These awe-inspiring images of glaciers are helping scientists to determine just how quickly our planet is heating up. The huge ice fields are thought to be one of the most reliable indicators of climate change and are best studied from space. The features form when snow accumulates on an area of land over tens to [...]

Total greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions currently proposed by industrialized countries fall short of the pathway to reaching a 2 degree target as referred to by the UNFCCC Kyoto Protocol negotiating group, despite the fact that the cost of meeting these pledges is much lower than anticipated, according to a new study. FULL STORY. The [...]

Greenhouse gas emissions are higher for oil sands production than for conventional oil production. Photo: David Dodge, The Pembina Institute Oil sands development is carbon-intensive. READ THE FULL REPORT – WHY IT SHOULD BE STOPPED. The production and upgrading required to produce synthetic crude oil from oil sands mining results in greenhouse gas emissions in [...]

NEW HAVEN, W.Va. — Poking out of the ground near the smokestacks of the Mountaineer power plant here are two wells that look much like those that draw natural gas to the surface. But these are about to do something new: inject a power plant’s carbon dioxide into the earth. The United States still depends [...]

U.S. spends about two-and-a-half times as much on fossil fuels (mostly aiding foreign oil production) than it does on renewable energy. Fossil fuels were given about $72 billion during the seven years, while renewable fuels got just $29 billion. The money the U.S. spends on renewables isn’t all that great, either. Of the $29 billion, [...]

Peat mining for energy “causes much larger carbon dioxide emissions than fossil fuels, will ruin precious nature and disrupt the hydrology of large areas,” writes Tatiana Minaeva from Wetlands International. Large-scale plans for exploitation of the country’s massive peatlands was recently announced by Konstantin Alekseyev, director of the Department of coal mining and peat industry [...]

Special thanks to Neal Rauhauser on Twitter as @StrandedWind for this information. Thomas Malthus published An Essay On The Principle Of Population in 1798, a stern warning on the dangers of human overpopulation. Growth in biological systems is controlled not by total resources available but instead by the most scare vital resource – a principle [...]