Articles 5/15/08

"There's no question now that chemical exposures impair fertility,' she says. 'We have 80,000 chemicals in circulation .... While our grandfathers probably had a sperm count of about 120 million in one millilitre of seminal fluid, the average male sperm count now stands at about 60 million. (Anything less than 25/30 million is classified as infertile.) At the same time testicular cancer, which is linked to low sperm counts, is rising fast." Source

"[A] landmark field investigation that will follow 100,000 American children from as soon as possible after conception to age 21. He hopes the research will identify factors in the environment—cultural, genetic, social, physical, and chemical—that make us more susceptible to disease. He also hopes it will shed light on why rates of birth defects, childhood cancers, asthma, obesity, violence, ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and other learning disabilities are skyrocketing." Source

"This week, the province announced a sweeping ban on the use of traditional pesticides and herbicides on residential lawns and gardens, similar to one already in place in Quebec. Home Depot has promised to voluntarily yank products such as Killex and Grub-B-Gon from Canadian stores by the end of the year, and Canadian Tire is doing the same in Ontario. But some lawn-loving diehards are not ready to surrender. "I don't want a pile of weeds in my yard," Source

"In terms popularized by Sir Halford John Mackinder, the famed theorist of geopolitics, the long isolated “Lenaland” along the Arctic basin will transform into a highly productive and strategically important “Rimland,” transforming the Arctic into tomorrow's equivalent of the Mediterranean, a true strategic, economic and military crossroads of the world. As envisioned by Oran Young two decades ago, we will finally witness the arrival of the “Age of the Arctic.” ... While at the top of our world sits the polar sea, at its bottom lays the ice-covered continent of Antarctica. And as its ice cover melts, this long-isolated continent will rise from the shadows, like Atlantis transmigrating from imagination to reality, with all its long-hidden treasures revealed, its resources becoming accessible, its land mass in time becoming suitable for human habitation. As the world population continues to grow, and with it its appetite for natural resources, the emergence of this new, unfrozen continent, and its integration into the world's political economy, may prove every bit as transformative as the melting of the Arctic sea ice in the years to come." Source

"The new research observed the lifetime pesticide exposure of over 300 Parkinson's patients. Over 200 of their healthy relatives were also included in the study as a control group. The results showed that patients with Parkinson's were 1.6 times more likely to report an exposure to pesticides in their lifetimes compared with the control group. Additionally, people with Parkinson's were 2.4 times more likely than healthy people to report heavy exposure to pesticides. Heavy exposure is defined as more than 215 days over a lifetime." Source

"The scientists believe toxins and carcinogens found in polluted air can stop hair growing by blocking mechanisms that produce the protein from which hair is made. Baldness is known to be hereditary, but the new research suggests that environmental factors could exacerbate hair loss." Source

"Its new kind of concrete walls and floors, combined with super insulation and triple-glazed windows makes it airtight, meaning the requirement for heating is minimal. Fresh air entering the passes through a heat exchanger, which transfers the heat from the outgoing stale air and puts it back into the house. A rainwater harvesting system collects water for use in flushing toilets. House builders in the UK will be forced by government legislation to build only zero-carbon houses from 2016 onwards but, given the long lead times in the industry, they are already trying to meet that target." Source

"The resulting deaths of an estimated 500 waterfowl have left the Alberta government and the oilsands industry struggling to convince the world they are not just paying lip service to cleaning up their operations. Images of oil-fouled birds flashed on televisions and computer screens around the world all week, just as Deputy Premier Ron Stevens returned from Washington where he touted the oilsands as a plentiful and sustainable supply of energy." Source

"Rather than realizing the enriched social life that Kellogg’s vision offered us, we have impoverished our human communities with a form of materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, and neighbors. We simply don’t have time for them. Unlike our great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it. An outside observer might conclude that we are in the grip of some strange curse, like a modern-day King Midas whose touch turns everything into a product built around a microchip." Source

"Back in the day, cribs were made of metal and babies got lots of fresh air and sunshine. Now, most kids get put in shiny new cribs from Wal-Mart or Babies R Us, and guess what; they are made from particle board and are full of formaldehyde. Environment California found a half dozen products – out of 21 nursery furnishings it tested – emitted formaldehyde at levels high enough to trigger allergy and asthma attacks in children.. The regulators are all over cribs for safety, space between bars and little pieces, but not a word about formaldehyde; it is not even checked." Source

