Articles by Glenn Hurowitz

U.S. Senate candidate Scott Kleeb and the clean energy roundup

Fresh from an overwhelming primary victory in Nebraska's U.S. Senate race, 32-year-old rancher, Yale Ph.D., and college history teacher Scott Kleeb spoke with me on the phone about his "brand of change" for a clean energy economy and the environment.

Kleeb shocked the political establishment in 2006 by getting 45 percent of the vote in Nebraska's 3rd Congressional District, one of the most Republican districts in the country. Then, as now, he ran as a clear progressive on most economic and environmental issues (while staying coy on some contentious social issues).

One of Kleeb's core concerns has been meeting the challenge of the climate crisis through a clean energy revolution on the prairie and through aggressive use of domestic and international forest and farm carbon credits. Through it all, Kleeb has been aided by a huge renewable resource of his own: megawatt good looks that won him "The Hot Rancher" award from Young Voter PAC.

Now Kleeb is hoping his unique combination of deep Nebraska roots, Ivy League cred, and movie star charm will help him overcome his opponent: President Bush's former agriculture secretary (and former Nebraska governor) Mike Johanns, who's based his career on support for Big Ag, free trade, and fossil fuels.

Q. Where do you see Nebraska's economic future, and what role do you think clean energy will play in it?

A. We've got to transform the way we produce and consume energy. There's a failure of leadership we've seen at all levels of government. We've got to figure out how to do more with less. That's true of our elected officials and true of ourselves as individuals. This is a generations-long process. We are on the cusp of it right now. Biofuels and wind energy and solar energy and algae-based energy is just the tip of the iceberg.

Nebraska's economy is going to be transformed by that revolution. Farmers will find new ways of feeding or, once we get to cellulosic ethanol, fueling the world.

Q. Recent studies have suggested that devoting American land to growing biofuels instead of food is causing massive deforestation in carbon-rich tropical forests. How can switchgrass and cellulosic ethanol be viable if it's just causing food to be grown in these highly sensitive ecosystems thousands of miles away?

Climate bills would save world’s forests

• More money for forests and wildlife conservation than has ever been available in history
• The regrowth of many of the world's forests
• Massive quantities of greenhouse gases sucked out of the air

Those are a few of the benefits of the newest versions of the climate legislation now being considered in the House and Senate. Both the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill [PDF] and Rep. Ed Markey's latest proposal [PDF] include massive financing for forest and land conservation that could save these planetary lungs.

Both bills are based on a fundamental recognition that trees suck up vast quantities of carbon dioxide and convert it into oxygen -- and that standing pristine forests and grasslands (especially tropical forests) are a tremendous storehouse of carbon that we've got to keep safely locked up in forests. Indeed, deforestation for agriculture and logging is already driving 20 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions and is the biggest single source in the developing world.

And so these bills would unleash unprecedented levels of financing to preserve great natural reserves from Big Ag, Big Timber, and land-hungry peasants.

But the ways in which they do it -- and the overall scope of the bills -- could spell very different fates for the forests and grasslands they're meant to save. The Lieberman-Warner bill would allow polluters to offset their own pollution with more than 25 percent offsets through domestic and international forest, grassland, and agricultural conservation, reforestation, and afforestation -- amounting to billions of dollars a year in financing opportunities. Polluters are likely to jump at these forestry offset opportunities: Because of the relatively low price of land and the immense quantities of carbon stored in the forests, conserving forests is generally a lot cheaper than cleaning up industrial pollution.

The Markey bill takes a different approach. In the past, there's been some skepticism that offsets from forestry could be accurately tracked. In the words of a senior adviser to Markey's global warming committee, "You can't plug a meter into a tree to see how much carbon was sucked in that day." There were also concerns in the past that it would be hard to accurately track whether a forest that was "saved" would actually have been cut down in the absence of financing or conservation action.

New website shows which shampoos, foods kill lovable primates

While doing the research for a Los Angeles Times op-ed about the dangers and prevalence of palm oil, I came across a great new website from the Rainforest Action Network. It lists hundreds of products that contain this orangutan-killer. (In case you haven't been following palm oil coverage on Grist and elsewhere, rainforests -- the homes of the orangutans and many other rare creatures -- are being destroyed at the fastest rate in history in Indonesia and Malaysia to make way for palm oil plantations, accounting for between four and eight percent of annual global greenhouse-gas emissions.)

The site, The Problem with Palm Oil, is valuable for two reasons: First, it allows folks to green their home by getting rid of climate-killers like Oreo cookies, many Entenmann's baked goods, Body Shop soap, and Kit Kats -- and replace them with the many equally affordable (and healthier) alternatives like Lever 2000 soap (ironically made by Unilever, the biggest palm oil consumer in the world). After my article was published, I received an email from Andrew Butler of Lush Cosmetics, in which he reports has "eliminated the vast majority of palm oil we use" and is "working with Friends of the Earth to gather signatures in our stores asking [Members of the European Parliament] to vote against targets to increase the use of biofuels in road transport." Every food and cosmetics product I looked at had mainstream, equally affordable (and often tastier/better) alternatives that didn't contain palm oil.

Unilever supports rainforest destruction moratorium

Greenpeace just announced a big win in its anti-palm oil campaign: just five days after launching a campaign to pressure food and cosmetics giant Unilever to stop purchasing palm oil from rainforest destroyers, Unilever met Greenpeace halfway. Apparently nervous about the prospect of orangutan-suited activists continuing to scale their corporate headquarters (see picture), the company agreed to support a legal moratorium on rainforest destruction. Given that Unilever uses five percent of the world's palm oil and chairs the so-called Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, that's big news!