + “pleasure” = 69 hits, most of them in movies.
A sustainable city is the one that integrates housing, work and leisure, while preserving its history and investing in public transportation.” With this idea in mind, Jaime Lerner has turned Curitiba, capital of the Parana State in Brazil, into one of the greenest cities in the world.
Some of his ideas were to educate children on garbage separation in order for them to educate their parents, to exchange food for recovered garbage in favelas (poor settlements) in order to encourage trash separation, and to put sheep in parks for them to take care of grass and attract children.
Apparently these absurdly rich countries — with projected revenues of $658 billion this year — who are selling their product at nearly $100 a barrel, are threatening not to invest in new production unless the consuming countries promise to maintain demand. Seriously! No, seriously
There is plenty of waste in industrial processes, and the world of computer manufacturing is no exception. A prime example of this are the silicon wafers used as starting materials for the production of chips by the computing industry. Every year, roughly 3.3 million silicon wafers are sent to landfills across the world to be crushed. Of course where some see waste, others see opportunity — such as IBM, who just announced a new process to turn these silicon wafers into solar panels.
…and wins the “2007 Most Valuable Pollution Prevention Award” from The National Pollution Prevention Roundtable (NPPR) in the process.
Most psychotherapists and counselors are setting up shop as Chinese struggle with the demands of a rapidly changing society and the profession loses its stigma.
“The faster society develops, the faster people’s lives become, and the more stressed they get,” explains Che Hongsheng, dean of Beijing Normal University’s psychology faculty. “Many people feel they are losing their balance, and balance matters a lot to Chinese.”
So Al Gore is now a partner at Kleiner-Perkins, the legendary venture-capital firm. And according to Fortune Magazine, he’s thinking big!
“What we are going to have to put in place is a combination of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo project, and the Marshall Plan, and scale it globally.”
But at another point in the same article, Gore says “We all believe that markets must play a central role.”
O.K. What do the Manhattan Project, Apollo project and the Marshall Plan all have in common?
The “market” was not the prime mover in their success. The federal government of the United States conceived these projects, funded them, and changed the world by executing them successfully.
Precycling is trying to reduce waste by “pre-thinking” our purchases. While recycling is, of course, a positive thing, it still requires energy to transport the materials, melt them down and then re-manufacture items. Precycling tries to avoid the amount of stuff that gets chucked into landfills AND the recycling bin to begin with.
Whaa! My grass is brown. Whaaa! As you can tell, my sympathies lie elsewhere.
Wake County, N.C., where Pericchi lives, has issued permits for more than 25 irrigation wells in the past six weeks. And local well driller Jason Poole said his company has installed dozens of them since the drought began.
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But in North Carolina, some leaders are concerned about the growing popularity of irrigation wells. The resort town of Pinehurst last month imposed a moratorium on new wells, and state officials are warning that some irrigation wells can affect local water tables.
“Putting in new wells for irrigation may affect some neighbors who are dependent on their wells — not just for irrigation, but for their ordinary complete domestic water supply,” said John Morris, the director of the North Carolina Division of Water Resources.
i first met my daughter in the lobby of the Westin Camino Real, the grandest hotel in Guatemala City. The night before, my husband Walter and I had soothed our nerves running on the treadmills in the fitness center, where a polite attendant handed us plush white towels and spritzed the equipment with a flowery disinfectant. Afterward I wrote a series of letters to our daughter. Because children adopted from overseas usually have little information about their history, parents are advised to document the trip as best they can, creating what is known as an “adoption story.”
Free Rice purports to be a vocabulary test masking as a fundraiser for the UN. Sad thing is, its actually a vocabulary test masking as an ad server, while the rice you donate does seem to go to the UN World Food Program. The real money is in the ad clicks - companies support the site, you click on their ads, they pay the website for the click. That fee is no doubt more than the cost of the 420 grains of rice you’ll earn before you realize you’ve wasted another 10 minutes of your day.
