Climate 411

This post is by Sheryl Canter, Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize went to people fighting global climate change. What does fighting climate change have to do with world peace? Here’s the answer that Michael Oppenheimer, Ph.D., one of the team of authors of the IPCC’s 2007 reports and science advisor to Environmental Defense, gave in an interview with PBS:

A stable climate helps keep the peace. We see situations all around the world where shortages of the sorts of resources that will shrivel under a changing climate, like water for food, water for agriculture, are contributory factors in places like Darfur, the Horn of Africa, where instability is rife, and governments just can’t hold it together, and people die. That’s ultimately why this is justifiably a prize for peace.

The author of today’s post, Sheryl Canter, is an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

Annie Petsonk, International Counsel for Environmental Defense, keeps an eye on happenings around the world. It was from her that I found out that the European Union’s Commissioner for Environment, Stavros Dimas, has dedicated today as International Blog Action Day on the environment.

Commissioner Dimas asks everyone with a blog to post a climate-related message today, and he held an online chat on his blog from 8 am to 11 am U.S. Eastern Time. I took a quick look, and people were weighing in from all over the world. I couldn’t read the comments in Greek, but the English ones made some interesting points, and the Commissioner was active in responding.

The author of today’s post, Sheryl Canter, is an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

Today Al Gore and the IPCC received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of their efforts to raise public awareness and understanding of the global climate change crisis. We applaud them, and also the Nobel committee for recognizing the threats global warming poses to security and stability around the world.

Congress now has the opportunity to make the U.S. a leader on climate change by harnessing the unprecedented momentum for strong policies to cap and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

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This is Part 3 of a three-part series on Food and Farming.

1. Increased CO₂ and Food Quality
2. Farm Animals and Methane
3. “Food Mile” Complexities

The author of today’s post, Sheryl Canter, is an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

When it’s apple season here in New York and the green markets are overflowing, for a store to ship in apples from Washington State or New Zealand burns fuel for no good reason. Local food is fresher, tastes better, and supports the community. And locally produced food often results in lower greenhouse gas emissions – but not always. The greenhouse gas calculation is complicated, and you can’t assume that if a crop is produced locally, greenhouse gas emissions are lower.

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The author of today’s post, Andy Darrell, is Regional Director for the Living Cities program at Environmental Defense.

In 1800, 3 percent of the world’s people lived in urban areas. In the last year, that number is likely to have passed 50 percent [PDF]. The world is becoming urbanized at an extremely fast rate, and as the urban population increases, so does urban development.

This presents an opportunity in the fight against global warming, since energy use in buildings accounts for 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

You might think it costs a lot more to make a building energy efficient, but it doesn’t have to. A building that produces half the usual emissions can cost as little as 1 percent more to build. How can that be?

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