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Green election news, Bush’s State of the Union speech, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: At Least He Recycles PastGen Doing the Waive The Consent of the Governator Soakin’ Up the Sunshine State John, But Not Forgotten As I Lei Dying Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Is It Really Green? LP, I Need Somebody

High fashion around the globe

It's been a few months since the Ethical Fashion Show in Paris, but I had a nice chat recently with French fashion designer Annabel Gerenthon, who debuted her fair-trade shoe label Moyi Ekolo there. Annabel was the former fashion designer at Charles Jourdan before it was sold in 2003. Now she's on her own and starting shoes from scratch.

The vegetable-tanned leather used in the collection's cute ballerina flats and boots is sourced from a social project in Namibia, which she is helping supervise. "There is very little history of footwear production in Namibia, except on the workshop level," she tells me. Annabel also adorns her collections with talismans from Madagascar and Kenya. The figures, carved from horn, bone, and wood, are representative of the traditional artisan techniques of the area.

And since we are on the topic, Julie Gilhart (senior vice president over at Barney's), who also recently came back from a trip to Namibia, helped put on a stellar Future Fashion event with Earth Pledge this past Thursday with the crème de la crème of the design world. "Many of these designers have been thinking about sustainable fabrics, but didn't know where to start," she told me. "This is all about getting the influencers to do something and getting them involved in the process."

RFK Jr. for Hillary

Noted enviro Robert Kennedy Jr. makes a campaign ad for Clinton, trying to steal back a little of the Kennedy mojo from Obama:

More bad news for coal as big banks reconsider financing

I assume you’ve all heard the good news that three huge investment banks are planning to impose stricter standards on investments in coal-fired power plants. See WSJ’s Jeffrey Ball here and here. I’d like to think this was the sheer power of green groups or the moral sensitivities of bank executives finally acting up, but […]

In Ireland, plastic bags are out of fashion

By making the unsustainable alternative a faux pas … In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts. Within weeks, plastic bag […]

Nelly, reimagined

Jenny Owen Youngs covers “It’s Getting Hot In Here,” gives it an eco-bent:

EPA moves to veto wetland-destructive Army Corps project

The U.S. EPA has moved to block an Army Corps of Engineers flood-control project in the Mississippi Delta, the first time the agency has aimed to veto a Corps project since 1990. The $220 million project would have built the world’s largest hydraulic pump, sucking dry enough wetland area to cover New York City in […]

Converting the permanent military economy to a green economy

In the 1960s, the silver-tongued leader of the Senate Republicans, Everett Dirksen, is reputed to have said, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money." According to a recent article by Chalmers Johnson, "Going Bankrupt: Why the debt crisis in now the greatest threat to the American Republic," we may have to replace Dirksen's "billion" with the Pentagon's "trillion." By Johnson's accounting, the military is now spending over $1 trillion a year.

At the same time, Bob Herbert has been arguing for a serious committment to rebuild our physical infrastructure:

The country has been hit hard by lost jobs in manufacturing and construction. As government and political leaders are scrambling for ways to stimulate the economy in the current downturn, infrastructure improvements would seem to be a natural component of any effective recovery plan ... We appear to have forgotten the lessons of history. Time and again an economic boom has followed periods of sustained infrastructure improvement.

The way I see it, we need to understand three things: the nature of the military budget, the needs of the current infrastructure, and how infrastructure renewal could be used to create a green economy.

Jack Johnson’s new album is solar-powered

Grist has been all over Jack Johnson’s greenness (if you know what we mean …) for a while now, but this weekend, the Gray Lady got hip to him too. The laid-back surfer-songwriter’s upcoming album, Sleep Through the Static, drops tomorrow — straight from the all-solar studio where he recorded it. CNN takes a tour […]

Umbra on vinyl records

Umbra, I know that PVC is bad, and vinyl records are PVC (right?), but is there any harm in keeping the records I already have, or should I get rid of them? And if so, what’s the best way to do so? I’ve recently been trying to phase out any “bad” plastics, including anything that […]