Welcome ! As a young French Marketing professional with a Master's in International Management I have been selecting since January 2007 the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change, cleantech and the world energy sector. Sounds great ? Don't hesitate to subscribe now !
To Reuters : ” An Ecuadorean appeals court on Tuesday upheld a ruling that Chevron Corp should pay $18 billion in damages to plaintiffs who accused the U.S. oil giant of polluting the Amazon jungle and damaging their health. “
” A judge ordered Chevron to pay $8.6 billion in environmental damages last February, but the amount was more than doubled to about $18 billion because Chevron failed to make a public apology as required by the original ruling. “
This brings further development to the story I ran in 2010 where I noted that during three decades Texaco operated hundreds of oil wells without taking any notice of environmental issues. Continue »
After three months of crunching numbers for the World Community Grid on solar panels, better water, aids and cancer, I am joining their new project due to combat malaria. Here is why you should join the fight :
“ Malaria is one of the three deadliest infectious diseases on earth and is caused by parasites that infect both humans and animals. (…) Malaria initially causes fevers and headaches, and in severe cases it leads to comas or death. “
” Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes the deadliest form of malaria, kills more people than any other parasite on the planet. Over 3 billion people are at risk of being infected with malaria.“
To the Guardian : ” Nationwide, cancer rates have surged since the 1990s to become the nation’s biggest killer. In 2007, the disease was responsible for one in five deaths, up 80% since the start of economic reforms 30 years earlier.
” While the government insists it is cleaning up pollution far faster than other nations at a similar dirty stage of development, many toxic industries have simply been relocated to impoverished, poorly regulated rural areas. “
” Chinese farmers are almost four times more likely to die of liver cancer and twice as likely to die of stomach cancer than the global average, according to study commissioned by the World Bank. “ Continue »
To Climate Progress : “ Wednesday, Shell claimed responsibility for two oil spills dating to 2008 (which) are estimated to exceed the 11 million gallons spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster. “ (over 40 million liters)
” As a 2010 article by the Guardian’s environment editor explained: With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. “
” Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations… ” Continue »
Not so long ago, I hated tea and saw it like a drink for elders or respected Englishmen (or my parents…). But with time I evolved, mostly thanks to my discovery of green tea with mint in Morocco.
Now there is hardly a day where I don’t drink a pint of tea. Darjeeling and Earl Grey are my favorite with the aforementioned green tea. Tea has many advantages over sodas
Daryl wrote over two years ago a compelling article on why you should stop drinking sodas. It’s bad for your health, your wallet and the environment. Continue »
What do you get when Hillary Clinton and Julia Roberts work together? An article on clean cookstoves : “Some 3 billion people live in homes where food is cooked on stoves or over fires burning fuels like wood, dung, charcoal, or waste.”
” According to the World Health Organization, smoke from dirty stoves and fires kills almost 2 million people each year, most of them women and children. It kills more than twice as many people as malaria. “
If you are interested in this important issue, please check out the website of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Continue »
With all the agitation around the Fukushima catastrophe, I thought it would be interesting to put some facts and figures on the dangerosity of energy sources, including oil, coal, natural gas, some renewable energy sources and nuclear…
The global death rate for coal is 161 per TWh (15 in the United States), 36 for oil, and a staggering low 0.04 for nuclear. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the people who will die because of the Fukushima accident.
Nonetheless, nuclear will still kill much less people than fossil fuels – and will kill even less if we increase safety measures and transparency of the industry. Continue »
According to new research from the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association (APHA) released last week, climate change would pose serious threats to human health.
Among these threats are bad air, longer allergy seasons, the spread of infectious diseases, extreme risks associated to extreme weathers and last but not least increased heat waves. The latter killed 40,000 people in 2003.
This should enable us to better grasp what we might be confronted to if we don’t act enough on climate change. For more read the Time article.
It made the headlights last week on practically all environmental websites. The hidden costs – the negative externalities if you prefer – of coal are of 500 billion Dollars per year for the United States alone.
Yes, you read it right : burning coal costs the country half a trillion dollar on health costs, premature deaths – we saw about this earlier - and of course environmental issues as it pollutes soil, air and water…
Luckily, the United States can cut by two thirds their consumption by 2020 and become completely coal-free by 2030 just by investing in energy efficiency. What are they waiting for ? Continue »
To the UNEP : ” For millennia, medical practitioners have harnessed substances from nature for treatments and cures: aspirin from the willow and, more recently, Taxol – the groundbreaking anti-cancer drug – from the bark of the Pacific yew.
Some of the biggest breakthroughs may be yet to come. But this can happen only if nature’s cornucopia is conserved, so that current and future generations of researchers can make new discoveries that benefit patients everywhere.”
Given the astonishing breakthroughs we are witnessing today I wonder what could happen tomorrow if we preserve our common treasure. I hope we will find out !
