Eating Meat = Global Warming

Interesting posting at the NYT's Green Inc. blog. First cites 2006 UN report that livestock is responsible for 18 % of greenhouse gas emissions. But then a recent Archives of Internal Medicine editorial stating that water use is 2-5 times greater worldwide for animal-source food than basic crops such as legumes and grains. Also states that livestock production accounts for 55% of the erosion process in the U.S. and 1/3 of the total discharge of nitrogen and phosphorous to surface water.

See the blog and links at http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/

Climate Change Warned in Video from 1958(!)

This piece of video from 50 years ago lays out the dangers of excessive carbon dioxide, down to the southern coasts of the US falling to rising waters, the melting of glaciers, etc. See it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg.

So, what are the obvious excesses of today that we know are inherently wrong but that we ignore?

NYT Piece on Greening Suburbs

The New York Times had an excellent piece on the challenges involved in greening suburbs. See it here. Discusses the relationship between density and auto use to a community's carbon footprint. Great reporting. Average single-family home in the U.S. nearly doubled in size from 1970 to 2005, to nearly 2,500 square feet. I didn't know there was a 70-ft turbine in Lisle!

Chicago Tribune Interviews Weisman

Today's Trib has an interview with author Alan Weisman. An excerpt from the story:
Among those interesting facts:

- Humans use more than a third of the world's land surface for food production.

- In the ocean, north of Hawaii, there is a 1,000-mile-wide area containing 3 million tons of trash -- bottle caps, fish netting, six-pack rings, limp balloons, plastic bags and other detritus of human civilization -- that oceanographers have dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

- Over the past half-century, humans have produced 1 billion tons of plastic.

Virtually all of that plastic remains somewhere on the planet, and, even if humans disappeared tomorrow, it would stick around for a long, long time.

How long?

"No one knows," writes Weisman, "because no plastic has died a natural death yet. It took today's microbes ... a long time after plants appeared to learn to eat lignin and cellulose. More recently, they've even learned to eat oil. None can digest plastic yet, because 50 years is too short a time for evolution to develop the necessary biochemistry."

Provocative stuff, right?

Environmental Journalism Round-Up

There's a nice round-up of coverage on the environment by Curtis Brainard on the Columbia Journalism Review's web site. Brainard looks at some of the top green reporting of late - including Grist , the NYT's series "The Energy Challenge," the LA Times series "Altered Oceans" and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel series on how climate change is specifically affecting Wisconsin. News budgets are being slashed, but fortunately - for the moment - climate change is not just a hot story but a sizzling one. "We can only hope for more."

Chilling Future for Global Warming?

Rolling Stone's October edition has a fascinating piece on where British scientist James Lovelock sees global warming headed. Jeff Goodell summarizes Lovelock's outlook: "...the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions." How on target is Lovelock? Who knows, but just to contemplate the future as he sees it is chilling and should compel us to act now.