The Ice Caps Are Melting Faster Than Expected

We know the ice caps are melting as the world gets warmer because of the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. Now a new report out of Cambridge University explains that the ice caps are melting a lot faster than earlier than predicted. If you weren’t doing it before, it really is time to reduce and offset your carbon footprint.

The team from Cambridge has spent several months measuring the thickness and spread of the Arctic ice region and state that much of the ice will completely disappear in the summer months. Within 30 years, the region could be little more than open sea.

Without the Arctic, the whole world will change.

The temperature will continue to rise, changing weather patterns, affecting animal and insect ecosystems, changing crop growing patterns and availability of food sources. Flooding will become a major constant for a number of countries, costing lives, homes, and millions in damage. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere will increase rather than decrease.

A melting icecap situation will change everything.

And all the little things we do, like offsetting our carbon footprints, reduce our waste, recycling materials and trying to leave a better lifestyle is great. It will make a difference. But without the assistance of federal and international laws that force countries to act like smart green citizens, it may not be enough.

Legislation on climate change has to go beyond admitting it exists and something should be done about it to actually doing something about it. Good intentions will not save the planet. Living green on a budget is a fantastic concept: we just need the nations of the world to join in.

Its time to offset your carbon footprint and buy some carbon credits. Tell a friend to try it too. Maybe this whole climate change fixing, ice cap melting reversal thing is a matter of role modeling.

We can only hope.

Dripping Away the Pennies: Water Conservation on a Budget

I’ve managed to avoid a summer hike on my electric bill by fighting off the vampires so now its time to figure out how to reduce my water bill. Oh and of course, offset my carbon footprint.

Sometimes we think using water is okay. I mean the world is 70 percent water, it rains a lot, water gets reused…it’s okay. Aaaah the blissful naivety of ignorance.

Think about it: cleaning water takes machines, chemicals, transportation and electricity. The process involves synthetic chemicals and petrochemicals and of course, emissions. Emissions contribute to global warming.

Besides measuring our individual carbon footprint, you can also measure a countries water footprint, that is, how much water a single country consumes. America is well into the red zone, far above the global average.

We may be okay for water here but other places aren’t so lucky. Water conservation is a key element in helping the planet get through this bad patch. So we have to reduce our water usage, especially our hot water usage which is a double carbon calamity.

So first off, turn off the tap and make sure it’s actually off. A dripping tap amounts to hundreds of dollars down the drain every year. And all those gallons could have gone to much better use like growing crops for food in Africa (yeah there’s a tap turning off guilt trip for you!).

Turn down the hot water heater. The recommended low temp is 120 degrees. Most tanks are set at 140 so go and check where you stand. This will make a nice savings in the electric bill too.

Reuse water. I know that sounds gross but there are plenty of opportunities to do so, especially when cooking. If you boil eggs in a pan of water and don’t break any eggs in the process what do you have? A pan of hot water. Great for washing dishes. If you boil vegetables in water, what’s wrong with taking a cup of that water to make your mash potatoes with? Nothing.

Get out of the shower when you are clean not when you are wrinkly. Taking a hot shower is great after a run but its not really necessary everyday. It’s a complete waste of water and electricity. Think crops in Africa, greenhouse gases and carbon footprints if you need a motivation to grab for that towel a few minutes earlier.

If you can’t resist a long hot shower or boiling your clothes to death, then at least offset your consumption by buying carbon credits. Water is a precious commodity, just like the money in our wallets. Saving both is a step in the right direction.

Walking For The Planet

I came across an article today that talked about the walkability of my geographical location and the need for people to live in places where they are in walking distance of all of life’s necessities. Walking is a must when it comes to offsetting your carbon footprint.

Walking seems a sort of obvious way to save money and get a little fresh air, but sometimes we need reminders regarding what is good for us and for the planet. Every time we aren’t walking or cycling, we are taking transportation that relies on fossil fuels and emits toxins into the air, causing pollution and contributing to global warming. We have to think about the good that walking does.

Walking reduces carbon emissions.

Walking promotes human interaction and communication.

Walking helps support downtown businesses.

Walking is good for the heart and health.

Walking is one of the lowest impact forms of exercise.

Walking promotes community involvement.

Walking lowers your carbon footprint.

Walking saves money.

Walking allows you to breathe in fresh air, enjoy your neighborhood and interact with nature.

Walking is good. Hurray for walking.

The same walking article suggested that for every ten minutes you spend sitting alone inside your car, your likelihood of being involved in community activities, decreases by ten percent.

