BRADENTON, Fla. — How much does your morning glass of orange juice contribute to global warming?
PepsiCo, which owns the Tropicana brand, decided to try to answer that question. It figured that as public concern grows about the fate of the planet, companies will find themselves under pressure to perform such calculations. Orange juice seemed like a good case study.
PepsiCo hired experts to do the math, measuring the emissions from such energy-intensive tasks as running a factory and transporting heavy juice cartons. But it turned out that the biggest single source of emissions was simply growing oranges. Citrus groves use a lot of nitrogen fertilizer, which requires natural gas to make and can turn into a potent greenhouse gas when it is spread on fields. Read the complete Post.
You’re invited to a lively debate and discussion open to the public on
the theme of climate change and sustainability with Prof. John
Robinson – UBC, Alexis Morgan – World Wife Fund for Nature (WWF) -
Canada, and Fiona Koza – Amnesty International. Wednesday, February 4
at 7pm (UBC Robson Square). Read the complete Post.
By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com
Posted on December 3, 2008, Printed on December 4, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/109546/
George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to be repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their hinges, he is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the time the bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening America’s wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls, tearing up conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last 60 days of his presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3,000.
His backers — among them the nastiest polluto-crats in America — are calling in their favors. But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the world to rubble.
If it is now too late to prevent runaway climate change, the Bush team must carry much of the blame. His willful trashing of the Middle Climate — the interlude of benign temperatures which allowed human civilization to flourish — makes the mass murder he engineered in Iraq only the second of his crimes against humanity. Bush has waged his war on science with the same obtuse determination with which he has waged his war on terror.
Is it too late? To say so is to make it true. To suggest that there is nothing that can now be done is to ensure that nothing is done. But even a resolute optimist like me finds hope ever harder to summon. A new summary of the science published since last year’s Intergovernmental Panel report suggests that — almost a century ahead of schedule — the critical climate processes might have begun. Read the complete Post.
