B e t r a y T h e A g e

By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH, NY Times The sheep that have long grazed on 150 acres of farmland in Serpa, Portugal, will soon have to share their space with the world's largest solar energy plant. Next month the PowerLight Corporation, using $75 million of the General Electric Company's money, will begin installing the first of what will be 52,000 solar panels, capable of generating 11 megawatts of electricity — enough to light and heat 8,000 homes. Click To Read

With gas prices at an all-time high, Democrats, Republicans and President Bush are all quick to point blame. But they're ignoring the biggest offender: all of us. Click To Read

David Korten argues that corporate consolidation of power is merely one manifestation of what he calls "Empire": the organization of society through hierarchy and violence that has largely held sway for the past 5,000 years. Empire has always resulted in misery for the many and fortune for the few, but now it threatens the very future of humanity. Korten points to global terrorism, climate change, and rising poverty as just a few of the signs that Empire has become unsustainable and destructive. The Great Turning offers a new framework with which to understand our current predicament, grasp the potential of this historic moment, and take action for the future of our planet, our communities, and ourselves. Click to Read

By Blair Golson, Truthdig. Posted on Alternet "It was a gathering sense that Americans -- myself included -- had gotten deeply confused and worried about what they were eating and unsure where to turn. To read the newspaper over the last couple of years is to read one story after another that makes you wonder if the way you've been eating all these years is such a good idea -- for yourself or the planet or the animals. Just reading the coverage of mad cow disease was an incredible educational experience. For example, we read that you've got to stop feeding cows to cows. It's like, "What? We've been feeding cows to cows?" And we've got to tighten up those rules about feeding chicken litter to cows. "We've been feeding chicken crap to cows?" If you read those stories, it made me realize that the system by which we're producing our food is not one I feel very good about participating in. So I began looking into the food chain and altern...

by Stephen Leahy, Inter Press Service BROOKLIN, Canada - The loss of reefs will have a catastrophic impact on all marine life. One-third of the coral at official monitoring sites in the area of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have recently perished in what scientists call an "unprecedented" die-off. Extremely high sea temperatures in the summer and fall of 2005 that spawned a record hurricane season have also caused extensive coral bleaching extending from the Florida Keys to Tobago and Barbados in the south and Panama and Costa Rica, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch. High sea temperatures are also killing parts of Australia's 2,000-kilometre-long Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest living reef formation. As summer ends in the Southern Hemisphere, researchers are now investigating the extent of the coral bleaching. Up to 98 percent of the coral in one area has been affected, reported the Australia...

Vermont Guardian New England’s largest alpaca farm is teaming up with Vermont’s largest voluntary renewable energy program, CVPS Cow Power. “We’re putting CVPS Cow Power to work at Cas-Cad-Nac Farm,” said co-owner Ian Lutz, who with his wife Jennifer runs the 250-head alpaca farm in central Vermont. “We’re strong supporters of sustainable, Vermont-scale agriculture, so it’s a natural decision for us to become Cow Power customers.” CVPS Cow Power is the nation’s only direct farm-to-consumer renewable energy program, creating a market for farmers who want to process cow manure and other farm waste to generate electricity, according to CVPS officials. More than 2,500 CVPS customers have enrolled in the program, which provides farms with new manure management opportunities, environmental benefits, and income. Click To Read

By DANIEL BARLOW Southern Vermont Bureau, Rutland Herald BRATTLEBORO — More than 26,000 cars travel Interstate 91 through this town every day and each one leaves behind carbon monoxide from its exhaust. So Brattleboro is joining with other I-91 border towns, such as Hartford, Conn., and Northampton, Mass., to develop new transportation models that can be implemented on the local and regional scale to reduce emissions that cause greenhouse gases. The project is organized by ICLEI, an international association of governments that has worked on sustainability issues since 1990. Officials with that organization say they hope the model developed by Brattleboro and the four participating towns can be repeated elsewhere. Click To Read

