Students for Environmental Action                               at Brandeis

New transit developments bypass inconvenience and privacy issues with public transportation, and possibly eliminate need for environmentally harmful private transportation. Learn about Personal Rapid Transit here: http://www.cprt.org/CPRT/Home.html

Chris Jordan photographs young albatrosses near the North Pacific. They die from being fed large volumes of plastic (even though the coast/area is sparsely populated) mistaken by their parents for food.  Visit his beautiful and shocking gallery.

James Fallows is a writer for The Atlantic who blogs personal anecdotes as well as post some of his professional writing on China's politics, business, and society. In this blog post, he shares some of his thoughts on China and the U.S.'s partnership for developing a clean energy sector. Both the US and China (the two largest greenhouse gas emitters in the world) have made commitments to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, though neither have adopted official policies, and both seem to be waiting on the other to do so first.

Susan Paykin writes:

Though the joint initiatives announced today are a great start and provide the beginning of a roadmap to confront global climate change, I want to discuss two specific short-falls in the plans.

1) I shudder every time I see that money is being spent on developing "clean coal" technology. This false solution touted largely by coal companies and lobbyists has been under study and development for years, and it has been found to be cripplingly expensive and potentially unsafe. The premise of "clean coal" is that we keep on extracting coal like normal, but when we burn it for energy, the companies will collect all of the CO2 emissions and store them under the ground. Not only is the process cost prohibitive, but the coal companies' and energy sector's branding of it as "clean" is simply a corporate lie. There is no such thing as clean coal. When coal burns, CO2 and other greenhouse gases (not to mention particulates and other air pollutants) are released, and putting those gases underground are not going to solve the fact that the gases are being taken out of their natural state and being put into the biosphere. It also does not address the fact that we are relying on a finite resource for our existence. Beside the biological and environmental impact, coal is the cause of many social issues in areas from where is it extracted and processed, such as poverty, low education rates, and high asthma rates (see Appalachia, especially southwestern West Virginia -- the heart of coal country -- as a prime example).

2) As far as I'm aware, none of these initiatives present any concrete numbers, percentages, reduction levels, or timetables which are necessary to formulate tangible goals before 2020 (The US has committed to reducing emissions levels by 0-23% below 1990 levels by 2020 -- wait what, ANYWHERE between 0 and 23???). Furthermore, smaller countries in terms of size of population, GDP, and emission production, have made more serious commitments (see Norway, South Korea, and Japan). Without concrete goals in a measured timetable, how can we expect to make any progress, much less the drastic action necessary to curb the affects of global climate change?  We are simply elongating the process and preventing other serious efforts of cooperation in succeeding. And we've seen what happens when cooperation is delayed due to a lack of serious commitment.

Discovered by Brandeis University's very own Professor Eric Olson, this species of spider (Bagheera kiplingi) is able to survive on a vegetarian diet of acacia leaf tips (occasionally supplemented with ants or larvae, but many opt not to). If they can do it, so can we...

This December, the UN is getting everyone together again for the biggest, most important party EVER. Maybe not EVER, but it's a pretty big deal (maybe even still arguably EVER).

International political representatives will gather to develop a global climate treaty during the UN Climate Change Conference hosted in Copenhagen, December 2009. Follow their twitter to receive updates on the issues at hand, and on the pre-development of the conference. Feel free to discuss and comment below!

New technologies power the world's first CO2 neutral music festival in Copenhagen.

The Watermarks Project calculates the rising sea levels of coastal cities and projects the eventual water line onto buildings to show the direct impact of global warming.

NY Times Article brings coal and contaminated water and issues to forefront of America's consciousness. For a day.