There was a very scary story out of Georgia today after two Armenian men pleaded guilty during a secret trial to smuggling highly enriched uranium into the former Soviet state and trying to sell it to an undercover agent posing as a representative of Islamic radicals.
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The Green Cost of The New Great Game
In 2007, James Graff wrote a cover story for TIME that looked at the new “great game” developing in the arctic. Global warming is melting the arctic ice cap, opening a scramble for control of a short passage between Asia and Europe. But now a new study has underlined how the new great game may come with a high ecological cost.
Trash Talk: Hong Kongers Produce the Most Garbage in the World
When you first get to Hong Kong, there are a few clues that this city might have a trash problem on its hands — like the fact that people seem to live off takeaway food, which all comes in plastic containers that are then wrapped in a paper bag, wrapped in a plastic bag. Or how at global chains like Pret A Manger, the nice people …
Will Britain sell off its public forests?
One of the major environmental challenges today is the task of convincing many developing economies in the tropics to protect their forests. But some countries up north in the developed world may soon understand how difficult it can be to strike a balance between economic pressures and arboreal conservation, at least according to a …
Climate: Why Bipartisanship on Energy Won’t Be Easy—and Why It’s Necessary
Last week I wrote about a paper on energy and climate policy that came from scholars at the leftish Brookings Institution, the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the (centrist and technology-focused) Breakthrough Institute. Called “Post-Partisan Power” (download a PDF here), the paper laid out a research and development …
Yeo Valley: British Dairy Goes OG
I have to say, this kind of made my morning. Via Grist, behold the endearing/embarassing video from the organic British dairy Yeo Valley.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOHAUvbuV4o&fs=1&hl=en_US]
Wildlife: How Do We Divide Up the World’s Biological Resources?
As we wrote yesterday, the meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya has a long agenda. That’s what happens when you convene a global meeting to save wildlife on the planet Earth. But beyond the dire warnings about disappearing animals and emptying seas—and the grand, if fuzzy promises governments will …
More on Rare Earths: Looking for a Way out From Under a Monopoly
Last month, after China and Japan locked horns over Tokyo’s arrest of a Chinese fishing captain whose boat collided with the Japanese Coast Guard, shipments of rare earths from China to Japan started to dry up at over 30 different Japanese companies. Since then, Beijing has stuck to its story – that the there is no …
Get Busy NASA, We Need a Second Planet
It only seems appropriate to start with a word about the view out my office window in Hong Kong this morning, and that word is murk. As I was just discussing with a colleague visiting from New York, when you first encounter this kind of day in Hong Kong, you can convince yourself that you’re looking at fog that has rolled in over the …
Climate: Al Gore Wants Business to Step Up
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 …