NYC.gov Environment -- Information on water, air quality, recycling and more.
plaNYC -- Official government site for making NYC a sustainable city,
Hudson River Foundation -- Supports scientific research and the management of the Hudson ecosystem.
New York City Environmental Fund -- Fosters active community stewardship of waterways, shorelines, parklands and open spaces in and around New York City.
The Council on the Environment of NYC -- A non-profit dedicated to greening neighborhoods, creating environmental leaders of the future, promoting waste prevention and recycling, and running the largest farmers market program in the country.
Eight Midwestern states have agreed to work toward the common goal of developing high speed rail in the Midwest, and hope to access $8 billion in earmarked federal dollars to fund the new services.
Governors from those states — Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin — signed an agreement on Monday, saying they support each other in seeking federal dollars to build a high speed rail network. The hub of the network would be in the Windy City, and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley along with five of the governors attended the Midwest High Speed Rail Summit to solidify the agreement.
Chicago already serves as a hub for Amtrak and many freight lines. The new plan would bring high speed rail into the mix, which advocates say could transform and green transportation in the the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes regions.
Odwalla is continuing its successful plant-a-tree program by donating $100,000 worth of trees to be planted in state parks in California, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Utah, Ohio, Texas, Maryland, Michigan and Virginia.
Visitors to www.parkvisitor.com/odwalla can choose their preferred state to receive a tree — no contribution or registration is required. The trees will be used to support important reforestation and planting initiatives across the country.
Detroit Edison is the latest power company to ramp up wind-generation as a major part of its production capacity. The utility is soliciting proposals from potential partners interested in jointly developing wind energy projects with the company.
Detroit Edison wants to build Michigan-based wind energy farms capable of producing at least 75 megawatts of power by 2011. The energy produced from those projects would help Detroit Edison achieve Michigan’s new Renewable Portfolio Standard for the state’s electric utilities to provide 10 percent of their retail electric sales from renewable resources by 2015.
Wind energy officials, manufacturers and providers have gathered in the Windy City this week for WINDPOWER 2009, a conference expected to draw some 18,000 people.
Kicking it off on Tuesday, four governors from the Midwest along with the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission appeared at a news conference.
The presence of so much executive clout demonstrated just how important wind has become, rising from a small player on the energy scene merely a few years ago to becoming a leader in the movement for low-carbon, job-creating clean energy solutions.
The American Wind Energy Association released its annual rankings of industry leaders today, among manufacturers, producers and states with the greatest wind production capacity.
First the states: Texas leads the nation with the ability to produce 7,118 Megawatts of power, or enough to keep 1.75 million homes in electricity.
It is followed by: Iowa (2,791 Megawatts of wind capacity); California (2,517 Megawatts); Minnesota (1,754 Megawatts); Washington (1,447 Megawatts) and Oregon and Colorado (each with just over 1,000 Megawatts).
Seeking to show that proposed new U.S. coal plants would exact a high environmental toll even beyond their carbon air pollution, the Natural Resources Defense Council issued a list today of the states that would bear the greatest burden from coal waste.
Texas, with eight proposed plants, topped the NRDC’s “Filthy 15″ list. It was followed by South Dakota, Florida, Nevada and Montana, Illinois, South Carolina, Ohio, Wyoming, Michigan, Kentucky, Missouri , Wisconsin, Georgia and West Virginia.
Those states have 54 proposed coal plants awaiting permitting. Across the nation, there are 80 proposed plants that would dump an estimated 18 million tons of dangerous coal combustion waste annually into various dump sites, largely unmonitored by the federal government.
Here is the Natural Resources Defense Council’s list of the 15 states that would be the biggest polluters — the “Filthy 15” — based on their total of 54 planned coal plants that create nearly 14 million tons of dangerous waste (state; number of proposed plants; estimated coal ash waste in tons):
Odwalla is continuing its successful plant-a-tree program by donating $100,000 worth of trees to be planted in state parks in California, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Utah, Ohio, Texas, Maryland, Michigan and Virginia.
