Green Options

The continuing quest for cleaner power has finally brought humanity to kneel before Mother Nature, pleading for some help. We have damaged her planet so effectively, and now we are asking for her good favor in return. We’ve turned to the sun, the waves and also the wind.

And it is winds that many believe will be our salvation.

A recent study by Cristina Archer and Mark Jacobson, published in the November issue [...]

Climate science is really one of those things that I’ve developed quite an attachment to. If I ever manage to get back in to university, it will definitely be high on my priority list. But for the moment, I have the enviable joy of reporting about it. And this one really sprung to mind as interesting.Apparently, according to recent research, our tropical belt is expanding.Most of you are well aware that our [...]

Much of the environmental news at the moment is focusing on the Bali summit. Well, I’ve reported on that summit for much of the lead up, and I’m altogether sick of it. So I shall be leaving that to other hands. In the meantime, I shall endeavor to raise those stories that would otherwise be washed away.

And, in a shameless segue, being washed away is exactly what I want to discuss.

There’s been mention over the past

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You’ve got to hand it to Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. Even though he’s cut from the same political cloth as fellow Republican Sonny Perdue, Georgia’s governor, Crist is doing a lot more than praying when it comes to dealing with climate change.

Still, you could understand if Crist and his fellow 18 million-or-so Floridians — myself included — felt the need to throw a few extra appeals heavenward [...]

Over the past two years in my role as an editorial and journalistic reporter, I’ve become more and more interested in earth’s millennia long history. The theories of evolution, ice-ages, periods of warming and continental shift have all opened up to me as they never did in high school (probably because I went to a Christian school in the late 90’s).

Of all that I’ve learnt, I have found a particular attachment [...]

More and more people are showing up at their therapists these days with signs of what is called eco-anxiety, or fear concerning environmental issues. Santa Fe, NM therapist Melissa Pickett says this unrest has been growing in the last two years, and may be the tip of the iceberg.

Michael d’Estries wrote about Melissa in May, and I had the occasion to interview her recently about this issue, and the field of eco-psychology. [...]

They loaded up the fuel tanks with fresh canola oil refined to biodiesel, started the engines, and the 1968 L-29 Czechoslovakian jet, nicknamed BioJet 1, soared into the sky from a Reno, NV airport. It’s the first recorded time that a jet plane used biodiesel as a fuel.

It was a three minute flight, revving the engines to 98 percent of capacity, but certainly enough to be a nonissue in climb performance and time [...]

Going outside for a breath of fresh air never meant more than it does today, according to an article in our hometown paper, The Arizona Daily Star. While the article is geared for the Tucson area, the implications are that indoors is a dirtier place to be than outdoors.

Homes, according to the article, are toxic hotspots, up to 100 or 1000 times greater than stepping outdoors into the polluted air [...]

Once again, another report has come out showing that — with the right actions — we could see a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over the next couple of decades. Once again, the news raises the same question as previous reports: will we ever see enough political will to make the possible become reality?

This week, the management consulting firm McKinsey and Company released a report, “Reducing U.S. Greenhouse Gas [...]

If you remember the ’70s, you also remember Chiffon Margarine teaching us that “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” Today, though, we’re learning a new lesson: “It’s not as easy to fool Mother Nature as some presumptuous humans might think.”

Take, for example, one of the hot new technology fixes being proposed for global warming: ocean fertilization. The idea is to seed the oceans with iron or other nutrients to encourage [...]

Coal might be a four-letter word, but it’s proving to be an addiction that’s not only hard to kick but that keeps getting worse.

Last year, people around the globe burned more coal than ever before — a record 3.09 billion tons of oil equivalent, according to a new report from the Worldwatch Institute. That’s an increase of 4.5 percent over 2005 levels, meaning coal now provides a full one-fourth of the world’s [...]