Dipping into the EarthFirst.com Archives: Littering in Space, Guerrilla Gardening, Styrofoam Eco Fail and Life After Oil
July 4, 2009
What would happen to American society if our oil supplies were interrupted for an extended period of time – a month, or even a year? In a word: chaos. Relive this October 2008 article and more in our little journey through the EarthFirst.com archives:
Oh, Great! Astronaut Accidentally Litters in Space While Cleaning Solar Panel – There’s a lot of random junk floating around in space, and now we can add a tool bag to the list after an astronaut, startled by an exploding grease gun, let go of her cleaning supplies.
Is Your Cell Phone Drenched in Blood? In the Congo, prisoners – including children – are forced into deadly mines in search of coltan, a mineral that is refined into a heat-resistant metal powder used in electronics.
Eco Fail: Giant $6M Foam Statue of Liberty a Big Polluting Mess – Why the hell would we need a 50,000 pound, 130-foot styrofoam replica of the Statue of Liberty? As one of our lovely commenters remarked, “It’s kind of like masturbation… but for a whole nation.”
Urban Gardening: You Can Grow Food No Matter Where You Live – It’s summer, and for many people, that means garden-fresh veggies and herbs. If you thought you couldn’t grow edibles because you don’t have enough space, check out our tips for urban gardens.
What Would Happen if Oil Supplies in America Suddenly Dried Up? No food on grocery store shelves, riots, martial law and the threat of thousands of zombie-like starving people roaming the suburbs looking for something to eat.
9 Easy Ways to Green Up Your Life – And they really are easy. Have your nanny use public transportation, buy a Tesla roadster and consider renting Johnny Depp’s eco-resort next time you need a break from the arduous rigors of your pampered life.
FactCheck.org Debunks 6 Common Eco Myths
May 8, 2009
When you want to check whether the rumors flying around about a politician or piece of legislation are true, what’s the first site you visit? Chances are, it’s FactCheck.org, which recently won a well-deserved ‘People’s Choice’ Webby award. In honor of their win, The Daily Green has compiled 6 eco myths recently debunked by FactCheck.org.
1. There’s enough wind power in the Atlantic to offset all the electricity we now get from coal.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar made waves when he said the U.S. East Coast was so rich in wind that offshore wind farms could produce as much electricity as every U.S. coal-fired power plant. It sounds great. Coal, which produces roughly half our electricity, is a major source of pollution that causes smog, acid rain, mercury contamination and global warming; wind power causes none of these. Unfortunately, it’s just not true, according to Factcheck.org. “We calculate that converting wind to enough electricity to replace all U.S. coal-fired plants would require building 3,540 offshore wind farms as big as the world’s largest, which is off the coast of Denmark,” Factcheck.org reported. “So far the U.S. has built exactly zero offshore wind farms.”2. Congress is outlawing your backyard organic garden.
A vast campaign, spread via e-mail, Facebook and elsewhere, has tried to convince people that a food safety bill being considered in Congress will wipe out organic farming as we know it, and even possibly make it illegal to have a garden in your backyard. According to Factcheck.org, though, there’s hardly anything to worry about. “We suppose in the grand realm of all that’s possible, or more likely a futuristic B movie, federal bureaucrats could decide that public safety calls for inspections of every backyard garden in the nation, leading everyday citizens to surreptitiously cultivate tomato plants in a closet with a sunlamp, lest they get busted by the cops,” Factcheck.org concluded. “But we kinda doubt it.”3. “Clean coal” is a reality, or at least a possibility.
During the presidential campaign and beyond, as the coal industry and the Waterkeeper Alliance (yay Gloria Reuben!) and other environmental groups have engaged in an epic advertising battle, Factcheck.org has been tamping down enthusiasm for clean coal, which is an expensive concept for removing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants, not a reality. “There are no commercial ‘clean coal’ plants operating currently in the U.S.,” Factcheck.org reported. “The larger question posed by these dueling ad campaigns is implied rather than stated outright. Can coal can be ‘clean’ in the future? Is ‘clean coal’ a laudable, achievable goal as Obama and the coal miners and electric utilities would have us believe? Or is it a ridiculous oxymoron on par with ‘controlled chaos,’ as Gore and other environmental groups suggest?”
