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Amazon encourages its customers to buy green

Ah, Earth Day. What could be a better way to celebrate our planet than buying more stuff and then having it shipped halfway across the country?

Regardless of what you may think of the online behemoth, Amazon.com should get some credit for prominently promoting its Earth Day store on its home page for the last week. And if their customers are going to buy things, it might as well be green things, right?

In their "10 Ways You Can Help the Environment" they suggest buying CFLs (of course), a bike, a programmable digital tire gauge (for better fuel efficiency), a battery recharger and rechargeable batteries, and the must-have for every eco-shopper: a canvas bag. There's more, but no where near as comprehensive as the Grist store (powered by, ahem, Amazon.com), where your favorite online environmental news site earns a percentage of every purchase.

Amazon has also begun tagging some of their blog posts with "Green Life" and "Healthnut" and have been writing about Grist's Earth Day dinners article, CFLs (again), green PCs, and organic chocolate. And Doug informs us that for each purchase of An Inconvenient Truth on Earth Day, one school in the U.S. or Canada will get a copy donated. (But will they be able to watch it?)

But if you really want to be green and buy a DVD, check out Amazon's Unbox Video Download service, which allows you to buy or rent from a large assortment of movies and TV shows, and watch them on your computer (legally), including: An Inconvenient Truth, Who Killed the Electric Car? and Fast Food Nation.

ADM gets its filthy paws on an immaculate confection

Earlier today, Trina Stout brought to our attention a food crime in progress: the FDA is quietly preparing to let manufacturers adulterate chocolate by replacing cocoa butter with cheap vegetable oil. This will allow them to cut costs on candy bars and use cocoa butter for more valuable purposes — thus undermining the quality of […]

Students ask candidates the tough questions

Starting this weekend, students across the country will begin accosting politely approaching presidential candidates and asking them to share their plans on global warming. The effort is part of a new national campaign called "What’s Your Plan?" by The Student PIRGs and a coalition of other eco-groups. Their hope is that by trailing the candidates […]

An expedition to see critters and talk freshwater

Mary Pearl is the president of Wildlife Trust, cofounder of its Consortium for Conservation Medicine, and an adjunct research scientist at Columbia University. Over the next week, she'll be traveling in the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador with a boat full of scientists, conservationists, and business leaders to forge partnerships and develop solutions to the global freshwater crisis. This is the first of her dispatches from the journey.

Claudio Padua and I hatched a crazy idea last year, and at this moment we are living with the consequences. Claudio directs research at Brazil's Institute for Ecological Research (IPE), and I run the organization Wildlife Trust, which is based in New York. Together, we coordinate an entity known as the Wildlife Trust Alliance. The alliance is an egalitarian network of leading research-based conservation organizations around the world. The 14 independent groups each set their own strategies and annual conservation research and action agendas, and come together annually to identify problems we can address as a team, exchange experiences, and make plans for all kinds of collaborations.

After last year's meeting, Claudio and I decided to bring together members of the Wildlife Trust Alliance and a group of international business leaders to build partnerships between researchers and conservationists and those who can provide advice and support to help them succeed.

Here’s what we have to accomplish

((brightlines_include))

The supply-side solution developed in the Bright Lines exercise, drawing on Bill Hare's Greenpeace International paper "Climate Protection: The Carbon Logic" (PDF), won little support from first readers. It is included in this proposal as a concept to be explored because no other solution could be determined to meet the dictates of the climate timeframe -- and the strong responses it provokes are evidence of its strong narrative value.

A supply-side response -- imposing a cap on extractions in 2015 with 10 percent reductions at 5 year intervals until emissions are stabilized at pre-industrial levels, as shown in the accompanying chart, for example -- is the ideal climate policy. A cap and phase-down would set clear market parameters for fossil fuels phase-out and establish future economies of scale for renewables and efficiencies, encouraging early investment and driving innovation. Capping extractions would, in effect, move forward the global response to exhaustion of oil and gas reserves, a great challenge even if climate change were not a problem.

Mitt Romney (R) endorses Hitler’s energy policy!!1!

New York Sun has the details. (h/t: Wolcott)

Using earth to save the earth

(Part of the No Sweat Solutions series.)

In my last post on material intensity, I mentioned green building as an example of how to indirectly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, before building one wind turbine or making one factory more efficient. Because green building is more familiar than most types of material intensity reduction, I'll use it for my first examples.

After all, building construction worldwide uses about 40% of mineral and metal products, and 25% of forest products*. And we have experts in green building on this blog who can comment on the examples that follow.

Let's start with "super-block" or "super-adobe" construction, invented by Nader Khalili, California architect/author and founder of the Hesperia, California-based Cal Earth Institute. It is similar to rammed earth: Wet soil under pressure (mixed with a little cement) turns into a sturdy and long-lasting building material. Khalili's innovation is to pump the soil into bags that are continuous coils and bind them with barbed wire.

Willy Wonka would be pissed

The FDA is thinking about allowing Big Chocolate to pass off waxy imitations as the real deal:

Photos and voices from Step It Up 2007 rallies across the U.S.

As promised, albeit a few days late, we've published an audio slideshow of Step It Up Seattle, which also includes some photos from other Step It Up events from around the country. For post Step It Up 2007 action, check out the national website.

Grist would like to produce more multimedia content in the future, so please let us know what you think in comments.

Some of the funniest stuff I’ve seen in a long time

Remember that wacky Federal Way, Wash. father who opposed showing An Inconvenient Truth in public schools? ("Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore!") Well, he's back, and on the Daily Show: