Earth Wise
Storing Wind Energy With Batteries
The growing use of solar and wind power is driving a growing need for large-scale energy storage technology. There are many ways to store energy ranging from pumping water into an elevated reservoir to storing compressed air in caverns to a wide range of battery technologies.
Factory Farms And Super Germs
Nearly 80% of the antibiotics sold in the United States are fed to livestock and poultry in an effort to encourage growth and stave-off unsanitary conditions. This chronic exposure leads certain bacteria to develop antibiotic resistance, resulting in dangerous and difficult-to-treat staph infections, like MRSA.
Radon
Radon is a cancer-causing, radioactive gas. It is invisible, has no smell or taste, and is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States causing an estimated 20,000 deaths per year.
Electric Power Rights Of Way
The US has over 20 million acres of rights-of-way for electrical transmission lines and pipelines. These corridors are typically 150 feet wide and go on for hundreds of miles through our countryside. Generally speaking, they are thought of as a blight on the landscape.
Pinpointing Invasive Species
Throughout the world, invasive species plague local ecosystems, degrading natural resources and damaging infrastructure. In the U.S. alone, biological pollution is estimated to carry a price tag of $120 billion per year.
Fuel From Seaweed
Biofuel is considered to be a promising way to shift our energy needs to sustainable and climate-neutral sources. Replacing petroleum with fuels made from crops or other plants basically recycles CO2. The plants absorb it as they grow and release it when they are burned.
Bats And Wind Turbines
Large numbers of bats are being found dead beneath wind turbines, leading researchers to believe they may be mistaking the turbines for trees.
Apples And Antibiotics
In the Northeast, fall is all about apples – apple picking, visiting orchards, and baking apple pie. Most of us would never suspect that our apples may have been treated with antibiotics – even those that are certified organic. How is that possible?
Citizen Scientists Help Gauge Conservation Success
In the 1970s, the world’s fastest bird – the peregrine falcon – was nearing extinction in North America. The culprit: the toxic legacy of DDT. The widely used pesticide caused the birds to suffer reproductive problems, and their numbers plummeted.
[Read more…] about Citizen Scientists Help Gauge Conservation Success
Saving The Monarch Butterfly
For the past 20 years, the population of monarch butterflies has been dropping. In the past few years, it has been dropping catastrophically. In 1996, there were an estimated 1 billion monarchs in North America; today there are only about 35 million.
Will Natural Gas Help Reduce Carbon Emissions?
The US is in the midst of a transition from depending upon coal for generating electricity to the use of natural gas instead. This has been driven in great part by the boom in shale gas and the widespread use of fracking technology.
[Read more…] about Will Natural Gas Help Reduce Carbon Emissions?
Safe Seafood
A new tool can help shoppers choose seafood that’s higher in omega-3 fatty acids, lower in mercury, and sustainably produced. This ‘seafood calculator,’ produced by the Environmental Working Group, takes into account a person’s age, weight, gender, whether they have heart disease and, for women, whether they are pregnant or nursing.
Caves full of energy
Wind power is getting cheaper all the time and wind farms are getting bigger. In southeast Wyoming, there is a plan to build a 2.1 gigawatt wind farm, the largest yet in the US. California, which has mandated that at least 1/3 of its power come from renewable sources, represents a huge market for the output of the wind farm.
Schumer and flame retardants
New York’s U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer recently proposed legislation to ban the use of ten toxic flame retardants in children’s products and home furniture.
Lionfish
Since lionfish first appeared on the eastern seaboard in the 1980s, the invasive predators have wreaked havoc on local ecosystems. The venomous, striped fish have voracious appetites. And they spawn at a mind-boggling rate, producing two million eggs per year. Lionfish now dominate Atlantic waters from North Carolina to Venezuela.
Profiting by reducing global warming
At this point, it is pretty clear to most of us that climate change is real, that it increasingly will threaten lives and property, and that it is going to take some real changes in society’s behavior to slow it down.
Deforestation and the grocery store
When we visit the supermarket or drugstore, deforestation is probably not at the forefront of our minds. Yet many of the items we purchase – from packaged cookies to body lotion – come with the hidden cost of illegal deforestation, particularly in tropical regions.
Valuable elephants
Over the past 40 years, the world has lost half of its wildlife and a very visible part of that loss has been the killing of African elephants for ivory. The illegal ivory trade is big business. Despite increasingly strong ivory trade bans, the slaughter of elephants has not abated. Some 23,000 African elephants were killed for their tusks in 2013 alone. The raw ivory value of a single poached elephant is estimated to be $21,000. All this money has led to corruption and difficulty in enforcing anti-poaching laws.
Defining Protected Waters
