A milestone marking how green building is maturing in the United States has been reached: more square feet of existing buildings have been retrofitted to meet LEED standards than the square footage of new construction that’s LEED certified. Ever since the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program was established in 2000 and became the gold standard in green building, it’s been a young structure’s game: new construction is erected to meet LEED standards, but all those drafty old energy hog commercial buildings continued on their inefficient way. Since old buildings vastly ... Read More
Cigarettes Do Have Free Speech Rights
November 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In August, our Emily Badger asked if cigarettes have a right to free speech. This week, a federal judge answered yes. Not that cigarettes, perhaps outside Doonesbury’s Mr. Butts, actually talk. Instead, a U.S. court in the District of Columbia determined that über-graphic depictions of diseased lungs and rotting teeth that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration required be put on cigarette packages exceeded the informational and entered the emotional. The distinction mattered to U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, who argued that the disturbing images and giant warning text were not the ... Read More
The iPod Touch as a Crop Saver
November 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
On the heels of Cellscope, a device that clips onto a smartphone to analyze blood samples, comes Gene-Z, a device that can clip onto an iPod Touch and identify diseases in crops and plants. The traditional approach to identifying plant pathogens is to collect field samples, send them to a laboratory, and await the results. With Gene-Z, researchers said, they can take a swab of plant pathogens, transfer the sample to a kind of “lab-on-a-chip,” insert the chip into the device, and get results within 10 to 30 minutes via smartphone technology. Gene-Z was unveiled November 7 at a conference ... Read More
Wildlife CSI Positively Identified Bat Killer
October 26, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In a scientific detective story with Halloween overtones, researchers say they have definitively identified what causes white-nose syndrome in bats: a fungus. The journal Nature today reports that exposure to the fungus Geomyces destructans resulted in white-nose 100 percent of the time among an experimental colony of hibernating little brown bats. The disease is named for the fuzzy white material that grows on the bats' muzzles while they hibernate over the winter in caves. Miller-McCune has been following the explosion of white-nose since 2008, when David Richardson wrote about a new ... Read More
Malaria Vaccine Gives Debate Shot in the Arm
October 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The fight against malaria has always featured a side controversy over whether the search for a vaccine — which always seemed a little pie-in-the-sky — sucked out some of the oxygen (read money) for more practical efforts like pesticide-infused bed netting. (Writer Karen Schmidt described such things as “Everyday Miracles” for us two years ago.) Given that most diseases that primarily hurt those in the developing world are pretty much ignored in the industrialized world, the dispute by well-meaning people was always a trifle unusual. Then the search for the malaria vaccine was ... Read More
Trash Free Seas Alliance Takes Aim at Great Pacific Garbage Patch
October 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Normandy's windswept beaches have been quiet since the Allied invasion in 1944. Now the desolate coastline plays host to a different, more insidious attacker: plastic trash. Nestled in the coarse sand and tangled among pieces of driftwood lie the detritus of the industrialized world, an army of plastic bottles, discarded fishing lines and floats, crushed buckets, flip-flops, broken chairs, and bags. The English Channel is not the world's sole depositor of plastic debris. Lonely beaches all over the world — ones you’d expect to be devoid of human influence — teem with wildlife, but ... Read More
Consistency Key to Renewable Energy Policy
October 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The bankruptcy of the solar startup Solyndra last month has placed government funding for renewable energy projects under a microscope. Were the government-guaranteed loans a wise way to use public funding to help green technologies? An analysis conducted by the George Soros-funded Climate Policy Initiative (“Evaluating Policies for Low Carbon Growth”) looked at six large-scale renewable energy projects in the United States and Europe, seeking answers about how their real costs matched up with their estimates, and "how policy affects project economics." The six projects were: wind ... Read More
Solyndra’s Problems Were More Politics Than Power
October 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In September, Dan Arvizu, who heads the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, made a prescient prediction during a European solar energy conference. He said the meteoric growth of photovoltaic installations over the last six years would cause fossil fuel and nuclear interests to demonize solar cells in hope of killing what they might see as a powerful threat. Days later, Washington politicians started ramping up an investigation into Solyndra, a leading maker of thin-film solar cells that had gone bankrupt two years after receiving a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. ... Read More
Jimmy Carter Wants to Finish Off Guinea Worm
October 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Former President Jimmy Carter joined the World Health Organization in London today to ask governments and nongovernmental organizations for $93 million in donations over four years to rid the world of guinea worm disease, a debilitating infection that still afflicts four African countries. In 1980, about 3.5 million people in 20 countries suffered from guinea worm disease, an affliction so painful that it can immobilize sufferers for months. According to the World Health Organization, only 970 cases of guinea worm have been confirmed from January through August this year, primarily in the ... Read More
Climate Optimist Revisits Failures of His ‘Wedges’ Paper
October 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Perhaps the most famous blueprint for slowing and reversing carbon emissions was the 2004 “wedges” paper by Princeton researchers Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow. While the resulting project’s optimism, innovative approach — it includes a “Stabilization Wedges Game” and a musical lecture — and frequent citation have captured imaginations worldwide, policymakers continue to scuttle away from the hard choices it suggests for addressing climate change. As Matt Jenkins described for in the April-May 2008 issue of Miller-McCune, (“A Really Inconvenient Truth”) "... Pacala and ... Read More
