Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Umbra Fisk

Related Links:

Garden Girl TV: indoor gardening, part three

Philadelphia activists rally & risk arrest to tell the EPA no more MTR

Ask Umbra on down comforters, soapy gray water, and canned tomatoes

by Mimi Frusha

Property
Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs, which allow private property owners to
finance energy-efficiency and renewable-energy projects via their property
taxes, has been taking off around the country. These programs are designed to
spur private improvements to reduce our nation’s energy consumption, create
green jobs, and lower energy bills.

The first
PACE program was announced in Berkeley,
Calif., in 2007. Since that time,
17 states have adopted some version of PACE and more than 200 cities and
counties throughout the country are preparing to launch programs.

PACE
offers a bright spot in the efforts to jump-start investments in clean-energy
and energy-efficiency projects. With Berkeley’s
pilot program now completed, it is time to take stock of what was learned
through the experiment. In short, the Berkeley
pilot was a remarkable success: it proved that PACE financing is feasible and
taught us a lot about how to take programs to scale.

Berkeley’s pilot, called
BerkeleyFIRST, launched in November 2008 with a solar-only financing program.
BerkeleyFIRST was a small-scale program designed to test the idea of PACE-type
financing in the real world. The program’s 40 available slots were all claimed
in 9 minutes. Once approved, property owners had nine months to install their
projects. In the end, 90 percent of participants installed or plan to install
solar systems, 85 percent said the program was responsible for their decision
to “go solar,” and roughly a third of participants used BerkeleyFIRST financing
to pay for their new systems.

Listed
here are the top four lessons learned through the Berkeley pilot.

PACE works. When the City of Berkeley announced this innovative
idea to encourage property owners to go solar, nobody had ever tried the
approach before. It worked.  Participants installed solar and are
repaying the costs through their property tax bills. Larger programs in Boulder
County, Colo., and Sonoma County, Calif., have shown that administering PACE
programs at a larger scale is not only possible, but can reduce administrative
and financing costs. Across the country, more than 2,000 property owners have
now taken advantage of PACE programs.

Bigger is better. Berkeley’s PACE pilot allowed that city to
learn what components work together to create a successful and sustainable
program. The City of Berkeley
has since opted to join a county-wide PACE program that was created in the wake
of the pilot. Alameda County’s program will make PACE financing available
to thousands of Berkeley
property owners, thus helping to reduce interest rates and bringing down
administrative costs for each participating property. The program is scheduled
to launch mid-summer 2010 as part of the statewide CaliforniaFIRST program.

Programs should ensure that
applicants are “ready to go.”  In an
effort to make the program easily available to all property owners,
BerkeleyFIRST had a nominal $25 application fee and did not require that owners
have “shovel ready” projects with approved bids. Nor were property owners
required to commit to going forward with projects. While nearly everyone
installed a solar system or plans to do so, many property owners financed using
alternative means.

Some attrition is unavoidable in any voluntary program like
PACE, especially as many people have faced dramatic and unexpected changes to
their financial situations in recent years. However, attrition can be managed
by adjusting application fees, requiring projects to be ready for installation,
and asking property owners to make a strong commitment to completing their
projects as part of the application process.

Include a broad range of
eligible renewable-energy and energy-efficiency projects. Installing a
photovoltaic system on a home that is poorly insulated or sealed is a bit like
pouring water into a bucket that is full of holes.  The Berkeley
program recognized this challenge by requiring homeowners to meet a basic
energy-efficiency standard to be eligible for financing their solar projects,
but in order to keep the pilot program simple, it did not help property owners
to pay for these improvements.

Nearly all PACE programs that are now coming online offer
funding for projects ranging from installing energy-efficient furnaces and
water heaters to improving insulation to covering solar or wind-power systems.
When Berkeley rolls out the next phase of its PACE financing through Alameda County, it will allow such improvements to be covered as well. This policy change will improve the economics of many projects as well as provide the opportunity for whole home energy retrofits.

Berkeley stepped up to develop a
new model for financing renewables and energy efficiency.  It—along with other pioneers like Babylon, N.Y., Boulder County, Colo., and
Sonoma County
and Palm Desert, Calif.—helped to pave the way to a more
energy-efficient future. The lessons learned from Berkeley’s pilot have helped tremendously in
our efforts to develop a flexible and sustainable PACE model.

Editor’s note: The
author’s for-profit company, Renewable Funding LLC, was the third-party administrator for
the BerkeleyFIRST program.

Related Links:

Will Sen. Jim Webb Fight for Clean Energy or Dirty Coal?

China’s changing energy economy

Policy fixes to unleash clean energy, part 8

by Charles Komanoff

Al Gore’s eminence in the global climate movement is on impressive display in his full-throated defense of climate science in Sunday’s New York Times. His essay, “We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change,” is triple the paper’s standard length for op-eds. Only Gore could command such a bully pulpit, and probably no one else could so powerfully restore the sense of urgency that has seeped out of climate policy over the past year.

In Gore’s essay, the triple debacles of Climategate, Copenhagen, and Congress fall into perspective, and the moral high ground is regained for a renewed U.S. legislative effort to place a stiff price on carbon pollution. From his stage-setting opening lines,

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

To his calling out climate change deniers for misappropriating this winter’s East Coast snowstorms,

[S]cientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been … causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

Mr. Gore demonstrates his mastery of both science and metaphor that animated the documentary An Inconvenient Truth and invigorated the citizens’ climate movement during the long darkness of the Bush administration.

The former vice-president also presents a reasonable, if backhanded, explanation of the demise of cap-and-trade legislation, the approach long anointed by the Big Green groups (though not by Gore himself, a carbon taxer since the early 1990s), which Lindsey Graham, a rare G.O.P. Senator who “gets climate,” reportedly just pronounced “dead.”

Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution—arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.

Which makes it both perplexing and frustrating that Mr. Gore’s response to cap-and-trade’s manifest failure is to repeat not only his endorsement of cap-and-trade before Congress last year, but his latter-day criticism of a carbon tax:

[T]here is no readily apparent alternative [to cap-and-trade] that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax.

This is dreadfully wrong, both substantively and politically.

Mr. Gore’s substantive error lies in presuming that a cap-based approach could be harmonized globally. Perhaps this is a legacy of his having championed cap-and-trade in the 1997 negotiations that produced the Kyoto Protocol. Yet now, as then, there are no clear grounds for translating a possible U.S. cap on carbon emissions into limits for other countries. Per capita, Americans generate 4 times as much greenhouse gases as Chinese and 14 times as much as Indians. Why, then, should a U.S. commitment to reduce emissions by, say, 2 percent a year, carry any moral authority in China or India? Indeed, India’s per capita emissions could increase by 2 percent a year for more than 60 years and still not match U.S. emissions declining at the same rate.

A carbon tax, in contrast, is wholly fungible across borders. A fee that raises the price of coal or natural gas by so much in one country will do the same in another. If one country is more efficient in turning energy into goods and services, or enjoys a greater abundance of carbon-free water- or wind-power, then that is an incentive to other nations to step up their efforts and achieve parity. A carbon tax thus creates no unfair comparative advantage. While these facts can’t guarantee global harmonization of a carbon tax, they provide a strong basis for it.

Politically, Mr. Gore’s dogged support of cap-and-trade sounds tone-deaf. The financial crisis hasn’t merely shaken the world’s confidence in market-based solutions; it has provoked a profound revulsion among Americans against financial speculation, market manipulation and legislative complexity. Yet all of these are intrinsic to cap-and-trade systems built on trillion-dollar markets in volatile emission permits. It is this political reaction, even more than media-driven denial of climate science, that has turned Congress against cap-and-trade. Mr. Gore underestimates its staying power at his own risk.

There is an alternative to both cap-and-trade and inaction, and it is the very instrument that Al Gore bravely backed for almost two decades: a carbon tax. This is not a market-based approach to be administered by Wall Street insiders, but an incentives-based one applied to all fossil fuels by the U.S. Government. With the revenues redistributed to Americans as monthly carbon checks and the tax rebranded as a carbon fee—as proposed by Mr. Gore’s climate mentor, climatologist James Hansen—a carbon “fee-and-dividend” would be everything cap-and-trade cannot: simple, transparent, effective and, above all, equitable.

With fee-and-dividend, a majority of us would get back in dividends more than we would pay in the tax, and all Americans would have equal incentives to transition to low-carbon ways of life. Industry would have what it needs to steer the transition: clear, unmistakable price signals to drive investment from dirty coal and imported oil to clean energy and green jobs.

