If everyone in America stopped eating beef tomorrow and started eating chicken, it’d be like taking 26 million cars off the road

Check out the chart above, via here. It compares the greenhouse gas emissions linked with the production of beef and chicken. As you can see, chicken is a lot less — in fact, it’s about four times less. If you were… Continue Reading

Kiribati, an island of 100K in the South Pacific, just banned commercial fishing. That seems like a big step.

Here’s the article, and here’s the money quote: “If you think of the ocean as a bank account in which everybody withdraws but nobody makes a deposit, then protected marine reserves are like savings accounts that produce interest,” Sala told… Continue Reading

North Carolina is about to be the tipping point for the fracking debate in America

Get this: North Carolina lawmakers have softened a controversial bill that would have made it a felony to disclose the chemicals used in fracking. Under the version of the law that passed the state legislature on Thursday, the offense has been knocked down to a misdemeanor. But legal… Continue Reading

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Is Kemper County, Mississippi going to be the future of the climate change battle?

You may have heard about the Kemper County (MS) power plant — here’s the Wiki for it, for good measure — as it could be a major step forward in the climate change battle. Here’s the basic situation: the plant converts coal into… Continue Reading

Climate change will soon be arriving at your breakfast table, and General Mills might start fading as a company around 2035

Quick, semi-humorous story before we get into this: last October, General Mills came to my graduate school to recruit. They had set up interviews on a Thursday, and conducted probably 10-12 that day. It just so happened that the same… Continue Reading

Look at this graphic and try not to be worried about drought, the future of food, climate change, California as a whole, and, well, the United States

What am I looking at, you may have just asked. Well, hopefully you realize that’s California pictured above and there are three distinct time periods shown: 1950 (The Great Move West!), 2000 (a little after San Francisco became the new… Continue Reading

Honda (a car company) and UC-Davis just built a smart home together. Wait, why?

Our homes + our cars = 44 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. So what if the two were synced up — as part of the emerging “Internet of Things” or “smart grid” — in an effort to get to zero-carbon… Continue Reading

The first Earth Day was the result of Gaylord Nelson, Pete McCloskey, and Denis Hayes

“This planet is threatened with destruction — and, we who live in it, with death.” This were some of the first words associated with Earth Day when it started — way back in 1970 — and despite being depressing, the… Continue Reading