EcocentricHealth
Do you know how much radiation your cell phone emits? You will from now on if you live in San Francisco. Yesterday the city’s Board of Supervisors voted to require all retailers to display the amount of radiation a phone emits, a regulation that’s believed to be the first in the U.S. The new ruling, which Mayor Gavin Newsom is expected …
EcocentricEcocentric
As if we needed further proof that chopping down the Amazon was a bad idea, a new study suggests that deforestation in Brazil had led to an increased incidence of disease.
Writing in the current (June 16, 2010) online issue of the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, a team of scientists from the University of …
EcocentricOil
During his Oval Office speech last night, President Barack Obama told the American people that he would be meeting with the chairman of BP on Wednesday and that Obama would “inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s …
EcocentricEndangered Species
Whaling hasn’t had an overwhelming surge of global support since the days of oil lamps and corsets, but the eastern hemisphere’s tolerance for Japan’s ongoing hunt is wearing particularly thin these days.
The latest to jump ship is Palau, a Pacific island a few thousand miles south of Tokyo which has backed Japan in its exploitation …
EcocentricPolitics
The reaction among environment writers—and political ones, for that matter—on Obama’s speech was almost uniformly negative. (David Roberts at Grist, who noted that Obama at least took energy efficiency seriously, has a good roundup.)
But I thought Bradford Plumer at the New Republic put his finger on why not just Obama’s reaction, …
EcocentricOil
It may be time to bury cap-and-trade.
Speaking in his first prime-time televised address from the Oval Office, President Barack Obama hit a range of topics. He promised the people of the Gulf Coast, and the rest of the country, that his Administration would do whatever it took to fight the BP oil spill—while warning us that it would …
EcocentricOil
A new report from the government’s Flow Rate Technical Group, charged with clocking the speed of the Gulf oil leak, has just been released and it’s not good: the new estimate is 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day. That’s a significant increase from the most recent count, nearly a week ago, which put the leak at between 20,000 and 40,000 …
EcocentricEndangered Species
If white-nose syndrome attacked a cuter species, we’d be all over it. But just because bats that are being afflicted—and not cute bunnies—doesn’t make the sudden spread of this disease any less worrying. Today the Center for Biological Diversity reported an outbreak of the disease in a new species of bat, the southeastern myotis, in …
EcocentricOil
Around 10:30 AM Eastern this morning, just as the five executives of the major global oil companies were settling in for what was set to be a brutal hearing from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a fire broke out on BP’s Enterprise drilling ship, which is processing thousands of barrels a day of oil diverted from the Gulf of …
EcocentricPolitics
While the Socratic exercise that is the House hearings on Big Oil go on—and on, and on—this afternoon, it’s not the only piece of energy and environmental news today. The Environmental Protection Agency released today its preliminary economic analysis of climate and energy bill co-sponsored by Senators John Kerry and Joseph …
