Environment » Eoin

Climate activists: Prez-elect should go to UN climate talks in Poland

The global environmental group 350.org has issued a challenge to whoever wins the presidential election: attend the next round of UN climate talks this December in Poznań, Poland. It's about time that the US got involved in the UN's efforts to halt global warming, says the group: For seven years now the ...

CO2 could worsen whales’ sonar problems

On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court heard a dispute between a group of conservationists and the Navy over sonar exercises that scientists say are killing and injuring whales. What isn't often mentioned in the debate is how the burning of fossil fuels could be making the problem worse. It's not mentioned ...

Report: Illicit urban chicken movement growing in US

The Worldwatch Institute reports that a growing number of US city-dwellers are raising their own chickens, often in defiance of local ordinances. Citing unsanctioned henhouses in Denver, Boston, and other cities, Worldwatch's Ben Block notes that an "underground 'urban chicken' movement has swept across the United States in recent years," flouting ...

Study reports bad news for world’s mammals

At least one-quarter of the world's known mammal species are at risk of becoming extinct, and about half are declining in population, a global survey released Monday morning has found. The study – which took 1,700 experts in 130 countries more than five years to complete – was conducted as part ...

Does closing roads cut delays?

File this one under "intensely counterintuitive." A recent study has found that closing off certain streets can actually relieve traffic congestion. Using Google Maps, a trio of scientists – Hyejin Youn and Hawoong Jeong, of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Michael Gastner, of the Santa Fe Institute ...

What does Palin believe causes climate change?

Climate change came up during Thursday night's debate between Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Joe Biden, when moderator Gwen Ifill asked each candidate about what they believed was causing it. Biden's position is well-known: Like his running mate, Sen. Barack Obama, and like all of the world's major climatological institutions, the ...

Palin says cause of global warming “doesn’t matter”

In an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric that aired Tuesday, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said that it "kinda doesn't matter at this point" if human activity is responsible for climate change. You can see a video of the interview here. The topic of global warming comes ...

EPA proposes using contaminated land for renewable energy

The thing about renewable-energy projects is that we don't want to live near them, but we don't want to put them on pristine land, either. This would seem to eliminate all the options, but the Environmental Protection Agency has come up with an alternative: What if we put our big ugly ...

The greenest generation?

A friend from journalism school who now is now a flak for Scholastic Press sent me one of the winners of his company's annual "Kids Are Authors" contest. It's a neat little book. Produced by 19 kindergartners and titled "Our Class Is Going Green," it describes some of the steps they ...

Study: Privatization could avert fisheries’ collapse

Replacing the fishing season with a quota system could prevent fisheries from being depleted, a new study has found. Writing in last week's issue of the journal Science, a trio of researchers has found that the world's handful of fisheries with a "catch share" system, in which individual fishermen own long-term ...