Building Support for Locally Relevant Climate Tech
Climate Innovation Centers can promote clean technologies but need backing with a coordinated effort
-
-
2012: Top Ten Signs of a Warming World
Another year, another set of climate records. Here are the top ten signs you are living in a warming world, 2012 edition:
-
As Forests Disappear, Examining the Mechanisms of Their Death
Everywhere, trees are dying. The boreal forests of Canada and Russia are being devoured by beetles. Drought-tolerant pines are disappearing in Greece. In North Africa, Atlas cedars are shriveling. Wet and dry tropical forests in Asia are collapsing. Australian eucalyptus forests are burning. The Amazon basin has just been hit by two severe droughts. And…
-
Tablet as Teacher: Poor Ethiopian Kids Learn ABCs
Using 20 tablet computers dropped off in their Ethiopian village in February by a group called One Laptop Per Child, the children of Wenchi now know their ABCs and can spell. The project’s goal was to find out whether children using today’s new technology can teach themselves to read in places where no schools or…
-
Fighting Poverty By Giving Poor People Money
From Mattew Yglesias and the Slate MoneyBox blog: There’s more to life than just this, but I’ve come to think that directly transfering cash money to people in need is the most underrated tool around for fighting poverty. So I was incredibly excited to read Dana Goldstein’s profile of GiveDirectly. They take advantage of the fact that Kenya…
-
Deforestation in Amazon Is Bad News for Microbes
Scientists have found that deforestation not only affects the diversity of plants and animals, but is bad news for the forest’s microbes too. While it has long been known that deforestation in the Amazon leads to a net loss in the biodiversity of plants and animals, until now very little has been known about how…
-
Commerce Claus: The Behavioral Economics of Christmas
Some economists dislike Christmas. They allege that it “destroys value,” which is, in Econoland, the first and only sin. The economist Joel Waldfogel, author of Scroogenomics, goes so far as to contend that the winter holiday season is “an orgy of value destruction.” Waldfogel’s main concern is that the value of gifts to their recipients…
-
Coral Reefs Could Be Decimated by 2100
Nearly every coral reef could be dying by 2100 if current carbon dioxide emission trends continue, according to a new review of major climate models from around the world. The only way to maintain the current chemical environment in which reefs now live, the study suggests, would be to deeply cut emissions as soon as…
-
Power Company Loses Some of Its Appetite for Coal
Coal took another serious hit Wednesday — in the heart of coal country. American Electric Power, or A.E.P., the nation’s biggest consumer of coal, announced that it would shut its coal-burning boilers at the Big Sandy electric power plant near Louisa, Ky., a 1,100-megawatt facility that since the early 1960s has been burning coal that…
-
Fund Aims to Improve Governance Through New Technology
A $45 million pot to fund innovative projects that aim to increase government transparency and accountability using web and mobile technology has been unveiled by the U.K., U.S. and Swedish governments. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched the Making All Voices Count (MAVC) initiative in early December to support Internet-based technologies that increase…