This week on ZapRoot: KFC Canada tries to do chickens right with their new animal welfare plan. China’s air control results. Check out new Alternative Autos: Chevy Volt, Shelby Supercars, Prius, and more.

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Needless to say, the warming caused by carbon dioxide, that would release more carbon dioxide, is not a helpful turn of events.

What’s worse, according to one commentary on the research which was published this past Sunday, is that the current models predicting future climate change currently do not take in to account the possible release of these stores of carbon.

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The performance of key actors - particularly national governments - has been inadequate to date with rhetoric at much feted climatic conferences over-dominating action states the survey.

Respondents in the survey conducted by the GlobeScan for the World Bank, The World Conservation Union (IUCN), and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), noted that there is currently little consensus on solutions to climate change.

In many parts of the world, the destruction of the environment is a daily reality in spite of the numerous statements that have been made about the terrible state of the environment.

But visionary political leadership can indeed influence a paradigm shift that can promote better treatment of the environment through requisite legal and policy mechanisms, but most importantly through political text that highlights the urgency of the matter followed by action.

As Kenyan Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai succinctly puts it the generation that destroys the environment may not be the one that pays the prize.

It is the future generations that will confront the consequences of today’s destructive activities of the current generation, she says.

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But Th!nk Global, yes, think with an exclamation mark, a Norwegian company buoyed by undisclosed funding injection by Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and RockPort Capital Partners, is rolling out the Ox, Open and City in North America within three years after a gallant start in Europe and I can’t stop to think when they’ll ever get to Africa.

Think cars are gas-free, city cars that will start selling in the US next year but the actual mass roll out is slated for sometime in 2011, and the company has recently opened its North American division to steer the promising mad drive from the gas pumps.

Which, I think, is good news for those who feel fuel prices are already over the top, with more pump shocks yet to come if the global crude price projection is anything to go by?

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According to UNESCO, globally there are 262 international river basins: 59 in Africa, 52 in Asia, 73 in Europe, 61 in Latin America and the Caribbean and 17 in North America — overall, 145 countries have territories that include at least one shared river basin.

UNESCO states that between 1948 and 1999, there have been 1,831 “international interactions” recorded, including 507 conflicts, 96 neutral or non-significant events and, most importantly, 1,228 instances of cooperation around water-related issues.

As a result, some experts argue that the idea of water wars is rather farfetched given the precedent of water cooperation that has been exhibited by many of the countries around the world.

“Despite the potential problem, history has demonstrated that cooperation, rather than conflict, is likely in shared basins,” says UNESCO.

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Apart from parading their own theoretic short and long term goals and how best to approach this growing problem while clouding their own best national interests, making concessions for climate change may prove harder than committing to curb global carbon pollution.

As the main players at the Hokkaido summit, were the G8 Club, and China, Brazil and India, to pose and think about climate change issues as possible recipe for wars, the plight of the millions of victims of the conflict in Darfur, Sudan would connect with their jostling for the best breathing space.

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Instead of acting upon it or even printing copies to president George Bush and his handlers, they tossed it in a cyber trash bin called Spam folder as if that was the only green thing to do.

Many months after Scott McClellan quit spinning for Dubya, climate watchers are crying foul that he never ever touched the seemingly hot subject in his recently released book, What Happened. But in his famous spins, he had blamed human activity - you and me - as responsible for global warming on more than one occasion.

Spin can be clever tomfoolery sometimes but the White House stance on global warming is well known and George W. Bush has never disappointed with his public statements that smack verily of official ignorance or pretense on the subject as an inconvenient truth.

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The US has in the past shown great moral strength, courage and sacrifice to respond to global crises but no so with the imminent threat of global climate change.

Yet, in order to accelerate global efforts to protect the environment, the US must not only be held to a higher environmental standard than the rest of the world, it must also show greater commitment to a coordinated worldly response.

The statistics speak for themselves - the US produces a total of 5,410 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, almost a quarter of the global emissions, according to researchers. This makes the US the world’s leading polluter, making it imperative to hold the country to a higher environmental standard.

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World Wildlife Fund (WWF) published a report in 2006 that documented the plunder of natural resources by human activity and warned that the globe itself could be outstripped in its capacity to support life, rendering the earth extinct in under 50 years.

Based on scientific data collected from across the globe, it revealed that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by human activity in just over the past three decades, because of, among others, increased emissions of green house gases into the ecosystem.

Unless consumption of natural resources was cut and the destruction of vital ecosystems was stopped, human life and that of thousands of other animals and plants would not be sustainable hence the suggestion that the earth itself could be extinct by 2050. In short, the demise of biodiversity will be the death of life on earth, as we know it.

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Contrary to popular opinion, bicycling can potentially damage the environment due to the increased longevity of people engaged in physical activity, says Karl Ulrich, a Wharton Business School professor.

Ulrich argues that the greatest environmental peril society may face is the looming prospect of slowing the aging process, and bicycling potentially contributes to slowing aging.

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This week, EcoWorldly authors from six continents contributed articles on bicycling in their country. With exerpts from those articles and others in the blogosphere, here are seventeen very good reasons to bicycle no matter where you live. Click the headings as you go to read more.

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Putting aside the fantastical nature of the speed with which this happened, the base science is sound; that an increase in freshwater could slow or shutdown the thermohaline circulation, causing an unexpected and unhelpful ice age.

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That target is expected to increase to five per cent by 2010 as part of efforts to make transport fuels more environmentally friendly. United States has just surpassed Brazil as the world’s largest producer of ethanol fuel.

The increased demand for biofuels from the world’s richer nations is being partly blamed for the skyrocketing food prices. Farmland that was once used to grow crops to feed people is now growing fuel for cars.

