Bollywood star Akshay Kumar has been named the brand ambassador of International Indian Film Academy's (IIFA) Green Global Foundation, which champions the issue of global warming through various international events.
'Being the brand ambassador for the Green Globe Foundation is a great honour for me as it gives me an opportunity to highlight the fight against global warming,' the actor said in Mumbai Monday.
In an attempt to strengthen its commitment towards fighting the issue of climate change, IIFA launched the Green Global Foundation this year.
The foundation is the initiative of IIFA and Wizcraft International Entertainment.
United Nations Environmental Programme and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), headed by R.K. Pachauri, are the partners of the foundation.
In a symbolic gesture towards the climate change issue, instead of the usual red carpet reception to the celebrities, the IIFA had a green carpet reception at the IIFA Weekend in Bangkok this year.
As a symbol of their support to the movement against global warming, IIFA brand ambassador Amitabh Bachchan and Thailand Minister for Tourism and Sports Khun Weerasak Kowsurat planted a sapling at the inauguration venue of the event.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
25 years of Appiko, a green movement to save trees in Karnataka
The 25 years of Appiko or, hug the tree Green Movement on the Sahyadri Mountain ranges in the western ghats of Karnataka has created a tremendous impact here.This movement started in Gubbi Gadde, a small village near Sirsi in the (north) Uttara Kannada district, has forced the forest department to change the forest policy on felling of trees.Besides affecting the forest policy, it also spread to other parts and saved forests.On Sep.8, 1983, Pandurang Hegde, the fiery activist, started the Appiko (to hug) movement. He derived inspiration from Sunderlal Bahuganas Chipko movement in Uttar Pradesh, in which villagers used to hug trees to save them from being felled by the State, which then had no laws against felling of timber inside protected areas.Appiko movement was started against monoculture (the agricultural practice of producing or growing one single crop over a wide area) in the western ghats. Today, it has become a part of the lives of people. Their non-violent protest movement has compelled the forest department to amend the policy against felling of forests in eco-sensitive region. There has been a silent revolution in the Western Ghats.
Panduranga Hegde, the founder of Appiko Movement says that this movement has become a part of the culture in the western ghats and has saved the very sensitive eco sphere.This movement, started to protest against felling of trees, monoculture, forest policy and deforestation, has succeeded in changing the forest policy. This first ever peoples green movement in south India to save our natural resources has become a model of sustainable development, said Panduranga Hedge, the founder of Appiko movement.The activists used local folklore to reach out to the masses. Another activist and farmer Mahabaleshwara Hegde of Gubbi gadde village finds this movement a part of the lives of people in this area. The Gandhi of environmental movement, Sundarlal Bahuguna, has not only inspired the movement but visits here regularly to guide the people, Hedge added.Mahabaleshwara Hegde, said: The river Kali meanders through the valley linking the past and the present. The song of Apppiko reverberates in the hills. The 25-year-old movement, reminds the people of the need to conserve sensitive eco sphere. In 1983, the villagers in Sirsi taluka of North Kanara district launched an embrace the trees campaign.In 1950, forests covered more than 81 percent of the geographical area in Uttara Kannada (or North Kanara) district. But being declared a backward district, the area was selected for major industries– a pulp and paper mill, a plywood factory and a chain of hydroelectric dams constructed to harness the rivers. By 1980, forest in the district was believed to have shrunk to 25 per cent.Locals, especially the poor, were displaced by dams.