The carbon tax (or fee) movement has missed Al Gore’s participation this past year. Yet it has maintained its presence in the grassroots and is gaining a toehold in Washington. Mr. Gore’s op-ed essay today shows again how vital his voice is. We carbon taxers call upon him to rejoin the fold and lead the political drive to pass a revenue-neutral U.S. carbon tax this year.

Related Links:

The ‘energy-only’ bill and Byron Dorgan’s deficit hypocrisy

Myths and realities of cap-and-trade

Lindsey Graham’s dilemma, part two: Trying to deal a winning hand without ACES

by David Roberts

Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) appear set to introduce a draft of their new climate/energy legislation this week.  Graham says they are trying to hash out a moderate bill that can draw broad public support and pick up a few Republican votes.

Now, as it happens, what Graham is groping around for already exists. There is a moderate climate/energy bill that has drawn broad public support and picked up a few Republican votes. It’s called the American Clean Energy & Security Act (ACES), or Waxman-Markey. It passed the House back in June of ‘09.

But Graham can’t use that bill! Indeed he has to make a big production of not using it. He has to distance himself from it as much as possible.  He’s got to come up with a bill that can satisfy a wide range of legislators and interest groups … but looks completely different from the bill that’s already done so. That’s quite a pickle.

Can he do it? To answer that question, it helps to take a brief trip back in time to see how we ended up in this odd situation.

ACES in reality

Despite stiff competition from the health-care reform bill, the Waxman-Markey bill may be the most misunderstood legislation of the Obama era. Conservatives and liberals have both caricatured it beyond recognition, its reputation now almost completely at odds with its contents and its history.

In fact, ACES was the result of careful preparation and negotiation. To establish a left flank, Markey introduced his ambitious iCap bill in May ‘08. In January ‘09, the enviro-business coalition USCAP introduced its own more moderate (read: weaker) blueprint.  When it came time to introduce a bill, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.)  modeled it on USCAP—a conspicuous signal to moderates, for which more than one thanked him.

Months later, after meeting with virtually every legislator and interest group with a stake in the bill, listening to their concerns, and finding what it would take to get their support, Waxman and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) shepherded a somewhat diminished version of the bill through the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is roughly representative, in terms of carbon intensity, of the overall House. Sure enough, with few more unsavory tweaks, the bill passed in the House, 219-212, with eight Republicans voting aye.

ACES is, in other words, a moderate bill. And Waxman’s quiet pragmatism stands in glaring contrast to the   leaks and counter-leaks, squabbles, and grandstanding that have characterized the Senate’s efforts at … well, anything.

ACES as ghost story

ACES isn’t seen as a moderate bill, though. Quite the contrary: it’s seen as radically liberal. Why is that? The bill’s odd reputation has four intertwining explanations:

First, as has been the case more than once this session, the House’s competence proved its undoing. ACES passed well before the Senate was prepared to take it up. That left an entire summer for the newly energized teabag movement to bash it as a puppy-killing socialist energy tax. Indeed, it has now been nine long months since ACES passed—nine months for Dems to defend a vote but not a bill, an idea but not a victory.

Second, the political press proved stunningly incompetent at assessing the bill or the politics behind it. Rather than offering some sense of the bill’s scope, its goals (clean energy and security, right there in the title!), or the breadth of political support behind it, they deemed it “cap-and-trade” and wrote story after story about its (speculative) costs. The public overwhelming supports clean energy, energy security, and legislation on their behalf. They don’t understand “cap-and-trade,” though, and they fear costs.

Third, the progressive messaging infrastructure proved utterly incompetent as usual. Rather than fighting back in a coordinated way against the “costs of cap-and-trade” narrative favored by the press and conservatives, the left formed the usual circular firing squad. Instead of driving home a counter-narrative about the benefits of legislation—energy independence, clean energy industries,  lower energy bills,  jobs—the left descended into Talmudic debates over the relative virtues of cap-and-trade and a carbon tax. Hmm, which way to raise energy prices? Let’s talk about that!

And finally, the U.S. Senate has become hopelessly sclerotic and dysfunctional. U.S. senators—particularly the “centrists”  most needed to make a bill work—are possessed of extraordinary vanity and ignorance. They know frighteningly little about climate change, climate economics, or climate policy, but they’re quite certain they’re not going to pass something the House passed. The House is a bunch of raving liberals! Whatever gets through there is too far left by definition, in need of the Senate’s cooling saucer. (The bill’s quick passage through the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, seen as a liberal bastion, only reinforced the impression.)

Add these together and ACES, along with “cap-and-trade,” became irrevocably tarnished, particularly in the pinched worldview of the Senate’s self-described centrists. That’s why Graham said, in October, “What I’m trying to do is make sure the Waxman-Markey bill from the House is dead.” That’s why he said, just last week, “Cap-and-trade is dead.” He’s got to say that, or his effort with Kerry and Lieberman will never get off the ground. No Republicans and too few conservadems can vote for “cap-and-trade,” so whatever it is, it’s got to be called something else.

But what? What should it look like? More on that tomorrow.

Related Links:

The ‘energy-only’ bill and Byron Dorgan’s deficit hypocrisy

Myths and realities of cap-and-trade

Lindsey Graham’s dilemma, part two: Trying to deal a winning hand without ACES

by Agence France-Presse

Photo: Olivier FfrenchWASHINGTON—One of the most common weed killers in the world, atrazine, causes chemical castration in frogs and could be contributing to a worldwide decline in amphibian populations, a study published Monday showed.

Researchers compared 40 male control frogs with 40 male frogs reared from hatchlings until full sexual maturity in atrazine concentrations similar to those experienced year-round in areas where the chemical is found.

Ninety percent of the male frogs exposed to atrazine had low testosterone levels, decreased breeding gland size, feminized laryngeal development, suppressed mating behavior, reduced sperm production, and decreased fertility.

And an alarming finding of the study was that the remaining 10 percent of atrazine-exposed male frogs developed into females that copulated with males and produced eggs. The larvae that developed from those eggs were all male.

The study was conducted by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Earlier studies have found that atrazine feminized zebra fish and leopard frogs and caused a significant decline in sperm production in male salmon and caiman lizards.

“Atrazine exposure is highly correlated with low sperm count, poor semen quality, and impaired fertility in humans,” the study said.

Atrazine is widely used by farmers around the world as a weed- and grass-killer, particularly in production of corn, sorghum, and sugar cane.

According to the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council, the chemical herbicide has been banned in the European Union, although advocates for atrazine, who say the weed killer increases crop yields, say only some European countries have banned it.

The U.S. EPA refused to ban the chemical herbicide four years ago, saying there was insufficient data to determine whether the it affects amphibian development.

Around 80 million pounds of atrazine are applied annually to crop fields in the United States alone, and half a million pounds of the herbicide fall to earth in rainfall in the United States, including in areas hundreds of miles from the farmland where it was originally applied, the study says.

“Atrazine can be transported more than 1,000 kilometers [620 miles] from the point of application via rainfall and, as a result, contaminates otherwise pristine habitats, even in remote areas where it is not used,” the study says.

Related Links:

Obama home upgrade program targets jobs, energy conservation

Democratic candidate in Colo. guv race questions climate science

British scientist in climate controversy admits emails were ‘awful’

by Tom Laskawy

An interesting new study was just published in Psychological Science, about a lab experiment at SUNY Buffalo that suggests junk-food taxes increase the overall nutritional quality of a shopping trip, while subsidies on healthy foods actually decrease the nutritional quality (via Science Daily).

[Study author and clinical psychologist Dr. Leonard] Epstein and colleagues simulated a grocery store, “stocked” with
images of everything from bananas and whole wheat bread to Dr. Pepper
and nachos. A group of volunteers—all mothers—were given
laboratory “money” to shop for a week’s groceries for the family. Each
food item was priced the same as groceries at a real grocery nearby,
and each food came with basic nutritional information.

The mother-volunteers went shopping several times in the simulated
grocery. First they shopped with the regular prices, but afterward the
researchers imposed either taxes or subsidies on the foods. That is,
they either raised the prices of unhealthy foods by 12.5 percent, and then by
25 percent; or they discounted the price of healthy foods comparably. Then
they watched what the mothers purchased.

