Tagged: General

With Love, From Bali

From the article, “Al Gore lays blame for Bali stalemate on U.S.“:

Nobel Laureate and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore speaks at the side event of the UN Climate Change Conference 2007 in Nusa Dua, on Bali island, December 13, 2007. The European Union threatened on Thursday to boycott U.S. talks among top greenhouse gas emitting nations, accusing Washington of blocking goals for fighting climate change at U.N. talks in Bali. (Supri/Reuters)“I am going to speak an inconvenient truth,” Gore told an audience of several hundred, playing on the name of his Oscar-winning documentary.

And in low tones he added: “My own country the United States is principally responsible for obstructing progress in Bali,” spurring rapturous applause and cheers.

Arriving fresh from Oslo, where he had collected the Nobel Peace Prize, Gore urged governments to forge a “new path” towards a global climate change agreement in spite of what he described as an obstructive United States.

“I don’t know how you can navigate around this enormous elephant in the room which I’ve been undiplomatic enough to name. But I’m asking you to do it,” he said.

Way to go Al, kick our asses!

Junk Mail Begone!

A friend of mine sent me an email regarding a site called GREENDIMES, which is the Internet face of a company focused on helping the environment by reducing junk mail. Essentially, they provide a service for a small fee that “reduces the credit card offers, insurance offers, sweepstakes offers, coupon mailers, charitable solicitations and retail catalogs that your household receives.” I signed up and will try to remember in about eight weeks to update readers on whether or not it seems to be working.

The schtick works like this: GREENDIMES registers and maintains the names of people in your household (and variations of names) on the Direct Marketing Association members’ mailing lists – all 3,600 of them! In addition, the company plants ten tree for every kit they sell. Not to shabby. I don’t know if there’s any sort of independent audit that verifies the tree planting but the company’s partnered with some large organizations in this effort. So, either there’s collusion or the trees are being planted. I’m optimistic.

I hope to find other inspiring business ideas like this in the future. I couldn’t find whether the company is a nonprofit, but either way, it’s a perfect example of successful social entrepreneurship, the latter half of which is not a foreign calling for much of the company’s board and staff.

Freedom Trains

We have much to learn from those red America disdains in George Bush’s war on terror. The French (ah!) have just tested the fastest train . . . ever. In a test conducted today, the latest French TGV train hit 574.8 kmh. For those of you who don’t know, the TGV stands for Traine a Grande Vitesse, which means “train of big fastness” in Alabama, and “very fast train” most everywhere else. The entire point this post is to bring attention to the fact that travel in this country is structured and encouraged to grow in an inherently bad way.

Politicians battle for highway funds and cities want airports with the highest number of take offs and landings. All the while, much of the rest of the developed world designs brilliant public transportation systems that reduce the need for two of the most polluting forms of transit on earth, automobiles and airplanes. I’m all for Richard Branson’s super jet fuel but I’m not holding my breath.

The article that brought my attention to this development does include a ray of hope for the United States: ‘”Not only are you French people lucky to have the high speed train system, but it also impacts the environment in a positive way,” said Fabian Nunez, speaker of the California state assembly, which is looking into a possible link between San Francisco and Los Angeles.’

Woo hoo! Can you imagine . . . a new America with TGV-equivalent trains efficiently carrying people from city to city on America’s coasts and throughout the heartland? I can. The day won’t come soon but I think it will happen. Air travel will always be a significant part of transportation system but small to medium length travel should be supplemented by efficient, environmentally-friendly, and cost-effective rail travel.

Just think, with every ticket purchased, a coupon for free French fries!

Ethical Man’s Top Ten Tips for Ethical Living

Our friends across the Atlantic bring us this very interesting and action-oriented article about reducing one’s carbon footprint. The author, Justin Rowlatt, and his family went “green” for an entire year and the results are going to be discussed on BBC’s One’s Panorama. The ten tips are:

1. Give Up Your Car
2. Insulate Your Home
3. Move the Electricity Meter from Under the Stairs
4. Start Composting
5. Eat More Veggies
6. Eat Less Meat
7. Use Washable Nappies (diapers)
8. Buy Energy-Saving Light Bulbs
9. Try to Fly Less
10. Turn Off the Taps

The article contains more information on each of the option but being vegetarian, I always like to point out the astonishing amount of energy farming animals use. According to the article, in England, cars produce 11% of country’s carbon emissions. Globally, farming animals produce 18% of the world’s carbon emissions.

You Are What You Eat

Kelly Freston published a phenomenal piece on HuffingtonPost.com a few weeks back but I just got a hold of it the other day from my friends over at Alternet.org. The article is called, Vegetarian is the New Prius, and makes the environmental case for vegetarianism.