Environmentalists blamed monoculture for drying up water sources, affecting forest-dwellers.Started in Sirsi.The Appiko movement spread across the western Ghats, including in places outside Karnataka. By linking up, campaigners managed to build awareness to conserve the sensitive environment in this region.Appiko is seen by some as a kind of echo of the more prominent Chipko movement of north India.The western Ghat biodiversity include 120,000 living species, 4,500 flowering plants, 500 species of birds, 120 species of mammals, 160 species of reptiles, 70 species of frogs, 800 species of fish and 1493 species of medicinal plants
Panduranga Hegde, the founder of Appiko Movement says that this movement has become a part of the culture in the western ghats and has saved the very sensitive eco sphere.This movement, started to protest against felling of trees, monoculture, forest policy and deforestation, has succeeded in changing the forest policy. This first ever peoples green movement in south India to save our natural resources has become a model of sustainable development, said Panduranga Hedge, the founder of Appiko movement.The activists used local folklore to reach out to the masses. Another activist and farmer Mahabaleshwara Hegde of Gubbi gadde village finds this movement a part of the lives of people in this area. The Gandhi of environmental movement, Sundarlal Bahuguna, has not only inspired the movement but visits here regularly to guide the people, Hedge added.Mahabaleshwara Hegde, said: The river Kali meanders through the valley linking the past and the present. The song of Apppiko reverberates in the hills. The 25-year-old movement, reminds the people of the need to conserve sensitive eco sphere. In 1983, the villagers in Sirsi taluka of North Kanara district launched an embrace the trees campaign.In 1950, forests covered more than 81 percent of the geographical area in Uttara Kannada (or North Kanara) district. But being declared a backward district, the area was selected for major industries– a pulp and paper mill, a plywood factory and a chain of hydroelectric dams constructed to harness the rivers. By 1980, forest in the district was believed to have shrunk to 25 per cent.Locals, especially the poor, were displaced by dams.
Environmentalists blamed monoculture for drying up water sources, affecting forest-dwellers.Started in Sirsi.The Appiko movement spread across the western Ghats, including in places outside Karnataka. By linking up, campaigners managed to build awareness to conserve the sensitive environment in this region.Appiko is seen by some as a kind of echo of the more prominent Chipko movement of north India.The western Ghat biodiversity include 120,000 living species, 4,500 flowering plants, 500 species of birds, 120 species of mammals, 160 species of reptiles, 70 species of frogs, 800 species of fish and 1493 species of medicinal plants
Tech Firms Tap Into the 'Green' Movement
Being ''green'' is all the rage with technology companies these days, but what's not clear is whether or not the environment-friendly approach is bringing in more greenbacks.Tech buyers say they desire devices that are kind to the environment, but they haven't shown a strong predisposition to buy them - except when it saves them money.''There's high-level awareness and low-level activity,'' said Christopher Mines, an analyst at Forrester Research. ''The goal is to feed into it ... and try to take advantage of the growing concern.''Among those able to successfully tap into those concerns are computer hardware companies like Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel Corp., Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard Co., Armonk, N.Y.-based International Business Machines Corp. and Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which have all been churning out servers or server components that require less power - and thus less money to operate.However, other green initiatives by technology companies, such as running environmentally oriented contests or planting trees, don't have a direct line to the pocketbooks of client companies' chief investment officers, making those initiatives ring a bit hollow.''By and large, the vendors are, of course, trying to differentiate and trying to win goodwill to enhance their brand,'' Mines said. But, he added, ''there's real, legitimate hard-dollar cost-saving to be had.''The hype surrounding being green has even spawned a new word - greenwashing - harkening back to the days when the buzzword was ''dot-com.'' Just like those days, the environment presents an opportunity for technology companies, either by selling into it or using it as a marketing tool.The proselytizing seems to be resonating. Chief investment officers polled by Forrester said they were concerned about the impact their company was having on the environment, although few were doing much about it.The machines with the most success so far have been ones that provide a clear return on the investment, such as energy-efficient servers.With big data centers running out of space and burdened with big energy bills, servers that draw less power have been in demand. For example, Intel and H-P promise to save companies money with lower-powered servers while IBM can make sure everything works together thanks to its services arm.H-P has seen a 120 percent increase worldwide in the number of inquiries connected to the environment since the last half of 2006. In 2005, the company saw $6 billion in requests for proposals that had some environmental element.Pat Tiernan, vice president for corporate social environmental responsibility, said that number continues to climb. Most of the inquiries are about energy conservation, with recycling a close second, Tiernan said.IBM launched its ''Project Big Green'' program in early May, committing $1 billion per year to increase the level of energy efficiency in the information technologies markets, and since then has been bombarded by customer request.While most of the activity is happening on the corporate side, consumers are starting to become a driving force in the green push. So are shareholders of public companies who want to make sure environmental polices are in place. All of these different constituencies give technology companies an opportunity to sell products and services, experts said.''Our consumer research shows that, on both coasts, 7 percent to 11 percent of Americans consider themselves to be green,'' said Richard Doherty, research director at Envisoneering Group. ''Of the consumers we've interviewed, they say one or more purchases is influenced by the more-green company.''In recent months, most technology companies also have been crowing about their green initiatives. Round Rock, Texas-based Dell Inc. will plant trees for customers who buy a computer, while Sunnyvale-based Yahoo Corp. recently launched a contest to find the greenest city in America. (The winner: Hastings, Neb.)While it's nice to plant a tree, is it a reason to run out and buy a company's products?''If the computer is up to snuff and the price is about the same, it helps'' to be green, says Howard Anderson, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Business, noting that technology companies seem to have different shades of green. ''If Nokia and Motorola are green, then why haven't they invented phones that use less battery-charging?''
