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The Headlines:

Greenpeace members arrested at anti-drilling protest
Beijing zoo serves the species they house for dinner
No poo this week, but we’ll do some numbers:
Extending the Treasury Grant Program could produce 200,000 jobs
Protein made by plants to be reduced by 1/5
USA one of the top ten renewable energy investors

The Details:

Greenpeace members arrested at anti-drilling protest

Ever the users of dramatic symbolism, members of Greenpeace boarded an offshore drilling support ship off the coast of Louisiana on May 24. Their mission? To scrawl crude anti-drilling messages on the side of the ship using crude oil.

The ship is scheduled to travel to the Arctic over the summer to support Royal Dutch Shell’s plans to survey the area for potential drilling, and Greenpeace found this to be unacceptable. Seven members of Greenpeace wrote “Arctic Next?” on the ship and held up a sign that said, “Salazar: Ban Arctic Drilling” before being captured and detained by local law enforcement.

The activists were charged with unauthorized entry of critical infrastructure and unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling, both of which carry a maximum sentence of six years in prison.

Phil Radford, executive director of Greenpeace, said, “It is outrageous that prosecutors would confront peaceful protesters with such a heavy hand while not a single BP executive has been charged for the devastation they have wrought on the Gulf of Mexico and the people and animals that depend on it.”

The seven members of Greenpeace were released on bail on May 25.

Beijing zoo serves the species they house for dinner

An unsettling article from The Guardian recently reported on the misconduct of the Beijing Zoo in China. While most other zoos try to protect the animals in their exhibits, the Beijing Zoo would rather turn a profit, selling some of the very species that inhabit their zoo as food in their restaurant.

The restaurant serves the webbed toes of hippopotamus, dishes made with crocodiles, scorpions, kangaroo tail, deer penis, ant soup, shark fin soup, peacock and more. And until the zoo began receiving bad PR, they even had the bad taste to put nutritional information and serving suggestions on the cages of their exhibit animals.

The management of the zoo has promised to change their menu, but no one knows yet what those changes will entail.

Extending the Treasury Grant Program could produce 200,000 jobs

The Solar Energy Industry Association or SEIA released a report last week stating that if the federal government only does two teensy weensy things, the green energy industry could create over 200,000 jobs by 2016!

If the federal government extends the Treasury Grant Program, which was part of the Federal Stimulus Package, for another two years and gives tax breaks to green industry equipment manufacturing companies in the form of Manufacturing Investment Tax Credits, $48 billion would be invested in the solar industry, and 207,000 jobs would be created.

Protein made by plants to be reduced by 1/5

A UC Davis study released in a recent issue of Science made a sobering discovery about the effects of CO2.

Over the next 50 years, the authors of the study say, plants will not be able to absorb as much nitrogen due to projected higher CO2 conditions. Without taking in as much nitrogen, plants will not be able to produce as much protein.  In 50 years, people will be eating plant-based food that contains 20 percent less protein than the plant-based food of today.

And in case some of us are not big salad eaters, we will still be affected because any foods made with carbohydrates such as spaghetti and bread are created from wheat and other grains that grow on plants. So this affects virtually everyone.

USA one of the top ten renewable energy investors

We just got its hands on a Pew research study and found the countries that have invested the most into renewable energy sources. And the U.S. did pretty well.

We’re now ranked number two, lagging behind China as the top clean energy investor. Here’s the top ten, and the amount they invested in 2009:

10. India with $2.3 billion

9. Italy with $2.6 billion

8. Canada with $3.3 billion

7. Germany with $4.3 billion

6. Brazil with $7.4 billion

5. Spain with $ 10.4 billion

4. Smaller European Union nations combined with $10.8 billion

3. United Kingdom with $11.2 billion

2. United States with $18.6 billion

1. China with $34.6 billion