For a movie that explicitly addresses the perils of overconsumption, Pixar’s WALL*E is being used to promote an awful lot of consumer products.

One tie-in in particular is rankling Greenpeace. It seems that the lovable robot’s image has popped up on boxes of Kleenex, a product the activist group has criticized with a “Kleercut” campaign that asserts, “it takes 90 years to grow a box of Kleenex” because the product’s manufacturer Kimberly-Clark “all but refuses to use recycled paper in its products.” (Among other things, they’re trying to get parents and teachers to reject the company’s tissues in classrooms.)

Seeing a wealth of irony (or, as the activist group puts it, “Iron*E”) in the promotion, Greenpeace commissioned political cartoonist Mark Fiore to make his own cartoon parable. The result falls far short of Pixar quality in terms of wit and charm, but it gets the message across: The cute ‘bot meets a new character named Kleer*E, whose chainsaw arms and ferocious jaws are used to turn forests into tissue boxes; his theme song offers bits of hyperbole like “You blow your snotty nose, another tree goes down…”

Requests for comment from Kimberly-Clark went unanswered. At the FAQ on the Kleenex site, the company defends itself by insisting, “Virgin fiber is used in our tissue because it provides the superior softness consumers expect from a premium facial tissue product such as Kleenex® facial tissue.” At the corporate web site, a large Sustainability Report plays up the introduction of a “Naturals” line of products (some of which is carried by Wal-Mart at last check) including facial tissues with 20% recycled fiber, bathroom tissue with 40%, and paper towels with 80%.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Mitsubishi Electric announced Wednesday that it will quadruple its capability to produce solar cells, jumping from the 150 megawatts it currently produces each year to an annual 600MW capacity by 2012 — a more ambitious goal than its previously stated one to get to 500 MW by 2013. Current production levels are already triple what they were four years ago.

Citing a “sharp increase in demand for solar power generation systems,” the company (which opened its first PV plant in 1998) said it will build a new plant in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture — one with photovoltaic systems on the roof, naturally — with around 24,000 square meters of floor space.

If the company’s forecast of global demand for PV systems holds true, Mitsubishi will be well placed to supply a larger percentage of solar cells than it does now: A press release forecasts demand growing by less than a factor of three (from 1,950 MW to 4,430) in the same period its own capacity quadruples.

Of course, Mitsubishi — which also manufactures residential inverters for use with the solar cells — isn’t the only company hoping to get a piece of that pie. And increased supply from a variety of manufacturers (along with a greater number of solar design/installation companies entering the field) will almost surely bring prices down for businesses and homeowners wanting to harvest energy from the sun.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Residents of the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area will again get a chance to trade in their pollution-emitting old clunker for a newer, less polluting car with the help of state money.

The North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) reports that it has about $12 million for the second year of the AirCheckTexas Drive a Clean Machine campaign, which began taking applications in mid-August. “On-road emissions are the biggest cause of air pollution in the North Texas region,” says NCTCOG spokesperson Lara Kohl. “That’s the whole point of our program — to get those cars off the road that are causing the majority of pollution.”

North Texas residents with cars 10 years or older and who meet the net income requirements can get $3,000 toward repairs to make their cars more air-friendly or to replace their car with one that meets the new, higher clean air standards. The qualifications depend on the size and income of the family. A family of four with $63,600 annual income, for example, would qualify for the $3,000. Those who buy a hybrid vehicle can get $3,500 toward the purchase.

AirCheckTexas was considered a big success in 2007-2008, when interested car owners packed waiting lists for the state assistance. In fiscal 2008 the program issued 11,500 replacement vouchers and 1,500 repair vouchers.

NCTCOG is a voluntary association of North Texas municipalities started in 1966 to plan for common needs.

Jeff Jacoby of the nonprofit Texas Campaign for the Environment says the NCTCOG has done “a solid job” with the AirCheck program but he wishes the Texas legislature would do much more to improve the area’s air quality.

The Environmental Protection Agency has flagged the D/FW area as a “non attainment” zone because it suffers repeated high ozone days during the summer, when heat and car emissions combine to generate ground-level ozone, causing unhealthy air conditions. The TCTCOG tracks ozone alert days in the area (21 days have exceeded safe levels for more than 8 hours each day in 2008) and offers a guide to the alert system, explaining for instance that during “orange alerts” kids and those with respiratory issues should limit outdoor activities.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

This coming Labor Day Weekend, San Francisco will celebrate the intersection of taste, sustainability and social justice that is the Slow Food movement. Non-profit educational organization Slow Food USA is throwing a four-day party they’re calling Slow Food Nation.