If we aren’t trying to fix the planet to promote a healthier world and tighter community, then where is the point? Going green is about getting along with each other and our natural environment better. Community is key.

So get out of the car, buy a pedometer and a pair of good shoes and get to stepping.

Putting it all on the Line

Choosing to use a clothes line to dry clothes rather than an electric dryer is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint. Besides saving money on electricity and dryer sheets, not using the dryer reduces the amount of heat in your home. Less heat means less use of the air conditioner in the summer months and did I mention the savings on the electric bill? According to the California Energy Commission, a single dryer will cost over $1,500 in operation fees over its life time. That doesn’t include the initial cost to buy the dryer which runs into the hundreds of dollars.

According to electric use calculators, if you wash a single load of clothes on hot water, put that load into the dryer and then iron that load with an electric iron, it costs you about $1.10. If instead you simply washed the clothes in cold water, hung them on the line to dry and become naturally wrinkle free, a single load of laundry would only cost 12 cents.

That’s a big difference. And reducing your energy consumption is simply a wonderfully side effect of your budget laundry choices.

So once you realize the logic of drying clothes on a line, you have a number of choices. You can buy a clothes line from an online store which can cost anywhere from 20 bucks to a couple hundred dollars depending on style and size, or you could buy a line of rope and a bag of clothes pins. This would cost less than ten dollars. Tie the rope between two trees or other points in the yard and pin your wet clothes on the line. Wait for the power of wind energy to do its work and enjoy line dried, fresh smelling, footprint reducing, alternative energy promoting, clean clothes.

Sometimes it isn’t being green and helping the planet recover from the effects of carbon emission and global warming. But sometimes it is. Sometimes being green is just good old fashioned common sense that benefits both the bottom line and the world.

I mean, its not like clothes lines are a new invention. Sometimes being green isn’t about innovation and looking to the future. It can also be about reviving past ways of doing things to change the present.

A rope, a few pins and a clear day. Easy.

Fish Have Feelings Too

I was reading the news the other day online and saw this picture of a sea lion caught in garbage being rescued by a diver. He was cutting the plastic found around the animal’s neck with his knife. But the worst part was that it wasn’t some isolated incident. In fact the photo was attached to a story regarding one of the world’s largest landfills: the Pacific Ocean.

Of course, I should have realized. But we are all so focused on the damage done by melting glaciers and arctic temperatures rising, we forget that global warming and pollution are not isolated incidents. This “synthetic sea” as Discover Magazine explains is a floating dump of manufactured waste which floats along ocean currents until it either evaporates into oceanic particles or washes up on distant shores.

All that post consumer waste consuming our oceans.

It’s not bad enough that we release carbon emissions for the latest “must have,” the current “have to own” or this week’s “simply can’t live without.” We are spreading our virus to the seas.

Sea lions are inheriting carbon footprints.

Something is definitely wrong with this picture. I don’t know what’s sadder, the fact that the majority of this waste is plastic and therefore not biodegradable or the fact that none noticed this moving island of rubbish until 1997. This floating dump is the same size as this country. Hard to imagine. But given the amount of garbage, packaging and one time use items we discard everyday, its surprising it’s not bigger.

They say they don’t know the full impact on the delicately balanced ecosystems contained within the ocean but it can’t be good. Nature is nature: only confused when interrupted by humanity.

You could toss a plastic coffee cup in the ocean in San Francisco and it could travel along the synthetic sea all the way to Asia then back around to Hawaii. Garbage travels further than any frequent flyer program could possibly allow. This seafill is no anomaly. Apparently, they are everywhere but we are all so focused on the myriad of other planet in crisis problems, the fish often come last on the list.

But fish have feelings too.

In fact, a lot of the human population depends on ocean fish for their health and nutrition. The fish die, the ocean gets sick, we get sick. The double edged sword of the world’s interconnectedness.

And it all comes down to reducing waste, recycling what we can and for goodness sake, offsetting offsetting offsetting. Cause it all comes back to what we do, what we leave behind and the choices we make.

Forewarned is forearmed? I wonder…

Heat Waves, Smog Warnings & No Man's Lands

In the evolutionary, historical sense, human beings really aren't that different from other animals. The human species emerged as a result of optimal environmental conditions. There are lots of places on Earth that human hands had never touched up until the last few hundred years, and although they've nearly all been explored save a few, at most of these hostile locales it just doesn't make any sense for people to stay.

