The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is a compilation of the week’s most notable stories from our entertainment-meets-social-action blogging network. Check out some of our most popular stories of the week, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites!

TakePart Gang:

Arrested in Development by Wendy Cohen

Is Google Making Us Dumber? by Blair Golson

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Nicole Hughes:

Top 5 Ways to Green Your July 4th

Greenopia: Eco-Guides For Your City

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Andy Kondrat:

Hypermiling Contest Winner Gets 124 Miles to the Gallon

Rise in Fuel Prices May Lead to Dirtier Energy Sources

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Jon Popham:

Red Tide in Yellow Sea Threatens Olympics

Mercedes-Benz Ditching Gasoline Cars by 2015

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Giulia Rozzi:

46664 Concert: Happy Birthday Nelson Mandela

Denise Richards Likes to Share

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Gina Telaroli:

Top 10 Movies for the 4th of July: For Patriots and Cynics!

The Radical and Beautiful Journey of Wall-E

So some of us hadn’t been too bent out of shape with the skyrocketing fuel prices because 1) Some of us are selling our cars anyway, and 2) Some of us kind of hoped this would necessitate a rise in renewable energies. However, there are some predictions floating around out there which state that may not be the case. The International Herald Tribune tells us,

According to Climate Strategies, an international climate policy network based at the University of Cambridge, one of the likeliest consequences [of high fuel costs] could be a rush to highly polluting technologies to extract more fossil fuels from different sources, including technologies pioneered during the last century to extract liquid fuels from coal.

The thought is that, instead of spending on innovation to combat fuel prices, governments and companies might instead revert back to tried and true, yet dirtier, practices to meet energy demand.

Read the rest of this entry »

The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is a compilation of the week’s most notable stories from our entertainment-meets-social-action blogging network. Check out some of our most popular stories of the week, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites!

Nicole Hughes:

Should Drive-Thrus Be Banned?

Eco-Moms Mad About “Greenwash” Barbie

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Andy Kondrat:

Home Depot Will Recycle Your CLF Bulbs for Free

Department of Energy Predicts 50% Energy Increase By 2030

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Jon Popham:

NYC Waterfalls Installation Starts This Week

Capt. John Smith Is Back…and Running for President

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Giulia Rozzi:

Yoga Across the Border

Emile Norman: By His Own Design

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Gina Telaroli:

Silverdocs 08: A Post-Fest Wrap-Up

Human Rights Watch 08: Letter to Anna

Hey, you know how there are all these awesome things like CFLs and solar power and wind energy and renewable this and rechargeable that, and so we’ll be energy independent and carbon neutral in no time at all?  Yeah, well, the United States Energy Department is really excited to rain on that parade.   Like, super pumped.   Turns out they’re guessing that by 2030, the global energy demand will rise by 50 percent, and everyone and their mothers will continue to rely on coal and fossil fuels.   Check out the buzzkill in the International Herald Tribune:

The projections by the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the Energy Department, said that without mandatory actions to address global warming, the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide flowing into the atmosphere each year from energy use will be 51 percent greater in 2030 than it was three years ago.

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Thanks to our MSM’s misguided efforts to be “evenhanded,” a huge number of Americans actually think that the jury’s still out on whether climate change is even really happening.

Actually, the jury has already ruled, and they’ve found us guilty of gross inaction. The penalty? We’ve been sentenced to life imprisonment on a planet whose eco-system may have been irreversibly thrown out of whack by our own greed and apathy.

The final report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just been released, and as grim as its findings are, some scientists have noted that the IPCC’s report doesn’t fully take into account the latest, and most ominous, indications that global warming is spiraling out of control faster than anticipated. As British scientist James Lovelock told the International Herald Tribune:

“Sadly, even the most pessimistic of the climate prophets of the IPCC panel do not appear to have noticed how rapidly the climate is changing”¦scientists have let this potentially disastrous future steal up on us unaware.”

But is it really fair to blame the scientists? Haven’t they, “along with Bill McKibben and Al Gore,” been trying to warn us about global warming for years? We just haven’t been listening. Maybe they just need to borrow one of Spinal Tap’s amplifiers”you know, the ones that go that one increment louder, all the way to 11. After all, it looks like we’re about to go off the charts, here.