Green movement 'hijacked' by politics
Parts of the green movement have become hijacked by a political agenda and now operate like multinational corporations, according to two senior scientists and members of the House of Lords.
The peers, who were speaking at an event in parliament on science policy, said they felt that in some areas green campaign groups were a hindrance to environmental causes.
"Much of the green movement isn't a green movement at all, it's a political movement," said Lord May, who is a former government chief scientific adviser and president of the Royal Society. He singled out Greenpeace as an environmental campaign group that had "transmogrified" into one with primarily an anti-globalisation stance.
"Maybe they are right, but I wish they would wear the uniform of the army they are fighting [under]," said May, adding that he used to be involved with Greenpeace in the 1970s.
Greenpeace's chairman John Sauven said he did not recognise the characterisation. "I don't know who he is talking about," he said, "As far as I know, no mainstream environmental organisation has been anti-globalisation per se...Frankly that does not represent what we are about."
He said that Greenpeace did, however, campaign against examples of unsustainable trade, such as transporting bottled water between continents. "There are a million and one examples of the madness of globalisation that are having a detrimental effect on the environment," he added.
May also criticised green groups who campaign against initiatives such as wind farms and the Severn tidal barrage scheme, while also proclaiming the need to tackle climate change. He said such groups were "failing to recognise the landscape is human-created".
As an example of how attitudes can change, he cited the poet John Ruskin's angry condemnation of the Monsal Dale railway. The line, built in the 1860s, runs through beautiful countryside between Matlock and Buxton. At the time, Ruskin raged: "The valley is gone and the Gods with it, and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour." The railway is now regarded fondly by many people as an integral part of the landscape, May said.
Lord Krebs, the former chairman of the Food Standards Agency and current principal of Jesus College Oxford also criticised Greenpeace, saying that it had been set up to peddle fear on environmental issues. "Greenpeace is a multinational corporation just like Monsanto or Tesco. They have very effective marketing departments... Their product is worry because worry is what recruits members," he said.
He added that in some areas, such as warning about the effects of climate change, such an approach was justified, but that Greenpeace sometimes chose the wrong issues – for example, nuclear power and GM crops.
Sauven said Greenpeace's resources are a "tiny fraction" of those of Monsanto or Tesco's. "With very few resources, we are a very effective campaigning organisation," he said, adding that he would prefer to take the comments as a compliment. "I can live with that one."
May and Krebs were speaking at a meeting – Science, Policy and Ethics: Potential future flashpoints, for peers and journalists in parliament – which was chaired by the leader of the House of Lords, Baroness Hayman. It was attended by several peers including Lord Cunningham, former agriculture minister and minister for the Cabinet Office in Tony Blair's cabinet, and the broadcaster Lord Bragg.
May said parliamentarians had not done enough to prepare the public for the effect climate change would have on their lives in terms of efforts to reduce emissions and adapt to climate changes.
"I think there has been a problem of communication," he said. "For some, I think it's the desire not to confront the issue." But, he said, the smoking ban had showed, for example, that public attitudes could change rapidly.
The peers, who were speaking at an event in parliament on science policy, said they felt that in some areas green campaign groups were a hindrance to environmental causes.
"Much of the green movement isn't a green movement at all, it's a political movement," said Lord May, who is a former government chief scientific adviser and president of the Royal Society. He singled out Greenpeace as an environmental campaign group that had "transmogrified" into one with primarily an anti-globalisation stance.
"Maybe they are right, but I wish they would wear the uniform of the army they are fighting [under]," said May, adding that he used to be involved with Greenpeace in the 1970s.
Greenpeace's chairman John Sauven said he did not recognise the characterisation. "I don't know who he is talking about," he said, "As far as I know, no mainstream environmental organisation has been anti-globalisation per se...Frankly that does not represent what we are about."
