Articles by Sarah Laskow

Do individual green actions matter? Maybe not, says New York Times

The Huffington Post's eco-etiquette column yesterday featured a question from “Kimberly,” who writes "I used to be enthusiastic about going green, but now I feel like what's the point? Like a stupid reusable water bottle is going to make a difference…" She got a comforting answer, but if she’d written to the New York Times, op-ed contributor Gernot Wagner might have told her she might as well pack it in.

HuffPo’s advice columnist Jennifer Grayson identified Kimberly’s problem — "You're having a F**k it moment right now" — and told her to step back, take a breather, and "remember that individual actions do make a difference."

But Wagner, an economist with the Environmental Defense Fund, has a different answer for people like Kimberly:

[S]adly, individual action does not work. It distracts us from the need for collective action, and it doesn’t add up to enough. Self-interest, not self-sacrifice, is what induces noticeable change. ...

Meter-long king crabs invade Antarctic waters, eat everything

On the seafloors of Antarctic basins, the water has warmed by just 0.27 degrees C — but that’s enough to allow giant king crabs to take over the ecosystem and eat everything they find. These suckers are more than three feet across, and they're gobbling up sea urchins, sea lilies, sea cucumbers, and starfish. They're also messing with the make-up of the sea floor. Check out the (terrifyinggggg) video above: The crab looks like an invasive vehicle in a Star Wars movie that's launching a sneak attack on an unsuspecting, peaceful civilization.

Critical List: Obama admin backs more solar projects; Kiribati president wants a new island

The Obama administration provided a loan guarantee to a SolarCity project that would put solar panels on 160,000 military homes — "the larger domestic residential rooftop solar project in history," Energy Secretary Chu said.

Rick Perry thinks he's a smart as Galileo. Or at least that some climate-denying scientists are.

So he’d be pretty irked to see yet more evidence that global warming is real, if he actually read newspapers.

Here’s what happens to EPA whistleblowers (hint: it isn’t pretty)

Marsha Coleman-Adebayo's new book, No Fear: The Whistleblower's Triumph Over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA, tells about the ordeal she went through while working at the EPA in the 1990s. She told NPR:

For me, working at the EPA was a very harrowing experience. … I was surprised that the in environment of the EPA, instead of being rewarded for being proficient in what you do, loyalty was a much greater value. When I began questioning U.S. policy, I was considered disloyal. And at that point, at the minds of many people at the EPA, I had become their enemy.

Coleman-Adebayo says she faced racial and gender-based discrimination during her time at the office. But her real problems started when she questioned her supervisors' reaction to a problem she found out about while working with the 1996 Gore-Mbeki commission in South Africa.