By Tomas Roman
KGO-San Francisco

The recent storms haven’t done enough to replenish the water supply in Santa Clara County, so the county is asking for more voluntary conservation. Now some businesses are taking the extra step of installing new technology to save water.

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By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

For years, California has been a leader of environmental policy — writing it’s own stricter rules for pesticide controls, air pollution and waste disposal as it sees fit, regardless of whether the nation is following along.

In the 1990s, the state pushed the leading edge of a technology that many of us wish had been pursued more aggressively when it hosted a test of modern electric cars, a fairly successful experiment that was regrettably shoved into neutral by U.S. automakers.

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By David Louie
KGO-San Francisco

The Bay Area is on notice that it’s exceeding new federal air standards for asthma-aggravating particles.

Federal transportation funding is on the line if the Bay Area doesn’t shape up. The problem is nearly invisible soot in the area that can lead not only to asthma, but also to bronchitis and heart disease.

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By Harriet Blake
Green Right Now

Geoff LeBaron gets paid to count birds, among other things. And this is an especially busy time of year for him and all bird watchers. From Dec. 14 through Jan. 5 the National Audubon Society conducts its annual Christmas Bird Count. LeBaron has served as its director since 1987.

“It’s neat to be able to work for the National Audubon Society in this [endeavor] that brings birding and ornithology together,” LeBaron says, explaining that ornithologists like himself are trained scientists who study what birds do, while birders are folks, also like himself, who are captivated by watching birds. Not all ornithologists, he points out, enjoy birdwatching as a pastime.

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By Harriet Blake

Drill, baby, drill may be what’s on the minds of gas companies, but if you’re a landowner of a potential gas site, you probably have a lot of questions.

Thanks to a new software application that’s being test marketed by MIT, landowners may now extract data to see if the gas companies’ proposals to drill are fair and safe. The software tool, called the Landman Report Card (LRC), will help landowners in any state navigate the government and corporate databases, as well as get feedback from other landowners who’ve been in similar situations. And they can do all this before agreeing to a drilling contract.

The term “land man” refers to an oil company representative who often times shows up on the doorstep of unsuspecting property owners who’ve been targeted as having prospective drill sites.

“People often will sign the day the land man shows up at the door,” says MIT professor Chris Csikszentmihalyi. “There are lots of negotiations that people can do, that they often don’t know they can.”

Csikszentmihalyi , co-director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, and Sara Wylie, a grad student in the Science , Technology and Society Program, are the directors of the Landman Report Card project, which is coming to fruition just as natural gas exploration in America gains traction as a potential energy source that doesn’t rely on foreign oil — affecting land and homeowners from New York to Texas to the Rocky Mountains states.

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By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

You’ve heard the saying, “it’s easy being green.” Maybe sometimes. But not always, and not if you’re the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) agency, which finds itself tangling with a green dilemma.

DART, which serves Dallas and 11 other cities in the region, has been planning to replace its aging bus fleet with 537 shiny new buses. It’s a great opportunity to go green with the entire fleet.

But after taking bids this fall and updating the research, the agency members are locked in debate over what type of buses are “cleaner” and which ones make the most sense environmentally and economically. The answer is not readily apparent. Like potential car buyers on the threshold of a dealership showroom, the bus-buying members of DART find themselves puzzling over the new technologies and old perceptions.

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By Julie Bonnin and Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

At this time of year, when many municipalities are gearing up for holiday tree recycling programs, the city of Houston is dealing with something far more monumental - more than 5.6 million cubic tons of tree waste left behind after Hurricane Ike swept through Southeast Texas in early September.

The city turned some of the debris into mulch, but launched a contest in October, Recycle Ike, to spark ideas for keeping the remaining tree waste from simply being disposed of in landfills.

The winners, announced last week, are a Rice University team of students and scientists who will create a biomass charcoal from the tree remains. The group was among more than 200 entrants from around the world that submitted ideas.

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By Clint Williams
Green Right Now

Horseshoe crabs - believe it or not - scuttle about in Jamaica Bay, a 20,000-acre maze of marshland, islands and water that forms the southern boundary of Brooklyn. There would be more if they could find a place to breed.

Decades of debris have piled up on the bay’s beaches, blocking the path to egg-laying sites for the prehistoric-looking crabs. But things will soon get better for horseshoe crabs in New York City - and blue-winged warblers in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, and marbled godwits along the Mendocino Coast of northern California - because of TogetherGreen, an initiative of the National Audubon Society paid for by Toyota.

The program awarded TogetherGreen Conservation Innovation Grants totaling $1.4 million this fall. The grants, ranging from $5,000 to $68,000, will fund 41 projects in 24 states. As you might expect from Audubon, many of the funded projects benefit birds.

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By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Guess what city just mandated that businesses disclose their toxic chemicals, put a five cent price tag on plastic bags and set up a future ban on the sale of bottled water at city-owned centers as well as plastic take-out food containers?

Portland? San Francisco? They’ve taken some similar measures. But no, the latest municipality to get aggressive with consumer waste is Toronto, Canada’s largest and apparently greenest city.

This week the Toronto City Council set in motion a sweeping effort aimed at reducing the number of plastic disposables - grocery bags, water bottles and take-out cartons - that wind up in the local landfill.

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By Catherine Girardeau
Green Right Now

Despite the derailing economy, California voters got on board for reviving train service in their state November 4th by passing state proposition 1A — a $10 million bond to begin construction of a fully electric rail system running 220-mph trains between San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal and Union Station in Los Angeles.

The bond is a vote of confidence from the public and a down payment on the $40 billion-plus project that plans to run high-speed trains from Sacramento to San Diego. The plan’s boosters say it will create jobs, relieve air and highway congestion, and help the state meet its legislative mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

While detractors like the San Diego Union-Tribune’s editorial board said California’s budget woes make spending billions of dollars on a massive transportation project not only ill-advised, but “potentially the biggest boondoggle in California history”, proponents called the victory a landmark for high-speed rail nationwide.

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By Tomas Roman
KGO - San Francisco

SAN MARTIN, CA — Thousands of lives could be saved in California by reducing the diesel fumes being pumped out from trucks and buses. New regulations are being considered to cut the cancer risk.

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By Kelly Rondeau

Move over Seattle, Portland, and Austin and other green heavyweights — make room for some like-minded, newcomers.

Columbus, Ohio; New Orleans, La., Syracuse, N.Y., and Louisville, Kty., residents might not be wearing Birkenstocks and basking under solar tubes. But they are living in some of the growing number of mid-sized, Middle American cities that are making impressive green strides, changing their attitudes and getting smarter about eco-choices.

Syracuse, led by Mayor Matthew Driscoll, is becoming a greener “Emerald City” of New York with its sustainability website, partnerships with area universities and a solid number 17 placement for 2008 on Popular Science’s list of the 50 Greenest Cities in the U

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