EcocentricWind Power
After two months of near silence, Japan’s government has seemingly awoken from its slumber and kicked into high damage-control gear. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Naoto Kan, whose administration has come under fire for its slow and opaque response to the ongoing nuclear crisis at Fukushima, made two surprise announcements. First, that he …
EcocentricEnergy
Yesterday the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with an early summary of a new report projecting the future of renewable energy. As with many international studies of the sort, readers were free to use parts of the results towards whichever conclusion they’d already reached on alternative power and climate …
EcocentricNatural Gas
My Going Green column this week covers a new study that contains the strongest independent scientific case yet that shale-gas production can contaminate nearby water wells. A team of Duke researchers examined groundwater wells in northeastern Pennsylvania and New York state—the gasland I visited for our recent cover story on …
EcocentricUncategorized
A major new report looking at over three decades of data in the UK has found no evidence that young children living near nuclear power plants face an increased risk of developing leukemia.
However, the report looked only at nuclear power plants during normal operation and so the findings cannot be used to predict the health …
EcocentricInvasive Species
Another interesting story over on Time.com’s science page: Christy Choi writes about how the lionfish, an aquarium-pet-turned-ocean-invader with a voracious appetite and bad manners, “has residents and scientists throughout the Caribbean and Northern Atlantic worried about the threat it poses to coastal ecosystems and economies by wiping …
EcocentricOil
With major oil players enjoying eye-popping profits on the back of high gas prices, there’s a growing political push to eliminate tax incentives for the petroleum industry. Senate Democrats and President Obama are behind a plan to strips billions in subsidies for the five biggest oil companies, with the money going either to clean …
EcocentricWaste
The Italian Army arrived in Naples today to help the city deal with some 2,000 tons of uncollected garbage. About 170 troops have been deployed, with around 70 trucks, in a long-running trash crisis that began in 1994 when Italy declared a state of emergency after illegal dumping by the local mafia overflowed the region’s landfills.
EcocentricRegulation
Chubu Electric Power Company agreed on Monday to suspend operations at the controversial Hamaoka nuclear power plant, three days after Prime Minister Naoto Kan made an unprecedented request for the company to shut down the plant, citing safety concerns. Like the beleaguered Daiichi Fukishima nuclear power plant further north, Hamaoka is …
EcocentricForests
We’ve just posted an interesting story to Time.com about a group of monks in northern Cambodia who are lobbying for over a dozen protected forests to go onto the global carbon market.
This is exactly the kind of project that makes Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) so promising: protecting the forests …
EcocentricEcocentric
About a month ago, we posted an item about GoDaddy CEO Bob Parson’s elephant-hunting safari in Zimbabwe. (You can find it here.) Parsons came under a little criticism, though as he told us later, he wasn’t the least bit sorry. He claimed that the hunt was an act of charity, killing an elephant that had been destroying crops for hungry …
