By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

With winter weather at its most aggressive about now, it’s hard not to notice all the idlers in our midst. They’re idling at fast food restaurants, outside offices and schools. You find a business, there’s a car idling outside. Some people take their right to idle pretty seriously. Police cruisers sometimes idle while they lie in wait and will get no argument from me. Ditto crossing guards, for different reasons.

I am not suggesting that we regular folks suffer frozen feet nobly in the name of curbing carbon emissions. I’m all for necessary feet-saving measures. But I have noticed that my car stays warm for a little while after I’ve been driving it. You notice that? Do I really need to idle while my teenager tarries at the bookstore checkout? Reaallly? No, I don’t. Do I need to warm up in the driveway before heading to an appointment? Not anymore. Experts say modern engines do just fine with a cold start. Do I need to keep the car especially toasty, while someone runs into the bakery for bread? No — and neither did the woman I noticed last week in a big hulking truck that idled while someone else got the bread. Humpff!

OK, I agree, this is a little thing, in the large scheme of things. But did you know that two minutes of idling is the equivalent of driving one mile, according to the Consumer Energy Center ?

It might be worth thinking about. A hundred million Americans idling less — and thinking more. It could help.

And while you’re at it, check those tires to make sure they’re properly inflated.

Copyright © 2008 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

White House photo by Eric Draper

President George W. Bush smiles after delivering his remarks on U.S. Ocean Action Plan last September at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. President Bush has now protected more of the ocean than any other president.

Green Right Now reports

President George W. Bush today announced the establishment of three underwater monuments that will protect a vast area of the central Pacific Ocean that spans nine tropical coral islands and their surrounding waters.

The action was cheered by conservationists and environmental groups, including the Marine Conservation Biology Institute and Environmental Defense Fund, which each worked with the administration to establish the protections.

[Read more →]

By Tim Sanders
Saving the World at Work

Here’s a new feature of my blog: Daily Catch. It’s an article or blog post that I want to share with you.  My first Daily Catch is a collection of The 10 Best 2008 Articles from Green Biz.

If you haven’t checked out Green Biz, do it right away. It’s author, Joel Makower, is one of the greenest minds in the world today and his point of view is keen.Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

The National Audubon Society headquarters in New York City has distinguished itself as a builder not just of avian habitats, but of green, sustainable office spaces too, earning a LEED Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council.

In fact, the society’s 27,500-square-foot headquarters at 225 Varick Street received the highest point total of any commercial interior in the world that has been evaluated by the USGBC, according to an Audubon news release today.

The conservation group reports that the redesign of the space, which included a long list of energy-saving changes, cost only about 10 percent more than the upfront price for comparable conventional improvements. And most modifications are expected to pay for themselves within 10-15 years.

“Our new home office demonstrates Audubon’s commitment to providing employees with a cost-effective, productive and comfortable workplace that fits our environmental values and also allows us to concentrate financial resources on our conservation mission,” said Audubon President John Flicker, in a statement. “Most importantly, what we’ve done here is a model of cost-effective sustainability that can be replicated by others.” [Read more →]

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Happy New Year! And while it might not seem quite so happy at this moment — with renewed fighting in Gaza, rising U.S. unemployment and global economic pain — we always are seeking signs of hope on the green front. Trawling for good news over the holidays, we found these encouraging items:

• The New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) reports that the coral reefs in Indonesia are recovering rapidly following the tsunami that hit four years ago. “Baby corals” are springing up to replace those lost in the Dec. 26, 2004 disaster, which means that the ecosystems needed to support fishing, as well as tourism, in the area are mending nicely. “This is a great story of ecosystem resilience and recovery,” said Dr. Stuart Campbell, coordinator of the WCS’s Indonesia Marine Program in a news release. In assessing the coral lost in the area, Campbell’s team of researchers discovered that destructive fishing practices (using dynamite and chemicals), in addition to the tsunami, had killed much of the coral. But increasingly, local communities are managing these undersea resources more responsibly, and also are successfully transplanting coral in damaged areas.

• A new wildlife preserve in South America has been established to help protect some 500,000 penguins, fur seals and several species of seabirds. This inaugural protected area in Argentina is expected to save breeding grounds and also offshore habitat for these imperiled animals. Several groups collaborated to create the park, including the Wildlife Conservation Society (the Bronx Zoo-based group’s mission is to restore wildlife around the globe); the National Parks Service of Argentina; the government of Chubut; Fundacion Patagonia Natural and the United Nations Development Programme.

So here’s to Mother Nature, who will find a way, if we provide a path instead of a roadblock.

Now if we could just get the WCS working on that world economy problem…

Copyright © 2008 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

By Clint Williams
Green Right Now

An expectation met is rare enough. An expectation surpassed is a culturally appropriate winter solstice celebration miracle.

