The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Unusually Large Snowstormwww.thedailyshow.comDaily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorHealth Care Reform Yesterday India and China notified 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 --...
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...
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...
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...
Judging from some of the backchannel chitchat I'm encountering, we environmental journalists are hitting our collective head against a wall over the near-deafening yawp from global warming deniers. The ratio of science-literate to science-challenged responses in our blog comments, email, and in-baskets is so unbalanced, the scale is broken. And mainstream reporting on climate change remains stuck in a time warp, where a few big snowstorms during one winter on one small part of a big continent, undercut the...
Make Your Voice Heard for Climate Action: Call Your Senators This WeekThe news out of Washington has grown discouraging lately. Lawmakers are bickering and Congress is in gridlock. Corporations, meanwhile, have been given license by the Supreme Court to purchase more political influence than ever before. Many Americans are tempted to turn their backs on the DC infighting, but that would be a mistake. We still possess a powerful ability to influence our lawmakers. When we raise our voices loudly...
Something to consider - many of us are still knee-deep in snow, but winter's not going to last forever, and with the prospect of rain in our future, it's never too early to start thinking ahead.If you have any sort of garden, and you live where there's any sort of rain, it would be widely to your advantage to consider getting a rain barrel.Rain barrels are big units that collect water run-off from the roof of your house. There are myriad obvious advantages. Many towns impose rules or bans on watering your plants...
Caught in the Devil's Bargain: Chevron stabs workers in the back Have you seen the latest story coming out about Chevron and their troubles in Richmond, CA around their attempt to ram though a giant expansion of their oil refinery? Seems since they didn't get their way, the Oil Giant wants to close up shop, dismantle the 300 acre facility and sell the parts at the world's largest garage sale over in China. Huh? Get rid of your largest...
