Latest News
Big Storm? Think Small -
Superstorm Sandy turned the lights out on 35,000 people, many of them for weeks. So two years later, New York State has launched a $40 million competition to build the best microgrid for the Rockaways. Generating its own power supply (often with renewable sources) a microgrid could hook up hospitals, schools, grocery stores, gas stations, and other crucial services. Why the Rockaways? Sandy devastated this coastal community, and Long Island's power lines come to an end here. All in all, a place for new beginnings. Climate Central
Out of Options -
“The oil industry has been expanding in Alberta, Canada's forests for years, steadily eroding the basis for centuries of tradition and ways of life. With much of their water, land, fishing and hunting already compromised, community leaders decided around 2008 to quit resisting the inevitable and instead work with their new neighbors. The arrangement has since brought them a degree of economic advantage, but to some it’s akin to a deal with the devil.” —From “Sleeping with the Devil,” Doug Bierend’s Vantage story chronicling photographer Aaron Vincent Elkaim’s quest to document a First Nation community trading its way of life to Big Oil
Fashion Victim -
You've probably heard about all the microplastic in the sea, but did you know your clothing is adding to it? Wastewater from washing machines is carrying loads of teeny-tiny synthetic fibers to the ocean. In some areas, bits of nylon and acrylic might account for 85 percent of ocean plastic. Yet apparel companies—Patagonia, Nike, and Polartec, to name a few—aren’t interested in doing anything about it. The Guardian
Check the Math -
Let's see if we've got this right. Falling oil prices are making tar sands crude even costlier to produce and ship by rail. That means the proposed Keystone XL pipeline out of Canada is more necessary than ever to keep the industry’s expansion plans affordable. Ergo, no KXL = more tar sands oil stuck in the ground = fewer global-warming emissions. Earlier this year, President Obama said the pipeline's contribution to carbon pollution would be a deciding factor in whether he would give the project the go-ahead. So…no-go? Inside Climate News
I'll Have the Steak, Hold the Guilt -
"More than any other food, meat focuses cultural anxieties. In the 1970s, beef caused heart attacks; in the '80s and afterward it carried mad cow. Recent decades have brought to light the dark side of industrial agriculture, with its hormone- and antibiotic-intensive confinement-feeding operations, food-safety scares, and torture-porn optics. The social and environmental costs, the moral burden, the threat to individual health—all seem increasingly hard to justify when weighed against a tenderloin." —From "Elite Meat," Dana Goodyear's New Yorker story on sustainable-beef entreprenuer Anya Fernald (and whether that can really be a thing)
Reading Fiction Is So Hot -
Climate fiction is sizzling in the book market right now. Whether you're looking for international award-winning novels like the Windup Girl, dystopian sagas like Ship Breaker, or Washington political trilogies like Forty Signs of Rain, the “cli-fi” genre has a disaster just for you. “I’m definitely writing my fears,” says novelist Paolo Bacigalupi. “It’s almost therapeutic to at least voice a terror.” Salon