The study authors separated food into two categories, “high calorie for nutrient” food and “low calorie for nutrient” food—i.e. junk food and healthy food. They did this so that they could specifically measure the effect pricing changes had on the nutritional content of a participant’s shopping basket. As you might expect, taxing junk food reduced junk food purchases, and subsidizing healthy food increased healthy food purchases. But the story does not end there. The researchers discovered that taxing the bad stuff was far more effective from a nutritional standpoint than subsidizing the good stuff—and not just because prices affected sales.

The junk food taxes caused a real shift in nutritional quality because the money saved on junk food was spent on healthy food, which has more nutrients per calories. However, when the researchers subsidized healthy food in their test, many participants spent the savings on—wait for it—junk food. A subsidy for health foods actually increased the amount of fat, protein, and carbohydrates from that simulated shopping trip by about 10 percent each.

There were some other important elements to the study. A subject of some debate in academic circles involves whether obese people will react the same way as normal-weight people when presented with increased prices for junk food or reduced prices for healthy food. In this case, 40 percent of the study participants were obese, defined as a Body Mass Index over 30. They reacted to the changed prices in more or less the same way as normal-weight participants.

This SUNY Buffalo study does present some challenges for advocates of taxes and subsidies. On the one hand, I’ve argued, and continue to believe, that both taxes and subsidies are necessary components of addressing obesity. But there is clearly some risk that pairing the two policies might not give quite the bang for the buck some might hope, since consumers might use the subsidy savings to pay for more junk.

And while the ideal solution involves a general junk-food tax, the study does suggest that a soda tax on its own might still have a significant positive effect on the nutritional content of a shopping basket. A chart accompanying the study lists the “calorie for nutrient” ratings of all the foods used. Healthy foods had CFNs below 30 (bananas are 20, chicken is 11, tomatoes are 4), while junk food ratings were 30 and up. But if you look at individual foods, you realize that soda is off the charts in terms of caloric impact of a grocery trip. Cheetos, for example, have a CFN rating of 48. Pop-Tarts are 50. Starburst and M&Ms are 70 and 83, respectively. Pepsi, however, has a CFN of 443. Even mayonnaise, not exactly a stand-alone food, has a CFN of only 197. The point here is that anything that deflects purchases from soda will improve the nutritional quality of a shopping trip. And a soda tax on its own will do just that.

The challenge now is to figure out a way to bring down the cost of fruits and veggies in such as way as not to increase purchases of junk food. Here’s one idea: subsidize farmers markets and green grocers, i.e. places that tend not to sell lots of cheap, calorically dense foods. Any other suggestions?

Related Links:

The bluefin tuna gets a bigtime backer: the U.S. government

Obama’s cholesterol beef isn’t with the burgers, but the buns

EPA stands by as polluters ignore the Clean Water Act

by Dan Lashof

Sen. James Inhofe, (R-Okla.), the Senate’s chief spokesman for climate deniers, says so many outrageous things (see his recent interview on Grist) he’s all but lost his power to surprise.

Last week, though, the Oklahoma Republican crossed a line that I find shocking, attempting to discredit scientists through innuendo and the kind of intimidation that can have a chilling effect.

If Inhofe wants to call global warming a hoax, as he first did in 2003, that may be paranoid, but he has that right.

If he wants to say some stolen emails between a handful of climate scientists prove that he was right all along, PolitiFact rates the statement “false,” but it’s a nice debating point for him.

If he wants to have his grandchildren put a sign on their Igloo saying “Al Gore’s new home,” I guess that’s OK, though it does sadden me to see one of the great joys of childhood—a snow day—politicized.

But when Inhofe attempts to discredit respected scientists through innuendo and tries to intimidate them by threatening a criminal investigation, enough is enough.

It is time to say, “Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

 

Last week Inhofe released a report by his minority staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that represents a shocking new low in the public discourse on global warming.

The first chapter is unremarkable. It simply rehashes previously discussed accusations arising from the emails hacked from University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU).

In chapter two, though, the report shifts tone, setting the stage for guilt by association. The bulk of the chapter simply describes how the IPCC operates, but it includes a table called “CRU-IPCC CONNECTION.”  The table lists a number of lead authors of the three most recent IPCC reports. The Inhofe report asserts that:

The chart below shows that the scientists at the center of the CRU scandal were participants in drafting IPCC assessment reports. Nearly all of the scientists worked at the highest levels of the IPCC, shaping and influencing the content of the assessment reports that form the international global warming ‘consensus.’

The only link to the CRU controversy for some of them appears to be that their names were mentioned in one of the emails.

For example, Inhofe’s report claims that Susan Solomon is “implicated in the CRU emails” and her name appears three times in the “CRU-IPCC CONNECTION” table. Solomon, a distinguished NOAA scientist, was indeed heavily involved in the IPCC report—she co-chaired Working Group I, which assessed the fundamental science of global warming. Her only link to the CRU emails presented in the Inhofe report is a February 2006 message from Keith Briffa to Jonathan Overpeck that mentions her in a single sentence. That sentence reads:

Of course this discussion now needs to go to the wider Chapter authorship, but do not let Susan [Solomon of NOAA] (or Mike [Michael Mann]) push you (us) beyond where we know is right.

Note that there is no evidence whatsoever that Solomon made any attempt to push Briffa and Overpeck to modify their views of the scientific issues that were discussed in the email. No matter, if your name is mentioned in one of the stolen emails you are “implicated.”

Chapter three is the most insidious as it is designed to intimidate scientists. It contains nothing of substance other than a summary of the Freedom of Information Act, White House openness directives, the False Statements Act and the False Claims Act. It then implies that the scientists mentioned in the emails may have violated these statutes and policies, but never presents any actual evidence that they have. The only actual accusation made in the report is that the emails “raise questions.” The authors go on to say they are investigating “whether any violations” occurred. The complete text of the innuendo is:

These and other issues raise questions about the lawful use of federal funds and potential ethical misconduct. Discussed below are brief descriptions of the statutes and regulations that the Minority Staff believe are implicated in this scandal. In our investigation, we are examining the emails and documents and determining whether any violations of these federal laws and policies occurred.

Have you no sense of decency Senator Inhofe, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

 

Related Links:

Democratic candidate in Colo. guv race questions climate science

The Climate Post: Climate bill + climategate = Bill ‘Climate’ Gates!

James Inhofe, Senate’s top skeptic, explains his climate-hoax theory

by Tyler Falk

Jeff Biggers talked about his new book Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland on GRITtv with Laura Flanders last Friday. Check out the interview:

Biggers was also on Democracy Now! to talk about the myth the of clean coal technologies that President Obama continues to promote.

Related Links:

Humane Society Gives Top Honors to Mountaintop Removal Champion

Will Sen. Jim Webb Fight for Clean Energy or Dirty Coal?

Ask Umbra’s Book Club launches

by Ashley Braun

They’re secretly unicycling jugglers!

Turns out you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do it, though—just a climate scientist.

At least that’s the case for NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt, who, after he’s done juggling data to pin down atmospheric changes, likes to space out by tossing pins and balls into the atmosphere. How’d he get started? Back in high school, Schmidt decided he Goddard pick up juggling to pick up the ladies.

How’d that work out for him? You can see he’s still clowning around:

Get more on the Secret Life of Scientists over at PBS.org.

Related Links:

A rich guy’s guide to saving the oceans

British Airways plans to get wasted on future flights

Hummer to hum along no more?

by Lisa Hymas

Our friends at Slate have launched a new project that’s
collecting practical suggestions for living a more energy-efficient life. Check out the ideas offered
so far, vote on your favorites, and submit your own. 

A panel of judges, including yours truly, will help choose
the top ideas. 

If you’re in the D.C.
area, join Slate (and me) at live event on March 10: 

A conversation about personal energy efficiency: What are
the most useful ideas? And what are the best ways to persuade Americans to
adopt them?

Wednesday, March 10, 2010
House of Sweden, 2900 K St. NW, Washington, D.C.

5:30 p.m., followed by cocktails. 

Come prepared to participate! After the experts speak, we’ll
divide into groups and generate ideas about improving personal energy
efficiency, ideas that will be published and publicized on Slate.