Last year, Chinese officials celebrated the completion of the Three Gorges Dam by releasing a list of 10 world records. As in: The Three Gorges is the world’s biggest dam, biggest power plant and biggest consumer of dirt, stone, concrete and steel. Ever. Even the project’s official tally of 1.13 million displaced people[emphasis added] made the list as record No. 10.
…The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s biggest man-made producer of electricity from renewable energy. Hydropower, in fact, is the centerpiece of one of China’s most praised green initiatives, a plan to rapidly expand renewable energy by 2020.
Homes spared in the wildfires in Southern California were in so-called “shelter-in-place” communities. They’re designed so fire goes around instead of through them, enabling residents to stay safely if there is no time to evacuate.
The point the [Berkeley School of Public Health] prof made was that as bad as the air is there, the particulate matter density of 200-300 micrograms per cubic meter (10x greater than average figures for US cities) is still less than the levels typically seen in biomass-burning homes in the developing world.
When it comes to finding a successful exit for your cleantech startup, good luck finding a buyer willing to pay the price you want. That was the consensus of investors at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Conference this week. The cleantech industry is too young for its M&A market to have matured, and the IPO market, for certain sectors, is offering a lot better options.
On the CDC’s Director Julie Gerberding’s testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on the “Human Impacts of Global Warming.”
“It was eviscerated,” said a CDC official, familiar with both versions, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the review process.
The official said that while it is customary for testimony to be changed in a White House review, these changes were particularly “heavy-handed,” with the document cut from its original 14 pages to four. It was six pages as presented to the Senate committee.
The White House’s deletions included “details on how many people might be adversely affected because of increased warming and the scientific basis for some of the CDC’s analysis on what kinds of diseases might be spread in a warmer climate and rising sea levels.”
China’s interest in African oil has exposed its companies to increasing risk in recent months. Separatist rebels in Ethiopia’s remote Somali region killed nine Chinese workers in a raid on an oil installation in April. Chinese oil workers have also been kidnapped in volatile southern Nigeria.
The New York Times ran an interesting but rather incomplete article yesterday, discussing the split over anti-malaria bednet distribution strategies in Africa and the apparent demise of “social marketing” as a legitimate approach to reducing illness on a large scale. The article focuses on an ongoing debate in the aid community over whether or not insecticide-treated bednets, produced by Danish and Japanese makers and purchased by aid agencies, should always be given way in mass quantities for free.
If a single African country were to incorporate the best practices that are already in place across the sub-Sahara region, it would rank eighth worldwide. This was one of the observations that business leaders made last Friday at an award ceremony for the top two African reformers – Ghana and Kenya.
The nonprofit Worldwatch Institute has released a list of 21 “mega-cities” of 8 million people or more that are in direct danger as a result of global warming and rising seas
Progressive environmental policies sometimes come from unusual places like Uganda, which banned plastic bags in July of this year because they have become so problematic for the environment.
Now local and international NGOs are helping Ugandans in a suburb of the capital city of Kampala to collect plastic bags and turn them into items like baskets, handbags, shoes and roofing tiles.
Here are my favorite environment, health, climate change, international development or country specific blog posts (and articles) for the past week in no particular order.
On the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert herders and farmers with a bitter history of fighting over dwindling resources are now working together to stop a common enemy: the desert’s increasingly rapid advance.
BP’s new chief executive, Tony Hayward, announced a major business restructuring this week that could result in the company’s clean energy initiatives getting pushed to the back burner. Calling it “a fundamental shift” in the way the oil giant does business, Hayward said BP’s gas power & renewables division would be folded into its two existing exploration and refining segments.
Al Gore may be the big name getting the Noble Peace Prize, but half of the award is going to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — or IPCC. The once obscure body is having its moment in the spotlight. Its thousands of scientists from around the globe can now say they got a piece of a Nobel Prize.
According to Greenpeace, Indonesia had the fastest pace of deforestation in the world between 2000 and 2005, with an area of forest equivalent to 300 soccer pitches disappearing each hour.
But they’re looking to turn things around and, in all reality, on their heads!
