Environment

With the good weather lately, feeling all crunchy and wanting to save gas and all that I’ve been riding my bike a bit more. For far too long, I’ve been been too paranoid about not having my bike stolen (I got a bike stolen in high school and another in college) and so I’m ashamed to admit that my bike has spent more time in my shed, rather than on the road. But I’ve been totally loving hitting the streets…

[via Alan Wiig]

NYT: After a month of investigation, Italian public health officials discovered that the people of Castiglione di Cervia were, in fact, suffering from a tropical disease, chikungunya, a relative of dengue fever normally found in the Indian Ocean region. But the immigrants spreading the disease were not humans but insects: tiger mosquitoes, who can thrive in a warming Europe. Aided by global warming and globalization, Castiglione di Cervia has the dubious distinction of playing host to the first outbreak in…

This LA Times article provides some suggestion as to what I’d wondered about for some time: Beneath the feel-good simplicity of buying your way to carbon neutrality is a growing concern that the idea is more hype than solution. According to Native Energy, money from “An Inconvenient Truth,” along with payments from others trying to neutralize their emissions, went to the developers of a methane collector on a Pennsylvanian farm and three wind turbines in an Alaskan village. As it…

When I first read the headline “The Year Without Toilet Paper” in today’s New York Times, I thought to myself “Um, that’s not a big deal.” Most people in many parts of the world don’t use toilet paper (read: most Africans as well as people in the Middle East and many other places, I’m sure). While that may sound repulsive to many Americans, it’s really not as hard as one, typical American consumer might think. Sliding down past the headline,…