Opinion
by ted nordhaus and michael shellenberger Even as the climate science becomes more definitive, polls show that public concern in the United States about global warming has been declining. What will it take to rally Americans behind the need to take strong action on cutting carbon emissions?
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Report
by greg breiningA number of biologists are challenging the long-held orthodoxy that invasive species are inherently bad. In their contrarian view, many introduced species have proven valuable and useful and have increased the diversity and resiliency of native ecosystems.
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Opinion
by john wargoLong a ubiquitous part of modern life, plastics are now in everything from diapers to water bottles to cell phones. But given the proven health threats of some plastics — as well as the enormous environmental costs — the time has come for the U.S. to pass a comprehensive plastics control law.
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Analysis
by fred pearceOver the last century, the intensive use of chemical fertilizers has saturated the Earth’s soils and waters with nitrogen. Now scientists are warning that we must move quickly to revolutionize agricultural systems and greatly reduce the amount of nitrogen we put into the planet's ecosystems.
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Video
During the last two decades, mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia has destroyed or severely damaged more than a million acres of forest and buried nearly 2,000 miles of streams. Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining
, a video report produced by Yale Environment 360
in collaboration with MediaStorm, focuses on the environmental and social impacts of this practice and examines the long-term effects on the region’s forests and waterways. At a time when the Obama administration is reviewing mining permit applications throughout West Virginia and three other states, this video offers a first-hand look at what is at stake for Appalachia’s environment and its people.
Report
by jon r. luomaThe solar power boom in Germany, Spain, and parts of the United States has been fueled by government subsidies. But now some U.S. states — led by New Jersey, of all places — are pioneering a different approach: issuing tradable credits that can be sold on the open market. So far, the results have been promising.
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Opinion
by gaia vinceAs the world warms, how different societies fare in dealing with rising seas and changing weather patterns will have as much to do with political, social, and economic factors as with a changing climate.
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Opinion
by david owenGreen rankings in the U.S. don’t tell the full story about the places where the human footprint is lightest. If you really want the best environmental model, you need to look at the nation’s biggest — and greenest — metropolis: New York City.
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Report
by winifred birdAlthough it is a heavily urbanized nation, fully two-thirds of Japan remains woodlands. Yet many of the forests are timber plantations inhospitable to wildlife, especially black bears, which are struggling to survive in one of the most densely populated countries on Earth.
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Opinion
by jonathan foleyAs the international community focuses on climate change as the great challenge of our era, it is ignoring another looming problem — the global crisis in land use. With agricultural practices already causing massive ecological impact, the world must now find new ways to feed its burgeoning population and launch a "Greener" Revolution.
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Opinion
by elisabeth rosenthalThe average American produces three times the amount of CO2 emissions as a person in France. A U.S. journalist now living in Europe explains how she learned to love her clothesline and sweating in summer.
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20 Nov 2009: Emergency Rainforest Fund
Created by Prince Charles and 35 Nations
Britain’s Prince Charles has struck an agreement with 35 nations to contribute $22 billion to $36 billion
to reduce the destruction of tropical forests by 25 percent by 2015. The Prince of Wales said the U.S. has agreed to contribute $275 million to the rainforest protection fund, which will pay countries such as Indonesia and Brazil to preserve forests rather than felling them for timber or agricultural use. Ed Miliband, the U.K.’s energy and climate change secretary, said a global mechanism for paying countries to protect tropical forests is on the agenda at next month’s Copenhagen climate summit and is “closer than it’s ever been” to being codified in an international treaty. Deforestation is responsible for nearly 20 percent of global carbon emissions, and various nations and conservation groups are
working to develop programs known as REDD 
Prince Charles
— Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. Conservationists said that the Prince of Wales’ effort must ensure the funds are not squandered through local corruption or questionable forest protection schemes. The conservationists cited the example of Norway’s pledging $250 million to slow deforestation in Guyana. Since the Guyanese government claimed an artificially high rate of previous deforestation, it can receive payments while actually doing little or nothing to slow current forest loss.
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20 Nov 2009: Using Enzymes from Termites
To Make Biofuel from Plants and Wood Waste
A U.S. company has come up with a new way of producing biofuels from cellulosic feedstocks, such as agricultural waste:
Using enzymes from the guts of termites to more efficiently produce ethanol. The startup company, ZeaChem, says using the enzymes from the wood-eating insects has achieved ethanol yields in the laboratory 35 percent higher than other producers of cellulosic ethanol, according to
MIT Technology Review. ZeaChem uses acid to break the cellulose into sugars, but instead of fermenting the sugars into ethanol using yeast — as is customarily done — the company feeds the sugars to an acetogen bacteria found in termites. The bacteria turns the sugars into acetic acid, which produces ethanol when combined with hydrogen. “It’s not the obvious, direct route, but there is a high yield potential,” said an official from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado. ZeaChem’s CEO said the company has produced 135 gallons of ethanol per ton of cellulosic feedstock.
