EcocentricOil
Sometimes a President can’t catch a break—a lesson the current, beleaguered resident of the Oval Office keeps learning. The latest bit of bad news came from a commission the President himself appointed back in the spring to study the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama announced the creation of the study group on May …
EcocentricWildlife
Life always surprises. That’s the lesson that should be taken from the discovery of 200 new plants and animals in the forest-covered mountain of Papua New Guinea. Today the environmental group Conservation International (CI) announced that it had discovered never before seen plants, frogs, mammals, insects and spiders—including …
EcocentricEcocentric
I’m at the Mexico City airport now—at the Chili’s actually, eating a way-too-big for one person basket of chips—leaving the B4E Climate Summit. After Al Gore’s keynote speech yesterday afternoon, the conference organizers divided the audience into five sectors: transport and logistics; energy and utilities; food, water and …
EcocentricUncategorized
I’m still at the B4E Summit in Mexico City (though it’s not so much Mexico City as the business district of Santa Fe, which is less than walkable—my hotel and the gargantuan convention center are next to each other, but getting from one to the other is a 15-minute walk around streets designed for cars, not people). Al Gore—former …
EcocentricUncategorized
I’m at the B4E Summit in Mexico City, where the early message from the panelists is that last year’s Copenhagen climate summit led to the “end of carbon fundamentalism,” in the words of Rachel Kyte of the International Finance Corporation. That means that the decades-old Rio dream that the world could look at the science of climate …
EcocentricOceans
“Only the sea knows the depth of the sea.” So goes a line from Hindu scriptures, one that well describes the mystery of the ocean depths—and our ongoing ignorance about life beneath the waves. For thousands of years, our knowledge of the seas was limited to surface currents and the fish that we could catch, close to the coast. …
EcocentricEcocentric
I’m in Mexico City for the next two days, attending the B4E Climate Summit. B4E is conference speak (and text message speak) for business for the environment, and it’s a meeting that brings together sustainability experts at major corporations from around the world—Siemens, Coca-Cola, McKinsey—to discuss how business can become …
EcocentricOil
Environmentalists can take President Obama to task for more than a few disappointments over the first two years of his Administration—and some of them have—but one area where the White House has fulfilled its green pledges is in auto fuel efficiency. In May 2009 Obama brokered a deal with the auto industry that saw Corporate Average …
EcocentricOil
Since the Deepwater Horizon accident on April 20—and the moratorium on new deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that followed it—both the oil industry and environmentalists have been waiting for the White House to issue new rules on drilling. BP’s Gulf spill showed that there were clear problems with the way offshore drilling was …
EcocentricUncategorized
In the polarized realm of climate and energy politics, energy efficiency has always been the common ground. The concept is so attractive—we clearly waste far too much of our energy, whether that means driving a car with that gets low gas-mileage or living in a poorly insulated house. If you’re worried about climate change and are …
