Bursting the Bubble: Climate Cartoon Dissent
Editor's Note: On the dual occasion of Sunday Cartoon day, and Friday's release of the latest IPCC report (EarthDesk, September 29), we decided to step outside our own climate bubble here at EarthDesk and share the work of three cartoonists who dissent about, or...
Fifth IPCC Report Sets a Global Carbon Budget
By Karl Coplan Karl Coplan is a professor of law at Pace Law School and co-director of its Environmental Litigation Clinic. This post also appears on GreenLaw, the blog of the Pace Environmental Law Program. More on Karl at the conclusion of this post. The Fifth...
Abandoned, Polluting, and Costly: Are the Gas Wells of New York’s Past a Glimpse into Its Future?
By Tom Wilber Editor's Note: Tom Wilber regularly contributes posts about shale gas and fracking to EarthDesk. This post also appears on his excellent blog Shale Gas Review. More on Tom follows. -- John Cronin The debate over natural gas development in New York has...
It’s Not Called the Cleaner Water Act
America’s waterbodies are imperiled as never before. The words are not mine. That is how former EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson described the state of the nation’s waters in a January 12, 2010 memo to EPA staff. Today, our waters are still “imperiled as never...
Sustainable Snapshot: Yankees Station
More than 5,000 fans will travel to Yankee Stadium by Metro North Train on a well-attended game day. Opened during the 2009 baseball season, the Yankees-E. 153rd Street Station has so reduced car traffic to the Yankees Heritage Field complex in the Bronx that the...
Live Stock by Hajo de Reijger
Hajo de Reijger is a prolific political cartoonist and freelance illustrator whose themes include animal welfare and the environment. He works for the Dutch newspapers NRC Handelsblad, NRC Next and de Pers, and lives with his wife and three children in Amsterdam. You...
Revkin’s Roundup: Frack Leaks, Coal Jewlery, Arctic Water, Pork-Beef
From the fracking fields of Texas to the bizarre butcheries of mainland China, here are Andy's highlights for the week behind and the week ahead. The Week Behind: A Closer Look at Fracking Emissions This week began with the publication in the Proceedings of the...
The Obama Climate Battle is Joined, but Does the President Have the Clout?
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to issue carbon standards in the next few days that will regulate air emissions at new power plants, the first salvo in the climate offensive President Obama promised to launch from the Oval Office. Earlier...
Antibiotics & Human Disease: The CAFO Connection
On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially confirmed what health advocates, independent scientists and common sense nutritionists have maintained, and CDC had alluded to, for years: uncontrolled use of antibiotics in food animals is...
Bee Orchid by xkcd
Editor's Note: Typically, we do not run a cartoon from the same artist two weeks in a row, but this beautiful piece from xkcd/Randall Munroe deserved it. More on Randall follows. -- John Cronin xkcd is the webcomic creation of Randall Munroe, an extraordinarily...
Voyager of Hope
If our environment is the space we occupy, it is now interstellar. NASA reports: NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion km) from our sun. It...
America the Possible by James Gustave Speth
Something very troubling has been happening to our country in the past few decades. We are letting our greatness slip away. -- James Gustave Speth. What is your America the Possible? What America can you dream? What America will you stand for? Must we have the highest...