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Pollan weighs in

Michael Pollan thinks so. Let's hope he's right. Call your Senators and Representatives to make sure.

The lost art of conversation

I passed a big rabble of bikers on my way to downtown Seattle yesterday evening. Several complimented my bike as I passed. There were a couple of talls in the mix. I assumed it was another Critical Mass ride, but maybe not. Sure looked like fun. I need to participate in one of those someday.

I periodically attend a monthly gathering of Seattle atheists. There are always new faces, and they pick a different restaurant every month for variety's sake. We chatted about things like global warming, the recent shootings in Virginia, diesel verses hybrid cars and, of course, the American propensity for religiosity.

Once a year, the press notices that politics is bad for the environment

Almost too easy:

[S]urrounded by boxes of energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs [Pelosi] wants to install in 12,000 desk lamps, she became conspicuously vague when asked about the pair of towering smokestacks four blocks away.

Congress runs the Capitol Power Plant, which heats and cools buildings on the Hill. Two senators ensure it burns coal, one of the dirtiest fossil fuels.

Wouldn’t it be great if Beijing did pull off a green Olympics?

Along with some guy named Al Gore, Olympics chief Jacques Rogge has been honored with an award by the United Nations for being an environmental enforcer. Good on ya, Jacques! (Perhaps he was behind the fancy sewer heating system in Vancouver?) The next Olympics hurtling our way is Beijing 2008, and apparently the International Olympic […]

Check your local listings

All the magazines have gone to press with what's become their annual Green Issue. And now TV is in on the act.

MTV has a special Earth Day edition of Pimp My Ride: they take a '65 Impala, put in a 800 hp diesel engine, fill the tank with biodiesel, and race it against a Lamborghini. My money is on the Impala. Cameo by Governor Schwarzenegger, check local listings (April 22). While this isn't exactly a recipe for sustainability, that's not really the point, either. Everyone should work to their strengths, and if MTV can make it sexy to get the kids involved, all the better.

PBS is airing a NOVA special titled "Saved by the Sun," which asks the provocative question: "Is it time to take solar seriously?" Yes, is the answer. It features a hero of mine, Steven Strong of Solar Design Associates, who built the first solar powered neighborhood in 1984, put what was then the world's largest solar system on the roof of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and is now designing a solar system for the SF Giants baseball stadium. He has been doing this longer and better than anyone else in the business and fully deserves his day in the sun. Ahem. April 24, generally 8 PM on your local PBS station, check local listings.

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.