Ahead of the U.N. climate change summit being held in their native Bali this December, the Indonesian people – from the lowest to the highest in status, including the President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – will be planting a total of 79 million trees in one day!
Scheduled for November 28th, the tree planting will be part of a global initiative launched at U.N. climate change talks in Nairobi last year. The Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign has so far planted 346,469,727 trees, with a total pledge of 1,130,983,692 trees. 79 million is definitely going to help matters!
The best reason yet not to be worried about global warming: A more pleasant climate in the Arctic will make it easier for oil and gas companies to extract resources in the formerly harsh north.
That is the most delightful nugget to be mined from a front-page article in Tuesday’s New York Times by Jad Mouawad, “A Quest for Energy in the Globe’s Remote Places.” Here is a reporter for whom the glass is always half full, of fossil fuel.
It’s hardly news that war has hampered Africa’s development, but a new study by Oxfam is the first to quantify just how much the continent has lost through armed conflict. Since 1990, war has cost Africa almost $300 billion, according to the report. This is an average of $18 billion per year or 15 percent of GDP. It’s also equal to the total amount given in aid to Africa by major international donors over the same period. As the report explains, while the destruction of lives, property, infrastructure in war is expensive, the real damage is in opportunity costs:
Hot on the heels of Pitt’s latest work in New Orleans comes this new announcement that he and Steve Bing are planning a new 150-home community in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. He wants to Make It Right, in a place that gets less and less attention.
Alang, India, is the place where for the past year environmentalists have been protesting for the health of shipbreakers there, with the breaking of the 46,000 ton, 16-storey tall Norwegian cruise liner Blue Lady. Greenpeace states that the shipyard does not have the technology to safely dismantle the ship, which they estimated could contain 900 tons of toxic waste like asbestos.
I am witnessing a truly remarkable turnaround. I’m in Monrovia, Liberia, in the midst of what until recently was a horrible war zone, but is now a place of hope. Led by the indomitable President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman elected head of state in Africa, Liberia is beginning to rebound from its devastating civil war and the monstrous incompetence of Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor that nearly destroyed the country. Liberia is at peace, the economy is growing, democracy is taking root, kids are going back to school and families are being united.
Archer Daniels Midland Co. (ADM) Chief Financial Officer Doug Schmalz said Tuesday the corn and soy bean processing giant would consider buying ethanol plants now that lower prices for the fuel have been pressuring production margins. “In general, we’ll look at all opportunities including acquisitions,” Schmalz said at the Citi Biofuels Conference. “We have to have properties that will fit within our network. Some plants just wouldn’t fit; others might. We’ll analyze that as they become available.”
Check out: Ruth DeFries, University of Maryland / College Park
Ruth DeFries is an environmental geographer who uses remotely sensed satellite imagery to explore the relationship between the Earth’s vegetative cover, human modifications of the landscape, and the biochemical processes that regulate the Earth’s habitability.
The facts on sewage in this country are pretty astounding - very, very few Americans have any idea just how much raw and partially-treated sewage is spilled or legally dumped into our streams and rivers every year.
IF INDIAN newspaper reports are to be believed, the children of Punjab are in the throes of a grey revolution. Even those as young as ten are sprouting tufts of white and grey hair. Some are going blind. In Punjabi villages, children and adults are afflicted by uncommon cancers.
The reason is massive and unregulated use of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals in India’s most intensively farmed state. According to an environmental report by Punjab’s government, the modest-sized state accounts for 17% of India’s total pesticide use. The state’s water, people, animals, milk and agricultural produce are all poisoned with the stuff.
Rising seas, an inevitable result of global warming, will almost certainly inundate those important historical sites located along coastlines. And at this point, there’s very little to be done about it.
The People of Nueva Linda from Mi Mundo
A lovely photo spread of the “men and women from the southern coast [of Guatemala] who continue their struggle against impunity.”
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sweeping assertions and rumors swirled as violently as the storm. PM heads to New Orleans to investigate what went wrong, what went right and what we can do better next time.
