Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green?

I'll be honest, I haven't been to up-to-date on what buying carbon credits meant and I'm not entirely sure what my stance on it is yet. I feel like Denis Hayes's comparison of this to the Catholic Church selling indulgences is a bit strong, but the article does have good points about how buying and selling carbon credits could actually be detrimental to the attempt to stop global warming.

Michael R. Solomon, the author of “Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having and Being” and a professor at St. Joseph's University, said he was not surprised by the allure of the carbon-offsetting market.

“Consumers are always going to gravitate toward a more parsimonious solution that requires less behavioral change,” he said. “We know that new products or ideas are more likely to be adopted if they don’t require us to alter our routines very much.”

But he said there was danger ahead, “if we become trained to substitute dollars for deeds — kind of an ‘I gave at the office’ prescription for the environment.”

Scientists Propose Interspecies Cloning

The gut reaction I experienced just reading the headline was "NO, who do they think they are, Dr. Frankenstein?!?" But upon actually reading the article, it seems that the rationale behind the decision to try to pursue this method of using animal eggs along with human DNA is fairly logical, especially when many people balk at the use of human eggs to create stem cells.

All three U.K. teams aim to get around that bottleneck by taking DNA from patients sick with a disease like Alzheimer's and fuse it with cow eggs that have had all their genetic material removed. The hope is that the human DNA will trick the eggs into thinking they're pregnant, beginning development.

After about five days of growth, the cloned embryos would be destroyed and the stem cells extracted. The stem cells would be grown in their labs and the researchers could look for the onset of diseases, study their development and test experimental drugs on the cells.

When this method was first tested by a Michigan-based researcher, his actions were condemned as unethical. Yet, as long as the growth in the egg is terminated and no interspecies being is created (as these scientists promise won't happen), it seems to be a logical step away from using human eggs for experiments. Many things that the average person would find startling have been done in the name of science, and the benefits to human beings seems too great to ignore the potentiality of this method. As long as the animals used, cows in this case, are not harmed in the process of harvesting their eggs, I'm all for this.

ENN: Fight Brews Over How to Address Climate Change

Now that it is official -- humans are almost certainly causing the most dramatic climate shift the planet has seen in thousands of years -- it is time to stop arguing and get down to the serious work of solving the problem, right?

This is a good article from ENN (link in title) about what's going on right now with politics about global warming. I really hope our next president is (tons) more forceful about creating laws to lower green house gas emissions and finding other, more eco-friendly sources of fuel, because, honestly, I think this is the biggest problem the global community is facing right now. Everything else can pretty much wait. And a lot of other issues, such as aspects of poverty (if you look at the environmental justice theory, for example), are tied to environmental issues. But Bush believes that a free market economy will regulate everything, and uh, sorry, so far it hasn't. A lot more needs to be done.

Yeah, of course no one wants a drop in our standards of living which is what will probably have to happen if we as a nation become serious about slowing/stopping (is that possible?) global warming, but it's pretty selfish to have the mindeset that I'm not going to change my lifestyle, that I need to have four cars for my family and air conditioning keeping me at 65 degrees all summer -- forget about future generations. But it's also going to be hard for people to change unless there's a massive force around it, I mean, realistically, who wants to be the only one sweating all summer and riding their bike to the grocery store? Being able to pat yourself on the back only gets most people so far. We like following the crowd, so in order to change the mindesets of crowd, laws need to be put in place.