Disease Proof : Health & Nutrition News & Commentary : Dr. Joel Fuhrman

• Bad news for Canada! Experts claim Canada’s environmental record ranks among the WORST in the industrialized world. Poor efforts to fight global warming are to blame; Reuters reports.

• The Global Wind Energy Council and Greenpeace International believe China will become the world’s BIGGEST manufacturer of wind-power equipment by 2009; via CleanTech.

• But China faces a heart-breaking eco-problem. The effects of climate change could WEAKEN bamboo crops and put the giant panda, a national symbol, in further peril; ENN reports.

• More and more people are getting hip to electric cars and hybrids, but these vehicles require lithium batteries and researchers feel this could STRAIN lithium supplies; GreenTech explains.

• With lithium gone, we could always switch to FUNGAL fuel! Scientists claim a fungus from leaves of the ulmo tree could convert plant waste into usable biodiesel; the NewScientist reports.

• California has until 2011 to develop a system for identifying and evaluating harmful chemicals. And it should feature a searchable online database for consumers; via ENN.

 

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• You could go green that way or, for those of you NOT interested in living a mud hut, you could just lower your thermostat, unplug battery chargers, better insulate and use light-timers. They’re all great ways to green your home; via Huddler.

• Oddly enough, some researchers contend, global warming actually HELPS short-lived creatures with wide thermal windows and large gene pools. This means climate change will not affect all animals equally; NewScientist Environment explains.

• We’ve all driven clunker cars with poor gas mileage. But imagine driving a car that runs on AIR and just a little salad dressing. Zero Pollution Motors is selling a micro car, that clocks in around 35 mph, for $20,000; Kiplinger reports.

• Now, if a putt-putt car isn’t your thing. Consider BMW’s GREEN super car! It’s only in the idea phase, but it’d be a 2-seat vehicle that adheres to emission and fuel standards, while still looking sleek and cool; via forecast earth.

• New York has 450 wind turbines, with 900 more planned. But before they get too carried away, state officials are setting up measures to ensure companies play by the rules, calling for CLEAN government; Reuters reports.

• Speaking of jobs, America’s rust belt is finding more and more green jobs. Maytag may have moved out of states like Iowa, but wind-turbine makers have moved in, employing hundreds of displaced workers; The New York Times reports.

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• Many people in the United Kingdom are going green, even in death! As funeral space becomes scarce, more and more Britons are looking for GREEN burial plots, like natural farmland and woodland areas; the AFP reports.

• California plans to CUT water deliveries. The state will only distribute 15% of the water requested by local water agencies throughout California. Farmers fear they won’t have enough water; the Associated Press explains.

• Bolthouse Farms, I like their juices, plans to go 80% SOLAR power at their Palmdale, California location. A 1.9MW solar array will stop the farm from emitting 2,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year; via TreeHugger.

• New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wanted to REQUIRE owners and operators of taxicabs to switch to hybrid vehicles, but a judge has blocked the legislation, much to the delight of cab companies; via City Room.

• Philadelphia will soon have a $420 million GREEN Waldorf-Astoria hotel. It’ll feature a green roof, specialized HVAC system and a high degree of automation, as well as state-of-the-art amenities; from TheGreenMeeting.

• The Bush administration continues to force legislation that will weaken government rules protecting consumers and the environment, putting drinking water and emissions standards at risk; The Washington Post reports.
   

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• Apparently there is A LOT of debris hovering around the earth, mostly nuts, bolts and paint chips and it usually burns up when entering the atmosphere, but even still, NASA has pledged to reduce non-functioning space junk; Fox News reports.

• The financial crisis is tough, but experts from the World Wildlife Fund contend a LOOMING natural resources crisis will be far worse. Humans are using 30% more resources than the earth can replenish each year; via The Guardian.

• Computerized climate models reveal that humans and NOT natural phenomena are directly responsible for melting the polar ice caps. Researchers conclude that all continents are heating up due to human activity; from NewScientist Environment.

• The olive oil industry produces 4 million tons of pits each year. But researchers now claim “olive stones” could be used to make bioethanol. Degrading the pits into sugar creates yeast which ferments into ethanol; Physorg.com reports.

• Alila Hotels and Resorts plans to go carbon-neutral. Starting with its headquarters in Singapore, the company will to offset greenhouse gas emissions by supporting emission reduction projects in Asia; via TheGreenMeeting.

• UPS is going GREENER by becoming the first delivery company to drive hydraulic hybrid vehicles, a diesel-hybrid technology that utilizes hydraulic propulsion systems that better capture and store energy; EcoGeek reports.

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• My first pet was a frog. So this made me sad. Researchers blame climate change for the DECLINING numbers of amphibians in Yellowstone National Park. They’re calling it a catastrophic loss of toads and salamanders; Discovery News reports.

• Climate change is also HURTING fish populations. Warming waters could make cod, salmon and eels a rare sight off the Irish coast. Temperature change forces cold water fish, like salmon, to swim deeper for cooler waters; from The Evening Herald.

• Global warming affects people too! Hotter temperatures and the resulting desertification are causing a “dire water situation” for rural Chinese. They’re unable to farm land or graze their animals, making them internal refugees; via CNN.

• In fluffier news, the United States’ largest pillow-maker, Hollander Home Fashions, plans for ZERO waste by 2010. It’s a top to bottom approach. Everything from manufacturing to shipping will be involved in the strategy; from SustainableBusiness.com.

• General Motors has gone GREENER too. To save power, the company will shut off escalators at its corporate headquarters between 7PM and 6AM. And turn off lights and lower the thermostat to 66-degrees at night; via AutoBlogGreen.

• And now Nike is getting hip to the eco-push. New "Nike Considered" products will utilize efficient design patterns, which use less material and will be easier to RECYCLE and contain non-toxic compounds, like cork and organic cotton; Reuters reports.
   

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• That’s a super quiet rooftop wind-turbine. At $10,000 each, they’re cheaper than solar panels and can generate 2,000 KWh of CLEAN energy each year, paying for themselves in about 3 years; via CleanTechnica.

• Actually, the turbines are a British import. Speaking of the Brits, Prince Charles says climate change is a REAL crisis and despite the current financial meltdown, we should NOT take our eye off the environment; the AFP reports.

• Message received by Oregon governor, Ted Kulongoski. He just unveiled an AMBITIOUS plan for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for households and buildings by 2030; via the Associated Press.

• Sadly, the UK may be swan-less this year. Warming temperatures in Siberia are DELAYING the Bewick’s swan annual migration. Each year, bird watchers have been waiting for them longer and longer; The Telegraph reports.

• The Philippines have rapidly adopted agro-fuel production, using crops for fuel instead of food, the problem is this may result in mass DEFORESTATION as more land is cleared for fuel-crops; via GMANews.TV.

• Despite our ever-growing green awareness, carbon dioxide and methane emissions INCREASED during 2007 and 20% of those emissions could remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years; ENN reports.

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There are LOTS of ways to go green. You can eat organic food. Buy reusable shopping bags. And even stick a brick in your toilet.

Or you can dedicate SIX MONTHS of your life to growing a FREAKING tomato and blog about it EVERY week!

And then, you can make a VIDEO about it and set it to music:

 

You know you LOVE the song! Digging that up took some MAJOR nerdy-ness on my part.

Actually, growing that tomato was QUITE an experience. I really enjoyed doing it. I can’t wait for the spring, so I can do it again!

Stay tuned, DiseaseProof’s GREEN revolution has only begun!
 

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• Experts at the United Nations believe MORE investment in green technologies and clean energy could spur GLOBAL economic growth; Scoop World reports.

• Wind power posted GAINS this quarter, adding 1,389 megawatts of wind energy, opening up 8 NEW turbine facilities and announcing plans for 19 more; via TreeHugger.

• Lots of economic news today! A top economist URGES moving towards a low-carbon economy should NOT be stifled by the current financial downturn; the AFP reports.

• Over the past 3 decades California’s energy initiatives have created and saved 1.5 MILLION jobs and added $45 BILLION to state payroll; via Reuters.

• Greenpeace has there OWN idea for resurrecting the economy! Invest $360 BILLION in renewable power and energy efficiency; the AFP explains.

• To OFFSET individual carbon-footprints, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey will let commuters BUY emission credits that go towards charity; The New York Times reports.
   

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• Climate change is scary! But it’s also depressing. Quercus has designed this SAD video on global warming awareness. It might upset kids; via GreenDaily.

• Global warming is also THREATENING the Netherlands 120-mile speed-skating marathon across local frozen rivers and canals; the Associated Press reports.

• California wants a 177-MEGAWATT solar-thermal plant in Bakersfield. Currently a 5-megawatt facility serves as a showcase for the technology; from greentechmedia.

• Towns in Massachusetts, Vermont and New Orleans are growing community gardens to help REBUILD small towns and inner-cities; via TreeHugger.

• Recent research has determined MANY pesticides used in European Union may harm the brain of fetuses and young children; ENN reports.

• Rolls-Royce has developed a new propeller-driven engine that could CUT an airline's fuel bills and greenhouse gas emissions by 30%; The Guardian explains.

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• France is SERIOUS about saving energy! For years, the Eiffel Tower has twinkled for 10 minutes on the hour, every hour. But now, it’ll ONLY shine for 5 minutes at a time; Reuters reports.

• The United States has opened up 190 MILLION acres, across 11 states, for the development of geothermal energy. But animal habits and national parks will remain OFF limits; via TreeHugger.

• Illegally logged wood costs developing countries $15 BILLION a year. To combat the problem, the U.S. will now REQUIRE producers to declare the origin and species of all plant material; ENN explains.

• Scientists NOW believe photosynthesis, the plant process of converting sunlight into chemical energy, first occurred 2.7 BILLION years ago in a region of Western Australia; NewScientist Environment reports.

• New NASA-funded research claims greenhouse gases, like nitrogen trifluoride, may be THOUSANDS of times MORE effective at warming the planet than previously thought; from the AFP.

• Car exhaust is a MAJOR source of carbon dioxide, but it ALSO contains dangerous chemicals, like carbon monoxide, benzene, sulfur dioxide, formaldehyde and MANY other harmful compounds; via Green Living Tips.
   

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• Wal-Mart isn’t known for being green. But that MIGHT change! By 2012, Wal-Mart will REQUIRE its suppliers to draw 95% of their production from eco-friendly factories; via Tree Hugger.

• A TOXIC ship, Greenpeace called hazardous, is being dismantled off the coast of Bangladesh, India despite a court order BANNING it from the country’s shores; the AFP reports.

• Conventional petroleum-based fuels STRAIN the environment, but alternatives fuels, like biodiesel and hydrogen, may consume even MORE water; from Energy Efficiency News.

• More BAD press for bio-fuels! The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirms the link between an ethanol-byproduct and a RESISTANT strain of E. coli; via Green Daily.

• To help save elephants, eBay has BANNED the sale of ivory. An eBay spokes claims they can’t guarantee the ivory is coming from regulation-compliant sellers; the Associated Press reports.

• As China develops, experts warn their greenhouse gas emissions could DOUBLE in two decades. The blames lies with China’s INCREASED burning of coal, oil and gas; from ENN.

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• Swedish architects have a unique idea for keeping your house warm. Stick it INSIDE a greenhouse! Builders claim the structure lowers heating bills and helps gardens grow longer; via TreeHugger.

• Saving the planet is a great idea. But DON’T let it become an obsession! “Energy anorexics,” is the term experts are using to describe green-obsessed people; from The New York Times.

• Recent U.S. tax-breaks may soon help solar-power to cost LESS than energy generated from conventional power plants; Reuters reports.

• Turbines for New Jersey’s 3,000 MEGAWATT wind farm will be installed 16 to 20 miles offshore. They’ll look like tiny specks on the horizon; via Forecast Earth.

• By 2030 Hawaii wants 70% of its energy to come from CLEAN sources. The plan includes converting fossil fuel plants into biodisiel facilities that use locally grown crops; the Associated Press reports.

• The merits of genetically modified (GM) crops are WIDELY disputed. Many worry about their environmental impact, while others insist GM’s could ease poverty and improve agricultural; more from ENN.

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• That canola-powered CONTRAPTION took the $5,000 prize in “Escape from Berkeley”, a 600-mile race from Berkeley, California to the Sahara Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada; The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

• Researchers claim the air in the Arctic has hit RECORD temperatures. The loss of sea ice upped the air temperature by 5 degrees Celsius; via NewScientist Environment.

• The Environmental Protection Agency will enact the TIGHEST air-quality standards for lead in the past 30 years, but it’ll take years to enforce them all; the AFP reports.

• A lead-acid battery could replace traditional batteries and help drive DOWN the cost of hybrid-vehicles, they could be used in wind-turbines too; from NewScientistTech.

• The Bush administration has a policy that will REMOVE protection for 400,000 acres of national forest in Idaho, opening it up logging and mining; via TreeHugger.

• As climate change SHRINKS habitats in India, TIGER attacks are on the rise. Tigers are preying on villagers for food; ENN reports.

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Ozone is not JUST an environmental issue. It’s also a health issue. With ozone levels in peril, many experts insist people’s lungs are at risk. Inhaling TOO MUCH ozone can harm lungs and worsen respiratory ailments; Discovery News reports.

This has been a problem for a LONG time now. Previous reports have shown ozone levels can increase stroke risk, heighten the chance of premature death and even SHUT DOWN immune responses in the lungs. So screw it, I’m staying inside!

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• Garbage trucks are loud! So, to REDUCE noise and save energy, European countries are driving HYBRID rubbish trucks; via Green (Living) Review.

• Speaking of Europe, Britain will institute a LEGALLY-BINDING pledge to cut 80% of carbon emission by 2050; the AFP reports.

• More UK news, a London-based company has designed artificial TREES that could GENERATE enough energy to power a house; via CleanTechnica.

• An Australian guy figured out how to make his own BIODIESEL with algae! He’s already producing a few liters of oil a day; Mercury reports.

• Wind energy might be green, but some experts claim turbines create low-pressure VORTEXES that make bats to EXPLODE; from GreenDaily.

• More animals in trouble, according to the World Wildlife Fund 75% of Antarctic’s penguins could be DEVISTATED by climate change; ENN reports.
   

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• Scientists at Yale University have developed power cells designed to mimic the SHOCK value of electric eels; via Yale News.

• Despite the potential of fuel cells, experts believe electric cars will DOMINATE the market for green vehicles; ENN reports.

• Hewlett Packard plans to install a 1.1 megawatt SOLAR panel system at its printer factory in San Diego; from TreeHugger.

• In fact, California’s Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger, believes solar energy will be GREAT for the United States; via Ecorazzi.

• And some experts suggest using SATELLITES, equipped with solar cells, to beam the sun’s rays down to earth; The Washington Post reports.

• Water works too! ScottishPower wants to build a MAJOR tidal power project off the coast of Northern Ireland and Scotland; from BBC News.

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Yesterday, Connecticut, New Jersey and Delaware urged baby bottle-makers to STOP using bisphenol-A (BPA). Reacting to research claiming BPA exposure causes learning impairments and depression.

And now, a new study discovered the SAME contaminants in tap water, turned up in popular brands of BOTTLED water, immediately challenging the belief that bottled water is purer; the Associated Press reports.

A similar story broke last year. Pepsi had to admit that its bottled water brand, Aquafina, is actually TAP water; responding to heat from environmental watchdogs claiming plastic bottles HARM the planet.

Ditch the freaking plastic already! Get yourself a metal water bottle, I did.
 

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• Nintendo is rolling out a line of video games to teach kids the IMPORTANCE saving the environment and endangered species; via smartplanet.

• Google’s MASSIVE data centers consume A LOT of energy and to save money. Google is turning up the thermostat; from Data Center Knowledge.

• Green jobs are on the RISE and some of highest paying eco-jobs are venture capitalist, Chief Executive Officer and Vice-President of sustainability; via TreeHugger.

• On that note, many of U.S. cities are becoming hotbeds for GREEN markets, like New York, Washington D.C. and Houston; Forbes reports.

• Here’s a BIZARRE way to save the planet. MTV is running ads encouraging public URINATION to help save water; more from The Guardian.

• Brazil is poised to become a MAJOR producer of oil, but Brazil's President doesn’t want his country’s new wealth to be turned into nonsense; ENN reports.

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• Tidal power uses seawater to drive submerged turbines and could generate up to 25% of today’s electricity, even MORE than offshore wind farms; smartplanet explains.

• The U.S. wind power industry is going strong! Manufacturers CONTINUE to build factories and wind farms across the country, creating much needed jobs; via TreeHugger.

• Global temperatures could increase 7 degrees by the end of the century. Experts urge the United Nations to reach a compromise that will REVERSE the course; the AFP reports.

• Microorganisms consuming human WASTE generate electrons that can be transported by electrodes into a circuit and provide power; from Discovery News.

• A UK-commissioned report says rich nations should PAY tropical nations billions of dollars to save rainforests, reduce deforestation and increase replanting; ENN reports.

• Payless will unveil a LOW-COST line of eco-friendly footwear, made from organic fibers like cotton, linen, and hemp and feature eco-smart packaging; via GreenDaily.

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• At high altitude ozone PROTECTS us, but at low elevation it promotes respiratory illnesses. And research shows Californian’s recent wildfires have pushed ozone levels BEYOND “safe” limits; the NewScientist Environment reports.

• Ericsson plans to construct wind-powered cell-phone towers. Vertical turbines will REDUCE power consumption by 40%, but the towers may still need to be grid-connected to ensure a stable signal; via earth2tech.

• Beijing, which saw its pollution-levels plummet during the Olympics, will REINSTATE traffic restrictions. Banning half of its 3.4 MILLION cars from the road during periods of heavy pollution; from the Associated Press.

• We’re used to thinking of asbestos as a toxin, that MUST be removed, but some experts suggest just leaving it alone or painting over it. This doesn’t disturb the dangerous fibers and seals them in place; The New York Times reports.

• Spain’s 26,000 hectares of horticulture are generating a GOOD greenhouse effect. The buildings’ white roofs are reflecting so much sunlight, they’re actually REDUCING local temperatures; more from the NewScientist Environment.

• Global warming initiatives, like laws to reduce carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases, are LOSING their urgency amid the U.S. financial crisis. Focus has shifted to STABILIZING the economy; ENN reports.

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• Proving that clean energy is possible, both near AND far, Ethiopia will construct a 120-megawatt wind farm in sub-Saharan Africa; greentechmedia explains.

• Experts believe that investing in GREEN technologies could help pull the United States out of economic calamity; Reuters reports.

• Toyota, the manufacturer of Lexus automobiles, may soon make ALL Lexus models hybrid-only; more from TreeHugger.

• Global warming is driving tropical animals uphill. This would leave lowland rainforests with NOTHING to take their place; the AFP explains.

• As humans create MORE farmland, many species of birds are suffering DEVASTATING habitat loss; National Geographic News reports.

• As climate change continues warms the arctic, it’s creating a global RACE to seize the natural resources under the melting ice; via ENN.

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That’s ALL the leftover tomatoes. Here’s how they got there.

 

 

The fall weather took its toll. I had to pick them.

 

 

Sadly, it was time to say goodbye.

 

 

Look, ALL my compost turned into dirt!

 

 

Some STRANGE finds! Corn cobs, avocado shells and dirty apples.

 

 

No sense just throwing out the plant!

 

 

No, this story ISN'T over yet. To be continued.
 

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• A bad economy and HIGH gas prices have NOT slowed down bicycle sales. With less people looking to burn fuel, car sales are down, but bike sales are up; The Economist reports.

• In order to SAVE money, many people are eating cheaper NON-ORGANIC food, but tough times HAVEN’T stopped them from buying fancy electronics and flat-screen TVs; from MediaPost.

• The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has determined California LEADS the nation in energy efficiency, followed by Oregon, Connecticut, Vermont, New York and Washington; via the ACEEE.

• British waterways, 2,200 miles of rivers and canals, will SOON be equipped with wind-energy turbines and small hydro-electric projects; SmartPlanet explains.

• The global financial crisis could UNDERMINE animal conservation efforts and put recent measures to protect the planet at SIGNIFICANT risk—less money to go around; from National Geographic News.

• ABC is cool with running advertisements for big oil companies, like Chevron, but they recently DENIED a We Can Solve It ad promoting cleaner, GREENER forms of energy; via Ecorazzi.

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• Now, more than ever, consumers are looking to SAVE money at the pump. Try INCREASING your fuel efficiency! Do more up-shifting, coast when possible, and break and accelerate smoothly; GreenSpace explains.

• The U.S. Army is building a solar thermal power plant in Fort Irwin, California. It could provide 500 megawatts of electricity. The army wants to be a LEADER in energy efficiency in the nation; more from TreeHugger.

• Nowadays, everyone is WORRIED about polar bears. Climate change is destroying their natural habitat. That’s why the U.S. Interior Department will LIMIT oil drilling in polar bear rich areas of Alaska; ENN reports.

• Heavy metals, like arsenic and lead, are MAJOR pollutants. So the discovery of toxic metal-eating “super worms” in Britain and Wales, could lead to new pollution-reduction methods; from National Geographic News.

• People are QUICK to point the finger at industry for pollutant emissions, and RIGHTFULLY so, but new research, by McKinsey & Co., claims consumers are responsible for 37% of emissions; via The Wall Street Journal.

• Some folks CAN’T live without their double espresso, triple caramel, extra cream and sugar coffee abomination, but according to a new report, Starbucks—with their “green” image—wastes millions of liters of water a day; The Guardian reports.

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• One in four of the world’s 5,487 mammals face EXTINCTION! The International Union for Conservation of Nature blames humans and pollution; National Geographic News reports.

• Australia could derive 171,000 megawatts of energy from WAVE power—pressurized sea water drives hydroelectric turbines and generates base-load electricity; The Sydney Morning Herald explains.

• New Jersey is poised to become a BIG player in wind power. State officials plan to install 96 offshore wind turbines that could yield 346 megawatts of electricity; via City Room.

• Michigan’s Great Lakes are ANOTHER source of wind energy. Placing turbines in the lakes could produce up to 321,000 megawatts of electricity; more from The Detroit Free Press.

• Eco Child’s Play has a bunch of GREEN tips to stretch your family’s budget; like riding a bike, shopping at thrift stores, planting a garden, unplugging unused appliances and recycling as much as possible.

• As e-waste continues to PILE up, Toshiba has announced it will EXPAND its free recycling program—giving them the MOST comprehensive trade-in-program in the industry; Enhanced Online News is on it.

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• Texas resident, Clyde Curry, made those walls and sculptures out of “papercrete.” Super strong, fire retardant, lightweight bricks made out of PAPER; via TreeHugger.

• The Vatican has seen the light! Workers began installing photovoltaic cells on the roof of Paul VI Hall—the current Pope LOVES renewable energy; the Associated Press reports.

• Since the industrial revolution, over 200 years ago, ocean acidity is up 30%. Many experts insist reducing acidity must be an important part of all GREEN initiatives; more from TreeHugger.

• In related news, a new report claims countries do MORE to protect land against environmental threats than they do for oceans; ENN reports.

• Researchers have determined current ozone controls are FAILING human health and the environment—WORSENING the problem of climate change; via The Royal Society.

