July 2009
10 posts
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Here's the Meat of the Problem →
Join us.
According to a 2006 United Nations report, livestock accounts for 18 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Some of meat’s contribution to climate change is intuitive. It’s more energy efficient to grow grain and feed it to people than it is to grow grain and turn it into feed that we give to calves until they become adults that we then slaughter to feed to people. Some of...
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Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag in Three Months →
Plastic takes thousands of years to decompose — but 16-year-old science fair contestant Daniel Burd made it happen in just three months.
The Waterloo, Ontario high school junior figured that something must make plastic degrade, even if it does take millennia, and that something was probably bacteria.
(Via Arif Mamdani.)
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William Shatner continues his reign of comedic... →
You’ve seen him do a dramatic interpretation of Governor Palin’s incoherent resignation speech, now hear his voicemail chiding Hewlett-Packard employees for breaking the company’s 2007 promise to stop using toxic chemicals in its computers. On the same day the message turned up in their voicemail boxes, Greenpeace activists wrote “HAZARDOUS PRODUCTS” on the roof of...
Climate Change
squashed’s response to this idiotic exchange is awesome.
sds writes:
[A] new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience … found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.
~ USA Today “Science...
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“When it comes to eliminating actual pollutants such as mercury, particulate...”
– Bill Frezza: Clean Coal: An Unsustainable Political Myth
This whole, short article is worth a look.
(via mattlehrer)
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Tucker Carlson has a question for Jeb Bush
From “Jeb Bush: The Future of the Republican Party”:
Do you believe global warming is primarily man-made?
I’m a skeptic. I’m not a scientist. I think the science has been politicized. I would be very wary of hollowing out our industrial base even further… It may be only partially man-made. It may not be warming by the way. The last six years we’ve actually...
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“When it comes to saving money and growing our economy, energy efficiency...”
– Energy Secretary Steven Chu, in a statement yesterday announcing new standards for lighting that will boost the efficiency of fluorescent tubes (yep, the very things casting the unattractive glow as you read this in your office cube).
The standards will come into effect in 2012 and by 2042, they...
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If you eat food in America, see "Food, Inc."
The 90-minute documentary will disgust, infuriate, and inspire you. Multinational food conglomerates, with the help of their cronies in government, have spent millions of dollars to make sure the average consumer never learns the things you learn in this film.* As we watched pigs being roughly herded to their deaths in the nation’s largest slaughterhouse, I turned to Andrea. “So,...