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- Indonesia forest moratorium won't meet climate pledge - Norway
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Green Facts
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Nudge your thermostat up two degrees in the summer and down two degrees in the winter to prevent 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.
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American workers spend an average of 47 hours per year commuting through rush hour traffic. This adds up to 23 billion gallons of gas wasted in traffic each year.
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82 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. come from burning fossil fuels.
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Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the material from scratch.
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Every week about 20 species of plants and animals become extinct.
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Turning off the tap when brushing your teeth can save as much as 10 gallons a day per person.
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Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every 3 months
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Less than 1% of electricity in the United States is generated from solar power.
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Recycling 100 million cell phones can save enough energy to power 18,500 homes in the U.S. for a year.
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It takes 6,000,000 trees to make 1 year's worth of tissues for the world.
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Due to tiger poaching, habitat destruction, and other human-tiger conflicts, tigers now number around 3,200—a decrease in population by about 70% from 100 years ago.
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You will save 300 pounds of carbon dioxide for every 10,000 miles you drive if you always keep your car’s tires fully inflated.
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77% of people who commute to work by car drive alone.
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Americans throw away more than 120 million cell phones each year, which contribute 60,000 tons of waste to landfills annually.
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A tree that provides a home with shade from the sun can reduce the energy required to run the air conditioner and save an additional 200 to 2,000 pounds of carbon over its lifetime.
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Washing your clothes in cold or warm instead of hot water saves 500 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, and drying your clothes on a clothesline six months out of the year would save another 700 pounds.
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Recycling for one year at Stanford University saved the equivalent of 33,913 trees and the need for 636 tons of iron ore, coal, and limestone.
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Current sea ice levels are at least 47% lower than they were in 1979.
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The World Health Organization estimates that 2 million people die prematurely worldwide every year due to air pollution.
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If every U.S. household turned the thermostat down by 10 degrees for seven hours each night during the cold months, and seven hours each weekday, it would prevent nearly gas emissions.
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In California homes, about 10% of energy usage is related to TVs, DVRs, cable and satellite boxes, and DVD players.
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In the United States, automobiles produce over 20 percent of total carbon emissions. Walk or bike and you'll save one pound of carbon for every mile you travel.
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You’ll save two pounds of carbon for every 20 glass bottles that you recycle.
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You will save 100 pounds of carbon for each incandescent bulb that you replace with a compact fluorescent bulb (CFL), over the life of the bulb.
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A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.
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A steel mill using recycled scrap reduces related water pollution, air pollution, and mining wastes by about 70%.
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Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute.
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Shaving 10 miles off of your weekly driving pattern can eliminate about 500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year.
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States with bottle deposit laws have 35-40% less litter by volume.
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Bamboo absorbs 35% more carbon dioxide than equivalent stands of trees.
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Glass can be recycled over and over again without ever wearing down.
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For every 38,000 bills consumers pay online instead of by mail, 5,058 pounds of greenhouse gases are avoided and two tons of trees are preserved.
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One recycled aluminum can will save enough energy to run a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours, a computer for 3 hours, or a TV for 2 hours.
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Recycling 1 million laptop computers can save the amount of energy used by 3,657 homes in the U.S. over the course of a year.
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Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year.
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A laptop consumes five times less electricity than a desktop computer.
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An aluminum can that is thrown away instead of recycled will still be a can 500 years from now!
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Refrigerators built in 1975 used 4 times more energy than current models.
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Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day.


If the last article on erosion did not get your attention, perhaps you will take erosion a bit more seriously when you see it forever alter infrastructure and entire housing communities. This time around, let’s look at more dramatic forms of erosion, including sinkholes, coastal erosion, and landslides. This does not discount the impact...

When you think about saving the environment, what comes to mind? Perhaps you think about stopping deforestation, reducing pollution and harmful emissions, promoting biodiversity, or protecting the Earth’s waters—but how many times have you stopped and thought about soil erosion? According to David Pimentel, professor of ecology at Cornell...
Forests are disappearing at a rate of about 36 football fields per minute. That equates to an annual loss of 12-15 million hectares of forest, which is an area roughly the size of Costa Rica. The United States Forest Service defines “forest” as land that is at least one acre and at least 10 percent stocked with trees of any size. Forests...
The Amazon rainforest is not what television has made it out to be. It's not always teeming with wildlife, nor is it ever absent of human footprints. In the Peruvian Amazon, there's Iquitos, a city of more than 400,000 people, the largest city in the world that has no roads connecting it to the outside. I flew into Iquitos a few summers...
Other countries may have thousand year-old cathedrals, cobble-streets, amongst many other national treasures, but the United States has land. Million-year-old geologic formations are our cathedrals, and our national parks, forests, and monuments pay tribute to and preserve these natural wonders for generations to come. I have been fortunate...
Climate change and global warming are hot topics these days, and the public lands and forests owned and managed by the Federal government of the United States are not being overlooked. Federal Agencies such as the Department of Interior (DOI), Department of Energy (DOE), and Department of Agriculture (USDA), among others, are implementing...
Since the 1960's, clearcutting has been one of the most controversial methods of logging in the logging industry. On the other hand, it has remained the most widely used method in United States national forests. Clearcutting simply is the practice of cutting down all the trees in an area and growing new, even-aged trees in their place...
Santa Barbara made history in May of 2009 with the Jesusita fire. After two other separate and significant fires within just 10 months of the Jesusita and a total of four major fires in two years, residents were scratching their heads wondering when the threat of another natural disaster would finally subside. But the truth is that fire is a...
Many of us use the holidays as a time to stay home and rest, but some of us use the holiday season as an opportunity to travel. If you are one with a travel bug, try taking the environment into consideration with your trip planning this year. With over 390 National Park Service areas covering more than 84 million acres across the United States...
In 2008 it would have been hard not to notice the abundance of wildfires. California was by far hit the hardest, burning in areas such as San Diego, Santa Barbara, Yosemite, and Redding. Other states like Florida and Texas were also witness to this natural, yet destructive process. Millions of dollars of federal spending were dedicated to fighting them...
For residents of the Bay Area, late-June usually signifies getaways up to Lake Tahoe, wine tasting in Napa and Sonoma County, camping trips to Big Sur, or festival fun in the city. This year, we are experiencing something a little different: eerily hazy skies, smoke-filled air, and soot. The smoggy skies are a result of about 1,100 wildfires burning...