"The flame retardants have been used for decades in television sets, computer-wire insulation, mattress stuffing, carpet padding and many other common household products. They have been found in household dust, but no one has been able to say how they got there and from what products." Source

"With the price of oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren’t as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer." Source

Articles 4/25/08

"The drug maker Merck drafted dozens of research studies for a best-selling drug, then lined up prestigious doctors to put their names on the reports before publication ..." Source

"According to the FDA, 17% of the American diet comes out of cans, and many of those have an epoxy liner made with Bisphenol A, a chemical which can mimic human estrogen and which is linked to breast cancer and early puberty in women ... The Environmental Working Group tested canned food bought across America and found BPA in more than half of them, at levels they call "200 times the government's traditional safe level of exposure for industrial chemicals." Source

"Though drivers across the nation are smarting from the rising price of gas, it is taking a particularly harsh toll here in Wilcox County, where the median household income is $17,500. A recent report by the Oil Price Information Service estimated that residents spend more than 13% of their monthly income on gas -- the highest ratio in the nation. ... William Coleman, 53, has been driving the 30 miles to and from his plywood mill job for 17 years. To save on gas, he has recently taken to sleeping in the boiler room between 12-hour shifts. Coleman usually stays overnight twice a week, leaving his wife to deal with the two grandchildren they are raising."
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"Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems." Source

"Since 2006, Mr. Nash, 31, has uprooted his backyard and the front or back yards of eight of his Boulder neighbors, turning them into minifarms growing tomatoes, bok choy, garlic and beets. Between May and September, he gives weekly bagfuls of fresh-picked vegetables and herbs to people here who have bought "shares" of his farming operation. Neighbors who lend their yards to the effort are paid in free produce and yard work." Source

"In Japan and South Korea, some manufacturers for the first time have begun buying genetically engineered corn for use in soft drinks, snacks and other foods. Until now, to avoid consumer backlash, the companies have paid extra to buy conventionally grown corn. But with prices having tripled in two years, it has become too expensive to be so finicky." Source

"GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent ... the physiology of plants [is] now reaching the limits of the productivity that could be achieved." Source

"Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are slated to build about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades." Source

"Peak Water: Aquifers and Rivers Are Running Dry. How Three Regions Are Coping" Source

"Researchers have found alarming evidence that the frozen Arctic floor has started to thaw and release long-stored methane gas. The results could be a catastrophic warming of the earth, since methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. ... Russian polar scientists have strong evidence that the first stages of melting are underway. They've studied largest shelf sea in the world, off the coast of Siberia, where the Asian continental shelf stretches across an underwater area six times the size of Germany, before falling off gently into the Arctic Ocean. ... In the permafrost bottom of the 200-meter-deep sea, enormous stores of gas hydrates lie dormant in mighty frozen layers of sediment." Source

" * One wedge of vehicle efficiency -- all cars getting 60 mpg, with no increase in miles traveled per vehicle.
* One of wind for power -- one million large (2 MW peak) wind turbines.
* One of wind for vehicles -- another 2000 GW wind. Most cars must be plug-in hybrids or pure electric vehicles.
* Three of concentrated solar thermal -- about 5000 GW peak.
* Three of efficiency -- one each for buildings, industry, and cogeneration/heat-recovery for a total of 15 to 20 million gwh.
* One of coal with carbon capture and storage -- 800 GW of coal with CCS.
* One of nuclear power -- 700 GW plus 10 Yucca mountains for storage.
* One of solar photovoltaics -- 2000 GW peak (or less PV and some geothermal, tidal, and ocean thermal).
* One of cellulosic biofuels -- using one-sixth of the world's cropland (or less land if yields significantly increase or algae-to-biofuels proves commercial at large scale).
* Two of forestry -- End all tropical deforestation. Plant new trees over an area the size of the continental U.S.
* One of soils -- Apply no-till farming to all existing croplands." Source

"Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests ... the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age." Source

Articles 4/16/08

"Climatic change at the end of the last glacial period led to an increase in the size and concentration of patches of wild cereals in certain areas (Wright 1977). The large quantities of cereals newly available provided an incentive to try to make a meal of them. People who succeeded in eating sizeable amounts of cereal seeds discovered the rewarding properties of the exorphins contained in them. Processing methods such as grinding and cooking were developed to make cereals more edible. The more palatable they could be made, the more they were consumed, and the more important the exorphin reward became for more people.