He said that Greenpeace did, however, campaign against examples of unsustainable trade, such as transporting bottled water between continents. "There are a million and one examples of the madness of globalisation that are having a detrimental effect on the environment," he added.
May also criticised green groups who campaign against initiatives such as wind farms and the Severn tidal barrage scheme, while also proclaiming the need to tackle climate change. He said such groups were "failing to recognise the landscape is human-created".
As an example of how attitudes can change, he cited the poet John Ruskin's angry condemnation of the Monsal Dale railway. The line, built in the 1860s, runs through beautiful countryside between Matlock and Buxton. At the time, Ruskin raged: "The valley is gone and the Gods with it, and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour." The railway is now regarded fondly by many people as an integral part of the landscape, May said.
Lord Krebs, the former chairman of the Food Standards Agency and current principal of Jesus College Oxford also criticised Greenpeace, saying that it had been set up to peddle fear on environmental issues. "Greenpeace is a multinational corporation just like Monsanto or Tesco. They have very effective marketing departments... Their product is worry because worry is what recruits members," he said.
He added that in some areas, such as warning about the effects of climate change, such an approach was justified, but that Greenpeace sometimes chose the wrong issues – for example, nuclear power and GM crops.
Sauven said Greenpeace's resources are a "tiny fraction" of those of Monsanto or Tesco's. "With very few resources, we are a very effective campaigning organisation," he said, adding that he would prefer to take the comments as a compliment. "I can live with that one."
May and Krebs were speaking at a meeting – Science, Policy and Ethics: Potential future flashpoints, for peers and journalists in parliament – which was chaired by the leader of the House of Lords, Baroness Hayman. It was attended by several peers including Lord Cunningham, former agriculture minister and minister for the Cabinet Office in Tony Blair's cabinet, and the broadcaster Lord Bragg.
May said parliamentarians had not done enough to prepare the public for the effect climate change would have on their lives in terms of efforts to reduce emissions and adapt to climate changes.
"I think there has been a problem of communication," he said. "For some, I think it's the desire not to confront the issue." But, he said, the smoking ban had showed, for example, that public attitudes could change rapidly.
In Confronting Its Biggest Foe, Green Movement Also Fights Itself
The modern environmental movement is having an identity crisis. Staring down its biggest enemy yet, it's fiercely divided over how to beat it.
The global challenge of climate change is tougher than the localized problems the green movement has spent decades fighting. To some environmentalists, it requires chucking old orthodoxies and getting practical. To others, it demands an old-style moral crusade.
The pragmatists have the upper hand. One sign is that the movement is moving beyond small-scale backyard wind turbines and rooftop solar panels. It's calling for technological change at industrial speed and scale -- sometimes to the detriment of local ecologies
In Europe, environmental groups are backing proposals for massive collections of wind turbines off the continent's Atlantic coast that would amount to seaborne power plants. In California, they're endorsing huge solar-panel installations on farmland and in the desert. In Washington, they're lobbying for more spending to develop "clean coal," resigned to the conclusion that scrubbing coal is more plausible than killing it.
"There's a kind of reality check," says Stephan Singer, the Brussels-based director of global energy policy for WWF, an environmental group also called the World Wildlife Fund. The only clean-energy options likely to matter are "large, centralized solutions," he says. "That's the way it is."
Karen Douglas feels the pressure from both sides of the divide. She has spent her career as a green activist in California, and her success has helped move her from outside agitator to inside policy maker. After California passed a law curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tapped Ms. Douglas early last year to join the California Energy Commission, which has to help figure out how to comply with the law. Recently, she was named chairman.
The commission is trying to figure out where big new solar-energy installations and electric-transmission lines should go. The process is pitting locally oriented environmentalists, whose priority still is to protect California's wilderness, against globally oriented environmentalists whose focus is to get big renewable-energy projects built. "I am in an interesting spot," she says. "It's hard."
Mr. Singer of the WWF is in a similar fix. In Europe, the prospect of large-scale renewable energy means the construction of hundreds of wind turbines off the coast. His organization "strongly supports" that move, he says, despite opposition from some local environmentalists who contend such installations might harm birds or fish.
"We all grew up with this kind of mantra that small is beautiful," he says. But that "is not a model for a highly modernized, global world."