• The EarthBottle is lighter than plastic, non-breakable, requires no petroleum and is fully BIODEGRADABLE! It’s made from sugar and fiber; GreenDaily explains.

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Robots harvesting crops based on smell. Plants kept safe from disease and insects. Vertical sewage tanks converting waste to power and below ALL this would be a supermarket! That’s what FARMING might look like in the future; from PopSci.com.

Actually, new age farming has changed A LOT over the years. In the past, they thought farming would exist on GIANT aquatic platforms and in bio-dome looking contraptions; via Paleo-Future.

Certainly puts my backyard compost-grown tomato to shame!

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• This is a YUCKY! British landfills intend to use trash’s SYRUPY excretions to irrigate and fertilize bio-fuel crops. Lagoons will be built near landfills to accumulate the slop; gas2.0 reports.

• The fall is here. That means A LOT of raking! Mother Earth News has some uses for ALL those dead leaves, like throwing them in a compost pile or using them as mulch next summer.

• Aeronautica Windpower, a company based in Plymouth, Massachusetts is REFURBISHING old wind turbines and selling them to farmers; more from the BusinessWire.

• Chipotle Mexican Grill, one of our favorite restaurants, is going GREEN! They’ll be opening a green restaurant equipped with its own onsite wind turbine; via MarketWatch.

• According to TreeHugger, the Japanese are LESS than please with genetically modified foods—they’re PROTESTING in the streets—blaming Monsanto and the U.S. government.

• The Read Green Initiative wants people to quit buying paper periodicals and start doing MORE online reading. As a blogger, I LOVE the sound of that! Eco Child’s Play reports.

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No doubt, the end is near. With fall weather in full swing, my tomato is running OUT of time. Just look at it. Gone is the lush vibrancy. Now it’s slowly dying.

With MANY green tomatoes hanging on for dear life, I hope it can stick around just a LITTLE bit longer.

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• In a surprise move, the Bush Administration has placed 48 threatened species in Hawaii on the endangered species list. Hawaii has MORE endangered plants, animals and insects than any other state; via TreeHugger.

• Republican vice-presidential hopeful, Sarah Palin, doesn’t know the EXACT cause of global warming, citing both man-made and natural reasons, but she still insists we MUST do something about it; the AFP reports.

• California’s governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has passed a landmark piece of legislation that will REGULATE genetically engineered seeds and crops—protecting farmers against intimidation tactics; from ENN.

• More news from the left coast! This time the governator has proposed measures that would REWARD communities that reduce urban sprawl by building homes close together, which helps curb global warming; The Los Angeles Times explains.

• If you’ve got a some EXTRA cash, you might consider buying an all-electric 1981 DeLorean DMC-12—the car from Back to the Future—at present, bidding is well over $15,000; check it out on Ecorazzi.

• Despite the current economic POOP storm, venture firms have invested $2.6 billion in 158 green-based companies. A 37% jump from last year, but experts are predicting a slowdown; more from earth2tech.

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• Our economy is in the crapper, but going GREEN might help save us! According to the United Nations Environment Programme, a green economy could create MILLIONS of new jobs.

• Many European companies are incorporating GREEN strategies for their information technology centers. It'll save them money! Via GreenerComputing.

• To help combat climate change, the Food Climate Research Network suggests rationing low-nutrient foods; like meat, dairy products, alcohol and sweets. The Guardian reports.

• A big worry about wind farms is that they kill birds, but a new report insists birds are safe from the GIANT spinning turbines; from NewScientist Environment.

• Hilton plans on building an eco-friendly hotel in Bariloche, Argentina. Equipped with a green roof and private water treatment system. Via TreeHugger.

• ENN reports Greenpeace has ranked cell phone manufacturer Nokia the GREENEST electronics company, beating Samsung and Nintendo.

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• Hospitals produce a lot low-level NUCLEAR waste. Things like tubes, capsules and pellets. Nuclear waste is hard to get rid of and officials are worried it could fall into the wrong hands, like terrorists; the Associated Press reports.

• Both McCain and Obama plan to get us OFF oil. They make it sound so simple, but experts urge they’re UNDERESTIMATING cost—it could be as high $1 trillion dollars; more from The Chicago Tribune.

• Reusable shopping bags are EVERYWHERE! I’ve seen a lot of different people using them—from housewives to businessmen—but apparently a lot people have them, but don’t use them; The Wall Street Journal explains.

• I’ve always thought this might be bad for the environment. Washington State is considering a BAN on driveway carwashes, citing a soapy runoff entering storm drains can ultimately poison wild salmon; USA Today is on it.

• Did you know today, October 1st, is World Vegetarian Day? I didn’t it. It was created in 1977 by the North American Vegetarian Society, in order to “promote the joy, compassion and life-enhancing possibilities of vegetarianism.” Via Ecorazzi.

• California’s Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, wants to terminate climate change. He is hosting a meeting between China, India, European countries, Australia, Canada and Mexico to discuss lowering greenhouse gas emissions; from ENN.

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• I’ve had my share of junky cars and I wouldn’t suffer ANYONE with them, but if you’ve got an old car taking up space. GreenDaily shows where you can donate that broken down jalopy.

• The Bush administration has just NIXED the $8 million-a-year program that tests fruits and vegetables for levels of pesticide residue; The Chicago Tribune reports.

• Fitting diesel engines with an electric field can INCREASE fuel efficiency by 19%, making them run cleaner and greener; NewScientist Environment explains.

• According to the AFP, climate change could bring floods, droughts and even MOSQUITOS to areas of Europe and Asia.

• Offshore drilling has been ALL OVER the news lately, but how will lifting the ban on offshore drilling REALLY effect the United States? About.com breaks it down.

• August didn’t feel THAT hot, but apparently this past August saw the FASTEST artic ice retreat on record—a blatant sign of global warning; more from ENN.

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• We know polar bears are suffering from climate change—so are HUMANS—but amphibians, like toads and frogs, are also facing habit-loss and extinction; the AFP reports.

• According to the Associated Press, pollution from carbon dioxide output jumped 3 percent from 2006 to 2007—scientists are calling it a DIRE outlook.

• In related news, China has SURPASSED the United States as the global leader of greenhouse gas emissions; more from the AFP.

• Imagine this, a 100 turbine wind farm in New York City. Located on the coast of Queens, New York, the farm could supply 200 megawatts of energy; The Baltimore Sun explains.

• What do you do with old cell phones? Instead of throwing them out, EcoLocalizer passes along five GREAT resources for recycling unwanted cellular phones.

• And you can also RECYCLE jewelry from ex-lovers. GreenDaily examines ExBoyfriendJewelry.com, a place to swap treasures from failed relationships.

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The weather is ROTTEN today. Dank, damp, rainy and just plain icky! Pretty much sums up my tomato this week. It’s really starting to show the change in season.

Last week began the decline, but as you can see today. Fall weather is taking its toll. Tomatoes are taking longer to ripen and leaves are shriveling—sigh.

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• I was surprised to read that America is NOT lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to wind power. LiveScience examines other popular myths about wind energy.

• The U.S. senate will extend $18 billion in tax credits for renewable energy. This is helping the solar panel industry enjoy continued GROWTH despite the current economic conditions; more from Reuters.

• Soon they’ll be a price tag on carbon gas emissions. U.S. polluters will have to PURCHASE allowances to emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; NPR reports.

• The World Health Organization claims some countries could face increased health risks and food shortages as a result of global climate change; the AFP is on it.

• According to ENN, the European Commission believes an overhaul of fishing laws is long-overdue. Concern is mounting over ecological decline and unsustainable fishing practices.

• If you insist on eating meat, GreenDaily passes along some suggestions for making your meat eating more green, like eating LESS meat and cooking it yourself.

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• The United States military consumes 340,000 barrels of oil everyday. It’s the LARGEST purchaser of oil in world. First is the U.S. Air Force, followed by the Navy and then the Army—via TreeHugger.

• Scientists from Britain's University of York have discovered a “chemical equator.” This dividing line separates the polluted air of Earth’s Northern Hemisphere from the CLEANER atmosphere of the Southern Hemisphere; Reuters reports.

• Sarah Palin claimed, during an interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson, that Alaska produces 20% of U.S. energy. NOT true. Alaska only generates 3.5% of domestic energy and 12.8% of the crude oil—from Short Sharp Science.

• Both John McCain and Barrack Obama support nuclear energy, but they DIFFER on its finer points. McCain wants radical expansion of nuclear power and Obama prefers a more diversified energy portfolio—TreeHugger explains.

• A poll of 28,000 Internet users in 51 nations has revealed that more consumers want COMPANIES to lead the fight against climate change than governments; More Reuters.

• A lot of people are installing personal solar energy systems on their homes, but these people are being TARGETED as solar panel theft begins to rise; The New York Times explains.

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• Congratulations Portland! Sustainlane.com, a web site for green living, has named Portland, Oregon the MOST sustainable city in the United States—via TheGreenMeeting.

• Here’s a startling report from the Associated Press. U.S. hospitals and long-term care facilities flush MILLIONS of pounds of unused pharmaceuticals down the toilet!

• Maybe that’s why a U.S. congressional panel is being pressed to MORE closely monitor pharmaceuticals and fire retardants in the water; the Associated Press explains.

• But on the other hand, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced it WON’T limit rocket fuel in public water supplies across the country; the Associated Press is on it.

• Would you BUY air? One entrepreneur from New York City has just started selling “99 percent breathing oxygen” in a can! Nope, I’m not kidding; more from The Washington Post.

• David Chameides, an Emmy-winning camera man, saves and composts ALL his garbage and stores it in his basement; Time magazine is on it.

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• That’s the iYo. It’s a yo-yo like device that uses induction to CHARGE your iPhone and iPod—via TreeHugger.

• The Olympics are over and now Beijing is left with a water crisis. Forcing them to pump “emergency” water into the city; Reuters reports.

• Concerned about genetically engineered animals? The Food and Drug Administration wants your feedback—more from GreenDaily.

• According to the AFP, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is set to enact new renewable energy plans.

• A United States rocket scientist is using RUBBER DUCKS to help track melting glaciers; Reuters reports.

• U.S. companies recognize climate change, but are slow to do anything about. While global firms responds MORE quickly; Reuters is on it.

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• Starting October 1st New York City wants all new taxis to have a fuel efficiency of at least 25 miles per gallon. Cabbies are MAD! They’re suing over it; ENN reports.

• General Motors’ Bob Lutz tells Steven Colbert that he DOESN’T believe that carbon emissions are causing global warming, but unveils a no-gasoline car—via GreenDaily.

• Give this kid a gold star! A 12-year old boy from Portland, Oregon has invented a solar-cell that absorbs 500 times more light than existing cells—from TreeHugger.

• The Toronto Star reports Toronto is considering a BAN on coffee cups; citing coffee cups, takeout food containers and plastic bags as the city’s biggest garbage offenders.

• Chicago’s Mayor Richard M. Daley plans to crack down on emission and heat-trapping gases as the city takes strides to go GREENER; more from the Associated Press.

• Cheese is gross, but Kraft has a COOL idea. They want to turn whey into natural gas and use it to help power their facilities; GreenBiz.com explains.

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Today’s the last day of summer and it sure FEELS like it. The weather was much cooler this week than last week and my tomato is taking it hard.

Green tomatoes took longer to turn red and even the leaves are getting a little crinkly. With fall FAST approaching these might be the last days of my heavenly tomato.

Although, my mom told me a good tomato plant can go well into October. So, we’ll see!

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• We all know factories and refineries ravage the environment, but CHURCHES have a carbon footprint of about 1.1 million tons a year, inspiring many of them to go GREEN—via GreenDaily.

• This sounds a little gross, but Millbrae, California’s Water Pollution Control Plant has recycled 1 MILLION gallons of used kitchen grease; The San Mateo County Times reports.

• According to The Daily Mail, drivers in England could face FINES for letting their cars idle while stuck in traffic. Officials suggest shutting off engines to reduce emissions.

• Berkeley, California has approved city-backed loans for homeowners who wish to install solar panels on their houses. The loans would be up to $22,000 apiece; more from The New York Times.

• Zoos are a great place for school field trips and they’re also doing A LOT to slow the extinction of endangered species. Zoos do genetic research and conduct wild release programs—from Green Daily.

• Inkjet printers are cheaper than laser printers, but they create MORE waste. Inkjets need a new cartridge after a couple hundred pages, while laser printers can go into the THOUSANDS—TreeHugger is on it.

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• On Tuesday the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation that will UNDO a longstanding ban against offshore drilling. The House voted 236 to 189; Reuters reports.

• We know about oil and coal and we’ve heard about solar and wind energy, but some countries are also considering TIDAL power; more from ENN.

• Senator Barack Obama wants to designate $5 million to help coordinate the restoration of the Great Lakes; The Detroit Free Press explains.

• National Geographic journalist Charles Mann claims that the degradation of soil quality across the world is putting the global population at risk—via GreenDaily.

• Wyndham hotels have just hired a “vice president of sustainability and innovation” to help improve the GREEN quality of their resort properties—from The Green Meeting.

• Your television isn’t green, but there things you can do to improve it, like keeping it clean and switching to an Energy Star model—Grist is on it.

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• The economy might be slowing, but the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica continues to grow. It has already SURPASSED its 2007 size; ENN reports.

• The University of San Diego has planted some interesting trees, SOLAR trees! These tree-like canopy solar panels generate energy AND provide shade—via TreeHugger.

• Here’s more solar panel news. Barack Obama’s step-grandmother foiled thieves who were trying to steal the solar panels off her house—more from Ecorazzi.

• According to The Wall Street Journal, the Internal Revenue Service has GREEN aspirations. This tax season they want everyone to save paper and e-file.

• Recycle Bank encourages people to recycle by REWARDING them with points and coupons for various products—from GreenDaily.

• Ten U.S. states are cracking down carbon dioxide emissions. They plan on making polluters pay MORE; The New York Times explains.

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• Check out Howard Stern’s sidekick Robin Quivers! She became a vegan and now, at 56, she looks GREAT and has a new lease on life; more from New York Magazine.

• This Saturday, September 20th is California Coastal Cleanup Day. Citizens will be joining forces from 9AM to 12PM to help spruce up of their beaches—via TreeHugger.

• Reuters reports that China is planning to TAX polluters. The deputy minister for environmental protection has formed a team to further research the idea.

• Plant Green shares some tips on how to get green in the BATHROOM; like reducing water usage and avoiding chemical cleaners and disposable products.

• Almond growers are TICKED off! They’re suing the USDA for requiring them to spray almonds with propylene oxide gas, it pasteurizes them; the Associated Press reports.

• YUCK! All these pesticides in the environment have created “super lice.” They’re outsmarting drugs and terrifying school nurses everywhere; MSNBC is on it.

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• Lots of schools buses have them and those mini cars too. Apparently installing a white roof on your house can SLOW global warming; The Los Angeles Times reports.

• A newly married couple in Chicago used their wedding registry to help them purchase their very own solar power system; more from The Daily Green.

• Now, Washington is offering new car shoppers a sales tax exemption if they buy a hybrid or alternative-fuel vehicle; The Seattle Post-Intelligencer explains.

• And California is considering legislation that would allow insurance companies to LOWER rates for drivers that decrease their amount of driving—via TreeHugger.

• According to the Associated Press, the University of Oklahoma wants its main campus to be TOTALLY powered by wind by 2013.That BLOWS my mind!

• Did you know this week is National Pollution Prevention Week in the United States? Well, it is. Green Living Tips tells us what reduce, reuse and recycle is all about.

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It’s time for a tomato update. Okay, last week my tomato started slumping to one side—which totally FREAKED me out! I was worried, could my tomato recover?

The answer is YES. In a big way! Just check out ALL those red—and getting redder—tomatoes! In fact, I’ll be devouring that big one on the left later today.

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• This shouldn’t be ironic, but 55-59 year-old females—formally the peace and love generation—are the BIGGEST consumers of green products; Marketing Vox reports.

• As someone who lives in a small apartment and is looking to go smaller, I applaud the increased demand for tiny domiciles; more from Michael Cannell of The New York Times.

• The Food Network’s Alton Brown is going green. Soon he’ll feature more sustainable and locally grown food on his show Good Eats—via Eat. Drink. Better.

• Organic farming is catching on. For example, farmers in the Philippines are A LOT happier now that they’ve made the switch; Prime Sarmiento of IPS explains.

• Prince Charles wants a militant approach to deforestation. Calling for a “war time” effort to combat rampant tree-cutting which threatens rainforests; the AFP is on it.

• More love for wind energy! China is planning to build a 300 to 1,000 megawatt wind power station in Inner Mongolia; from CleanTech.

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• You’ve probably heard about it already—sorry, I DON’T keep up with celebrities—but Brad Pitt is building green houses in New Orleans, like that one—via Life Without Buildings.

• Speaking of green homes, Reuters reports that many home builders are offering buyers ways to cut climate control costs; like more insulation and triple-glazed windows.

• According to GreenDaily the military’s MREs produce 16,667 tons of waste each year; lots of aluminum foil, polyethylene, nylon and polyester wrappers. Not to mention unhealthy food!

• If you drive a teeny-tiny car in Manhattan you’ll only have to pay half-price for parking until 2009. AutoBlog Green has the details.

• Jet fuel made from algae—yes, ALGAE—has passed its first test. Scientists are optimistic about algae-fuel because it doesn’t freeze at high altitudes like other biofuels—from Scientific America.

• Another unusual source of fuel is the sweet potato. ScienceDaily reports that sweet potatoes may out-yield corn in ethanol production.

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• Raising temperatures are threatening California's giant sequoia trees. Federal researchers have determined that sequoias are dying at more than DOUBLE their normal death rate; the Associated Press reports.

• According to Checkbiotech, CHICKEN POOP could be the fuel of the future! A Netherlands biomass plant claims chicken crap can deliver renewable power to 90,000 households.

• This is interesting. More and more young people are choosing colleges based on how green they are. The Princeton Review just gave 534 colleges “green ratings.”

• Speaking of green college, TreeHugger passes on some how-to information for making dorm rooms greener—goodbye empty pizza boxes and beer bottles!

• The AFP reports that Bangladesh needs BILLIONS of dollars—from more developed nations—to help combat the effects of the climate change; such as floods, droughts and cyclones.

• Mitsubishi is stepping up efforts and inventing new technologies to improve the recycling of electronics, like more efficient separation of plastics—via GoodCleanTech.

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• The sun is REALLY bright. That’s why one expert believes that solar energy can meet ALL of the world’s energy demands; the AFP reports.

• The U.S. presidential race is LOADED with green issues and A LOT of people are worried about Sara Palin’s environmental track record and vision—via Jolly Green Girl’s Blog.

• Plastic bottles sock the environmental. So it’s good news that the demand for bottled water might be declining; more from ENN.

• Mother Jones claims that the Bush administration helps the tuna industry suppress news about tuna’s high mercury content. Scary!

• Experts at the United Nations claim eating LESS red meat could significantly reduce C02 emissions—TreeHugger is on it.

• The U.S. Green Building Council is looking to promote legislation that steps up effort to build green schools; ENN explains.

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• See that stuff. Its flatware made using misprinted tin cans. They take the defective cans and roll them up, which makes a nifty looking handle. Check out Vivaterra for more info.

• Cake is one of my favorite bands and apparently they’re VERY eco-conscious. They just installed some serious solar panels on their recording studio—via Ecorazzi.

• Who said republicans don’t care about the environment? According to GreenDaily, at the Republican National Convention they distributed BPA-free water bottles.

• Some researchers claim Asian pollution could further spur global warming in the United States and Europe; ENN reports.

• Speaking of global warming, this report by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer suggests that the increase in temperatures is having a particularly hard impact on the Northwestern United States.

• To make matters worse. Satellite imagery has revealed that deforestation is ESCALATING in the Brazilian Amazon; more form ENN.

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There’s my tomato, leaning. Last week reaching for the stars, this week—not so much! It’s cool though. All those delicious tomatoes are weighing it down.

But after tying it to the house, I think it’ll be just fine. Although I FREAKED out when I first saw it, I guess I am just a worried daddy.
 

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• The Environmental Defense Fund says President Bush has proposed establishing two new marine national monuments in US waters, which will preserve A LOT of ocean territory.

• In other ocean news, mobile fish farms in open sea water could reduce impact on local ecosystems, but some people disagree—via NewScientist Environment.

• TreeHugger points out how MUCH storms like hurricane Gustav highlight our current energy vulnerabilities; i.e. refineries in flood zones.

• Speaking of storms, some experts content that warming oceans are the reason why we’re seeing increasing stronger tropical storms; Reuters reports.

• According to The Guardian, The EU is studying plans to create a transnational renewable energy power grid that could sustain 70 million homes.

• Some businesses are trying to entice employees to bike ride to work by offering them free showers; AutoBlogGreen explains.

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More bad press for bisphenol-A (BPA), the toxic compound used in making hard plastic. Researchers from the Yale School of Medicine claim that BPA interferes with brain cells, possibly causing “learning impairments” and depression.

The study’s published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. More from Medical News Today:

Unlike previous studies that looked at the effect of BPA on rodents, the team examined the effects in a primate model. They also used lower levels of the chemical than in past studies. "Our goal was to more closely mimic the slow and continuous conditions under which humans would normally be exposed to BPA," said study author Csaba Leranth, M.D., professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences and in Neurobiology at Yale. "As a result, this study is more indicative than past research of how BPA may actually affect humans."

Over a 28-day period, Leranth and his team gave each primate 50 micrograms/kg of BPA per day, adjusted for body weight, the amount considered safe for human consumption by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The team also administered estradiol, the major form of hormonal estrogen that modulates nerve cell connections in the brain. Best known as one of the principal hormone products of the ovary, estrogen has also been shown in past studies to be synthesized in the brain, where it aids the development and function of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.

The team then used an electron microscope to count nerve cell connections in the brain. They found that BPA inhibits creation of the synaptic connections in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain involved with regulation of mood and formation of memory.

Scary stuff—I’m stupid enough! Actually, I’m getting more and more concerned about plastic. Just check out my new water bottle. Metal baby! Take a look:

Maybe all this trepidation over plastic is part of the reason why many schools are ditching lunch trays to get green—via CNN.

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• Dr. Fuhrman suggests limiting fish, but The Chicago Tribune has just uncovered that pregnant mothers on the east coast eat so much fish that they risk passing deadly mercury onto their babies.

• Back in June a raft made out of recycled garbage affectionately named “Junk” left California and set sail for Hawaii. Three months at sea and 2,600 miles later Junk just dropped anchor at Ala Wai Boat Harbor in Hawaii.

• After studying things like coral reefs and stalagmites, new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has revealed that the earth is hotter now than it was during the previous 2,000 years.

• Wow, here’s a STRANGE upside to the heat wave. Scientists in Norway, the United States and Sweden believe that a hot climate will reduce the number of PLAGUE outbreaks in the United States.

• In related news, one of America’s top military analysts insists that governments in the US and the UK are already planning for “climate wars”. The resulting strife over mass famine, flood refugees or worse, nuclear conflict—via ENN.

