EcocentricOil
China’s State Oceanic Administration (SOA) said this week that a large oil spill off the coast of Shandong province, near Beijing, is worse than previously stated, and that the government may seek compensation from ConocoPhillips, the U.S. oil company with a 49% stake in the oilfield.
On Tuesday the agency said that two separate …
EcocentricOil
“In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold.”
So Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote of his years of hard labor in 19th century Siberia, after a jittery Tsar Nicholas I banished the famed writer to the lonely Far East. For centuries, the massive swath of land east of Moscow and north of China has been a place of political …
EcocentricWater
Back in the day, before Al Gore informed us about a certain inconvenient truth, before we started to calculate our commutes in carbon, and before people in the South Pacific had to start heading for higher land, there were beach clean ups. People walked along the sand — maybe sometimes only on Earth Day, like once-a-year churchgoers …
EcocentricEnergy
Tokyo Electric Power Company’s stock rose 25% after Japan’s cabinet announced it approved a plan to help the nation’s largest utility avoid bankruptcy and pay a huge compensation bill to victims of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant crippled in the March 11 tsunami.
For the last three months, the future of TEPCO, which …
EcocentricUncategorized
A guest post from TIME Asia’s editorial intern Vanessa Ko:
Last month, Hong Kong banned the destructive practice of trawl fishing in its waters. A few days later, affected fishermen showed up with their boats by the hundreds on Victoria Harbour, red protest banners waving brightly in the drizzling rain.But they were not opposing the …
EcocentricWildlife
Feral camels have never gotten much love in the Australian bush. Considered to be an invasive species, they graze native plants to the point of local extinction. They walk across roads in the middle of the night. They trample fences. Now one Australian company has a plan to get rid of the camel scourge once and for all. The proposition? …
EcocentricEnergy
Summer has arrived in Japan. The pink cherry blossoms that offered some aesthetic respite from the destruction in the weeks after March 11 are long gone, and the heat —and all of the attendant challenges of living long-term with a nuclear disaster — have arrived. In Tokyo, where the mayor has set an ambitious energy reduction goal of …
EcocentricMedia
An eight-part series that appeared in the Economist has won this year’s prestigious Grantham Prize for environmental reporting. Journalist James Astill reported the 14,000 word story in the forests of Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and Uganda, assessing the state of the world’s tropical forests and what’s being done to protect them. The …
EcocentricWater
The fleeting moments that Somalia still gets in the international press these days mostly revolve around pirates, and understandably so. Piracy, though it no longer dominates headlines, is still a tremendous problem both inside Somalia and for the crews and owners of ships that must make the trip through the Indian Ocean to get from …
EcocentricEnergy
Naoto Kan, Japan’s beleaguered prime minister, has acknowledged for the first time since March 11 that he may step down — but not until he’s done doing what he needs to do. Kan has come under increasing pressure from both inside and outside his party to give up his post after his handling of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and …
