Opinion Forum

Get Ready for Higher Gas Prices

January 22nd, 2012

By Dan Miller Why an oil refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands will shut down by mid-February. An oil refinery in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, will shut down by mid-February. It is owned by Hovensa, a joint venture of U.S.-based Hess Corp. and Venezuela’s state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). Losses at [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: environment, EPA, gas, oil refinery, prices, U.S. Virgin Islands, Venezuela
Categories: Economics, News, Politics | Comments (0) | Home

Conservation for the Sake of Our Children Is Far More Important than Mere Cost

December 12th, 2011

By Dan Miller Green stuff is scarce and is too important to waste. According to this article, Last week, the Navy signed a contract with two biofuel companies to purchase 450,000 gallons of advanced biofuels at $12 million to assist in President Obama’s goal to establish a domestic biofuels industry and to advance it in [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: biofuels, conservation, cost, energy, environment, oil, satire, U.S. Navy
Categories: Military, News, Politics | Comments (3) | Home

A Commitment to Uncovering Local Environmental Issues

December 8th, 2011

By Jan Barry The headlines in a recent newspaper series unveiled a shocking story: “DEP let poison flow for decades” … “North Jersey riddled with failed cleanups” … “Desperate to move, but bound to stay; Residents say homes in Superfund site are worthless.” Got your attention? That’s the intent of the “Toxic Landscape” series that [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: chemicals, environment, Garfield, New Jersey, Ringwood, superfund, toxic
Categories: Media, News, Science | Comments (1) | Home

At the Movies: Rising Up Down South

November 23rd, 2011

By Jan Barry The myriad marches, sit-ins, camp-ins and other protest demonstrations sweeping across America these days didn’t spring up out of nowhere. Such actions against entrenched injustice were honed in the civil rights movement that shook up authorities in the 1950s and 1960s. That movement energized and inspired a groundswell of grassroots movements against [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: civil rights, democracy, demonstrations, dissent, environment, film, protest
Categories: Arts, Life, Politics | Comments (3) | Home

Only Happy Numbers Wanted on Regulatory Impact

November 18th, 2011

By Dan Miller According to testimony today before a House Natural Resources subcommittee, The Obama administration pressured analysts to change an environmental review to reflect fewer job losses from a proposed regulation, the contractors who worked on the review testified Friday. The dispute revolves around proposed changes to a rule regulating coal mining near streams [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: coal mining, environment, jobs, regulation, satire, testimony
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (2) | Home

Environmental Writing 2011

May 27th, 2011

By Jan Barry From Agent Orange’s insidious grasp out of the past of the war in Vietnam to current health concerns of many residents of Ramapo River communities, to the potential future effects of global climate change, 11 student-reporters at Ramapo College of New Jersey dug into a wide array of ecological issues in the [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Agent Orange, climate change, Earth, environment, projects, students
Categories: Education, News, Science | Comments (0) | Home

The Obama-Gaia Energy Partnership

April 9th, 2011

By Dan Miller The community organizer in chief does what he does best. Years ago, a Venezuelan acquaintance told me a story: Venezuelans and Germans had a rowing race. The German crew had ten oarsmen and one leader who shouted commands; the Venezuelan crew had one oarsman and ten shouters. Surprisingly, the German crew won [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: Brazil, climate, drilling, employment, energy, environment, Gaia, oil, satire
Categories: Humor, News, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

Fires, Cars: More Deadly Than Nuclear Power!

April 1st, 2011

By Dan Miller We must stop using them lest intelligent life on Earth be further endangered! The extraordinarily powerful magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in Japan were truly terrible — many lives were lost and there was great destruction. President Obama’s heart went out to the people of Japan and he did his presidential best: [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: cars, earthquake, environment, fires, Japan, nuclear power, satire, tsunami
Categories: Humor, News, Politics | Comments (0) | Home

A Dolt on the Volt

January 29th, 2011

By Tom Carter Gene Weingarten wrote a very funny satirical article in The Washington Post today about the Chevrolet Volt. That’s the “volt” referred to in the title; Weingarten is the “dolt,” by his own admission. Like most people, I suppose, I didn’t know much about the Volt before I read Weingarten’s article. From what [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Chevrolet, cost, energy, environment, incentive, performance, subsidy, Volt
Categories: Economics, News, Politics, Science | Comments (4) | Home

The True Face of the Eco-Fascists

October 9th, 2010

By Brianna Aubin Last weekend, an environmentalist group wanted to stir up some enthusiasm for a program called 10:10, the objective of which is to reduce one’s “carbon footprint” by 10% by the end of 2010. To do so, they made a movie in which those who were less than enthusiastic about this objective were [...]

