In The News

The Hidden Global Trade in Water

Jenny Kehl February 13, 2013
Water seems plentiful, but less than 3 percent of the Earth’s supply is fresh water, much of it polar ice. Agriculture represents about 70 percent of the globe’s annual water use. Exporting water-intensive crops like cotton produced in arid nations is essentially trading an essential resource away, resulting in net losses for water-scarce nations. Subsidies for water and agriculture, cross-border...

Middle East Rivers Losing Critical Water Reserves

Lee Rannals February 13, 2013
Water shortages and secrecy over how much is used will only exacerbate tensions in the Middle East. Researchers, in the journal Water Resources Research, report a rapid decline of freshwater in the Middle East region. Lee Rannals of redOrbit.com reports on the University of California’s Center for Hydrologic Modeling study that relied on NASA satellite images to show that most of the loss in...

APP to Preserve Indonesia’s Rainforests

Ben Bland February 8, 2013
Pressure from Greenpeace and awareness among Asia Pulp & Paper’s multinational customer base have prompted a promise from the firm to stop cutting natural forests and draining peatlands in Indonesia, reports Ben Bland for the Financial Times. The company is also calling on other logging firms operating in Indonesia to join the effort, as Indonesian people alone would have low carbon...

Let's Not Learn to Love Disaster

Stan Cox February 1, 2013
Countries often focus on disasters within their borders, overlooking floods, fires and storms elsewhere. Scientist Stan Cox suggests that entire economies must be restructured in an opinion essay for Al Jazeera: “Governments and corporations worldwide … have built entire economies that depend on huge energy inputs and ever-expanding consumption, and they can't back out now.” Disasters are...

Temperatures Off Charts, Australia Turns Deep Purple

Peter Hannam January 14, 2013
Australia’s national weather bureau is adding new colors to weather graphs to for forecasting rising temperatures exceeding 50 degrees Celsius, or 122 degrees Fahrenheit. “The Bureau of Meteorology's interactive weather forecasting chart has added new colours – deep purple and pink,” reports Peter Hannam for the Sydney Morning Herald. Breaking temperature records and battling wildfires, the...

Real Criminal Element: Lead

Kevin Drum January 10, 2013
The US had a noticeable decrease in crime during the 1990s. City mayors took credit, and economists also pointed to correlations with the aging population, reproductive rights, reduced illicit drug use and an improving economy. But these correlations were imperfect. Another possibility is that lead in gasoline contributes to low intelligence, hyperactivity, juvenile delinquency and violence, a...

All-Night Negotiations in Doha Produce No Cliffhanger

Scott Barrett December 10, 2012
Global leaders have been more adept at resolving economic crises than the climate crisis. Negotiating an economic crisis, whether it’s Brussels imposing euro budget oversight and consequences for excessive debt or the US avoiding a fiscal cliff of automatic spending cuts and tax hikes, is forced by immediate costs of inaction. Climate is not a human invention like an economy, and does not...