EcocentricWildlife
The 125-year-old Coca-Cola Company doesn’t like to mess with its brand image. That’s in part because it’s so valuable—according to Interbrand Coke has the best brand in the world—but also because previous efforts to tweak its image haven’t always worked out so well, and sometimes lead to things like this.
So perhaps it’s a …
EcocentricEcocentric
If you want to see global warming in action, head to the Arctic. The seasonal shrinking of the sea ice over the North Pole is one of the most visible symptoms of the gradual warming of the planet. Every winter, Arctic ice builds up in the polar darkness, and then in the summer, it melts. Over the last several years—as temperatures …
EcocentricOil
Well, there’s one thing you should take away from the Interior Department’s decision yesterday to conditionally allow the oil company Shell to begin drilling exploratory wells in the Arctic Ocean: the Obama Administration is not anti-energy. Despite constant complaining from the energy industry and Republicans in Congress that the White …
EcocentricWildlife
Sometimes I wonder how the polar bear became the poster animal for climate change. These are ferocious beasts—they’ve even be known to engage in a little cannibalism when food gets tight. They’re far from the only animals that may be suffering because of climate change—just ask the Panamanian golden frog—and few of us will ever …
EcocentricOil
Oh Greenpeace. Only PETA outshines you in the shameless publicity stunt department, and yet here I am, falling for your tricks, because this week your eco-warriors have attached themselves — literally — to a topic I can’t resist: the quest to find oil in the Arctic.
At 3AM on May 29, a Greenpeace team left the Esperanza, the …
EcocentricUncategorized
For all its remoteness, the North Pole generates a lot of controversy. In 1909, the American admiral Robert Peary reported that he successfully reached the geographic North Pole, a feat of navigation that is now widely disputed. Nearly a century later, another expedition to the remote top of the globe caused a stir when Russian …
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 …
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 …
EcocentricEcocentric
One of the most pressing predictions that must be made in climate science concerns the rate of polar melting. As they warm—and the Arctic and Antarctic regions have heated up faster than most of the rest of the planet—the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica are melting and flowing into the ocean, which then raises sea levels. …
EcocentricHealth
Remember the hole in the ozone? (TIME magazine does.) Thanks largely to the unchecked use of chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and halons in the postwar era, the ozone layer thinned dramatically—especially over the Arctic and Antarctic poles. That was bad news for life on Earth because the ozone layer blocks harmful blocks UV-B …