The overriding goal of author Ricardo Cantú in his delightfully titled “Ethanolomics: The Think-About’s of the Mexican Ethanol Project” is to devise a strategy for improving the living standards of the rural poor in Mexico via an invigoration of the agricultural economy, without committing the major sin of inducing price hikes in food staples that will hurt the urban poor.
Meles Zenawi, prime minister of Ethiopia, laid out the, ahem, inconvenient truth: That countries like his suffer because of what countries like ours have done, and that a world-wide cap-and-trade treaty would have to allow countries like Ethiopia to sell carbon allocations to countries like the United States.
He says the funds would be used to invest in green energy. Of course, they could also end up spent on Ethiopia’s continuing quest to take over Somalia, so, it seems, there would have to be some oversight here.
With a push from the United Nations “Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign”, designed to encourage tree planting around the world, Cuba has committed to plant some 135 million trees this year.
California’s Department of Fish and Game has begun poisoning Lake Davis, near the small Sierra Nevada community of Portola. The move targets the northern pike, an invasive species — but the gallons of poison will kill many other fish, as well.
Americans responding to a survey by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) seems not to be aware just how much their buildings contribute to global warming via the emission of greenhouse gases. In the US buildings consume 71% of power plant electricity and are responsible for 48% of the countries GHG emissions. But survey respondents placed them down near the same level as aerosol cans (1%), with only seven percent correctly pointing the finger at buildings as the biggest, baddest cause of emissions. Most (40%) thought it was cars and trucks, while others blamed power plants (19%) or natural causes (15%), with (18% not willing to take a stab at the question.
Shopping at Whole Foods (a.k.a. Whole Paycheck) can break the bank, so what foods can you get away with buying in the non-organic form and which can you not?
Most forests in the Amazon River basin grew greener in 2005 even as a potent drought caused the waterways in the region to shrivel to a 100-year low, scientists said in a paper published in the online journal ScienceExpress.
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The greening in the face of intense drought implies that Amazonian trees are resilient, at least in the short term, to big rainfall changes.
Since the collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River bridge on August 1st, there have been many stories about repair and maintenance of infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, etc.). This is a time lapse video of the replacement of a segment of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge’s upper deck.
According to a new study from the Center for Sustainable Transport, or CTS, by 2015, 27 Mexican cities will have more than 750,000 inhabitants each and their current car-based transportation models will be inefficient and unable to handle a major increase in vehicle traffic. The report urged medium-sized Mexican cities like Querétaro, Torreón, Poza Rica, Tampico, Cuernavaca, Morelia and Celaya to undertake their own massive public transport projects like those in Mexico City and Guadalajara.
When it comes to chicken, Europeans seem to only like the breast. The rest of the chicken is almost impossible to sell and ends up being exported at dumping prices. But farmers in Cameroon are refusing to be the victims of globalization, they have fought the import of European chicken legs — and won.
This is a great story of solid detective work, inspired grass-roots organizing, clever marketing and a firm grasp of what the political situation would allow.
What is equally fascinating about this article is where different animal parts end up.
Once one of the [”Ross 708″] chickens is ready for slaughter, it is killed, cut into pieces, packaged and sold, and its limbs are then shipped around the world. Its feet end up in Thailand, the innards in the former Soviet Union, the wings in China and the legs in Japan, Mexico — and Africa.
[In the recent Guatemalan elections, Rigoberta Menchú (winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize and first indigenous presidential candidate)]finished sixth in a field of 14, according to results released Monday, with just 3 percent of the vote. The two front-runners, Álvaro Colom and Otto Pérez Molina, will compete in a runoff on Nov. 4.
Why Ms. Menchú fared so poorly is as complex as the Mayans themselves.
BTW: Hurray that NYT dropped its Times Select malarkey.
The World Bank and the United Nations announced Monday that they were setting up a system to help developing nations recover assets stolen and sent abroad by corrupt leaders that amount to an estimated $40 billion a year.
