TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Drafting the next global treaty to combat climate change Negotiations on a new global treaty to combat climate change continue to heat up, even though a meeting in Copenhagen that is meant to forge a final deal remains months away. [More] rss.sciam.com |
EPA reverses Bush ruling, grants California stricter emissions rules The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said today that it will let California set its own tailpipe emissions standards under a fresh interpretation of the Clean Air Act, The Los Angeles Times reports. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Learning About Nature To the Editor:. nytimes.com |
Biotech's Plans to Sustain Agriculture (preview) If environmental and economic sustainability is ultimately a matter of balancing the human race’s consumption and productivity, then the agricultural industry leans heavily on both sides of that scale. Its drain on the earth’s resources is enormous: it claims 70 percent of all freshwater taken by our species and more than 40 percent of the planet’s solid surface (nearly all the arable land), with attendant casualties in bio­diversity. Yet modern agriculture is also the only reason we can produce enough food to nourish our population of 6.8 billion--a number slated to reach more than nine billion by midcentury. Keeping up with that steeply rising demand thus defines the challenge of sustain­ability not only for agriculture but for humanity. Agriculture depends on many technologies, but bio­technology might be the most influential among them. To find out how the industry perceives its prospects for raising both global crop productivity and sustainability, con­tributing editor John Rennie spoke with representatives of four leading agricultural biotechnology companies. What follows here is an abridged version of their edited con­versation. --The Editors [More] rss.sciam.com |
How to Make Plastic with Less Petroleum--Just Add CO2 Plastic may be fantastic, but it takes an awful lot of petroleum to make it. As such, efforts to cut oil use in the U.S. have produced, among other results, a budding bioplastics industry specializing in plastic manufacturing that relies less on oil for its raw material and more on biomass , carbon dioxide or even microorganisms such as Escherichia coli . Such efforts got a boost Monday when Ithaca, N.Y.–based Novomer, Inc. , announced an $800,000 effort co-funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to begin commercializing the company's polypropylene carbonate (PPC) materials, made using a combination of CO2 and petroleum . [More] rss.sciam.com |