At first, patches of wild cereals were protected and harvested. Later, land was cleared and seeds were planted and tended, to increase quantity and reliability of supply. Exorphins attracted people to settle around cereal patches, abandoning their nomadic lifestyle, and allowed them to display tolerance instead of aggression as population densities rose in these new conditions.

Thus major civilisations have in common that their populations were frequent ingesters of exorphins. We propose that large, hierarchical states were a natural consequence among such populations. Civilisation arose because reliable, on-demand availability of dietary opioids to individuals changed their behaviour, reducing aggression, and allowed them to become tolerant of sedentary life in crowded groups, to perform regular work, and to be more easily subjugated by rulers. Two socioeconomic classes emerged where before there had been only one (Johnson & Earle 1987:270), thus establishing a pattern which has been prevalent since that time." Source

"All animals bear the physiological scars left by the past greenhouse extinctions and hydrogen sulfide events, and we mammals are no exception. While high levels of H2S kill mammals ... a bit less slows a creature's metabolism. ... By exposing lab mice to small doses of H2S, Roth and his team can put them into the deepest of sleeps--with very slow, or even no heartbeats--for several hours. In that time, the mice can be cooled to temperatures that would have killed them prior to the H2S exposure." Source

"[T]he post-Roman economic collapse had its roots in the very sophistication and specialization that made the Roman economy so efficient. ... A single generation of social chaos and demographic contraction thus could easily have been enough to break the transmission of the complex craft traditions of Roman pottery-making, leaving the survivors with only the dimmest idea of how to make good pottery." Source

A great podcast: "Researchers say that adding charcoal to soil may provide more benefits for long-term soil quality than compost or manure. It could also be used to sequester carbon captured from carbon dioxide emissions. Mingxin Guo discusses new applications for the technique, used more than 1,500 years ago in the Amazon basin."
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"[I]n a radical move, the city - which has suffered since the steel industry left town and jobs dried up - is bulldozing abandoned buildings, tearing up blighted streets and converting entire blocks into open green spaces. More than 1,000 structures have been demolished so far." Source


"Every time a new coal-fired power plant is proposed anywhere in the United States, a lawyer from the Sierra Club or an allied environmental group is assigned to stop it, by any bureaucratic or legal means necessary.

They might frame the battle as a matter of zoning or water use, but the larger war is over global warming: Coal puts twice as much temperature-raising carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as natural gas, second to coal as the most common power plant fuel." Source

"The plants will employ thousands of tiny, flat movable mirrors called heliostats to focus and concentrate the sun’s energy upon a water boiler, heating it to more than 1,000 degrees. This generates steam, which in turn drives a turbine to generate electricity. Plants will consist of clusters of these “solar fields”, with each tower producing 20 megawatts of power." Source

"Thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate. They are spurning guaranteed annual payments for a chance to cash in on the boom in wheat, soybeans, corn and other crops. Last fall, they took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined." Source

Articles 4/11/08

"Homebuyers need more information about the homes they are buying when they are buying. There should be a way for them to have easy access to information like how efficiently a home will use energy and water, how healthful and eco-friendly its materials are, and the price of a home needs to be discussed in terms of long-term monthly costs rather than the hardly relevant upfront cost." Source

"The Inuit recently filed a petition ... (t)he petition asks the commission to declare that the US is responsible for the violation of their rights. They also seek remedial recommendations that the US limit greenhouse gas emissions, establish a plan to protect Inuit culture and resources, mitigate any harm caused to the resources and implement a plan to provide assistance for the Inuit to adapt to unavoidable impacts of climate change." Source

"[T]here may be an unprecedented swarm of jellyfish heading for Europe ... Mr Brotz calls jellyfish “harbingers of change”. The solution isn’t to find ways of using them but to “stop polluting the ocean with nutrients and stop over fishing.” Source

"Mature and old growth forests can store or sequester extraordinary amounts of carbon, such as in the forests of the Pacific Northwest," said Dr. Jerry F. Franklin, a Professor with the University of Washington's College of Forest Resources. "An analogy would be that older forests can be viewed as having very large capital reserves, whereas younger forests have high cash flow, or carbon uptake, but contain very little capital, such as sequestered carbon. There's also a high 'transaction cost' when you 'liquidate' this stored carbon by harvesting the forest. The harvested sites are significant carbon sources leaking carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for many years to decades following the harvest." Source

