There’s a high conversion rate for European-funded climate skeptics running for the Senate.Photo: Ben Klemm

The CANE report said the companies, including BP, BASF, Bayer and Solvay, which are some of Europe’s biggest emitters, had collectively donated $240,200 to senators who blocked action on global warming – more even than the $217,000 the oil billionaires and Tea Party bankrollers, David and Charles Koch, have donated to Senate campaigns. [Guardian]

The biggest giver was the German pharmaceutical company Bayer, who gave $108,100 to senators. And the largest beneficiary wasn’t even the infamous climate denier James Inhofe (R-Okla.), but Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) who pulled in $47,500 from seven of the eight companies. [Politico]

And in other green news:

No, no, a thousand times, no!: A new Los Angeles Times/USC poll shows Proposition 23, which would suspend California’s landmark greenhouse-gas law, is trailing 48 to 32 percent among likely voters. [Los Angeles Times]

Ebb and blow: The wind industry warns Republicans to stop airing ads saying that renewable energy programs in the stimulus law are creating jobs in China. [The Hill]

Rare form: With China’s temporary ban on rare earth metal exports, Japan is turning to “urban mining” (i.e. recycling, but more hipster-sounding). [Huffington Post]

A ploy named sue: The Center for Biological Diversity has sued the Interior Department to reinstate the moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf. It argues that more study is needed on the long-term impact of the disaster. [The Hill]

Know the drill: The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is looking at a plan which would enable it to track data from offshore oil rigs in real time instead of relying solely on on-site inspections. [Houston Chronicle]

Craptacular: A Sacramento-based company is turning sewage into biodegradable plastic. [Discovery News]

No-land: Greenland is melting at a record pace this year, 25 to 50 percent higher than normal. [Climate Progress]

He’s a super-freak: Glenn Beck’s Top 10 Anti-Environment Freak Outs [Ecopolitology]

A KFC spokesperson, Rick Maynard, makes a lame case for the campaign, telling AP, “The idea of branding T-shirts and sweat pants is certainly not [new]. Apparel companies and sororities have been doing that for years.”

Rick, you’re right — it’s not new, but this is why it’s wrong.

KFC’s new campaign perpetuates the thinking in our country that meat is “meat,” a thing to be consumed without thinking about where it comes from — whether it’s a piece of chicken breast or a woman’s butt. In this mindset, neither animal nor female flesh are living things, don’t need to be respected, and can be used freely for our consumption.

It is this thinking that allows us to raise more than 8 billion chickens a year in unspeakably crowded, inhumane conditions, feeding them antibiotics that make them grow abnormally fast.

This is nothing new for fast food and meat advertising. Women have been linked to meat in objectifying and oppressive ways for years. (For a good resource, check out The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams.) And this will undoubtedly continue until the day we treat our animals with respect rather than a cheap, quick fix of gluttonous enjoyment.

That is why this is more about college women running around with “sexy” across the seat of their sweatpants, Rick. It’s about a society that doesn’t think twice when they’re honking their horns at the college women standing on the corner with KFC signs. Or when they’re eating a double chicken-breast sandwich for just $5.

As a public-policy professor told the New York Times in a story about Maryland’s polluting chicken industry, “there are consequences to being able to sell skinless, boneless chicken breast for just over $2 per pound when virtually no other protein source with so little fat is that cheap.”

KFC, not only is your sandwich gross, but so is your advertising.

Worst-case estimates of the oil spill were kept from the public, a presidential commission says.

The White House responded, with the Office of Management and Budget denying it blocked NOAA from releasing worst-case oil flow estimates.

So is the critique fair? Jeffrey Kluger at Time says yes, and no:

The commission is right that there was a random, wheel-of-fortune quality to the ever-changing estimates of the flow rate, with the only constant being that the numbers kept going up … Part of the reason for the uncertainty was the lack of good monitoring data. The Obama administration did show regrettable credulousness in accepting BP’s initial lowball figure, but there weren’t a lot of alternatives since BP was the only party with access to the well and the robot subs that could begin to take the measure of the flow rate.