Articles written by Brianna Aubin
Tags: 10:10, children, environment, environmentalist, green, killing, video, violence
Categories: Media, News, Politics | Comments (9) | Home

Raise Green Children

June 24th, 2010

By Dr. Jim Taylor Regardless of where you stand on the issue of climate change, I hope there is no argument that, environmentally speaking, we simply can’t sustain our current path for much longer. Air pollution caused by the growing number of automobiles on the road and coal-burning power plants worldwide. Our oceans and seas [...]

Articles written by Dr. Jim Taylor
Tags: children, climate change, Earth, environment, garden, green, recycling
Categories: Education, Life, Politics | Comments (5) | Home

Environmental Writing: The Next Generation

May 21st, 2010

By Jan Barry My explorations of innovative solutions to environmental problems have been on hold since January, as I focused on teaching journalism courses at two colleges, including launching a revived course at Ramapo College of NJ called Environmental Writing. The original course was called Environmental Journalism; it was created more than 20 years ago [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: climate change, energy, environment, journalism, Ramapo College
Categories: Media, News | Comments (6) | Home

The True Evil of the Oil Companies

May 9th, 2010

By Brianna Aubin On the recommendation of a Jacobs Technology employee I met at a space conference in 2008, I read Jared Diamond’s Collapse a couple of years ago. Since I’d already read his book Guns, Germs, and Steel independently of this engineer’s recommendation and found it a fascinating read, it didn’t really take much [...]

Articles written by Brianna Aubin
Tags: BP, Chevron, environment, exploration, Gulf of Mexico, oil, petroleum
Categories: Economics, News, Politics | Comments (2) | Home

Not Melting After All

January 26th, 2010

By Brianna Aubin In 2007, the International Panel on Climate Change issued a dire warning that the Himalayan glaciers will have disappeared by the year 2035 due to the scourge of global warming. This assertion worked wonderfully to fuel the climate change activists into thinking that everybody needed to chip in to “Please help the world” [...]

Articles written by Brianna Aubin
Tags: climategate, environment, glacier, global warming, Gore, IPCC, Pachauri
Categories: News, Politics, Science | Comments (3) | Home

King for a Day, Part I

January 21st, 2010

By Brian Bagent How do we disentangle ourselves from the Gordian Knot that can characterize what has become many of our foreign affairs, especially what is going on in the Middle East? How can we reduce unemployment back to an acceptable level of 3-5% and sustain it indefinitely? How can we reduce our staggering $12,000,000,000,000 debt [...]

Articles written by Brian Bagent
Tags: deficit, drilling, environment, Middle East, oil, production, unemployment
Categories: Economics, Politics | Comments (4) | Home

Veterans Campaign on Environmental Issues

November 17th, 2009

By Jan Barry After Army tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Captain Mike Breen (photo at left) is on a new mission—seeking to convince fellow Americans that our addiction to fuel from Middle Eastern oil wells is a dire threat to our soldiers in combat and our security at home. Breen, a former infantry platoon leader, [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: energy dependence, energy policy, environment, veterans
Categories: Military, News, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

Think Green, Go Green

November 5th, 2009

By Jan Barry America is in the midst of massive change as sweeping as the transformation in daily life from horse-drawn wagons to horseless carriages, candle light to electric lights, and farm work to factory work that swirled through the nation a century ago. A cutting edge of 21st century change is the spiraling use [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: environment, farming, green jobs, renewable energy, sustainability
Categories: Economics, Life, News, Politics | Comments (5) | Home

Back to the Future: Wind Power

October 28th, 2009

Sometimes a good innovation comes from an old idea—such as windmills. Invented more than 1,000 years ago in Persia, their whirling sails and spinning blades harnessed wind power to draw water and grind grain from China to Holland to farms across America. Replaced by electric motors powered by high-voltage electric grids, the ancient windmill is [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: environment, green energy, windmill, windspire
Categories: Life, News | Comments (4) | Home

National Defense: Saving the Environment

August 18th, 2009

One of the biggest forces of destruction of the natural world are military actions in wars and training exercises, such as extensive explosions at bombing ranges and pollution of groundwater from leaking gasoline storage tanks, chemical and nuclear wastes. Imagine if “national defense” missions were reconfigured to fully focus on saving the environment that sustains [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: conservation, ecology, environment, national defense
Categories: Life, Military, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

Clearwater Legacy

June 24th, 2009

When folk singer Pete Seeger and some friends launched the Clearwater project in 1969, the Hudson River was an open sewer for industries, cities and towns along its majestic sweep from the Adirondack Mountains to New York Bay. In the years since, the full-sail sight of the Clearwater sloop tacking up and down the river [...]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Clearwater, environment, Hudson River, Pete Seeger
Categories: Life, News, Politics | Comments (3) | Home

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