The Democratic Congressional victories are likely to provide new momentum for the U.S. to finally act on climate change. Three newly empowered Senators—Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) sent a letter to President Bush November 15 urging him to work with them to "signal to the world that global warming legislation is on the way."
It is widely agreed that aquatic life and fisheries are in global decline. However, a new report says the damage could be worse than previously suspected. Appearing in Science, the report summarized a four-year study by a team of ecologists and economists, and concluded that at current rates of over-fishing almost all marine life harvested by humans will be wiped out before 2050.
The nonprofit Rainforest Action Network urged 54 financial institutions last week not to participate in lending Texas-based TXU Corp. the $11 billion it needs for the construction of 11 new coal-burning power plants across Texas. The new plants would produce some 78 million tons of new carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions each year they are operating, which is more greenhouse gas pollution than is produced by 21 states or by small countries like Sweden, Denmark and Portugal.
A new study by the international environmental group WWF released last week reported that two-thirds of the forests in Africa’s Congo River Basin could disappear within 50 years if logging and mineral exploitation continues unabated.
According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s (ACEEE) Green Book, an annual environmental rating of the best and worst cars, Honda and Toyota models led the pack as the world’s “greenest” automobiles for 2006.
Querido DiálogoEcológico: Una serie de productos, incluyendo el papel y la ropa—y hasta cerveza y ciertos alimentos—se hacen a base del cáñamo. ¿Qué es lo que hace al cáñamo tan versátil, y por qué es ilegal cultivarlo en los Estados Unidos? ¿Es ilegal también en Canadá?
Querido DiálogoEcológico: ¿Es cierto que las selvas húmedas contienen quizás miles de plantas y hierbas con propiedades medicinales?
As the weather gets colder and many of us batten down for winter, it’s a great time to start drawing up plans for those improvements you’ve been contemplating. Go green and you can make an important individual contribution to the environment, help take a bite out of global warming, and save money over the long haul, too.
Rice farming may look pretty from a distance, with its bucolic images of farmers in conical hats ankle deep in water as they cultivate green sprouts, but it has earned a bad environmental reputation because of its wasteful irrigation systems and incursions into wetlands. But not all rice farming is environmentally destructive.
The manure from pooping cows, collected by “alley scrapers” that run along the floor like a giant squeegee, is processed into renewable electricity.
When it comes to solid waste, most people think of candy wrappers, soda bottles and Styrofoam packing peanuts instead of the house they’re living in or the Target where they shop. However, the EPA estimates that up to 40 percent of U.S. solid waste is construction and demolition debris. Deconstruction—taking homes and commercial buildings apart, rather than landfilling the waste—does involve more labor than demolition, but it also avoids costly disposal fees. What had been a total loss—demolition and landfilling—turns into a revenue-generating opportunity to resell what was previously waste.
