Features daily blog posts from Switchboard, the voice of NRDC's environmental experts.
March 21, 2010
It was later than usual when we set off this afternoon for our second trip onto the lagoon. A world-renown marine scientist, Bruce Mate from the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, was on a boat nearby and he arrived for lunch and conversation with my colleague Joel Reynolds, himself world-renown in whaling circles for his work in saving Laguna San Ignacio and from challenging the Navy’s use of sonar.
Mate specializes in tagging whales with GPS devices that can track their migratory patterns...
March 21, 2010
The trial of the Syncrude Canada, Ltd. oil company is now almost three weeks old. Syncrude is facing criminal charges for the death of over 1600 migratory waterfowl at its Aurora tailings pond in St. Albert, Alberta on April 28, 2008. A major point of contention that has emerged in the trial has been around the use of deterrents (noise cannons and scare crows) to keep the ducks from landing on the tailings pond. Syncrude attorney Robert White has argued that a late winter storm prevented Syncrude from deploying...
March 21, 2010
Yesterday, EPA released the results of its assessment of chemical spot-on flea & tick treatments, following the recent sharp increase in reported pet poisonings. As I mentioned in my last post, NRDC was watching closely – as we’ve been working hard to protect pets & families from toxic chemicals in products like this.
After revisiting the safety of these products the agency had previously approved, EPA announced it will increase restrictions on the products and urged consumers to use them with...
March 21, 2010
The Adopt-a-Highway program has had success in removing litter from our roadways. Even though our roadways may be prettier due to the lack of litter, a harm related to roads exists that in many ways is more frightening. The harm emanates from the noxious stew of pollutants from the cars and trucks that rumble down our highways each day.
A barrage of studies have highlighted the major impacts on the health and welfare of residents associated with living in close proximity to highways. For example...
March 21, 2010
Next week, the International Maritime Organization will be meeting in London to consider a proposal that would drastically cut harmful air pollution from the largest, dirtiest ships at North American ports.
If successful, next week’s meeting will be a major step forward for public health in cities and towns up and down our Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf of Mexico coasts - and even hundreds of miles inland.
Here's the background:
Only the IMO can set standards for all of the ocean-going vessels at our ports, such...
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March 20, 2010
Former Secretary of the Interior, Conservationist, Writer: 1920 - 2010Stewart Udall died today, the first day of spring, at the age of 90. President John F. Kennedy named the Arizona-born Udall secretary of the interior in 1961. After Kennedy was assassinated, Udall continued at the DOI under President Johnson. He held that post from 1961-1969, crucial years as the conservation movement morphed into the environmental movement, with Udall's help.In his 1963 classic, The Quiet Crisis (with a foreward by President...
March 18, 2010
Image: "Lake Hume at 4%," 2007. Credit: suburbanbloke/flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0Australia is getting hotter, the seas surrounding it are rising, and rainfall patterns are changing. Those are the take-aways from the "State of the Climate" report released on Monday by top scientists in Australia. "There is greater than 90 percent certainty that increases in greenhouse gas emissions" -- carbon dioxide and methane created by human activity -- "have caused most of the global warming...
March 16, 2010
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...
March 15, 2010
"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...
March 12, 2010
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...