Please RSVP by email to [email protected]

Speakers include:

Daniel Gross, the business columnist for Slate and Newsweek.
His project, The Efficient Life,
is searching for the best ways Americans can save money by using less energy
David Katz, the special assistant to the secretary at the
U.S. Department of Energy, coordinating the department’s energy-efficiency
efforts
Rebecca Craft, director of energy efficiency at Consolidated
Edison Company of New York, Inc.
Lane Burt, manager of building energy policy for the Natural
Resources Defense Council [and a Grist
blogger]
Lisa Hymas, senior editor and cofounder of Grist.org

Daniel Gross, who’s kicking off the project by looking
at the energy usage in his own home, says reader suggestions could address one
of these four areas—or maybe another area he’s never even thought of. 

Personal behavior. What can I
do-in a non-obsessive way-that will best reduce my energy use without ruining
my life? (You could, for example, suggest that I turn the heat off entirely,
but that’s not realistic.) How much can be gained just by making marginal-not
radical-changes?

Software. I’d like to outsource as
much energy saving as possible to smarter technology. For example, you could
tell me the absolute best, easiest way to program a thermostat.

Hardware. What capital investments
should I make that will save me the most energy and money? (A particularly
interesting related question: What is the best way to take advantage of tax
credits to defray that spending?)

Information. What information
should my utility company (or others) be sharing with me that will spur me to
use less energy?

Here’s Gross with more info about the project: 

Related Links:

China’s changing energy economy

Ask Umbra on down comforters, soapy gray water, and canned tomatoes

Talking Vancouver and successful urbanism on the radio

by Janet Wilson

Photo: Official Avatar Movie photostream via FlickrHe’s made the highest grossing film on
the
planet, but Hollywood mega-director James Cameron is now promoting
“Avatar” as
the most successful environmental film of all time, too.  Really.

“There is no studio anywhere
in the world who would say an environmental message would make $3 billion … I
can’t think of any other really commercially successful ones, can you?” he said
during an interview at a Santa Monica fundraiser last Monday for the
environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council.

“‘WALL-E’, maybe?” replied his
wife, actress Suzy Amis Cameron.

It was Amis Cameron who asked
an astonished, grateful NRDC if they would like her husband to appear at a quickly arranged
fundraiser starring Cameron and his sci-fi
blockbuster, which features a mother tree deity. The film is nominated in nine Oscar categories, after all, including
best director and best picture.  Hooking
up with NRDC was, if you think about, perfectly natural. 

Talking to a graduate film
student at the event, Cameron warmed to
his message that he’s the greatest enviro director, comparing his work to “An Inconvenient Truth,” which he called boring with bar charts.  “If it wasn’t Al Gore, nobody would have listened,” he said, but then ruefully admitted
he made four semi-successful documentaries about the ocean before plunging into
“Avatar.”

“I wanted to do a film that
had a deeply embedded environmental message … but do it in the form of a science
fiction action adventure,” Cameron told local public radio host Elvis Mitchell.
“My feeling was if we have to go four light years away to another planet to
appreciate what we have here on earth, that’s okay.”

He wanted, he said, to pack
such an emotional wallop that by the time the film’s giant, sheltering tree is
felled, everyone in the theater would feel moral outrage. Further, after the
triumph of nature’s creatures over evil military contractors, he wanted the
audience to feel hopeful enough to do something.

“Avatar” may be the most
explicitly environmental film of Cameron’s oeuvre, but he insists he’s been
making them all his life, from a high school work entitled “The Extinction
Syndrome” to his obsession with nuclear
war fears à la the “Terminator” series.

Cameron’s environmental zeal started
early. Though he spent his childhood in a Canadian farm town, he earned his
scuba certification in a landlocked swimming pool. When he was 17, his family
moved to inland southern California,
but he homed in on the beach, surfing off Huntington and Laguna, then switching
to scuba diving.

In recent years he has done group
submersible dives, exploring and noting the slow degradation of coral reefs. Oceanic
influences infuse “Avatar’s” phosphorescent lighting and dreamlike landscapes.
The giant, whirly creatures that shrivel up when Sully taps them were based on
sea worms. He had a team of the planet’s best designers, Cameron said, but every
time they invented something spectacular, they found Mother Nature had done
something better.

Cameron seems pretty well positioned to take on right-wing
climate deniers, having made “The Terminator” for Fox when Rush Limbaugh was a
California cow town radio host. At the NRDC event, he refused to debate about
Fox News commentators, however, noting he works for a different division,
though he confirmed studio executives asked him to “tone down the tree-hugger
crap.” He refused, but art imitated studio life when Jake Sully, the contract
soldier who is the main character, says he hopes “all the tree-hugger crap”
he’s being exposed to “won’t be on the final.”

Tree hugging is not, Cameron
acknowledged, in the moviemaking industry’s genetic makeup, it being a carbon-intensive
process. But, he insists, his family’s
use of hybrid vehicles, fluorescent bulbs, and other sustainable products is his
way of making a difference. Okay sure, that should even things out.

It might have been an NRDC
event, but the mobs were vintage Hollywood, even if there were high schoolers
and Amazon River activists mixed in with the “Aliens” fans and wannabe filmmakers.
One man’s daughter had attended a birthday party for one of Cameron’s’ kids and
said he’d have his child slip a copy of his documentary on soil to Cameron’s
child to pass on to him. Have your girl
call my girl. We’ll do lunch.

I joined the mob, testing Cameron’s
green chops: Wind power (he’s a huge fan), clean coal (it doesn’t exist), the
failure of Obama and other world leaders at Copenhagen (agreed), cap-and-trade,
he was acquainted with them all, even a bit directa-torial in his opinions. But
he gave as good as he got. When I noted that acid rain was still spreading
despite cap-and-trade, he retorted that it’s not spreading as fast as it would
have. He asked what a better solution might be. Tough new regulations?

Fine, “I’m willing to engage
or indulge real ideas,” he said. “But if we don’t do something, we’re all going
to die! What’s it going to take, a big fucking disaster with all kinds of
people dying? We need to change our priorities fast.”

Cameron said he has been overwhelmed
with requests from environmental groups, and will probably do more events,
since his wife told him, “Maybe more than an opportunity, maybe there’s a duty
to try to use this film for whatever good can be brought to bear.”

He added, “The environmental
message maybe got lost earlier in all the talk about 3-D … It’s time to start
having that conversation more.”

<!— /* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:”Cambria Math”;
panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:roman;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1107304683 0 0 159 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:”Times New Roman”,”serif”;
mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;}
span.msoIns
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-style-name:””;
text-decoration:underline;
text-underline:single;
color:teal;}
span.msoDel
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-style-name:””;
text-decoration:line-through;
color:red;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
font-size:10.0pt;
mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;}
@page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}—>

Related Links:

The latest musical trend is annoying the Senate into climate action

Avatar: The Prequel

Could transparency make up for a lack of a carbon cap?

by Umbra Fisk

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

I’ve recently moved to Tahoe and,
in an energy-saving effort, am trying to keep the heat down in my house. The
problem is that now it gets to be around 50 degrees in the bedroom at night,
and we need some serious warmth in the blankets! I’d like to get a huge, puffy,
and wondrously warm down comforter, but I’m not sure if there are any ethical
or environmental problems with getting real goose down and generally eschew
synthetic alternatives to anything. A little help?

Mila
Kings Beach, Calif.

A. Dearest
Mila,

I wore out my VHS of Mary
Poppins. One of my favorite scenes involves Uncle Albert, whose laughter has
caused him to levitate. He needs a sad story to bring him off his high, so Bert
pipes up with a story about his granddad chewing his pillow to bits.

“In the morning, I says, ‘How you feel, Granddad?’ He says, ‘Oh,
not bad. A little down in the mouth,’”
Bert says. “I always say there’s nothing like a good joke.”

“And that was nothing like a good joke,” Uncle Albert says.

You know what else is no joke? How goose and duck down, the
soft layer of feathers on the birds’ chests, is obtained. So props to you, Mila,
for caring enough to ask (and for braving the bedroom chill to keep the
thermostat low).

It would be nice to think there’s just a flock of quiet
farmers who wait patiently for the down to fall out on its own. However, here’s
the real deal, according to the USDA:
When the birds are slaughtered, they are first stunned electrically. After
their throats are cut and the birds are bled, they are scalded to facilitate
removal of large feathers. To remove fine pinfeathers, the birds are dipped in
paraffin wax. Down and feathers are then sorted.

Gosh, that doesn’t sound comfy at all. According to PETA, some
countries still practice the painful method of live-plucking on geese from
breeding flocks or those raised for meat or foie gras (another nasty can of worms
entirely). And in the case of eider ducks, a protected species that lines its
nests with feathers, farmers swipe the feathers for bedding and clothing,
removing insulation the little eider eggs need to hatch. Not cool.

