Olivia DrakeBetween now and Earth Day in April, Wesleyan employees who seek greener ways to commute to campus will have the opportunity to earn rewards through the Earth Day Commuter Challenge 2010: "Race to the Finish." The event encourages all forms of green commuting including carpooling, vanpooling, telecommuting, biking, walking and taking the bus, and is projected to eliminating more than 140,000 vehicle trips state-wide. This level of participation would result in 5,000,000 fewer miles of driving and the elimination of 2,000 tons of emissions. "Our hope is that the Earth Day Commuter Challenge will encourage employees to get out of…
David PesciGary Yohe, Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics, and a senior member if the U.N.'s IPCC panel discusses the economic implications of polar ice melt with ABC's Bill Blakemore '65. He estimates the costs of polar ice melting and rising seas at $2.4 trillion over the next few decades.
Cynthia RockwellJerry Melillo ’65, a senior scientist at the U.S. Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., says in a study published in Science that the new generation of biofuels will actually emit more carbon dioxide, averaged over the first three decades of this century, than gasoline—although the fuels were meant to be a low-carbon alternative. A Reuters report on the study noted that governments and private industry are spending billions of dollars on research into making fuels from wood and grass in the hopes of cutting carbon emissions while not competing with food, as corn-based biofuels do. Melillo and his…
Gary Yohe, the Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics, was quoted in a Nov. 3 New York Times article titled "Obama Administration Weighs Costs of Doing Nothing." The article examined the Obama Administration's inaction on significant climate change measures and how it is "struggling to reach its own conclusion," a stark difference from the President's campaign rhetoric of speedy action on climate change issues. The sticking point appears to be the cost versus benefit calculations or "social costs" of deciding whether to enact specific measures. Yohe says, in part, that the difficulty lies in objectively quantifying these costs. "You can't really quantify…
Four weeks before the nations meet in Copenhagen to try to avert the catastrophes that global warming may bring, ABC News Correspondent William Blakemore ’65 will identify many surprising psychological factors at play as people in all walks of life deal with the latest "hard news" on climate. Blakemore will speak on "The Many Psychologies of Global Warming," during a talk at 8 p.m. Nov. 3 in Memorial Chapel. He'll explore new definitions of sanity that may pertain, and give examples displaying different "psychologies, as well as manmade global warming's place in "the long history of narcissistic insults to humanity…
Dana Royer, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, contributed to an important study on the dangerous levels of Carbon Dioxide on the planet. He is featured in a Nov. 6 issue of Health News Digest. According to the article, if climate disasters are to be averted, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) must be reduced below the levels that already exist today. The model, created by Royer and nine other scientists from the U.S., the U.K. and France, suggests “the only realistic way to sharply curtail CO2 emissions is phase out coal use except where CO2 is captured and sequestered.” According…