Nothing underscores the green movement's soul-searching more than its conflicted view of coal, which provides about half the world's electricity. Should society pour billions of dollars into trying to perfect a way to turn coal into electricity without emitting greenhouse gases? Or should it reject coal as inalterably dirty and try to replace it entirely with renewable sources like the wind and sun?
Late last year, the influential Natural Resources Defense Council helped sponsor ads ridiculing coal-industry ads boasting about progress toward cleaning up coal. "In reality, there's no such thing as clean coal," said a print version of the ad.
But last month, the NRDC, along with the Environmental Defense Fund, another prominent group, hosted workshops advocating more spending on clean-coal research. The rationale: Coal will remain a crucial fuel for decades, so it makes sense to try to clean it up.
"If NRDC had written all the ads by itself, we probably would have had a more nuanced ad," says NRDC climate expert David Hawkins. "But it probably would have been a nuanced ad that doesn't get noticed."
Industry claims that coal already is clean are "misleading," says Mr. Hawkins. Still, the technology to generate electricity from coal and capture the carbon-dioxide emissions "is both needed and feasible," he says. That was the point of the workshops, he says: that government should implement policies to deploy the technology.
Now, a backlash is building within the movement. Rather than push certain technological fixes, critics say, environmentalists should simply push government to slap industry with a tough cap on greenhouse gases -- and let industry figure out how to meet the mandate.
"It's like we're pushing to invent a better cotton gin as a way to reduce slaveholding instead of just banning slaveholding," says the Environmental Defense Fund's John DeCicco. "The environmental movement has become insiders. Is that actually to our benefit now? Or is that to our detriment?"
The global challenge of climate change is tougher than the localized problems the green movement has spent decades fighting. To some environmentalists, it requires chucking old orthodoxies and getting practical. To others, it demands an old-style moral crusade.
The pragmatists have the upper hand. One sign is that the movement is moving beyond small-scale backyard wind turbines and rooftop solar panels. It's calling for technological change at industrial speed and scale -- sometimes to the detriment of local ecologies
In Europe, environmental groups are backing proposals for massive collections of wind turbines off the continent's Atlantic coast that would amount to seaborne power plants. In California, they're endorsing huge solar-panel installations on farmland and in the desert. In Washington, they're lobbying for more spending to develop "clean coal," resigned to the conclusion that scrubbing coal is more plausible than killing it.
"There's a kind of reality check," says Stephan Singer, the Brussels-based director of global energy policy for WWF, an environmental group also called the World Wildlife Fund. The only clean-energy options likely to matter are "large, centralized solutions," he says. "That's the way it is."
Karen Douglas feels the pressure from both sides of the divide. She has spent her career as a green activist in California, and her success has helped move her from outside agitator to inside policy maker. After California passed a law curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tapped Ms. Douglas early last year to join the California Energy Commission, which has to help figure out how to comply with the law. Recently, she was named chairman.
The commission is trying to figure out where big new solar-energy installations and electric-transmission lines should go. The process is pitting locally oriented environmentalists, whose priority still is to protect California's wilderness, against globally oriented environmentalists whose focus is to get big renewable-energy projects built. "I am in an interesting spot," she says. "It's hard."
Mr. Singer of the WWF is in a similar fix. In Europe, the prospect of large-scale renewable energy means the construction of hundreds of wind turbines off the coast. His organization "strongly supports" that move, he says, despite opposition from some local environmentalists who contend such installations might harm birds or fish.
"We all grew up with this kind of mantra that small is beautiful," he says. But that "is not a model for a highly modernized, global world."
Nothing underscores the green movement's soul-searching more than its conflicted view of coal, which provides about half the world's electricity. Should society pour billions of dollars into trying to perfect a way to turn coal into electricity without emitting greenhouse gases? Or should it reject coal as inalterably dirty and try to replace it entirely with renewable sources like the wind and sun?
Late last year, the influential Natural Resources Defense Council helped sponsor ads ridiculing coal-industry ads boasting about progress toward cleaning up coal. "In reality, there's no such thing as clean coal," said a print version of the ad.
But last month, the NRDC, along with the Environmental Defense Fund, another prominent group, hosted workshops advocating more spending on clean-coal research. The rationale: Coal will remain a crucial fuel for decades, so it makes sense to try to clean it up.
"If NRDC had written all the ads by itself, we probably would have had a more nuanced ad," says NRDC climate expert David Hawkins. "But it probably would have been a nuanced ad that doesn't get noticed."
