By John DeFore

While this past weekend’s Los Angeles Auto Show had autophiles lusting after tomorrow’s hot wheels, a very different California event just celebrated a company working to make yesterday’s cars a lot greener.

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By John DeFore

While you’re sitting around the table on Thursday, be sure that in addition to giving thanks for whatever combination of fowl and starches sits on the plate you also pay due respect to the water in your glass. As a new documentary insists, it’s not something to take for granted.

FLOW (the title’s an acronym for “for love of water”) is a frightening film full of outrages and dispiriting facts about the state of water here and abroad. Stocked with scary tidbits for Americans who take water safety for granted — Can it be that 40% of the brief but nasty illnesses we attribute to “something we ate” are actually caused by water? Can you believe that drugs like Prozac linger in the water supply so long they’re found in the flesh of fish? — it also travels to areas where the scene is more dire: Bolivia, where the World Bank’s insistence on water privatization led to horrible things; India, where dying of water-borne pathogens is commonplace.

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• Five vegetarian entrees for the T-giving table

• Don’t run afoul on Thanksgiving, buy humanely raised, veg-fed turkeys

• Thinking Turkey: Don’t panic, there’s still time to buy organic

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By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
There’s science, and there’s applied science. Here’s some interesting applied science: Nanobamas. OK. We get that everything’s Obama right now. Obama-drama. Obama-rama. But nanobamas?
The scoop: John Hart, an assistant professor in the mechanical engineering department at the University of Michigan wants to expand our understanding of nanotechnology, which could be [...]

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By Harriet Blake

By now, most people are familiar with the ubiquitous bright green (and blue and pink) totes that supermarkets are touting to replace hard-to-recycle plastic bags.
Many customers dutifully carry them to and from grocery shopping each week, often receiving 3 to 4 cents in return. But what about those folks who are less conscientious?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City has a solution: charge shoppers six cents for each plastic bag they use. The mayor’s proposal is a work in progress, but environmental groups are pleased.

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By Clint Williams

Don’t be fooled. Gasoline prices won’t be bumping around $2 a gallon for long. Driving a car with good fuel economy still makes sense. Higher mpg means lower operating costs for the household budget and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

Happily, car shoppers today have a myriad of options among fuel frugal 2009 cars. You can find something getting 30 mpg or better on the highway at nearly every dealer lot. In some cases, you’ll have to settle for a trim line with a smaller engine and manual transmission to hit the 30 mpg mark.

Here are 30 with 30 mpg:

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From Green Right Now

In one final mad dash of activity, look for the Bush administration to significantly roll back several significant environmental restrictions, according to a report from McClatchy Newspapers. It’s expected that the administration will overturn limits that have kept power plants from encroaching upon national parks, blocked uranium mining near the Grand Canyon and protected ground water from contamination at mountaintop coal mining sites in Appalachia.

McClatchy reports that the Bush administration is expected to have the new rules finalized shortly before Thanksgiving. If the administration can get the rules in place quickly, it would make it more difficult for the Obama administration and the new Democratic Congress to undo the changes.

If the relaxed restrictions occur, the areas od potential impact include:

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By Tom Kessler

More than 30 years after the Clean Air Act set a national goal of cleaning up dirty air in major national parks and wilderness areas, conservationists don’t see progress but they do still see a yellowish haze caused by old power plants and factories with outdated pollution controls.

Last week, the Environmental Defense Fund and National Parks Conservation Association sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to enforce deadlines for the states to adopt Clean Air Act plans. To date, only a handful of states have submitted the required plans to comply with the law. The two groups say power plant and factory emissions continue to obscure views at national parks across the country.

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By Shermakaye Bass
The Spanish word “salud” (meaning “to your health”) is often used by wine lovers when raising a glass. But when it comes to growing grapes and making wine, not all is in the best of health, especially where ecology is concerned. Grape growing can be just as tough on the land as any [...]

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By Harriet Blake

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) issued a report earlier this week stating that global warming is increasing at an even faster pace than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast in 2007. The report, “Climate Change: Faster, Stronger, Sooner,” was pegged to the Oct. 20 Luxembourg meeting of the European Union’s Environment Ministers.

Despite concerns about the global financial crisis, the ministers have chosen to stick with their environmental improvement plan – to reduce greenhouse gases 20 percent by 2020. The WWF would like to see that increased to 30 percent.

According to the WWF’s scientific data, there were six key findings:

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By Barbara Kessler

Disturbing reports haunt the news lately, suggesting that the faltering U.S. economy could stall environmental progress or even force a digression on climate change programs.

Two U.S. wind energy companies and several corn ethanol projects have been delayed for lack of financing, The New York Times reported this week in “Alternative Energy Suddenly Faces Headwinds“.

A similarly upbeat piece “Environment will wither whoever wins US election” from The Times in London, notes that “environmental groups are already bracing themselves for delays or disappointment on action to tackle global warming”. The article postulates that post-election political leaders will face opposition to environmental programs from job-starved states in the Rust Belt reliant on coal and other heavy industry. American’s immediate need for cold green cash, it warns, could trump green growth.

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My tweener daughter has often patiently explained to me that there are “girly girls” and “Tom Boys” and variations in between. I guess she figures that in the century when I grew up that wasn’t the case, or possibly that my girlhood is so far gone, it can’t even be imagined! I need to be brought up to speed.

As her tutorial goes, “girly girls” - like her - need to dress girlishly and primp with lip gloss, cologne and smell-nice body lotions. Tom Boys, not so much.

As her mom, I want her to be a Shiny Happy Female, but my green side ends up questioning all this girlish goop-la.

Scientists have been sounding alarms about suspicious ingredients in shampoo, lotions and cosmetics for many years and being an obsessive label reader, I’ve tended to agree that it might be worthwhile to deconstruct these labels with their gazillion unpronounceable preservatives, sudsing agents, flavorings and fragrances.

Can a product containing PPG-2 hydroxyethlcoco/isostearmide be completely safe? Not being a chemist, I really don’t know, and I imagine that’s where a lot of us land: wary of this onslaught of chemicals, but without sufficient knowledge to sort it out.

The Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based watchdog organization concerned with toxins in our everyday lives, can help. You can gather info on the products you use by consulting the EWG database Skin Deep. The online tool - which includes some 25,000 products — can show you whether your body lotion, mascara or hair conditioner is rated as low, medium or high toxicity. It identifies the chemicals that are noxious; tells how they are potentially dangerous (carcinogen vs. skin irritant, say) and shows the level of research that’s been done.

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