In the end, Kluger points out, it’s much better that we’re discussing what should have happened rather than what still needs to be done:

It’s a measure, perhaps, of how comparatively well the crisis was handled that as the six-month anniversary approaches, the majority of the discussions are over post-mortem analyses like the new report as opposed to over how to handle a still-unfolding environmental disaster. The oil spill was nowhere near “Obama’s Katrina” as many claimed it would be. But nor was it the Administration’s finest hour. The President likes to talk about teachable moment; let’s hope this was one of them — and that the White House itself learned a few things too.

In other green news:

Coast is clear: Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar gave the final sign-off to the long-delayed Cape Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts. [The Hill]

Losing their tops: West Virginia is suing the EPA and the Army Corp of Engineers to reverse tougher regulations against mountain-top mining adopted by the Obama administration. [The New York Times]

Memory like an elephant: In trying to foster comparisons of Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter, the right-wing media is choosing to ignore that George Bush, Jr, also had solar panels installed on the White House. [Media Matters]

Back burner: New research suggests that the sun’s role in global warming may have been overestimated, but still concludes the humans are responsible. [BBC]

Labels are turned: Products will now face stricter rules before they can be advertised as “environmentally friendly.” [The New York Times]

A Nepali woman cooking over a wood-fed stove.Photo courtesy ah zut via Flickr

This initiative would not only address the health issue, it would also benefit the environment, says Reuters.

Smoke from such cooking methods can lead to childhood pneumonia, lung cancer, bronchitis and cardiovascular disease while contributing to climate change through emissions of carbon dioxide and methane — two major greenhouse gases — and black carbon.

Bloomberg points out that stove pollution has been an overlooked global health issue:

Smoke from poorly ventilated cookstoves contributes to the early deaths of more than 2 million people a year, according to the U.N. Foundation. Malaria kills 1 million people a year, according to the World Health Organization, and 343,000 mothers died in 2008 in childbirth or from related complications, the British medical journal Lancet reported.

Maybe this will light a fire under world leaders and get them to take action on more global health and environmental issues. But I’m not holding my breath (unless I’m in the kitchen).

More green news:

Thank you, global warming: Here’s one upside to climate change: a drop in bubonic plague cases in the United States. [The New York Times]

Spies of the law: The FBI treated Greenpeace and PETA activists like sh*t. [ABC News]

Can it!: A new study says Americans are exposed to eight times more BPA than what is a deemed safe for humans. [The New York Times]

Thinking outside the box [store]: Walmart plans to use thin-film solar panels at 30 locations. What’s that, like, .000001 percent of all Walmarts? [Grist's Todd Woody]

The life of the Macondo oil well might be over, but life goes on for residents living with the effects of the well’s disaster.Photo courtesy Deepwater Horizon Response via Flickr

The AP reminds us that there is still oil in the water and that it’s washing onto the shore, causing problems for fishers in more than one way.

Many people are still struggling to make ends meet with some waters still closed to fishing. Shrimpers who are allowed to fish are finding it difficult to sell their catch because of the perception — largely from people outside the region — that the seafood is not safe to eat.

Like a scene from a science fiction movie, when the tide rolls in, oil is covered up by the new sediment washing onto beaches. But when that sediment heats up the oil bubbles to the surface, reports Bob Marshall for The Times-Picayune, and that bubbling crude still poses a threat for wildlife and humans.

While the most dangerous components of the oil — the volatile organic compounds — probably were weathered off long ago, what’s left still poses a mortal threat to any fish and wildlife that make contact, Overton said. And oil that was buried in sediments before being heavily weathered could still carry compounds proven to be carcinogenic to humans.

Fortunately, the Gulf was spared some of the worst-case scenarios that scientists predicted, NPR reports:

Small storms did propel some oil into Louisiana’s wetlands and onto the beaches of other Gulf states, but the big blanket didn’t come. Jane Lubchenco, who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says even though hurricane season isn’t over yet, that risk is gone.

It’s not dead yet: The New York Times reports that even though BP successfully killed its Macondo oil well, companies might still make use of the reservoir that the well was pumping from.

Experts say that there are no technical or commercial reasons why BP — or another company if BP is wary of the political or public-relations repercussions — could not eventually produce oil from the formation, which BP once estimated contained about 50 million barrels of oil. The well spewed only about one-tenth of that amount, according to government estimates.