So what’s a more ethical, still-warm eco-alternative?
Organic cotton, humanely harvested wool, or even an electric blanket, which
isn’t nearly as big an energy-suck as keeping that thermostat turned up (check
out this Treehugger
forum piece on what to look for in an electric blanket).

If you’re still into the idea of down but not the ethical
ramifications, you could always shop secondhand stores for used down comforters,
so at least no additional geese or ducks would be plucked of their feathers for
your warmth. After all, our bird friends don’t have the option of an electric
blankie—or of not getting tazed if someone wants their feathers.

Supercalifragilistically,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

My apartment
has no dishwasher, so my roommates and I are constantly creating a lot of
“gray water.” I know the eco-choice here is to collect the dirty
rinse water and hydrate the plants, but will the soap hurt them? Will any of
the food scraps? We don’t use biodegradable soap, but I don’t know what else to
do with it!

Erika
Chicago

A. Dearest Erika,

Why no biodegradable soap? Do you work for a non-biodegradable soap company
that gives you a sweet discount on its product?

Whatever the
discount is, I say blow it off. Invite your roommates to help you scrounge
between the sofa cushions and under the coin-op washing machine for spare
change to purchase some more eco-friendly dish suds, because the stuff you’re
using now probably isn’t great for your plants. Or for the fish and other
creatures who eventually meet it in our waterways. As I’ve suggested before, look for a dish soap without
sodium, chlorine, or boron (which is, alas, a major ingredient in the handy
cleanser Borax). These are either immediately harmful to plants or will become
so over time as they accumulate in the soil.

As for the
food waste, scrape what you can off the plates into the composting bin (yes,
you can compost in your apartment), except for meat, fish, dairy,
and grease. Whatever bits are left in the water post-washing are fine for your
plant friends and can even be nutritious, especially when filtered through mulch.

Happy
washing and watering! And thanks for not letting it all go down the drain.

Bubbly,
Umbra

I recently visited the
topic of BPA in canned foods, and readers MBP1111 and Rachel W. had this to add
in the comments section of the column:

MBP1111: Come on
Umbra! Just because a reader found her own answer doesn’t mean you shouldn’t
check her work. This site has much more extensive information on which brands have BPA in their
cans.

As it turns out, Eden is not all BPA-free
(its tomato cans have BPA), and there are other brands that have some BPA-free
canned goods (like Trader Joe’s).

Rachel W.: I’ve done
a fair amount of research into BPA in can liners, and I have not been able to
find any brand of canned tomatoes that is BPA-free (including Eden and Trader
Joe’s). My sense is that this has something to do with the high level of acidity
in tomatoes (relative to, say, beans or other vegetables).

A. Dearest MBP and Rachel,

Thank you, my attentive readers. Indeed, I was remiss in not
going into further detail about canned tomatoes specifically. It is true that, due
to the acidity of tomatoes, Eden Foods’ canned tomato products, as well as all
others that are commercially canned in the United States, contain some BPA.

“The FDA hasn’t approved any other type of can lining
for highly acidic foods,” says Mike Potter, founder and president of Eden
Foods, on the company’s website, though the company also says independent laboratory
tests have shown that the amount is in the “non-detectable” range.

So, as best I can tell, if you truly want to avoid the
potential of BPA exposure when it comes to tomatoes, the solution is opting for
fresh ones, as even the glass jars of tomatoes I found have plastic-lined lids.
However, in a canning class I attended recently, the instructor was able to
forage her decades-old supplies to find a few porcelain-lined lids—which
apparently haven’t been produced since the ‘50s. Time for a comeback?

Lycopenely,
Umbra

Related Links:

Garden Girl TV: indoor gardening, part three

Water and the War on Terror

EPA stands by as polluters ignore the Clean Water Act

by Miles Grant

Does Dow Chemical support climate action? Or think it would destroy America? Depends on which Dow Chemical you’re listening to.

Is it the Dow Chemical that’s a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership? That Dow made a major investment in clean energy in Michigan last week. From MLive.com’s The Mudpuppy:

Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm says it was a great week for Michigan and the Dow Chemical Co., with Dow announcing three clean-energy projects in the state that will create up to 6,900 new jobs.

“Dow announced a combined investment of almost $1.3 billion in three
clean-energy projects that’ll create thousands of new jobs in our
state,” Granholm said today in her weekly radio address.

Or is it the Dow that’s a member of the American Chemistry Council? That Dow’s membership dues are supporting a dirty attack on the Clean Air Act in several states. The Chemistry Council was apparently the money behind the ads attacking the Environmental Protection Agency for trying to do its job and protect our air as mandated by the Clean Air Act—passed by a Democratic Congress, signed by a Republican president, and approved by a conservative Supreme Court.

I say “apparently” because the announcer in the ad never actually says who paid for them. In tiny, semi-transparent type at the bottom of the ad are the words “Paid for by the Coalition for American Jobs.” If that name sounds about as credible as the law firm of Dewey, Cheatem & Howe, you’re on the right track.

You see, the “Coalition” won’t say who’s in the coalition. Its website just makes a vague reference to “businesses, industries and others.” And its “resource” page is completely blank. Who’s the website registered to? The “Coalition” doesn’t want you to know, having hidden its registration information. And why not? The website is as flimsy and phony as the group itself. (The firm that created the site didn’t return my call asking who’d paid for it.)

Here’s a photo from the site:

A “Coalition” supporter? Not exactly. More like a stock photo:

You’d think front groups would have learned from Big Coal’s embarrassing “FACES of Coal” stock photo scandal. Guess not. In fact, the entire Flickr account of the “Coalition” appears to be stock photos.

The group’s phone number is a cell that goes straight to voicemail … but a search shows up as having it registered to “Chemis American.” Considering the “Coalition” ads are prominently featured on the Chemistry Council’s front page, it’s safe to say the American Chemistry Council is pulling the strings.

It would be understandable if Dow Chemical’s position was to support Congressional clean energy & climate legislation but not direct EPA regulation. But the Chemistry Council campaign isn’t calling for legislation—it’s calling for complete inaction:

What needs to be done?

The Administration and Congress can promote a reasonable policy outcome that makes sense for the U.S. economy, jobs, and the environment by taking prompt action to postpone EPA regulation of GHGs from stationary sources under the Clean Air Act.

Not “postpone” and pass legislation—just postone. The “Coalition” website also throws out ridiculous lies about EPA regulation, like, “Investment in American manufacturing and clean energy technologies will come to an immediate halt, putting creation of many new jobs at risk.” And its TV ad says nothing about either the climate crisis or urgent need for the Senate to pass clean energy and climate legislation. It’s even more of a red flag considering the Chemistry Council was consistently critical of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, saying after the bill passed the House that “more work remains to be done.”

I know on the interwebs this is where I’m supposed to get all DOW IS A FRAUD and THEY SHOULD QUIT CHEMISTRY COUNCIL and WE MUST BOYCOTT TEH SCRUBBING BUBBLES. But it’s not like you can pin the “Coalition” fiasco directly on Dow. And remember in Jackass when Steve-O says, “It’s like when your parents say, ‘I’m not mad at you; I’m just disappointed.’ That hurts so much more, you know?”

Dow Chemical—I’m not mad; I’m just disappointed.

Related Links:

Copenhagenfreude: Inhofe’s “truth squad” steps on a rake [VIDEO]

How about we stop claiming environmentalists are “anti-human”

On ‘climategate’

by Kurt Michael Friese

Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was
playing chess?

That’s the impression I get when watching many of the recent spate of food documentaries.
Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system;
on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it,
the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, not their strategy.

That’s how it’s gone with the British 2009
documentary film Pig Business. I
watched this film in several 10-minute segments via YouTube (Part One) because it
hasn’t been released in the U.S., primarily due to legal pressure brought
upon the director (Tracy Worcester, who spent four years making the film) by the film’s main villain,
Smithfield Foods. The world’s largest pork producer, Smithfield has 52,000 employees processing 27 million
pigs per year in 15 countries, accruing annual sales around $12
billion. The UK’s Channel 4 ran the film last
summer despite four
letters from Smithfield threatening litigation, but since no U.S. insurer would back the film’s release here, it
has become essentially a black-market film. Score another one for corporate
censorship.

