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

By CHRISTINE LARSON, NY Times "Call them green upgrades: easy ways for consumers to help the environment without changing their behavior. Such upgrades have been proliferating: Skiers, for example, can spend an extra $2 at some resorts to offset the pollution produced in a drive to the mountains; the money goes to environmental organizations. On Web sites like TerraPass.com or CoolDriver.org, drivers can total a car's pollution for a year and direct a corresponding sum to clean-energy projects. " Click To Read

About 5.5 percent of the gasoline burned annually by America's cars and light trucks -- 7 billion gallons -- goes to run air-conditioners. That's equivalent to the total oil consumption of Indonesia, a petroleum-rich country with a population size comparable to ours. Four states -- California, Arizona, Texas and Florida -- account for 35 percent of that extra fuel consumption Fifty-six percent of refrigerants worldwide are used for air-conditioning buildings and vehicles. North America, with 6 percent of the world's people, accounts for nearly 40 percent of its refrigerant market, as well as 43 percent of all refrigerants currently "banked" inside appliances and 38 percent of the resultant global-warming effects. Finally, in counting costs, it's important to consider not only fuel and refrigerants but also the materials -- steel, copper, plastics and a lot more -- that have gone into building up the nation's colossal tonnage of air-conditioning capacity. ...

By ANDREW C. REVKIN, NY Times An influential and controversial paper asserting that recent warming in the Northern Hemisphere was probably unrivaled for 1,000 years was endorsed Thursday, with a few reservations, by a panel convened by the nation's pre-eminent scientific body. More broadly, the panel examined other recent research comparing the pronounced warming trend over the last several decades with temperature shifts over the last 2,000 years. It expressed high confidence that warming over the last 25 years exceeded any peaks since 1600. And in a news conference here on Thursday, three panelists said the current warming was probably, but not certainly, beyond any peaks since the year 900 Click To Read Article

By KEITH BRADSHER and DAVID BARBOZA, NY Times. Unless China finds a way to clean up its coal plants and the thousands of factories that burn coal, pollution will soar both at home and abroad. The increase in global-warming gases from China's coal use will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol seeks. The sulfur dioxide produced in coal combustion poses an immediate threat to the health of China's citizens, contributing to about 400,000 premature deaths a year. It also causes acid rain that poisons lakes, rivers, forests and crops. Click To Read

Coming soon: Cars that get 100 miles per gallon Last modified: April 25, 2006, 4:00 AM PDT By Michael Kanellos Staff Writer, CNET News.com A car that doesn't need gas, or at least not much, is getting slightly more realistic all the time. A few small companies will start to offer services and products for converting hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius that currently get around 50 miles per gallon into plug-in hybrids that rely more heavily on electrical power and can get about 100 miles per gallon. "I get about 99 miles to the gallon," said Felix Kramer, founder of The California Cars Initiative (CalCars), who owns the eighth Prius converted into a plug-in hybrid. "When gasoline costs $3 a gallon, driving most gasoline cars costs 8 to 20 cents a mile. With a plug-in hybrid, your local travel and commuting can go down to 2 to 4 cents a mile." In general, plug-in hybrids have much larger battery packs than standard hybrids--in prototypes, the extra batteries fill ...

by Monica Davey, NY Times The State of Indiana first brought the idea to Reynolds last year, calling it BioTown, in an experiment Gov. Mitch Daniels acknowledged could be viewed as a bit of "a stunt." But in the ensuing months and as the price of gasoline soared, Reynolds adopted the notion as its own, and residents began speaking passionately of an end to their reliance on foreign oil and of the potential electricity they could envision in the more than 150,000 pigs that wander nearby. Since November, nearly 100 of the community's residents have begun driving cars that can run on ethanol-based fuel, as has the employee who drives one of the town's three vehicles. The other two town cars have been replaced with diesel vehicles, so they can run on bio-diesel fuel like vegetable oil. Click To Read

By JAD MOUAWAD, NY Times Americans are increasingly recognizing that the effects of carbon emissions on global warming are a serious problem, but there are no rules in the United States regulating heat-trapping gases comparable to those that most other developed countries have adopted under the Kyoto Protocol. Some United States businesses, though, are responding for a variety of reasons anyway: to satisfy customers or shareholders who worry about the environment, to improve their public image or to drive down their energy costs. In addition, some states and local authorities have stepped in to try to curb their contributions to global warming. Click To Read

By TERENCE CHEA The Associated Press, published in the Rutland Herald Last year, about 1.2 million cars and light trucks were sold here. That number is expected to increase by about 9 percent annually over the next five years, according to J.D. Power and Associates, a global market research firm based in Westlake Village, Calif. The Indian market is still tiny compared to that of the U.S., where about 17 million vehicles were sold last year. But with a population of 1.1 billion and an economy that has averaged 8 percent growth over the past three years, it has a lot of room to grow. Click to Read

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...