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Good Bite, and Good Luck

Grist taking a little Thanksgiving break We Gristers are taking a few days off to stuff ourselves silly and give thanks for our many devoted readers. Happy Thanksgiving! See you on Monday.

Chelsea Glintin’

Green amenities catching on in new housing complexes In Chelsea, Mass., new condos in the Forbes Park development come with access to a fleet of DaimlerChrysler Smart cars — two-seater mini-mobiles that get great mileage. Every unit at Buzz, a Dallas loft project, will include an eGo electric moped. They’re more useful than the traditional […]

At Least He Can Pronounce “Nuclear”

Blair softens on mandatory emissions targets and warms to nuclear power British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s shifting approach to climate change has environmentalists in a stormy mood. Earlier this fall, he hinted publicly that he was cooling his support for extending the Kyoto Protocol’s mandatory greenhouse-gas reduction targets beyond the treaty’s conclusion in 2012. Now […]

Is There a Procter in the House?

Experts say true eco-transformation of big business is under way Big business is going green … hey, where you going? No, we mean it this time! Old-guard financial-services firm Goldman Sachs Group just announced new policies to promote forest and climate protection, and intends to invest $1 billion in alternative-energy projects. Procter & Gamble, seeking […]

Corn-based packaging not as green as it looks

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a memorable piece on its front business page about corn overproduction in Iowa. Entitled "Mountains of Corn and a Sea of Farm Subsidies," the piece featured a photo of a monstrous pile of corn outside of a stuffed-to-capacity grain elevator, "soaring more than 60 feet high and spreading a football field wide," the text informs us.

(Shame on me for not writing about this at the time; the piece has since gone premium.)

One ingenious entrepreneur has even rushed out with "Ski Iowa" t-shirts, the article reports -- a funny echo of the "Ski Iraq" t-shirt that transfixed the character Billy on Six Feet Under in its final season.

Seems that farmers once again produced way too much corn in 2005, cranking it out faster than the likes of Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill can transform it into industrial-food filler, high-fructose corn sweetener, and ethanol. Say what you want about it, but input-heavy, energy-intensive, subsidy-dependent agriculture has certainly proven it can crank out a whole bunch of grain.

I got to thinking about that mountain of unwanted corn when I read another page-one story from the Times' business page, this one on growing corporate/investor interest in "green" technology.

Wal-Mart’s eco-announcements generate a clash among activists

The mother ship. Photo: Wal-Mart. It was easy for Wal-Mart’s critics to laugh this past spring when CEO Lee Scott proudly announced that he drove a Lexus hybrid. For Scott to expect praise for his consumer choices given the abysmal record of his massive company — which has repeatedly violated the Clean Water Act while […]

Further Down the Drain

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation wants to bet up to $1 billion of your tax dollars that its latest proposals to carry toxic waste waters away from the nation's largest federal irrigation project will not result in another ecological disaster like the selenium poisoning of the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge more than 20 years ago.

The Bureau is putting the final touches on an environmental impact statement (EIS) due Feb. 1, 2006 in which it will announce support for one of three possible drainage solutions: Delta Disposal, Central Coast disposal, or building drainage treatment facilities and evaporation ponds within the San Joaquin Valley with varying levels of land retirement.

Opponents say the Bureau's science is flawed, threatens fisheries and birds, and that construction and operation costs are likely to become astronomical for keeping just a few hundred growers in business irrigating a desert.

Schweitzer and coal-to-fuel conversion

I confess I'm not quite sure what to make of Montana governor Brian Schweitzer's grand scheme to make the U.S. energy independent with coal-to-fuel conversion. The NYT makes only passing reference to the pollution generated -- "what is new is the technology that removes and stores the pollutants during and after the making of synthetic fuel" -- and Schweitzer seems slightly too pat about the consequences of mining the coal:

Mr. Schweitzer said the mining could be done in a way that restored the land afterward. "I call it deep farming," he said. "You take away the top eight inches of soil, remove the seam of coal, and then put the topsoil back in."

Yes, because farming has been so kind to the Western prairie ...

Naturally, my environmental spidey-sense tingles at this sort of stuff. Will the mining really be done carefully? Will restoration really be a priority? Are the pollutants really "removed and stored" safely? I know very little about the process, technically speaking, and would love to be enlightened by an educated reader. But methinks when it comes to energy extraction in the West, an enormous dose of skepticism is warranted.

Still.

Umbra on composting toilets, again

Dear Umbra, I’m attempting to “green” my home, room by room. I’ve heard of low-flow toilets, but someone just told me about composting toilets. Do they smell bad? Will my grandmother use it or ask for an outhouse? Thanks for your wisdom! MoiraProvidence, R.I. Dearest Moira, Excellent, manageable room-by-room plan. What in tarnation?! Composting toilets […]

When Turkeys Attack

Wild-turkey comeback means more human-critter confrontations As Thanksgiving approaches, we offer this warning: The turkeys are back, and they’re not happy. From its nadir of perhaps 30,000 around 1900, the U.S. wild-turkey population has gobbled all the way up to about 7 million today. But this conservation success story has sharply increased confrontations between territorial […]