The interior of Alaska comes to mind. The Rub' Al-Khali might be another. Maybe that god-forsaken Black Rock City. You won't find any permanent encampments or signs of civilization there, because the climate is just too forbidding, too harsh for humanity to exist in any substantial way.

With some exceptions, you can mostly trace the spread of human civilization as it developed, and along the way you can pick out the places people broke ground with some accuracy. Follow the water. Look where the climate is most palatable. Catal Huyuk didn't spring up from the empty quarter of the Arabian Desert, it emerged from a place where an agricultural life could be easy for people. As humanity transitioned from a pastoral lifestyle to a sedentary, urban one, it assembled into organized enclaves in places that were most conducive to life.

The oral traditions of humanity are rife with stories of cataclysmic change leaving cities unlivable. Plato describes an unrecorded, prehistoric civilization that is undone by all-too-human hubris and swallowed by the ocean. Western mythology, especially the mythology of the fertile crescent, all share the common thread of a great flood that covers the whole world. And in more recent times, fanciful Romantic authors and 19th century Spiritualists described the lost continents of Mu and Lemuria sinking and leaving a diaspora of people in their wakes.

But there's no need to look to sandaled philosophers of great antiquity or tarot-reading occult-book-store crystal-wavers for the truth about what it looks like when a place becomes unlivable. The truth is, it might happen so slowly and so imperceptibly that you wouldn't notice it, and you one day wake up and realize you can't leave your house.

This summer has been the hottest on record for the Pacific Northwest. It had a late start, and I recall often opining that if it stayed as mild as it had been, it might not get very hot at all this year. Then, in late July, the thermometers broke, and Seattle's previous record temperature was shattered by a 103°F afternoon. Lucky for us, Seattle's topography contribute to a weather pattern that keeps the air quality here pretty decent. It's almost always clear enough to see Mt. Rainier from the I5 bridge in the University District. We've got it pretty good here.

Not so for Vancouver BC. Wildfires in Lillooet, record breaking heat and an urban population that owns 2.3 cars per household despite a vast mass transit system, along with geographic features surrounding the city that trap smog in to boot, all coalesced as factors in a perfect storm to send the air quality index in the Metro Vancouver area hurtling to level 6, the highest in memory for the bourgeois business-class yuppies who make their living there. Asthmatics and people suffering from respiratory diseases were recommended to stay indoors, and though it would dissipate in a matter of days, the effect of the air quality warning was troubling. How could a place with such strict emissions controls and an incomparably responsible society, bent on being green, be so thick with pollution?

But Vancouver's air pollution problem pales in comparison to Beijing's. Following the failure of Mao's Great Leap Forward, Deng Xiaoping led the Communist Party of China to adopt what it termed "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", a pastiche of both ideological Marxism and, with a certain grudging acknowledgement to pragmatism, contrarian Capitalist concepts as well. With barely a sliver of an opening to the absurd vastness of the Chinese consumer markets, virtually overnight the country became solvent, and within a decade the poverty rate had been slashed from more than half of the country's 1 billion during the Mao era to a shrinking 12% in 1981 and single-digits more recently.

The Beijing of 2009 is just under 3 times as large as it was prior to the economic reforms, and duplicate success stories raise metropolises across the country at a rapid clip. With the new-found prosperity came all the trappings of modern first-world nations: cars, skyscrapers, airports, luxury apartments, corporate identities, advertisements and, at the heart of it all, manufacturing plants making the export goods that fuels China's economic breakthrough.

Beijing has arrived, and by 2009 China has become the reigning economic power in the world, but rapid modernization brought the unintended consequence of unchecked, unchallenged release of greenhouse gases the likes of which the world has never seen. Forbes Magazine estimates that the 10 most polluted cities in the world are all in China, and the Chinese government claims nearly one and a half million premature deaths occur as a result of poor air quality every year. Where Vancouver's air quality might be dangerous for people already at risk, Beijing is consistently shrouded in a dark grey porridge that chokes healthy people to death and reduces visibility to less than the length of a city block.

The point I'm trying to make here, is that humanity is turning the places it makes it's bed unlivable. The non-stop, uninterrupted release of not just the greenhouse gases that feed into self-perpetuating feedback loops and precipitate global climate change, but also the real nasty stuff that comes out of your exhaust pipe and your chimney and every coal power plant you use when you charge up your iPhone, is slowly but surely making those archetypal myths of cataclysmic change seem prophetic at best and at worst like observations that self-similarity in man's inhumanity to man scales up and will eventually kill us. There's no sense in this. We're committing suicide on a global scale, and we're doing it in a really weak, wimpy, cowardly way that betrays our imprinted consumerist apathy.