SFN’s Executive Director Anya Fernald hopes the debut event, expected to draw some 50,000 people, will reach out beyond the obvious coalition of foodies, health-nuts and environmentalists to, “build momentum and demand for an American food system that is safer, healthier and more socially just.” Highlights of the festival, which runs Friday through Monday, will include the:

• “Slow Food Rocks” concert, serving up not only Gnarls Barkley and the New Pornographers but gourmet beer and locally-grown and locally-produced food;

• 50,000 square feet of “taste pavilions” for which nationally-recognized regional food experts have hand-picked authentic gastronomic specialities from every state;

• A “Victory Garden” — an ornamental edible garden in the heart of San Francisco’s Civic Center planted on the same site as 60 years ago during World War II;

• A speaker series featuring Slow Food luminaries like the movement’s founder, Carlo Petrini, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, author Wendell Berry, and Slow Food Nation founder, chef and slow food activist Alice Waters;

• And for those who can stomach politics along with their pickles and panini, a petition calling for a new food and farm policy for the 21st Century that Slow Food USA and its allies will present to Congress next year.

It’s not surprising that the modern slow food movement was born in Italy, well known for its love of traditional gastronomy and the midday meal. In 1986, Italian journalist and philanthropist Carlo Petrini began to speak out against the industrialization of food. In an effort akin to an ecologist trying to preserve the world’s biodiversity, Petrini wanted to show consumers that fast food was wiping out authentic culinary traditions, and the richness and enjoyment of access to a diverse and unprocessed diet.

Petrini’s Slow Food movement is grounded on the belief that food should be good, clean and fair. His 2007 book, Slow Food Nation, outlines the basic principles behind what he hopes will become a worldwide movement toward a more sustainable, healthy and just way to live, and eat, on planet Earth. Slow Food now has 120,000 members worldwide, with 15,000 of those in Slow Food USA.

In the United States, Michael Pollan’s 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals inspired a national conversation about how our eating choices affect not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains us as well. Pollan’s In Defense of Food, published this year, takes that argument a step further, advocating individual action to re-think the way we buy, prepare and consume food in order to be healthier, take pleasure in what we eat, and bring our own habits back into balance with a planet that needs our stewardship to survive.

Slow Food Nation event director Anya Fernald isn’t looking for overnight converts to the Slow Food way of life. “It’s about everyday little steps people can take,” Fernald said, “like reducing the number of meals we eat in our cars from one in five to one in ten.” And for the other nine meals? “There are ways to eat slow and eat quickly,” she said, pointing out that in California, which the California Department of Food and Agriculture said supplies almost half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, you can make a simple, healthy meal from fresh produce in less than ten minutes.

Fernald points out that fast food is associated with the American work ethic. “Deprioritizing food is considered a value of people who work,” she said. While Slow Food isn’t expecting Americans to adopt the two-hour lunches some workers in Spain take for granted, it does advocate moving your meals out from behind the wheel, your desk or the television and taking time, even ten minutes, to taste, relax and enjoy.

Ferald said Slow Food in the United States is struggling against the perception that it’s a movement for the wealthy, gourmet few. She hopes the Labor Day weekend event will inspire attendees, as well as a larger public, to begin to see eating well and having access to well-grown, unprocessed food as a right, not a choice for the elite few.

“Good food is elite in America, but it doesn’t have to be,” Fernald said.

Which brings us to the obvious question in this era of rising prices for food and fuel: Can Americans really afford to change from fast to slow food?

“Can America afford to eat the way it eats?” Fernald fires back. “We’re on the payment plan with our current system. The logical future of our food system isn’t sustainable. We’re at a moment where we have to make some changes.”

(Photo credit: University of California - Davis)

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Marin County dairy farmer Albert Straus started moving toward a “slower” way of doing business back in 1994, when his family-owned farm, Straus Family Creamery, became the only organic dairy west of the Mississippi.

Straus, whose organic ice cream will be scooped out at the Ice Cream Pavilion at Slow Food Nation, has been producing organic milk, yogurt, butter and ice cream under the family name ever since. Straus grew up on his father’s conventional dairy farm in Marshall, California, a town so small it had a one-room schoolhouse, on the shores of Tomales Bay in western Marin County, 60 miles north of San Francisco. He joined the farm as a partner in 1977 and made the risky, but prescient decision to transition the operation from conventional to organic in the early 1990s.

