Pecologix Political Ecology Blotter

A former Bush administration energy and environment official, Douglas Faulkner, has initiated a dialog on bioenergy at Biofuels Digest. Ta launch the discussion, Mr. Faulkner asks: 1.     Do you agree with my premise of reduced federal support for bioenergy? 2.    And, if so, as leading members of the private sector, are you willing to help [...]

Here is what President Obama said about energy and the environment in the State of the Union address of 1/24/2012: “Nowhere is the promise of innovation greater than in American-made energy. Over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I’m directing my Administration to open [...]

A recent study of the net land carbon sink estimated using the Mauna Loa, Hawaii atmospheric CO2 record, fossil fuel estimates, and a suite of ocean models suggests that the mean of the net land carbon uptake remained approximately constant for three decades and increased after 1988/1989. Due to the large variability in the net [...]

Infections with Shiga toxin (STx)–producing bacteria cause more than a million deaths each year and have no definitive treatment. To exert its cytotoxic effect, STx invades cells through retrograde membrane trafficking, escaping the lysosomal degradative pathway. We found that the widely available metal manganese (Mn2+) blocked endosome-to-Golgi trafficking of STx and caused its degradation in [...]

Fermentative hydrogen production from waste activated sludge (WAS) has low H2 yield because WAS contains limited amounts of carbohydrate suitable for use by hydrogen-producing bacteria. Here, augmentation of hydrogen production from WAS by microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) was implemented. H2 yields of 3.89 ± 0.39 mg-H2/g-DS (5.67 ± 0.61 mg-H2/g-VSS) from raw WAS and 6.78 ± 0.94 mg-H2/g-DS (15.08 ± 1.41 mg-H2/g-VSS) from alkaline-pretreated WAS were obtained [...]

How much and why precipitation changes as the climate warms is uncertain, even for the global mean. In the 21st Century of the IPCC AR4 A1b forcing scenario, global-mean precipitation increase per degree warming varies among models by over a factor of three. Clear-sky atmospheric shortwave absorption change explains over half of the intermodel spread [...]

Genes from recently extinct species can live on in the genomes of extant individuals of mixed ancestry. Recently, genetic signatures of the giant Galápagos tortoise once endemic to Floreana Island (Chelonoidis elephantopus) were detected within eleven hybrid individuals of otherwise pure Chelonoidis becki on Volcano Wolf, Isabela Island [1]. Movement of tortoises between islands by [...]