“There should be no safe haven for those who steal from the poor,” Robert B. Zoellick, the bank’s president, said in presenting the plan with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
Visitors to the two Bay Area Maker Faires will remember the amazing supercomputing cluster made from recycled PCs running on a veggie oil-fueled generator, and Silicon Death Valley, a fun cemetery of computer industry cast-offs. Those were the work of the good people at the Alameda County Computer Recycling Resource Center, a fantastic Berkeley, California-based non-profit group that recycles anything that plugs into the wall.
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Now though, the ACCRC is in trouble. The Department of Toxic Substance Control of the California Environmental Protection Agency has issued the ACCRC a violation that could make it very hard for the group to stay in business. And, quite frankly, that’s a damned shame.
Given the opportunity last month to adhere to the Supreme Court’s findings in the case of Massachusetts vs. EPA, the EPA chose instead to completely ignore the ruling and proceed as if the case had never been heard. It issued a permit to Deseret Power to construct a 110-megawatt coal-fired power unit at an existing power plant in Uintah County, Utah.
Here are my favorite environment, health, climate change, international development or country specific blog posts (and articles) for the past week in no particular order.
Tuvalu’s main island of Funafati. 10 centimeters above sea level. Photo from Der Spiegel
The tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu is urging the rest of the world to do more to combat global warming, before the island-state sinks beneath the ocean’s lapping waves.
Related: Very good NPR piece on their lone envoy’s plea to the UN and the world on his country’s behalf.
American parents cradle their new babies in cotton blankets and feed them bottles of formula. They clog the lobby of the Marriott Hotel in Guatemala City with strollers. Penny Conner, from Medfield, Mass., says she cannot wait to bring her 9-month-old boy home. It’s a joyous scene: Guatemala is one of the most popular places to adopt for American families – second only to China.
But across town, Angelica Lopez cries and can’t stop. A year ago, three women kidnapped her 2-month-old baby daughter, she says. Her story is the underbelly of the country’s multimillion-dollar adoption industry.
Whether you consider genetically modified papaya to be a fruit of Satan or salvation from a dreaded papaya-annihilating virus, it’s hard not to chuckle at reports of what transpired at a Greenpeace-organized protest in Bangkok, Thailand, earlier this week.
In 1610, Galileo Galilei published a small book describing astronomical observations that he had made of the skies above Padua. His homemade telescopes had less magnifying and resolving power than most beginners’ telescopes sold today, yet with them he made astonishing discoveries: that the moon has mountains and other topographical features; that Jupiter is orbited by satellites, which he called planets; and that the Milky Way is made up of individual stars. It may seem strange that this last observation could have surprised anyone, but in Galileo’s time people assumed that the Milky Way must be some kind of continuous substance. It truly resembled a streak of spilled liquid—our word “galaxy” comes from the Greek for milk—and it was so bright that it cast shadows on the ground (as did Jupiter and Venus). Today, by contrast, most Americans are unable to see the Milky Way in the sky above the place where they live, and those who can see it are sometimes baffled by its name.
Interesting tidbit:
The [International Dark-Sky Association] also has members in seventy-eight foreign countries, including Iraq and Iran, where astronomy is a popular hobby, especially among girls and young women. Authorities in Sa’adat-shahr, about four hundred miles south of Tehran, periodically cut off all electric power in the town in order to improve visibility at nighttime “star parties” conducted by a local teacher.
Pipeline bombs: Mexico’s gas infrastructure comes under attack from The Economist
A series of attacks on September 10th on Mexico’s natural-gas pipelines have dealt the country a triple blow: they have crippled affected businesses, caused losses to the state oil company Petróleos Mexicanos and hurt the government of President Felipe Calderón. Concern about the vulnerability of Mexico’s infrastructure and its vital oil and gas industry is likely to increase as a result. The incidents also suggest that Mr Calderón, who has proven to be more effective in his early months in office than had been anticipated, still faces considerable challenges from both within and outside the political system.