“Someone approached me about doing organic milk for ice cream,” Straus said in an interview in a makeshift conference room above his dairy. “I had no clue what it was. It took me three-and-a-half years to figure out what “organic” meant. No one else was doing it. There was one small co-op in Wisconsin, Organic Valley, but that was it.”

As he transitioned his farm, Straus found out what organic meant - not just by definition, but also in terms of how he had to change his approach to farming. To be a California Certified Organic dairy, Straus said, the land has to be free of herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertizliers for at least three years. The cows have to go through at least a year transition with no hormones, no antibiotics and all-organic feeds.

Translated to day-to-day dairy farming, Straus said it meant, “Learning how to treat the animals without antibiotics and hormones, what homeopathy was, how to make it workable, where to find and produce organic feeds, how to market our products, build a plant, and get financing. We transitioned the whole farm. Organic feeds cost twice as much as conventional feeds, so it was a very expensive and risky time,” he said. “The Small Business Adminstration wouldn’t give me money without taking all my parents’ land and my sister’s house as collateral, so I got going by taking loans from family members and friends, and leasing a lot of equipment.”

But Straus also quickly learned what organic meant for his business. In terms of economics, he said, “We’ve grown double digits every year for last 14 years,” he said.

Straus doesn’t believe growth is the only way to profitability. In fact, he’s the perfect poster boy for the Slow Food mantra that bigger isn’t necessarily better. “This has been my challenge,” he said. “In order to keep a viable farm, you need to have an operation that is profitable and sustainable with the resources you have and not be forced to get bigger and bigger.”

Straus said with about 300 milking cows on 660 acres, his creamery is considered a small, regional processor, and he likes that just fine. “We’d like to keep most of our products local, to keep a quality and a freshness for consumers who know where their milk comes from, how it’s processed, what our philosophy is, and who want to support that. We don’t want to go cross-country unless we have to,” he said.

His operation employs about 70 people in the creamery and six in the dairy. In a walk through the small creamery, we saw the stainless-steel vats where yogurt is made and set, and how it’s piped over to the brand-new yogurt-filling machine, plopped into containers, moved on a conveyor belt to the capper, then boxed by workers and sent to the walk-in or put on delivery trucks.

We got to peer into the 1950s-style butter churn, which makes award-winning butter so yellow it was once disqualified from a national butter contest because the judges were convinced it was artificially colored. (It isn’t.) VP of Sales and Marketing Rich Martin said Straus butter is the only butter Slow Food Nation founder and chef Alice Waters uses in her famous Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, because of its high percentage of butterfat to moisture.

We saw the milk-bottle capper and the ice-cream makers. (Had we been there on a Thursday, we could have tasted fresh ice cream right out of the machine, but since it was Monday, we had to settle for taking part in sampling the first-ever Straus frozen yogurt, a product in development for the gourmet frozen yogurt shop market.)

Straus said his creamery is developing a sustainability model around reusable packaging, energy independence, and land stewardship. The dairy products are packaged on site, put on trucks, and sold mainly on the West Coast. Much of Straus Family Creamery’s milk is packaged in bottles made of 40 to 50 percent recycled glass, Straus said. Consumers pay a bottle deposit, which is returned when they bring them back to store. “The same trucks that deliver pick up the empties and bring them back, where we wash them, sanitize them and reuse them. We get six to eight uses out of a bottle,” Straus said.

Cows supply a constant source of methane gas, which comes in handy if you have the equipment to trap it and use it to power your farm. Straus does.

“In our methane digester, we digest and capture the waste from the cows, and produce 90% of electricity and about half of our hot water needs,” Straus said. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration (NOAA), methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more damaging to the atmosphere than C02, so what Straus said is true: “We’re doing our part by keeping it from going into the atmosphere.” Not to mention the fact that less methane means fewer odors, and fewer flies - a win-win-win for humans, cows, and planet.

Keeping the land in farming is a cornerstone of Straus’ sustainability model, and a concept that his mother, Ellen Straus, championed. In the 1970s, when the future of the region was being threatened by developers eyeing the coastal access and million-dollar views, Ellen Straus co-founded the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT), a unique alliance between Marin ranchers and environmentalists. Through restrictive zoning, land use regulations, active support for ranching by County government, and MALT’s agricultural conservation easement program, MALT has bought the development rights to 47 ranches and dairies covering more than 32,000 acres — about a quarter of privately-owned farmland in the county - which keeps the land in agriculture in perpetuity.