Some people just don’t get a damn if animals are killed to make food or the seats in their car. I know some very liberal, pro-environment, well-informed people who refuse to acknowledge that eating meat is ethically horrible. And people will debate for decades whether eating meat is morally wrong. It’s like debating the existence of god. Some people know s/he exists and other know s/he doesn’t. You’re really not going to convert anyone using arguments about salvation or faith, just like you’re not going to convince anyone that eating meat is bad when they don’t care if animals suffer. BUT, if they care about the environment and are sensible people some of the facts from Freston’s article have to resonate:

  • Last month, the United Nations published a report on livestock and the environment with a stunning conclusion: “The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” It turns out that raising animals for food is a primary cause of land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, and not least of all, global warming. 
  • The U.N. report says almost a fifth of global warming emissions come from livestock (i.e., those chickens Hoover was talking about, plus pigs, cattle, and others)–that’s more emissions than from all of the world’s transportation combined.
  • Last year researchers at the University of Chicago took the Prius down a peg when they turned their attention to another gas guzzling consumer purchase. They noted that feeding animals for meat, dairy, and egg production requires growing some ten times as much crops as we’d need if we just ate pasta primavera, faux chicken nuggets, and other plant foods.
  • On top of that, we have to transport the animals to slaughterhouses, slaughter them, refrigerate their carcasses, and distribute their flesh all across the country. Producing a calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times as much fossil fuels–and spewing more than ten times as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide–as does a calorie of plant protein.
  • The researchers found that, when it’s all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius.

Preston continues spewing out fact after fact:

  • According to the UN report, it gets even worse when we include the vast quantities of land needed to give us our steak and pork chops. Animal agriculture takes up an incredible 70% of all agricultural land, and 30% of the total land surface of the planet. As a result, farmed animals are probably the biggest cause of slashing and burning the world’s forests.
  • Today, 70% of former Amazon rainforest is used for pastureland, and feed crops cover much of the remainder. These forests serve as “sinks,” absorbing carbon dioxide from the air, and burning these forests releases all the stored carbon dioxide, quantities that exceed by far the fossil fuel emission of animal agriculture.

Ahhhhhhhhh, unbelievable! Our ignorance as a people is indescribable. I understand things can’t change over night but things must change more quickly. We are committing slow, deliberate suicide. The rich (that includes everyone with the ability to read this post) have enough medicine to make the pain go away. The poor continue to suffer.

Fishy Practices

As we all know, fishermen are a little trigger happy with the ol’ reel. Now, the companies who drive demand, and itchy trigger fingers, are doing something about it. This article by Marc Gunther discusses the problem of over fishing and what companies like Wal-Mart, Whole Foods and Disney aim to do to lessen the damage over fishing does to our oceans.

What’s the problem? Well, to put it bluntly, “a study published last fall in the journal, Science, warned of a “global collapse” of all wild seafood by mid-century if fishing continues at its current pace.” I’m sure someone will come up with a positive way to interpret that but for practical people, there’s only one response – stop fishing so freakin’ much.

Michael Boots and Stephanie Faison of the Seafood Choices Alliance:

work with companies including retailers Wal-Mart and Whole Foods Market, theme park operator Walt Disney and distributor Sysco, as well as fishermen and fish farmers, to promote seafood consumption in ways that will protect catch for the future. “We’re trying to build a market for a greener seafood industry,” Boots said.

I’m not naive enough to think people are going to stop eating meat any time soon but I’m sure if the oceans were left alone population of species would take care of itself.

The good news is corporate responsibility seems to be on the rise. According to the article:

Historically, commercial fisherman and ecologists fought over fishing regulations, but they now frequently cooperate. The Nature Conservancy, best known for acquiring land to save it from development, recently purchased trawling permits from fisherman in central California, to protect the habitat of Moro Bay. Several years ago, McDonald’s brought in Conservation International, a nonprofit committed to protecting biodiversity, to assess fishing practices in its supply chain.

The pessimist in me wonders why McDonald’s doesn’t take more responsibility for its practices regarding livestock and deforestation but I guess I can’t have my cake and eat it too. Any progress is positive, and protecting our oceans has been a long ignored corporate responsibility. For decades we’ve strived for clear blue skies, often at the expense of clear blue water. Hopefully, the tides are turning.

There’s That Shrimp!

So I dropped this hitchhiking shrimp off at a gas station a few years (50 million) ago and he hasn’t been heard from since. Damn cops hassled me something awful too. Well, they found him. A six-year census of the ocean conducted by the Sloan Foundation was culminated with a report released on December 10, 2006. According to this article, here are some of the juicy tidbits from the study.

