Yesterday, the U.N. and the World Blank announced plans for a task force to address skyrocketing food prices worldwide (Forbes.com).
The food price shock now roiling world markets is destabilizing governments, igniting street riots and threatening to send a new wave of hunger rippling through the world’s poorest nations. It is outpacing even the Soviet grain [...]

Hundreds of scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have reported political interference in their work, according to a report released on April 23 by the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Interference at the EPA: Science and Politics at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency” draws from the anonymous responses of 1,586 EPA scientists, 889 (56 percent) [...]

For a long time, solar has been finding itself on non-traditional surfaces in fresh, yet practical, ways. The presence of solar shingles and solar billboards attests to this. Now take, for example, a solar balloon project called Sunhope.
 
 This initiative, which is being developed by architect Joseph Cory and aerospace engineer Dr. Pini Gurfil, of [...]

“Taking a dodgy accounting proposition, which is that you can somehow identify the amount of carbon that any given new bit of forest picks up out of the atmosphere and sequesters, and make that correspond somehow to emissions elsewhere,” is how Greenpeace sees carbon offsetting, according to its senior climate adviser Charlie Kronick. “It can’t [...]

San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge at night. Now imagine it without the lights.
On March 29, inhabitants and businesses in around 380 cities—including Bangkok, Rome and Chicago—turned off their lights for at least an hour. At 8 p.m. wherever they were, various households, businesses, and governments were urged to flick the switch and to return [...]

Over the past two weeks, hundreds of building professionals, students, and generally interested members of the public convened in New Orleans to kickstart the restoration of the Holy Cross Neighborhood in the Lower Ninth Ward. There have been many restoration projects in the Katrina-ravaged city, but what sets this one apart is how it brings [...]

Facing increased roadblocks to financial success and growth stateside, the U.S. coal industry is taking its business elsewhere: overseas. Coal exports jumped from a little over 49 million short tons (mmst) in 2006 to 53 million in 2007, according to the National Mining Association, and the New York Times reports that coal executives predict exports [...]

The official start to the trade show segment of the NESEA’s conference was an address from Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. One government official with more than twenty-five years’ worth of experience echoed the general sentiment when he said that Governor Patrick’s speech was a “shot in the arm”. Alternative energy has had little support from [...]

The NESEA (Northeast Sustainable Energy Association) is hosting its 33rd annual Building Energy Conference & Trade Show in Boston this week, from March 11-13. The parameters on the breadth of the conference, stemming from the NESEA’s dedication to issues particular to the Northeast, allows for remarkable depth of education. Workshops and sessions are offered for [...]

JATAN
Today, it may not directly affect the physical and socioeconomic environment of the U.S. as much as it does some developing countries, but deforestation anywhere deserves some attention, and not just from tree huggers. It accounts for about one fifth of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide, after all, and a study from the WWF (World [...]