Industry claims that coal already is clean are "misleading," says Mr. Hawkins. Still, the technology to generate electricity from coal and capture the carbon-dioxide emissions "is both needed and feasible," he says. That was the point of the workshops, he says: that government should implement policies to deploy the technology.
Now, a backlash is building within the movement. Rather than push certain technological fixes, critics say, environmentalists should simply push government to slap industry with a tough cap on greenhouse gases -- and let industry figure out how to meet the mandate.
"It's like we're pushing to invent a better cotton gin as a way to reduce slaveholding instead of just banning slaveholding," says the Environmental Defense Fund's John DeCicco. "The environmental movement has become insiders. Is that actually to our benefit now? Or is that to our detriment?"
Recycled CDs and Sofa Foam for Your Feet
Shoe manufacturers have been busy burnishing their green credentials over the last few years, incorporating everything from reBut one company appears to be taking the green theme to an extreme, integrating recycled CDs, old sofas, and even water bottles, among other materials, into a new running shoe.
The Green Silence marathon racing shoe, made by the running gear company Brooks and scheduled for release in February 2010, sports heel cups reinforced with recycled CDs; shoelaces, mesh, lining and stitching made from discarded water bottles; outsoles made from recycled rubber; and a collar stuffed with foam from old sofas.
Although Brooks says that the shoe will have half the number of parts of similar lightweight running shoes, those parts will still be shipped from around the world, including water bottles from the United States, Taiwan and Japan, and CDs from Europe — not the sort of “local sourcing” that many environmentalists would prefer.
Still, Brooks says that transportation will account for just 5 percent to 8 percent of the shoe’s total carbon footprint. It also says the midsole of the shoe is biodegradable, although the Federal Trade Commission in the United States has recently expressed skepticism about such claims in general.
Setting aside biodegradability, Brooks said it hopes that runners will retire their used shoes to charities like Soles4Souls, which distributes used footwear to people in need. Nike’s Reuse-A-Shoe program, which takes all athletic shoes – Nike or not — and turns the soles into artificial turf and other products, is another option.
The Brooks shoe is undoubtedly part of a trend toward funkier — and more environmentally conscious — shoes for the running crowd. Another example is a recently released training shoe with toe sheaths that its manufacturer claims “deepens your connection to the earth” and is lighter than most other running shoes.
But Brooks says it’s not easy to make a shoe that will completely satisfy environmental advocates.
“We call this Whac-a-Mole,” said Derek Campbell, the company’s sustainability chief. “Once you hit one button for sustainability, three pop up.”cycled rubber soles to hemp shoelaces.
The Green Silence marathon racing shoe, made by the running gear company Brooks and scheduled for release in February 2010, sports heel cups reinforced with recycled CDs; shoelaces, mesh, lining and stitching made from discarded water bottles; outsoles made from recycled rubber; and a collar stuffed with foam from old sofas.
Although Brooks says that the shoe will have half the number of parts of similar lightweight running shoes, those parts will still be shipped from around the world, including water bottles from the United States, Taiwan and Japan, and CDs from Europe — not the sort of “local sourcing” that many environmentalists would prefer.
Still, Brooks says that transportation will account for just 5 percent to 8 percent of the shoe’s total carbon footprint. It also says the midsole of the shoe is biodegradable, although the Federal Trade Commission in the United States has recently expressed skepticism about such claims in general.
Setting aside biodegradability, Brooks said it hopes that runners will retire their used shoes to charities like Soles4Souls, which distributes used footwear to people in need. Nike’s Reuse-A-Shoe program, which takes all athletic shoes – Nike or not — and turns the soles into artificial turf and other products, is another option.
The Brooks shoe is undoubtedly part of a trend toward funkier — and more environmentally conscious — shoes for the running crowd. Another example is a recently released training shoe with toe sheaths that its manufacturer claims “deepens your connection to the earth” and is lighter than most other running shoes.
But Brooks says it’s not easy to make a shoe that will completely satisfy environmental advocates.
“We call this Whac-a-Mole,” said Derek Campbell, the company’s sustainability chief. “Once you hit one button for sustainability, three pop up.”cycled rubber soles to hemp shoelaces.
Are E.U. Climate Ambitions Being Sidelined?
