If climate change concerns you, consider nuclear power, which, according to many of its proponents, does not involve emissions of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. But is this true? Kristin Shrader-Frechette contests those claims; she also discusses the financial costs of nuclear energy, the risks to human health it poses, the perils of industry-funded science, and the contours of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
Tags / environmentalism
Tagged with “environmentalism”
(8)
-
Against the Grain: Nuclear Clouds and Facts
-
Against the Grain: Lichtman on Alienation, Part One
-
Against the Grain: A Program about Politics, Society and Ideas
-
Whales within Whales: Ecological Emergency as the End of Human Narrative
A talk by Tim Morton at East Michigan University, March 15, 2012. And Q&A with Eileen Joy and Jeffrey Cohen. Part of the JNT Dialogue series.
-
Orion Magazine | Paul Kingsnorth & Friends Discuss “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist”
Summary: Has environmentalism lost its way? What does sustainability really have to do with a healthy planet? During Orion’s latest live web event, Paul Kingsnorth discussed his essay “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist” in the January/February 2012 issue of the magazine. According to Kingsnorth, environmentalism has effectively died, its original deep connection to nature lost in the language of science and economics. Kingsnorth is joined by authors Lierre Keith and David Abram.
Orion is a bimonthly, advertising-free magazine devoted to creating a stronger bond between people and nature.
Tagged with dark mountain environmentalism
-
Stewart Brand: Rethinking Green — The Long Now
This talk was given at Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, California on Friday October 9, 02009.
Brand built his case for rethinking environmental goals and methods on two major changes going on in the world. The one that most people still don’t take into consideration is that power is shifting to the developing world, where 5 out of 6 people live, where the bulk of humanity is getting out of poverty by moving to cities and creating their own jobs and communities (slums, for now).
The second dominant global fact is climate change. Brand emphasized that climate is a severely nonlinear system packed with tipping points and positive feedbacks such as the unpredicted rapid melting of Arctic ice.
Global warming has to be slowed by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases from combustion, but cities require dependable baseload electricity, and so far the only carbon-free sources are hydroelectric dams and nuclear power. Brand contrasted nuclear with coal-burning by comparing what happens with their waste products.
Moving to genetically engineered food crops, Brand noted that they are a tremendous success story in agriculture, with Green benefits such as no-till farming, lowered pesticide use, and more land freed up to be wild. The developing world is taking the lead with the technology, designing crops to deal with the specialized problems of tropical agriculture. Meanwhile the new field of synthetic biology is bringing a generation of Green biotech hackers into existence.
-
Skeptoid *162: Locally grown produce
From http://skeptoid.com/
Why big corps can sometimes be greener than small "local" farms. Do the math.
Tagged with farming environmentalism greenies green
-
To The Best Of Our Knowledge - To Sprawl Or Not To Sprawl
Subdivisions. Industrial Parks. Strip Malls. Gridlock. Sprawl is socially unequal, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Right? In this hour of To the Best Of Our Knowledge, we’ll look at the costs and – YES – the benefits of suburban sprawl. Because maybe, just maybe, sprawl is a good thing.
Joel Hirschhorn is a critic of sprawl. Robert Bruegmann thinks sprawl is very American way to live. Photographer Edward Burtynsky documented Chinese industrial zones, and film maker Jennifer Baichwal documented the trip. Tom Perrotta’s novels feature life in the suburbs.