Happy day, earthlings. I hope you’re basking in pre- or post-holiday bliss, depending when you read this.
Let’s begin this round of Green Reads with some good news for Dominion. They’re making too much money! Sounds tough. Perhaps they could be persuaded to donate some of their excess profits to anti-mountaintop-removal groups. Oh, wait. They’re building a new coal-burning plant as we speak. Never mind.
If you’re wondering what to make of Copenhagen, Grist has a pretty clear summary of the major players and their plays. The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin has his own take here.
While you’re at it, take a gander at Revkin’s 1988 article on global warming (as it was then called) in Discover magazine, which engenders a weird sort of nostalgia with passages like this: "The amount of [atmospheric] carbon dioxide has risen and fallen a bit, coinciding with the spread and retreat of glaciers as ice ages have come and gone. But until the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels never rose above a manageable 280 parts per million. Then, beginning early in the nineteenth century, the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, took off. By 1900, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere had begun to rise steadily, reaching 340 parts per million last year."
(We’re now wishing we could get down to 350.)
One more on the global scale: a Mother Jones story that gets deep into the complexities of carbon credits and offsets, and who really benefits from them. Turns out indigenous tribes are being displaced so big corporations can polish their green images.
Here’s a review of a book called Goat Song I just gave my husband, who nurtures a dream of owning goats. I think I’ll read it when he’s done, not only because of said dream, but because it sounds like a nice articulation of some of the underlying reasons that many of us are interested in local food.
And finally, all about wind turbines and bats!
