13 More Green Stories of the Week: China's Amazing Bike Sharing System & Bad Environment; Fracking, Fracking, & Fracking; Climate Change Deniers Unravelled…

Other than the 50+ stories we covered in the past week, here are 15 more green stories I thought were worth a share:

  1. An ecomaginative collaboration went up on the west side of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, London recently and it is AWESOME. It is “an installation of Van Gogh’s famous A Wheatfield with Cypresses, made from over 8,000 living plants.” GE’s got photos and information. (Thanks to a loyal reader for sharing this with me.)
  2. Hangzhou, China has the “biggest, baddest” bike sharing system in the world, Streetfilms writes. The bike sharing system has 50,000 bikes at 2,050 stations and is used for approximately 240,000 trips a day. By 2020, the system is supposed to include 175,000 bikes! The video above is on this amazing system.
  3. China still faces a “very grave” environmental situation due to industrial pollution, Chinese officials say. Citizen protests and concerning biodiversity loss have resulted from this. The NYTimes has more.
  4. Hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) may be causing earthquakes in the UK. This controversial method of shale gas drilling has been temporarily halted in Lancashire as an investigation into the matter ensues. In case you missed it, we covered essentially the exact same story (fracking possibly causing earthquakes and being halted while experts investigate) in Arkansas in March and February.
  5. John Cook of Skeptical Science and others have put together an interactive history of climate science (super cool to play with!) and had a good post on it on Tuesday.
  6. John Cook also had a truly excellent article on the very important difference between a skeptic and a climate denier — I would say it’s a must-read — over on ABC Drum on Monday. Of course, this is a controversial topic (even though the science is clear as day in the Maldives) and as I’m writing this, there are 554 comments on the post! Wow. Check it out…
  7. NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sued the federal government on Tuesday “for its failure to evaluate the environmental and health risks of new fracking in the critical Delaware River Basin.” Kate Sinding of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has more on this fracking lawsuit.
  8. Wildfires destroyed 12 homes in Texas this week, the AP reports, as a record-setting Texas drought continues.
  9. Texas may be the first state to require that fracking companies publicly reveal what chemicals they use for fracking, as legislation on this matter was approved late Sunday night in the Texas House.
  10. The Fox News Propaganda Machine was picked apart by Rolling Stone. Here’s what’s in the excellent piece and slideshow (it’s the subheading for the piece): “Fox may look like a news broadcast, but it’s really the advance guard of the GOP distortion machine. An hour-by-hour look at how Fox turns Obama into the second coming of V.I. Lenin.” Again, if you don’t know a ton about this already (or even if you do), Check.This.Out!
  11. Obama nominated environmentalist and solar and wind energy leader John Bryson for head of the Commerce Department. This made many greens more than happy. And, of course, Republicans are trying everything they can to stall or stop this wiely popular nomination. Is Bryson qualified? “Bryson would bring a unique skill set to the Commerce Department, an agency tasked in part with representing the interests of U.S. businesses abroad. The 67-year-old is the former chairman and chief executive of Edison International, a California-based power company; co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization; and has served on the board of major international businesses, including The Boeing Co. and the Walt Disney Co.,” the AP reports. Looks pretty qualified to me.
  12. Corexit, the oil spill dispersant used to make the Gulf of Mexico look better after the BP oil spill last year, may have done much more harm than good, researchers are finding. More research needs to be conducted, but as many assumed early on, it seems corexit may have been a very bad move for the Gulf of Mexico and all who rely on it.
  13. “Climate Truthers” is a new term that’s been given to the ridiculous conspiracy theorists who think global warming isn’t happening despite the MASSIVE body of evidence showing that it is (and that it’s being caused by humans). Sahil Kapur of the Huffington Post had a good piece on this on Tuesday titled: Climate Truthers: Why Global Warming Deniers Are Conspiracy Theorists, Not Rational Skeptics. Check her out!

That’s it for this week. Let us know if you’ve got any more!

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