Fee to Be Carbon Free
Summer is upon us, unofficially at least. And to usher in the driving season, here's Carbonfund.org, a new way to offset your personal carbon emissions from driving -- as well as from flying, and heating, cooling, and powering your house.
Here's how it works: Carbonfund.org invests in energy efficiency, in solar and wind power, and in tree-planting projects. And those projects either offset electricity that would have been generated from fossil fuels (coal and natural gas, mostly), or capture carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it trees and forest soils.
The fund apparently looks for projects that wouldn't be undertaken, were it not for the fund's involvement -- which helps guarantee that people who contribute to the fund are genuinely making a difference, not just taking credit for something that would have happened anyway. And you can use a handy calculator on their website to estimate how much carbon you emit from driving, flying, and operating your home -- so you can tailor your carbon offsets to your lifestyle.
There are a number of similar efforts already underway (see here and here for a rundown of some of them, including the better-known Terrapass). But the thing is, buying a ton of carbon through Carbonfund.org is cheap. I mean, really, really, cheap. A ton of CO2 costs just $5.50 US, which is less than one-third the current price on the European Union carbon futures market (which has rebounded somewhat from a mini-crash a few weeks ago). It also means that a mere $19 will offset all the carbon that my family car emits per year.
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Attack of the Giant Earthworm!
Okay, okay, my headline is a tad sensational.
It's just a way to draw attention to the rediscovery of one of the Northwest's rarest species: Driloleirus americanus, better known, when it is known at all, as the giant Palouse earthworm. The earthworm, which may have once have reached 3 feet in length, was believed extinct until a 6-inch specimen was recently rediscovered by a grad student from Idaho.
The earthworm was found on a tiny 800-acre preserve, a remnant of an arid grassland that blanketed 2 million acres--an ecosystem now almost entirely converted to agriculture. For me, the earthworm's decades-long absence, is a reminder of how important bread-and-butter land conservation is. When we don't protect intact native landscapes, we rob the world--and ourselves--of the biological wealth we inherited. That's the sad story of the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit, a species that went functionally extinct this month, largely because it lacked habitat.
Great, White North!
It looks as if Canada is poised to ban flame retardants known as PBDEs, which are have been linked with learning deficits and behavioral abnormalities in lab animals, and are found at high levels in some people.
That's the good news. The bad news is that some tests are finding alarmingly high levels of the compounds in kids. You win some, you lose some.
