Features daily blog posts from Switchboard, the voice of NRDC's environmental experts.
March 10, 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 this very real threats to our long term prosperity is to make economic growth radically cleaner and leaner. This process begins at home by ...
March 10, 2010
Yesterday’s NY Times article on Spain’s solar policy experiments provides an interesting and balanced look at the challenge of using deployment mechanisms to develop markets for renewable energy technologies.
...the Spanish government, eager to fulfill its commitments to renewable energy, guaranteed generous subsidies for any company that met its aggressive deadlines.
While the ministry expected a...
March 10, 2010
A new study by University of Missouri Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (PDF) reveals that the current corn ethanol tax credit is effectively costing tax payers $4.18 per gallon and is driving up grain prices. The study estimates that the tax credit, which would cost about $5.85 billion next year if extended, will lead to 1.4 billion gallons above the 12.6 billion gallons required by law...
March 10, 2010
My colleague Thom Cmar had an interesting experience on Wisconsin Public Radio this morning. What was billed as a discussion of Great Lakes and ocean policy devolved into an ugly free-for-all about a supposed plot by the Obama Administration to abolish recreational fishing?
Sparked by an odd article on ESPN.com,...
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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...