“It’s something that’s been lost around the globe,” Straus said of family farmland. “We’re losing five percent of our family farms every year. This is what Slow Food is trying to promote: global heritage of farming and food that reflects those values.”

Straus said he thinks his business has been successful in showing that organic dairy farming can be profitable and sustainable.

“Organic farming is the wave of the future. For many years I was the only organic dairy in Marin County. In the last couple years we now have about a quarter of dairies in Marin County that are certified organic. I think more and more farms are starting to understand what it takes to do this, and that this is how they can survive.”

(Photo credits: Albert Straus and Equipment/Catherine Girardeau; Cow/Straus Dairy)

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

For those yearning to hear more about the Democrats’ energy plans, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s vigorous speech Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention in Denver opened a more detailed dialogue on the subject.

Schweitzer, a first-term Democratic governor who chose a Republican lieutenant governor, called for “a new energy system that is clean, green and American-made.” He lamented U.S. dependence on foreign oil and what he labeled the Bush Administration’s single-minded focus on drilling to extract more oil, not just abroad but also domestically.

“That single-answer proposition is a dry well, and here’s why,” Schweitzer said. “America consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil, but has less than 3 percent of the reserves. You don’t need a $2 calculator to figure that one out. There just isn’t enough oil in America, on land or offshore, to meet America’s full energy needs.”

In Montana, said the rancher turned politician said, leaders are pursuing oil, but also wind power and coal operations with carbon sequestration; just as the nation will have to pursue many new avenues on the path to energy independence, and to counter global warming. And that includes conservation measures.

“Barack Obama understands the most important barrel of oil is the one you don’t use. Barack Obama’s energy strategy taps all sources and all possibilities. It will give you a tax credit if you buy a fuel-efficient car or truck, increase fuel-efficiency standards and put a million plug-in hybrids on the road,” said Schweitzer.

Read the full text of the speech on the DNC Convention website. To learn more about Montana’s energy policies, see the governor’s Office of Economic Development website.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

The changing schedules of fall foliage may be a headache for nature lovers who time their forest vacations to maximize viewing of autumnal reds and oranges. But they could be good for the environment those travelers set out to enjoy.

According to a new article in the journal Global Change Biology, a team led by Michigan Tech forestry professor David F. Karnosky has established that increased levels of atmospheric CO2 “act directly to delay the usual autumn spectacle of changing colors and falling leaves in northern hardwood forests.”

Studying forests in Wisconsin and Italy and using an elaborate system that allows researchers to control the concentrations of carbon dioxide and tropospheric ozone within a given wooded area (the project was launched to help answer questions listed here), the team found that longer periods of green leaves resulted from higher CO2 levels. And longer green periods mean more time in which trees can soak carbon up. (Other researchers have already asserted that increased CO2 leads to earlier growth in the spring as well.)

Karnosky describes the phenomenon as “a good-news story for our region’s forests,” since trees have longer periods of productivity before taking a break for the winter. While the experiment was too brief to suggest how mature forests would behave in the long term, it’s surely welcome news for sustainable foresters to hear that what threatens the planet in one respect is at least helping their young trees grow more quickly — putting a dent in the very problem that keeps them green.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

J.C. Penney Company has announced plans to expand its renewable energy program with solar and wind projects that will provide electricity in 10 stores and one distribution center. In addition to these initiatives, J.C. Penney will also seek Energy Star certification for 200 stores by 2011.

“Hosting these solar and wind projects will add to our knowledge of the benefits and potential applications of renewable energy programs at our facilities,” said Mike Ullman III, J.C. Penney’s chairman and chief executive officer. “We are constantly looking for opportunities to contribute to a cleaner environment.”

SunPower Corporation based in San Jose, Calif., will install the solar power systems on the rooftops of 10 J.C. Penny stores. Four stores are located in California in the cities of El Cajon, Palmdale, Redland and Santa Clarita. The other six stores are located in New Jersey in the cities of Cherry Hill, Deptford, East Brunswick, Freehold, Wayne and Woodbridge.

According to Jim Thomas, vice president and director for corporate social responsibility for J.C. Penney, the benefits of the solar power systems include:

• Producing more than 4 megawatts of clean electric power
• Preventing 146,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions over a 30-year expected lifetime — the estimated equivalent of annual greenhouse gas emissions generated by more than 800 cars.

