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Do you know where your candidates stand on climate change?

With growing numbers of scientists declaring that the global climate crisis is approaching a point of no return, there is a huge and bewildering disconnect between our physical world and our political environment. Our government’s response to the prospect of runaway climate impacts is one of paralysis. The negligence of the Bush administration is understandable. […]

File under: WTF

Did you know you can now get organic food on Amazon.com?

Investors see green in buildings

Contrary to popular belief, most developers don't bulldoze Bambi solely to satisfy their innate avarice. Instead, they pave the Earth at the bidding of their clients -- by which I mean lenders and investors, not homebuyers, office tenants, or other such "end users." Regardless of how exciting and cool a development proposal is, it just won't happen if some faceless banker doesn't advance a big pile of cash.

As rapacious national banks swallow smaller, local competitors by the dozen, these lending decisions have increasingly fallen to bankers blindly applying generic guidelines. The result: a paint-by-numbers landscape of interchangeable (but financially safe) subdivisions, strip malls, and office parks. Any developer who dared to innovate would have to do so on his own dime -- and sure enough, many pioneering examples of New Urbanism have been backed by "nontraditional" investors like old-money families, large corporations (like Microsoft, Disney, EDS, and Ebsco), and even charitable foundations. Despite growing interest in socially responsible investing, few investors have thought of how to clean up the picture in the building industry -- source of, say some, half of America's greenhouse gas emissions.

NY Times headlines Chicago as “green business”

This Sunday, The New York Times ran a package of Business articles focused on "The Business of Green." (If previous packages are any indication, the links will remain active longer than the standard week.)

Hearteningly for this Second City resident, Keith Schneider's banner headline -- To Revitalize a City, Try Spreading Some Mulch -- spotlights Mayor Richard M. Daley's efforts to improve the city's quality of life through greening initiatives. While many local wags have ridiculed the Daley as a mere gardener, the article calls new street trees and spiffy parks an "economic development strategy" central to the city's general economic resurgence:

Show me the monkey

An AP article titled "Leaders Want Biodiversity Pay Off" tells us about a five-day conference put together by Conservation International where more than 400 delegates will kick around ideas for using their rich biodiversity to boost local economies. Until the advent of carbon trading, the only real option for doing that was ecotourism. The two ideas can now be combined and may one day prove to be a powerful combination. Forest that is locked away in a legally binding contract to soak up carbon for a century or so may as well be used as an ecotourism destination.

Good things are happening. The president of Madagascar intends to add 23,000 square miles of protected territory by 2008. Equatorial Guinea announced plans to create 1.2 million acres of new national forest along with a $15 million conservation trust fund to manage it. Jumping on the bandwagon, the president of Liberia announced that she is going to create a $30 million conservation trust fund to finance the creation and maintenance of new protected areas as well.

[update]Following is the text of an e-mail I just received. Here you go, Alphonse and good luck:

I was delighted to see your post on Grist Mill titled "Show Me The Monkey" about the Conservation International Global Symposium titled Defying Nature's End: The African Context. I am currently at that event which looks likely to produce a substantive "compact" on how to tie conservation to economic and human development. We are posting news from the conference hourly on the symposium's website http://symposium2006.conservation.org/ and are providing information for the public on our own home page http://www.conservation.org/ It would be wonderful if you could add these links to your article Thanks Alphonse Alphonse L. MacDonald Senior Director Online Communications Conservation International

How do we reduce long-distance shipping?

Random factoid from a recent New Yorker article (not online, unfortunately) on, among other topics, the international shipping business:

For a pair of shoes made in China and sold in this country for fifty dollars, only about seventy-five cents of the retail cost derives from transportation. And the main costs in international shipping come from friction in the pipeline, particularly at the points of ship loading and unloading. [Emphasis added.]

Wow: shipping shoes all the way across the Pacific accounts for well under 2 percent of their retail price. And most of the transportation costs cover things other than fuel: labor, capital, financing, etc.

So for finished goods shipped over long distances, the fuel costs of transportation are probably not much more than a rounding error.

The big-box plot thickens

Was watching TV last night, and half paying attention during the commercials, when I heard something like this: "High gas prices got you down? Do all your shopping in one place: Wal-Mart."

Oh, Wal-Mart. What to make of your ongoing evolution? Way back when, you were an in-town store. Then you became the hated icon of big-box suburbia, and a huge contributor to people driving more as part of their daily routines. Now you're twisting the driving thing to make it seem like a benefit -- but at the same time, you're sending a subtle message to conserve! Which can't be a coincidence, considering the shift to selling organics and such! Is it time to return to your roots, open a few downtown locations, experiment with the notion of community again? Stranger things have happened.

Oceana names names as part of seafood contamination campaign

Along with your omegas, you've been getting a dose of mercury in some of your seafood. In fact, the amount of mercury in some seafood has risen to dangerously high levels, putting children at risk for neurological problems. In an effort to combat the growing number of contamination cases, the Food and Drug Administration issued an advisory in 2004 warning women of child-bearing age and children to avoid certain types of fish and limit their consumption of albacore tuna, for example, to six ounces a week. That's about one sandwich. Grist readers undoubtedly know this, but what about those that don't check the FDA website on a daily basis?

Oceana has been pressuring supermarkets for nearly a year to post this warning at their seafood counters. Yesterday, we held press conferences in eight cities across the nation, revealing which supermarkets are stepping up to the plate and outing supermarkets that aren't. On Monday, I got word that Whole Foods joined Safeway, Dominicks, Carrs, Genuardi's, Tom Thumb, Vons, Wild Oats and some others as members of the Green List by agreeing to post the signs.

Check out our new website to see if your store is on the "Green" list or the "Red."

A proposed gold mine in Chile and Argentina has emails flying

Last week, Chile’s government green-lighted a controversial mining project known as Pascua-Lama. If the name rings a bell, odds are a chain email has found its way to your inbox, an appeal to “friends who care about our earth.” Activists hoped Chile’s new president, Michelle Bachelet, would stop the mine. Photo: Queen/ WireImage.com. The far-reaching […]

Don’t Hook Now

Senate passes bill to strengthen fisheries oversight The Senate passed a bill this week that would ramp up fisheries oversight, require annual catch limits, develop a uniform environmental review for fisheries management plans, and boost the role of scientific advisory committees. The legislation, passed unanimously, renews and improves the 30-year-old Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management […]