EcocentricEcocentric
Last week, WikiLeaks published a new round of diplomatic cables in concert with an annual meeting of the Arctic Council in Nuuk, Greenland. Written between 2007 and 2010, the cables highlight the lingering sense of global insecurity over who owns what at the rooftop of the world. They don’t cover any particularly new ground, but they …
EcocentricWildlife
In the past few days, two pieces of good news have floated to the surface from the morass of Japan’s ongoing nuclear crisis. No, nothing has really improved at Fukushima; in fact, things have turned out to be worse inside Reactor 1 than TEPCO thought. (Read more about that over on Global Spin.)
But! Japan’s Environment ministry, …
EcocentricUncategorized
I went to an interesting talk today in Hong Kong where Felix Tschudi, the chairman of the Tschudi Shipping Company in Norway, raised an interesting proposition: What if the shipping industry’s pirate problem could be solved by our warming planet?
In 2010, Tschudi starting working on a plan to start shipping iron ore from …
EcocentricWind Power
After two months of near silence, Japan’s government has seemingly awoken from its slumber and kicked into high damage-control gear. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Naoto Kan, whose administration has come under fire for its slow and opaque response to the ongoing nuclear crisis at Fukushima, made two surprise announcements. First, that he …
EcocentricInvasive Species
Another interesting story over on Time.com’s science page: Christy Choi writes about how the lionfish, an aquarium-pet-turned-ocean-invader with a voracious appetite and bad manners, “has residents and scientists throughout the Caribbean and Northern Atlantic worried about the threat it poses to coastal ecosystems and economies by wiping …
EcocentricRegulation
Chubu Electric Power Company agreed on Monday to suspend operations at the controversial Hamaoka nuclear power plant, three days after Prime Minister Naoto Kan made an unprecedented request for the company to shut down the plant, citing safety concerns. Like the beleaguered Daiichi Fukishima nuclear power plant further north, Hamaoka is …
EcocentricForests
We’ve just posted an interesting story to Time.com about a group of monks in northern Cambodia who are lobbying for over a dozen protected forests to go onto the global carbon market.
This is exactly the kind of project that makes Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) so promising: protecting the forests …
EcocentricEnergy
That’s an old fashioned. Looks pretty good, right? I thought so.
Old fashioneds can be made with whisky, which brings me to my real point — an interesting article by Kirsty Scott in the Guardian this week. In Speyside, home to half of Scotland’s whisky distilleries, a project is underway to use the by-product of Scottish whisky …
EcocentricUncategorized
A colleague in Japan just drew my attention to this video on YouTube that was shot inside the beleaguered Fukushima nuclear power plant. It was shot on April 22 by Aoyama Shigeharu, a member of the Japanese government’s Atomic Energy Commission.
I don’t know a whole lot more about it than that — such as how it ended up on Japanese …
EcocentricHurricanes
In the middle of the night on Tuesday, in a hotly contested move, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blasted open a two-mile long hole in a levee along the Mississippi River, sending the rain-swollen waterway gushing over 100,000 acres of Missouri farmland. The flooded area – sparsely populated but fertile farmland – has long been …
