Environment » Eoin

Will talking change anyone’s mind about climate change?

On Wednesday, Columbia University's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions released a guide titled "The Psychology of Climate Change Communication." Freely available online [pdf], the manual endeavors to describe the various biases and barriers that lurk in the minds of the general public, and that, as the authors see it, confound ...

Drawbacks of geothermal heating systems

I’m sold on geothermal heating. Just check out my previous blog post. But being trained as a journalist, I can’t help but strive for at least some kind of balance. And so, I’ve felt it necessary to outline some of the various problems associated with geothermal residential heating. First, let’s start ...

Four good green reads, from edible fashion to your pet’s eco-pawprint

Who says that environmental news always has to be about cap and trade or disappearing glaciers? Some of our green reading today tends toward the offbeat: edible clothing (think pasta blouses and a cabbage-leaf bikini) and calculating the eco-pawprint of your dog or cat. Then take a peek at Southwest's new ...

Why choose a geothermal heating system?

As an indication of how completely antediluvian I was in terms of my Green IQ (a term I thought I’d just made up, but is actually all over the place, I had not even known that geothermal heating and cooling was a viable option in the Northeast until after we’d ...

Is global warming melting the ice on Mt. Kilimanjaro?

Global warming appears to be melting the ice on Tanzania's Mt. Kilimanjaro. The summit's glaciers are likely to be gone within a few decades That's the word from a study appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But global warming may not be the whole story behind ...

ARPA-E – are its energy projects crazy or revolutionary?

Last week, the US Department of Energy announced a series of new energy-efficiency projects that could, according to the press release, "fundamentally change the way we use and produce energy." The projects are, in the words of one observer, so crazy they may actually work. If just one is successful, it could ...

How to have a green Halloween

If you'd like Halloween's dominant color to be green instead of orange, here are some tips for how you and your family can celebrate the holiday with the environment in mind: Costumes Reuse materials from thrift stores or yard sale to make costumes, instead of buying them, suggests Larry West, who ...

Reasons to hire a green renovation expert

I ended my last post with the conclusion that hiring a “green expert” would be too expensive and so I would not hire one, but would do the research about various green building techniques myself (which I will then share with you). In that way, I concluded, Martin and I could ...

Global warming takes a toll on Arctic ecosystem

Sediment cores taken from a remote Arctic lake indicate that the ecosystem has changed dramatically in recent decades, according to a new study. These shifts, which are unprecedented for the past 200,000 years, most likely result from human-induced climate change. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors ...

Want to go green? There’s an iPhone app for that.

Along with all the other interesting things that an iPhone can do – allow you to read free books, listen to Elvis radio, and never be out of tweeting range, for instance – a few of its more than 50,000 apps can make an environmental impact on your life. Which ones ...