Green People

After 940 posts as a news blog, Dot Earth is moving to the Opinion side of The New York Times, where it will re-emerge in about a week. Don’t expect momentous changes. I’m not going to suddenly be revealed as an ardent liberal or conservative.

I am an advocate, for sure — for reality.

Andy Revkin wrote that.

The most powerful man in Abu Dhabi has hired architects to design a zero-carbon city. He wants it to be free of cars, free of skyscrapers, and entirely powered by the sun.

Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan is the President of the United Arab Emirates and the emir (commander) of the city of Abu Dhabi. And, according to the BBC, he has already committed between USD 15 billion and USD 30 billion to the creation of Masdar, an urban community of 50,000 that will serve as a model for all future eco-cities.

Primatologist Jane Goodall wants people to face the fact that human population growth is a big problem:

It's very frustrating, as people don't want to address this topic. It's our population growth that underlies just about every single one of the problems that we've inflicted on the planet.If there were just a few of us, then the nasty things we do wouldn't really matter, and Mother Nature would take care of it - but there are so many of us.

According to Gallup Poll results released on Tuesday, Americans aren't worrying as much as usual about environmental issues.

Between March 4 and March 7, Gallup polled over 1000 American adults, asking them if they were concerned with any of eight environmental issues:

Jeffrey Hollender, one of the founders of Seventh Generation, wrote an article on Friday about which businesses are (and aren't) worthy of admiration.

He wrote in response to Fortune Magazine's release of its World's Most Admired Companies list. Fortune's list ranks Apple the world's number one most admired company, and its top ten also includes Toyota, Goldman Sachs, and Wal-Mart.

Clean coal, eh? No such thing. The stuff is dirty from the cradle to the grave. Just consider coal ash. Over 130 million tons of this so-called coal combustion waste -- containing nearly 100,000 tons of toxic metals -- is produced every year, as a byproduct of burning coal to generate electricity at hundreds of U.S. power plants.

Gaze out across a New York dairy farm, a Kansas wheat spread or a field of tomatoes in California's Salinas Valley, and you might think of the folks who grow America's food as natural born environmentalists.

I read a few interesting climate change pieces over the weekend. Taken together, they reflect the political struggle to pass comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation now. But only one captures what is at stake for America and our future: Al Gore’ New York Times op-ed.

Author and activist Bill McKibben published a fascinating op-ed piece yesterday comparing climate change skeptics with the defense lawyers in the OJ Simpson trial.