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You Look Like You Just Saw a Coast

Offshore drilling bill moves forward in House Legislation that would end a 25-year ban on most offshore drilling was approved by the House Resources Committee yesterday. The bill would authorize oil and gas development farther than 50 miles offshore, unless a state acted to prohibit exploration within 100 miles of its shore; the current ban […]

Sear in the Headlights

Summer in Western U.S. is off to a hot, dry, fiery start In Western states, wildfires and heat waves are getting an early start this year — a pattern unsurprising to climate scientists, and likely to get worse. Wildfires have already burned more than 3 million acres, more than triple the average for this time […]

A Long and Windy Road

Compromise in Congress keeps Cape Wind project above water The beleaguered Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound is keeping its head above water, thanks to good old-fashioned compromise. A provision to allow the Massachusetts governor to veto the planned wind project was holding up a Coast Guard reauthorization bill in Congress; a new version of […]

Moms

Lou Bendrick -- who occasionally writes for us -- is funny. And she's got a funny piece up on Orion. It's about moms and environmentalism and how easy it is to screen it all out.

Let me cultivate my personal female mystique by disclosing that I am the environmental media and I also loathe the environmental media. Just say "photovoltaic" and my eyes start to get heavy; start in about polar bears drowning and I have to go the happy place in my head that involves ponies, chocolate, and George Clooney. Add to this the typical dose of future pessimism found in most environmental reportage (we'll soon be digging for grubs with a stone spear, you just wait and see!) and blame (that un-recycled peanut butter jar just killed a polar bear cub, damn you!), and you'll discover that I'm headed to the grocery store to see who made the worst-dressed list at the Oscars.

It's a sentiment that might annoy some hardcore Gristies, but it's obviously pretty widely shared.

(She goes on to say nice things about us, so naturally I find the article brilliant.)

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.