By John Vidal15 November 2014 (The Observer) – When Botswana’s president, Ian Khama, opened a giant $4.9bn diamond mine in the heart of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in September, there were some notable absentees among the invited guests: the 700 bushmen whose hunter-gatherer families had been the traditional inhabitants of the desert, but who […]
By Matt Townsend 20 November 2014 (Bloomberg) – On a crisp Friday evening in late October, Shannon Rich, 33, is standing in a dying American mall. Three customers wander the aisles in a Sears the size of two football fields. The RadioShack is empty. A woman selling smartphone cases watches “Homeland” on a laptop. “It’s […]
By Rune Likvern 10 October 2014 (Fractional Flow) – […] The Race between Fossil Fuels and Renewables By putting the growth between fossil fuels and renewables into a perspective, it demonstrates how dependent our economies, our wealth and well beings are upon fossil fuels. Looking at the growth in total fossil fuels versus renewables consumption […]
By Michael Casey 17 November 2014 (CBS News) – The never-ending demand for Pacific bluefin tuna among sushi lovers is driving the iconic fish towards extinction, a conservation group said. The Swiss-based International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) upgraded the status of the tuna from “least concern” to “vulnerable,” which means it is now […]
By Lindsay Abrams19 November 2014 (Salon) – Congressional climate wars were dominated Tuesday by the U.S. Senate, which spent the day debating, and ultimately failing to pass, a bill approving the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. While all that was happening, and largely unnoticed, the House was busy doing what it does best: attacking […]
By Dom Phillips 18 November 2014 ATIBAIA, Brazil (Washington Post) – Seen from a micro-light aircraft, flying low near this small town in Brazil’s interior, the scale of the water crisis blighting São Paulo, a megalopolis 40 miles away, was frighteningly clear. Four of the five reservoirs in an interlinked system that supplies 6.5 million […]
By Robert Preidt12 November 2014 (HealthDay News) – Scientists report that they found evidence of six kinds of toxic flame retardants in Americans. The researchers tested urine samples from California residents and found detectable levels of a rarely studied group of flame retardants known as phosphates, and one — tris-(2-chloroethyl) phosphate (TCEP) — has never […]
By Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Sandra Maler8 September 2014 BOSTON (Reuters) – The widening gap between America’s wealthiest and its middle and lower classes is “unsustainable”, but is unlikely to improve any time soon, according to a Harvard Business School study released on Monday. The study, titled An Economy Doing Half its Job, said American […]
By Robert Sanders13 November 2014 BERKELEY (UC Berkeley) – Today’s climate models predict a 50 percent increase in lightning strikes across the United States during this century as a result of warming temperatures associated with climate change. Reporting in the Nov. 14 issue of the journal Science [pdf], UC Berkeley climate scientist David Romps and […]
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer17 November 2014 WASHINGTON (Associated Press) – A key polar bear population fell nearly by half in the past decade, a new U.S.-Canada study [pdf] found, with scientists seeing a dramatic increase in young cubs starving and dying. Researchers chiefly blame shrinking sea ice from global warming. Scientists from the […]