Can BP really let sleeping crude lie? We’ll see.

More green news:

Everything old is nuke again: Turns out there’s way more uranium available than scientists thought, enough to fuel 10 times as many reactors as exist today, according to an MIT study. [Christian Science Monitor]

Glowing pains: The German government is now very big on nuclear energy as a bridge to a fossil fuel free future. Germany is so high on nukes that it’s pushing a plan to extend the life of the country’s 17 nuclear plants. Tens of thousands of Germans gathered in Berlin over the weekend to say this is a very bad idea. [AFP]

Dim wits: Here’s a glimpse of the future if Republicans win the House. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) has introduced legislation to save the energy-inefficient incandescent light bulb. Kate Sheppard has more on the GOP’s commitment to freedom of (light bulb) choice. [Mother Jones]

Set sale: Could the oceans be saved by selling them to private fishing industries? Chile might provide a case study. [Discovery]

Talking dirty [energy]: Major climate talks start this week, but don’t expect any major announcements. [AFP]

The White House says the deepwater drilling moratorium will have little impact on unemployment.Photo courtesy BP America via Flickr

Louisiana senators think the report is a bunch of crap, AP reports:

[Sen. Mary] Landrieu and fellow Louisiana Sen. David Vitter repeatedly challenged the report’s accuracy and noted that it did not address what they called a de facto moratorium on shallow-water drilling. Fewer than a dozen shallow-water drilling permits have been issued in recent months, compared with an average of 40 a month before the BP spill, they said.

The Wall Street Journal points out that in Louisiana parishes that support the most deepwater drilling, the number of jobs actually rose two months after the ban. And unemployment-insurance claims in three parishes dropped from April through August.

Most oil employers haven’t laid off highly skilled workers despite the ban and have used the moratorium to do maintenance and repairs on some of their rigs.

How about adding a few solar panels?

More green news:

Speed of super-light: A 100 MPG, super-light car, weighing less than 1000 pounds, won the $5 million X Prize that seeks to inspire designs and reward for low polluting cars. (GreenBiz)

Partners in clime no more: The EPA’s decision to phase out a program that has helped businesses create comprehensive greenhouse-gas management strategies came as a shock to industry groups. (ClimateBiz)

Light at the end of the mine shaft: The CEO of Austyralia’s BHP, the world’s largest mining concern, says his company will need to move away from coal if it wants to stay competitive. (Treehugger)

Shoots to the moon: If this global warming thing gets out of hand and we are forced to move to the moon, at least we won’t go hungry. Scientists are developing lunar greenhouses that are surprisingly close to usable. (Discovery)

Red light, green car: A new technology, called micro-hybrid, will bring the efficient stop-and-start engine found in hybrids to conventional cars, saving as much as 25 percent in fuel economy. (Yahoo! Green)

Alleycat Acres breaks ground on one of its donated lots.Photo courtesy e_pants via Flickr

To roost or roast: Chickens at the Esbhani residence in Seattle.Photo: Tyler FalkAsif and Adila Esbhani let four chickens out of their coop and watch them search for bugs down the long, narrow dirt path next to the couple’s Seattle home.

The sleek new structure represents no small feat for the Esbhanis. “We never owned a saw until we decided to build the coop. It was our first trip to the lumber store,” Adila told me on a chicken coop tour hosted recently by Seattle Tilth, a sustainable gardening education organization.

“We’ve never been on a farm. We’ve always lived in cities and we didn’t think we’d be able to [raise chickens],” Adila said. “Having fresh eggs is just amazing,” her husband added.

Down the street, Kent Brookover and his wife, Karen Lewis, showed visitors around their untamed yard, where tall grasses and flowers mingle with asparagus stalks, raised beds, a beehive, and chickens nibbling small patches of lawn grass under a large shade tree. The couple has raised chickens for four years. But unlike the Esbhanis, Brookover grew up on a farm in Kansas and worried the birds’ noise and smell would be too much. That hasn’t been the case, he was pleased to report.

Lettuce plant, please! Josh Parkinson tends to his backyard farm in West Seattle.Photo: Magic Bean FarmOver in West Seattle, Josh Parkinson tends Magic Bean Farm, which he and his significant other, Shabnam Basmani, started earlier this year — in someone else’s backyard.