Get the other three myths – which include Congress outlawing second-hand clothing, the EPA taxing cows and a supposed giant oil reserve in the Western U.S. – over at The Daily Green.
Link [The Daily Green]
Surf the Web, Stay on Top of Green News in Eco-Chic Style
April 28, 2008
If you want to get in on what all the cool kids are doing, check out Flock’s new ‘Eco Browser’. It’s the greenest way to surf the web! Basically, you can do all of the things you normally do in whatever browser you’re currently using, plus you can set up all your favorite green news feeds to get your daily dose of green goodness. It’s similar to the Mozilla Firefox setup, which will make all of us anti-IE folks happy.
From Flock:
Flock has partnered with leading respected content and opinion leaders from around the web to bring you the latest breaking news. Here’s just a sampling of the sites that are preloaded into the Flock Eco-Edition browser: Treehugger, Think MTV, Environmental News Network, Ecorazzi, National Geographic, Green Yahoo, Grist, Spring, Planetgreen and many more…
I just downloaded it myself and must say it’s pretty slick. It seamlessly pulls together all the content you’re likely to need on a daily basis. Special tools make it easy to stay connected via Flock-supported social networks like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. I got all my feeds loaded up and found some new favorites in the process. It’s easy to learn and use, and it looks mighty purty.
Green News Roundup 3/17: Pollution a Sin, Wal-Mart’s Not Green (Duh), and Glaciers Are Melting Fast
March 17, 2008
We’re happy to have our new Editorial Intern and Writer Caroline Rau getting started this week with a new feature that looks back on the previous weeks bit of green news. Here are a few good stories you might have missed last week.
The Pope stated in an interview with the Vatican’s Newspaper that modern sins include genetic manipulation and polluting the earth. The Vatican has also installed electricity-generating photovoltaic cells on it’s grounds and facilitated conferences on Global Warming. Praise Jebus! From Reuters.
The “Emerald Isle” may become the “shit-brown” Isle
Happy St. Patty’s Day! While we were busy polluting our eco-system with toxic green dyes and our livers with Guinness, a report from the Irish American Climate project reported that Climate Change is threatening to turn the lush green of Ireland brown. Let’s drink more to forget. From ENN.
Daylight Savings May not actually Save Energy
We may have “sprung forward” for no reason. Don’t you hate when that happens? Since only parts of Indiana participate in daylight savings (the parts that aren’t too busy drinking Colt45 in their trailer to notice the time) UC Santa Barbara was able to study the energy “saved” by day light savings. It wasn’t much. Which probably means we need to focus more energy chuggers like air-conditioning instead. From WorldChanging
China Shuts Down Mount Everest
Until May 10th, the north face of Mount Everest will be a no-go zone due to overcrowding and “environmental pressures.” Recently, over 17 tons of trash have been cleared from the Moutain’s hiking trails. From Green Daily and TreeHugger
Walmart’s CEO Lee Scott Jr. announced that Walmart is not a green company. To use a turn of phrase from Junior High, Duh Hickey. Scott did say however, that steps are being taken by the giant superstore chain to reduce packaging and energy use not for the sake of the planet, but for cost efficiency. From Wallstreet Journal
CEO’s Predict Regulations on Climate Change will Save Jobs
At a conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal near Santa Barbara, C.E.O’s backed by the Governator himself demanded that Washington step up to create a cohesive energy policy. They argued that tax subsidies supporting green energy would create jobs for Americans.From Environmental News Network
Con-Way Freight loses Speed to save the Earth
Con-Way’s freight trains will be reprogrammed to run around three miles slower per hour in order to save over 3 million gallos of fuel and 70 million pounds of Carbon Emissions. Whoo-Whoo! From Green Biz
Island of Plastic in Pacific is Here to Stay
So there is this huuuuge wad of plastic (we’re talking twice the size of the good ole U.S. of A) floating in the Pacific. And there’s not much we can do to stop it. Suckness. The plastic kills wildlife, fucks with the food-chain, and inhibits the growth of plankton who help deal with all our access C02 but there is no techology as of yet to get rid of the hulk of crap. From Green Daily
Glaciers Melting at Fastest Rate Recorded
The UN Environment Program found that Glaciers have been losing more ice in recent years than they ever have in the past five Millenia. The rapid melting could cause massive flooding and a change in land and food security. A vast change in energy consumption is needed to avoid all that shit. From Treehugger