So imagine my surprise and delight when reading the miles per gallon readout on the trip computer of the 2009 Jetta TDI during a recent holiday drive over the river and through the woods. The display reads: 43.7 mpg. That’s significantly above the Environmental Protection Agency estimate of 40 mpg in highway driving.

And we weren’t doing any of that 55 mph, coast-down-hills, hyper-miler sort of driving. We were zipping along at 70 mph or so, singing loudly along with the Christmas tunes provided by the satellite radio.

That sort of fuel economy apparently isn’t a fluke. Volkswagen hired a third party, automotive evaluation company AMCI, to test the real-world fuel economy of the Jetta TDI and found it performed 24 percent better than EPA estimates, getting 38 mpg in the city and 44 mpg on the highway.

Such miserly fuel use is one reason the Jetta TDI earlier this year was named the 2009 Green Car of the Year by Green Car Journal.

“The Volkswagen Jetta TDI rose to the top as Green Car Journal’s 2009 Green Car of the Year® for some very important reasons,” said Ron Cogan, editor and publisher of Green Car Journal and editor of GreenCar.com.

“Hybrids have dominated the discussion of environmentally positive vehicles in recent years.” Awarding the title to the VW, Cogan said, “shows that advanced clean diesel has arrived and is poised to change this dynamic. With its affordable price point, refined ride and handling, and high fuel economy, the Jetta TDI shows that hybrids now have a strong competitor in the marketplace.”

The diesel cars of today aren’t the clattering, smoky, smelly diesels of 20 years ago. The new vehicles meet even strict California emissions standards, in part because of regulations requiring the development of ultra-low sulfur fuel. Refiners reduced the sulfur content in diesel fuel by 97 percent, making exhaust control systems more effective.

The new, clean-burning diesel cars such as the Jetta are a better alternative to conventional automobiles than even gasoline-electric hybrids such as the Toyota Prius, according to a RAND study.

The study, presented in November 2007 at the annual meeting of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management in Washington, D.C., examined the benefits and costs of three alternatives to the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine for the 2010-2020 period. The alternatives were advanced diesel technology (the kind making its way to dealer showrooms), gas-electric hybrids and duel-fuel vehicles burning E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.

By Heather Ishimaru
KGO-San Francisco

The nation is working to move away from fossil fuels and toward plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. But, are we trading one limited natural resource for another? Lithium-ion batteries are now considered the best option for the next generation of cars. But where will all that lithium come from?
>> Read more

By John DeFore

Unless you avoided the conventional gift-buying routine entirely this holiday season, odds are good that you spent much of December in some retail environments whose construction and operation involved a lamentable level of waste.

Outdoor-gear merchant R.E.I. is a few years into an effort to chip away at waste in its stores. This September the chain opened a store in Round Rock, Texas (just north of Austin) that is phase two in its development of a long-term eco-friendly model. Most of its innovations have been tested for over a year in a Boulder, Colorado location, but that store, which opened in October 2007, was a renovation of an existing space. This one, situated in a cluster of stores whose heavy traffic is generated by the area’s only IKEA, was built from scratch to accommodate its green agenda.

I took a tour in early December with store manager Todd Callaway and Daniel Grillo, an “outreach specialist” who coordinates the store’s group workshops and is particularly enthusiastic about convincing locals they can use their bikes to commute, even in Texas heat. If there have been any hitches in the location’s start up, you wouldn’t guess it to speak with these two enthusiastic men, who are clearly smitten with little earth-friendly details a casual shopper would never notice; they took pride in the belief that the store’s physical design was every bit as sales-friendly as any other retailer’s but has a far smaller impact on the environment.

“We’ve redesigned about 85% of the fixtures,” Callaway said as he gave me the first of many breakdowns on the novel components and impressive stats behind the shop’s counters, racks and displays. At the moment, he was standing beside a shelf system made of steel and Plyboo, a plywood-like product whose attractive outer layers are made of fast-growing bamboo.

“The point of this fixture is that when we go to dispose of it later on, it’s fully recyclable. Everything on it can be recycled really easily.” (When the store was under construction, representatives say that 75% of the building waste was recycled or reused in some way.)

Callaway and Grillo were well versed in the levels of post-consumer/post-industrial waste that had been recycled into surfaces all around — from the steel shavings that offered visual appeal in a bathroom vanity and the footwear department’s wall made of sunflower seed husks to the counter made of waste sorghum and Grenite that is “85% post-industrial waste ceramic plus soy.”

Beneath our feet was one way in which the Round Rock venture learned lessons from Boulder. While the upstairs level used a lot of waste-reducing, no-glue carpet tiles from the ultra-green company Interface, the downstairs featured a yielding rubber material whose confetti-like look came from its being composed of recycled car tires and tennis-shoe soles.