The Washington Post recently lamented the decaying state of the country’s system of Earth observation satellites and Congress’s unwillingness to provide funding to maintain it. The Post’s concerns come from a report released by the National Research Council, which warns of a rapid decline in the number of Earth-observing instruments in orbit due to their age, possibly down to 25 percent of the current fleet by 2020. RFF Vice President for Research Molly Macauley serves on the committee that generated the report and has spent many years investigating the value that information from Earth observations can provide for solving environmental problems. Some of her work has focused the Landsat Program, which uses satellite imagery to create an unparalleled database for studying natural resources.

Last Thursday, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held a subcommittee hearing on the potential for developing unconventional energy resources, including oil sands and oil shale. Director of RFF’s Center for Energy Economics and Policy and Senior Fellow Alan Krupnick took a trip to Alberta, Canada, where oil sands extraction is in full swing, to check out the environmental impacts for himself. In his blog post on Common Resources, Krupnick describes different extraction techniques for oil sands and the impacts they have on the surrounding landscape.

Ecosystem services and conservation investments have gained traction in the environmental movement over the past few years, but the chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy thinks they should be more fully embraced. Peter Kareiva has been delivering direct and expansive talks over the past few months about the follies and future of efforts to protect ecosystem services. One of his key points (starting around 40:00 in the video) is that investing in natural systems is good for people and the planet. Jim Boyd, Juha Siikamäki, and Becky Epanchin-Niell—experts at RFF’s Center for the Management of Ecological Wealth—have gone one step further and laid out ways to improve conservation return on investment analysis to better measure and value ecosystem services.  

This Thursday, RFF Research Director and Senior Fellow Karen Palmer will testify before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on the implications of the proposed Clean Energy Standard bill. Check the link to read her testimony and watch the hearing live.