By John DeFore

There may be a few billion reasons to worry about the environmental impact caused by rapid development in China and India, but one Chinese company has taken a green step serious enough to earn it a first-of-its-kind award from our own U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA’s Combined Heat And Power Partnership has been handing out awards to American companies since 1999, encouraging industries that use various technologies to produce both heat and electricity from a single fuel source. But it has never given one to a foreign company until now.

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By Barbara Kessler

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.

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By Harriet Blake

Nevada Senator Harry Reid joined forces this week with former President Bill Clinton, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Texas oilman-turned-wind-advocate T. Boone Pickens and other notables at the University of Nevada/Las Vegas for the National Clean Energy Summit.

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By Barbara Kessler
In the race for top carbon emissions polluter, the United States is still Number One, but China is sprinting forward and could soon edge into the lead. The current Olympics host nation accounted for a “staggering 57 percent of the growth of emissions” worldwide this century, and will likely surpass the U.S. [...]

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By Diane Porter
They could all be fine.
Or they could suffer allergic reactions, coughs, asthma attacks, respiratory infections, oxygen debt and cramps. Their performances could slip,

Photo: Frank Wechsel / triathlon.org
 
Jason Shoemaker competes at the 2007 BG Triathlon World Cup
their chances for world records could suffer. And predicting medal winners could prove more difficult than usual, [...]

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By John DeFore

California leads the nation in efforts to curb its addiction to oil, according to a report issued this week by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The group’s second annual report is mainly intended to measure each state’s relative vulnerability to rising oil prices, suggesting that while “the federal government has a responsibility to take [...]

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By John DeFore
It must be a bittersweet moment to be Darrell Hammond.

Every talk Al Gore gives, after all, continues to prove the Saturday Night Live veteran’s brilliance at honing in on the speech patterns of public figures; if Gore can’t tweak his style after years of mockery, then clearly Hammond caught something elemental.
But in [...]

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By John DeFore
In what is said to be the “largest conservation commitment in Canadian history,” Ontario has set aside an area of forest that is almost the size of the United Kingdom.
On Monday, the province’s Premier Dalton McGuinty announced that, as part of its Far North Planning initiative, it would “permanently protect” an area [...]

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By Nima Kapadia
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Swedish Energy Agency (SEA) have extended their partnership with Volvo another three years to develop commercial trucks with greater fuel efficiency. The partnership is an extension of a one-year agreement signed by the three groups in June 2007, with the overall objective of creating [...]

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By Barbara Kessler

If you’ve been wondering about all the buzz over honeybees, here is some food for thought – or rather some thought about food: Bees play a role in one out of every three bites of food Americans eat.

Pollinators, mainly bees, but also butterflies, songbirds and even bats, perform such a critical function in the food chain that their absence threatens everything from the viability of vast fields of commercial corn and other crops to the tomatoes in your garden. Without the bees and other pollinators, plants can fail to produce the fruits and seeds we eat.

Which is why a San Francisco-based group called the Pollinator Partnership has dedicated itself to the survival of pollinators — from hummingbirds to small mammals to the fragile and busiest pollinators of them all, the bees. Partnership members, along with beekeepers and researchers testified before Congress last week to lobby lawmakers for more funding to research the decline of many pollinators, particularly the loss of millions of bees around the world to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

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By Barbara Kessler
Chief Executive Officers concerned about climate change – including the chiefs of Royal Dutch Shell, Alcoa, BP, British Airways, Deutsche Bank, Tokyo Electric Power, Duke Energy, Citi, Airbus SAS, France Electric, DuPont and Nike - have issued a statement to the G-8 national leaders urging them to support a “new international climate [...]

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By Shermakaye Bass

In light of recent European bans of a pesticide linked to Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), at least one key bee expert is calling for a ban of the same pesticide in the United States.

“In the United States, drastic action is needed,” says Canadian geneticist Joe Cummins, explaining that U.S. farmers and beekeepers shouldn’t have to wait for more evidence or for an air-tight explanation for the complex syndrome, which threatens one in every third bite of food in the United States. Now most apiarists and scientists realize that pesticides are a factor in CCD, he says.

Cummins’ remarks, in an interview with GreenRightNow, come less than a month after Germany’s ban of clothianidin, a pesticide commonly used to keep insects off of corn crops. Germany banned the pesticide after heaps of dead bees were found near fields of corn coated in the pesticide, and in response to scientists who report that the insecticide severely impairs, and often kills, the honeybees that corn and other crops depend on for pollination.

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