Smithfield does, in one sense, have
cause for concern: this film certainly doesn’t show their company in
the most favorable light. Right off the bat, the viewer is struck with
some rather gruesome images of pigs being brutally mistreated,
apparently at the hands of workers in Smithfield-run facilities. We hear
from farmers and neighbors complaining of health problems that they tie
to the fumes and water contamination from Smithfield hoglots. An owner
of a small family farm in Poland who this
large corporation has pushed out of business says, “I don’t
know whether I should retire, hang myself, or leave the country.”

Watch the trailer:

In the early ‘90s, there were 27,500 independent pig farmers in Poland. Today
there are 2,200 hoglots, and 1,600 of them are wholly owned by
Smithfield Foods. Each of those factory farms in Poland replaced 10 family farms
with two to three minimum-wage jobs. Smithfield accountants and shareholders might laud the boost to the company’s bottom line, but one protester in the film asks a different question:

Why is it, when people are in bondage to their government it
is called “tyranny,” but when the oppressor is a multinational
corporation, it is called “efficiency?”

It was precisely this form
of “efficiency” that the art and social critic John Ruskin had in mind when
he said “There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot
make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys
on price alone is this man’s lawful prey.”

Smithfield is not the only corporate specimen under Worcester’s microscope; she takes large financial
institutions to task as well. In an interview with noted Belgian
economist Bernard
Lietaer, he points out that Big Finance has its fingers in
absolutely everything—making one-third of all political contributions in the
United States (a figure that is sure to only increase in light of the
Supreme Court’s recent decision). Big Money’s influence, along with that of
many other large and wealthy corporations, dictates the type and scope
of laws throughout the U.S. and the world. My daddy used to call this the
Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.

That influence
is precisely what makes the competitive practices of Smithfield (not to
mention many other agribusiness conglomerates) patently unfair. As Pig
Business points out, if the likes of Smithfield had to pay for the
damages they cause, to the environment and to human health, then any small
farmer in the world could out-compete them. But they don’t, because the
game is rigged.

So most of the time, agribusiness will take its
profits and steam obliviously onward. But if anyone points out that the wreckage these companies leave in their wakes, they have scads of lawyers and PR
professionals to make certain no one hears. Watching Pig Business on YouTube is one small way to get past their invisible hand.

Watch Part One of Pig Business >

 

A version of this post appeared on CivilEats.com.

Related Links:

Study suggests junk food taxes may beat healthy food subsidies

Food as America’s newest religion

Chef Jamie Oliver takes on the American school lunchroom in his new show

by Eric Burkett

Meanwhile the eleven disciples set out for Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had arranged to meet them. When they saw him they fell down before him, though some hesitated. Jesus came up and spoke to them. He said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations; baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you. And look, I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.’

Christians among readers of Grist will recognize the preceding passage as the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20), Jesus’s call to spread his message to the world. Religion, of course, takes many forms, but its most interesting form to date is food. Many folks, it seems, have embraced food, or food activism, as a new religion.

I don’t toss this out lightly: I’m religious myself—I’m involved in a ministerial training program at the Buddhist temple of which I am a member—and having converted from one faith to another, I think I’m fairly adept at recognizing others who share my affliction. Zealotry, passion, conviction, and a touch of self-righteousness in many cases, are all markers of religious faith.

None of this is surprising, really. How many among us are chasing after miracle foods, downing gallons of pomegranate juice, or wolfing down goji or açaí berries, convinced they’ll somehow give us health and happiness and, perhaps, make us sexier to boot? I remember a smirking Twitter posting I saw months ago: “I’m having goji berries and green tea.” Had the poster been in reach, I might have given him a wedgie…just because.

Others throw themselves into food fads or specialized diets: locavores, vegans, low carbs, wheat free, dairy free, raw milk—the list is very long. There are, often enough, sound bases for many of these decisions: actual allergies, for example, or other health concerns. I am a firm believer that buying local is better, and buying organic when feasible is a smarter choice.

With the release of the Oscar-nominated documentary Food, Inc., I was astounded at
the number of people who announced the film had changed their lives in an almost
Pauline-road-to-Damascus kind of way. It was, absolutely, a very good movie and
like past food-industry exposés—Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is the obvious
example—it brought a level of awareness to the public that has and will
continue to improve conditions not only for people who eat, but for farm
workers, farmers, and slaughterhouse employees, as well as
the animals we raise for food.

Food, Inc. and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, on which the film is heavily based, have inspired a new religion that might be called born-again carnivorism, as exemplified by a post on Food Inc’s Facebook page from
a woman excited by her discovery of a farm that raises organic chickens on actual pasture. And as with all religions, old and new, there are sects that insist on a very different path to salvation. The woman’s post elicited some strident replies from vegans, some as self-righteous as anti-abortion activists. Promoting organic meat is “like saying that its [sic] ok to keep slaves
as long as they are feed [sic] well!” wrote one respondent. “How
about raising your children to be compassionate, not just ‘organic’?”

I am the last person to decry anyone who has made food a pillar of their
lives. I cook professionally. As a journalist, I cover food safety
and sustainability. As a food writer, I write about cooking. Clearly, food is
something about which I am passionate. There is little doubt, as well, that our
food system is desperately in need of an overhaul and that, in too many cases,
profit has been put well before the needs of the public. I am heartened by the
numbers of people who are willing to work for, and to make, those changes.

But we must remember that many of the changes we are working for, many
of our goals as activists and consumers, are vulnerable to new developments in
technology or, simply, changes in societal tastes and priorities. Just as many
of the advances made in agriculture over the past half century have ultimately been found to
come with costs that outweigh their perceived value, it seems quite reasonable
to suggest that some of our own goals may prove to have been not quite what we
had hoped. To draw on a core teaching of my own faith, change is inevitable and
that includes changes in what we know and believe.  There are no ten commandments for food.

Food is so many things: it is vital to life, it is a source of nourishment
and of pleasure as well as an outlet for creativity. It fosters cultural identity and comforts those far from home. But no matter how ethical
it may be, or how many antioxidants it contains, it will not save
us. When we season our food with dogma and self-righteousness, we give it an
unhealthy power over our ability to rationally consider its already vital place
in our lives. If what you eat has become your religion, take care to serve up your message peacefully and palatably.

Because it’s just food. 

Related Links:

Study suggests junk food taxes may beat healthy food subsidies

Pig Business: Who owns your food owns you

Chef Jamie Oliver takes on the American school lunchroom in his new show

by Garden Girl

Getting my garden started on the right foot makes the rest of the
season simply work smoothly, but it also gives me a jumpstart on the
growing season with a spring harvest. The key for me is starting my plants in my indoor system. In this second installment of Indoor Gardening, I show you how to get your seedlings off to a healthy start.

Can’t get enough of Patti Moreno’s great advice? There’s a lot more where this came from. Check it out.

Related Links:

Garden Girl TV: indoor gardening, part three

Ask Umbra on down comforters, soapy gray water, and canned tomatoes

Ask Umbra’s pearls of wisdom on gardening

by Todd Woody

The Bloom Energy Servers installed at eBay’s headquarters in San Jose. Photo: Todd WoodyGreen tech had its Google moment this week in Silicon Valley when one of the most secretive and
well-funded startups around, Bloom Energy, literally lifted the curtain on what
it claims is a breakthrough in fuel cell technology: affordable electricity! Fewer greenhouse gas emissions! And that’s all before they throw in the
bamboo steamer.   

After eight years in stealth mode—until this week, Bloom’s website featured the company’s name and
little else—the startup pulled out the stops in a carefully stage-managed media
blitz that recalled the high-flying dot-com days of a decade ago. First came a
report on “60 Minutes” that got the blogs abuzz along with stories in Fortune and The
New York Times.

It all culminated in a star-studded press conference at eBay’s
headquarters in San Jose
on Wednesday, where California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger introduced
Bloom’s co-founder and chief executive, K.R. Sridhar, and gave him a bear hug
before several hundred suits, environmental movement honchos and a bank of
television cameras.

Before Colin Powell, the former secretary of state and a
Bloom board member, delivered the benediction, testimonials were offered by Google
co-founder Larry Page and top executives from Wal-Mart, eBay, Federal Express,
Coca-Cola, and other Fortune 500 companies that had quietly purchased
100-kilowatt Bloom Energy Servers over the past year. 

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Senator Dianne
Feinstein (D-Calif.), meanwhile, beamed in a bipartisan endorsement via video.

“This technology is
going to fundamentally change the world,” the California Democrat declared.

But is it?