That's why offsetting your personal carbon footprint is so important. If everyone in Seattle, Vancouver and Beijing paid for their yearly carbon output, we would solve the global ecology crisis in less time than it took for China to awaken from it's ideologically-lullabied slumber. All it takes is pointing your browser at http://www.offsetcarbonfootprint.org/. All the links are there, they'll help you calculate your carbon footprint and give you all the tools you need to decide how you'd like to offset your carbon. They make it easy! They'll accept all major payment methods and will even offer you a certified guarantee. All you've got to do is make the choice to take responsibility for your share of climate change.

Are you ready to do the right thing? Time is of the essence, so don't delay. Do it today.

What Are Greenhouse Gases?

Carbon is the fourth most prevalent element in the solar system. It's the bedrock of all known organic life. Carbon dioxide is recycled into oxygen by all plants and animals. It's in a sort of dynamo between animals and plants exchanging CO2 for oxygen, filtering out the natural clear background noise of the environment and providing a relatively nice planet to live on. It evolved this way. This is why life is possible on Earth.

The planet has come to this fragile state by a delicate balancing act perfected over 4.6 billion years. It arose out of nature, like a flower from concrete. One could spend a lifetime covering what the philosophers say about that! But science shows that Earth is fundamentally unguarded and vulnerable to changes that may be imperceptible to us.

By the late 18th century, the Enlightenment had brought not only revolutions of the mind and state, but also technological revolutions, and the mechanical amusements of the ultrarich landed aristocrats became affordable to a new class of merchant, who presided over factories and smokestacks to become captains of industry and railroad barons. Tall, brick exhaust towers emerged on the horizon, and a malaise of thick haze spread over the land.

Fast forward 150 years. In the 1950's, America returns from World War II flush with triumph and economic prosperity, and so began another technological revolution, where a new class of postwar successes slid smoothly into the prefab suburbs, all in gleaming chrome Cadillacs, streaming down the 16 lane highways full of cars, smiling in averaged-off numbers like 3.6, Mom & Dad & Buddy & Sis and even the family dog. Now, that same dream of owning some kind of great guzzling machine became not only feasible for the factory owner -- now it was affordable to the workers, too. The ubiquity of cars duplicated the effect of the paper mills and smokestacks of the industrial age, and the murky soup hanging over cities started getting thicker.

What people don't realize when they witness air pollution firsthand, is that it accumulates. The carbon that humanity is releasing right now is adding to a mass that contains the same carbon that was released when the first factory switched on. Greenhouse gases don't just go away. They accumulate.

Environmentalism and the broader tradition of conservationism have always existed in some form or another, but the modern Green movement is an unprecedented break with that most august and austere tradition. The effects of unchallenged emission of greenhouse gases are self-evident, and so even the factory owner has to stroke his chin and wonder aloud if the businesses of ruining the Earth and poisoning the seas are going to effect his bottom line. The U.S. military increasingly relies on solar power as it's primary source of electricity, since operational security demands an uninterrupted source of power. They're betting on the long-term viability of oil, or rather a lack thereof.

This is why buying offsets is so important. Whether you're a commuter paying off the 4 tons of carbon you produce per year, or a CEO of a Fortune 500 infrastructure company with an international fleet of cargo jets and supertankers, you can cancel out your carbon production by purchasing offsets and contributing to the global effort to change the world. It doesn't cost much, and it's for everybody! It's easy, and OffsetCarbonFootprint.org does everything for you and makes it easier than anyone else. Do the right thing for the environment. Now's a great time.

There are Vampires in my House

It’s officially called Wasted Standby Power. But most people refer to it as the electricity vampire that sucks energy out of appliances, even when they aren’t in use. Vampires in the home are one of the many things that add to a household’s carbon footprint.

Home phones, microwaves, alarm clocks, computers, remote control units, rechargers and any other appliance that is left plugged into the mains can steal energy from the grid and money from your pocket. In fact, over 4 billion dollars a year goes to feed these electrical vampires. It’s bad for the planet, really bad for the planet. Carbon emissions are released in the process of making electricity. So every kilowatt of energy wasted leads to the pointless release of carbon into our atmosphere, adding to the problem of global warming.