  • “Shrimp, clams and mussels living near the super-hot thermal vent in the Atlantic, where they face pulses of water that is near-boiling despite shooting into the frigid sea. 
  • In the sea surrounding the Antarctic, a community of marine life shrouded in darkness beneath more than 1,600 feet of ice. Sampling of this remote ocean yielded more new species than familiar ones. 
  • Off the coast of New Jersey, 20 million fish swarming in a school the size of Manhattan. 
  • Finding alive and well, in the Coral Sea, the type of shrimp called Neoglyphea neocaledonica, thought to have disappeared millions of years ago. Researchers nicknamed it the Jurassic shrimp. 
  • Satellite tracking of tagged sooty shearwaters, small birds, that mapped the birds’ 43,500-mile search for food in a giant figure eight over the Pacific Ocean, from New Zealand via Polynesia to foraging grounds in Japan, Alaska and California and then back. The birds averaged a surprising 217 miles daily. In some cases, a breeding pair made the entire journey together. 
  • A new find: a 4-pound rock lobster discovered off Madagascar. 
  • A single-cell creature big enough to see, in the Nazare Canyon off Portugal. The fragile new species was found 14,000 feet deep. It is enclosed within a plate-like shell, four-tenths of an inch in diameter, composed of mineral grains. 
  • A new type of crab with a furry appearance, near Easter Island. It was so unusual it warranted a whole new family designation, Kiwaidae, named for Kiwa, the Polynesian goddess of shellfish. Its furry appearance justified its species name, hirsuta, meaning hairy.”

Good stuff. Let’s keep polluting!

Super Sponge!

I know, I know. The most exciting title for any post I’ve ever written. Please, settle down.

According to an article in Fortune Small Business the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has “has ordered that all towns with populations of more than 10,000 must stop grease- and oil-contaminated storm water from running into lakes, rivers, and other waterways by 2008.” I’m surprise Bush let them make this mandate. His advisors must have proved that there was no causal link whatsoever to that global warming thing.

To clean the water, cities are turning to sponges. Mmmm. The sponges are “made from the same plastics found in automotive dashboards and sneakers, can be molded to fit any catch basin, drain or pipe. It absorbs oils, PCBs and other toxins while allowing water to pass through.”

My dream is to have a giant one put in the Mississippi River just north of every major city so that by the time the water flows past the city it’s much cleaner than it currently is. That would be schweeeeeet!

The company that makes the sponge, AbTech, is debuting a new version in January. Their current sponge, the Smart Sponge, “has killed about 75 percent of those types of bacteria and costs about one-tenth the price of systems currently used to clean up polluted water. (Most cities either route contaminated seawater through a filtration plant or set up large lamps along the beach, which destroy bacteria by shining ultraviolet rays into the water.)”

AbTech CEO CEO Glenn Rink launched the company in 2000. ‘A former executive at an agricultural products company, Rink says he drew his early inspiration from a 1996 oil spill off the coast of Puerto Rico. “I watched government crews swabbing fish and rocks with what looked like paper towels,” says Rink, now 46. “I figured there had to be a better way.”‘

This is the kind of innovative thinking that gets me hot, and we need more of it. Right now. I challenge every American to create his or her own “Smart Sponge”.

The Killing Has Already Begun

Based on a recent review of 866 different scientific studies published in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics by University of Texas biologist Camille Parmesan, dozens of species have already done extinct due to global warming. And hundreds more are in deep piles of figurative mud made from dirt and water from melted icebergs.

According to this article published on CNN.com:

At least 70 species of frogs, mostly mountain-dwellers that had nowhere to go to escape the creeping heat, have gone extinct because of climate change, the analysis says. It also reports that between 100 and 200 other cold-dependent animal species, such as penguins and polar bears are in deep trouble.

The scariest revelation from Parmesan’s summary is that the effects of global warming are being felt much faster than predicted only a few years ago.

Just five years ago biologists, though not complacent, figured the harmful biological effects of global warming were much farther down the road, said Douglas Futuyma, professor of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. “I feel as though we are staring crisis in the face,” Futuyma said. “It’s not just down the road somewhere. It is just hurtling toward us. Anyone who is 10 years old right now is going to be facing a very different and frightening world by the time that they are 50 or 60.”

The most severe change effecting species is the earlier spring being experienced in many climates.

The most noticeable changes in plants and animals have to do with earlier springs, Parmesan said. The best example can be seen in earlier cherry blossoms and grape harvests and in 65 British bird species that in general are laying their first eggs nearly nine days earlier than 35 years ago.

Nine days may not seem like a lot but the impact is quite dramatic.

Parmesan said she worries most about the cold-adapted species, such as emperor penguins that have dropped from 300 breeding pairs to just nine in the western Antarctic Peninsula, or polar bears, which are dropping in numbers and weight in the Arctic.

What should be taken from the article is this: global warming in undeniable and the effects are dramatic. Why wait to see who’s right about the timing of such ill effects? Let’s band together and curtail waste, promote sustainability and become one with our environment instead of raping it or turning it into a political bargaining chip. Anyone?