Wow, this is just yuck. Apparently, China is being besieged by a massive algae bloom caused by pollution. It’s like some kind of terrible, old horror movie. The picture alone is worth checking out this article from Treehugger.
One time, my wife and I went with some friends to Deception Pass in Washington. We waded through water filled with seaweed that’s washed up shore. My wife mentioned that it’s a lot like wading through the Korean seaweed soup she loves to eat. I agreed. There was something about seaweed (and its slimy texture) that resonates within the inner child in me. Whenever we take walks along the beach and I find one of [...]
China attacked by algae
Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill Pictures
The team at Eco Picture Of The Day, EPOTD, have put together a selection of pictures which represent what happened and is happening in the Gulf Of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
This has been a massive disater which is slowly being contained.
Click here to see the pictures they have collected.
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Saving Civilization is Not a Spectator Sport
By Lester R. Brown
Given the enormous environmental and social challenges faced by our early twenty-first century global civilization, one of the questions I hear most frequently is, What can I do? People often expect me to talk about lifestyle changes, recycling newspapers, or changing light bulbs. These are essential, but they are not nearly enough. We now need to restructure the global economy, and quickly. It means becoming politically active, working for the needed changes. Saving civilization is not a spectator sport.
Inform yourself, read about the issues. If you want to know what happened to earlier civilizations that found themselves in environmental trouble, read Collapse by Jared Diamond or A [...]
Taxpayer Dollars Subsidizing Destruction
By Lester R. Brown
One way to correct market failures is tax shifting—raising taxes on activities that harm the environment so that their prices begin to reflect their true cost and offsetting this with a reduction in income taxes. A complementary way to achieve this goal is subsidy shifting. Each year the world’s taxpayers provide at least $700 billion in subsidies for environmentally destructive activities, such as fossil fuel burning, overpumping aquifers, clearcutting forests, and overfishing. As the Earth Council study Subsidizing Unsustainable Development observes, “There’s something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction.”
The perverse nature of harmful subsidies is especially apparent [...]
Lowering Income Taxes While Raising Pollution Taxes Reaps Great Returns
By Lester R. Brown
As economic decisionmakers—whether consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers, or investment bankers—we all depend on the market for guidance. In order for markets to work and economic actors to make sound decisions, the markets must give us good information, including the full cost of the products we buy.
Unfortunately, markets largely ignore the indirect costs of goods and services, thus grossly distorting the structure of the economy. The market price of burning coal, for example, includes only the direct costs, those of mining the coal and transporting it to the power plant. By neglecting the substantial indirect costs of burning coal—the costs of air pollution, acid rain, devastated ecosystems, [...]
Breath of fresh air
I recently received an email from a group calling themselves: Adopt The Sky Organization. They are a group committed to cleaning the air quality up for us and our children and our children’s children.
This email read as follows:
• Eric Husband wrote:
Sick of breathing dirty air?
We just launched a new kind of eco website for Earthjustice, an
environmental group.
adoptthesky.org
It could be nice content for your Ecogeek but if all you do is sign
the petition and adopt the sky, that would be great too. It’s free.
Adoptthesky.org lets visitors demand cleaner air by adopting a square
mile of sky over the US. They can add a personal message that floats in their adopted sky. All [...]
AB32 repeal update: Texas oil companies throw money behind overturning clean air
A few weeks ago I posted about the attempts large polluters and several politicians are taking to repeal California’s landmark AB32 anti-air pollution act by disguising their repeal as a “California Jobs Act”.
This is a pretty big deal. If AB32 is repealed (or suspended until the CA jobless rate hits a rate it only has once or twice in 30 years, so basically, a permanent suspension) then the state’s largest industries will have free reign to spew whatever they want in whatever quantities out of their factory smokestacks.
California voters already said that they think that air quality control and jobs can coexist. My article a few weeks ago cited numerous [...]
Link Sunday
Here’s a roundup of our favorite stories from the past week:
1) CA cities required to use a carbon calculator for state funds? Plus check your own footprint.
2) The latest on the hormone disrupter found in everything from canned food to ATM receipts– BPA– and the hope (legislation) on the horizon…
3) Po River oil spill– bad news for parmesan?
4) The blobfish.
5) Using tree stumps for cake stands– so smart, but we didn’t think of it.
6) Linguists on how to discuss climate change.
7) Slowing cargo ships would save a lot, economically and for the environment.
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AB32: We can have jobs and clean air
In 2006, California Governor Arnold Schwartznegger made headlines by signing into law a landmark bill that established the world’s first comprehensive program of regulatory and market mechanisms to achieve real, quantifiable, cost-effective reductions of greenhouse gases.
This bill is known as AB32, or the Global Warming Solutions Act. And in this year’s election season, certain forces in California are working to not only suspend it indefinitely, but in doing so, to try to make a statement that jobs and sustainable growth cannot go hand in hand.
I find this assertion ludicrous, and I’m not alone.
A bit more background: AB 32 seeks to reduce greenhouse gases in California to 1990 levels by 2020 [...]
Beluga whales towards extinction?
A great article posted yesterday discusses the “re-ignited” issue of ocean pollutants causing cancer in marine mammals.
This issue first emerged in the 1980s when scientists proposed that the beluga whale population along the St Lawrence river was declining due to ocean pollutant-caused cancer.
A University of Montreal study notes that: “Between 1983 and 1999, University of Montreal veterinary pathologist Daniel Martineau and his team conducted a study of 129 dead St. Lawrence belugas and found that 27 percent of the adults they studied had cancer…”
And a New York Times briefing cites: “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report shows the numbers [of beluga whales in Cook Inlet, Alaska]] have slipped again [...]