Those poor, poor polar bears, floating on ice cubes because we were too lazy to unplug the cell phone charger from the wall.

It can be up to 10 percent of the utility bill, accounts for billions in wasted money, tons of life destroying carbon emissions and aids in the pollution of the planet and the heat in the sky. We offset our carbon footprint by practicing balance. If we reduce our use of power by plugging things into power strips that have an off switch, unplugging all appliances at the end of the day, turning out lights and removing anything from the electrical socket that serves no purpose, we can begin to win the war against these power sucking fiends.

And for everyone that’s begins complaining about the effort it takes to switch off and unplug? Fine, don’t do it. You are free not to. But consider doing something to offset your growing carbon footprint. Calculate your carbon tones using the carbon footprint calculator and if, after you realize just how much money and energy you are wasting, you still don’t want to join the crusade against the vampires? It’s your choice but offsetting your energy usage by helping a few trees has got to make you feel better.

For me, I’ll keep waging the battle using my vampire deterrent: unplugging appliances.

Cheaper than a bulb of garlic.

Trees Glorious Trees

There is something about the constancy of trees that I admire. Their towering longevity and inherent grace always gains my respect. Yes, trees are one of my favorites from Mother Nature’s collection. And the fact that they allow me to breathe just completes the perfection of their design.

The process of photosynthesis always used to bore me in science class. It was one of those school facts that had little relevance to my life. Now I realize what the teachers were trying to get me to understand. My life depends on those tree related processes, now more than ever.

In case you too blocked it out in school, photosynthesis is the means in which a tree, plant or any green thing lives. The chlorophyll in the leaves (the green tone we see) soaks up water and carbon dioxide in the air. This absorbed energy is utilized in processing the minerals taken in by the roots to help nourish the tree. After the process is complete, trees release oxygen and water back into the atmosphere.

So, essentially, we breathe in tree waste. We are dependent upon trees for our lives.

Sure, there is natural oxygen in the atmosphere making up about 20 percent of the gases but without the constant replenishment from tree waste, the chemical composition of the air would begin to change drastically. And with the ever increasing carbon emissions adding to the temperature of the planet i.e. global warming, it’s all the trees can do to keep up.

A single medium sized tree provides enough oxygen for one human to breathe in ideal circumstances.

So with carbon, pollution, toxins and goodness knows what else in the air, the situation is far from ideal. And what about all our furry friends? They too require oxygen to breathe. And our fishy friends? Water plants release oxygen into the water which allows them to breathe. We need trees for our continued planetary existence.

And of course, to offset all this bleeping carbon.

The connection between people and trees isn’t some throwback from the sixties or belong to people with flowers in their hair and sandals on their feet. That connection is foundational to everything and everyone.

You might not have an urge to go out and hug a tree after reading this but you might consider a little internal nod to the grand design.

Yes, for me, it’s definitely a case of trees, glorious trees.

Managing Your Carbs: A Learning Process

I’m a big believer in awareness being the first step to correcting a problem. After discovering what a carbon footprint is, using a carbon footprint calculator to determine the size of your particular imprint, its time to start thinking: “what can I do to make this situation better?” Because no matter how hard you try, you can’t eliminate your carbon footprint overnight and you must understand how offsetting is a great stop gap between awareness and complete elimination of the problem.

Offset is a game of tit for tat, of losing and gaining, of finding balance. For everything you take away, you should give something back. And there’s nothing wrong with being creative about the whole thing. For instance if you are a big paper consumer, maybe planting trees could be your thing. Maybe you don’t have time to plant trees. So paying someone else to plant trees for you could be your thing. Maybe trees are not the way to go at all. Maybe energy reduction is your thing. Maybe you can’t really reduce your energy output anymore so maybe you could help pay for someone’s else energy. Maybe you could support a fund that provides clean energy to people or maybe you could start building windmills.

Maybe a lot of things.

This whole offsetting business is quite involved. There are so many ways to restore a sense of balance to our lives and to the planet as a whole. Reading about what is happening to the planet may be another way to go for some of us. Learning about global warming, how it occurs and what can be done about it. Education is a good second step after initial awareness of the problem. It’s all about choice.

There is a great freedom in being green because there are so many ways to do it.

Managing carbon is the same for me as managing carbohydrates. Something I know I should be doing but sometimes it’s hard and seems an unattainable goal. But I know its good for me in the long run. So I make tiny changes and concentrate on learning what I can do. Cut out a cookie here, walk past a cupcake there and slowly start realizing the effect of my good choices.