• TreeHugger believes that meat-eating should receive the same level of environmental scrutiny as driving and flying. A valid point, because mass meat production does wallop the planet and consume huge amounts of resources.

 

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• The Stockholm Environment Institute suggests that the world’s wealthiest nations—like the United States and China—should shoulder the bulk of the cost for cutting carbon-dioxide emissions worldwide. Jeremy van Loon of Bloomberg reports:

The growth of climate-warming gases in coming decades will mostly originate in developing countries trying to spur economic growth and reduce poverty by boosting energy use, Kartha said. Any agreement that doesn't address that reality is destined to fail, he added. Power plants, refineries and vehicles together are the main source of manmade CO2.

``Developing countries' emissions are the real challenge to climate change,'' said Sivan Kartha, the institute's energy director.. ``And most poverty results from a lack of access to energy services. Traditionally, that has been addressed by fossil fuels,'' which add CO2 to the atmosphere.

The proposal, which has not been adopted by any country negotiating in the current United Nations-sponsored talks, considers both national income and overall emissions to quantify a nation's contribution to overall CO2 cuts. Rich countries wouldn't be able to meet their targeted levels by simply reducing output domestically and would be obliged to pay for clean-energy development in poorer nations, under the plan.

• Coincidently, China just approved legislation promoting sustainable economic growth—meaning resource conservation, pollution control, water-saving technologies, recycling and alternative fuels. Via ENN:

The law calls for closer monitoring of resource-intensive and heavily polluting industries such as steelmaking, non-ferrous metal production, power generation, oil refining, construction and printing, the Xinhua news agency said.

It will encourage industries to adopt water-saving technologies and use cleaner sources of energy such as natural gas and alternative fuels.

It also promotes recycling or making use of waste materials, including the recycling of maize straw, livestock waste and farming by-products to produce marsh gas.

China consumed 1.16 tonnes of coal equivalent for every 10,000 yuan of GDP in 2007, down 3.66 percent from 2006, and the government has set a 2010 target of reducing energy consumption per unit of GDP by 20 percent and emissions of major pollutants by 10 percent from 2005 levels, Xinhua said.

• Japan’s jumping on the pro-environment trend too. The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has proposed a $4 billion budget to cut emissions and develop greener sources of energy. Ucilia Wang of GreenTechMedia explains:

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukudo has touted a set of emissions-reduction measures in recent months, of which the Ministry has now announced its financial support. However, the ministry's budget will still need to go through other regulatory processes and receive approval from the legislature before taking effect in the new fiscal year, beginning in April 2009.

In June, Fukuda pledged to cut Japan's greenhouse gas emissions by between 60 percent and 80 percent from the country's current levels by 2050.

The prime minister's master plan includes a carbon-emissions-trading program, in which companies that can't meet emissions limits can buy credits from those who have lower emissions. This type of program is already in place in other parts of the world.

The European Union has a carbon-trading program in place and sets carbon emissions caps for different industries. A consortium of 10 states in the eastern United States plans to enact a carbon-trading program on January 1, 2009.

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• A gym that powers itself! Yup, it’s now a reality. The Green Microgym in Portland, Oregon just opened yesterday. It features solar panels and spin bikes that generate up to 600 watts of energy per hour. More from ENN:

The gym, opening September 1, takes human powered energy from its fitness bikes and stores it in a battery which runs some of its other equipment. The 2,800 square foot gym, called is owned by Adam Boesel, a former grade teacher. He was interviewed by the Seattle Times and told them its the first human-powered gym in the US…

…Even though the Green Microgym is the first of its kind in the US, a similar gym is already up and running in Hong Kong. Called the California Fitness gym, exercising people power the lighting system as well as the gym’s batteries, according to the Seattle Times. And in London, nightspot Club Surya is even more exotic; a dance floor converts movement directly into energy!

Boesel is available for one-on-one consultation to other gym owners who wish to make their gyms green. As energy prices soar it makes sense to do some exercise that results in more than burning off calories. Creating energy whilst losing calories is certainly the closest human beings get to becoming carbon negative.

• I do a lot of shopping online. Selection and customer reviews being my main reasons why, but one blogger insists online shopping is actually very green. Here are some reasons why, via Green Living Tips:

Buying direct from warehouses
Bricks and mortar stores are usually incredibly energy and resource hungry. All the lighting, air conditioning, elaborate stands to catch your eye. When you shop online, often your order will be fulfilled via a warehouse that doesn't have all the glitzy gimmicks and fixtures.

Greener products, more choices
While many supermarkets are now stocking more environmentally friendly lines, some products just don't seem to be carried yet - you can usually find these online. The online world also gives you wider access to smaller businesses run by very environmentally conscious people who are genuinely striving to make a difference - it's great to support these folks.

Product research
Even if you don't like the idea of purchasing something sight unseen; the Internet can save you a great deal of time, money and resources by doing your initial research online. For example, looking to buy an energy efficient washing machine? You can read bundles of reviews posted online by people who have purchased the brands and models you're interested in. The Internet helps you to make a more informed purchase decision on green products; rather than just relying on an in-store sales person's knowledge.

• Rising fuel prices have claimed another victim, schoolchildren. Many schools are stopping or cutting back on bus service in order to cut costs, meaning more and more kids will have to huff it to school. Henry and Jessie L. Bonner of Forecast Earth report:

Health advocates long have encouraged students to walk, stressing the fitness benefits. But school and transportation officials say they fear that abruptly reducing bus service could lower attendance rates, increase traffic congestion or endanger students if they cannot walk on sidewalks and crosswalks.

"If you remove a school bus from the road, you're adding 40 to 50 cars in the morning and in the afternoon," said Bob Riley, spokesman for the American School Bus Council, which represents school transportation officials.

Major cuts loom in California, where schools are not required to provide transportation to campus. As a result, districts squeezed by fuel prices and fewer state dollars are trimming millions from transportation budgets.

The Capistrano United School District in Orange County, for example, has eliminated 44 of its 62 bus routes to save an estimated $3.5 million, district spokeswoman Julie Hatchel said. The cuts will affect an estimated 5,000 students from kindergarten to high school.

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It’s Labor Day, so I'm taking it easy today. Instead of a typical post, I decided to share these photos of my CSA goodies. Here's what I got yesterday:

Oh, and check out this gnarly grasshopper I found on my porch:

He won’t get his claws on my tomato!

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It’s Sunday. Time for a tomato update! Okay, this was last week:

And here's today:

Everyday there’s a new sprout!

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• America’s obsession with fuel-guzzling trucks may be coming to an end. Ford is spending $75 million to retool its Michigan truck plant for producing small cars. Michael Graham Richard of TreeHugger reports:

The plant will begin converting its body shop in November when the tooling and equipment specific to the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator will be disassembled and transferred to Kentucky Truck Plant [...] in the interim, 1,000 employees will be transferred next door to Wayne Assembly Plant where a third crew will be added in January to accommodate increased production of the hot-selling Ford Focus."

Small Vehicles at Michigan Plant: Only in 2010
Retooling a manufacturing plant of that size isn't easy or quick, so the C-class vehicles will only start production in 2010. If Ford had been a bit faster to react and had make the change a few years ago, it would already have these vehicles now that demand is higher than supply in many areas.

• Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean floats a TEXAS-SIZED island of plastic—indecomposable plastics containing the toxin Bisphenol A. For more, check out this video documentary on VBS.TV:

Before this trip, I was never all that crazy about the ocean. I’ve always appreciated the fact that it generates the majority of the world’s oxygen and keeps us nice and far from places like Britain, but in terms of any sort of awe or “respect” it just never happened. I would say I looked at it less as the primeval womb of all terrestrial life than as an excessive amount of water you sometimes have to fly over.

Part and parcel with this was my attitude toward the Pacific Garbage Patch, or as we willfully misidentified it for the duration of our journey, the elusive Garbage Island. All the journalism I’d read about the patch had carefully danced around physical descriptions of the trash, leading myself and the rest of the shooting crew to fanciful visions of a solid, Texas-size barge of discarded Coke bottles and sporting goods. The idea that people had managed to f**k up a part of the world that nobody even visits, much less inhabits, and on such a monumental scale struck me as interesting and, to be honest, slightly awesome-sounding, but at the end of the day the impact of the mess on the rest of the world failed to register. I mean, sure, sea birds choking to death on deflated balloons and sea turtles whose shells have been completely deformed by soda can rings—all this definitely sucks, but so do a lot of things, you know?

• The Sierra Club has released its energy scorecard for presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barack Obama. How will each of them address America’s green energy needs? See for yourself:

Both candidates are talking about energy, high prices and global warming, so it's important to look past the rhetoric and see what is at the heart of their plans," said Cathy Duvall, Sierra Club Political Director. "As this scorecard illustrates, the contrast in this election could not be starker. Barack Obama wants to give tax relief and $1,000 energy rebates to working families, while John McCain wants billions more in tax breaks for oil companies making more than $1,000 a second in profits."

Taking on Big Oil-The scorecard contrasts Obama’s pro-consumer plan for middle class tax relief and $1,000 emergency energy rebates paid for by taxing Big Oil’s billions in record profits with McCain’s plan for another $4 billion in tax breaks for Big Oil.

Investing in the Clean Energy Economy-Obama’s $150 billion plan for 5 million new clean energy jobs is contrasted with McCain’s unblemished record of opposition to pro-clean energy policies and refusal to show up and vote for clean energy incentives necessary to save 116,000 existing jobs and $19 billion in new investments and lay the foundation for the clean energy future that will rid us of our dangerous dependence on fossil fuels.

Fixing Global Warming-Barack Obama will do what scientists tell us is necessary and make polluters pay in order to give back hundreds of billions of dollars to consumers in order to bring energy costs back under control. Meanwhile, McCain has proposed an outdated plan that gives away hundreds of billions to polluters.

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• Here’s a cool idea. A sustainable reading movement, it involves donating used magazines and books to local schools and shelters—as well as using old newspapers as compost. Here’s the lowdown, via Green Living Ideas:

There are several organizations that support the sustainable reading movement. To ease your green mind about the books on your shelf right now, there are several organizations like EcoLibris, whose aim is to balance out the tree to book ratio. For every 2 books you volunteer, they plant one tree.

This online community of fellow readers is easy to join and creates a very simple solution to easing the environmental impact of reading. EcoLibris partners with book clubs, publishers, authors, and book stores.

There is a growing online book swapping community for people who want the real thing, and want to contribute to reforestation while stopping the waste cycle. BookMooch is an international online community for exchanging used books. It has more than 500,000 members who exchange books for free, using a simple points system—every time you send someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch.

• Hope you like 3-eyed fish! British environmental agencies warn that nuclear waste containers are likely to fail—i.e. become FUBAR—before they can be sealed away underground. Geoffrey Lean of The Independent reports:

The unpublicised report is by the Environment Agency, which has to approve any proposals for getting rid of the waste that remains deadly for tens of thousands of years.

The document effectively destroys Britain's already shaky disposal plans just as ministers are preparing an expansion of nuclear power.

It shows that many containers used to store the waste are made of second-rate materials, are handled carelessly, and are liable to corrode.

The report concludes: "It is cautious to assume a significant proportion will fail." It says computer models suggest up to 40 per cent of them could be at risk.

• Bayer CropScience is under attack from by a German organization for using pesticides that kill honey bees. Very bad, we need bees! More from the Environment News Service—take a look:

The coalition filed the charge in cooperation with German beekeepers who claim they lost thousands of hives after poisoning by the Bayer pesticide clothianidin in May.

Since 1991, Bayer has been producing the insecticide imidacloprid, which is one of the best selling insecticides in the world, often used as seed-dressing for maize, sunflower, and rape. Bayer exports imidacloprid to more than 120 countries and the substance is Bayer's best-selling pesticide.

Since patent protection for imidacloprid has expired in most countries, Bayer in 2003 brought a similarly functionning successor product, clothianidin, onto the market, the coalition alleges.

Both substances are systemic chemicals that work their way from the seed through the plant. The substances get into the pollen and the nectar and can damage beneficial insects such as bees.

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• Startling! EPA scientists have determined that pharmaceuticals—like hormones, painkillers, and antibiotics—are contaminating the drinking water of 41 million Americans. More from ENN:

While the concentration of drugs in drinking water tends to be low, some medications, such as hormones, are able to operate potently even at concentrations of one part per billion. To make matters worse, there is evidence that the chlorine commonly used to treat drinking water may make some pharmaceutical chemicals more toxic. Thus, the typical claim that "pharmaceuticals are only present in very low concentrations, and therefore could not be dangerous" holds no water (pardon the pun). Not only are some chemicals potentiated (made more toxic) by other chemicals in the water, but to date, there have been absolutely no studies looking at the increased danger posed by combinations of pharmaceuticals now being found.

In other words, nobody knows the level of risk that may be associated with the chemical cocktail of pharmaceuticals now being found in the water supply. No one can say with any degree of honesty that the drug contamination is safe, meaning that the real risks to human remain entirely unknown.

• Could municipal waster—i.e. garbage—be the next super fuel? A California-based company claims it convert biomass into a substitute gasoline that’ll cost $1.70-2.00 per gallon. Via TreeHugger:

Biomass Turned Into Gasoline Cheaply
Developed in conjunction with the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, Byogy’s claims its process can convert a wide range of biomass feedstocks directly into “Byolene”, a 95-octane gasoline substitute at a cost of $1.70-2.00 per gallon.

Wide Variety of Feedstocks
Byogy states that the process is designed to run on non-food feedstocks such as garbage, biosolids from wastewater treatment plants, lawn clippings, food waste, and livestock manure, in addition to non-food/feed crops grown for fuel purposes.

Initially, Byogy says it intends to use municipal waste in its first plant, which it hopes to have online with two years. By 2022 Byogy says it hopes Byolene can meet 2% of the nation’s transportation fuel demand, and hopes to build an additional 200 biorefineries to do so.

• At next week’s Scientific Advisory Board meeting the EPA will be hearing public comments on pollution prevention activities. Melissa Schober of GreenDaily reports:

The SAB meeting will focus on "consultative advice" from the EPA's Environmental Engineering Committee to the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics (OPPT) "on possible new approaches to measuring results of pollution prevention activities." The OPPT is responsible for oversight of programs falling under the Toxic Substances Control Act and the Pollution Prevention Act. These acts evaluate chemical safety and while "promoting the use of non-toxic or less-toxic substances, implementing conservation techniques, and re-using materials rather than putting them into the waste stream." Programs specifics can be found on the EPA website.

Given the EPA's already legendary foot-dragging on pollution standards, the need for public comment now is greater than ever.If you're in or near Washington, DC and would like to register to speak at the event please note the following: "In general individuals or groups requesting an oral presentation at a public meeting will be limited to five minutes per speaker, with no more than one hour for all speakers. Interested parties should contact Ms. Kathleen White,
Designated Federal Officer, EPA Science Advisory Board at 202.343.9878 or via email at white.kathleen@epa.gov." The Federal Register notes that email contact is preferable.

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• I like The Lord of the Rings, but some people REALLY LIKE it. Like this dude, he built his own earthy-friendly hobbit house. More from Rigel Celeste of Green Daily:

This house in Wales is one that he built for his family so they could all live greener lifestyles closer to nature. And it doesn't just look green on the outside -- it's eco-conscious through and through. Dale built the house completely on his own, with very little experience and just a few buddies to help out here and there. The foundation is made from rocks and mud sourced on site, the interior features skylights and natural branch rafters, the water runs via gravity from a nearby spring, solar panels provide lights at night, it has a compost toilet, and the refrigerator is cooled with air from underground.

• With suspicion over pesticides mounting, a company has developed a “biopesticide” that is supposedly safe for humans and animals. ENN reports:

The new biopesticide has active compounds that alert plant defenses to combat a range of diseases, including powdery mildew, gray mold and bacterial blight that affect fruits, vegetables, and ornamentals. The product will be available this October for conventional growers, according to Marja Koivunen, Ph.D., director of research and development for Marrone Organic Innovations. A new formulation has also been developed for organic farmers and will be available in 2009.

In one of the presentations by Marrone Organic Innovations (MOI), the progress toward discovery of an "organic Roundup" — the Holy Grail of biopesticide research — an environmentally friendly and natural version of the world's most widely used herbicide was discussed.

Biopesticides are derived from plants, microbes, or other natural materials and are proven to be safer for humans and the environment. The active ingredient in one of the company's first products, GreenMatch EX, came from lemongrass oil, and microorganisms from around the world are studied in the search for novel and effective natural pesticides. Currently, the MOI R&D team is working on an organic rice herbicide based on an extract from a marine microorganism, as well as on insecticides and nematocides to kill insect pests and soil-inhabiting, parasitic roundworms that affect plants and animals.

• Colorado, it’s high on altitude and apparently eco-friendly jobs too. Colorado is poised to provide more than 2,000 green jobs. Via John Laumer of TreeHugger:

This has nothing to do with political conventions, and everything to do with the wind and the future - a little bit about the tipping of the balance of power among lobbyists.

Vestas expects to employ 2,450 people in Colorado…

…The towers will be built in Pueblo - biggest such in the world. Blades and nacelles in Brighton CO. Blades in Windsor.

That's probably more people than work in "clean coal' combined, the world over: and they don't even have to get filthy. No support columns caving in on poor miners either. Nice. Who would have thought a Danish company would be the light at the end of the tunnel.

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• If you’re trying to live greener, a clothes dryer can be a real drag—on your electric bill! That’s why Green Living Tips offers these suggestions for amping up your dryer’s efficiency. Take a look:

Proper loading
Ensure your drier isn't overloaded. Air needs to circulate easily between the clothes in order for drying to be most effective.

Venting
Open a window when using the dryer. A closed up laundry gets very humid and that humid air just gets sucked into the drier; decreasing its effectiveness. If your drier has an exhaust leading to the outside; ensure that it's cleaned regularly.

Separate loads
Heavier items should be dried separately to light weight clothes.

Cool it
Many modern clothes driers have a cool-down cycle which allows the clothes to complete drying with the remaining heat in the dryer. If you live in a dry climate, a cool cycle can be extended.

• Activists are cracking down on users of palm oil—like General Mills, Nabisco and Kellogg’s—because producing palm oil destroys tropical rainforests. Marc Gunther of Fortune reports:

The Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace International, Friends of the Earth and the Center for Science in the Public Interest are all campaigning against palm oil. (You can find their arguments here and here and here and here.) Last week, RAN asked about 2,000 volunteers to sneak into food stores across the United States and attach stickers to products made with palm oil.

"Warning!," the stickers said. "May Contain Rainforest Destruction."

The targets of the RAN campaign are three global agricultural firms that grow or import palm oil: Archer Daniels Midland (ADM, Fortune 500), Cargill and Bunge (BG). The goal of last week's stunt was to get the attention of consumer-goods companies, who are being asked to look into their sourcing of palm oil.

"We're working our way down the food chain," explained Mike Brune, the executive director of RAN. "Most customers won't want rainforest destruction and climate change in every mouthful of cookies or crackers, so our plan is to start with the most prominent brands. Once we get some of the top brands on our side, we'll use the power of the pocketbook to convince the 'A,B,C's' (ADM, Bunge and Cargill) that destroying rainforests and increasing climate change isn't smart - for business or the planet."

• The fish you bought might be labeled as one thing, but it could be something very different. Two TEENAGERS figured this out with a little DNA testing. Alister Doyle of Reuters explains:

In the worst cases, two samples of filleted fish sold as red snapper, caught mostly off the southeast United States and in the Caribbean, were instead the endangered Acadian redfish from the North Atlantic, according to the tests, revealed on Friday.

"We never expected these results. People should get what they pay for," Kate Stoeckle, 18, told Reuters of the project with Louisa Strauss, 17.

The two classmates from New York's Trinity school collected and sent off 60 fish samples to the University of Guelph in Canada. Of 56 samples that could be identified by a four-year-old DNA identification technique, 14 were mislabeled.

In all cases, the fish was labeled as a more costly type, apparently ruling out simple chance. It was the first known student use of DNA barcoding technology in a public market.

"We really like sushi and we'd take home fish samples and put them in alcohol," Stoeckle said of fish bought in shops and restaurants in Upper Manhattan.

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Tomato time! Here's my tomato last week:

Now, after some limb tying. Check out today:

 

And yesterday I plucked three luscious tomatoes:

This plant is unstoppable!

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• New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is hell-bent on renewable energy. In fact, he wants to power NYC with windmills. More from ENN:

Bloomberg said he is determined to keep the city's energy usage at or near its current level even as the population grows. But the city has to increase production of clean energy, he said.

"I believe that we've got to be willing to do what some other nations -- such as France -- have already done, and increase our capacity of safe and clean nuclear-generated power," he said.

Clean energy projects could also "draw power from the tides of the Hudson and East Rivers -- something we're already doing on a pilot basis," he said.

Bloomberg proposed increasing rooftop solar power production, "which we've estimated could meet nearly 20 percent of the city's need for electricity."

Companies may also "want to put windfarms atop our bridges and skyscrapers, or use the enormous potential of powerful off-shore winds miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, where turbines could generate roughly twice the energy that land-based windfarms can," he said.

• Mushrooms may be far more AMAZING than we think. Scientist Paul Stamets believes harnessing mushroom technology could save the planet. Via TreeHugger:

Stamets is also experimenting with packaging materials infused with mycelium and tree seedlings, that could help regenerate old growth forests (though I can’t help but wonder about the dangers of shipping non-native species around the globe), and he has also been exploring the possibility of using fungi in the production of cellulosic ethanol (Matthew has delved a little into fungi and ethanol before). But, in our experience of talking about Stamets’ work, it’s usually the slides about mycopesticides that most often blow people’s minds – once you’ve seen a mushroom infesting a termite, and then sprouting from its head, you start to understand what Stamets means when he says that these are powerful organisms that we would do well to understand better.

• It might sound stinky and altogether disgusting, but 200 million farmers fertilize with human waste—i.e. poop. Tasha Eichenseher of National Geographic News reports:

While the practice carries serious health risks for many, those dangers are eclipsed by the social and economic gains for poor urban farmers and consumers who need affordable food, the study authors say.

Nearly 200 million farmers in China, India, Vietnam, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America harvest grains and vegetables from fields that use untreated human waste.

Ten percent of the world's population relies on such foods, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

"There is a large potential for wastewater agriculture to both help and hurt great numbers of urban consumers," said Liqa Raschid-Sally, who led the study published by the Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and released this week at the World Water Week conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

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• Former President Bill Clinton lists 10 things the U.S. government SHOULD do for clean energy. Here's the first three. Katie Fehrenbacher of earth2tech reports:

1. Congress must pass legislation that puts a price on carbon and establish a cap-and-trade system. The alternative is passing a carbon tax, Clinton says, but adds that he tried that route already and it didn’t work out too well.
2. We need to renew and lengthen the tax credits for clean energy. The time frame needs to be longer than three years — more like 6 to 10 years. That is the only way to stimulate enough production of clean energy technologies.
3. It’s important to figure out the federal government’s role in modernizing the electrical grid, including both efficiency and carrying capacity. The grid wastes a lot of energy moving power, given that the wind blows and the sun shines in places where a lot of people don’t live. Tax payers should also be able to split the cost of modernizing the grid with utilities.