by Mark Henderson, Times/UK, Posted on Commondreams.org AIR temperatures above the entire frozen continent of Antarctica have risen three times faster than the rest of the world during the past 30 years. While it is well established that temperatures are increasing rapidly in the Antarctic Peninsula, the land tongue that protrudes towards South America, the trend has been harder to confirm over the continent as a whole. Now analysis of weather balloon data by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has shown that not only are the lower reaches of the Antarctic atmosphere warming, but that they are doing so at the fastest rate observed anywhere on Earth. Temperatures in the troposphere — the lowest 8km (5 miles) of the atmosphere — have increased by between 0.5C and 0.7 C (0.9F and 1.3F) per decade over the past 30 years. This signature of climate change is three times stronger than the average observed around the world, suggesting that global warming is having an uneven impa...

Turbines spin at a wind farm in Daban, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Region, March 1, 2005. Wind turbines may one day replace hydropower as China's second-largest source of electricity, if the country continues with a drive to boost renewable generation. Wind energy is emerging as a centerpiece of the new energy economy because it is abundant, inexpensive, inexhaustible, widely distributed, clean, and climate-benign,'' meaning that it does not add to global warming, said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute. REUTERS/China Newsphoto by Abid Aslam, Oneworld.net, posted on Commondreams.org WASHINGTON - Alongside the war in Iraq, Americans worry most about U.S. dependence on foreign oil, a leading pollster said Thursday. While most appeared fatalistic over problems like job outsourcing, around half said the government can do something about energy dependence, according to a survey run by Daniel Yankelovich, funded by the Ford Foundation, and published...

Posted by Tom Philpott, Grist Magazine What he was asking me, in essence, was, "can sustainable farming feed the world?" To which the only wise response is, "can unsustainable farming feed the world -- for long?" To an extent, the problem is one of semantics, centering on the definition of "sustainable." To many green types, places like Whole Foods and Wild Oats teem with "sustainably produced" stuff -- everything from T-shirts to apples, chicken and eggs, even versions of Twizzlers and TV dinners. But the great bulk of it falls under the rubric of industrial-organic -- like the wares on offer at Wal-Mart, only a little less so, these goods depend on a culture of cheap and plentiful crude oil and labor. The cheap-oil problem has certainly gained traction among greens. Blogs devoted to "peak oil" abound; this very blog seems like one at times. Most of these discussions, though, devolve into sniping about biofuels and hybrids. It's im...

by Chad Heeter, from Tomdispatch.com, posted on Energy Bulletin. For decades, scientists have calculated how much fossil fuel goes into our food by measuring the amount of energy consumed in growing, packing, shipping, consuming, and finally disposing of it. The "caloric input" of fossil fuel is then compared to the energy available in the edible product, the "caloric output." What they've discovered is astonishing. According to researchers at the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Agriculture, an average of over seven calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food. This means that in eating my 400 calorie breakfast, I will, in effect, have "consumed" 2,800 calories of fossil-fuel energy. (Some researchers claim the ratio to be as high as ten to one.) But this is only an average. My cup of coffee gives me only a few calories of energy, but to process just one pound of coffee requires over 8,000 ca...

Vinod Khosla, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, now invests in ethanol. The flex-fuel Chevy Tahoe next to him can run on gasoline and ethanol. By NORM ALSTER, New York Times Ethanol derived from corn now accounts for 3 percent of the American automotive fuel market. Most cars in the United States can already handle fuel that is up to 10 percent ethanol, and as many as five million are so-called flex-fuel vehicles that can use a fuel called E85, which is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. The current excitement over ethanol derives from research that has cut the cost of converting nonfood plant matter like grasses and wood chips into alcohol. Mr. Khosla says he believes that such ethanol, called cellulosic ethanol, will eventually be cheaper to produce than both gasoline and corn-derived ethanol Click to Read

By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH European and Asian companies are paying more attention to global warming than their American counterparts. And chemical companies are more focused on the issue than oil companies. Those are two conclusions from "Corporate Governance and Climate Change: Making the Connection," a report that Ceres, a coalition of investors and environmentalists, expects will influence investment decisions. The report, released yesterday, scored 100 global corporations — 74 of them based in the United States — on their strategies for curbing greenhouse gases. It covered 10 industries — oil and gas, chemicals, metals, electric power, automotive, forest products, coal, food, industrial equipment and airlines — whose activities were most likely to emit greenhouse gases. It evaluated companies on their board oversight, management performance, public disclosure, greenhouse gas emissions, accounting and strategic planning. Click To Read ick To Read