Broadstar Wind Systems of Dallas, Texas, will install wind turbines at J.C. Penney’s 1.6 million-square-foot distribution center in Reno, Nev. Broadstar’s AeroCam wind turbine will be used, which captures and generates more power than conventional three-blade turbines.

Installations of the solar and wind systems are expected to completed in November.

J.C. Penney is a participant in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program, which recognizes the top 25 percent of commercial buildings and industrial plants for energy efficiency. Last year, four J.C. Penney stores received Energy Star certification. To reach the goal of 200 stores by 2011, J.C. Penney plans to push Energy Management Systems (EMS) and retrofit store equipment.

By the end of this year, 800 stores will be equipped with EMS, which provides remote motoring and control of electrical and mechanical systems, monitors store comfort levels (i.e., air conditioning and heating) and helps identify opportunities for energy savings.

J.C. Penney also will invest in replacing old lighting. In 2007, a total of 167 stores received lighting retrofits that will save 27 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually compared to older systems.
For more information on J.C. Penney’s solar and wind projects, visit their website.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

There are already undeniable legacies of the 2008 Olympic Games: eight gold medals hanging around U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps’ neck, for instance, or the otherworldly sprint that helped Jamaican runner Usain Bolt break Michael Johnson’s record in the men’s 100 meter race. There are visual reminders, as well; the Olympic pavilions, Bird’s Nest and Water Cube will remain a part of central Beijing life for decades.

Perhaps the most crucial legacy, however, is yet to be played out. As hotels empty, athletes and television crews return to their home countries, and Beijing goes back to a life more sheltered from the world, the lingering question is this: Will the enormous and by most accounts successful efforts to reduce the city’s pollution during the Olympic games continue in some fashion, improving life for those who live there and reducing the city’s footprint on the global environment?

“Beijing will be built into a livable city,” said Du Shaozhong, deputy head of the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau in a press conference the day before closing ceremonies.

“We will take some new measures to ensure that air quality will reach a new level after the Olympic Games,” he said. “Whether it is automobile emissions reduction, or construction site dust reduction or coal pollution reduction, I believe that the requirements will be more stringent.”

Shaozhong and state media were pleased to note that the numerous, complicated and costly measures taken to help reduce the city’s smog had resulted in the clearest skies in a decade. (See picture above at the beach volleyball competition: credit: Sadat/Xinhua; Beijing 2008 Olympics.) Those measures had included closing hundreds of factories in and around Beijing and taking half of the city’s cars off the road daily. Their efforts were aided by several days of rain, which eased the haze that had been worrisome enough that world-record holder Haile Gebrselassie withdrew from the marathon and some American athletes wore black breathing masks when they first arrived in the city.

State officials did not announce the details of what they said would be strict new measures, saying they would do so after they had properly studied the results of the Beijing efforts. But Du said that companies that pollute the air heavily would need to address their pollution problems before they reopened.

“If they can’t resolve the pollution problems, they must stop or limit their production,” he said.

Construction-site dust, vehicle emissions and coal pollution would also be targeted, Du said.

The skies over Beijing had been one of the deepest concerns before the Olympic Games began. News organizations found independent ways to monitor daily levels of particulate matter in a city whose air at times far exceeded the levels the World Health Organization (WHO) deems safe for ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide and other pollutants. Despite the reassurances of the International Olympic Committee’s medical commission chairman, Arne Ljungqvist, that the air would be clear in time for the Games, track and field teams trained outside of the city. Athletes with asthma took extra precautions, and officials said that it would be possible to reschedule outdoor events if the pollution was too dangerous on any given day.

Instead, China’s “blue sky” index - which is different from the air quality index used in the United States - rated air quality in the capital between excellent and fairly good on most days of the Olympics.

“We have had 100% compliance days in August and nine great single days,” Du told BBC News. “Without these measures … the current air quality would have been impossible.”

The BBC was one of the organizations doing its own monitoring of particulate matter, and determined that the city met the strictest WHO standards for particulate matter in six out of the first 11 days of the games. By the end of the Games, the Air Pollution Index (API) had dropped by more than 20 percentage points compared with the same time period in 2007, from about 80 points in August 2007 to around 56 points in 2008.

Nitrogen oxide related to vehicle emissions fell 61 percent, according to the city environmental protection bureau.

One possibility for future action would be making the odd-even license-plate driving restrictions permanent beyond September 20, the original end date, but it remains to be seen whether that would be possible once workers need to return to the still-closed factories and construction sites.

