I'll confess right now that I get the warm fuzzies just walking past a library, so the opening of a brand-new branch of the New York Public Library in itself is enough to thrill me. What's even more exciting about NYPL's new Battery Park City library is that, like several other buildings in this quiet development at Manhattan's southwestern tip, it's green. I took my kids to visit on opening day, and even on that overcast Monday morning the library felt naturally bright and airy. Huge windows line the building's...
"The Unchained Goddess" (1958), produced by Fritz Capra for the Bell Laboratories. "Even now, Man may be unwittingly changing the world's climate through the waste products of his civilization. Due to our release through factories and automobiles every year of more than six billion tons of carbon dioxide, which helps air absorb heat from the sun, our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer! "----- In early March, The Washington Times published an exchange of e-mails between U.S. environmental...
The Alamosa Photovoltaic (PV) Solar Plant, 8.2 MW, ColoradoIf you want a rough estimate of solar power's growth in the United States over the past 35 years, all you really need to look at is the ever-changing solar capacity at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. When President Jimmy Carter installed a solar water heating system on the White House roof in the 1970s, the industry made a quantum leap across the nation. Not by coincidence. Spurred by skyrocketing oil costs, Carter oversaw an unprecedented government investment...
Mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, maybe uranium in the walls around you? Why should that bother you? Have you renovated in the last 10 years? Most brands of sheetrock use coal ash as a component, which is known to contain these byproducts. Somehow the coal industry has managed to keep coal ash designated as non-toxic waste, in spite of those toxins.When I heard that the administration was close to considering the regulations for coal ash, I knew it was time to resume my photo project.The logistics of doing an...
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Unusually Large Snowstormwww.thedailyshow.comDaily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorHealth Care Reform Yesterday India and China notified the United Nations that they would join the climate deal created at December's climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. (Relive the fun with OnEarth's Copenhagen Climate Talks coverage.) The Associated Press reports that "[A] one-sentence note from China's top climate change negotiator, Su Wei, authorized the addition of China to the...
Forgive us for indulging in a little self-promotion here, but OnEarth has just been nominated for TreeHugger's Best of Green Awards in the category of best political website. That seemed a little odd to us at first -- we're journalists here, not politicians -- but considering who else is in the category, we're in very good company: Andy Revkin's Dot Earth, Mother Jones' Blue Marble, and Joe Romm's Climate Progress. Those are some of the must-reads for environmental news and commentary online, so we're quite happy...
Yes, the resurgence of the "climate-deniers" -- like weeds, or zombies -- is discouraging. But this resistance to scientific knowledge has a long history in the United States. Consider the enduring revolt by many conservative fundamentalists against Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.Quick recap: Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859. The landmark Scopes trial (the basis for the play and the film, Inherit the Wind) took place in 1925 in the state of Tennessee, which sought to bar the...
A Katrina-like winter storm tore through parts of Western Europe early Sunday morning, killing over 60 people. Most of the dead are from Atlantic coastal France, where ( Per Agence France-Presse) winter storm Xynthia's 93-mile-an-hour winds and 26-foot waves hit the coast so ferociously that they breached many of the region's aging sea levees. Between around 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. local time on Sunday, the sea surged at least 1,600 feet inland. Streets were flooded so fast that many people didn't have time to...
You probably don't give too much thought to coal ash.You might want to change that.The USA gets half its electricity from coal, produced by about 600 power plants , each of which produces about 325,000 tons of coal combustion waste (CCW), composed of fly ash, bottom ash, and scrubber slurry. This is nasty stuff. Industry tells us that it's not very harmful, but then you read the articles about the horrible birth defects and environmental consequences to the third world locations, unlucky enough to have a couple of...
If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of American birders, The American Bird Conservancy (ABC) has a suggestion for your summer vacation: spend your time and money investing in "conservation birding." You can see some of the most spectactular birds in the Americas (like the Yellow-scarfed Tanager, above) while helping to prevent their extinction. ABC has partnered with bird conservation organizations in a dozen countries to set up thirty-six preserves covering a quarter-million acres of unique and...
