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 …
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. …