Perhaps the most poignant measurement of the air improvements showed up in the behavior of the city’s population: Beijing residents opened their windows, spent time on their balconies, watched sunsets over the mountains and saw the stars overhead at night for the first time in years.

Zhou Manjun, who lives in Beijing, told China View news that he could sleep with his bedroom windows open during the Olympics. “I never did that in the past, because I didn’t want to wake up to a room full of dust,” he said. “But now it’s all so clean.”

Wang Weihua, a Beijing taxi driver, agrees. “We can breathe much better,” she told Reuters news service. “These restrictions show the difference the cars make.

“It will get worse once they are back on the road, but it could still be better than it was, because of the environmental measures taken regarding the factories,” Wang said.

Zhou and Wang’s reactions, and those of the 15 million residents of Beijing, will play a key role in deciding whether the city’s skies change permanently, said Matthew Fraser, Associate Director for Research and a professor in Arizona State University’s Global School of Sustainability.

“It’s most important to note that this was clear it was meant to be a temporary program,” Fraser said. “It’s very different to fix things long term.

“To me, the interesting thing is whether the people of Beijing now have the political clout with the authoritarian regime there to require change, or whether it will go back to business as usual.”

There is a substantial economic cost to shutting down the city’s industrial engine, even for a short time. Job creation and economic growth are paramount to China, which has the world’s fourth largest economy. Tao Dong, chief Asia economist for Credit Suisse in Hong Kong, told Bloomberg News that China may have lost as much as 3 percent of its estimated $585 billion gross domestic product by shutting down Beijing-area factories.

The World Bank has said China has 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities. Many of its industries - cement plants, power plants, and steel mills, for instance - are heavy polluters. Because the environment and the economy of Beijing go hand in hand, the positive effects of the city’s vacation from pollution will last only as long as the vacation does, Fraser said. “There might be some short-term health benefits,” he said. “But the atmosphere is transient. You expect that as soon as the emissions come back, the air quality will rapidly reach the levels of before.

“If they were to keep some of the dirtier factories shut, that would have an effect,” said Fraser. “That would be kind of a shift in the stated or unstated national priorities for China.

“I think that’s really what it’s going to take. It’s going to need to be either recognition from above or demand from below, and it’s very different there because of the authoritarian regime. In the United States, it’s really demand from below,” Fraser said.

The 2008 Games were not the first summer Olympics to focus intense attention on pollution. The Los Angeles games in 1984 imposed some similar actions to reduce traffic and industrial smog, with similar results: clearer skies and a happier populace. In Athens in 2004, the city built mass transit, planted thousands of trees and closed factories for the month of August.

The Atlanta Games in 1996 provided an opportunity to study not only the results of such efforts, but also the effect on a population’s health. Ozone pollution and severe traffic congestion in the steamy capital city inspired officials to add car-pool lanes, ban traffic from downtown, increase the city’s mass transit ability and add natural-gas buses to the fleet. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study of the four weeks before the Olympics, the 17 days of the games and the four weeks afterward found reductions not only in the levels of pollutants but also in the rates of emergency asthma events in children ages 1-16. The CDC monitored two pediatric emergency departments, the HMO database, Georgia Medicaid claims and the hospital discharge database, and found that acute asthma events dropped by 11% in some areas to 44% in others.

One study of the Beijing results will continue through Sept. 30. Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of UC San Diego are sending unmanned aircraft equipped with sensors into the skies above the city to gather information about pollutant levels and their effects on the rays of the sun and meteorological events. The scientists hope to measure the activity of China’s pollution “plumes,” or the transport paths that particulates and smog follow as they make their way around the world. The unmanned planes will take off from South Korea’s Cheju Island and fly directly into the plumes.

“Thanks to the concern of Olympic organizers, the Chinese government, and the cooperation of the Korean government, we have a huge and unprecedented opportunity to observe a large reduction in everyday emissions from a region that is very industrially active,” said Professor V. Ramanathan in a press release from Scripps.

In an interview shortly before the Beijing Games began, Dr. Albert J. Polito, director of The Lung Center at Mercy and chief of the Division of Pulmonary Medicine at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, discussed the effects of pollution on the human respiratory system. He spoke about not only the athletes, who would be in the city for a relatively short period, but also the residents.

“It will be very interesting to see how this plays out,” Polito said. “I know Beijing has done a lot, and you have to give them credit for trying to make some progress in this regard. You hope that it’s going to be a long-lived thing, not just for the Olympics.”

