The anti-GMO troops in the United States received some unwelcome news this week from Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA). At a congressional hearing on Thursday, Hamburg reiterated the FDA’s support for voluntary GMO labeling initiatives, but nothing beyond that: The way FDA has for many years interpreted the law…Continue Reading…
In the late 2000s, the notion of “clean coal” was widely panned. As Bryan Walsh wrote in a 2009 Time piece: currently there’s no economical way to capture and sequester carbon emissions from coal, and many experts doubt there ever will be. Critics in the Guardian and elsewhere dismissed “clean coal” as industry greenwash. But…Continue Reading…
The end of the world, like everything worth knowing these days, will be tweeted: NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? | Nafeez Ahmed http://t.co/nWqOcD3UkB — Guardian Environment (@guardianeco) March 14, 2014 If a study with the imprimatur of a major U.S. government agency thinks civilization may soon be destined to fall apart, I…Continue Reading…
In the late 2000s, a new climate change story line emerged in the media. The seeds for this narrative were perhaps sown ten years ago, when a worst-case scenario report commissioned by the Pentagon triggered breathless headlines about a research field known as “abrupt climate change.” Perhaps you saw the 2004 movie. The sensationalist portrayal of…Continue Reading…
Paul Ehrlich and Ann Ehrlich, two long-time prominent voices in the environmental community, often speculate about the future of humanity. They recently shared this anecdote: A few years ago we had a disagreement with our friend Jim Brown, a leading ecologist. We told him we thought there was about a 10 percent chance of avoiding a…Continue Reading…
Not long ago my wife and I went out to dinner at a restaurant with another couple, who, like us, have two boys. The conversation inevitably turned to our kids, school, family stuff. Their older son made the transition this year to junior high school. I asked how this was going. Pretty well, the mother…Continue Reading…
This April 22, Earth Day turns 44. The green movement is not aging well. Like today’s U.S. Republican Party, it has a diversity problem and speaks primarily to a narrow, graying demographic slice of the United States. In 2009, Francis Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) said to the New York Times: Our groups…Continue Reading…
The list of supermarkets, companies and restaurants hopping aboard the anti-GMO train keeps growing. Last year Whole Foods and Chipotle made headlines for their pledges to go GMO-free. [CORRECTION: Only Chipotle has made that pledge; Whole Foods has committed to labeling any of its products that contain GMOs] Numerous food companies have already slapped such a label on…Continue Reading…