Emily Gertz: OnEarth Author

A Katrina-like winter storm tore through parts of Western Europe early Sunday morning, killing over 60 people. Most of the dead are from Atlantic coastal France, where ( Per Agence France-Presse) winter storm Xynthia's 93-mile-an-hour winds and 26-foot waves hit the coast so ferociously that they breached many of the region's aging sea levees.

Between around 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. local time on Sunday, the sea surged at least 1,600 feet inland. Streets were flooded so fast that many people didn't have time to escape before their homes were inundated.

So no more lonely hearts for us: France joins the USA in being an industrialized nation where some combination of ...read full post

Judging from some of the backchannel chitchat I'm encountering, we environmental journalists are hitting our collective head against a wall over the near-deafening yawp from global warming deniers.

The ratio of science-literate to science-challenged responses in our blog comments, email, and in-baskets is so unbalanced, the scale is broken. And mainstream reporting on climate change remains stuck in a time warp, where a few big snowstorms during one winter on one small part of a big continent, undercut the veracity of years upon years of recorded temperature increases across the globe.

It's tempting to become dispirited about reporting on climate change. What's driving this hostility and inattention to facts?

To answer that question, journalists -- at least the ones who care about being effective on the job -- often look for ...read full post

I'm at the annual, one-day Greener Gadgets Conference here in New York City, where the capstone event is just kicking off: the Greener Gadgets design competition. Many of the entries in the design contest are prototypes or conceptual.

The foundation of this conference is the concept that the gizmos we love can be more ecologically sound -- made of benign matierals, highly energy efficient -- and also, that it's OK to love gadgets and want to have them in our lives, even if we're trying to be more enviro-conscious.

The judges are a trio of green design luminaries: Sarah Rich, a ...read full post

We're saps for the "noble savage."

The movie "Avatar" is just the newest in a long list of pop culture artifacts in which a 97-pound weakling from industrial society becomes a new, better man by joining a tribe that lives in an holistic union with nature.

But once we take off the rose-colored (or 3-D) glasses, it's back to business as usual: watching our noble savages ride off into the sunset, not caring a whole lot about how they view the world.

Empirical and traditional methods for observing nature can complement each other, however. Take this case from the James Bay region of northern Quebec, ...read full post

The molasses-paced progress of environmental policy can be enough to crush the optimism of all but the most stoic observers.

The world of design, by comparison, is a source of immediate gratification.

Flip through the pages of Transmaterial 3: A Catalog of Materials That Redefine Our Physical Environment and you'll encounter one encouraging, fascinating example after another of human inventiveness:

• Carolyn Dry's "self-repairing concrete" features an especially durable cement that is "less pourous, and also prevents corrosion and cracking." With the pollution created by concrete manufacture accounting for 8-10 percent of the world's human-propelled CO2 emissions, self-repairing concrete ...read full post

How many jobs would be created under a re-vamped nuclear power industry?

It depends on when you ask.

Today, President Obama announced $8.33 billion in federal loan guarantees for the construction of two new 1,100-megawatt nuclear reactors, at a single power installation in Georgia.

"Compared to a similar sized coal plant, the new ... units will avoid significant greenhouse gas emissions each year: 16 million tons of carbon dioxide, 3,900 tons of nitrogen oxides, and 5,500 tons of sulfur dioxide," states a Department of Energy press release about the loan guarantees.

Speaking today in Maryland at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 26 headquarters, President Obama said that the new plants will create thousands of "well-paying, permanent jobs in the years to come."

I do my best to report agnostically on the potential of nuclear power as a climate change solution. But I do have to call foul on ...read full post

As of January 31, the Copenhagen Accord's first major deadline, 92 countries have submitted materials to the non-binding agreement, according to the UN's climate secretariat. They account for 75 percent of the world population, with human-propelled emissions adding up to 83 percent of the global total.

All the major greenhouse polluters have submitted plans for cutting their greenhouse pollution to the UN, including the five that jointly issued the accord in December: Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and United States.

The total is 100 short of the number that would be needed to adopt a legally binding treaty at November's climate meeting in Caracas, Mexico. But a couple assessments suggest that there is some reason for measured optimism.

"Whether we limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius [by 2100] also depends on what countries do after 2020," writes Trevor Howard, a ...read full post