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 …
EcocentricOil
I’ve spent the last few days flying, coptering and driving around northern Alberta with the director James Cameron, taking a close look at the massive oil sands developments in the Canadian province. (As this 2008 piece from TIME shows, Alberta’s underground oil sands reserves have made Canada a world player on the global energy …
EcocentricEcocentric
The UN climate change negotiations have fallen off the news map since last year’s summit in Copenhagen ended in barely avoided disarray, but that doesn’t mean they’ve gone away. China will be hosting interim talks for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Tianjin starting on Oct. 4. That meeting will be …
EcocentricUncategorized
In Sunday’s New York Times—which I consumed along with a bagel on my iPhone—architecture critic Nicolai Ourousoff has a report from Masdar, the zero-carbon, ultra-sustainable city growing up in the deserts outside of Abu Dhabi. The Masdar project is the result of a government initiative by the sultans who control Abu Dhabi, the …
EcocentricUncategorized
If anyone would be receptive to the idea that cell phone radiation might play a role in cancer, it would be Dr. Devra Davis. The epidemiologist and toxicologist is an expert in environmental health, and she’s made a career out of the idea that cancer often has more to do with what’s happening to us than what’s going on inside our …
EcocentricEcocentric
After I sit down with Christiana Figueres, the energetic new chief UN diplomat on climate change, she asks me if I made it to last year’s global warming summit in Copenhagen, which was plagued with logistical problems. I tell her I had, and that the first day I’d waited outside in the Danish cold with thousands of other people …
EcocentricOceans
Over in the paper and iPad TIME magazine, I have a long story this week on the oceanographer Sylvia Earle and her mission to save the oceans. I’ve written about Sylvia before on Ecocentric, during our trip to Bermuda—no matter what you think about her very ambitious plan to created vast protected areas across much of the ocean, you …
