Green Options

I admit it: I feel virtuous when I drop off a few bags of glass bottles and aluminum cans in the county recycling bin (we don’t have curbside recycling where I live) or stuff a few months’ worth of plastic shopping bags into the big cardboard bag collection bin at Walmart (though, yes, I feel less virtuous when I shop at Walmart). But there’s always a nagging doubt: is recycling really as

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A booming airline industry might be great for the economy, but it’s wreaking increasing havoc with the environment. Aviation today spews out only 3 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, but the segment is expanding fast — faster, in fact, than any improvements in efficiency are likely to keep pace with. According to the Christian Science Monitor,

"Efficiency is only set to improve at 1 or 2 percent per year at best,

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Technophiles often like to point out how their gadgets help save the planet by, say, eliminating the need for CDs (think iPod), DVDs (TiVO) and other wasteful products because everything’s going increasingly digital. However, the fact that more and more gadgets are produced and purchased every year, and thrown away more frequently as they quickly become obsolete, negates some of those environmental benefits. In fact, Greenpeace estimates that, globally, we

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The Arctic is heating up in more than one way, as we saw last week when Russia planted its flag on the seafloor below in an apparent move to establish a claim to the ample oil and gas reserves buried beneath.

What’s disastrous for polar bears and Inuit subsistence hunters is emerging as a potentially huge — and destabilizing — fossil-fuel rush for the nations bordering the Arctic Ocean as the polar ice melts.

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Even as many retailers are adopting the marketing slogan, "Buy Green," a backlash movement is emerging calling on people to "buy nothing" or, at least, "buy as little as possible and, preferably, buy nothing new."

Now, I can pretty well predict how free-marketers would respond to this ("Aaaagh! There goes the economy!"). But how effective is the buy-nothing strategy environmentally? I’ve seen arguments both pro and con.

I try to buy responsibly

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The polar bears are drowning. Large numbers of fish are disappearing from the oceans. Bottled-water companies and farms are depleting the aquifers. Chemicals in cosmetics are linked to birth defects.

The litany of bad news about the environment seems endless. Are things really that bad? Or do environmentalists tend to view everything they see through soot-colored glasses?

In answer to the latter question, I don’t think so. No, the sky

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The thunder here rolled for hours and hours before something long-absent in my neck of the woods finally arrived: rain. That’s when I had an epiphany. It’s come to this, I realized: I am in awe of the rare occurrence of something I used to take for granted. Because my part of the country, like so many other areas, is deep into an exceptional drought.

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You know, just 10 years ago, few vacations sounded as thrilling to me as an "eco-vacation." Maybe two weeks in a rustic part of Costa Rica on the lookout for wild scarlet, green-wing and blue-and-gold macaws squawking in the trees, flocking to claylicks or just soaring through the warm, moist tropical air from one spot to another. Or, though I’m not the cold-weather-type, cruising along the Alaskan coast to drink in the

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China's impact on the environment — usually for the worse — is making headlines almost daily: now number one emitter of greenhouse gases, melamine-tainted pet food, contaminated fish exports and on and on. Some Chinese citizens are bravely trying to lobby for change — and suffering consequences — but even officials acknowledge their country can do better. But will it?

As one of the leading consumers of Chinese goods, the U.S. has a responsibility

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Jimmy: When we chose the recently-passed Senate Energy Bill for our Red, Green and Blue discussion this week, I really didn’t expect it to be such a great illustration of what not to do to secure our energy future. Since this is the same crew who left our last shot at reasonable immigration reform this decade to die on the vine, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

This bill is all about government and

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The oceans and atmosphere are warming, and now the global warming blame game is also heating up. Inuit in Shishmaref are seeking damages for the climate change that has forced them from their 4,000-year-old community. And 12 states recently prevailed in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that states carbon dioxide is a pollutant that can be regulated by the U.S. EPA.

In the past week alone, we've seen the U.N. point

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