Biology
Breach
April 22, 2009, from Mother Jones
...Inexpensive to make and easy to discard, plastic morphed from an engineering triumph into a global scourge. In 1960, Americans sent 390,000 tons of plastics to the landfill; today we annually trash more than 28.5 million tons—around 11 percent of all municipal waste. Plastic doesn't biodegrade, and the very characteristic that makes it so versatile—its protean ability to be resilient or stiff, soft or hard, opaque or transparent—makes it extremely difficult to recycle efficiently. Even the most common recyclable categories of plastic (No. 1 water bottles, for instance) consist of incompatible polymers with different melting points. In 2007, less than 7 percent of Americans' plastic waste was recycled (mostly milk jugs and water and soda bottles), as opposed to 55 percent of paper.
A 2000 survey by the American Chemistry Council (ACC) found that fewer than half of Americans had a positive opinion of the miracle material; 25 percent "strongly believed" that plastic's environmental negatives outweighed its benefits.
April 22, 2009, from The Charleston Gazette
Significant safety lapses by management of Bayer CropScience's Institute plant caused a fatal August 2008 explosion that could have turned into a disaster worse than Bhopal, according to evidence presented Tuesday to a congressional committee.
Bayer plant officials continued to use long-deficient equipment, leading employees to bypass safety gear in the plant's Methomyl-Larvin unit where the explosion occurred, U.S. Chemical Safety Board officials told a House subcommittee.
The runaway explosion sent a 5,000-pound chemical vessel rocketing into the air and across the plant, where it could have easily smashed into a nearby methyl isocyanate tank, "the consequences of which could have eclipsed the 1984 disaster in India," congressional committee staffers concluded in their report.
April 22, 2009, from Frontline
More than three decades after the Clean Water Act, iconic American waterways like the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound are in perilous condition and facing new sources of contamination.
With polluted runoff still flowing in from industry, agriculture and massive suburban development, scientists note that many new pollutants and toxins from modern everyday life are already being found in the drinking water of millions of people across the country and pose a threat to fish, wildlife and, potentially, human health.
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Climate
Chaos
April 22, 2014, from E&E Publishing
The Obama administration finalized $6.5 billion worth of loan guarantees for the country's first U.S. reactors in decades without requiring developers to pay a "credit subsidy fee" -- money that protects taxpayers should the developers default, according to documents obtained by Greenwire... The zero-sum figure drew immediate criticism as a "sweetheart deal" for the companies.
"It is outrageous that the Department of Energy and Office of Management and Budget somehow determined that the two reactors under construction at Plant Vogtle pose less of a risk of default today than they did a couple years ago," said Sara Barczak, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy's high-risk energy choices program. Barczak said the fees are critical in light of the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan, stiff competition nuclear projects face from cheap gas and the snuffing out of other projects.
April 22, 2011, from Alaska Dispatch
Glaciers in the Canadian High Arctic -- home to about one third of the world's ice outside of the continental sheets of Antarctica and Greenland -- are melting away much faster than anybody realized. Between 2004 and 2009, the frigid runoff from the ice tongues of Ellesmere, Baffin and hundreds of other islands in the Canadian Far North would have filled Lake Erie three quarters full, according to a new study published this week in the journal of Nature.
Toward the end of that period, the accumulated meltdown had surpassed the runoff from the glaciers rimming the Gulf of Alaska and became the greatest single contributor to global sea-level rise outside the continental sheets...
April 22, 2009, from McClatchy Newspapers
...the overall condition of the planet has worsened since 1970, as its human population has nearly doubled to 6.8 billion. Natural resources like fresh water and tropical forests are dwindling, and it's becoming more difficult to hide our waste, much of which is plastic and will be around long after our children -- and theirs -- have lived through future Earth Days.
But after nearly 40 years, saving the Earth is finally at or near the forefront of American politics, pushed there by growing awareness of global climate change and a national energy policy that leans too heavily on imported oil and other limited fossil fuels....
April 22, 2009, from Indianapolis Star
Environmental comparisons can be difficult because of oceans of complex data generated and evaluated in different ways. But it seems that no matter who is compiling the survey -- or what aspect of the environment is being measured -- Indiana consistently ranks near the bottom.
Some examples:
Forbes.com ranked Indiana 49th out of 50 states in its 2007 "America's Greenest States" survey. Only West Virginia fared worse.
Indianapolis ranked 99th out of 100 metropolitan areas per capita in a 2008 Brookings Institution report on environmentally harmful carbon emissions from transportation and energy. Only Lexington, Ky., was worse.
April 22, 2009, from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry via ScienceDaily
Overpopulation is the world's top environmental issue, followed closely by climate change and the need to develop renewable energy resources to replace fossil fuels, according to a survey of the faculty at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF)... Overpopulation came out on top, with several professors pointing out its ties to other problems that rank high on the list.
"Overpopulation is the only problem," said Dr. Charles A. Hall, a systems ecologist. "If we had 100 million people on Earth -- or better, 10 million -- no others would be a problem."
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Resource
Depletion
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Recovery
April 22, 2014, from Green Bay Press Gazette
A religious community on Green Bay's north side is going green in a big way.
The Sisters of St. Francis of the Holy Cross has launched construction of a 400-panel solar energy installation believed to be one of the largest such systems in Wisconsin.
Located near Nicolet Drive and Church Road, the alternative energy system is designed to generate enough electricity to power about a dozen average-sized homes.
The Sisters of St. Francis plan to harness the power to reduce energy costs in their nearby convent, creating savings projected to surpass $500,000 over the next 20-plus years.
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