Green Right Now Reports

Dr. James Hansen, the NASA scientist known for sounding an early alarm about climate change, will join student protesters at a “sleep out” in Boston this weekend.

The students, from Boston-area and other Massachusetts colleges, have been sleeping out on Boston Common and at various campuses to push the state to pass a law committing to clean energy. Their target goal: Have Massachusetts pledge to be using 100 percent clean energy by 2020.

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Green Right Now Reports

One could count a thousand ways humans have soiled the planet, from shearing off mountaintops to mine coal to dredging the bottom of the ocean with heavy, coral-destroying equipment.

Congress zeroed in on one needless waste stream, this past week introducing legislation in both houses to stop cruise ships from releasing untreated sewage into the ocean.

The Senate’s Clean Cruise Ship Act, proposed by Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) would extend the Clean Water Act to regulate the millions of gallons of waste water from cruise ships. The net effect would be a ban on the release of raw, untreated sewage.

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Greenland Ice Flow (Photo: NASA)

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

By now you’ve heard the dire predictions for how sea level rise would affect Miami. Basically this city, already imperiled by worsening hurricanes is in the bulls-eye for rising oceans too.

But did you realize that a one meter sea level increase — now believed by many scientists to be a likely outcome of global warming by 2100 — would put Philadelphia underwater?

Yes, the city of Brotherly Love would be among the large family of coastal cities potentially devastated by coastline changes. And not in the too-distance future either.

According to glacier and ice shelf expert Dr. Gordon Hamilton, Philadelphia could experience troubles decades before that 2100 benchmark if storm surges pushed rising oceans inland.

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Green Right Now Reports

Just when we got clear of growth hormones in our milk, now comes news that estrogens and other hormones are floating around our waterways, interfering with the biological functions of fish and wildlife — and causing yet untallied health issues for humans.

These synthetic and natural hormones from plastics, pesticides and prescription drugs that have been flushed into sewer systems are “seeping into rivers and streams and having unintended consequences on wildlife, causing some male fish to become feminized and lay eggs,” according to a news release promoting a conference on the subject.

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By Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica

A version of this story appeared in the Albany Times-Union [1] on Oct. 8, 2009.

A preliminary report [2] from a consultant hired by New York City warns that “nearly every activity” associated with natural gas drilling could potentially harm the city’s drinking water supply and that while the risk can be reduced with strict regulations, “the likelihood of water quality impairment…. cannot be eliminated [2].”

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From Green Right Now Reports

The Baltimore City Public Schools system has announced it will participate in the Meatless Monday campaign — the first school system in the U.S. Under the program, the school district’s 80,000 students will begin each week with a Meatless Monday menu.

The Meatless Monday campaign aims to get Americans to cut out steaks and pork chops on one day a week as a way of trimming the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the livestock industry and supporting locally grown foods.

The school system’s actions yesterday earned it the 2009 Award for Visionary Leadership in Local Food Procurement and Food Education from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Dr. Robert Lawrence, director of the CLF, and Dr. Michael Klag, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, presented the award to Neil Duke, chairman of Baltimore City Board of Schools, and Tony Geraci, director of Baltimore City Schools Department of Food and Nutrition.

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By Melissa Segrest
Green Right Now

Your kids may be working on their ABCs, but is their school working on its IPM?

That’s Integrated Pest Management, an increasingly requested – or required – method of fighting pests without using potentially harmful pesticides. (Or using minimal pesticides.)

For decades, schools liberally applied toxic pesticides on their grounds and in their classrooms to beat back bugs and rodents. Exterminators or the school janitor might have sprayed DDT, diazinon or chlordane. If things got bad enough, teachers would (and still could) take matters into their own hands with a can of Raid.

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By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
For those of us who are frustrated, daily, by the vast dispersed array of government information on environmental threats to our health, a new website assembled by the Centers for Disease Control may offer some relief.
The National Environmental Health Public Tracking Network aims to help us connect to information about [...]

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From Green Right Now Reports

SustainableBusiness.com has released its 8th annual list of 20 public companies that are leading the way to a sustainable economy. The selections are made in cooperation with a group of judges consisting of leading green stock analysts.

Judges select companies across the range of green business sectors: solar, wind, geothermal, smart grid, water, food, agriculture, green building and transport. SustainableBusiness.com said a third of the companies populating this year’s list are “corporate pioneers” — companies with conventional products and services that are greening their product lines.

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From Green Right Now Reports:

A majority of Americans – about 75 percent – support regulating greenhouse gases from power plants, cars and manufacturing that would reduce global warming, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

But only a bare majority – 52 percent – support a cap-and-trade approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and 42 percent oppose such a program, which is the type of approach taken in the Waxman-Markey climate legislation expected to be voted on in the US House of Representations, possibly Friday.

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By Chris Reinolds
Green Right Now

A new cancer study from India suggests that fluoride is a contributing factor to osteosarcoma, or bone cancer – but just how much fluoride intake causes the uncommon disease is not clear.

Fluoride in Americans’ tap water has spurred controversy since its introduction in 1945. Anti-fluoride activists say the risks are too high to add “medication” to the water, while government officials cite scientific studies that prove fewer cavities and no serious risk.

In Europe, most countries refuse to treat their water with fluoride with the exception of the United Kingdom. According to the British Medical Journal, fluoridation was introduced in 1963, and the Department of Health reports that rates of dental decay have been reduced 70 percent. But experts remain divided over epidemiological research that has suggested that water fluoridation might be linked to osteoporosis, dental fluorosis, irritable bowel syndrome, and other health problems.

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By John DeFore
Green Right Now

Ascending through the dense greenery on the way up Rio de Janeiro’s Corcovado mountain, travelers may be caught off guard by the sight of a Toucan or the call of a far-off monkey, they may marvel at the beauty of a wild orchid, and they’ll almost certainly be struck by the size of it — the sensation of being far from civilization, not smack in the middle of a metropolitan area housing well over 10 million people.

Few visitors, one suspects, would guess that this forest is man-made — a mammoth greenification project, dating back over a hundred years, that serves as an example (albeit an over-sized one) of how governments might set out to combat the side effects that office buildings and sidewalks have on both the ecosystems surrounding them and the humans living within them.

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