• They’ll be using biodegradable hotel keycards at this month’s Democratic National Convention. More from Whit Honea of GreenDaily:

If they weren't wasting energy via freezing rooms or water due to countless loads of laundry they were filling landfills with plastic keycards. Wait. What? How big of a footprint could those thin plastic keycards be leaving? How about 1,300 tons (TONS!) per year? That may not bigfootesque in the relative picture but it is still an alarming, and totally unnecessary, impact.

Here's why plastic keycards are unnecessary: we don't need them. Simple, isn't it? It turns out that Europe has been using wooden keycards for that past 10 years. Seems like someone could have told us (note to self: travel).

From Gadling: "This morning, Sustainable Cards, maker of the United States' first wooden hotel keycards, announced that 70,000 biodegradable wooden keycards will be used in Denver hotels during next week's Democratic National Convention."

• Old U.S. Navy Ships are being intentionally sunk to create artificial reefs off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. Via DiscoBlog:

It seems like a strange move, one step removed from attempts to tinker with ecosystem problems by introducing new predators or invasive species. But the coastal waters of the Earth already abound in old ships: Besides the famous goners like the Lusitania or the Gordon Lightfoot-immortalized Edmund Fitzgerald, it’s impossible to know just how many long-forgotten ships are decaying under the sea. In any case, divers have already identified 38 species of fish hanging around the Oriskany.

The Navy spent $20 million cleaning up the Oriskany before they sank it, but the city of Pensacola has recouped $4 million from tourism—recreational divers or war buffs who want to go down and see the ship. Perhaps other cities will start asking the Navy to sink a ship in their harbor so they have a new tourist attraction. However, once you’ve seen one retired Cold War relic inhabited by marine life, you’ve probably seen them all.

More importantly, from a should-we-or-shouldn’t-we-perspective, the Navy’s cleaning operation wasn’t totally complete. According to The New York Times, 700 pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) remained aboard the Oriskany when it went down, thanks to an agreement the Navy struck with the EPA. The State of Florida is currently studying whether these toxic compounds are getting into the food chain, but considering Congress banned PCBs 30 years ago, we’re not exactly excited about the idea of having them sitting in the ocean.

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• Bleh! According to the International Water Management Institute 200 million people are eating food grown using untreated waste water. John Vidal of The Guardian reports:

It's a widespread phenomenon, occurring on 20m hectares across the developing world, especially in Asian countries like China, India and Vietnam, but also around nearly every city of sub-Saharan Africa and in many Latin American cities as well," said IWMI researcher Liqa Raschid-Sally.

"Nor is it limited to the countries and cities with the lowest GDP. It is prevalent in many mid-income countries as well", she said.

The report, launched today at World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden, found the practice "widespread and practically inevitable".

"As long as developing countries lack suitable transport to deliver large quantities of perishable produce to urban areas, urban agriculture will remain important. In the face of water scarcity generally and a lack of access to clean water, urban farmers will have no alternative except to use … polluted water", write the authors.

• President Bush just signed legislation banning lead from children’s toys—the toughest standard in the world. Via the Associated Press:

The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates there are about 28,000 deaths each year linked to unsafe products, including toys, in the United States. More than 33 million people were injured last year by consumer products.

The bill also bans a chemical called phthalates that is widely used to make plastic products softer and more flexible.

And the legislation bolsters the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which took the brunt of criticism last year over the massive recalls and the government’s failure to monitor toy imports before they reach store shelves.

The bill would double the agency’s budget, to $136 million by 2014, and give it new authority to oversee testing procedures and to penalize violators.

• Kudos to Hawaii! The island is recycling 72-percent of its usage beverage containers. More from ENN:

The state increased recycling by four percent to reach 72 percent recovery, an all-time high.

The state says this means more than 680 million containers were recycled from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008. State law requires that if more than 70 percent of containers are recycled there would be an increase in the container recycling fee (this cover costs of collection and sorting), but the director of health decided to waive the fee increase (it’s currently one cent per container).

Hawaii is one of 11 states to offer a beverage container deposit, meaning consumers pay a fee (in this case six cents) when purchasing containers and get a refund when the containers are recycled.

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• To help plug the city’s water problems, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa signed an ordinance that will double fines against residents who repeatedly violate water-wasting violations. David Zahniser of The Los Angeles Times reports:

L.A.'s future depends on our citizens to adopt an ethic of conservation," Villaraigosa said.

The anti-drought initiative has coincided with efforts by Villaraigosa to keep his top appointee at the DWP, Commission President Nick Patsaouras, from quitting his post. Perhaps the utility's most aggressive watchdog on spending issues, Patsaouras sent a resignation e-mail Monday, but the mayor refused to accept it.

Villaraigosa said his appointee had repeatedly talked about leaving the volunteer post and about being "overworked." Patsaouras serves on a panel overseeing construction of the new $454-million police headquarters.

"He's talked to me about resigning more than a few times. Each time, I get him to realize that we need him," Villaraigosa said.

Patsaouras would not discuss his conversation with the mayor but sent a brief text message to The Times saying he would stay put "to fulfill the mayor's vision."

• Monsanto, a monumentally lucrative and extremely dubious mega-corporation, is seeing more and more of its dirty laundry being aired out for public viewing. Check out this post and video via Green Living Tips:

Additionally, what I am increasingly becoming aware of is just how much control agri-business and the biotech industry has over governments. It's not only a heavy outside influence from lobbying, but inside as well. For example, Donald Rumsfeld was an ex CEO of a Monsanto subsidiary; and there's many others law makers who previously were associated with biotech companies. The importance of that and the ramifications become clear in the video below.

This may all sound a little tinfoil hat I guess, but when you think about it - control the food, control the water ... you control the world.

Rather than rattle on about the topic with my own half-baked thoughts (I'm still reeling from all the information), I present this documentary to you for consideration - Controlling Our Food. This isn't a 10 minute YouTube presentation - it goes for nearly two hours; so you'll need to set aside a bit of time - but please take the time to do so as it's worth it.

• What’s more green than enlisting a penguin in your army? A 3-foot tall king penguin, named Nils Olav, is now a Norwegian knight. More from the Associated Press:

A resident of Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland, the original Nils Olav was made an honorary member of the King's Guard in 1972 after being picked out as the guard's mascot by lieutenant Nils Egelien. The guards adopted him because they often toured the zoo during their visits to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, an annual military music festival, according to zoo spokeswoman Maxine Finlay.

The king penguin was named after Egelien and Norway's then-King Olav V. When the penguin died — Finlay said no one at the zoo knew exactly when — he was replaced by a second penguin, who inherited Nils Olav's name and rank.

The current Nils Olav, the third penguin to serve as the guards' mascot, was promoted from honorable regimental sergeant major to honorary colonel-in-chief in 2005, Finlay said.

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I’m not the only urbanite growing his own organic produce. More and more people are making good use of the free space around their homes, like these L.A. residents who transformed a seedy cinder-block wall into a cascade of strawberries, tomatoes, herbs, and vegetables. Cara Mia DiMassa of The Los Angeles Times reports:

The first time they tried planting vegetables, in a couple of wooden bins on the rooftop of their building, their novice status meant that plants weren't watered and cared for properly.

"Everything died," said Chris Owens, the group's de facto leader.

The second time, things went better. Members of the group paid special attention to the sprouts they planted, watering and pruning with care. And under their vigilant tending, corn stalks pushed upward. Watermelons appeared on vines.

Many residents were surprised by the way gardening united them, in an area where it sometimes seems best to mind your own business and keep to yourself.

"It brings us together as a group, kind of like therapy, to see something growing and flourishing," Jannie Burrows said.

"We're trying to feed our bodies with better nutrients," Lance Shaw said. "But more than anything, we like getting together."

The modest initial success led the Rainbow group to the nonprofit Urban Farming, which helped the group install the green wall last week as part of its Food Chain project. Urban Farming also erected "edible" walls at the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank, the Miguel Contreras Learning Center and the Weingart Center.

The Food Chain project, said Urban Farming founder Taja Sevelle, enables residents in some of the city's poorest areas to grow food in underused spaces at a time when food prices are soaring. The walls, she said, "get people to think outside the box. You can plant food in so many different places."

And Londoners are becoming expert backyard farmers too—via National Geographic News. Now, in case you can’t grow your own fruits and veggies. Christine McKinney of Eight Right, Stay Well shares a great shopping tip, Produce: The Dirtiest and the Cleanest. Actually, Christine’s list is very similar to Dr. Fuhrman’s chart of the least and most contaminated produce.

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• Our oceans are dying. Build-ups of nitrogen and phosphorus are creating “dead zones.” Burning fossil fuels and agriculture are to blame. Anne Minard of National Geographic News reports:

Dead zones occur when excess nutrients—usually nitrogen and phosphorus—from agriculture or the burning of fossil fuels seep into the water system and fertilize blooms of algae along the coast.

As the microscopic plants die and sink to the ocean floor, they feed bacteria, which consume dissolved oxygen from surrounding waters. This limits oxygen availability for bottom-dwelling organisms and the fish that eat them…

…The second largest dead zone surrounds the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite decades of efforts to clean up U.S. rivers and lakes, high nitrogen levels are currently combining with strong water flow to make that dead zone larger than it has ever been.

• This I like. China has raised taxes on big cars and lowered taxes on small cars. America is big car berserk. Maybe we’ll follow China’s lead. Via by Michael Graham Richard of TreeHugger:

Trying to Fight Air Pollution
Only 4 months ago, we wrote about how big cars were the stars at the Beijing Auto Show. But now that air pollution is in the news more than ever because of the olympics, it seems like the Chinese government has had second thoughts: It decided to reduce taxes on small cars, and increase them on big vehicles. And they're not taking half-measures. The tax on some big vehicles can be as high as 40%.

China's Tax Scale is Based on Engine Size
Starting on September 1st, passenger vehicles with engines bigger than 4 liters will see their tax doubled to 40% from 20%. Engines with displacement from 2 liters to 4 liters will be taxed 25%, up from the current 15%, and cars with engines at or smaller than 1 liter would drop to 1% from the current 3%.

• Residents of Flint Michigan are more than grumpy about genetically modified sugar beets that snuck into the food supply—they’re fighting back! ENN pass it along:

They're participating in a nationwide consumer boycott of Kellogg's Co. instigated by the Organic Consumers Association. By boycotting the world's largest cereal company, they hope to pressure Kellogg's into rejecting the use of sugar from genetically engineered (GE) sugar beets and to spark widespread market rejection in products ranging from cereal to baby food to candy.

As you may know, Roundup Ready sugar beets are genetically altered to resist Monsanto's toxic weed killer, Roundup, and its active ingredient, glyphosate. But here's the scary truth about these beets:

When the USDA first approved GE sugar beets for commercial planting in 1998, the EPA also increased the maximum allowable residues of glyphosate on sugar beet roots from just .02 parts per million to 10ppm. That's a staggering 5,000 percent increase of allowable toxins on beet roots. And, it's little surprise that EPA made this policy change at the request of Monsanto.

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It’s time to check in with my tomato plant. You remember last week:

It just keeps growing! Here’s today:

There are more than 20 tomatoes on that plant—heck yeah!

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• I fish. Badly, but I try. Now, polluted water can really screw up a fishing trip and a new report claims that common pesticides threaten Pacific salmon. The Associated Press reports:

Under the settlement of a lawsuit brought by anti-pesticide groups and salmon fishermen, NOAA Fisheries has issued a draft biological opinion that found the way chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion get into salmon streams at levels high enough to kill salmon protected by the Endangered Species Act.

The chemicals interfere with salmon's sense of smell, making it harder for them to avoid predators, find food, and even find their native spawning streams.

Banned from many household uses, tens of millions of pounds of the chemicals are still used throughout the range of Pacific salmon on a wide range of fruits, vegetables, forage crops, cotton, fence posts and livestock to control mosquitoes, flies, termites, boll weevils and other pests, according to NOAA Fisheries.

Jim Lecky, head of the office of protected resources for NOAA Fisheries Service, said his team has until a court-imposed deadline of Oct. 31 to work with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to find new ways to safely use the chemicals.

• E. coli good for making you sick and possibly good for making “renewable petroleum.” Silicon Valley is figuring it all out. Chris Ayres of The Times Online explains:

What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

LS9 has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its plan: Bob Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm’s president after a 26-year career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in London. “How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow a multi-billion-dollar company?” he asks. It is a bold statement from a man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial estate for a company that describes itself as being “prerevenue”.

Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”

• According to The Green Meeting developers have broken ground on a $600 million earth-friendly skyscraper in Manhattan. Take a look:

Designed by noted architect Helmut Jahn and developed by New York-based Time Equities Inc., the building will incorporate environmentally sustainable technologies including a green roof, efficient water fixtures and plumbing, automatic blinds and energy control. Further, the 65-story building will be clad in energy-efficient glass that maximizes use of natural light and filters UV rays. All waste from demolition will be recycled and construction materials will be "sustainable" and "rapidly renewable," according to the developer.

"50 West Street is marked by sustainable design, advanced technology, landmark architecture, and commitment to the community," said Phillip Gesue, director of acquisitions and development for Time Equities.

The eco-tower will contain 240 residential units and 150 hotel and retail units, as well as 2,500 square feet of meeting space.

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• Prince Charles is no fan of genetically modified foods and crops. He calls them an experiment in nature that has gone seriously wrong. The Independent reports:

"What we should be talking about is food security not food production - that is what matters and that is what people will not understand.

"And if they think also that somehow it's all going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time."

Charles said relying on gigantic corporations for the mass production of food would threaten future food supplies. And he said small farmers would be the victims.

"If they think this is the way to go we will end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness then you count me out. I think it will be an absolute disaster."

• Oh man, my beloved New York City could face subway floods due to global climate change. NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg is all fired up about it! Reuters is on it:

"There are costs to adapting to climate change ... By planning now, we can reduce our exposure to weather-related events," the mayor told reporters.

A task force charged with safeguarding all of the city's roads, bridges, tunnels, mass transit, water and sewer lines, and power and telecommunications systems will begin with an inventory. It will then forecast and report on the local impact of climate change and devise safeguards, he said.

"In order to manage any problem, first you have to measure it," Bloomberg said, recalling a lesson he learned while working on Wall Street. "In God we trust; everybody else has to bring data."

His latest effort is one of the 127 green initiatives launched last year in his PlaNYC program.

• To fuel our ever-festooning addiction to oil, a virgin rainforest in the Amazon is being targeted for drilling. Andy Coghlan of NewScientist Environment explains:

Unspoilt Amazonian rainforests covering an area almost as large as Texas have been provisionally earmarked for oil and gas exploration.

A new report reveals that the area has been divided into 180 "blocks" designated for exploration by governments of countries that own the land on the western fringe of the Amazon. Their intention is to lease the blocks to oil and gas companies for exploration and extraction, taking a cut of any revenues as a royalty. About 35 oil companies are vying for the contracts.

However, most of the blocks overlap with huge areas of rainforest that would become vulnerable to illegal hunting and logging once breached by roads to service exploration activities.

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British cyclist Nicole Cooke began biking at age 11, racing her father—a former competitive cyclist—twice a day during her seven-mile trip to and from school and now she’s a 2008 Olympic gold medalist. The Telegraph reports:

The young Miss Cooke and her father, himself a former competitive cyclist, shunned the bus to dash from their home in the village of Wick, in the rolling hills of the Vale of Glamorgan in south Wales, to Brynteg Comprehensive School in Bridgend, where Tony Cooke taught physics.

The unusual training quickly paid off and Miss Cooke, now 25, publicly announced her life's ambition, and her talent, after winning the Welsh cyclo-cross championship in 1994.

She beat everyone in her age group - including the boys - then promptly announced in a live television interview: "I want to win a gold medal at the Olympics."

Miss Cooke was given her first bike for Christmas when she was six-years-old.

Mr Cooke said: "It was a little blue bike with stabilisers and she got very angry with the stabilisers straight away and demanded we take them off.

"Since then we've brought her a bike for most birthdays and for every Christmas.

"She had a passion for riding straight away and we all went on tandem bike-ride holidays together.

"She was always competing at school and knew this is what she wanted to do as a career.

"I used to go out cycling with her but eventually she sacked me.

Wow! That’s a tough chick. Sounds like my kind of girl. Kudos to Cooke on her win! Clearly, cycling is a great workout, but it can also save you a ton on fuel. In fact, one college student is using bike rides to help her last all summer on just ONE tank of gas—via The Huffington Post.

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• The United Nations has named Yao Ming, of the Houston Rockets and a member of Chinese national basketball team, its first Environmental Champion, for his role in raising awareness of climate change and energy efficiency. Via Ecorazzi:

Yao explained how he’ll take on this enormously important task, “So I will work with young people across the world and try to inspire them to plant trees, use energy efficient light bulbs, harvest rain water and to become environmental champions in their own communities.”

He’s got billions of eyes on him as he competes for the Chinese basketball team, and he recently had the coveted honor to act as their flag carrier in the Olympic opening ceremonies. He uses this opportunity in the spotlight to ask for help in his task, “As the world celebrates the Beijing Olympic Games, I would also like to call upon the organizers of all major sports events in the world to make sure they use public transport facilities, build proper waste management systems and use greener forms for energy.”

• Disturbing news, some scientists believe that the Artic could be ice-free by 2013. They originally believed it would take 60 years—quite a difference! Robin McKie of The Observer reports:

Satellite images show that ice caps started to disintegrate dramatically several days ago as storms over Alaska's Beaufort Sea began sucking streams of warm air into the Arctic. As a result, scientists say that the disappearance of sea ice at the North Pole could exceed last year's record loss. More than a million square kilometres melted over the summer of 2007 as global warming tightened its grip on the Arctic. But such destruction could now be matched, or even topped, this year.

'It is a neck-and-neck race between 2007 and this year over the issue of ice loss,' said Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado. 'We thought Arctic ice cover might recover after last year's unprecedented melting - and indeed the picture didn't look too bad last month. Cover was significantly below normal, but at least it was up on last year.

But the Beaufort Sea storms triggered steep ice losses and it now looks as if it will be a very close call indeed whether 2007 or 2008 is the worst year on record for ice cover over the Arctic. We will only find out when the cover reaches its minimum in mid-September.'

• Elephant seals, big lumbering sea mammals, but environmental researchers? Reuters reports on how elephant seals are being used to gather data on climate change. Here’s a bit:

Elephant seals swimming under Antarctic ice and fitted with special sensors are providing scientists with crucial data on ice formation, ocean currents and climate change, a study released on Tuesday said.

The seals swimming under winter sea ice have overcome a "blind-spot" for scientists by allowing them to calculate how fast sea ice forms during winter.

Sea ice reflects sunlight back into space, so less sea ice means more energy is absorbed by the earth, causing more warming.

"They have made it possible for us to observe large areas of the ocean under the sea ice in winter for the first time," said co-author Steve Rintoul from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).

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• Mike Howard of Diet-Blog shares his gut reaction about eating for a healthier environment—he’s an unrelenting omnivore. Here’s a bit:

I think reducing our carbon footprint is at the forefront of our minds and there are some smaller-scale, realistic steps we can take to help the economy/environment and our health.

I love the idea of trying to eat locally as much as possible. Also, I think many of us could benefit from cutting back on the junk - with the energy cost adding extra incentive. (Cheetos: bad for your arteries AND your planet).

As for eschewing meat... I think I'll just change to fluorescent light bulbs. But seriously, the unrelenting omnivore can be more environmentally friendly by eating locally raised meat, meat with less packaging or simply by cutting back a little.

I think having the awareness that our dietary choices affect our economy and our planet in addition to our own personal health is crucial. If everybody made small changes, we can collectively make a big difference.

• The men’s room just got grosser. Osaka, Japan has introduced 73 waterless urinals at 18 train stations. Via TreeHugger:

There has been some controversy over waterless urinals, notable opponents including the plumber’s union of Philadelphia. However, joint research by Falcon Waterfree Technologies and UCLA, as well as research by other independent bodies, suggests environmental, economical and health benefits beyond saving water include improved hygiene compared to manual flush urinals (although these are uncommon in Japan as most flush urinals use automatic sensors), lower maintenance costs and energy savings leading to reductions in CO2 output.

Waterless urinals generally look and function much like a regular flush urinal and connect to the standard plumbing system. The notable difference is in the use of specially-designed cartridges containing oil-based liquids designed to filter urine and trap odors. As urine is composed of around 96% water and is free of bacteria and viruses, the urine simply passes through the filter and joins the normal waste stream. The filters are recyclable and the liquids are not considered to be harmful to the environment.

• No one likes bird poop—or any poop for that matter—but imagine stepping in a pile of radioactive seagull crap! Kelly Leahy of GreenDaily explains:

Sellafield is home to a nuclear waster processing plant. The waterways are full of weapons-grade plutonium as well as Cobalt-60 which is a known carcinogen. It's not only the local birds that are infected. Norway, 500 miles away, has reported finding radiation levels in their lobsters, shrimps and mussels. Liquid discharges of technetium-99 have increased fifty times over from Shellafield since 1994.

Local authorities have tried scaring the birds away for the toxic ponds with loud noises and they've even tried shooting them but the gulls continue to visit the ponds. It must be the radioactive, 14-eyed fish that keep them coming back for more.

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• When you think military, you don’t automatically think green—well, except for the camouflage—but apparently our armed forces want to lead the United States in green energy. Bernie Woodall of Reuters reports:

The military has set a goal that 25 percent of its energy should come from renewable sources by 2025 and aims to create machines and methods to help Main Street America reach similar targets, said Alan Shaffer, a retired Air Force officer who leads the Pentagon's research and engineering arm.

"It's only the Department of Defense that is big enough and has the federal mandate for the necessary scope of development" of new energy technologies and products, said Shaffer.

While the military marches on a greener path in which "every soldier is a steward of the environment" -- in Shaffer's words -- the federal government faces widespread criticism for failing to take significant action to slow climate change.

On the same day Shaffer arrived in California last week to tour military bases that test energy efficiency and renewable power, California announced plans to sue the Environmental Protection Agency for "wantonly" ignoring its duty to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

• Michael Smith of Green (Living) Review explains that not all plastic bags are made from oil, but nevertheless, Americans should get away from the free plastic grocery bag. Here’s more:

In some countries, such as the USA, for instance, most of the plastic bags given away by grocery stores and others are made not from oil but natural gas, and the USA has ample supply of natural gas within its own borders – so no costly imports. Other countries are not so lucky.


In addition it has to be said that that only applies if the bags are actually produced in the USA and not, as will be more likely the case, in places such as China (or India). The source of the ethylene from which the polyethylene is then constructed we do not know.

Whatever the source, the fact remains that Plastic Bags Are Bad For The Environment

Most of what you have read about plastic bags is true. Plastic bags kill wildlife, cause pollution, clog landfills and indirectly raise the price of food at the grocery store. There are also, aside from those made from PLAs, that is to say those that are made from a plastic made from corn starch and lactic acids and such, no biodegradable plastic bags about. That is a fallacy and absolute greenwashing. Ordinary polyethylene shopping bags do NOT biodegrade; they photodegrade. That is to say they break down into ever smaller and smaller particles of plastic in the environment, all the while releasing harmful substances into the soil and water.

