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Approaching Peak Car Use

Posted by lillianbarbeito on Saturday, 09 July 2011 in Transportation

BY Ariel Schwartz Many major cities have seen a decline in driving over the past few years. The reasons for this are varied, but if it's a continuing trend, it's going to mean drastic changes for the way we shape our cities. Even major oil companies admit that we are reaching peak oil--the point w...

Adventurers Embrace Their Inner Nerds to Help the Planet

Posted by Aaron on Friday, 08 July 2011 in Environmental Heroes

Montanans Gregg Treinish and Deia Schlosberg backpacked the length of the Andes Mountains for nearly two years, traversing the rocky spine of South America on foot. The two explorers pieced together a makeshift route that included portions of centuries-old Incan trails and paths carved by inhabitan...

How Dirty Is The Yellow School Bus?

Posted by lillianbarbeito on Friday, 08 July 2011 in Air Quality

Air Pollution: Tailpipe controls on buses don't clear the air inside bus cabins As iconic yellow buses transport children to and from school, their diesel engines deliver big doses of air pollutants. In response, school districts have started retrofitting their buses to cut tailpipe emissions. But ...

Trash trucks fueled by 'trash gas': a growing trend

Posted by grant on Friday, 08 July 2011 in Biofuels

The company that operates the largest trucking fleet in the waste industry is fueling more and more trucks with so-called trash gas. On Tuesday, Houston-based Waste Management Inc. will add its 1,000th truck fueled with natural gas. Powered with captured and converted methane gas from the company's ...

Sea Ice Is Changing Swiftly at the Poles

Posted by grant on Wednesday, 06 July 2011 in Climate Change

by fen montaigne of Yale 360 As sea ice rapidly melts in the Arctic and parts of Antarctica, the threat to creatures that use the ice as a feeding platform — polar bears and walruses in the Arctic, and Adélie penguins in the Antarctic — has been well publicized. But these iconic symbols of global ...

Oil Spilled Into Montana's Yellowstone River

Posted by bchristo on Tuesday, 05 July 2011 in Earth Violators

LAUREL, Mont. — Hundreds of barrels of crude oil spilled into Montana's Yellowstone River after an ExxonMobil pipeline beneath the riverbed ruptured, sending a plume 25 miles downstream and forcing temporary evacuations, officials said. The break near Billings in south-central Montana fouled the ...

Red, White and Green on the 4th of July

Posted by EarthDude on Friday, 01 July 2011 in Buy Local

The 4th of July weekend is upon us, which means we're lighting up our grills all across the country. There's nothing like a great bar-b-cue shared with friends and family. With the increasing concern about our health and that of the planet, I'd like to take a few minutes and talk about how you can m...

VW’s 235mpg car

Posted by ep-admin on Friday, 01 July 2011 in Transportation

With oil prices at $135 dollars per barrel, the pressure is on for car makers to innovate and create more fuel efficient vehicles. Volkswagen seems to be taking this task seriously with the 1L, a prototype that is capable of traveling for 235mpg using 1 gallon of gasoline, or 100km on 1L of gas. Add...

IKEA Flips the Switch on a 65,000 Square Foot Solar Array in Sacramento

Posted by bchristo on Friday, 01 July 2011 in Solar

Furniture giant, IKEA, just switched on a 573-kW solar power system, which covers 65,000 square feet of space at their Sacramento, California store. The array is made up of approximately 2,548 panels and will help to cut 630 tons of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere. The solar array i...

Rethinking Silly Car Trips

Posted by Wolf on Monday, 27 June 2011 in Transportation

In an article in Monday’s Times, I write about various strategies that European cities are using to cut down on private car use and inner-city driving. In Zurich, a multipronged approach has left residents less likely to own a car and less likely to use one if they do. The goal is to make cities mo...

Sea Shepherd Tuna Battle off the Barbary Coast

Posted by grant on Monday, 27 June 2011 in Wildlife Conservation

Saturday, June 11, 2011 Sea Shepherd’s Operation Blue Rage 2011 has certainly enraged Tunisian fishermen operating on Melita Bank, roughly 70 nautical miles off the Libyan coast and 20 miles inside the NATO no fly zone. At 0600 hours, the Sea Shepherd vessels Steve Irwin and Brigitte Bardot approa...

Fukushima is the greatest environmental disaster in human history

Posted by amir on Saturday, 25 June 2011 in Earth Violators

By way of comparison, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that occured in 1986 in the Ukraine, Russia- heretofore the worst nuclear disaster on record- burned for 10 days and cumulatively killed an estimated 1 million people worldwide. The Fukushima, Japan nuclear disaster...

'Super sand' to help clean up dirty drinking water

Posted by Wolf on Saturday, 25 June 2011 in Clean Water

Contaminated water can be cleaned much more effectively using a novel, cheap material, say researchers. Dubbed "super sand", it could become a low-cost way to purify water in the developing world. The technology involves coating grains of sand in an oxide of a widely available material called grap...

Stressful home ups lung damage in kids

Posted by GreenDog on Saturday, 25 June 2011 in Human Health

Living in stressful homes increases the effects of outside air pollution in children, resulting in greater pollution-related lung damage, U.S. researchers say. Lead researcher Talat Islam of the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, says psychosocial stress ...

Japan's "Throwaway" Nuclear Workers

Posted by lillianbarbeito on Saturday, 25 June 2011 in General Environment

A decade and a half before it blew apart in a hydrogen blast that punctuated the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, the No. 3 reactor at the Fukushima nuclear power plant was the scene of an earlier safety crisis. Then, as now, a small army of transient workers was put to work to try to stem t...

How Much Water Is There On Earth?

Posted by grant on Thursday, 23 June 2011 in Water Conservation

Magellan Would Be Shocked Water feels good when we're thirsty, cools us when we're hot, looks great in a pond, a lake, a cloud. Because we ourselves are two-thirds water, we like the stuff, we're drawn to it. We search the universe looking for signs of water and when we look back at our planet, we ...

Poachers Kill Mountain Gorilla in Bwindi Park, Uganda

Posted by bchristo on Thursday, 23 June 2011 in Animals

Poachers have killed a mountain gorilla at Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park. The area conservation manager, Mr Pontius Ezuma, said the 12-year-old black-back gorilla died last week of injuries it sustained after it was speared on the chest by unknown poachers at Biyumba in Kanyonza Sub-coun...

Mountaintop Mining and Birth Defects

Posted by henryfool on Thursday, 23 June 2011 in Mining

New study on the association between mountaintop mining and birth defects among live births in central Appalachia, 1996–2003 AbstractBirth defects are examined in mountaintop coal mining areas compared to other coal mining areas and non-mining areas of central Appalachia. The study hypothesis is th...

BP Wins a Big One in Oil Spill Litigation

Posted by amir on Monday, 20 June 2011 in Oil Spill

Ruling in favor of Transocean and BP, a federal judge on Thursday dismissed third-party environmental claims in a giant pleading bundle in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill litigation, saying the fact that the oil flow has stopped makes those lawsuits irrelevant. "Th...

The FBI’s War against Green Activists

Posted by plantitfilm on Thursday, 16 June 2011 in Earth Violators

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” -Joseph Heller, Catch 22 Ever wonder where your tax dollars go? I mean besides wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bailouts for Wall Street and tax cuts for the richest of the rich. How about our government’s rapidly expanding...