Overflowing landfills and a growing apprehension about their effect on climate change has many communities considering a “zero waste” strategy, according to the New York Times.

One of the most notable examples of a “no waste” society can be found in Nantucket, an island off the coast of Massachusetts whose want for landfill space and uneasiness about the cost of shipping local trash over 30 miles to the mainland encouraged its leadership to implement significant changes to it’s trash policy.  Like many communities, this no trash initiative was born not from …

A new report published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science notes that the ice cap atop Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania continues to recede. The authors of the report, however, do not state a consensus of opinion on the reason for the continued melting.
The scientists compared aerial photographs of the mountain taken over time to obtain horizontal measurements of the retreating ice. To obtain changes in depth measurements, the scientists used instruments installed on Kilimanjaro in 2000.

The New York Times highlighted the concept of ” environmental patents to the commons,” which essentially means that anyone may use them at no cost.  Dr. Sarah Slaughter, coordinator of the M.I.T. Sloan Sustainability Initiative said in the interview, “We all want to save the planet, and the problems are bigger than any one firm, sector or country.” 

Do fear tactics work?
The British government produced a commercial featuring a father reading a bedtime story to his daughter about the catastrophe the world will face if CO2 levels go unchecked.  At the end of the story, flood waters pour in and a puppy is seen drowning.

Jonathan Foley,  director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of the Minnesota, where he is also a professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the Department of Ecology,  Evolution and Behavior, recently wrote for Yale Environment 360.   His concern, the global crisis in land use.

What is happening with the global warming debate?  It seems to be taking a rather cutting rhetorical turn.  Here are a few views that just surfaced today in the news, although the speech was from several days ago. In an effort to publish two sides of a story, here is Lord Monckton.

On his blog, Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, predicts that any attempt by the EPA to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) will result in a flood of litigation by the fossil-fuel industries that will continue for years.
Reich notes that the Obama administration has attempted to use the specter of EPA regulation as a threat to move cap & trade legislation through the Congress before the Copenhagen meeting. Since that is now highly unlikely, Mr. Reich advises the administration to put the …

In the climate change world late last week, there were two uncommon events.
First, the BBC uncharacteristically published an article titled “ What happened to global warming?”   The article by BBC climate correspondent, Paul Hudson, notes, among other things, that the warmest year on record was 1998, not 2007 or 2008. The climate models did not predict this fact. This is noteworthy because during the past 11 years man-made CO2 levels have continued to rise.

This documentary is hitting movie theaters this week. It tells the story of a man who convinced his family to go totally environmental.

Most of us know of Maya Lin for her work designing the Vietnam Veterans Monument. Today the California Academy of Science houses two of her permanent collections — and the only such place in the world to do so.