• ENN reports that the USDA has put 15 out of 30 federally accredited organic certifiers on probation. It seems some people weren’t playing by the rules, which compromised the “organic” integrity of some produce. See for yourself:

Chinese imports have had a bad year in the news, making headlines for contaminated pet food, toxic toys, and recently, certified organic ginger contaminated with levels of a pesticide called aldicarb that can cause nausea, headaches and blurred vision even at low levels. The ginger, sold under the 365 label at Whole Foods Market, contained a level of aldicarb not even permissible for conventional ginger, let alone organics. Whole Foods immediately pulled the product from its shelves.


Ronnie Cummins, the national director of the Organic Consumers Association, emphasizes that most organic farmers "play by the rules." They believe in organic principles and thereby comply with organic standards. Unfortunately, Congress' pitifully inadequate funding for enforcement, including for organic imports from countries like China, "guarantees it'll be easy for unscrupulous players to cheat, and that's obviously what's going on here."

Farms that produce USDA-certified organic food are not personally inspected by anyone from the USDA National Organic Program (NOP). As a small and underfunded agency within the USDA (it has fewer than a dozen employees), NOP relies on what it calls Accredited Certifying Agencies -- ACAs -- to do the legwork. The ACAs take responsibility for ensuring that any farm or processor bearing the organic label meets the strict requirements for certification.

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Let’s see how my tomato is doing. This was last week:


Get a load of today:


Of course they’re all going to ripen at once!

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• Apparently, you can make rubber from dandelions and experts believe that using the pesky weed this way will not only save billions of dollars and will be better for the environment. Eric Bland of Discovery News reports:

Scientists from Ohio State University's Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) and the Ohio BioProducts Innovation Center (OBIC) recently received a $3 million grant to design and build a processing plant that would turn sticky white dandelion root sap into quality rubber for less money than current methods, say the scientists.

"No matter how much chemistry we've applied, we still haven't been able to find an artificial substitute for natural rubber," said William Ravlin, a researcher involved in the project. "We're still harvesting [rubber] the same way they did 1,000 years ago; by cutting into the tree and letting the sap drip into containers. It's not a very efficient system."

Efficiency, according to the Ohio scientists, would be Midwestern farmers in air-conditioned tractors harvesting acres of yellow dandelions with the same machines used to pull tulip bulbs.

• The agave plant is notoriously known for making tequila, but Mexican farmers could use agave to make ethanol too—it’d give your car quite the buzz! More from Andrew K. Burger of Renewable Energy World:

High in sugar content, the project team estimates that varieties of Agave tequilana weber can yield up to 2,000 gallons of distilled ethanol per acre per year and from 12,000-18,000 gallons per acre per year if their cellulose is included, some 14 dry tons of feedstock per acre every year.


These figures far outshine the plants that are dominating ethanol and biofuels' R&D and investment today, not only in terms of potential ethanol yield per acre, but also in terms of energy balance (the ratio of energy in the product to the energy input to produce it), as well as actual and prospective planted acreage.

Corn ethanol, for example, has an energy balance ratio of 1.3 and produces approximately 300-400 gallons of ethanol per acre. Soybean biodiesel, with an energy balance of 2.5, typically can yield 60 gallons of biodiesel per acre while an acre of sugar cane can produce 600-800 gallons of ethanol with an energy balance of 8.0. An acre of poplar trees can yield more than 1,500 gallons of cellulosic ethanol with an energy balance of 12.0, according to a National Geographic study published in October 2007.

• Mega-corporation Monsanto has had no luck with its business of producing an artificial growth hormone for dairy cows. So, they’re selling it. Andrew Martin and Andrew Pollack of The New York Times are on it:

The decision comes as more retailers, saying they are responding to consumer demand, are selling dairy products from cows not treated with the artificial hormone.


Wal-Mart, Kroger and Publix are among the retailers that now sell house-brand milk from untreated cows. Almost all of the fresh milk sold by Dean Foods, the nation’s largest milk bottler, also comes from cows that were not treated with the artificial hormone, a spokeswoman said.

Monsanto officials said the decision was not related to the retail trend and that business for the artificial hormone, sold under the brand name Posilac, remained brisk. Monsanto, which is based in St. Louis and is the only commercial manufacturer of the hormone, declined to provide sales numbers.

Selling Posilac “will allow Monsanto to focus on the growth of its core seeds and traits business while ensuring that loyal dairy farmers continue to receive the value of Posilac in their operations,” Carl Casale, Monsanto’s executive vice president for strategy and operations, said in a statement.

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• If you live in NYC and you think all those paper takeout menus stuffed into your door jambs are a giant eco-waste. Good news! New York State will start enforcing a law that prohibits the placing unsolicited materials. Via Sewell Chan of CityRoom:

Advertisers who violate the law face fines from $250 for a first offense to $1,000 for repeat violators.

The “lawn litter” legislation was sponsored by State Senator Frank Padavan and Assemblyman Mark S. Weprin, both of Queens, where complaints about “lawn litter” have been particularly acute.

The property owner’s sign must be at least five inches tall and seven inches wide, and display the following language in legible letters at least one inch in size: “Do Not Place Unsolicited Advertising Materials On This Property.”

• Worried that you’re underwear isn’t green? A Sri Lankan firm has announced that it will become the world's first carbon-neutral clothes factory. More from the World Business Council of Sustainable Development:

AT A SPANKING new lingerie factory in Thulhiriya, a short drive from Colombo, Sri Lanka's capital, senior managers wear T-shirts. This is not because MAS Holdings, the country's biggest apparel company, which recently opened the factory, is a dress-down sort of a firm. It is because the factory has no air-conditioning. Instead it uses evaporative cooling, which leaves the workplace around four degrees hotter than air-conditioning would—but uses much less energy.


The factory has many energy-saving features. Its carefully designed windows provide enough natural light for workers stitching bras. Its turf roofs provide a cooling shade. Overall it uses 40% less energy than an ordinary factory of the same size. And the electricity it uses is from renewable sources: 90% from a hydro-power plant and 10% from on-site solar panels. MAS reckons it has built the world's first carbon-neutral clothes factory.

It was built at the instigation of Britain's biggest clothier, Marks & Spencer (M&S), which contributed £200,000 ($400,000) towards the cost of the solar panels and design. The "green" underwear that MAS is now making at the factory for M&S will reach British high streets in June, and will cost no more than existing garments.

• I know that I have been driving less now that gas is a BILLION dollars a gallon. Green Living Tips points out that gas prices should indeed spark lifestyle changes. Take a look:

While gas prices are retreating somewhat now, people need to understand that the recent hikes were a tap on the shoulder; a perhaps final hint that we need to alter our lifestyles dramatically. Nature has a funny way of working - all things must be kept in balance and sometimes it will deliver a direct slap in the face, other times via other mediums.


The point is that all things are connected in Nature and for us to believe we have tamed it is a massive mistake. Whether through political unrest, peak oil or environmental disaster; the days of cheap fossil fuel are certainly numbered and that's probably a good thing as otherwise we'd just choke on our own hyperconsumption.

In that aspect, we're very much like children. Give a small child a bag of candy and tell them they can only have one piece a day, but it's up to them to control their consumption - and watch what happens :). Nature is the parent, and like any good parent, it will monitor and discipline us - harshly if we don't get the hint.

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• People blame China’s booming economy for increased greenhouse gas emissions, but those countries importing from China are equally to blame. Catherine Brahic of NewScientist explains:

Economists now say that one-third of China's carbon dioxide emissions are pumped into the atmosphere in order to manufacture exported goods – many of them "advanced" electronics goods destined for developed countries.

"Export goods emissions" account for 1.7 billion tonnes of China's carbon dioxide. That represents 6% of total global emissions – the equivalent of Germany, France and the UK's combined emissions.

Discussing the scale of China's emissions has been a hot topic since it was forecast that they could surpass US emissions as the world's leader in 2007. Some say that has now happened.

A large share of these emissions – up to 25% – has been blamed on China's ever-growing export market, but this has not been quantified until now.

• Somehow amid staggering gas prices oil companies are enjoying record profits, and, they’ll continue to receive tax breaks, royalty relief, and subsidies. ENN reports:

Tax breaks for the oil and gas industry included in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 increase from around $1.3 billion in 2000 to some $3.6 billion in 2008, and they’re set to grow further, to some $3.8 billion by 2010, according to the Joint Committee on "Taxation Estimates of Federal Tax Expenditures for Fiscal Years 2007-2011," FoE points out in its analysis (pdf). The list of oil and gas industry tax breaks is a long one. At an estimated cost of $5.9 billion over five years, the oil and gas depletion allowance allows oil companies to deduct 15% of their sales revenues to reflect the declining value of their investment. The problem is that the accounting methodology does not accurately reflect companies’ assets actual loss in value over time, and they often wind up deducting more than the value of their original investment, according to the report’s authors. Congress has passed H.R. 4520, the "American Jobs Creation Act of 2004," which included provisions added that changed the classification of oil and natural gas production to that of a manufactured good.


"This enabled them to claim billions of dollars in new tax deductions, effectively lowering their tax rate," according to the report.

Initial estimates by the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that it would cost the federal government some $3.5 billion over the next five years. On the other hand, efforts to change this, as was included in "The Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Tax Act of 2008," could raise more than $5.1 billion in revenue. Deductions for intangible drilling costs — cost of wages, supplies and site preparation, royalty payments, foreign royalty, and income tax payments will add another $6.5 billion to the lost government revenue total over the next five years.

• The average American households waste $500 a year on spoiled fruits and vegetables. The Associated Press reports:

One reason for the rampant waste is that many people aren't sure how long they can safely keep fruits and vegetables. If your fruit has gone bad, however, you'll generally know -- if not from telltale dark spots, then by smelling or squeezing it.


Knowing how to pick and store your produce can help extend shelf life so it doesn't get to the point where you have to throw it out. The best methods vary depending on the fruit or vegetable, but a few rules of thumb generally apply across the board.

The first step is to immediately inspect your goods once you get home and pluck out any spoiled specimens.

"It really is true that one bad apple can make the entire bunch go bad," said James Parker, who's in charge of buying produce for Whole Foods Markets.

That's especially true for soft fruits such as peaches and nectarines. And the higher the sugar content, the more likely a fruit is to spoil faster.

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Eat the View, a movement to plant healthy, edible landscapes in high-impact, high visibility places, wants the White House to plant an organic food garden. Via Bethany Sanders of That’sFit:

We planted our first vegetable garden this past spring and enjoyed it so much that we just spent the weekend doubling its size for next year. With a very small financial investment and a little bit of physical labor, we've been able to contribute fresh, healthy, organic foods to our menu and teach our kids some lessons about food production as well.

Rising food costs, food safety concerns, and an increased awareness about environmental issues have lead to an increase in backyard gardening. And some food activists are hoping to encourage that trend by putting an organic garden on one of the most well-known lawns in Amercia ... The White House.

Sounds like a great idea, the ultimate lead by example! The White House used to farm in the past. Check out this photo on EatTheView.org:

Although I imagine the scarecrow would be equipped with spy cameras, machine guns, and night vision.

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• Some environmentalists claim we have 100 months to fix climate change or else we face a tipping point. Via Karin Kloosterman of TreeHugger:

If we don’t, echo scientists, life on this planet will change as we know it. With the emerging economy of China, the eastern superpower is now producing more greenhouse gases than America.

For every coal plant America shuts down, China opens 20 more. In light of some of our imminent problems, Andrew Simms from the New Economics Foundation wrote an eye-opening opinion piece on the Guardian on the New Green Deal, a UK plan-of-action released last month to counteract climate change.

Simms, the policy director and head of the climate change program at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) –– a “think and do tank” –– says it’s now time to scream “FIRE!” We have 100 months (about 8 years) he warns to make radical changes to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

• A group of conservationists are suing the Environmental Protection Agency for failure to address pollution from ocean-going ships and aircraft. ENN reports:

Eight state and local jurisdictions filed similar notices today, formally declaring their intent to sue the EPA for unreasonable delay. The filers included the states of California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Oregon, the City of New York, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, California Air Resources Board and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.


The coalition filed petitions to the EPA in October and December 2007, requesting that it determine whether greenhouse gas emissions from marine vessels and aircraft endanger public health and welfare, and if so, to issue regulations to control greenhouse gas emissions from these sources. The coalition asked for a response within 180 days but none was received during that period.

• Scientists believe global-warming and over-fishing are responsible for booming jellyfish populations and stings. More from Elisabeth Rosenthal of the International Herald Tribune:

The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows.


These problems are pronounced in the Mediterranean, a sea bounded by more than a dozen countries that rely on it for business and pleasure. Left unchecked in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, these problems could make the swarms of jellyfish menacing coastlines a grim vision of seas to come.

"The problem on the beach is a social problem," said Dr. Gili, who talks with admiration of the "beauty" of the globular jellyfish. "We need to take care of it for our tourism industry. But the big problem is not on the beach. It's what's happening in the seas."

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• Stop & Shop and Giant Food supermarkets are suspending the sale of high-pollution risk fish: shark, orange roughy, and Chilean seabass. Via Cat Lincoln of GreenDaily:

In what Greenpeace is calling a major victory for the oceans, Amsterdam based supermarket owner Royal Ahold, which owns U.S. supermarkets Stop & Shop and Giant Food, announced that they are suspending sales of three overfished "red list" species: shark, orange roughy and the oh-so-delicious Chilean seabass.

Last month Greenpeace issued a report on how we're emptying the seas, and included a challenge to the top 20 U.S. supermarkets to change the way they purchase and sell seafood. Royal Ahold was rated number two on that report, in terms of their purchasing practices, although this move will improve their score considerably.

The list was interesting. All of the supermarkets, even #1 Whole Foods, totally fail in terms of sustainable seafood. Surprisingly, Wal-Mart way outscored feel good Trader Joe's. In fact, Costco and Winn-Dixie were also better! But it's splitting hairs because they all sell fish on the red list. Bad!

• Using 9.3% of cropland for perennial grass to make ethanol could offset 20% of gas use. More from Jeremy Elton Jacquot of TreeHugger:

Scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign have just staged the largest known field trial for Miscanthus, a giant perennial grass. Their results indicate that using Miscanthus as an ethanol feedstock could significantly boost biofuel production in the U.S. while greatly reducing the acreage devoted to them.


Offsetting 20% of gas use with 9.3% of agricultural land
According to Stephen Long, a professor of crop sciences at UIUC, it would be possible to produce enough cellulosic ethanol with 9.3% of agricultural land to offset a fifth of our current gasoline consumption. By comparison, it would take 25% of current cropland to produce an equivalent amount of corn-based ethanol. Similar field trials conducted for switchgrass were disappointing: producing roughly the same amount of ethanol per acre as corn -- a result that glaringly contradicts the results I cited above.

A longer growing season and superior photosynthetic efficiency contribute to Miscanthus' high yield
The two principal reasons why Miscanthus yields more ethanol per acre than corn, Long explains, are that it makes green leaves 6 weeks earlier in the growing season and keeps them until late October. Corn leaves typically wither by the end of August. While it shares a similar growing season, switchgrass is much less efficient at photosynthesis; Miscanthus has a conversion efficiency of around 1% (1% of sunlight gets turned into biomass).

• The European Union Commission has employed a new marketing campaign encouraging people to buy more organics. ENN reports:

The main slogan of the program is: "Organic farming: Good for nature, good for you." However, even with that slogan the commission insists it is not claiming any health benefits for organics but rather supporting the growth of the organic sector. It’s an interesting concept that a government agency might try and support two different approaches to providing the same product in one sector — conventional and organic produce. Is there a conflict of interest here when these two products are competing for the same consumer monies?


The commission also has an established program supporting farmers who want to change from conventional to organic farming methods. And with projections such as those from The UK Soil Association - a 10% growth for sales of organic products this year, which it says is four to five times higher than for the general food market in a good year — it would seem to make good business sense for farmers to switch over.

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Last week’s ripe tomatoes were great! But let’s check back with my heavenly tomato. Okay, this was last week:


And here’s today:


With two reddish ones on the vine and a freshly picked one in my kitchen, all I can say is—AWESOME!

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• Apparently the U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t feel it’s important to track the use of pesticides and fertilizers on American farms anymore. ENN reports:

The move has left scientists, industry groups, and public advocates surprised and confused about how to carry on their work without this free information. The canceled program was the only one to make freely available to the public nationwide data on the amount of pesticides and fertilizers applied to U.S. farms. In May, USDA announced that it had published the last of its Agricultural Chemical Usage reports, which are based on detailed surveys of farmers’ chemical use, collected since 1990 by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). In an unusual alliance, industry and environmental groups are lobbying USDA and Congress to restore the program, which costs $8 million out of an annual NASS budget of $160 million.

The program had many users and supporters in academia, industry, environmental and community groups, and government agencies. “The industry and the people who do dietary risk assessments in companies could not be more upset by this,” says Leonard Gianessi, director of the Crop Protection Research Institute at the CropLife Foundation, a nonprofit research center funded largely by CropLife America and other industry groups.

• The United Nations is combating global warming by turning up the thermostat at their New York City headquarters. Josh Loposer of GreenDaily explains:

Starting Friday, the building's AC will be set at 77°F instead of its usual 72°F on workdays and the switched off on the weekends. To mitigate the expected heat -- not that 77°F is exactly sweltering -- members are encouraged to wear their national dress, suit jackets optional.


The pilot program is called Cool U.N. and it probably won't be very popular since the building is notoriously drafty and uncomfortable. Despite the fact that it was designed by a coalition of the world's top architects, the building is apparently an energy sinkhole. That's why the UN's environmental gurus have come up with the initiative -- it's also why the building is set to be renovated next year.

• The Environmental Protection Agency is warning staff not to talk to its own internal watchdog. Via ENN:

Over the past seven years, the Environmental Protection Agency has redefined its mission from fighting pollution to serving as a guardian angel for big business, energy companies and land developers. On every front, from undercutting state efforts to ignoring greenhouse gas emissions to opening public lands for exploitation, the agency charged with protecting the environment has sided against environmental protection.


Not surprisingly, the agency's political appointees would like to keep the many dedicated civil service employees from sharing that bad news with the press, Congress and the agency's internal investigators. An e-mail sent to managers of the EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance by division chief of staff Robbi Farrell admonishes them to forward all inquiries from the EPA inspector general, the congressional Government Accountability Office or journalists to a designated senior staffer. According to the e-mail, "Please do not respond to questions or make any statements."

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• Graham Hilton, chair of the Renewable Transport Fuels Working Group and managing director of The Energy Crops Company, insists that biofuels are NOT linked to food prices. Via the Environmental Data Interactive Exchange:

He said the biofuels industry is working hard to ensure it is responsible and sustainable - claiming other industries are lagging far behind their efforts.

"Government should stop hiding behind tabloids and have the courage to encourage an industry that has done more than anybody to put the safeguards in place and to make a real contribution," Mr Hilton added.

Environmental Data Interactive Exchange wants to know what our readers think about Mr Hilton's argument.

Is the "fuel or food" debate redundant? Is it hijacking the debate about biofuels when there are other more important issues that should be discussed? Or are food prices a central concern when it comes to biofuels?

• Three democratic senators are calling for the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Stephen Johnson, to resign; claiming Johnson sides with polluters instead of fighting ecological problems. Deborah Zabarenko of Reuters reports:

"Mr. Johnson has consistently chosen special interests over the American people's interests in protecting health and safety," Sen. Barbara Boxer of California told reporters. "He has become a secretive and dangerous ally of polluters and we cannot stand by and allow more damage to be done."


Boxer, who heads the environment committee, said Johnson had made damaging decisions on mercury, lead, toxic chemicals, drinking water standards, ozone air pollution and global warming.

She said these decisions were "harmful to the American people."

Boxer noted that last year, Johnson denied California's request for federal permission -- known as a waiver -- to impose tough new limits on climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions from cars and light trucks. That decision effectively blocked as many as 18 other states from doing the same.

• Scientists aren’t ready to say global warming caused it, but seven square miles of the Canadian ice shelf in the Arctic has broken off. More from the Associated Press:

Derek Mueller, a research at Trent University, was careful not to blame global warming, but said it the event was consistent with the theory that the current Arctic climate isn't rebuilding ice sheets.


"We're in a different climate now," he said. "It's not conducive to regrowing them. It's a one-way process."

Mueller said the sheet broke away last week from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf off the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's far north. He said a crack in the shelf was first spotted in 2002 and a survey this spring found a network of fissures.

The sheet is the biggest piece shed by one of Canada's six ice shelves since the Ayles shelf broke loose in 2005 from the coast of Ellesmere, about 500 miles from the North Pole.

Formed by accumulating snow and freezing meltwater, ice shelves are large platforms of thick, ancient sea ice that float on the ocean's surface. Ellesmere Island was once entirely ringed by a single enormous ice shelf that broke up in the early 1900s.

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• The chairman of United Technologies Corp. wants congress to setup a pricing system for carbon-emissions to encourage companies to invest in tackling climate change. Scott Malone of Reuters reports:

"We need to reaffirm the principle of predictability," George David, chairman of United Technologies Corp, told the House of Representatives Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

"We need to say to our world that we are going to have a cost of carbon, whether it's cap-and-trade or a carbon tax," he told a hearing in Hartford, Connecticut, where United Tech, the world's largest maker of elevators and air conditioners, is headquartered. "There's got to be an understanding that the cost of energy is going to be high for a long time."

While oil prices have quadrupled in the last four years, he noted past price spikes have been followed by sharp declines.

David declined to back a particular approach for assigning a cost to emissions of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas associated with global climate change.

• We all like air-conditioning and if you have a window unit, trying shading it. According to the U.S. Department of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy shading an air-conditioning unit can increase its efficiency by 10%. Via John Laumer of TreeHugger:

Solar heat absorbed through windows and roofs can increase your air conditioner use. Incorporating shading concepts into your landscape design can help reduce this solar heat gain, reducing your cooling costs.


Shading and evapotranspiration (the process by which a plant actively moves and releases water vapor) from trees can reduce surrounding air temperatures as much as 9° F (5°C). Because cool air settles near the ground, air temperatures directly under trees can be as much as 25°F (14°C) cooler than air temperatures above nearby blacktop.

Using shade effectively requires you to know the size, shape, and location of the moving shadow that your shading device casts. Also, homes in cool regions may never overheat and may not require shading. Therefore, you need to know what landscape shading strategies will work best in your regional climate and your microclimate.

• Green Living Answers explains how recycling bins help reduce global warming. Here’s a bit:

If you cannot get a recycle bin from the sanitation department, you may be able to purchase one from your local health food store or by visiting a recycling center in your area. Making sure that everyone in your family participates will help to do wonders for conserving natural resources not only in your city, but also around the world.


When trash is picked up from your home or business, it is taken to a landfill, where it is sometimes sorted so that sanitation workers can bring the 'good trash' back to factories. This process is rather tedious and sometimes empty glass bottles or paper plates and cups that should have been recycled go unnoticed. When you use your recycle bin, you are already separating the products that can be used again to make recycled grocery bags, coffee cups and glass products.

