Planetary Ruin

At a prison on the East coast of Africa, in-mates are pioneering a sanitation project that is working with nature to neutralize human wastes.

The initiative, involving the development of a wetland to purify sewage, is expected to cost a fraction of the price of high-tech treatments while also triggering scores of environmental, economic and social benefits.

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Polluting electricity generators in Europe are set to reap another round of extraordinary windfall profits from the carbon trading scheme meant to curb their carbon emissions, a new report revealed today.

The study, commissioned by WWF from world-leading carbon market analysts Point Carbon, estimates that the windfall to electricity generators in just the five states of UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland over the current five year phase of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) could be between 23 and 71 billion Euros ($US 36 -111 billion ).

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Air pollution in the world’s busiest ports and shipping regions may be markedly worse than previously suspected, according to a new study showing that industrial and shipping pollution is exacerbated when it combines with sunshine and salty sea air.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of researchers that included University of Calgary chemistry professor Hans Osthoff report that the disturbing phenomenon substantially raises the levels of ground-level ozone and other pollutants in coastal areas.

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – California electricity and natural gas customers will be charged $600 million over the next 10 years to fund a green think tank, the California Public Utilities Commission unanimously voted on Thursday.

A surcharge to monthly power and gas bills will fund the California Institute for Climate Solutions, linked to the University of California. The surcharge will be tacked on customer bills of investor-owned utilities and not of municipal utilities in Los Angeles and Sacramento.

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The plot continues to thicken over the obviously White House-directed EPA decision to reject California’s greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles.

Today, Rep. Henry Waxman issued a subpoena to compel EPA to provided “unredacted” copies of documents that have been withheld from Waxman’s oversight committee. See below.

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LONDON (Reuters) – Plastic litter on Britain’s beaches has reached record levels, endangering whales, dolphins and seabirds, an environmental charity survey said on Thursday.

The Marine Conservation Society, which campaigns for cleaner beaches and seas, said plastic litter has increased by 126 percent since its first survey in 1994.

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The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has seriously underestimated the technological advances needed to stem carbon dioxide emissions, say Roger Pielke Jr, Tom Wigley and Christopher Green in Nature.

They describe the IPCC’s assumption that the majority of future emission reductions will occur spontaneously, in the absence of climate policies, as “optimistic at best and unachievable at worst”.

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Ever feel like everything you learned in college amounted to a pile of trash? Now, how about if that were a positive? In a piece that ran in the New York Times last week, Edward Rothstein turns a cultural critic’s eye on garbage in the modern age, referencing an NYU course offered last fall on creating a museum for the Department of Sanitation (from the syllabus: “What is the cognitive, practical, and cultural role of garbage in contemporary life?”) while making some wry observations about how and why we’ve come full-circle to embrace our refuse.

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The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has announced a voluntary recall of 144,000 StyleMark children’s sunglasses because they contained excessive levels of lead.

The affected glasses have Main Street Drag characters on one lens, and style number DI25K7116 printed on the left temple. They have been sold at drug stores including Payless, Walgreen’s, Academy Sports, and CVS since October 2007.

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Yes, they are at it again. The car companies and car dealers are once again trying to kneecap California and other states by taking away their rights to set better global warming emission standards for motor vehicles.

Yes, the Bush administration did reject California’s bid, but EPA’s attorneys believe California will prevail in court. Hence the new push by the car crowd to build a fire wall in Congress.

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