Features daily blog posts from Switchboard, the voice of NRDC's environmental experts.
March 11, 2010
This story in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times makes a compelling case for what NRDC calls the virtual river – new water supplies that...
March 11, 2010
It is almost 3 months after the Copenhagen Accord was hammered out by 28 of the world’s key countries that represent over 80% of the world’s global warming pollution and some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change (as I discussed here). Given the state of the Accord just after Copenhagen with some calling it a failure, some outlining...
March 11, 2010
In a reprise of the debate between NRDC's Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Massey Coal CEO Don Blankenship over mountaintop removal coal mining, the Washington newspaper The Hill published dueling pieces by both adversaries in today's edition. Back in January, these two squared off face-to-face in a debate held in Charleston, West Virginia....
March 11, 2010
Over the next two decades, 2.6 billion new consumers will enter the ranks of the global middle class. This rise in global wealth is expected to test the ecological limits of the planet as demand for raw materials, food, and fuel rise, water becomes more scarce, and global warming makes the climate less certain.
The only way to avoid these very real threats to our long term prosperity is to make economic growth radically cleaner and leaner. This process begins at home by ...
March 11, 2010
On Tuesday, in an official letter to the UNFCCC signed by China’s climate negotiator Su Wei, China officially expressed its willingness to be associated with the Copenhagen Accord. To be precise, the one-sentence letter confirmed that “the [UNFCCC] Secretariat can proceed to include China in the list of Parties included in the chapeau of the Copenhagen Accord” (the preamble to...
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March 8, 2010
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 --...
March 5, 2010
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...
March 4, 2010
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...
March 4, 2010
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...
