Environment Memo

Recently, a letter (or rant, as per the magazine) to Wired Magazine, noted a newspaper hoax from 1835, in which one Richard Adams Locke duped the literate Western world into believing there were man-bats, unicorns, and upright beavers inhabiting the moon. Appetite whetted, I’ve looked for more. Locke wrote a book about the matter, available [...]

One of the sludge listserves recently sent around a link to a powerpoint presentation on a San Francisco “Bay Area Bisolids to Energy Partnership.” The talk was presented at an EPA Region 9 confab called “2009 Pacific Organic Residuals Symposium” (detailed here by EPA).  (Biosolids is sludge, by another name.) This presentation, taken on it [...]

I’m getting emails pointing out that Al Gore is profiting handsomely from his investments in climate change businesses.  A quick check on the conservative blogosphere verifies talk in this regard. One good, recent article on the matter, reporting some questioning of Gore himself, appears in the Telegraph here.  They point out Gore has increased his [...]

RealClimate.org has a good discussion of the recent flap over the emails of many prominent climate change scientists, which were pilfered from a server in England.  It seems the pilferers were also trying to get at  RealClimate.org’s server, as well, and that attack led to discovery of the breach. As they point out, … these [...]

I had a chance some years ago to visit the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. It’s a sobering site. The official Japanese website for the museum is here, and there’s some good information on the museum here.  It’s worth looking through the official site, especially. It’s all done with real purpose, and is as if [...]

There’s an email going around about someone almost dying from eating pancakes made from an old mix.  The email says a high school student … came so close to dying. Evidently this is more common then I ever knew. Check the expiration dates on packages like pancakes and cake mixes that have yeast which over [...]

The Boston Globe reported recently on the radically reducing bat population.  Scary stuff. As they note in the article At least 1 million bats in the past three years have been wiped out by a puzzling, widespread disease dubbed “white-nose syndrome” in what preeminent US scientists are calling the most precipitous decline of North American [...]

It’s important to keep delving into all documents concerning hydrofracking and New York state regulatory activities on permitting hydrofracking in the Marcellus shale.  (As far as I know, people only have access to a fraction of the existing, available documents, as I’ve bemoaned in the past.) I’ve dug in and found an important example of [...]

In following-up on my previous post about how it seems very likely that hydrofracking in the Marcellus shale and other places can be done with non-toxic chemicals and substances,  I came up with a new hypothesis.  Call it Bierck’s Hypothesis (or not).  This is it: Hydrofracking can be done effectively and efficiently with benign, non-toxic [...]

It seems Costco and Coke are not getting along because Costco can’t get a good enough deal with Coke, as reported at yahoo finance here.   As they report, “Costco is committed to carrying name brand merchandise at the best possible prices. At this time, Coca-Cola has not provided Costco with competitive pricing so that [...]