Tourism is a significant contributor to global gross domestic product. Furthermore, it is growing at an annual rate of 4%, more than many other economic sectors. There are many places around the world where it is the largest industry. But until recently, there really wasn’t very good information about its carbon footprint.
Automated cars are coming, but they face many challenges in sharing the roads with human drivers. The on-board sensors in these cars are very effective in many ways, but they cannot see around corners or see through buses or trucks. They won’t know if six cars ahead, someone has slammed on their breaks leading to a chain-reaction collision. Of course, human drivers have the same problems.
Air pollution is a major problem all around the world. In fact, exposure to polluted air is blamed for the premature deaths of an estimated 6.5 million people annually.
There are some mind-boggling schemes being discussed to mitigate the global warming caused by greenhouse gases. These include placing giant mirrors in orbit to reflect sunlight before it reaches Earth and launching millions of tons of sulfur into the stratosphere to simulate the effects of a major volcanic eruption.
There is growing interest in the idea of capturing and storing carbon dioxide. Reducing the amount of it we are putting into the atmosphere is essential for limiting the effects of climate change, but even eliminating emissions entirely is not enough because the CO2 already there stays in the atmosphere for decades or more.
In recent years, alternative protein startup companies have been all the rage among investors. Last year, these companies attracted a least a quarter of a billion dollars in funding and the interest is not slowing down.
Less than 10% of discarded plastic is recycled. This is one of the major reasons that plastic waste is such a threat to the environment. There are many challenges to recycling plastics. For one thing, there are many different types of plastic and if they are melted together, they tend to phase-separate like oil and water and the resultant substance is structurally weak. Sorting plastics by type is not a simple task. More generally, it is very difficult to produce plastic with its original properties from recycled feedstock. So recycled plastics generally end up being useful in only more limited applications.
One year ago, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced that the grizzly bear population in the Yellowstone area would be delisted from the Endangered Species Act, and more recently, announced that those federal protections would not be restored.
Global sea levels are rising by about a tenth of an inch per year, but in some places, the rise is faster… much faster. From 2011 to 2015, sea levels rose up to 5 inches – an inch per year – in some locales along the Eastern Seaboard. Places like Norfolk, Virginia and Miami are experiencing so-called sunny day flooding, something that had not been expected for decades according to climate projections. So, what is going on?
Diesel cars have never been very popular in the US and in the aftermath of the so-called Dieselgate scandal at Volkswagen, they are even less so. Less than a dozen diesel car models are available for purchase in the US and only one of those is from a German automaker: BMW.
Scientists refer to the time in which we now live as the Anthropocene epoch – one in which humans are exerting a tremendous influence upon the natural world. One of the ways in which we are doing that is in our cities and suburbs where creatures are evolving through fast-paced natural selection to deal with our presence.
A couple of years ago, scientists in Japan discovered bacteria at a recycling plant that were breaking down a type of plastic called polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. With the world facing a growing plastic pollution problem, British and American researchers began to study the enzyme that the bacteria were using to try to understand how it works.
There is a great deal of concern about the status of pollinators like bees and butterflies. They play a crucial role for many important food crops. But it turns out that lizards, mice, bats and other vertebrates are important pollinators too.
The carbon cycle is the biogeochemical process by which carbon is exchanged between the atmosphere, the terrestrial biosphere, the ocean, sediments, and the earth’s interior. Its balance is a key factor that influences the climate.
Every year, the Environmental Working Group ranks pesticide contamination in 47 popular fruits and vegetables for its Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce. The environmental nonprofit has created this ranking annually since 2004.
Engineers from the National University of Singapore have recently discovered that a naturally occurring bacterium is capable of directly converting cellulose to biobutanol, a promising biofuel.
Last spring, we talked about a solar-powered water harvester designed to pull water out of even dry desert air. The prototype device was described in a paper by scientists at UC Berkeley and MIT in the journal Science.
Many of us are well aware of the environmental challenge faced because of the proliferation of plastics. Since plastic does not decompose naturally, most of it remains in our environment. Only 12% has been incinerated and only 9% has been recycled. A great deal of plastic ends up in the ocean and other bodies of water. Much of it breaks down into small particles – microplastics – which are now ubiquitous in the oceans. There are also microplastics that started out that way in the form of little beads used in the cosmetics industry. Studies have found microplastics in the bodies of 73% of fish from the North Atlantic.
Worldwide, deforestation and land disturbance are responsible for about a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. The largest contributor to this problem is Indonesia and getting control of its emissions is a crucial part of meeting global carbon reduction targets.
