Business & Politics

Image credit: Virgin Group

It's always hard to know what to make of Richard Branson. From his reported $3bn investments to fight climate change to his offer of cash prizes for removing atmospheric carbon, the man certainly talks a good talk when it comes to green initiatives. And then the waters get muddied by his plans for space tourism and underwater planes for the super rich. So where do all these plans fit with his well-documented belief that peak oil is coming, and it's going to be a major challenge to the world economy?

Travel & Nature

Photo via lalouque

Many researchers feel that sea birds could be the perfect species to study in order to see how climate change is affecting marine life on a large scale. In the film Arctic Cliffhangers, biologist and filmmaker Steve Smith travels along the eastern Canadian Arctic to talk with specialists who are tracking information about several cliff-dwelling species. Because their nesting is coordinated with arctic ice break-ups, and their feeding takes them as far as 500 kilometers out to sea, they have the ability to show us what is happening both on land and far out in the ocean depths.

Business & Politics

Photo: Warren McLaren / Inov8

Last week the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) advised it had sent out letters to 78 US retailers advising them to stop labelling clothing as being made from 'bamboo.' Any company that fails to correct its advertising and labeling may find the FTC imposing penalties of up to $16,000 per violation, or as the FTC did last year suing four companies for falsely claiming that their clothing and other textile products were made of bamboo fibre. The Federal Trade Commission believe such claims are deceptive.

Culture & Celebrity

Image from Daily Mail

With all the best intentions, most of us don't have the nerve to really change our life style dramatically. We do as much as we can within the limitations of our busy lives, but haven't the true grit to go that extra mile. Here are 3 inspirational stories of young families that are taking things to the limit and loving it.

The first tale is about a family of 4 that decided to see if they could survive for a year without shopping at supermarkets. They grew their own vegetables in their back yard and bartered the extra food for essentials. Living in a smallish city, they were able to rent an acre of land to plant crops as well as keep animals.

Business & Politics

Pedestrian braves the street, avoiding the un-shoveled sidewalk. Image credit:The Hook, photo by Hawes Spencer

Having grown up where snow up to the windows was normal, it is with amazement that I view my fellow Southeastern Pennsylvanians dealing with serious snow. Two honest-feet fell Friday night; and, another two feet are predicted starting tomorrow night. Pretty crazy. Unless you are a denialist or a meteorologist, looking out the window, you'd think the climate had changed!

Suppose 4 feet on the ground becomes a winter norm going forward. How will they adapt? The 1950's offer a model.

Travel & Nature

Photo: Wikipedia, CC

What Can We Learn From The Highways in the Sky
Science recently published a study titled "Flight Orientation Behaviors Promote Optimal Migration Trajectories in High-Flying Insects". It's about how migrating insects have evolved to take advantage very efficiently of high speed winds (while you're stuck in traffic, butterflies whiz by at up to 60 MPH, possibly more) to travel hundreds of miles in relatively short periods of time, all that while correcting for crosswinds taking them off-course, and expanding as little energy as possible. This made me wonder, in the spirit of biomimicry, what can we learn from that?

Business & Politics

photo via Flickr

The UN's top climate official and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, Rajendra Pachauri, has penned a novel that reportedly mixes global warming lectures with steamy sex scenes involving a male protagonist that resembles Pachauri himself. An engineer by training, Pachauri has endured the recent failings in Copenhagen and the recent attacks on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over charges that the group wasn't careful enough when editing their 2007 global warming assessment.

Business & Politics

Photo via UC Berkeley

A recently published report is exposing some shocking exploitation of the Amazon's natural resources--and this times it's water being stolen. Where is this water headed? According to the report, "tankers are quietly removing water" to be bottled and sold in Europe and the Middle East. This is coming at a time when regions of the northern Amazon region have been experiencing a devastating drought that threatens the livelihoods of its people. This burgeoning crime is known as hydro-piracy, and it could foreshadow a future of resource wars as clean water supplies become scarce.