Awareness. Education. Balance. Change. Reward.

Whether reducing or offsetting, the management of carbon is a learning process. Realizing we have a lot to understand and research is a good start.

Get Ready For The 21st Century, It's Gonna Be A Scorcher

Stunning satellite photographs published this week provide the most visually arresting evidence of worldwide climate change yet.

The photographs, taken over the past decade, were kept classified under the aegis of "national security" during the Bush years, deemed too sensitive -- perhaps too damning? -- for public consumption. This month, the National Academy of Sciences recommended that the Obama administration declassify the photos, and they were released in a torrent of around 1,000 of the photographs the following day.

The photos show a stark array of before-and-after comparisons. The single most startling image (shown above) is a shot of Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost point in the United States, historically surrounded year-round by a sheet of solid ice which, during the summer of 2007, receded and finally vanished completely, leaving a coast cloistered by solid ice since time immemorial confronted quite suddenly by the facts of climate change. Other photos in the series show the gradual disappearance of the Bering Glacier and open water on the Beaufort Sea, another location historically covered in an ice-sheet.

With facts like these developing on the ground, it's hard to feel as though your personal effort to conserve energy and shrink your footprint is worthwhile. Climate science suggests that the rapidly accelerating effects of global warming are not only far removed along causal chains from carbon emissions, but are likely precipitated by slippery-slope feedback loops, a global climate in tumbling transit from the balancing-act status-quo of the Holocene interglacial towards a hotter and wetter planetary configuration that represents a great big question mark for life on Earth. In other words, the struggle to save the Earth might be too little, too late, but nothing is ever so certain. Only time will tell, and meanwhile it couldn't hurt to ride your bike to work for a change, eat a vegetarian meal for a week or buy carbon offsets.

(Source: http://gfl.usgs.gov/ArcticSeaIce.shtml)

India Environment Ministry Says Climate Change Is Western Baloney

The chasm between the Indian environmental ministry and the self-evident truths of climate change widened precipitously today when Jairem Ramesh downplayed the danger of climate change and characterised fears of the Himalayan glaciers melting over the next 40 years as "... preconceived notion[s] ... based on the western media".

Speaking at an environmental threats conference in Delhi, Mr Ramesh dismissed predictions that the glaciers might disappear within 40 years as a result of global warming. "We have to get out of the preconceived notion, which is based on western media, and invest our scientific research and other capacities to study Himalayan atmosphere," he said. "Science has its limitation. You cannot substitute the knowledge that has been gained by the people living in cold deserts through everyday experience."

The comments by a close ally of Sonia Gandhi, the ruling Congress party president, are likely to discourage environmental campaigners hoping that India might help forge an agreement at United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen in December.

Earlier this week, Mr Ramesh challenged Mrs Clinton over her appeal to India to embrace a lowcarbon future and not repeat the mistakes of the developed world in seeking fast industrialisation. He said India was not prepared to agree to legally binding greenhouse gas emission caps, although developed countries are not asking for such caps.

Ramesh's flippant dismissal of the matter is in stark contrast to the facts. The scientific consensus has repeatedly reaffirmed the fact that climate change can be directly attributed to the breakneck speed with which the first world industrialised in the 19th and 20th centuries. Still, the climate change denial meme survives, in large part due to the insidious, interdependent relationship of the sleazy, amoral career-politician suits in control of the state and industrial business interests whose revenue-model relies on exercising free license to poison you and spurn catastrophic climate change, all the while manufacturing reams of disposable consumer junk.

The comments seemed to drive further nails into the coffin of the notion that the Indian state might join the emerging bloc of nations committed (in theory) to sustainable industrial practices. Ramesh's faux-skepticism comes on the heels of India's refusal to agree to binding carbon caps and long-term reduction goals at the G8 summit and later at a press conference during American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first visit to India in her capacity as chief diplomat for the Obama administration. Between today's statement and the habitual aloofness of India with regard to environmental concerns, the future of the Indian subcontinent looks hazy, stinky and possibly underwater.

(Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/43702396-77ea-11de-9713-00144feabdc0.html)

Global Stewardship

I'm thrilled to be using the library at http://www.offsetcarbonfootprint.org/ to further educate myself about global warming. Overwhelmingly I appreciate all efforts toward sustainability and stewardship of this planet and our universe. The article about carbon friendly dining especially appeals to me regarding our food choices. Not just the choices we make at the restaurants we choose but what we bring home to cook as well.