EcocentricOil
After rising and rising in recent months, oil prices have taken a sudden fall over the past couple of days, sliding beneath $100 a barrel. What happened? Representative Michael Burgess, a Republican from Texas, has an idea:
“What happened yesterday? Oh, the House passed a bill,” Burgess said.
“Here we are in the Senate
…
EcocentricEnergy
That’s an old fashioned. Looks pretty good, right? I thought so.
Old fashioneds can be made with whisky, which brings me to my real point — an interesting article by Kirsty Scott in the Guardian this week. In Speyside, home to half of Scotland’s whisky distilleries, a project is underway to use the by-product of Scottish whisky …
EcocentricFood
The hidden story of 2011 has been the record-breaking rise in global food prices. Global corn prices doubled between April 2010 and April 2011, while wheat prices are up some 60 to 80%. Exactly why food has gotten so expensive in recent months is the subject of an ongoing debate—biofuel policy, inflation, oil prices, natural …
EcocentricEcocentric
One of the most pressing predictions that must be made in climate science concerns the rate of polar melting. As they warm—and the Arctic and Antarctic regions have heated up faster than most of the rest of the planet—the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica are melting and flowing into the ocean, which then raises sea levels. …
EcocentricUncategorized
A colleague in Japan just drew my attention to this video on YouTube that was shot inside the beleaguered Fukushima nuclear power plant. It was shot on April 22 by Aoyama Shigeharu, a member of the Japanese government’s Atomic Energy Commission.
I don’t know a whole lot more about it than that — such as how it ended up on Japanese …
EcocentricFood
In March, I wrote about how the European Union had resolved to stop the process of legal dumping of fish in European waters. Fishing quotas set up to protect stocks from over-fishing has led European fishermen to (legally) discard portions of large catches so as to avoid coming to shore with a haul that exceeds their legal limit. The …
EcocentricHurricanes
In the middle of the night on Tuesday, in a hotly contested move, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blasted open a two-mile long hole in a levee along the Mississippi River, sending the rain-swollen waterway gushing over 100,000 acres of Missouri farmland. The flooded area – sparsely populated but fertile farmland – has long been …
EcocentricPopulation
Pencil in October 31, 2011 on your calendar. It’s not just the one day of the year you get to dress like Edward Cullen without everyone thinking there’s something deeply wrong with you. According to the United Nations Population Division (UNPD)—the demographers who rule over all demographers—that’s the day when the 7 billionth person …
EcocentricPolitics
As we survey the results of last night’s Canadian federal election, I’ll spare you the jokes about how completely boring Canada is. It’s actually a fascinating, vast nation that I lived in for a year (Scarborough!), one with a mix of cultures and language, a welcoming attitude towards immigrants, a sober banking sector, a fully funded …
EcocentricEnergy
A U.S. medical group has slammed the Japanese government and senior nuclear adviser Toshiso Kosako has tearfully resigned over the levels of radiation exposure Tokyo says are safe for students at elementary and junior high schools in Fukushima prefecture. In a statement quoted by Kyodo news agency, Physicians for Social Responsibility …