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19 Nov 2009: Oceans’ Ability to Absorb CO2
May be Diminishing, New Study Says
A study of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the world’s oceans from 1765 to the present shows that as humanity pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere,
the capacity of the world’s oceans to continue absorbing carbon appears to be decreasing. Researchers from Columbia University and NASA estimate that since 2000, the proportion of fossil-fuel emissions absorbed by the oceans may have declined by as much as 10 percent. In effect, researchers say that industrial activity has been producing so much C02 since 1950 that the oceans are slowly becoming saturated with the gas. “The more carbon dioxide you put in, the more acidic the ocean becomes, reducing its ability to hold CO2,” said lead researcher Samar Khatiwala, an oceanographer at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The study, published in the journal
Nature, estimated that
the oceans currently hold about 150 tons of industrial carbon — a third more than in the 1990s. The researchers used data on ocean chemistry, salinity, temperature, and other measures to calculate the amount of industrial carbon in the ocean for the past 245 years. The study showed that the land may now being absorbing more carbon than it is producing, perhaps because higher atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing the rate of photosynthesis.
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19 Nov 2009: Kenya Evicts Squatters
From Beleaguered Mau Forest
The Kenyan government has begun evicting an estimated
30,000 families that have squatted illegally in the vital Mau forest and caused major environmental damage to the one-million-acre woodland. The Mau forest, located in the Rift valley, is Kenya’s largest water catchment area, the source of at least a dozen rivers that feed Lake Victoria, the Masai Mara nature reserve, and the tea fields of Kericho. Over the last 20 years, however, squatters and officials in the government of ex-President Daniel Arap Moi moved into the Mau and have destroyed roughly a quarter of the forest by clearing the land for timber production and agriculture. The forest destruction has created large-scale soil erosion and caused aquifer levels to fall, exacerbating a recent drought that caused many rivers to run dry. Prime Minister Raila Odinga has made clearing the Mau of squatters and restoring the forest the nation’s top environmental priority. Already, officials report, 3,500 squatters have moved out of the forest after being served with eviction notices.
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Many scientists have shied away from the subject of geoengineering — the large-scale, deliberate manipulation of the Earth’s climate system — because they feel it is a wrongheaded and dangerous path to pursue. But climate scientist Ken Caldeira has not been so dismissive, in part because his climate modeling has demonstrated that some geoengineering schemes may indeed help reduce the risks of climate change. In fact, few scientists have thought harder about the moral, political, and environmental implications of geoengineering than Caldeira. In an interview with
Yale Environment 360, Caldeira discusses the complexities
Ken Caldeira
of geoengineering and also talks about how he has recently become a focal point in the controversy surrounding the publication of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s
SuperFreakonomics, the follow-up to their previous best-seller,
Freakonomics. A chapter of the book that deals with geoengineering circulated on the Internet prior to the book’s publication and has been widely criticized for its distortions and its cynical, contrarian perspective. Caldeira says the authors misrepresented both his position and mainstream climate science.
Click here to read the interview18 Nov 2009: Massive CO2 Increases
Documented in Comprehensive New Study
Emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels
soared by 41 percent from 1990 to 2008 and have jumped 29 percent since 2000, according to one of the most comprehensive studies to date of global carbon emissions. The study’s lead author, Corinne Le Quere of the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, said that unless these runaway emissions are soon brought under control,
global temperatures would likely rise by 9 to 11 degrees F by 2100, an increase that most scientists say could lead to catastrophic changes, including rapid melting of polar ice sheets. Le Quere’s study, published in the journal
Nature Geoscience, said that humanity was pouring so much CO2 into the atmosphere that the ability of oceans, forests, and soils to absorb the gas was diminishing. These carbon sinks, which absorbed 60 percent of atmospheric CO2 in 1950, are now absorbing only 55 percent, the study said. The study reported that for the first time, more CO2 is being emitted by burning coal than burning oil, and that
developing countries are now emitting more CO2
than developed countries. CO2 emissions increased at an average annual rate of 3.4 percent from 2000 to 2008 and, after a slight dip this year because of the global recession, are expected to rise rapidly again in 2010, the study said.
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