That’s the irony underlying Seattle’s urban agriculture scene: the city is one of the friendliest to chicken fanciers and backyard farmers, but bottle-necked as it is by water, Seattle can be no breadbasket. Unlike in cities such as Detroit, vacant land is expensive and scarce; what there is gets quickly snatched up for parks and open spaces.  

But Parkinson is resourceful. He connects with people who have empty land using Urban Garden Share — a website started in Seattle that hooks up gardeners with unused yards or vacant lots. Through the site and word of mouth, the farm is spreading quickly, and more and more vacant lawn space is coming his way. Magic Bean Farm currently works on 10 spots totaling about a half-acre.

From this tiny network, Parkinson is feeding members for the farm’s Community Supported Agriculture program — people who pay in advance for a share of the harvest — along with the owners of the land he farms.

Now that’s magic.

Fertilizing the city farm

Technically, however, Parkinson has been working in a gray area this year. Until yesterday, it was illegal to run a commercial farm from private, non-agriculturally designated property.

Jolly giant greenness: The Magic Bean backyard farm is technically illegal, but Seattle code is about to change.Photo: Darby Minow SmithBut Seattle has been quickly working to improve the urban farming landscape in the city. This year was declared the “year of urban agriculture” by new Mayor Mike McGinn. And on August 16, the Seattle City Council approved new legislation that allows urban farmers (meaning anyone) to grow and sell food in all zones and on private property. Also, to please the more garden-variety backyard farmers, the city is increasing the number of allowed domestic fowl from three to eight — a much requested change.

“We found that [the code] was silent like many major cities. It’s just, we don’t address urban agriculture,” said Andrea Petzel, a senior urban planner with Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development who headed up the policy changes. “The whole point of zoning was to separate these kinds of uses particularly agriculture and industrial away from where people lived. And now the trend is, with places like Magic Bean Farm and Alleycat Acres, to bring agriculture into the city more. It’s completely rethinking the way cities use land.”

But as the city has been working to pass these initiatives, a groundswell of people, organizations, and businesses haven’t been waiting for official support, they’re plowing along just fine. In fact, they have been for decades.

Deep roots in urban ag

Unsurprisingly for a city that boasts an early 20th-century farmers market as one of its most popular tourist attractions, there are organizations in Seattle that have been promoting local urban food for years.

Seattle seeded its first P-Patch community garden — plots of land divided up into individual plots for gardening — in 1973, during the height of back-to-the-land fervor. The U.S. was in the middle of an energy crisis, and Boeing, the largest company in Seattle at the time, cut more than half of its 80,000 employees, leaving Seattle in a deep recession. (One famous sign announced, “Would the last person leaving Seattle … turn out the lights?”) The economic downturn combined with the social activism scene of the ’70s to jump-start programs and organizations that are still active and thriving. Today there are 73 P-Patch community gardens in Seattle, comprising more than 23 acres of the city’s precious land and feeding more than 2,000 households. (See P-Patch spotlight, below.)

A few years later, in 1978, Seattle Tilth broke through a concrete play area to construct its first garden to educate people about growing their own produce. Today, there are three community learning gardens in the city, open to the public, that demonstrate year-round vegetable gardening, soil building techniques, and composting, among other things.

And starting in 1988, the nonprofit Solid Ground has worked to provide low-income residents with access to fresh organic produce, seeds, and gardening information through its Lettuce Link program. The group encourages community gardeners to plant an extra row of organic produce to donate to food banks and other meals programs. In 2009, over 27,000 pounds of produce was donated by P-Patch community gardens across the city.

Starting from scratch

A fresh crop of creative and innovative urban-ag projects are sprouting up in the Emerald City. Earlier this year, Sean Conroe gathered up like-minded Seattleites interested in urban farming and sta
rted the nonprofit Alleycat Acres. The urban farming collective works with volunteers to turn empty donated private land into urban farms, and the produce is biked to local food banks. (Learn more in the Alleycat spotlight, next page.)