Worldwide comment and opinion has not been lost on Chinese officials.

“We have noticed overseas and domestic public opinion has pinned high hopes on the efforts,” Du Shaozhong said

What can the United States learn from Beijing’s efforts?

“That things can be done in the short term to really improve the environment,” Fraser said.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Last Wednesday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his desire to turn the city into a wind-power titan, sprinkling the city with turbines and building huge wind farms off the coasts of Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island.

Speaking at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, he issued a formal request encouraging green power entrepreneurs to submit plans for a range of sustainable energy projects. But what got the most attention was the suggestion that “perhaps companies will want to put windfarms atop our bridges and skyscrapers, or use the enormous potential of powerful off-shore winds miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, where turbines could generate roughly twice the energy that land-based windfarms can. Windfarms located far off our shores, some evidence shows, could meet 10 percent of our city’s electricity needs within a decade.”

Even beyond the inevitable Photoshop gags at the speech’s expense, public reaction hasn’t exactly been effusive. The very next day, the Times trained a skeptical eye on the plan, conducting a series of interviews with engineers and energy experts who felt it “would be complicated and expensive and barely begin to meet the growth in demand for electricity that is expected in the coming years.”

A key problem is that skyscrapers not designed to hold the weight and vibration a turbine creates would have to undergo expensive retrofits that could negate savings entirely; turbines small enough not to require such measures, one interviewee said, “almost don’t pay.” Citing the original design of the building intended to replace the World Trade Center, which prominently integrated large turbines into its structure, the article says even those generators were expected only to supply enough power for the elevators, at most. The Post was even harder on Bloomberg’s vision, saying that “not even windmill manufacturers think it could work.”

(On the other hand, Donald Trump thinks it’s a fine idea, so long as nobody tries to put turbines on one of his own buildings. They’re so architecturally distinguished, the Don sniffs, you wouldn’t want to mess with the design.)

Some observers contended that solar power would be a much more fruitful use of NYC’s green-power opportunities — which, it turns out, is entirely in keeping with Bloomberg’s proposal. Though windmills caught the media’s attention, they were only a small part of a speech that talked also of solar and tide-harvesting technologies and was especially emphatic on the need to upgrade the nation’s power transmission system.

As he has said in the days since the public ribbing began, he never thought windmills would be the whole answer to energy woes, but wanted to jumpstart any and all conversations that might be fruitful. “If you don’t ask” for ideas, he said, “you’re never going to find out.”

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Hazardous chemicals are on hiatus, bottled water is out and bikes are in at the Democratic Convention in Denver, where organizers are seizing the opportunity to green the festivities this week.

As some 10,000 delegates, volunteers, politicos and media people converge on the Mile High city, they’ll be quenching their thirst at “hydration stations” or water fountains serving Denver tap water (inside and outside the Pepsi Center) instead of grabbing the once ubiquitous and landfill-clogging plastic water bottles that have been the norm at big gatherings.

Yes, what’s old is new again, and conventioneers have already been drinking from the well, so to speak, at weekend events where the non-profit water utility Denver Water provided a truck of chilled agua to refill water bottles. The new approach has been “incredibly well received” by those attending the pre-Convention activities, said Donna Pacetti, the local government conservation coordinator with Denver Water. “They love it. It’s cold water. We keep it chilled so it comes out at about 38-40 degrees.”

Convention goers also will find themselves with another back-to-basics choice, with 1,000 bicycles available free-of-charge for short carbon-free hops around top, courtesy of Humana and the Bikes Belong Coalition.

The health giant and the bike-advocacy group teamed up for the Freewheelin’
program to demonstrate a more healthful mode of transportation that’s especially suitable for the short trips that conventioneers will be taking between hotels, restaurants and meeting areas.

As of Monday morning, visitors (and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper who helped kick off the program) had taken 350 bike trips on the loaner fleet, logging just under two miles with each trip, said Avery Stonich
Marketing and Communications Director with Bikes Belong. Coincidentally, that’s in keeping with national statistics that show about 40 percent of all trips Americans take are under two miles, and could be converted to bike instead of car trips, Ms. Stonich said.

The group hopes that their bikes, donated by six manufacturers, will log a total of 10,000 rides and 25,000 miles between the Democratic Convention this week (Aug. 25-28) and the GOP Convention in St. Paul (Sept. 1-4), where Humana and Bikes Belong also will provide free bikes.

