Posted on 21 November 2011 by Sustainability Digest
Seemingly generating nary a ripple here in the U.S., the International Energy Agency (IEA) just issued its 2011 World Energy Outlook – its annual synopsis on the future of the global energy sector. If ignorance is bliss, then we’re certainly blessed by generally not bothering to confront the pretty-alarming conclusions of the report. A pastiche of the highlighted snippets in the Executive Summary, when [...]
Posted on 31 October 2011 by Sustainability Digest
Image: TreeHugger
One of the downsides of public transportation is that you can’t always expect a free seat, and you can’t save a place for yourself or a friend. But Jaymi showed us a novel solution — fake spilled ice cream cups and coffee to keep potential seat thieves at bay. They’re of dubious morality (and taste), but sometimes, you just need to sit down.
We also have sharks invading a golf course lake, a whale making friends with a motorboat, amazing night sky photography, and more in our roundup of the most popular stories on TreeHugger this month.
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Posted on 17 October 2011 by Sustainability Digest
Photo: ARLIS via Flickr/CC BY
Yes, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill occurred well over two decades ago, but the fallout can still be felt today. As Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard notes, you can still find oil right on the beaches where the crude first made landfall in 1989. That’s crazy. Fish and wildlife populations have not yet recovered, and some are still threatened. But despite the fact that the oil spill was one of the most widely-publicized environme…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Posted on 17 October 2011 by Sustainability Digest
Photo: Getty Images
The ongoing oil spill off the coast of New Zealand began nearly two weeks ago, but it will get worse before it gets better, officials predict. Much worse. Since the Rena ran aground on a reef, oil has been steadily but slowly leaking into the ocean and reaching shore.
But the ship’s position on the reef has become increasingly precarious, battered by high winds and 12 foot waves. The breakup of the ship and the spilling of another 1,000 tons of oil into the water are likely imminent, reported the New…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Posted on 05 September 2011 by Sustainability Digest
Two weeks of sustained protest concluded outside the White House yesterday. Over that time, over 1,250 people were arrested in order to send a single, simple message to the Obama administration: Do not approve the Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline, currently pending approval, would carry the exceptionally dirty tar sands oil 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada to American refineries along the Gulf Coast.
Just as the final protesters were being arrested right outside the gate separating Pennsylvania Ave…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Posted on 02 September 2011 by Sustainability Digest
The two week-long tar sands pipeline protests are entering its final stages, and I’m in Washington D.C covering the action. Today, notable Keystone XL opponents Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, along with a number of the nation’s religious leaders, accompanied hundreds of Americans to the White House. There, they risked arrest to confront the Obama administration on its tacit approval of the potentially devastating 1,700 tar sands pipeline.
Around midday, the famed consumer advocate Ralph Nader stopped by Lafayette Square to lend his support to the protest. Approving the tar sa…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Posted on 14 August 2011 by Sustainability Digest
Image: hakonthingstad/CC
Shell Oil has acknowledged an oil leak from a pipeline serving the Gannet Alpha platform in the North Sea. As the leak arises on the line bringing oil back to the platform from the undersea well, news media in England and the European continent naturally raise the spectre of that measure of all oil spills, the Read the full story on TreeHugger
Posted on 09 August 2011 by Sustainability Digest
photo: John Norton via flickr
It’s been a bad stretch recently for dirty coal, the country’s largest source of global warming emissions. First, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stepped up and contributed big time to the Sierra Club’s fierce Beyond Coal campaign. And now news comes that coal’s share of U.S. electricity production during the first quarter of this 2011 added up to i…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Posted on 14 June 2011 by Sustainability Digest
Energy is life, the rest runs on it. Since the 70s through every presidential administration and every Congress, we have had an energy policy that boiled down to fighting the cold war through oil and getting lucky on locally sourced coal and gas. It’s not a zero planning energy policy, we’ve spent money, defined policies, [...]
Posted on 20 May 2011 by Sustainability Digest
Bigger than four football fields, far eclipsing any naval aircraft carrier, and pretty generally terrifyingly huge, the largest floating object ever made by man will soon be a Shell natural gas processing plant. Just saying. The Washington Post has more….Read the full story on TreeHugger
