Climate change could spell the end for nuclear power, not vice versa.
Natalie Kopytko The Guardian, Friday 18 March 2011

The nuclear industry can offer no guarantee against a repeat of Japan's disaster Julian Glover says of the Fukushima crisis: "This accident may prove nothing but could signify everything: the illogical fear that the nuclear genie can never be controlled" (The world's nuclear fate rests in Japan, 14 March). I carried out a research project that examined how extreme climatic events impact nuclear power plants.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2011/mar/18/nuclear-po...

Varied Menus for Sustaining a Well-Fed World
January 10, 2011, 5:06 pm By ANDREW C. REVKIN

On many issues relevant to charting a smooth human journey in this century, arguments are often framed between camps seeking to promote and spread “sustainable” behaviors and those pushing to advance and/or disseminate “better” technologies. In such polarized discussions, it’s hard to find acknowledgment that a variegated world heading toward roughly 9 billion people by 2050 will almost assuredly require. Still, there is plenty of room for agreement, and potentially progress.
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http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/varied-menus-for-sustaining...

Why Consuming Smarter Means Consuming Less
Published March 15, 2010

“Consumption is a tricky issue for us, but we need to start talking about it.”
So says Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. This is welcome news. Like the other big environmental NGOs, NRDC has shied away from telling people what to eat (less red meat and dairy), what kinds of cars to drive (smaller ones), whether to fly (not too much) or how many homes to own (one). That may be about to change.
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http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/03/15/consuming-smarter-means-consumin...


Investigators Analyze Plastic Soup in World's Five Oceanic Gyres

HAMILTON, Bermuda, February 1, 2010 (ENS) - Marine scientists set sail from Bermuda on Thursday to document the extent of plastic pollution in the North Atlantic Gyre, a swirling vortex of ocean currents in the northern Atlantic Ocean. The scientists and crew are aboard the 72-foot sloop Sea Dragon sailing across the Sargasso Sea to the Azores Islands.
The husband and wife team of California researchers, Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins, are the first to study the plastics that accumulate in all of the world's five oceanic gyres. The gyres are formed by winds and currents in North and South Atlantic, the North and South Pacific and the Indian oceans.
In these gyres, plastic food and water containers, toys, plastic bags, six-pack rings, condoms, fishing lines and nets discarded on land or at sea float and whirl endlessly, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces but never completely disappearing.

"The question we're now looking into - do the chemicals on the surface of plastic particles get into the tissues of fish through ingestion, work their way up the food chain, and wind up on our dinner plate?" the Eriksen and Cummins told ENS in an interview.
Anna Cummins, left, Marcus Ericksen and crew member aboard the Sea Dragon towing a trawl to collect debris. January 31, 2010 (Photo courtesy 5 Gyres) If these plastic particles do wind up on human dinner plates, they carry high concentrations of persistent organic pollutants with them
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http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2010/2010-02-01-01.html