As John Broder and I write in today’s New York Times and International Herald Tribune, the Europeans may be yielding their global leadership on climate policy as the United States and China – the world’s two largest carbon-dioxide polluters – display signs of seeking a bilateral deal the rest of the world might be obliged to accept.
For Europe, the prospect of marginalization in climate talks is a serious concern. European climate policies have been predicated to a far greater extent on sharing the work of reducing greenhouse gas emissions through a United Nations-brokered agreement.
In particular, Europeans could be forced to downgrade the importance of their flagship policies – including their system for capping greenhouse gases and trading emissions permits – if they lose control of the negotiating agenda over the coming months.
To bolster their Emissions Trading System, which has suffered bouts of volatility and has been criticized for ineffectiveness since its creation four years ago, the Europeans want all rich-world nations like the United States join a global carbon market by 2015, and for fast-emerging economies like China to join by 2020.
But as my colleague Andrew Revkin writes today at Dot Earth, President Obama faces significant constraints in making more ambitious offers from the Senate.
Meanwhile the Chinese are fiercely averse to capping their emissions for the foreseeable future, and that has stoked fears among Europeans that the Americans and Chinese would reach a lowest-common-denominator agreement with widely divergent goals for reducing greenhouse gases even among wealthy nations.
That, in turn, could jeopardize European efforts to link its carbon trading system with other cap-and-trade systems under development in countries like the United States and Australia.
A key concern for European negotiators is that comparatively higher demand for permits to emit carbon in Europe would push up their price, giving other regions little incentive to join an expensive system.
Some senior European officials seem to acknowledge that tussling over comparability may actually be clouding the talks — by encouraging countries to seek the lowest negotiated commitment.
“I think many countries highly underestimate their potential to take action in this field,” Michael Starbæk Christensen, a senior adviser on climate change in the Office of the Prime Minister of Denmark, told a conference in Brussels late last month. “It becomes a negotiation about numbers and it seems that the winner is the one who can get out of the negotiation with the smallest number and it shouldn’t be like that,” he said. “The dynamic should be more a competition for opportunities rather than burdens,” he said.
Climate experts warn that the tussling will become worse and that it may ultimately undermine efforts to reach a deal unless negotiators refocus the debate in the coming weeks on what countries can achieve — rather than on what is comparable.
ClimateWorks, a group based in San Francisco that helps finance projects to limit global warming, suggested that major economies should not be distracted from reaching a deal in Copenhagen by negotiations that bog down in numbers.
At a point where negotiations could be turning into a stalemate, ClimateWorks has produced a study showing that it would be possible to achieve about 70 percent of the emissions reductions by 2020 that are necessary to prevent runaway climate change, using readily available technology and implementing measures that are in nations’ economic self-interest.
The group based its study on an analysis on the potential of nations and regions to cut emissions by McKinsey Global, a consultancy.
According to ClimateWorks, building consensus around universal standards for using clean energy would be far more productive than basing negotiations on obligations for certain countries to shrink each citizen’s carbon footprint or to reduce emissions by the same, or similar, amounts.
In the study, each major polluter would reduce emissions in sectors where it would be easiest to do so and in many cases where national efforts are already underway.
China would deliver the single biggest reduction by improving industrial energy efficiency and building up its renewable energy base. Heavily forested Brazil would deliver the second largest reduction in emissions by reducing the amount of trees it cuts down.
The United States and the E.U. would put most of their effort into fostering new standards for efficient buildings and appliances.
“A global deal that obliges nations to get most of the way to bringing emissions down to levels deemed safe is not all that hard if our leaders simply agree to accelerate – and maybe turbo-charge in some cases – the existing policies that a number of key countries are already pursuing in their national interest,” said Andreas Merkl, the director of global initiatives for ClimateWorks.
By James Kanter
For Europe, the prospect of marginalization in climate talks is a serious concern. European climate policies have been predicated to a far greater extent on sharing the work of reducing greenhouse gas emissions through a United Nations-brokered agreement.
In particular, Europeans could be forced to downgrade the importance of their flagship policies – including their system for capping greenhouse gases and trading emissions permits – if they lose control of the negotiating agenda over the coming months.
To bolster their Emissions Trading System, which has suffered bouts of volatility and has been criticized for ineffectiveness since its creation four years ago, the Europeans want all rich-world nations like the United States join a global carbon market by 2015, and for fast-emerging economies like China to join by 2020.