By ANDREW C. REVKIN, New York Times Within the next 100 years, the growing human influence on Earth's climate could lead to a long and irreversible rise in sea levels by eroding the planet's vast polar ice sheets, according to new observations and analysis by several teams of scientists. One team, using computer models of climate and ice, found that by about 2100, average temperatures could be four degrees higher than today and that over the coming centuries, the oceans could rise 13 to 20 feet — conditions last seen 129,000 years ago, between the last two ice ages. The findings, being reported today in the journal Science, are consistent with other recent studies of melting and erosion at the poles. Many experts say there are still uncertainties about timing, extent and causes. Click To Read

By Mark Clayton, Christian Science Monitor.Posted on Alternet. An Iowa corn refinery, open since December, uses 300 tons of coal a day to make ethanol. So just how green can it be? Late last year in Goldfield, Iowa, a refinery began pumping out a stream of ethanol, which supporters call the clean, renewable fuel of the future. There's just one twist: The plant is burning 300 tons of coal a day to turn corn into ethanol -- the first US plant of its kind to use coal instead of cleaner natural gas. An hour south of Goldfield, another coal-fired ethanol plant is under construction in Nevada, Iowa. At least three other such refineries are being built in Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota. The trend, which is expected to continue, has left even some ethanol boosters scratching their heads. Should coal become a standard for 30 to 40 ethanol plants under construction -- and 150 others on the drawing boards -- it would undermine the environmental reasoning for switching to ethanol in the...

Stan Cox, AlterNet. Modern human plagues like bird flu aren't the result of mysterious forces. Whether we mean to or not, we bring them on ourselves. When Michael Crichton's first novel, "The Andromeda Strain," was published in 1969, it was scary but also strangely reassuring. If some new disease were to threaten humanity with a deadly pandemic, it seemed, the microbe responsible would come from another planet. The march of medical progress appeared to have terrestrial germs on the run. Twenty-five years later, when Laurie Garrett published her nonfiction bestseller, "The Coming Plague," people were waking up to the fact that our own abused planet is perfectly capable of spawning a steady stream of new diseases without any help from alien worlds. Today, old familiar scourges like tuberculosis, malaria, measles, and diarrhea -- and a newer one, AIDS -- are the world's biggest killers, but they've been joined by a host of newcomers. Indeed, one could g...

By Harriet McLeod, Reuters - Posted on ENN CHARLESTON, S.C. — A small North Carolina-based specialty crops company is trying to turn a humble wildflower into a major new oilseed crop that could produce an alternative to coconut and palm oils. After 20 years in development, cuphea (koo-FEE-ah) will start its second planting this spring in the Midwestern United States. "It's grown (as a crop) nowhere else in the world," said Andrew Hebard, chief executive of Technology Crops International in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which is leading the commercialization of cuphea. The plant's seeds contain novel fatty acids along with lauric acid, which is used as a wetting and foaming agent in soaps, detergents, shampoos, toothpaste and even airplane fuel. The world market for lauric oil was about 4.5 million tons in 2003, the most recent year for which figures are widely available, according to market reports. The United States consumed about 1.5 million tons of that, mostly fr...

By Kari Lydersen, The NewStandard, Posted on Alternet Even a quick glance at coal-producing states like West Virginia shows that the idea of an eco-friendly use for the fossil fuel is far more misnomer than reality. Click to Read Article

By MARIANA GOSNELL, New York Times "It may be that we're not going to solve global warming," Marty Hoffert, a physics professor at New York University, told Ms. Kolbert, "the earth is going to become an ecological disaster, and, you know, somebody will visit in a few hundred million years and find there were some intelligent beings who lived here for a while, but they just couldn't handle the transition from being hunter-gatherers to high technology." Click to Read Article