natural resources

Tim Toben takes consumerism and GDP to the woodshed:

On the current economic roadmap, all growth is good. An industry that pollutes the air, water or soil or extracts minerals from an indigenous community without adequately compensating it is as prized as a non-polluting industry that builds community or restores ecosystems.

Most threatening of all, the material throughput of the economic system is breaching the boundaries of the biosphere. A condition known as "ecological overshoot" exists, whereby the global economy is now using up more than 1.4 times the Earth's capacity to regenerate the natural capital upon which the system and all life depends.

  

The News and Observer does a good job today covering the push by waste management companies to buy the heart and soul of North Carolina to site their mega-landfills. Here's my Saturday morning quarter-backing:

Some legislators say the state needs to stop and think about whether North Carolina wants to become home to a group of huge landfills.

Really? Stop and think about the future? There's a novel idea, but don't expect it to gain any traction with the free-market anti-planning government-haters who'd happily sell our state to the lowest bidder.

In the midst of all the political shenanigans swirling about, serious legislative initiatives going on in Raleigh can be hard to keep up with. The North Carolina Conservation Network does a good job on their blog this week running down the green issues on the Short Session agenda. A preview below the fold:

From the TerraBlog:

Sometimes numbers have an elegant way of encoding human behavior. Of course, with each gallon of petroleum causing roughly 20 lbs of global warming-causing CO2 (no matter how new your car is), it's easy to see why we have a global warming problem.

For those of you not familiar with TerraPass, it is a company that sells Carbon Dioxide offsets that, for around $25, ensentially allow you to drive a car for a year without adding any addition CO2 to the atmosphere (since you are paying others not to pollute the amount that your car is emitting).

EDIT:The same paper's top 10 list of environmental success stories in NC is here.

The Charlotte Observer's editorial staff has put together a list of the top ten problems facing NC's environment going forward, and number one on the list is climate change. According to the Observer:

The list changes each year as new problems arise and old ones ameliorate. This year, air quality drops out of the top 10 problems because there were fewer bad air days than in years.

Charlotte Observer | 12/11/2005 | State of the environment