Your Lifestyle Off The Cliff
Posted by Sonja Ebron
Grist.org has a great piece today on whether American lifestyle changes are needed to address climate change. Apparently, some folx believe we can simply change our light bulbs and drive hybrids, and all will be well! Since some of us would rather let the planet boil than give up our iPods, we should pretend there’s no need to change the way we live. Yeah, like Wile Coyote off the cliff, some of us will get the memo too late.
Nuclear Power for Environmental Justice? Uh… No!
Posted by Sonja Ebron
The Howard University School of Law hosted the second annual State of Environmental Justice in America Conference in May. Topics on the program included efforts at state and federal agencies, tribal perspectives, potential traps of Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs), technical advances in monitoring hazards, case studies of remediation, and other thought-provoking subjects. The discussion on nuclear options caught my eye.
Organized by my good friends at the African American Environmentalists Association, the workshop highlighted the lack of minority ownership of firms working in the nuclear industry and a number of ways for Blacks to get in. Many industry analysts expect a renaissance in nuclear power because of the focus on climate change and the fact that nukes have no emissions. But I found it strange that this discussion would take place at a conference on environmental justice. Where’s the tie-in? Would a more diverse industry really change the calculations that decide the siting of power plants?