Getting your family or co-workers involved in recycling is a great way to reduce global warming as well. When trash is taken from your home and needs to be disposed of, it is often burned in order to be easier to work with. The gases that are given off during this process negatively affect the ozone layer, and make the layer weaker. This means that over time, humans could be even more exposed to the hazardous rays of the sun. This exposure causes more incidences of skin cancer and affects our produce crops, so learning to reuse products can eventually help preserve our world.

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You hear a lot about converting meadow muffins into green energy. Carrie Cockburn of The Globe and Mail illustrates how it’s done. Take a look:


And TreeHugger breaks it down further:

1. BARN: Slurry of manure is washed and scraped from cow stalls into a series of sewage pipes that run under the barn. The manure is mixed with other food wastes.


2. DIGESTER: The slurry is heated to around 37 degrees and kept at that level for the five days needed for the microbes to decompose the cow dung. This process gives off methane gas, which bubbles through the slurry and is collected at the top.

3. DIESEL GENERATOR: The gas runs to the generator, where it is burned to produce electricity to power the digester and the farm, and to feed into the grid.

4. SOLIDS SEPARATOR: Leftover liquids are used as fertilizer and the solids are strained to make a material to be used as bedding for the cows.

No doubt, working at one of these facilities will land you on an episode of Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe.

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• Climate change is will hit many states right in the wallet. More from Jeremy Elton Jacquot of TreeHugger:

Colorado: More than $1 billion in losses due to impacts on tourism, forestry, water resources and human health from a predicted drier, warmer climate.

Georgia: Multi-million dollar losses from predicted higher seas along Georgia's coast.

Kansas: Losses exceeding $1 billion from impact on agriculture of predicted warmer temperatures and reduced water supply in much of the state.

Illinois: Billions of dollars in losses from impact on shipping, trade and water resources. Warmer temperatures and lower water levels predicted for much of the state.

Michigan: Billions of dollars in losses from damage to the state's shipping and water resources. Warmer temperatures and lower water levels predicted for much of the state.

Nevada: Billions of dollars in losses from a much drier climate and pressure on scarce water resources. Water limitations could affect tourism, real estate, development and human health. Many western states may confront similar challenges.

New Jersey: Billions of dollars in losses from higher sea levels and the impact on tourism, transportation, real estate and human health.

Ohio: Billions of dollars in losses from warmer temperatures and lower water levels and the resulting impact on shipping and water supplies.

• Bush administration’s voluntary pollution-reduction program is a flop. Via the Associated Press:

The report does not cover efforts to address the most plentiful greenhouse gas — carbon dioxide — or the biggest sources of it, transportation and electric power plants.


"If EPA wishes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions beyond this point, it needs to consider additional policy options," the report said. Persuading companies to spend money on optional activities "presents a significant challenge to using voluntary programs as the current solution to reducing greenhouse gases."

The Bush administration has been relying largely on the voluntary programs to reduce carbon intensity — the ratio of greenhouse gas emissions to economic output — by 18 percent by 2012. That goal would slow the growth of greenhouse gases, but not actually reduce them.

The White House has rejected using existing law to regulate greenhouse gases from motor vehicles and smokestacks despite a Supreme Court decision last year saying it could do so.

President Bush and other world leaders at last month's G-8 summit in Toyako, Japan, made a commitment to a voluntary 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gases worldwide by 2050 but offered no specifics on how to do it.

• GreenDaily passes along tips to make your refrigerator greener. Patricia Mayville-Cox is on it:

Check your doors for a good seal: Check the seals on your refrigerator and freezer for a good seal by closing a piece of paper in them. If you can pull the paper out, it's time to adjust or install a new seal.


Keep it cool: Allow for 2 inches of airspace around the appliance and nearby walls and cabinets. Keep your refrigerator out of direct sunlight and as far away as you can from the dishwasher, stove and heating vent.

Turn off the icemaker: We know you love the crushed iced function, but you might want to reconsider going back to old-fashioned ice cube trays. An icemaker can increase a refrigerator's energy consumption by 14 to 20 percent. Yikes.

Set the temp right: Keep your refrigerator between 37 and 40 degrees F, and the freezer between 0 and 5 degrees F.

Vacuum the condenser coils: Once a year, pull your refrigerator out from the wall and vacuum the coils behind it.

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Let’s see how my heavenly tomato is doing. Here was last week:


Now check out today:


And feast your eyes on these:

Yeah baby! In a couple days I’ll be the one feasting!

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• Concerned over “an unacceptable safety risk to toddlers” the EPA has banned the pesticide carbofuran on domestic or imported food. Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post reports:

"This is a product that we don't believe meets our high standards for the general population, particularly for small children who are more sensitive," said James Gulliford, EPA associate administrator for the office of prevention, pesticides and toxic substances. "While there is little exposure today [to the pesticide], we don't think there's a need, a reason for any exposure."

A million pounds of carbofuran are applied each year in the United States, affecting less than 1 percent of the nation's farmed acres, according to the EPA, but it is used more heavily in developing countries on crops including rice, bananas, coffee and sugar cane. The EPA had indicated earlier this year that it would not apply the ban to imported food, but yesterday it said it will.

"This could have major ramifications around the world, as there are many countries that export rice, coffee and bananas to the U.S.," said Michael Fry, director of conservation advocacy for the American Bird Conservancy. "It's one of the most widely used pesticides in the world."

• The new trend in our increasingly green world is cracking down on plastic shopping bags. And charging shoppers for them really seems to discourage use. Via TreeHugger:

Charging for plastic bags at the supermarket works--people really do bring their own. Ten weeks ago Marks & Spencer instituted a 5 pence (10 cents) charge on plastic bags at its stores. Since then customers have used 70 million fewer bags. That's an 80% decrease in use. Who would have thought! These are among the first statistics showing the impact of banning bags and they are impressive. At the same time, the company has sold ten million of its own store-brand hessian green bags-for-life; donating the 1.85pence profit made on each one to Groundwork, an environmental charity--$400,000 so far.


The British Government, in its upcoming Climate Change Bill, has given the other big supermarkets until next April to switch over to charging. If they don't do it, the Government will set a mandatory fee for bags. A representative of British supermarkets has called this move "a steamroller to crack a walnut". Environmentalists are concerned that the over-packaging of food is a much more important issue--one the Bill does not address.

• Granite countertops are growing in popularity, but the increased demand means deeper mining for granite—that sometimes digs up uranium! More from Kate Murphy of The New York Times:

“It’s not that all granite is dangerous,” said Stanley Liebert, the quality assurance director at CMT Laboratories in Clifton Park, N.Y., who took radiation measurements at Dr. Sugarman’s house. “But I’ve seen a few that might heat up your Cheerios a little.”


Allegations that granite countertops may emit dangerous levels of radon and radiation have been raised periodically over the past decade, mostly by makers and distributors of competing countertop materials. The Marble Institute of America has said such claims are “ludicrous” because although granite is known to contain uranium and other radioactive materials like thorium and potassium, the amounts in countertops are not enough to pose a health threat.

Indeed, health physicists and radiation experts agree that most granite countertops emit radiation and radon at extremely low levels. They say these emissions are insignificant compared with so-called background radiation that is constantly raining down from outer space or seeping up from the earth’s crust, not to mention emanating from manmade sources like X-rays, luminous watches and smoke detectors.

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• According to scientists vast solar panel farms in the Sahara desert could provide plenty of energy for all of Europe. Via The Guardian News:

Harnessing the power of the desert sun is at the centre of an ambitious scheme to build a €45bn (£35.7bn) European supergrid that would allow countries across the continent to share electricity from abundant green sources such as wind energy in the UK and Denmark, and geothermal energy from Iceland and Italy.

The idea is gaining political support in Europe, with Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, recently backing the north African solar plan.

Because the sunlight is more intense, solar photovoltaic panels in north Africa could generate up to three times the electricity compared with similar panels in northern Europe.

• Good thing I’m not a gadget guy because plasma televisions require more electricity than plug-in hybrid cars. More from TreeHugger:

Plasma TVs, industry officials say, consume about four times the electricity as recharging a plug-in hybrid. Yet utilities have managed to cope with the increased loads as thousands of new televisions came on line…


…Some other factors that help cars are that, unlike TV, they aren't usually plugged in during peak hours. In fact, a big part of what defines peak hours is that everybody is watching TV.

You could also make vehicle chargers 'smart' in a way that you can't with TVs. If you want to watch a show now, you want it now. But a 'smart' charger could look at grid load and decide to start charging the car a hour later (when rates are lower, for example). As long as you program the charger to let it know when you need to have you car charged, there won't be any problems.

• Rock Port, Missouri is planning to go totally wind-powered. They’re building four wind turbines to power their whole town. ENN reports:

Though the state may not be great for growing wheat or strawberries, Crawford said, "We're farming the wind, which is something that we have up here. The payback on a per-acre basis is generally quite good when compared to a lot of other crops, and it's as simple as getting a cup of coffee and watching the blades spin." Sounds a lot better than spending your days hunched over to pick berries from the ground.


Besides providing an environmentally-friendly source of power, the turbines provide an added bonus to Rock Port: cold, hard, cash. The wind farms are likely to bring in more than $1.1 million in county real estate taxes each year, and locals won't see an increase on their electricity bills for at least 15 to 20 years. We've got a feeling no one will be moving out of town any time soon - at least, not until the wind dies down.

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• Wetlands contain one-fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases. Destroying them could unleash a planet-warming “carbon bomb.” Deborah Zabarenko of Reuters reports:

Together they account for 6 percent of Earth's land surface and store 20 percent of its carbon. They also produce 25 percent of the world's food, purify water, recharge aquifers and act as buffers against violent coastal storms.

Historically, wetlands have been regarded as an impediment to civilization. About 60 percent of wetlands worldwide have been destroyed in the past century, mostly due to draining for agriculture. Pollution, dams, canals, groundwater pumping, urban development and peat extraction add to the destruction.

"Too often in the past, people have unwittingly considered wetlands to be problems in need of a solution, yet wetlands are essential to the planet's health," said Konrad Osterwalder, UN Under Secretary-General and rector of United Nations University, one of the hosts of the meeting.

So far, the impacts of climate change are minor compared to human depredations, the scientists said in a statement. As is the case with other environmental problems, it is far easier and cheaper to maintain wetlands than try to rebuild them later.

• Despite our affinity for giant SUV’s, the United States has surpassed Germany as the biggest producer of wind energy. TreeHugger is on it:

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) announced today that the USA has overcome Germany as the biggest generator of wind energy electricity in the first half of 2008. This milestone, which was not expected until the end of 2009, comes as a result of the higher average wind speeds in the USA, since Germany is still the leader in installed capacity.


More complete survey results will be published in the next weeks. TreeHugger will follow up with an interview with a knowledgable AWEA representative who can inform us further on:

• What this milestone means for the US and its energy crisis.
• ``The Pickens Plan''--is this a viable plan and why?
• The numbers/stats behind wind energy in the US and its phenomenal growth over the last year.
• Why transmission is critical for wind energy.
• The Department of Energy's 20% report, and its implications.

• To help cut pollution for the Olympics, Chinese officials have implemented an odd traffic-reduction plan. Jake Hooker of The International Herald Tribune explains:

Mo, a member of China's volunteer militia, said his morning bus ride to work was ten minutes shorter than usual after — new traffic rules took effect Sunday to rid the city of its pollution.


"It's taken some pressure off the roads," Mo said. Chinese authorities have said the traffic measures, which allow cars with even and odd license plates to drive on alternate days, will cut automobile emissions by more than 60 percent and take half of the city's 3.2 million cars off the road.

Odd-even restrictions on private vehicles will be in place for the next two months during the Olympic Games and the Paralympics. Trucks producing high emissions have been blocked from entering Beijing since July 1.

On Sunday and Monday, the traffic appeared to have improved. Beijing drivers found a way to get to work. Drivers with license plates ending in even numbers placed notices on Web sites looking for cars with odd numbers, to set up car pools. Local newspapers reported a surge in bicycle sales and many people rode a new subway line that opened over the weekend.

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• After a coal-burning plant in Tongliang, China was shut down, developmental problems in children are down 60%. Via The Green Blog:

In addition, the children born after the plant was closed had 40% lower levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in their cord blood. All of the women in the study were nonsmokers. Peter D. Sly, head of the WHO’s Collaborating Center for Research on Children’s Environmental Health, was cautious about the results of that study however. Sly said that the results do not have implications for the more contemporary, coal-fired ability plants in China. Apparently, the Tongliang coal plant did not have pollution control equipment to limit the emission of pollutants like carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter.

• Ken Dilanian of USA Today investigates the increasingly “green” positions of both presidential candidates. Here’s an excerpt:

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee [Barack Obama] now calls climate change "one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation," and proposes cutting carbon emissions 80% by 2050. But as a state senator, from 1997 to 2004, he usually supported bills sought by coal interests, according to legislative records and interviews.

Obama is not the only politician whose public stance has shifted on global warming, which a scientific consensus says has been caused chiefly by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, who now backs limits on carbon emissions, was among 95 U.S. senators who voted in 1997 to oppose the Kyoto Protocol, an emissions reduction scheme that had been negotiated by then-vice president Al Gore.

• Australia might be experiencing a drought, but organic farming continues to boom. More from Green Living Tips:

According to a report commissioned by the Biological Farmers of Australia, sales at the farm gate last year were estimated to be in excess of $231,000,000 – an 80% increase over 2004.


The report also found an increase in the number of organic produce farmers, with around 5.2% growth per year. We now have 2750 certified organic operators. It seems the young 'uns are the trailblazers in this area, with the average age of an organic producer in Australia is lower than a non-organic producer.

Organic food is certainly catching on in supermarkets too, with over 500 different organic lines in fresh and grocery categories in major retailers.

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• Lead found in hunting ammunition and fishing tackle may be harming the environment. Via Green Living Review:

Large quantities of lead ammunition and fishing tackle are produced annually -- the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that roughly 72,600 metric tons of lead shot and bullets are deposited in the U.S. environment each year at outdoor shooting ranges alone. And while estimates of lost fishing tackle are much less, lead tackle also poses a potential toxicological threat. Lead (Pb) is a nonessential heavy metal with no known functional or beneficial role in biological systems. Although lead is relatively stable, under some environmental conditions (e.g., soft acidic water, acidic soil), lead objects can weather and the element can mobilize, spreading the toxic properties. However, the TWS/AFS technical review concludes that the greatest hazard arises from direct ingestion of lead ammunition and fishing tackle by wildlife, particularly birds.

Topics covered include the chemical properties of lead, sources and estimated quantities of lead originating from hunting, shooting and fishing, as well as the pathways of exposure and the effects of lead on plants, animals, and humans. Current regulations on lead ammunition and fishing tackle, along with alternative materials, are also evaluated.

• Five environmentalist groups are suing the Environmental Protection Agency for cleaner water regulations. ENN reports:

The plaintiffs hope a favorable ruling would force the EPA to implement standards for every state, most of which have only vague limits on such pollution, said Earthjustice attorney David Guest.


The groups say rain sends the runoff, which includes fertilizers and animal waste, into rivers and lakes, contaminating waterways and nourishing algae blooms that poison the ecosystems.

"This is endemic throughout the United States," Guest said. "When you fertilize the water, it makes it so that only one instrument in the ecological orchestra can play. Where you used to have this vast ecological orchestra, now it's only the algae playing."

• California has instituted a statewide “green” building code. The hope is to improve water and energy efficiency. From the Inquirer.net:

In what was described as the United States' first statewide "green" building rules, the California Building Standards Commission said the code would help reduce the carbon footprint of every new structure in the state.


According to a statement from the California State and Consumer Services Agency (SCSA), the code goes beyond existing standards, targeting a 50 percent landscape water conservation reduction.

The code also calls on builders to reduce energy use of new structures by 15 percent more than existing standards.

Other measures include encouraging greater use of recycled materials in carpet and construction materials, the SCSA.

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Let's see how my heavenly tomato is doing. Here's last week:

Now check it out today:

I'm convinced, this thing is a mutant.

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• Toxic African dust—containing metals, pesticides, and microorganisms—may threaten U.S. and Caribbean coral reefs. Brian Handwerk of National Geographic News reports:

Air-quality data from a network of sampling sites have revealed intriguing results, Garrison said recently at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

For instance, Caribbean air samples during African dust events may hold two to three times as many microorganisms, such as bacteria and fungi, as samples taken from the same spot during other periods.

In Florida the Africa-influenced air conditions sometimes deteriorate below U.S. air-quality standards.

Air-quality testing in Mali, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Trinidad and Tobago has also revealed traces of pesticides, including DDE—a breakdown product of DDT, which is still used as an insecticide in some African countries.

• The higher temperatures associated with global warming may increase kidney-stone risk in the United States. Will Dunham of Reuters is on it:

"There's every reason to anticipate that it would be happening worldwide," urologist Dr. Margaret Pearle of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.


Not drinking enough water and other fluids or losing too much fluids through dehydration -- more likely in hotter climates -- can leave one's urine with higher concentrations of substances that can form kidney stones.

This is just the latest negative health consequence to be predicted due to climate change. Others include an increase in the many diseases spread by mosquitoes and other insects.

In the United States, about 12 percent of men and 7 percent of women experience kidney stone disease at some time.

The fraction of the U.S. population living in high-risk zones for kidney stones could grow from 40 percent in 2000 to 56 percent by 2050 and to 70 percent by 2095 if temperatures rise as predicted, the researchers said.

• To save water a California couple stopped watering their lawn. So the grass turned brown, neighbors complained, and now the couple faces a $746 fine. More from Matt Weiser of The Sacramento Bee:

Before Hartridge could plan new landscaping, a neighbor complained to the city about her brown lawn, and the Code Enforcement Department slapped the family with a citation.


Their small brick home was declared a "public nuisance" in violation of city code section 17.68.010, which states that front yards "shall be irrigated, landscaped and maintained."

A $746 fine will be next unless they correct the violation.

"In order to make the lawn go, I would have had to keep watering it intensely, and since the drought was declared, I decided that wasn't a good idea," said Hartridge. "Honestly, I think there's a disconnect within the city about priorities."

Two weeks ago, The Bee reported that Sacramento's per capita water use is among the greatest in the world. Later that week, the same day Hartridge got the citation, an audit revealed that the city has lost or misplaced nearly 5,000 water meters, out of more than 100,000 it must install citywide to comply with state law.

"On one hand they're mislaying their water meters, and on the other hand they going out and putting enforcement on people who don't have green lawns," Hartridge said. "And there's water running down the gutters of my neighborhood every day."

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• Friday the U.S. appeals court rejected new air-pollution regulations—shocking environmental groups. Jeff Tollefson of ENN reports:

The ruling, which one environmentalist called "the legal equivalent of a dirty bomb," threatened to overshadow a separate decision Friday by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to delay potential regulations for carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act.

Though many had expected the carbon dioxide non-decision, environmentalists were blindsided by the court's decision to throw out the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR), a programme designed to reduce East Coast air pollution by cleaning up coal-fired power plants in the Midwest.

"It is without a doubt the worst news of the year when it comes to air pollution," says Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, an environmental group based in Washington DC.

• A small town in Japan plans to recycle and compost EVERYTHING. Sea Stachura of GreenDaily has more:

The decision by Kamikatsu's mayor is partly economic. It costs the city less money to recycle and compost thoroughly than it does to incinerate the waste for energy.


But full responsibility for garbage falls on residents shoulders. The styrofoam trays used to hold meat have to be washed before being recycled; labels must be removed. Residents sort polyethylene teraphthalate bottles from other types of plastic containers because PET are more valuable. Pens and razors have boxes of their own.

Residents say composting and sorting does take more time, but they are more aware of what they throw out, what they use and how. The mayor of Kamikatsu says every community should follow his lead.

I’m not sure how to react to this, but apparently high gas prices curb the number of automobile deaths. Via Lloyd Alter of TreeHugger:

A new study indicates that high gas prices could reduce auto deaths by nearly a third, and even more among price-sensitive teenage drivers.


According to LiveScience, "Professors Michael Morrisey of the University of Alabama-Birmingham and David Grabowski of Harvard Medical School found that for every 10 percent increase in gas prices there was a 2.3 percent decline in auto deaths. For drivers ages 15 to 17, the decline was 6 percent, and for ages 18 to 21, it was 3.2 percent....

"I think there is some silver lining here in higher gas taxes in that we will see a public health gain," Grabowski said. But he cautioned that their estimate of a decline of 1,000 deaths a month could be offset somewhat by the shift under way to smaller, lighter, more fuel-efficient cars and the increase in motorcycle and scooter driving."

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• Houston’s mayor claims that the EPA is underreporting pollution caused by refineries and chemical plants. Matthew Tresaugue of The Houston Chronicle reports:

"Up until now, the EPA has relied on rough estimates, and the companies themselves have done the estimates," Mayor Bill White said. "It's a simple request, but it's a very bold request. It's a request that will allow the people of Houston to know what's in their air."

The mayor said federal, state and local governments must have reliable data to make decisions regarding public health. The push comes as state regulators work on a new pollution-fighting plan for the eight-county Houston region, one of the nation's smoggiest.

It's also White's latest attempt to confront regulators in his fight over toxic chemical emissions. In May, the city challenged the permits from a nearby plant to force the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to limit the levels of the carcinogen benzene in the air.

"You can't overstate how important this is," Matthew Tejada, executive director of the Galveston-Houston Association for Smog Prevention, said of the mayor's request to the EPA. "It's going to change your calculations of everything. It will open a can of worms, but it needs to be opened."

• The German Cancer Research Center has determined that male vegetarians are 50% less likely to die of premature death and female vegetarians 30%. Via TreeHugger:

The participants of the the German Cancer Research Center study included 60 vegans (no animal products consumed), 1165 vegetarians (eating eggs, milk but no meat) with the remainder described as "moderate" vegetarians who occasionally ate fish or meat. The health of these study participants was compared with the average German population. Living longer seems not to be exclusively related to eating meat, though, as the results for moderate vegetarians was not statistically different from those for vegan or strict vegetarian diets.


To the argument that it is not vegetarianism but a general interest in a healthier lifestyle which leads to such notable results, scientists reply with evidence that the majority of vegetarians do not cite health reasons for their lifestyle, but make their choice based on ethical commitment, environmental concerns or simply personal taste…

… Research by a team led by Professor Ibrahim Elmadfa at the University of Vienna found a much better than average intake of Vitamin C, Carotinoides, Folic acid, fiber and unsaturated fats. Where shortcomings may arise is for Vitamin B12, calcium und Vitamin D in a vegan diet. Astoundingly, however, study participants did not suffer from diseases, such as osteoporosis, typically related to inadequate intakes of these micro-nutrients.

• Greenopolis provides a list of earth-damaging products we should never buy. Here are three of them:

Paper Towels - A waste all over the map. It's money that you don't have to spend, and trees that don't have to be cut down. Buy reusable and washable hand and dish towels instead.


Bleached Coffee Filters - Dioxins, chemicals formed during the chlorine bleaching process, contaminate groundwater and air and are linked to cancer in humans and animals. Look for unbleached paper filters or use reusable filters such as washable cloth filters.

