Daily News Channel
Once touted as an environmental and economic cure-all, corn ethanol has had a rough year. The collapse in grain and oil prices, preceded by overinvestment in refineries over the past few years, badly hurt ethanol producers.
The death toll from flooding that has covered large parts of Brazil continued to rise Friday, with the government reporting seven new fatalities, bringing the total to 38. The rain-induced floods left nearly 800,000 people displaced, according to the Brazilian civil defense agency
NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander began sending photos of the planet’s surface on the first day of its three-month mission "to taste and sniff the northern polar site’s soil and ice," the space agency said. The first pictures, which the lander began taking shortly after touching down near Mars’ north pole — the end of a 422 million-mile trek — showed a pattern of brown polygons as far as the camera could see
The indigenous people of Alaska have stood firm against some of the most extreme weather conditions on Earth for thousands of years. But now, flooding blamed on climate change is forcing at least one Eskimo village to move to safer ground. The community of the tiny coastal village of Newtok voted to relocate its 340 residents to new homes 9 miles away, up the Ninglick River.
Bird migrations are likely to get longer according to a study of the potential impacts of climate change on the breeding and winter ranges of migrant birds.
A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century By Jacques Attali Arcade Publishing; 312 pages The Gist: Imagine a world where pirates run amok, blowing themselves up in European city centers; where wars are ignited over lack of drinking water; where a global face-off between Islam and Christianity makes World War II look like a water-balloon fight. According to economist and political scientist Jacques Attali, that is what the future has in store for us by 2025. In the belief that past experiences are indicative future events, Attali combs through the history of human kind, all the way back to Homo Habilis, separating the past into nine distinct periods to isolate “what is possible, what changes and what is unvarying” and applies those trends to the coming century
When Jon Bohmer sat down with his two little girls for a simple project they could work on together, he didn’t realize they’d hit upon a solution to one of the world’s biggest problems for just $5: A solar-powered oven. The ingeniously simple design uses two cardboard boxes, one inside the other, and an acrylic cover that lets in the sun’s rays and traps them. Black paint on the inner box, and silver foil on the outer one, help concentrate the heat.
President Barack Obama loves to talk about the great promise of energy reform, but all it takes is one glance down Pennsylvania Avenue to get a sense of the pitfalls of such ambitious designs. That was especially clear on Tuesday, as Congress ran both hot and cold on legislation to fight global warming
It’s been two years since the U.N.
Ask an Administration official what to expect legislatively this year and the answer will probably fall along these lines: reregulation of the financial markets, followed by the budget, health care and then green jobs. It is a massive agenda for President Barack Obama’s first year in office, and already some in the environmental community are worried that their agenda will be sacrificed.