City Fruit makes sure the abundance of fruit on Seattle’s trees doesn’t go to waste. Using Google Maps, it shows where 650 fruit trees are located. Though many of the trees are on private land, you can find some trees where the fruit is up for grabs. And the group helps fruit tree owners harvest and find use for their excess. In its first year, the group harvested more than 5 tons of fruit from 100-plus households.

This year, Harvest Collective is working on an online marketplace for backyard farmers in Seattle to sell their produce. And a new landscaping company, Cascadian Edible Landscapes, is working to develop underutilized land into places that can produce food for individuals, businesses, and governments. Cascadian uses a sliding scale for fees, to make sure their services are available to broader populations.

The city is doing its best to keep up with this groundswell of people, organizations, and businesses growing food in the city while making money, feeding those in need, and finding uses for vacant, but valuable land.

“Detroit’s kind of famous right now for urban ag stuff, but they don’t have the city codes to match up with that. And that’s mostly what’s happening with other cities,” said Petzel. “Seattle is one of the first cities to really look at their codes to try to match up with what the pressure is from the community.”

Next: A closer look at the Seattle urban-ag projects P-Patch, Alleycat Acres, and Goat Hill Giving Garden >

Dear Old Spice Man,

I see you a lot on TV lately, running around with your shirt off telling me that I won’t be a man if I don’t use Old Spice Body Wash.

I hate commercials that blatantly play at gender stereotypes. But I’m not gonna lie, these ads (and your response videos) do make me chuckle. However, I’m worried that your “manly” line of products may actually make me less manly.

According to the Environmental Working Group, all but one of the 92 Old Spice products pose a moderate or high health risk to consumers, or all those men you say smell like ladies.

And one of the products in the After Hours line that you are promoting is one of your company’s worst. Ingredients in it are linked to cancer and may harm the brain, and, yes, the reproductive system. The ingredients in that product can lead to infertility, reproductive organ cancers, and birth defects. Doesn’t sound so manly to me.

To be fair, the body wash you hold up in the commercials is free of the harmful ingredients linked to cancer and reproductive toxicity, but it still contains stuff that can harm the brain, nervous, and immune system.

So I’m asking you, Old Spice Man, please make this right. Encourage Old Spice to use ingredients that keep our reproductive systems performing! In the mean time, I’m on a Crystal.

Related links:

• Grist review of green deodorants
• Ask Umbra on choosing the right deodorant [VIDEO]

——————————————————————————————————————————————–

Like what you see? Sign up to receive The Grist List, our email roundup of funny and pun-usual green news just like this, sent out every Friday.

Since KFC introduced the Double Down earlier this year, fast food chains are tripping over themselves to slap together as many of their limited menu items as possible. In the process they’re churning out some pretty disturbing food-like substances.

You can add the Grilled Cheese Burger Melt from the Friendly’s restaurant chain to the growing list of WTFood items. This monster packs 1,500 calories and 97 grams of fat, but I guess that’s what happens when you sell three sandwiches as one (at least it’s two-thirds vegetarian!).

Photo: Friendly’s

Friendly’s, KFC, and IHOP still have nothing on SNL’s “Taco Town,” but they’re getting close. No, that wasn’t a challenge.

—————————————————————————————————————————————

Like what you see? Sign up to receive The Grist List, our email roundup of pun-usual green news just like this, sent out every Friday.

The 2010 World Cup is underway! Brazil and Spain may be the favorites, but superstars Kaka and Fernando Torres won’t help their countries score on clean air and low greenhouse-gas emissions as they compete with some of the world’s environmental powerhouses in the bid for the 2010 Green Cup.

To celebrate the World Cup soccer teams whose nations are also champions of the environment, I pitted these countries against each other in the World Cup draw. I ranked the teams based on Yale’s 2010 Environmental Performance Index — instead of soccer skills — to find out which countries advance to the knockout stage and which country ultimately takes home the 2010 Green Cup.

Environmental Performance Index rankings for each nation are indicated in parentheses. A lower number indicates a better ranking.

Group A:

France (7)

Mexico (43)

South Africa (115)

Uruguay (83)

Who moves on: France and Mexico

Analysis: France dominated the group, advancing alongside a decent but unspectacular Mexico side. No chance, really, for the host country South Africa with such a low overall ecosystem vitality score. And an extremely poor biodiversity showing kept Uruguay from advancing.