EcocentricWater
It’s not the heat that might get us with climate change—it’s the humidity, so to speak. The risk of sea level rise due to melting land ice is one of the most recognized—if controversial and hard to predict—threats posed by global warming. Other potential impacts from global warming include increasingly powerful storms and …
EcocentricInvasive Species
Chances are pretty good that the last fish you ate never saw a river or the open ocean. That’s because the U.S. imports 84% of the 5 billion lbs. of seafood we consume each year and more than half of that is raised on fish farms and other aquaculture operations. The U.S., however, has not gotten invested in the aquaculture game as …
EcocentricEcocentric
I’m in Dhaka this week, where I have been doing some work between my long hours becoming intimate with the Bangladeshi capital’s epic traffic. The traffic here — an unholy tangle of rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, buses, trucks, cars and motorbikes — puts everything I have seen in Jakarta, India, Bangkok and Los Angeles (please!) to …
EcocentricForests
The originally published version of this story incorrectly stated that a joint Finnish-Russian forest conservation project in Russia includes a Russian NGO with five employees who have a combined salary of 300,000 euro a month. In fact, each employee earns around 300 euro a month.
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EcocentricPolitics
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson finally got to use her parking space on Capitol Hill this morning. Jackson was the star witness at the newly Republican-run House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Power hearings on the proposed “Energy Tax Prevention Act.”
What’s that? You …
EcocentricOil
It’s the sort of news that would spoil an oil executive’s breakfast. Last night the Guardian reported that a cache of WikiLeaks cables from American diplomats in Saudi Arabia indicated that the Mideast country’s oil reserves could be overstated by as much as 40%. If true, that would have major implications for oil prices because the …
EcocentricUncategorized
Vice President Joe Biden earned the nickname “Amtrak Joe” not because he used to hop the rails hobo-style in his youth—that would be the Onion version of the Veep—but because he made over 7,900 commuting trips on Amtrak between Washington and his home in Wilmington during his 26-year career in the Senate. Logically, the White …
EcocentricHealth
Over on Healthland I have a post on a new online mapping project that will gather together reports of animal disease outbreaks from around the world. That data matters, and not just for vets—75% of the new, emerging and reemerging diseases affecting human beings at the start of the 21st century originated in human beings, including …
EcocentricForests
The story of the world’s forests is usually a depressing one. Tropical rain forests are under pressure in South America, Asia and Africa, threatening habitat for countless species and adding billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. But while the headlines can be scary, the reality is that the world may be close …
EcocentricUncategorized
The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released a report this week that food prices reached an all-time high in January. The Food Price Index rose 3.4% in January to 231, surpassing June 2008 levels that sparked food riots and hoarding from Haiti to the Philippines. Prices of all commodity groups except meat — cereals, …