"The West(ern United States) is now heating up at almost twice the rate of the rest of the world: While the global climate has "averaged 1.0 degree Fahrenheit warmer than its 20th century average," there are 11 western states which "averaged 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the region's 20th century average—which represents 70 percent more warming than for the world as a whole."Source

Articles 4/10/08

"There are three objectives of the BLUE movement. First, to measurably improve the quality of life of the people who join. Second, to engage as many people as possible in the effort. And third, to increase their effectiveness in making a difference in their community and the world ... There's a gap between the challenges facing our world and the actions people are willing to take in their own lives." Source

"Andy Netzel drives an average of 2,000 miles a month despite living only a mile and a half from work. He's addicted to his car, but agreed to part with his keys for a month to see if he could make it without his Toyota Yaris ... My car has kept me so detached from the world around me. What I thought was giving me freedom was really giving me an excuse to ignore my surroundings."
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"There are 40 cases of cancer among people who work in the same building at NASA Glenn Research Center ... The union that represents hundreds of scientists and other workers said nearly half of the 100 employees on the third floor of the building have been diagnosed with various forms of cancer in the past three to four years ... the head of safety at NASA Glenn said an employee survey shows cancer rates among workers are within the normal range ..." Source

"Al Gore ... presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of "generational mission" -- the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement -- to set it right." Source

"As I traveled through India on a recent business trip, the topic of energy was constantly on my mind (as it is every time I travel). I found out some interesting things about jatropha, toured a sugarcane ethanol plant, found a wind farm in the middle of nowhere, and encountered a native ethanol skeptic." Source

"[T]ruck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take: inaction. Faced with $4-per-gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down, shut down and started honking ... Dan Little tells me, "My granddad said, and he was the smartest man I ever knew, 'If you don't stand up for yourself, ain't nobody gonna stand up for you.'" Source

Global warming health implications: "Major cities such as New York and Chicago could see temperatures that would mean more heat stress and heatstroke ... Heavy rainfall may lead to flooding and overflow of sewage systems, causing an increase in the spread of disease ... Higher temperatures and decreased rain are likely to strain already limited water sources, increasing the likelihood of wildfires and air pollution ... Hurricanes and other weather events are expected to last longer and be more intense." Source

"The victory gardens and ingenious substitutions that kept the home front functioning during the Second World War are another potential source of ideas and inspiration well worth a sustained look. Still, the experiences of the Seventies offer a particularly rich resource in this regard. Close enough to the present to be part of living memory for many people, and faced with the same basic challenge of too little energy, too few resources, and too much economic instability for an overheated and overextended industrial world, it parallels our present predicament too closely to be neglected." Source

Articles 4/8/08

"Artificial colourings could be removed from hundreds of food products after researchers found that they may be almost as harmful to children's development as leaded petrol." Source

"In Haiti, four people were killed in protests last week over a 50 percent rise in the cost of food staples in the past year. From Egypt to Vietnam, price rises of 40 percent or more for rice, wheat, and corn are stirring unrest and forcing governments to take drastic steps, such as blocking grain exports and arresting farmers who hoard surpluses ... The World Bank says 33 countries face unrest from higher prices in both food and energy." Source

"While geologists have known that Greenland had crude reserves since oil was discovered seeping out of rocks along the coast in the 1990s, the ice surrounding much of the world's largest island made getting to it unfeasible ... If the ice in west Greenland continues to melt as dramatically as it has been doing in the past few years, then the cost of producing a barrel of oil will be closer to $20 than $50" Source

"Black carbon, the stuff that gives soot its dirty color, could be the second most important contributor to climate change ... Black carbon can mix with other aerosols to form what are called atmospheric brown clouds, which have been observed in regional hotspots over China, India, Southeast Asia, Africa and parts of Central and South America. These brown clouds absorb incoming solar radiation and prevent it from reaching the surface, warming the atmosphere in the process." Source

"About 700 sheep have now been employed by Turin officials to keep the grass verges and lawns in city parks neatly trimmed. Environment officials in Turin said they were paying 30,000 euros in gardeners’ fees to cut the grass in just one of the bigger parks." Source

"Airborne formaldehyde in the travel trailer was seven times the amount considered acceptable by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency ... Travel trailers and RVs are not regulated by anyone." Source