Cling/Saran/ Plastic Wrap - Many people don't realize that cling wrap may be made with PVC. #3 PVC (polyvinyl chloride) leaches toxins when heated or microwaved and it is an environmental problem throughout its lifecycle. Instead store things in reusable containers.

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Time to check in with my heavenly tomato! This was last week:


Now here it is today:


Behold, the power of tomatoes!

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• Bruce Watson of Green Daily ponders the question, is organic food really green? Take a look:

Ironically, organic food may not necessarily all that good for the environment. Wired magazine, in fact, argued exactly this point a little while back, when they noted that people who are concerned about the environment should consider cutting out organic foods and sticking to produce and meats that don't have to travel a great distance from the farm to the market. Organic animal products require more animals taking up more space and producing more methane than their non-organic counterparts. Similarly, organic plants take more space and more resources than their non-organic counterparts. Even worse, they then require refrigerated trucks to transport their products to market, further deepening a rather large carbon footprint.

There are many reasons to go organic; personally, I won't eat non-organic strawberries or celery. That having been said, the next time you find yourself getting the stinky eyeball from some would-be eco-warrior because your oranges aren't organic, you might want to smile smugly to yourself. After all, you're taking one for the team.

• Some neighborhoods in Detroit are turning vacant lots into thriving gardens. Matthew Wells of BBC News reports:

"There is something that every hand in this area can do," said Rose Stallard, who is keen to enlist as many volunteers as possible to help tend the garden and its precious crops.


As she organizes a band of eager helpers to pull greens from the rich top-soil, Ms Stallard says food is more expensive than ever and neighbourhood shops are scarce.

"That's one cucumber you didn't have to pay 69 cents for," she adds, with a smile.

There are no fences but one local said greed had not been a problem.

"People are only taking what they need, because they know it's for everybody," he said.

• Tom Weber of The Wall Street Journal lists 50 things being blamed on high oil prices. These made me worry:

3. Some schools are considering route changes that would create longer walks to the bus stop, raising safety concerns.
12. Gas theft is on the rise in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
14. The price of road salt for next winter’s storms is rising.
17. School lunch prices are going up.
24. Dallas-area residents are paying more to get rid of their garbage.
31. U.S. federal researchers cut back on ocean-going trips to study climate change.
35. Some police departments put officers on foot.
38. Yes, we have no cheap bananas today.
49. Meals on Wheels programs are losing volunteers.

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• Current Configuration insists that the way you unroll your toilet paper influences how much or how little you use. Take a look:

Notice the dramatic difference in the amount of visible toilet paper. Ironically, it is the over-hung toilet paper that has both the most visible free sheetage and the least amount of sheetage free from the roll to do it. Now, this may not seem like a big deal on its own, but in these extra sheets lies your undoing.

• Scientists are collecting cow burps to better understand how cattle-methane impacts climate change. Via the Environmental News Network:

Scientists around the world are studying the amount of methane in cow burps and Argentine researchers say they have come up with a unique way.

Attaching a red plastic tank to a cow's back and connecting it through a tube to the animal's stomach, scientists say they can trap bovine burps and analyze them.

"When we got the first results, we were surprised. Thirty percent of Argentina's (total greenhouse) emissions could be generated by cows," said Guillermo Berra, a researcher at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology.

• The Mad Architect is blogging about floating eco-sustainable lily pad cites. It’s pretty wild, take a look:

The Lilypad is an amphibian (half aquatic and half terrestrial) city which will house about 50,000 inhabitants and will enable life in the heart of the subaquatic depths. This ecopolis will be “covered by a stratum of planted housing in suspended gardens and crossed by a network of streets and alleyways with organic outline” that will “create a harmonious coexistence of the couple Human / Nature”.

• Grist shares some tips to help you make your workplace a little greener. I thought these two were cool:

Be a switch hitter. Your parents may have been saying it for decades, but just in case they haven't, we will: Turn off the lights. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, commercial buildings account for 18 percent of the nation's greenhouse-gas emissions. A good portion of the problem is caused by leaving lights on in vacant rooms -- that's a habit shared by about 50 percent of us, surveys show. Switch off the lights whenever you leave your workspace empty for more than 15 minutes, and especially when you leave for the day. And while you're flipping switches.


Turn that computer off. Contrary to old wives' tales, shutting down your computer each day will not cause any damage. One caveat: Your IT department might want computers left on for nightly geek procedures. You could try to convince them to do their backups during the day instead. Either way, set your machine to go into sleep mode after 15 minutes of inactivity. Every PC left on 24-7 over the course of a year results in more than 1,000 extra pounds of greenhouse gases. Since there will soon be 1 billion PCs in the world, the widespread use of sleep mode could prevent the annual release of hundreds of millions of tons of global warming gases, saving billions of dollars in the process.

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• New York City is committing $2.3 billion dollars to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from municipal buildings and operations. Via TreeHugger:

These reductions will be accomplished through improvements to the heating, cooling and ventilation systems of municipal buildings. Repairs to firehouses, police precincts, city offices and courthouses, along with purchases of more fuel efficient vehicles will also help reduce emissions

Regarding the price tag for these efforts, the mayor said that the city should break even on its conservation investments by 2013. He added, “The city is doing its part. I hope the private sector follows our example finds conservation savings on their own.”

Perhaps if the city that never sleeps could shut out the lights every once in a while it would be a good place for the private sector to start.

• Dell has teamed with the Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired-Goodwill of Greater Rochester, New York to help recycle old computers. From the Environment News Network:

Goodwill stores in the area now accept everything from whole desktop computers to cables. The program is fulfilling a need in the community, according to A. Gidget Hopf, president and chief executive officer of ABVI-Goodwill.


The program is expected to take in 300,000 pounds of computer equipment in the first year. So far, two people have been hired to sort the collected materials. One is Jim Austin, 39, who is blind. He said he feels “very honored” to be asked to do the job and learn a new skill.

• CNN shares an obvious tip for saving energy—use less! Take a look:

Want to help the country save a quick million barrels of oil a day? Drive 5% less. Slow down. Inflate your tires.


Those three steps would reduce U.S. oil consumption by 1.3 million barrels a day immediately, according to the Alliance to Save Energy, a conservation group running an efficiency campaign backed not only by environmental groups but also the auto and oil industries.

That's nearly twice the estimated daily oil production that could come from drilling in the Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, according to the government's Energy Information Administration.

According to Julius Pretterebner, a vehicles and alternative-fuels expert at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consultancy that does a lot of work for the oil companies, how fast people drive and how quickly they accelerate is responsible for 10% to 30% of fuel consumption.

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• We hear a lot about global climate change overtime, but what about new, longer and hotter, heat waves? Patricia Mayville-Cox of Green Daily explains:

Remember that horrible heat wave in Europe in 2003 that killed thousands of people? Well, according to a new study by Andreas Sterl at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, and as reported by the AP, in a few decades, "People will look back at those heat waves and laugh, we will find (those temperatures) lovely and cool."

According to Sterl's models, by the end of the century, high temperatures for once-in-a generation heat waves will rise twice as fast as average temperatures. Chicago extremes will go to 115, Paris to 109, Los Angeles to 117 and Atlanta to 100 degrees.

• Ever wonder what happens to old rusted out cruise liners and big fishing boats—they go to India. Jacob Baynham of The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

On its final voyage, the 25-year-old, 370-foot Russian trawler Komandarm Shcherbakov collected 3,000 tons of blue whiting fish from Denmark's Faroe Islands and ferried the catch to Nigeria. Three months later, the rust-riddled vessel sailed into this port - to die.


In May, the vessel gunned its engines for the last time and slid up the beach alongside the skeletal remains of numerous other ships at India's biggest ship-recycling yard in the western coastal state of Gujarat.

Like many vessels of its era, the Shcherbakov has asbestos insulation in its engine rooms and elsewhere, according to the ship's chief mate, Andrey Potapov.

"They didn't know it was bad back then," he said.

The Komandarm Shcherbakov is just the latest character in an ongoing drama of foreign waste dumped on Third World shores, critics say. Environmental groups say there are 90 ships on Alang's beaches, none of which has been precleaned of asbestos, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) or other hazardous material. PCBs were once used as fire retardants in paints, gaskets, cables and flooring.

• Not only is Sheryl Crow an amazing singer—and hot—but she recently started her own line of green clothing. Via Ecorazzi:

Sheryl seems to always be thinking about the environment, so it’s not surprising that the talented planet-saver’s fashion line will rock an eco-twist. Never one to waste, Crow is even known around her hometown to donate bags and bags of unworn clothing to her local secondhand shop every six months.


No word yet on when the line will be produced, but a friend told Star magazine. “She’s heading to Australia in October to meet with her partners and start production.” We DO know that it will be a denim-based collection and will be named Bootheel Trading Co. By Sheryl Crow. I don’t know about you, but I could totally use some eco-friendly jeans!

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The Los Angeles city council wants to impose a 25 cent fee on each plastic shopping bag. The Associated Press is on it:

If the full council approves the proposal, city employees would have to use reusable cups and plates whenever possible, Kandarpa said.

The city spends $20,000 per year on polystyrene products, said Neil Guglielmo, a recycling manager at the city Bureau of Sanitation. He told the committee plastic bags and foam food containers are not biodegradable, clogs storm drains and add waste to landfills.

Michael Westerfield, a spokesman for packaging company Dart Container, opposed the plan by arguing that by banning one product, "you're just going to replace the problem with another product."

And check out this article on plastic bags too: China's Plastic Bag Ban Will Save 37 Million Barrels of Oil.

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Heavenly tomato time! Here was my tomato last week:


And check it out today:



I'm growing a monster!

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The Nursing Degree Network shares a whole bunch of ways we can all live better. Here are some I really liked. Have a look:

3. Not getting enough sleep: Even though you’re not putting anything harmful in your body, not getting enough sleep can be harmful to you.
8. Being negative: Get rid of negative thoughts and feelings, and you’ll find that a life filled with feelings of gratitude, optimism and perspective will make you more successful and happy.
22. Introduce natural light: Introduce natural light into your home or office to improve your energy level.
24. Eat organic: Organic foods actually promote good feng shui and good energy, so make sure your kitchen is stocked with organic vegetables and grains.
39. Meditation: Relax your mind and de-stress with these meditation tips.
45. Go to the bathroom: It’s important to have regular bowel movements, and holding it in too long can cause an infection. Go when you need to go!
50. Add garlic to your diet: Garlic "activates liver enzymes" which clean out your system and help you detox.
62. Spend time outside: Taking a walk outside or reading a book in your yard will quickly make you feel more connected to your community and nature.
67. Clean out your inbox: Organizing your inbox by deleting old messages and moving important e-mails to separate folders will help you focus and de-clutter your mind.
72. Open the windows: Let in some of the natural elements by opening a window…even if it’s raining outside. Breathing in fresh air will calm you down naturally.
83. Pick something you enjoy: If you hate yoga, don’t do sign up for a class just because you think it’s the right thing to do. You can detoxify with any kind of exercise, including organized sports or running.
89. Exercise at work: Desktop yoga and other simple exercises can be done at work, helping workaholics detox anytime.
101. Eat broccoli sprouts: Broccoli sprouts have more "cancer-fighting, enzyme-stimulating" nutrients than regular broccoli.

The one about the going poop made me laugh. If you need to remember to go to the bathroom—you've got major problems! Be sure to read them all.

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• Some people are suggesting using greenhouse gases to help grow organic food—sounds intriguing. More from TreeHugger:

New data from U.S. government research shows that with agriculture using chemical fertilizers and herbicides, the U.S. food system contributes nearly 20 percent of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions. On a global scale, figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say that agricultural land use contributes 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Organically managed soils can convert carbon from a greenhouse gas into a food-producing asset. Results from a 10-year study at the Rodale Institute (pdf file) showed organic systems have the ability to capture up to 2,000 pounds of carbon per acre per year meaning more than 7,000 pounds of carbon dioxide are taken from the air and trapped in that field soil.

• Mickey Mouse, green? Looks like it. Disney is stepping up its green initiatives. The Better Planet blog is on it:

The theme of my speech is putting images with actions, connecting the light switch, if you will, to the polar bears. And Disney is quite a place to speak about images. It’s all about images here: the cast (which is how Disney refers to its employees) are well-trained on all aspects of the resort. The one character they all seem to know is Jiminy Cricket. He’s the character Disney uses to speak about green initiatives throughout the Disney family, and I must say all the family members seem to be interested in what he has to say, whether it’s the volatile organic compounds found in paint (Disney avoids VOCs in paint for this reason), to the sustainability of vegetation in the Animal Kingdom, or to the new type of fireworks the company is looking into to replace its iconic show each evening over the Magic Castle. There is a general sense of wanting to do more good.


Still, the biggest talk is about the baby elephant about to be born. After almost two years, his mother (it’s a boy) is ready–any minute now–to give birth.

• Wal-Mart is planning to sell more fruits and vegetables grown from by local farmers. Via the Environmental News Network:

The world's largest retailer said on Tuesday it had increased the number of local U.S. farmers that it works with by 50 percent in the past two years, and it would like to continue expanding that figure at a double-digit rate.


While Wal-Mart declined to provide an exact figure, it said it now works with "hundreds" of individual farmers, and this year it expects to source about $400 million in locally grown fruits and vegetables from farmers across the United States.

"When we're buying local, there are less trucks on the road, less miles that that produce is traveling and therefore less fuel," said Pam Kohn, Wal-Mart's general merchandise manager for grocery.

• Prince Charles powers his fancy car on white wine—apparently the DUI laws are more relaxed in Britain! Ecorazzi reports:

The vintage vehicle has been hacked to run on 100 per cent bioethanol fuel distilled from surplus British wine. The only problem is, it still only gets about ten miles per gallon, or roughly 4.5 bottles of wine per mile. But while it’s only slightly cheaper than pertrol, it outputs 85% less carbon dioxide — something the Prince is attempting to cut from his personal life by 25% by 2018. From the article,

“The grapes used for Charles’s fuel have already been fermented into wine on an English vineyard near Swindon, Wiltshire. Its owners bottle all they can, but cannot produce more than their EU quota. Rather than destroy the excess, the vineyard now sells it to the Gloucestershire biofuels supplier Green Fuels, where it is distilled."

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• Lackadaisical energy habits cost Australian households $300 million a year. Via TreeHugger:

Stats
Most operated their air conditioners on a too warm setting in winter. Almost 25% of all people surveyed left their fridge open when unloading shopping. Nearly half hadn’t bothered to activate their home computer’s energy saver settings and close to three quarters of households turn off their television with the remote rather that at the power switch, leaving it on standby mode to guzzle electricity.

Demographics
The survey found that while almost 70% of people used a clothes line to dry clothes it was low income households that more often or not chose to use an electric close dryer. This was also the case with age. Older folk were more diligent in hanging up clothes for solar dry whereas young people surveyed chose the dryer. Yoof were found to leave the fridge open whilst making sandwiches or prepping their breakfast.

Energy Saving Tips
In their media release (link below) EnergyAustralia suggest that 10 easy steps could have households saving over $600 AUD per year. For example, point 6. suggests that reducing showers by 2 minutes will save $100 alone. Getting rid of that second fridge that’s doing nothing much at all in the garage would save another 200 bucks.

• Weeds, not weed, could be the answer in solving global climate change. From The New York Times:

Coexistence with mankind has given rise to the sort of tough plants that flourish despite the worst we can do — hoeing, pulling, burning and, more recently, spraying the fields with herbicidal chemicals. Weeds have adapted to every means we used to exterminate them, even turning the treatments to their own advantage. Attacking a Canada thistle (actually of Eurasian origin and a regular entry in “worst weeds of North America” lists) with hoe or plow, for example, may destroy the plant’s aboveground growth but leaves the soil full of severed bits of fleshy root, each of which may sprout a new plant.


A result of this history is that crops and weeds embody diametrically opposed genetic strategies. Over the centuries, we have deliberately bred the genetic diversity out of our crop plants. Creating crop populations composed of clones or near clones was an essential step in achieving higher yields and the sort of uniform growth that makes large-scale, mechanized cultivation and harvesting possible. Because weed populations live as opportunists, however, they must include individuals with the ability to flourish in whatever type of habitat we make available. They also need diversity to cope with the wide range of punishments we inflict. A patch of Canada thistles, if it is to survive when the farmer switches from hoeing to herbicides, must include individuals that develop a resistance to the chemicals over time. Weed populations that lacked the necessary genetic diversity faded from our fields, lawns and waste places; historians of agriculture can cite many such casualties.

The survivors are an astonishingly plastic group of plants. James Bunce, a plant physiologist with an office down the hall from Ziska’s, has been studying the effect on dandelions (that nemesis of the suburban greenskeeper) of atmospheres artificially enriched with CO2. He found in a series of trials that populations of the familiar weed evolve, changing physically to take advantage of this sort of resource enhancement, within the space of one growing season.

• Plankton appears to be a nice ally in the fight against greenhouse gases. More from DiscoBlog:

Call it a happy accident: Phytoplankton in tropical areas of the Atlantic Ocean may be helping to break down greenhouse gases.


After analyzing data gathered by airplane and in a lab at Cape Verde, a chain of Atlantic islands not far from West Africa, a team of British researchers was pleased but puzzled to find that ozone in the atmosphere near the islands had decreased 50 percent more than climate modelers had predicted. The reason, they think, is that phytoplankton produce chemicals like bromine monoxide and iodine monoxide that get pulled up into the atmosphere by all the water vapor that evaporates in a hot climate like Cape Verde. Once aloft in the low atmosphere, these chemicals can break apart ozone molecules. Not only that, says Alastair Lewis, of the U.K.’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science, but the byproducts of that first chemical reaction then broke down methane, a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, into non-harmful components.

Ozone is three atoms molecules of oxygen, O3, but some chemicals can break up that trio and steal one oxygen atom, leaving O2, which is just plain old atmospheric oxygen. That’s how CFCs harm the ozone layer, and why the Montreal Protocol of 1987 phased them out. The plankton-produced chemical in this study might be destroying ozone in the same way, Lewis says, but helping us instead of hurting. While ozone high up in the ozone layer protects us from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, ozone in the lower atmosphere is a greenhouse gas contributing to global warming.

• China’s ban on plastic shopping bags is working out great. The Environmental News Network reports:

The ban prohibits shops, supermarkets, and sales outlets from handing out free plastic bags and bans the production, sale, and use of ultra-thin plastic bags under 0.025 millimeters thick. It took effect nationwide on June 1.


Plastic bags, a seemingly minor commodity, have mobilized four powerful government departments in China. The State Council, China's cabinet, issued the bag ban earlier this year, and in May, shortly before its implementation, three other departments stepped in and imposed an auxiliary ruling to enforce the directive. The Ministry of Commerce, National Development and Reform Commission, and State Administration for Industry and Commerce set forth detailed stipulations on implementation and enforcement in the ruling, known as Administrative Measures for the Paid Use of Plastic Bags at Commodity Retailing Places.

China's central government dealt this heavy blow to plastic bags out of concern for the environment and a desire for greater energy savings. People in China use up to 3 billion plastic bags daily and dispose of more than 3 million tons of them annually. Most of the carriers end up in unofficial dumping sites, landfills, or the environment. Urban dumping centers and open fields alongside railways and expressways are littered with the discarded bags, mostly whitish ultra-thin varieties. Such scenes have generated a special term in China: "the white pollution."

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Time to check in with my heavenly tomato. Here it was last week:


And remember these little guys:


Now check out this week:
And these too:

The tomato gods are happy!

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NASA claims that plants like asparagus and strawberries might be able to grow in Mars’ soil. Richard A. Lovett of National Geographic News reports:

Previous data from the two rovers exploring Mars's equatorial zones had suggested that the geochemistry on the red planet might have been too acidic to support most forms of Earth-type life.

But as little as an inch (2.5 centimeters) beneath the surface, dirt from Mars's arctic plains proved to be very similar to alkaline soils on Earth, with a pH between 8 and 9. The pH scale goes from 0 (acidic) to 14 (alkaline).

The finding is good news in the hunt for signs that Mars was or could now be habitable.

"This means there is a broader range of organisms that can grow [in it]," said Kounaves, who works with the lander's Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA).

"But Mars is a huge place, whose soils might differ radically from spot to spot," Kounaves said. "We have to remember that we're looking at tiny areas."

Well, until we can grow cheap produce on mars. Consumer advocates want government to allow the sale of “ugly produce.” Check out: Ugly Veggies to Ease Crisis

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• California is working on a plan to reduce vehicle emissions and generate more power using renewable resources. The New York Times reports:

The broad details of the plan by state regulators to meet the goals of California’s groundbreaking 2006 law requiring reductions in carbon dioxide and other emissions that contribute to climate change.

Since the probable death of national climate-control legislation after a brief Senate debate this month, the California plan is the most comprehensive effort in the country to devise an economy-wide program to reduce heat-trapping gases.

The plan does not , however, offer details about some politically delicate questions, including the costs it will impose on various industries, among them automobile manufacturers and electric utilities, which together contribute 61 percent of these emissions.

Rather than assessing the costs that will be borne by industry, Mary D. Nichols, who heads the California Air Resources Board, said the agency’s “macroeconomic analysis” had shown that the state’s gross domestic product would increase by 1 percent when the plan was fully put into place.

• All the flooding in the Midwest is expected to raise the price of organic produce. More from the Associated Press:

The floods that damaged his and other farms in southern Wisconsin earlier this month are likely to result in fewer fruits and vegetables at farmers markets this summer and help boost already high prices for organic eggs and meat at grocery stores in the fall.


A cool spring meant many farmers were about two weeks behind in planting. The storms struck just as their first vegetables emerged from the ground.

"Twelve inches of water falling on, say, this field of beets that were just starting to peak through the soil, it just washed them away," Richard de Wilde said. "They couldn't withstand that kind of deluge." De Wilde has one of the largest organic farms in the state.

Organic corn fed to livestock that provide organic eggs, chicken, beef and pork was barely 4 inches high, half of what it should have been, said Eric Newman, vice president of sales for La Farge, Wis.-based Organic Valley, the nation's largest cooperative of organic farmers.

• We need bees! That’s why Germany and France have banned a pesticide linked to bee deaths. GreenRightNow is on it:

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


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

The German government took the extraordinary action to protect bees and other essential pollinators, stating that there is now enough compelling evidence connecting the chemical to Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in that country.

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• The Whitehouse has “refused to accept” an email from the EPA insisting that greenhouse gases need to be controlled. Felicity Barringer of The New York Times reports:

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

Over the past five days, the officials said, the White House successfully put pressure on the E.P.A. to eliminate large sections of the original analysis that supported regulation, including a finding that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 32 years. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

• Delmarva Power has agreed to purchase a planned wind farm 13 miles off the coast of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. More from TreeHugger:

Peter Mandelstam, founder and president of Bluewater Wind was understandably enthusiastic about the news. “By signing this first-ever formal contract in the United States for the sale of pollution-free, stable-priced energy generated from our offshore wind farm, Bluewater Wind and Delmarva Power will usher in new era of power generation that benefits from utility-scale power plants located far from our shores.


