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Another day and there’s another study that undermines the case for biofuels as an eco-friendly source of energy. This time it’s the booming palm oil plantations of Southeast Asia, which yield the raw ingredients for biodiesel, used most often in Europe. Activists have been warning for some time that the growth of palm oil is [...]
Scientists call it the Beepocalyspe. (OK, not scientists, but I like to call it that.) In late 2006, whole hives of honey bees began dying overnight for reasons that are still unclear. Scientists called it colony-collapse disorder (CCD), and it’s as scary as it is mysterious. Adult bees simply leave the hive, ostensibly in search [...]
Say this about Marshall Burke and Halvard Buhaug—they know how to title their papers. Late last year Burke, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled “Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa,” which sums up the argument pretty well. Then [...]
That’s the conclusion from a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Two Stanford researchers looked at the effects of the Green Revolution—the half-century old transition to more intensified agriculture, with more fertilizers and more irrigation—to see what impact the shift might have had on global carbon emissions. Here’s how [...]
