By John Chappell •
May 6, 2009
A website recently delineated a simple list of 10 ways that you can reduce your environmental footprint through changes in your food choices.
The list is fairly straightforward and involves changes that any person in any country can make to reduce their carbon footprint. Substantive facts for each item are also laid out and explained along with a brief description of how the change can affect the environment in a positive manner.
Here the list of changes you can make to your food choices to reduce your environmental footprint:
By Chris Schille •
July 14, 2008
Sometime back on National Public Radio, a panel discussed the high cost of gasoline and what the next president should do about it. When asked if we should be concerned about running out of oil, a panelist quipped that “President Obama” will create appropriate tax incentives for photovoltaics and oil will become so much “useless sludge”. Am I alone in thinking that there is a general lack of understanding about what the future holds for all of us when petroleum runs out?
Yes, We Eat Oil
When nitrogen is allowed to infiltrate a suitable body of water, the normal population of algae grows explosively. It consumes available nutrients and oxygen, turns the water green, and kills most other species. The algae, unable to thrive under the conditions they themselves have created, begin to die. This is called an algae bloom.
Petroleum is humanity’s source of nitrogen. Increasingly, we’re aware that it doesn’t just heat our houses and propel our cars; we actually eat it. Through the twin miracles of modern agriculture and wet-milling, petroleum becomes nitrogen fertilizer, which becomes corn or soybeans, which become virtually every and any processed food product we know (including virtually all meat and farmed fish).[1] In Michael Pollan’s acclaimed book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he documents that over sixty percent of the average American’s diet comes from (petroleum-derived) corn![2]
By Mark Seall •
May 1, 2008
Earlier this week I wrote a particularly winging post, complaining about lack of UK government action on tackling climate change and arguing that many governments merely see green issues as an excuse to raise tax revenues.
Today I would like to look at a situation where the reverse is true, visiting the Germany eco-town of Freiburg .
At first glance, those Germans may appear to have limited green credentials. Fearful of potential impact on their high performance car industry, Germany has lobbied aggressively in recent months to delay new EU legislation aimed at improving vehicle fuel economy. Germany is also home to six of Europe’s ten most polluting power stations and has been keeping quiet about plans to build 24 additional coal powered plants.
However, in terms of concrete and practical actions aimed at making a real difference to the environment, this nation of passionate recyclers, high speed railway builders, and renewable energy nuts appear to be way out in front.
Just when you think you’ve heard it all, along comes a new study that finds yet one more way in which we humans can screw up the environment: get divorced.
Actually, as weird as it might sound at first, the discovery — published in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – makes perfect sense once you consider the typical result of divorce: two people and, possibly, [...]
Consumer Consequences, an interactive online game/environmental footprint calculator launched by American Public Media this week, strives for more detail than other footprint calculators have offered — which proves to be both a positive and a negative.
A positive because, by asking detailed questions about, say, your eating and drinking habits as well as all the more typical queries — What’s your monthly electric bill? What’s your car’s
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By Preston Koerner •
January 26, 2007
Recently, here on GO, we talked about green building in fairly general terms, but more specifically, what are some green building strategies?
