EcocentricWater
Lately, I’ve stopped worrying about climate change. Wait, that’s not quite right. But I only have so much worry bandwidth, and what is keeping me up at night lately is scarcenomoics, the idea that in a finite world, we may be hitting limits on some natural resources. Climate change doesn’t even have to play a major role in these fears, …
EcocentricUncategorized
I was traveling yesterday, speaking on a panel about electric cars at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, so I didn’t get a chance to cover yesterday’s news closely. But I wanted to note an alarming report published by the World Resources Institute (WRI) on the risks facing coral reefs.
The short version: coral reefs are in big …
EcocentricEcocentric
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has—how to put this—not been a friend of environmental legislation or regulation. The Chamber—which represents more than 3 million U.S. businesses—spent millions to lead the successful fight against carbon cap-and-trade legislation, along with health care reform and most of President Obama’s other …
EcocentricEnergy
This week I wrote a piece for the magazine on what many energy analysts believe to be the future of the nuclear industry: small modular reactors.
These mini reactors, which generate up to 300 megawatts compared to 1500 megawatts for traditional large nuclear power plants, are all the rage because they are versatile and cheap. …
EcocentricHealth
I have a post over on Healthland looking at the recent study showing that cell phone radiation does indeed affect brain activity. The cancer question is still an open one—but I describe a few easy steps to reducing radiation exposure just in case you’re the safer rather than sorrier type.
Check out the post here.
EcocentricUncategorized
I’ve got one more tidbit from last weekend’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and it’s nothing less than a new scientific concept: telecoupling.
This is not, as you might expect, a particular risqué form of conference call. Telecoupling refers to how connections between nature and human …
EcocentricRegulation
Ugh. Hong Kong’s English daily South China Morning Post has a distinctly unsavory dispatch from the Chinese media this morning: Government scientists have released research that millions of acres of Chinese agricultural land and over 12 million tons of Chinese grain are contaminated by toxic metal pollution, according to this …
EcocentricHealth
Crossposted from TIME’s Healthland:
For about 36 million Americans with seasonal allergies, torture time is just around the corner. As spring flowers, the pollen will flow, resulting in nasal congestion, red itchy eyes and overall awfulness. It’s not just cosmetic either—for an estimated 23 million Americans with asthma, …
EcocentricPolitics
I have a Going Green column on the Time.com mainpage about the similarities between the federal debt every politician in Washington claims to be worried about, and the debt to nature that almost no one is talking about. They’re remarkable similar. As a country, we’ve run up a massive federal debt in part because we’ve lived beyond our …
EcocentricWildlife
As authorities scrambled to pick up the pieces after a deadly earthquake hit the southern New Zealand town of Christchurch on Tuesday, government workers further south had just finished handling an altogether different kind of natural disaster. Over the weekend, more than 100 pilot whales were found on a remote beach on Stewart Island …