In the face of a mounting water crisis, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh outlined his plan for water conservation at a national groundwater conference in Delhi on Tuesday, stating that instead of economic and commercial subsidies, a price should be put on water usage. At the same time, he urged all local governments to come up with effective strategies to popularize rain-harvesting and to engage in maintaining traditional reservoirs through more sustainable means. [Emphasis added]
In a unique environmental scheme, Ecuador’s government is asking developed nations to pay $350 million for them NOT to drill for oil in a major field in the heart of the Amazon. The sum represents about half of the estimated revenue that Ecuador would receive from drilling in the Yasuni National Park, a UNESCO-designated biosphere reserve that may contain up to a billion barrels of crude. Since Ecuador proposed the scheme last spring, politicians from Germany, Norway, Italy, Spain, and the EU have expressed interest, according to Ecuador’s minister of energy.
Take an early morning walk by the shore. You’re guaranteed to see something interesting: a coconut from some far away beach. Shells. Maybe even the proverbial message in a bottle.
More likely, though, you’ll see trash — lots of it. Our oceans have become the Earth’s biggest dumping ground. Take the North Pacific Gyre, a vast whirlpool of mostly plastic trash spinning endlessly in the currents. This plastic is mistaken for food by marine animals, with fatal results. Fish and dolphins become entrapped in cast-off nets and fishing lines. It’s a slow-motion environmental disaster.
But you can help. Grab a bag and let’s head to the shore.
Here are my favorite environment, health, climate change, international development or country specific blog posts (and articles) for the past week in no particular order.
Brazil’s most hotly contested public conflicts today are often about water.
President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva says hydro-electric energy is a sine qua non for the development of South America’s biggest economy. But environmental and indigenous groups increasingly oppose massive engineering projects.
Up to 170 billion cubic meters of natural gas are “flared” by the world’s oil producers every year. The economic value amounts to $40 billion, but the burden on the earth’s atmosphere — in warming emissions like methane and carbon dioxide — is enormous.
EFFORTS to raise awareness of global warming take many forms. On Saturday August 18th Greenpeace launched its latest stunt to sway doubters that a heating planet is generally a bad thing. The environmental group co-opted Spencer Tunick, an artist renowned for his photographs of rolling acres of nude men and women, to repeat his trick on a Swiss glacier. But art and protest do not always make for happy bedfellows—crude polemic and subtle imagery often jar. Perhaps a bigger concern for the activists is that these days the naked form has lost much of its power to shock.
Indian software firm Wipro plans to open a big software design center in Atlanta. The Bangalore, India-based firm expects to hire around 500 computer programmers in the next three years. It’s a curious turnabout from the much more familiar story: a U.S. software company creating jobs in India.
Also of interest: A small globalization backlash from Managing Globalization
Netflix and some other companies are moving their call centers back to the U.S.
Shrimp farming is one of the major reasons why mangrove forests around the world are dying out, particularly in Asia. So what? Well, mangroves, which are concentrated in tropical and subtropical latitudes between 32º N and 38º S, offer protection from extreme weather events such as the tsunami that did so much damage in Southeast Asia back in 2004.
A battle heating up at the European Commission seems to pose a very stark choice. The trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, wants to eliminate duties on Chinese low-energy lightbulbs, as Stephen Castle writes. But others on the commission say jobs will be lost in European factories that can’t compete with Chinese prices. Is this really a zero-sum game?
During El Salvador’s bloody civil war in the 1980s, one-sixth of the population fled the country. Most of the emigrants ended up in the United States. The money sent back by those emigrants accounts for 66 percent of El Salvador’s foreign exchange.
That much has been well-reported. But here’s the odd thing: the regions of El Salvador that receive the most remittances are the also experiencing significant reforestation.
HSBC – one of the largest banking and financial service organizations in the world – surveyed nine thousand citizens across Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, the UK, and the US for the HSBC Climate Confidence Index 2007. Those in the developing economies showed the greatest concern about climate change, were the most committed to slowing it, and were optimistic that they and their governments could do something about it. In contrast, the British, French, Germans, and Americans had the least confidence in their governments to address climate change and were the least hopeful of tackling the problem overall. Researchers, struck by this low level of confidence, called it “green rejection”.
