Banks Reevaluate Lending to Dirty Industries
Mountaintop removal mining.There appears to be some evidence that concerns over climate change the environment are causing banks to reconsider who they lend to and for what purposes. The NY Times:
Blasting off mountaintops to reach coal in Appalachia or churning out millions of tons of carbon dioxide to extract oil from sand in Alberta are among environmentalists’ biggest industrial irritants. But they are also legal and lucrative.
For a growing number of banks, however, that does not seem to matter.
After years of legal entanglements arising from environmental messes and increased scrutiny of banks that finance the dirtiest industries, several large commercial lenders are taking a stand on industry practices that they regard as risky to their reputations and bottom lines.
Will Organic Fruits & Vegetables Become Cheaper, Less Safe?
Demand for organically grown fruits and vegetables has outpaced supply in recent years, keeping consumer prices and producer profit margins high. As a result, the expense of switching to organic methods no longer looks as prohibitive as it once did, enticing more growers to take the plunge.
A new study, led by professor Timothy Richards of the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University and published in the online journal, Agribusiness, suggests that increased supply should cause retail prices to fall, but that the entry of less regulated, foreign-grown produce could also introduce new safety concerns.
Was Mars Organic Back in ’76?
Artist’s concept of NASA’s Phoenix Lander on Mars. Credit: NASA, JPL-Calech, University of ArizonaExperiments prompted by a 2008 surprise from NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander suggest that soil examined by NASA’s Viking Mars landers in 1976 may have contained carbon-based chemical building blocks of life after all.
Chris McKay of NASA’s Ames Research Center, coauthored a study published online by the Journal of Geophysical Research–Planets, reanalyzing results of Viking’s tests for organic chemicals in Martian soil:
This doesn’t say anything about the question of whether or not life has existed on Mars, but it could make a big difference in how we look for evidence to answer that question.
Dry, British Summer Reveals Long-Buried Archaeological Sites as ‘Cropmarks’
Aerial surveys have turned up hundreds of sites, reports the BBC:
The surveys show marks made when crops growing over buried features develop at a different rate from those nearby.
The newly-discovered Roman and prehistoric settlements include a site near Bradford Abbas, Dorset.
Newton Kyme, near Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, was shown to not only be home to a Roman fort dating back nearly 2,000 years but also a larger, stronger defence built in 290AD.
Killing New Cures Before They’re Discovered
An article at Project Syndicate spells out the cost to medical science of our escalating losses in biodiversity:
Consider the polar bear, threatened with extinction in the wild by climate change. These mammals spend up to seven months of the year hibernating, during which time they are essentially immobile. A human would lose a third or more of bone mass when immobile for this period of time.
Astonishingly, hibernating bears lay down new bone, by producing a substance that inhibits cells that break down bone and promotes those that produce bone and cartilage. Studying hibernating bears in the wild may lead to new ways of preventing the millions of hip fractures that result from osteoporosis – a disease that costs $18 billion and kills 70,000 people each year in the United States alone.
While hibernating bears can also survive for seven months or more without excreting their urinary wastes, humans would die from the buildup of these toxic substances after only a few days. Unraveling how the bears accomplish this miraculous feat may offer hope to the estimated 1.5 million people worldwide receiving treatment for kidney failure.
Polar bears, which pile on fat to survive hibernation and yet do not become diabetic, may also hold clues for treating Type II diabetes, a disease associated with obesity that afflicts more than 190 million people worldwide, reaching epidemic proportions in many countries.
But, as the article notes, “hibernating bears are just the beginning of the story…”
