EcocentricUncategorized
Last month, after China and Japan locked horns over Tokyo’s arrest of a Chinese fishing captain whose boat collided with the Japanese Coast Guard, shipments of rare earths from China to Japan started to dry up at over 30 different Japanese companies. Since then, Beijing has stuck to its story – that the there is no …
EcocentricPolitics
Renewable energy may be clean, but the international politics behind it are getting dirtier by the day. A little more than a month after the United Steelworkers (USW) filed a compliant with U.S. trade officials over what the union saw as China’s unfair subsidies for its clean-technology sector, the Obama Administration announced that it …
EcocentricWildlife
It’s an undeniable fact—the most complete rainforests and the richest biodiversity on the planet tends to be concentrated in some of the poorest countries. Madagascar, Suriname, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Micronesia, Belize, Costa Rica—all tropical nations that are gifted with astounding natural beauty, but which also …
EcocentricEcocentric
Not to use an overly technical term here, but there’s a neat paper in this week’s Science that explains clearly why carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main agent behind changes in the Earth’s climate—now and in the geologic past. First a bit of background: one argument you might hear from skeptics of manmade climate change is that CO2 is much …
EcocentricHealth
It’s used almost everywhere. It’s in almost all of us. It does weird things to rodents and it may be doing weird things to us—but it’s tough to be certain. Bisphenol-A (BPA) has become a litmus test for how people view environmental health and the risks of common household chemicals—as I wrote in a long story for TIME earlier this …
EcocentricUncategorized
It only seems appropriate to start with a word about the view out my office window in Hong Kong this morning, and that word is murk. As I was just discussing with a colleague visiting from New York, when you first encounter this kind of day in Hong Kong, you can convince yourself that you’re looking at fog that has rolled in over the …
EcocentricEnergy
Update (8/14/10): A few additional voices in this argument. Over at his blog for the Council on Foreign Relations, Michael Levi argues that government investment in research isn’t enough on its own to bring clean energy to parity with fossil-fuel power, in part because unlike previous innovations like the Internet, clean energy doesn’t …
EcocentricEnergy
It’s not every day that a decision by the federal government can bring together environmental groups, cattle ranchers, the automobile industry and gas station owners, all in anger—but that’s biofuel for you. Today the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it was increasing the allowable percentage of corn-based ethanol …
EcocentricEnergy
Arctic security wonks are gathering in Cambridge this week for a workshop on the challenges ahead for environmental security in the Arctic. Sound familiar? It should: When Russia planted a flag on a seabed in Russia’s Arctic waters in the summer of 2007, the specter of a circumpolar military race hung over the globe as other nations with …
EcocentricFood
Bees have had it hard for the past few years. Ever since 2006, entomologists and other scientists in the U.S., Europe and Asia have been trying to figure out what’s causing wholesale deaths of of once-healthy hives—an epidemic that’s wiped out from 20% to 60% of colonies in the affected areas. Now, according to a paper published in the …
