Environmental Glance
EARTH HOUR is about to sweep around the world in what the United Nations is calling "the largest demonstration of public concern about climate change ever attempted".
The event, which started in Sydney two years ago, will see well over 3000 cities and towns in more than 90 countries switch off their lights for an hour this year. Hundreds of millions of people are expected to take part.
From the international dateline, Earth Hour starts in New Zealand's Chatham Islands this afternoon and will conclude in Honolulu tomorrow night (Sydney time).
In the US, the Empire State Building will dim its lights, along with Sears Tower in Chicago, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and the lights of the casino strip in Las Vegas. In Canada, lights at Niagara Falls and Toronto's CN Tower will be turned off.
TVNL Comment: Have you heard about this in the American media? We did not.
Ms Barlow, who is also the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, delivered the president's message to the People's Water Forum, a counter-forum being held by hundreds of civil society members from nearly 70 countries whose voices have not been at the WWF. The speech was later released to the World Water Forum, which is being attended by 20,000 delegates from 150 countries.
Energy production of all types — wind, ethanol and mountaintop coal mining — is contributing to steep drops in bird populations, a new government report says. The first-of-its-kind report chronicles a four-decade decline in many of the country's bird populations.
According to the Department of Energy, there is enough spent nuclear waste in the United States to fill a football-field-sized hole 15 feet deep. From a plethora of proposals, scientists and politicians have selected on-site storage as the safest solution for the buildup. But it's a temporary solution. The waste will be fatal to humans and other animals for tens of thousands of years — yet the storage tombs are expected to last only a hundred years.
