Paper usage is at an all-time high around the world, and the average office worker prints and copies through some 10,000 pages every year. Hopes that the advent of electronic communications would drastically cut paper consumption
When the Bush administration issued an important change in policy recently, virtually acknowledging that global warming is real, it was news to President George W. Bush, who was unaware that any new program had been announced. Earlier, he had dismissed another global warming report from his own administration as "from the bureaucracy."
Office buildings are indeed the top energy guzzlers among commercial buildings in the United States, head and shoulders above retail and service establishments and even manufacturing facilities.
Seven to 10 million koalas inhabited Australia at the time of white settlement two centuries ago. Today only about 100,000 remain. Native to the eucalyptus forests of Australia’s eastern seaboard, koalas were hunted extensively by the continent’s first European settlers
Death on the modern factory farm assembly line is not as neat and clean as it should be. "They blink. They make noises," Ramon Moreno <a href="http://www.hfa.org/hot_topic/wash_post.html">told</a> the Washington Post. "The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around." Moreno, a slaughterhouse worker in Washington State, says that on a bad day, many of the cows that reach him are still alive and even conscious, even after having gone through the "tail cutter," the "belly ripper" or the "hide puller." As Moreno puts it, "They die piece by piece."
September 29, 2004—Rana Foroohar of <I>Newsweek</I> reports that over the past two years, despite lots of recent media coverage about how hot the alternative energy sector is, the worldwide stock-market value of companies developing renewable energy fell from $13 billion to $10.7 billion, while the value of fossil-fuel companies surged to record highs of more than $1.2 trillion.
September 29, 2004—<I>Nature</I>, a leading international science periodical, has published written responses from President Bush and challenger John Kerry to questions regarding their respective stands on various scientific issues, including stem cell research, global warming, genetically modified crops and nuclear weapons development. As might be expected, the candidates rarely agreed on what should be done regarding federal policy on most matters of science.
Hydropower—electricity generated from turbines churning in dammed rivers—has been part of America’s energy mix since the 1880s when the world’s first hydroelectric plant began operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin. By the 1940s, hydropower accounted for about 40 percent of America’s energy needs.
New evidence that climate change is upon us arrives daily, and since this column is our most timely forum, we can offer new dispatches from the global warming front that arrived in just the last couple of months.
An international team of biologists released a report last week warning that when endangered species go extinct, they take down other dependent species with them. The upshot of the finding is that up to 50 percent more species may be endangered than can be currently accounted for by biologists.
