You’ve heard of green cars, green tourism and green weddings. Now Canadians should ready themselves for green sex. For those who like to make love to the soundtrack of the global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Greenpeace has released a list of strategies for ‘getting it on for the good of the planet,’ suggesting ‘you can be a bomb in bed without nuking the planet.’ TreeHugger, an online magazine edited by Ontario’s Michael Graham Richard, has just published a guide on ‘how to green your sex life.’ The famed adult store Good Vibrations announced last week they would no longer sell sex toys containing phthalates, controversial chemical plasticizers believed by some to be hazardous to humans and the environment alike. And throughout Canada and the U.S., people who want to pleasure the planet can now buy everything from bamboo bed sheets to organic lubricant and ‘eco-undies.’ ‘Green living is getting sexy,’ says Jacob Gordon, author of TreeHugger.com’s recent green guide for the bedroom. ‘Even a year ago, people wouldn’t have been nearly as receptive to this kind of thing. … But, as the importance of living green gains traction in our culture, people are willing to […]
Industrial pollution coming from Asia is having a wider effect on global weather and climate than previously realised, research suggests. The ‘Asian haze’ of soot is boosting storms in the Pacific, scientists find. It is also enhancing the growth of large clouds, which play a key role in regulating climate globally. Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the researchers say impacts may be felt as far away as the Arctic. ‘It’s a complex picture,’ observed study leader Renyi Zhang from Texas A&M University in College Station, US. ‘But the bottom line is that the aerosols actually enhance convection and increase precipitation over a large domain,’ he told the BBC News website Hot water While clean air legislation has reduced production of industrial aerosols – fine particles of dust, soot and sulphur – in Europe and North America, the opposite trend is seen in Asia. Here, rapid industrialisation has led to the formation of a pollution haze which is especially marked in winter as coal burning increases. Sulphur emissions have increased by more than one-third over the last decade. These aerosols drive cloud formation, as […]
U.S. Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., visited Hope Airport Saturday afternoon in support of homeless tornado victims from Dumas, Ark., to receive federal aid and shelter. ‘I’m here at the Hope Airport where there are brand new, fully furnished trailers to be used during disaster situations,’ said Ross, who reminded media that the tornados in Dumas were worthy of an Arkansas state declaration of disaster and a deployment by the National Guard. Some 9,000 trailers owned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency are stored at Hope Airport, less than a three-hour drive from Dumas and Desha County where tornado victims are without homes. ‘It has been one week since the tornadoes hit and not one employee from FEMA, not one, has stepped foot in Desha County,’ Ross said. Ross was critical of President Bush and FEMA and said the federal government has been slow to declare a disaster in tornado-struck eastern Arkansas. ‘My heart goes out to the people in Alabama and Georgia who were just hit by more deadly tornadoes, but FEMA must not forget Desha County, where last Saturday, more than 150 homes were destroyed or received heavy damage and 800 people are now […]
The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday. The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday on the night of March 3, 1991. The officers’ acquittal at the end on April 29, 1992 sparked riots in Los Angeles. If Holliday were to film a similar scene of violence in France today, he could end up in prison as a result of the new law, said Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi. And anyone publishing such images could face up to five years in prison and a fine of €75,000 (US$98,537), potentially a harsher sentence than that for committing the violent act. Senators and members of the National Assembly had asked the council to rule on the constitutionality of six articles […]
PORT KEMBLA, Australia — Australia’s cities are drought-parched and its desert outback drenched by floods, but climate change has not yet killed the country’s famed surf beaches, or their promise of clean energy. Australia’s first commercial wave-generated power station will in weeks begin supplying homes south of Sydney with electricity and fresh drinking water, courtesy of the sea. ‘The energy in waves is the densest of any natural sources of energy. It’s pretty much always there and it doesn’t go away like sun and wind do,’ said John Bell, the chief finance officer with station developer Energetech. Lying anchored just 100 yards off a popular surf beach near Wollongong, a city of around 200,000 people just south of Sydney, the 485-ton plant will power 500 homes along the local grid. Electricity is generated when waves wash into a funnel facing the ocean, driving air through a pipe and into a turbine capable of pumping 500 kilowatts of clean power each day into the local grid. The $4.7 million floating plant, built to withstand a 1-in-100 year storm, can also desalinate 2,000 liters of drinking water each day for almost as many homes as it […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