That’s the $400 million question (what some of Silicon Valley’s most storied venture capitalists have
poured into Bloom so far).

With the hype—the apparently brilliant but unassuming
Sridhar was compared to Steve Jobs at one point Wednesday—comes the backlash.
Almost immediately analysts and competitors began asking hard questions about
Bloom’s claims.

And there are some big unknowns. Will the fuel cell stacks
last as long as the company anticipates or will frequent replacement undermine
the economics of going off the grid, for both Bloom and their customers?

What’s the total cost of ownership for customers? Bloom says
the energy servers have a lifespan of 10 years and a payback period of three to
five years. That’s based on the current price of natural gas—which is one
fuel used by the devices—and state and federal subsidies that halve the cost
of the machines that sell for between $700,000 and $800,000. Will Bloom be able
to scale up manufacturing and continue to innovate to bring the price of the
energy server down? Can they be
competitive without subsidies?

All legitimate questions. But it’s important not to lose
sight of what looks to be some fundamental breakthroughs, not only in energy
technology but in the way some major corporate players are embracing
distributed generation-placing electricity production where it is consumed.

Fuel cells convert hydrogen, natural gas, or another fuel
into electricity through an electrochemical process that results in reduced
greenhouse gas emissions.

For decades scientists have sought to create a solid oxide
fuel cell that can operate at extremely high temperatures-around 800 degrees
C. That increases efficiency and eliminates the need for expensive precious
metals and rare earth elements required as catalysts in lower-temperature fuel
cells.

The challenge has been to engineer fuels cells that can
withstand such high temperatures without cracking or leaking. UTC Power, the
leading fuel cell maker, for instance, has spent three decades trying to
perfect a cost-competitive and durable solid oxide fuel cell.

Bloom says it cracked the code by using a combination of common
materials like sand and proprietary technology.

“What we have today is a very sellable product and that’s
why people are buying it,” Sridhar, a 49-year-old former NASA scientist, said
as he gave me a tour of company’s manufacturing operations before Wednesday’s
unveiling of the Bloom Box.

One side of the building located in a non-descript Silicon Valley office park resembles a semiconductor clean
room. Thin ceramic fuel cells the size of floppy disks shuffle through machines
that paint them with green and black inks that serve as the devices’ anodes and
cathodes, respectively. Next door, workers assemble 25-watt fuel cells into
one-kilowatt stacks that are inserted into a metal cylinder, which in turn is
placed into a silver metal cube.

In another area of the office, employees monitor the 30 Bloom
Energy Servers in operation at companies around California. On one screen, video of a Bloom Box installed at Google appears along with a stream of data.

“Customers like Wal-Mart believe in doing the green thing
but they absolutely believe in the bottom line,” says Sridhar. “The technology
had to pass the muster and the muster simply was the rate of return on the
investment.”

As the world’s largest corporation, Wal-Mart alone could be
the key to giving Bloom and its many competitors a market to drive down costs
and continue innovating. 

“We would like to be able to do this at scale,” Bill Simon,
Wal-Mart’s chief operating officer, said on Wednesday in San Jose, noting the
company had installed Bloom Boxes at two of its California stores. (Wal-Mart on Thursday announced that it is requiring its
suppliers to cut 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2015. As
one speaker at the Cleantech Forum confab in San Francisco on Thursday noted, Wal-Mart has
the heft to set global climate change policy while governments dither.)

Sridhar says the Bloom Energy Server generates electricity
at 50 percent to 55 percent efficiency, which is about twice as efficient as
the overall power grid. Unlike competing systems, the Bloom Box will not repurpose
excess heat to warm buildings and water, which can raise the overall energy
efficiency of fuel cells to 90 percent. The tradeoff is that installing
so-called combined heat and power systems is an expensive and months-long
process.

The Bloom Box is plug and play—“power in hours,” as company
executives like to say. That removes hurdles from the deployment of widespread
distributed generation.

“I’d love to see us have a whole data center running on this
at some point when they’re ready,” Google’s Larry Page said Wednesday. “Moving
production of energy closer to where it’s used has a lot of environmental
benefits and a lot of commercial benefits. It lets you choose your fuel
source.”

There’s been much debate about the environmental impact of
the Bloom fuel cells. Most will use natural gas and thus emit carbon dioxide,
though much less than a typical fossil fuel power plant. If they use biogas—made
from methane emitted by cow manure—carbon footprint drops to zero. But to have
any meaningful impact, there will need to be a huge ramp up in biogas
production .

But distributed generation, even when powered by natural
gas, offers other environmental benefits. New transmission lines don’t need to
be built—itself a carbon-intensive process—and you don’t lose efficiency by
transmitting electricity from a distant power plant.

Rather than judge the Bloom Box unveiled Wednesday as a
final product, it’s probably best to view it as the 1.0 version.

The pressure will be on Bloom to build cleaner and cleaner
versions of its fuel cell if they are to be placed in cities and, as the
company predicts, in backyards one day.

For instance, Bloom has patented and tested a
next-generation fuel cell that would tap solar electricity from a rooftop array
to produce hydrogen that could be stored and used to generate electricity at
night or when the sun does not shine.

“That’s the killer app,” said Sridhar.

As he noted Wednesday, “Why clean? Is it because you’re an
environmentalist? Because of regulation? No. For energy to be distributed it
also has to be clean.”

Related Links:

Making sense of Wal-Mart’s big green announcement

The economics of the Bloom Box

Ask Umbra’s pearls of wisdom on nuclear energy

by Agence France-Presse

DEAUVILLE, France—When Marcel Lapierre took over the family vineyard in Burgundy decades ago, the pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and other chemicals used in farming had made the wine “simply horrid.”

“I couldn’t drink the wine on the table,” said Lapierre, an easy-going man who wears worn, country-style corduroy and a hat. “So I decided to rethink the whole process to produce the kind of wine my father and grandfather made.”

Nowadays the 59-year-old Beaujolais winemaker is viewed as a pioneer of a new trend creating a buzz on France’s food and wine scene—the “natural” wine movement, or as the French say, “vin nature.”

At a two-day food festival this week in the posh Normandy seaside resort of Deauville, where dozens of cutting-edge world chefs gathered, “natural” winemakers toasted the cooks with reds and whites and bubblies from vineyards across France.

Some 200 makers of these tipples, a step up from the simply organic, have banded together to promote their cause, which embraces environmental issues as well as purely hedonistic concerns.

“Natural wines are minimalist wines produced with as little intervention as possible,” said London-based wine consultant Isabelle Legeron. “They are the closest thing to 100 percent grape.”

It is no secret that many of the world’s wines are made from grapes grown on soils stuffed with chemicals—and that the bottle on the shelf can contain yeasts, sugars, and even flavors or wood chips added to produce a predictable finish to please the average consumer’s palate.

“People tend to think wine is a natural product,” added Legeron. “They need to be made aware wine is not always pure.”

Lapierre, who produces a respectable 60,000 bottles yearly of Morgon in a 100 percent organic vineyard, says green-friendly farming is far easier than in the past thanks to scientific advances, such as using bacteria to combat grape worm.

But he readily admits that a lot of work—and an occasional dose of sulfur dioxide, an antioxidant that stabilizes the wine—is needed to turn grapes into wine, which otherwise would become vinegar.

“We don’t use sulfates in the wine-making process, but sometimes use them at the bottling stage for wines that are going to travel a long way or be subjected to heat.”

A third of his production is exported to places as far off as Brazil, Singapore, and Taiwan. Bottles shipped to California contain zero sulfates, while others sent to Florida contain small quantities of the product, known as E222 and E224 in listings of food additives.

“We’re all careful about what we eat, and the same is true of wine,” said 32-year-old Lise Jousset. A wine waiter turned winemaker, she works in the Loire valley of central France where more and more young winemakers are going for “natural.”

“We didn’t go into this because it’s fashionable,” said Jousset, who bought a vineyard with her husband six years ago and now produces 25,000 bottles. “It’s a philosophy of life. There’s such a thing as respect for the soil, for the earth, and there’s also such a thing as respect for health. People after all are going to be drinking your wine.”

Wine critics such as Legeron laud the new vintages as “easy to drink, immediate, complex, more pure and more digestible,” but the drawbacks remain their higher price, shorter shelf-life, and lack of certification.

Because of the added hours of people power put into producing a natural wine, the yield per hectare on Jousset’s vineyard at Montlouis, where she even makes “natural” bubbly, is only half the maximum allowed yield per hectare.

