Green Column: Raising Awareness of Plastic Waste

Goa State Pollution Control Board signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with a cement company to use the plastic waste generated across the state.

Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. When I started visiting our Santa Monica office, I was thrilled to get up early (I was on East Coast time) and go down to the beach to body surf.

THIS is an unusually busy moment in the unhappy history of efforts to curb climate change. In two weeks at the end of June the world’s three biggest polluters unveiled carbon-reducing measures. In China and America these are more ambitious than previous policies. But they fall far short of what is needed to rein in the relentless rise in global carbon emissions.

Just when our biggest banks thought they were out of the woods and into the money, the official consensus in their favor begins to crack. The Obama administration’s publicly stated view – from the highest level in the White House - remains that the banks cannot or should not be broken up.  Their argument is that the big banks can be regulated into permanently low risk behavior.

Air pollution in Africa is becoming a growing health concern as more people move to the cities, but few countries are taking serious action.

The Ontario Securities Commission says it has found an “unacceptable level of compliance” with proper mining disclosure practices after completing a review of 50 technical reports released by Ontario-based companies. The problems are widespread, according to the OSC. It said it found deficient reporting of mineral resource estimates, lack of information on community and social impact of mines, poor disclosure of costs, lack of economic analysis, poor disclosure of risks, and numerous other issues.