Here are (some of) the world’s biggest biofuel plants, including those in the pipeline, by production:

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According to Cristina Archer and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, Earth’s jet streams are shifting; possibly as a result of global warming. However they are upfront with the fact that they need to do more research before they can pinpoint what will happen, and why it is happening.

Jet streams are the high-altitude bands of fast moving wind that influence the paths of storms and other weather systems. “The jet streams are the driving factor for weather in half of the globe,” says Archer. “So, as you can imagine, changes in the jets have the potential to affect large populations and major climate systems.”

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The New Face of Hunger is not a stark picture of battered and malnourished children in Ethiopia. It is the rise of commodity prices and super inflation now biting all across the globe.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation predicted in October 2007: “If prices continue to rise, it would not be surprising if we began to see food riots.” World food prices have risen 45 percent in the last nine months and there are serious shortages of rice, wheat and maize, according to FAO.

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As it rages on five years later, perhaps one should spare a moment to reflect on the environmental effects of the war in Iraq.

How much has the war contributed to global warming? We can now debate the war on the scales of environmental justice and evidence is emerging that the damage on the environment and the global warming effects that this war has caused calls for all of us to pause and think.

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I am writing from the future. Well, kind of. You see, for me, it’s already January 1st of the year 2008. (Living in Korea, we’re a bit ahead of the trend, I guess you could say.)

I’m writing to remind you to enjoy a safe New Year’s Eve.

Enjoy today. These are the last moments of 2007, and for the environmental movement 2007 was a beautiful year. So cozy up with your favorite New Year’s grog and enjoy how far we’ve come. Here from the future are some of the greatest environmental victories of this past year.

In this year,

The environmental movement in general went mainstream around the world under the fashionable banner term “green.”

The United States finally made a commitment to international action on climate change.

The word “localvore” was the word of the year in the Oxford American Dictionary.

Demand for organic food continued to grow; in fact, organics caught on in a huge way and prices for organic products actually began to drop.

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]]> http://ecoworldly.com/2008/01/01/letter-from-new-years-future/feed/ http://ecoworldly.com/2007/12/30/california-to-undergo-global-warming-changes/ http://ecoworldly.com/2007/12/30/california-to-undergo-global-warming-changes/#comments Sun, 30 Dec 2007 19:03:50 +0000 Joshua S Hill http://ecoworldly.com/2007/12/30/california-to-undergo-global-warming-changes/ Global warming is going to affect much of the planet, and each affected area could be different from the next. The hardest hit will be California, which already has to deal with a multitude of microclimates.

“We need to be attentive to the fact that changes are going to occur, whether it’s sea level rising or increased temperatures, droughts and potentially increased fires,” said Lisa Sloan, a scientist who directs the Climate Change and Impacts Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “These things are going to be happening.”

But in an area a third larger than that of Italy, predicting what will happen by the end of this century is definitely a challenge for scientists. But as a result of a series of interviews taken with scientists each studying the phenomenon, a vague general description has evolved.

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]]> http://ecoworldly.com/2007/12/30/california-to-undergo-global-warming-changes/feed/ http://ecoworldly.com/2007/12/30/7-eco-wonders-you-should-see-before-you-die/ http://ecoworldly.com/2007/12/30/7-eco-wonders-you-should-see-before-you-die/#comments Sun, 30 Dec 2007 13:52:15 +0000 Gavin Hudson http://ecoworldly.com/2007/12/30/7-eco-wonders-you-should-see-before-you-die/ Like other wonders of the modern world, these amazing green wonders are places you must see before you die. These structures are unique in the world for their brilliantly creative methods of melding aesthetic beauty, functional design and environmental sustainability.

Built in Darmstadt, Germany, this structure is called Waldspirale or “Forest Spiral.” It was designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser, a celebrated Austrian architect and painter. Planted along the 12 floors of the rising roof are beech, maple, and lime trees. The structure even incorporates a running stream. The building comprises 105 apartments. In the tower on the Southeast corner, a restaurant and cocktail bar rises over the entire structure. Source: Wissenschaftsstadt Darmstadt.

Nestled in Pembrokeshire, in Southwest Wales, this structure is truly an eco-dream home. It was built about three years ago by a single family and their friends over the course of four months. The family estimates that it took about 1,000 to 1,500 hours of work and cost only about £ 3,000. It was constructed mostly out of logs, straw and mud, which acts as an effective insulator. According to the house’s inhabitants, the home “feels gentle. Feels to me more like being part of the (natural) world, less like a commodity in a box.” Source: Simondale.

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]]> http://ecoworldly.com/2007/12/30/7-eco-wonders-you-should-see-before-you-die/feed/ http://ecoworldly.com/2007/12/27/breakthrough-at-bali-the-us-signs-on-at-last/ http://ecoworldly.com/2007/12/27/breakthrough-at-bali-the-us-signs-on-at-last/#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2007 18:52:04 +0000 Gavin Hudson http://ecoworldly.com/2007/12/27/breakthrough-at-bali-the-us-signs-on-at-last/ The US decade-long boycott of international progress on climate change has finally come to an end. For ten years, the United States has sent diplomats to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Conferences (UNFCCC) with the single goal of preventing progress.

At each meeting, US delegates historically demand that the convention abandon mandatory carbon emission caps and then make a big show of walking out of the convention when this doesn’t seem likely.

In Bali, it was starting to look like more of the same. With the US demanding that it be given weaker emissions targets than the other 186 countries at the table, time was running out and another stalemate looked likely. The scene was tense and in extreme frustration Yvo de Boer, UN Climate Chief, left the table in tears.

But finally the US felt the heat. Under intense pressure from the international community and US citizens themselves, the United States agreed to move ahead with the rest of the world.

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