“But wine isn’t just a question of soil, grape variety, or climate,” she says. “It’s also the winemaker. It has our stamp.”

Like these lesser-known wines, many of France’s top vintages are equally natural, or even organic, but choose not to use the organic certification because of lingering wine snobbery.

“Natural winemakers need to get together under a certification,” said Legeron.

As for the cooks, star California chef David Kinch, who runs the Manresa restaurant outside San Francisco, said, “Organic and natural wines need to be good. It’s nice as a political statement, but they must also taste 100 percent good.”

A new French guide to “natural” wines, “Carnet de Vigne Omnivore,” has just been released.

Related Links:

James Hansen vs. cap-and-trade

France rejects carbon pricing policy

City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks

by John Atcheson

Cross-posted from Climate Progress.

Sometimes, fiction is the best way to win friends and
influence people – H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and
George Orwell’s classic 1984 come to
mind. Each provoked a visceral reaction
that galvanized the culture around it, changing forever the way issues such as
class and totalitarianism were perceived. Neville Shute’s On the Beach made the
consequences of nuclear war real, and, therefore, unthinkable.

In a scientifically illiterate culture such as ours, these
kinds of myth-based meta-narratives may be the best way to communicate complex
scientific issues like climate change. Myths, as Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell revealed, are not necessarily
false, nor are they automatically at odds with science. At their best, they provide another way of
viscerally experiencing a truth.

A spate of novels and movies that feature climate change as
either an overt part of the story line or an implicit backdrop against which
mythical heroes strive may be creating the critical mass for a cultural
awakening that allows climate change to be perceived at that pre-rational level—the kind of limbic awareness that motivates change. Or so we can hope.

Full disclosure: I am
at work on a trilogy that tells the story of one man’s struggle to prevent
climate change, and to survive it and preserve some small part of nature when
he fails.

Climate Progress is getting sent a steady stream of books—fiction and non-fiction—centered on global warming. I’ll be reviewing the best of these from time
to time, beginning today with Far North by Marcel
Theroux (yes, he is related to writer Paul Theroux—he is his oldest son) and
Primitive by Mark Nykanen. These novels are worlds apart in conceit,
yet each is thoroughly enjoyable.

Far North takes place in
Siberia in the not too distant future in a world transformed by climate
change. The central character,
Makepeace, is among the last surviving members of a Quaker settlement that
retreated to Siberia from America to avoid the excesses of a materialistic society
and a changing climate.

By the time Theroux’s story begins, civilization has
collapsed, bands of the lawless and dispossessed roam the land, and Makepeace
lives a solitary life with her books and her garden, protecting the remnants of
a ghost town against the occasional hoards of criminals that pass by.

Climate change is a backdrop—the setting on the stage in
which the story takes place. It is
rarely mentioned, but integral to Makepeace’s existence—an understated
leitmotif that runs throughout the novel, but doesn’t dominate it. Theroux gets the science right. Winters still snow; Siberia is still cold,
though not as cold; and precisely because of that, it has attracted climate
refugees. It is the Wild West set in the
East.

Against this backdrop, and beset by grief over the death of
Ping, a pregnant wanderer Makepeace has adopted, Makepeace sets off on a
journey that will be familiar to readers and moviegoers. Like the father in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Denzel Washington in The
Book of Eli, Theroux’s protagonist wanders through a post-apocalyptic
Hobbesian world where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short-a world
in which the apex predator is man.

The resemblance to The
Road goes beyond plot. With Far North,
Theroux has accomplished what McCarthy has consistently done—written a
literary novel that has clear commercial potential. The characters are well wrought, metaphor is
wound inextricably into character and plot, and it’s clear that Theroux has
bigger metaphysical fish to fry than a simple thriller typically offers.

For all that, it has plenty of thrills and surprises. Three chapters into the novel, for example,
Theroux literally pulls the rug out from under the reader, creating a forehead
slapping moment akin to that in The Sixth
Sense. Yet once he’s done
with it, the novel moves forward relatively seamlessly, with the reader alert
to the possibility of more twists and turns.

In the end, it’s the novel’s story and plot that
delight. If there is a flaw, it is that
coincidence and serendipity have been invoked too often and too obviously to
serve Theroux’s literary ambitions. Yet
it remains a good read that renders climate change as a reality and a palpable
force to be reckoned with and avoided.

Mark Nykanen’s Primitive makes no literary pretensions. It is a
thriller pure and simple—the reader hops into a rocket sled and holds on for
dear life, in a nail-chewing ride full of action, gut-wrenching fear, and
genuine terror. There’s no getting off once you’ve boarded. So leave yourself some time.

Nykanen, who was an investigative reporter for NBC news
before becoming a novelist, is adept at weaving plausible conspiracies, and his
experience as a counterculture reporter in his early career is put to good use
in Primitive.

The story opens when middle-aged model Sonya Adams lands a
job for a fashion shoot in Montana. But
almost immediately, she is kidnapped and used as a pawn by eco-terrorists.
Sonya—a good-hearted but politically clueless protagonist—is thrust into
an epic struggle between the government, corporations, and the primitive cult
that has kidnapped her and taken her to their secret compound Terra Firma.

Nykanen also gets the science right for the most part. The eco-cult
is using Sonya’s abduction to orchestrate media attention in a carefully staged
campaign to draw attention to a top secret CIA report they’ve obtained. It details an imminent threat of extreme
climate disruption caused by methane releases from the Arctic tundra and
near-shore clathrates. The Primitives skillfully issue a series of podcasts
featuring Sonya, counting on the presence of a “white woman in distress” to
spin up media interest, and soon it does, complete with nonstop coverage of
“The Terror at Terra Firma.”

Sonya’s disaffected daughter sets off to find her, followed
by the FBI, a truly sinister “contractor,” and an anti-terrorist task force.

The novel’s ending, in true thriller fashion, brings all
these ingredients together in a harrowing face-off.

One of Nykanen’s best achievements is to allow the reader to
experience the way the eco-cult is transformed in Sonya’s eyes. As she learns what it is they are trying to
accomplish and what is at stake, they grow to seem more sane than the society
she’s been abducted from. Nykanen also
manages to skewer the media, the government, and big bad oil, without too heavy
a hand.

While the pace is quick, Primitive does wander into the land of the didactic, and the science, although plausible,
drifts into the pedantic on occasion. But there are enough thrills to
compensate for that.

Purists and literalists may quibble with some of Nykanen’s
portrayal of sudden climate change, but as I was about to accuse him of
hyperbole, I was reminded of the last line from Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe:

It may seem impossible to imagine
that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy
itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

Given the stakes, one can forgive Nykanen a little hyperbole
… if hyperbole it be.

 

Related Links:

Jeff Biggers talks about his new book on coal

Two books that blew my mind

I paid $50 for this book and all I got was this lousy feeling of hope and goodwill

by Agence France-Presse

GUATEMALA CITY—Coffee producers say they are getting hammered by global warming, with higher temperatures forcing growers to move to prized higher ground, putting the cash crop at risk.

“There is already evidence of important changes,” said Nestor Osorio, head of the International Coffee Organization (ICO), which represents 77 countries that export or import the beans. “In the last 25 years, the temperature has risen half a degree in coffee-producing countries, five times more than in the 25 years before,” he said.

Sipped by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, coffee is one of the globe’s most important commodities, and a major mainstay of exports for countries from Brazil to Indonesia.

But producers meeting in Guatemala this week are in a state of panic over the impact of warming on their livelihoods.

While boutique roasters often seek out highland-grown cherries for their subtle tastes, the cooler terroir comes at a premium.

And the new race to the top comes amid already increasing demands for resources between farmers and energy firms.

“Land and water are being fought over by food and energy producers,” said Osorio. “We need to make an assessment to guarantee the sustainability of and demand for coffee production.”

ICO figures show that production in Latin America dipped last year, largely due to poor weather, and producers say they are struggling to stay afloat.

In Colombia, one of the world’s largest producers, production slumped 30 to 35 percent, while Costa Rica and El Salvador still struggled to recover from poor harvests from 2000 to 2005.

The National Coffee Association of Guatemala—a regional leader—said production in nine Latin American countries was expected to fall 28 percent in the first three months of this season.

Related Links:

Common weed killer chemically castrates frogs, study finds

Making sense of Wal-Mart’s big green announcement

The Climate Post: Climate bill + climategate = Bill ‘Climate’ Gates!