I don’t know if wind turbines 13 miles from the beach really qualifies as “far from our shores”, but compared to offshore wind developments in Europe the US lags behind so Mandelstam’s enthusiasm is definitely warranted.

Bluewater is currently investigating offshore wind projects in New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island.

• Florida has come to an agreement with the nation’s largest sugarcane producer to reclaim land for the Everglades. Damien Dave of The New York Times explains:

Under the proposed deal, Florida will pay $1.75 billion for United States Sugar, which would have six years to continue farming before turning over 187,000 acres north of Everglades National Park, along with two sugar refineries, 200 miles of railroad and other assets.

It would be Florida’s biggest land acquisition ever, and the magnitude and location of the purchase left environmentalists and state officials giddy.

Even before Gov. Charlie Crist arrived to make the announcement against a backdrop of water, grass and birds here, dozens of advocates gathered in small groups, gasping with awe, as if at a wedding for a couple they never thought would fall in love. After years of battling with United States Sugar over water and pollution, many of them said that the prospect of a partnership came as a shock.

“It’s so exciting,” said Margaret McPherson, vice president of the Everglades Foundation. “I’m going to do cartwheels.”

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Actually, that’s a good thing! Using abandoned farmlands to grow bio-fuels could eliminate the need to clear forests for new fields. From the Environmental News Network:

Using these lands for energy crops, instead of converting existing croplands or clearing new land, avoids competition with food production and preserves carbon-storing forests needed to mitigate climate change. Sustainable bioenergy is likely to satisfy no more than 10% of the demand in the energy-intensive economies of North America, Europe, and Asia. But for some developing countries, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa, the potential exists to supply many times their current energy needs without compromising food supply or destroying forests…

…The researchers estimate that globally up to 4.7 million square kilometers (approximately 1.8 million square miles) of abandoned lands could be available for growing energy crops. The potential yield of this land area, equivalent to nearly half the land area of the United States (including Alaska), depends on local soils and climate, as well as on the specific energy crops and cultivation methods in each region. But the researchers estimate that the worldwide harvestable dry biomass could amount to as much as 2.1 billion tons, with a total energy content of about 41 exajoules. While this is a significant amount of energy (one exajoule is a billion billion joules, equivalent to about 170 million barrels of oil), at best it would satisfy only about 8% of worldwide energy demand.

I’ve got an even better idea. Let’s cut down on all the cattle pastures and use that land for bio-fuels too!

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One gym is turning to ellipitical machines to help generate electricity. More from That’sFit:

The elliptical machines at my local Gainesville Health & Fitness Center are being used for more than health and fitness. They're being used to convert the energy spent exercising into something pretty darn useful: Electrical power.

Credit for this energetic feat goes to Hudson Harr, the 22-year-old who came up with the ReCardio system -- a patent-pending technology currently wired to 15 elliptical machines and working to convert the kinetic energy from pushing pedals into electricity. The power produced by the machines is plugged straight into the utility grid, which helps produce power for the gym and offsets utility costs. Each elliptical machine can produce one kilowatt of electricity every 10 hours -- enough to charge the battery for a 2004 Toyota Prius once or a cell phone up to 397 times. So far, 150 kilowatts of electricity has been produced.

Pretty cool! I’m always on the ellipticals.

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Last week my heavenly tomato grew a lot:


But check it out today:

And take a look at these:


Two baby tomatoes—awesome!

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• Sandy Bauers of The Philadelphia Inquirer investigates the impact of red meat on greenhouse gas emissions. Check it out:

Chris Weber, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has studied the global-warming impacts of the American diet. He found that red meat - such as beef, pork, and lamb - produces 150 percent more greenhouse gases than chicken or fish, not to mention veggies.

It's the Hummer of foods.

Weber's study is merely the latest in a cascade of beefs about beef. There's the fat and cholesterol. And, since most beef is fattened with copious amounts of corn - enough to feed eight times the people the beef itself will feed - it raises ethical questions related to world hunger.

Here's another eco-biggie: methane, emitted from both ends of these ruminants. Incredibly, the EPA rates their belchings as the third-largest methane source behind landfills and natural gas systems.

A greenhouse gas, methane has 20 times the global warming effect of carbon dioxide.

• Despite the lean times, consumers are still willing to pay more organic, earthy-friendly products. From the Environmental News Network:

"They are less price sensitive, and also have more fully integrated LOHAS products into their lifestyle and are less likely to go back," said Gwynne Rogers, business director at NMI, Harleysville, Pa.


About 20% of Americans make up this segment of buyers. These highly desirable consumers tend to spend 10% more in warehouse clubs as well as buy more cereal, jelly, pasta, produce, soup and ready-to-serve prepared food than "non-green" consumers.

Products labeled organic represented $4.4 billion in sales for the 52 weeks ended April 19 (excluding Wal-Mart), per The Nielsen Company. Mintel, Chicago, forecasts sales will grow to $6.8 billion by 2012.

Small brands are seeing big growth. Ian's Natural Food's grows 45% annually, per the company. Nature's Path Foods, meanwhile, grew 30% in the first half of this year and will launch 15 new products by year's end.

• According to The Toronto Star organic farmers can actually turn a decent profit. Stuart Laidlow reports:

Organic farms are not allowed to use chemical pesticides or artificial fertilizers on their crops, nor to give their cows antibiotics. As a result, chemical costs were virtually wiped out on the farms studied, saving almost $1,900 per cow, while veterinary costs were cut in half.


At the same time, once the transition period was over, the price that farmers received for their milk went up.

For the farms' last conventional year, Fisher's study cited a price of 59 cents a litre. In the first organic year, the price was 74 cents, a jump of more than 25 per cent.

In the end, Fisher says, the farms were making $217 less per cow once the switch to organic was complete. That's a small enough drop to make switch to organic a viable option, he says.

Ann Slater, a market farmer near St. Marys and president of the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario, says soils continue to improve even after the transition is complete, and farmers get better at running their farms.

Within a few years, she says, they are doing as well or better than they were as conventional farm operators.

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Promoting bicycling among citizens has saved Australian public health services millions! Via TreeHugger:

A new report, has after analysing the data, come up with a figure for the public health benefit offered by cycling. The study, Cycling: Getting Australia Moving, funded by the Australian government and prepared by Melbourne University and the Cycling Promotion Fund concluded that thanks to the increased health of cyclists, public health services are spared an estimated $227.2m AUD annually.

They also noted that per 100,000 participants, an individual is seven times more likely to be hospitalised playing football than riding a bicycle. And observed that “the more cyclists there are, the safer it becomes. In fact, if cycling doubles, the risk per kilometre falls by 34%.” The report’s authors were pleased to find that between 2001 and 2006 bicycle journeys to work had risen 22% in Australian capital cities, with Melbourne being the standout, recording over a 42% increase.

With the cost of gas off the charts, maybe Americans should start bicycling more.

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It’s Sunday, time for a tomato update! Here was my heavenly tomato last week:


And here it is today:


It’s growing like crazy!

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A Swedish study has concluded that beef and milk production is a far bigger burden on the environment than ethanol. Via TreeHugger:

Just one percent of the world's arable acreage is planted in crops for ethanol, compared to a third of global arable acreage (500 million hectares) used for milk and meat production - though milk and meat make up just 15 percent of our total food basket. The claims about ethanol's effect (percentage-wise) on food prices range extremely widely from three to 65%. The International Food Policy Institute says 30%. Hard to say who is more accurate, but it doesn't look as if Swedes are going to give up their ethanol (or beef for that matter) any time soon. But they will be first to sell so-called "sustainable" ethanol.

Sweden, or rather Sweden's SEKAB, a biofuel and chemical company, will launch the world's first "sustainable ethanol" in early August, made from Brazilian sugar cane and to be blended in E85 and ED95 fuels. SEKAB says that the criteria for the "sustainable" designation include well-to-wheel reduction of CO2 of at least 85 percent compared to fossil fuels, and a "zero tolerance" for child labor, slave labor and the felling of rain forests for production.

Listen, with these absurd gas prices. I say ditch the steak and ice cream and get me some cheap earth-friendly fuel!

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Mark Bittman of The New York Times offers up some practical suggestions to help everyone cut back on meat eating. Here’s a bit:

Let’s suppose you’ve decided to eat less meat, or are considering it. And let’s ignore your reasons for doing so. They may be economic, ethical, altruistic, nutritional or even irrational. The arguments for eating less meat are myriad and well-publicized, but at the moment they’re irrelevant, because what I want to address here is (almost) purely pragmatic: How do you do it?

I’m not talking about eating no meat; I’m talking about cutting back, which in some ways is harder than quitting. Vegetarian recipes and traditions are everywhere. But in the American style of eating — with meat usually at the center of the plate — it can be difficult to eat two ounces of beef and call it dinner.

1. Forget the protein thing.
2. Buy less meat.
3. Get it out of the center of the plate.
4. Buy more vegetables, and learn new ways to cook them.
5. Make non-meat items as convenient as meat.
6. Make some rules.
7. Look at restaurant menus differently.

This is really cool and right up DiseaseProof’s alley! Take the protein thing for example:

Complementary Protein Myth Won't Go Away!
“The ‘incomplete protein’ myth was inadvertently promoted in the 1971 book, Diet for a Small Planet, by Frances Moore Lappe. In it, the author stated that plant foods do not contain all the essential amino acids, so in order to be a healthy vegetarian, you needed to eat a combination of certain plant foods in order to get all of the essential amino acids. It was called the theory of ‘protein complementing.’”

And here’s plenty of reason to consume less animal products:

DiseaseProof Gets Green!
“Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.”

Not to mention all the delicious ways to prepare fruits and veggies:

Recipes
Orange Berry Greens Smoothie

2 cups organic baby spinach
1 cup frozen blueberries
1 cup pomegranate juice
1/2 cup frozen strawberries
4 pitted dates
1 orange, peeled & quartered
2 tablespoons ground flax seed

Blend all ingredients in a high-powered blender until smooth and creamy. Serves 2.

And it’s easy to eat healthfully when dining out:

Eating to Live on the Outside
“I’m in a New York state of mind. So, time to grab the next train and hit the big apple. This week we’re checking out Counter, right off east Houston Street in the capital of the world—New York City! And this vegetarian bistro certainly makes a good first impression.”

See, the world is catching on. Nutrient-dense vegetable-based eating is the way to go!

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Yesterday it cost me $45 to fill my rinky-dinky Honda Civic! So, its no wonder U.S. farmers are turning to mules plow their fields. Via TreeHugger:

Rural areas in the U.S. are now feeling the profound effects of mounting gas prices, more so than in other parts of the country, due to the combination of lower incomes and heavier dependence on farming equipment, tractors, pickup trucks and vans. In addition to other trends (gasoline theft, buying less meat, switching jobs for a shorter commute), the dilemma has led some farmers to turn to less energy-intensive forms of tilling land – or in a word, mules.

According to a recent survey by the Oil Price Information Service, Americans typically spend 4 percent of their after-tax income on gasoline. In rural areas however, such as the counties in the Mississippi Delta, families may spend up to 13 percent on fuel. It is a disparity that may not be so apparent in the Northeastern states, where families generally earn more, drive shorter distances or have better access to public transportation.

Well, I am Italian. So riding a mule to work wouldn’t look totally out of place.

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Food bought at a farmers market or a CSA tastes much better than food from large commercial food companies, but, could it also be better for you? The New York Times Well blog investigates:

A team of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has received a grant to study the public health impact of moving toward a local, sustainable food system. An increasingly vocal local food movement calls for consumers to try to buy and eat foods produced within 100 miles of their homes.

So far, there’s not real evidence that eating locally farmed food is better for you. But there are many reasons to think it might be. By definition, locally farmed food is not going to come from large commercial food companies, so people who eat locally aren’t going to consume as much processed food, which typically contains lots of refined carbohydrates, sugar, fat and preservatives.

By focusing your diet on products grown and raised within 100 miles of your home, you will likely end up eating more fruits and vegetables as well. Shopping for fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets is also pleasurable and may lead to more variety in your diet. Eating local often means you can meet the people who produce your food, and you can also ask questions about pesticide use and farming methods.

I think a big plus is the environmental factor. Locally grown food means less fuel burned during transport.

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• A company in Texas is seeking an exemption from the law prohibiting the import of PCBs, so they can burn them! Via TreeHugger:

Despite that law, Veolia Environmental Services is asking the EPA to let it ignore the law and import more than 20,000 tons of PCBs from Mexico for incineration.

And let's talk about just how nasty PCBs are. Some are implicated as carcinogens. PCBs and breakdown products may suppress your immune system, can impair your reproductive system; and they accumulate and linger in the body. Pregnant women and children are the most vulnerable and sensitive populations to harm from exposure to PCBs.

Veolia ES already incinerates all sorts of hazardous things in Port Arthur - including chemical weapons the Army no longer needs (and under controversial arrangements, as well). A Gulf Coast town, Port Arthur is home to many chemical plants, Superfund sites and oil refineries. Local resident Hilton Kelly said because the town is also home to many low-income families, Veolia sees it as the path of least resistance. It is an environmental justice issue. "They're taking advantage of this community," said Kelly.

• This is better news. Dole has announced plans to plant trees and promote climate-change awareness. From the Dole Organic blog:

Dole Food Company, Inc and its operating divisions in Latin America celebrated World Environment Day yesterday by organizing tree-planting events and environmental awareness campaigns with communities, employees and local officials to motivate participants to work toward environmental protection and mitigation of climate change.


Jonathan Bass, President of Dole Latin America stated, “I am pleased to see and share in the excitement that these World Environment Day events have produced with our employees and workers and particularly within the communities in which our production units operate. We all have an important role to play in protecting the environment”.

In Costa Rica, the event is also linked to the official opening of Dole’s organic pineapple plantation reaffirming the company’s leading position in organic agriculture and alternative production methods. The activity includes the planting of 5,000 trees provided by the National Electricity Institute as part of the Costa Rican Government’s pledge to plant 7 million trees in the year 2008. School children, local government regulators, field workers, office employees, neighbors and the region’s congresswoman will plant trees at the organic plantation to commemorate World Environment Day and demonstrate the effectiveness of private, public and community partnership.

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It’s time to check in on my heavenly tomato. Okay, here it was last week:


Now look at it today:


Grow baby, grow!

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Sandy Bauers of Green Space recently found out just how eco-friendly new refrigerators have become. Take a look:

Today, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers released new data based on 2007 shipments of major appliances, highlighting dramatic decreases in home appliance energy consumption since 2000.

Specifically: Refrigerators, dishwashers and clothes washers account for a 43 percent combined decrease in energy consumption since 2000. The association calculates that the energy savings realized in 2007 shipments would offset the carbon dioxide emissions of more than 698 million gallons of gasoline consumed or the annual carbon dioxide emissions from 1.3 coal-fired power plants.

Looking at refrigerators in particular, energy consumption has decreased 30 percent since 2000. The average refrigerator sold today consumes less energy than a 60-watt light bulb.
Yikes. So is it time to replace mine?

The government’s Energy Star website has an appliance section that you could just about spend all day reading. I short-cutted to the refrigerator calculator. The overall prognosis: If your fridge is pre-'93, it's curtains for the thing.

Now don’t forget! For more green news, check out DiseaseProof’s new green living category.

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The demand for corn for biofeuls has left Mexico’s poor short on tortillas. Lorne Matalon of National Geographic News reports:

Tortillas are filling—Mexicans eat up to ten every day—but a dramatic rise in the cost of corn flour has driven up the cost of a dozen tortillas from the equivalent of 30 U.S. cents to 50 cents or more in some stores.

By some estimates, a kilogram (about 2.2 pounds) of tortillas now takes up about one-fifth of the daily minimum wage of Mexico's working poor.

"I will not make my customers pay more—at least not for now," said Francisco Barriga, the owner of a tortilla factory in the border town of Reynosa, near McAllen, Texas.

"But I am paying 12 to 20 percent more for 20-kilogram [44-pound] bags of flour I need to make the tortillas."

For the country's low-income citizens, who already spend a large percentage of their money on food, the increases are disastrous, sending frustrated citizens to the streets to rally against the biofuels and trade policies they feel are the cause.

I know tortillas are part of their culture, but, they’re not exactly the healthiest food in the world. From Dr. Fuhrman’s Food Scoring Guide:

Aye carumba!

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Here’s another eco-friendly travel method that also doubles as a great work out. Introducing the RailRunner. Via TreeHugger:

Cool, but not as exciting as the Trailcart.

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Plastic bottles are not without their problems, but, can they sail? Introducing “Junk” a raft built with plastic bottles. Via the Junk blog:

And according to Discover’s Better Plant blog, Junk is headed to Hawaii or bust. Take a look:

How much plastic can our oceans take? Ask Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal – they’re about to embark on six weeks at sea to call attention to the problem. They’ll set sail on June 1, 2008 for Hawaii from the Long Beach Aquarium in a boat, dubbed Junk, which floats on six pontoons stuffed with 15,000 plastic bottles inside mesh bags made of stray fishing nets.


The historic venture is part of Algalita Marine Research Foundation’s ongoing mission to alert the world to the growing problem of plastics fouling our oceans. “You want to see what happens to your plastic bottles in Los Angeles when they wash into the sea?” Dr. Eriksen said. “Just follow our journey.”

Today, plastics in the ocean are the source of countless environmental nightmares — everything from choking sea birds that eat large items such as toothbrushes and cigarette lighters, to microscopic particles that attract toxins like PCB’s and DDT, and are then consumed by fish.

You can follow Junk’s progress on the Junk blog. Quite frankly, I think they stole my idea. From Water Bottle Blues:

Teresa: Oops! The word is "don't reuse those bottles". Guess there's some danger of leaching of bad plastic from those if reused. As my son the chemist told me, "Get yourself one of those bottles especially made for holding water while hiking". It's also better for the environment."Water-mining" is lowering the water table in some areas changing natural water supply. Plastic bottles, even if recycled aren't exactly eco-friendly.


Me: Wow Teresa! I didn't know that...Hmm... What to do with all those bottles now...I know...I'll make a raft for my hamster...oh wait...I don't have a hamster.

You’ll be hearing from my lawyer—not really.

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Introducing the Trailcart, the first pedal-powered sport utility vehicle. Via TreeHugger:


Looks like great exercise, but I wonder if it gets good city miles.

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In case you forgot. I joined the Honey Brook Organic Farm in Pennington, New Jersey. Check it out:


And today was the first delivery. Feast your eyes on this:

We got lettuce, strawberries, arugula, and beet greens! And just wait until my heavenly tomato starts bearing fruit. Here it was on May 27th:

Get a load of today's progress:

Stayed tuned to DiseaseProof's Greening Living category for more.

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According to a new study even low levels of air pollution may increase stroke-risk. More from the Annals of Neurology:

The results showed borderline significant associations between same day and previous day fine particulate matter exposures and ischemic stroke/TIA risk. Similar associations were seen with ozone. Despite the fossil fuel industry in the area, fine particulate matter exposures were relatively low relative to other regions in the US, probably because of the proximity to the coast and prevailing wind patterns. “Although the magnitude of elevated risk of stroke/TIA due to PM2.5 exposure was relatively small, the vast majority of the public is exposed to ambient air pollution at the levels observed in this community or greater every day, suggesting a potentially large public health impact.”

These findings support the hypotheses that recent exposure to fine particulate matter may increase the risk of ischemic cerebrovascular events specifically. There is experimental evidence that particulate air pollution is associated with acute artery vasoconstriction and with increases in plasma viscosity (thickening of the blood) which may enhance the potential for blood clots, although this requires further study.

The sad part is I’m not really sure what you can do to avoid this—not breathe!

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With gas prices soaring, many restaurant owners are reporting their used frying oil being stolen for use in making biodiesel. Susan Saulny of The New York Times reports:

Outside Seattle, cooking oil rustling has become such a problem that the owners of the Olympia Pizza and Pasta Restaurant in Arlington, Wash., are considering using a surveillance camera to keep watch on its 50-gallon grease barrel. Nick Damianidis, an owner, said the barrel had been hit seven or eight times since last summer by siphoners who strike in the night.

“Fryer grease has become gold,” Mr. Damianidis said. “And just over a year ago, I had to pay someone to take it away.”

Much to the surprise of Mr. Damianidis and many other people, processed fryer oil, which is called yellow grease, is actually not trash. The grease is traded on the booming commodities market. Its value has increased in recent months to historic highs, driven by the even higher prices of gas and ethanol, making it an ever more popular form of biodiesel to fuel cars and trucks.

In 2000, yellow grease was trading for 7.6 cents per pound. On Thursday, its price was about 33 cents a pound, or almost $2.50 a gallon. (That would make the 2,500-gallon haul in the Burger King case worth more than $6,000.)

Biodiesel is derived by processing vegetable oil or animal fat with alcohol. It is increasingly available around the country, but it is expensive. With the right kind of conversion kit (easily found on the Internet) anyone can turn discarded cooking oil into a usable engine fuel that can burn on its own, or as a cheap additive to regular diesel.

I drive a tiny little Honda Civic and I tell you thing, if I had some extra cash I’d swap it for a hybrid in a second!

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DiseaseProof is getting a “Green Living” category! Nowadays, with skyrocketing gas prices and global warming bearing down on us, you can’t help be a little curious about green living. I know I am!

Actually, I’ve already made a bunch of green purchases. Take my natural rubber Jade Harmony yoga mat for example:

My earth-friendly shopping bag from Stop & Stop:

My organic Earth Day t-shirt I bought from Old Glory:

And this 100% recycled jewelry from Tarma Designs:

But my biggest green achievement is my diet. Eating a diet based on wholesome fruits and vegetables places less burden on our environment. These articles will help explain why:

FAONewsroom: Livestock a major threat to environment.
“When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure.”

The New York Times: Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler.
“Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.”

Virtual Water: The Virtual Water project.
“The water footprint of a person, company or nation is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the commodities, goods and services consumed by the person, company or nation. The idea of the water footprint is quite similar to the ecological footprint, but focusing on the use of water.”

The Los Angeles Times: Treading lighter with low-carbon diets.
“The global food and agriculture system produces about one-third of humanity's contribution to greenhouse gases. So questions about food are shifting from the familiar ‘Is this good for me?’ or ‘Will it make me fat?’ to ‘Is it good for the planet?’”

Not only do I feel good about my health, but helping to preserve the well-being of our planet is an added bonus! Now, this gave me an idea. Remember this video about growing tomatoes out of garbage:

Guess what? I’m growing my own heavenly tomatoes! Okay, for a month I saved my fruit and vegetable scraps—Dr. Fuhrman staffers Linda and Susan and my mom also pitched in—here’s what I ended up with as of May 3rd:

Check out the digging and burying I did on May 4th:

By May 9th I had more scraps and I bought my tomato plant:

And then on May 10th I added to the pile and planted my tomato:

By May 18th my little tomato plant had already grown a lot:

And as May 27th it was even bigger:

I checked this morning and it’s already starting to flower! Not bad for a dopey blogger. I’ll be caring for my tomato all summer long, so keep checking the Green Living category for updates!


If you’re passionate about healthy eating and caring for the environment DiseaseProof’s new Green Living category will be a great place to get all your green news! Feel free to email your own green tips and suggestions to diseaseproof@gmail.com. Continue Reading...

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