“We’re just trying to help people understand that bicycling is a great way to get around for short trips,” she said, noting that bicycling is expedient, healthful and green.

“Just like one voter can impact the outcome of an election, one cyclist can help significantly reduce the environmental impact that our lifestyles have had on the planet,” said Jonathan T. Lord, M.D., Humana senior vice president and chief innovation officer, in a news release. “Bike sharing has been popular overseas for years, and is an easy way for Americans to integrate healthy living and environmental conservation into every day life.”

And even those who need to suit up for the political events should be able to take advantage of the program, which is providing trouser straps, in addition to the complimentary helmets, and pre-registration.

“I’m standing outside the Hyatt and I just saw two people pull up in suits on their bikes,” Ms. Stonich said, noting that Denver is a bike friendly city with marked bike lanes, bike/car lanes and biking paths.

Another green statement being made at the DNC gathering concerns toxic chemicals in our home environment, specifically Triclosan, controversial chemical found in antibacterial soaps and in dozens of other consumer products that may cause immunological problems, even cancer susceptibility in humans, according to the Environmental Working Group.

The EWG says that “soap and water” does a better job than the antimicrobial products containing Triclosan, and that the synthetic chemical, that’s been in use in personal products for some 30 years, may be contributing to the rise of “Super Germs.” Its online guide to Triclosan, which also is known to persist in the environment, lists some of the household products in which the chemical is used and summarizes concerns about it.

The DNC convention will not be providing hand sanitizers with Triclosan, but will be featuring a healthier, more natural sanitizer from a company called CleanWell, via dispensers set up at the Pepsi Center.

A convention press release touts CleanWell as the only “poison free” hand sanitizer that doesn’t pollute the environment.

CleanWell products, confirms found Dr. Larry Weiss, are formulated from plant-based hand soaps and sanitizers that rely on natural methods to fight germs.

Yet they can sanitize as well as synthetics, even killing the super strep strain MRSA, says Weiss, a physician. Specifically, the CleanWell sanitizer is derived from “plants that have been part of the environment in which we, as a species, have evolved.

“In fact,” he said, “these plants (thyme and oregano) which are ubiquitous are common ingredients in the Mediterranean diets which is one of the healthiest known.”

Other green activities at the convention include using biodegradable trash bags and lower-impact food containers; extensive recycling of paper, plastic and aluminum beverage containers by Coca-Cola Recycling (yeah — yuck-yuck at the Pepsi Center); a program that helped hotels switch to key cards made of birch waste instead of plastic; and efforts to track the convention’s overall carbon imprint.

DNC leaders have “challenged” delegations traveling to the convention to offset their carbon debt as part of the effort to maintain a carbon-neutral convention; but it’s unclear how effective that will be. Earlier feedback on that plan suggested that many of the state delegations might not come through with flying green colors.

Finally, like every good group or event that “goes green” the DNC published its own “green tips” for Denver visitors (though heavy web traffic prevented us from opening them).

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Saturday marked the end of a tour hoping to convince Americans that hydrogen-fueled cars are not as far away from practicality as we might think.

The Hydrogen Road Tour ‘08 was an explicit (if partial) answer to the lament “what does it matter if I can buy a hydrogen car, if I can’t get fuel for it?”: Starting in Portland, Maine and ending in Los Angeles, the varied cars in this caravan covered the continent while running entirely on hydrogen.

We call it a “partial” answer because there’s something of a cheat involved: While the vehicles visited some permanent refueling stations along the route, there are stretches where none exist and drivers had to rely on mobile units being sent out specifically for them — not a luxury most everyday drivers can afford. One such unit, provided by Linde, seems to have been sent on the tour solely to refuel BMW’s entry, its Hydrogen Series 7.

Other companies participating ranged from the expected Japanese automakers to General Motors. The nature of stops along the tour varied: Some were invite-only affairs, while others not only welcomed public spectators but offered them the chance to take short spins behind the wheel.

Organized by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy, and other groups, the event was a P.R. opportunity to make the public aware that the “non-polluting cars of tomorrow,” as U.S. Deputy Secretary Thomas Barrett described them, are already on the roads around us: As the D.O.T.’s
Paul Brubaker notes, six U.S. transit agencies are already using hydrogen-powered buses; car dealers in California already lease hydrogen vehicles, and demonstration programs around the country have let hundreds of folks test the cars, which are nearly net-zero carbon-wise. They emit nothing but water.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media