By Shreya Dasgupta20 July 2015 (mongabay.com) – Your car tires may be treading over forests and wildlife in Southeast Asia. As the global demand for tires soars, so does the demand for natural rubber sourced from Hevea brasiliensis, the para-rubber tree. This rising demand is driving a rapid expansion of rubber plantations into biodiversity-rich forests […]
By Aislinn Laing19 July 2015 Seronera, Serengeti National Park (The Telegraph) – As Howard Frederick flew in a Cessna low over the scrubland of Tanzania’s Selous game reserve, it was the complete absence of elephants rather than the piles of scattered bones he saw that chilled him most. The team conducting the aerial wildlife counts […]
March 2015 (CoalSwarm / Sierra Club) – Because coal is the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel and coal plants have a long lifespan, growth in coal capacity has major implications for climate stability. From 2004 to 2013, increased coal utilization outweighed all other sources combined, producing 62 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions growth from fossil […]
By Brad Plumer 9 July 2015 (Vox) – Earlier this week, I wrote about the global coal renaissance — arguably the most important climate-change story in the world right now. Since 2000, developing countries like China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia have been building coal-fired power plants at a rapid pace. On the upside, this boom […]
By Brad Plumer 7 July 2015 (Vox) – If you only focused on the United States, you might think coal’s days were numbered. The dirtiest of all fossil fuels once provided more than half of America’s electricity. That has since dropped to 39 percent, thanks to competition from cheap natural gas, a tireless campaign by […]
By David Sim 7 July 2015 (IBT) – Every summer, the Yellow Sea turns green as a thick carpet of algae covers the beaches of Shangdong Province, eastern China. People living in Qingdao and nearby coastal towns have grown accustomed to their beaches looking more like verdant meadows every July. Children play in a carpet […]
By Adam Voiland24 June 2015 (NASA) – People living in polluted areas inhale vast quantities of fine particulate matter, which is called PM2.5 because the pollution particles have diameters less than 2.5 micrometers. Such particles are so small—30 times smaller than the width of a human hair—that they can easily infiltrate human respiratory and circulatory […]
3 July 2015 (Carbon Counter) – A new piece at the Conversation claims that China is an emerging “renewables powerhouse”. And it is a classic example of twisting the facts to suit your narrative. It is also a classic example of the repeated failure to use meaningful statistics when comparing countries. Everything wrong with it, […]
17 June 2015 (Carbon Counter) – Last year China installed more new wind and solar capacity than any country in history. This is a fact, and it has led some to talk of China being a “renewables powerhouse” and of there being a “renewables revolution”. But out of context, this fact can be much less […]
By Charles Iceland12 June 2015 (The Guardian) – Every inhabited continent, to varying degrees, has areas where there is extremely high water stress. These are areas where more than 80% of the local water supply is withdrawn by businesses, farmers, residents and other consumers every year. These so-called stressed areas are also the ones most […]