But as my colleague Andrew Revkin writes today at Dot Earth, President Obama faces significant constraints in making more ambitious offers from the Senate.
Meanwhile the Chinese are fiercely averse to capping their emissions for the foreseeable future, and that has stoked fears among Europeans that the Americans and Chinese would reach a lowest-common-denominator agreement with widely divergent goals for reducing greenhouse gases even among wealthy nations.
That, in turn, could jeopardize European efforts to link its carbon trading system with other cap-and-trade systems under development in countries like the United States and Australia.
A key concern for European negotiators is that comparatively higher demand for permits to emit carbon in Europe would push up their price, giving other regions little incentive to join an expensive system.
Some senior European officials seem to acknowledge that tussling over comparability may actually be clouding the talks — by encouraging countries to seek the lowest negotiated commitment.
“I think many countries highly underestimate their potential to take action in this field,” Michael Starbæk Christensen, a senior adviser on climate change in the Office of the Prime Minister of Denmark, told a conference in Brussels late last month. “It becomes a negotiation about numbers and it seems that the winner is the one who can get out of the negotiation with the smallest number and it shouldn’t be like that,” he said. “The dynamic should be more a competition for opportunities rather than burdens,” he said.
Climate experts warn that the tussling will become worse and that it may ultimately undermine efforts to reach a deal unless negotiators refocus the debate in the coming weeks on what countries can achieve — rather than on what is comparable.
ClimateWorks, a group based in San Francisco that helps finance projects to limit global warming, suggested that major economies should not be distracted from reaching a deal in Copenhagen by negotiations that bog down in numbers.
At a point where negotiations could be turning into a stalemate, ClimateWorks has produced a study showing that it would be possible to achieve about 70 percent of the emissions reductions by 2020 that are necessary to prevent runaway climate change, using readily available technology and implementing measures that are in nations’ economic self-interest.
The group based its study on an analysis on the potential of nations and regions to cut emissions by McKinsey Global, a consultancy.
According to ClimateWorks, building consensus around universal standards for using clean energy would be far more productive than basing negotiations on obligations for certain countries to shrink each citizen’s carbon footprint or to reduce emissions by the same, or similar, amounts.
In the study, each major polluter would reduce emissions in sectors where it would be easiest to do so and in many cases where national efforts are already underway.
China would deliver the single biggest reduction by improving industrial energy efficiency and building up its renewable energy base. Heavily forested Brazil would deliver the second largest reduction in emissions by reducing the amount of trees it cuts down.
The United States and the E.U. would put most of their effort into fostering new standards for efficient buildings and appliances.
“A global deal that obliges nations to get most of the way to bringing emissions down to levels deemed safe is not all that hard if our leaders simply agree to accelerate – and maybe turbo-charge in some cases – the existing policies that a number of key countries are already pursuing in their national interest,” said Andreas Merkl, the director of global initiatives for ClimateWorks.
By James Kanter
Study: Geoengineering Won’t Help Oceans
A new study has concluded that geoengineering measures designed to reduce global warming will do little to reduce CO2 levels and, subsequently, ocean acidification.
CO2 that dissolves in salt water produces carbonic acid that undermines shell formation in crustations and coral. The world’s oceans absorb a quarter of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to an international oceanography research network.
“This century will see the end of coral reefs for the next tens of thousands of years,” said Ken Caldeira, a professor of environmental science in the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a co-author of the paper.
Earlier this week in Britain, the filmmaker David Attenborough joined marine biologists in calling attention to the situation.
In fact, coral depletion has the potential to be a major economic disaster as well as an ecological catastrophe. An essay in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs noted that approximately 100 million people living in coastal areas worldwide depend on coral reef ecosystems for their livelihoods. The problem is that attempts to artificially cool the atmosphere, though necessary to avert more polar melting and the release of methane trapped in sub-arctic tundra, won’t slow the build-up of greenhouse gases.
Geoengineering solutions have received a surge of attention in recent months, even though ideas for mechanically altering the atmosphere trace back to the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. Some scientists are experimenting with techniques to fertilize oceans so increased plankton growth will absorb excess CO2. Others have studied methods for reflecting sunlight, like seeding white clouds with sea water, launching solar reflectors or painting roofs white, as Energy Secretary Steven Chu famously suggested earlier this year.
Professor Caldeira dismissed most of these approaches as either financially unattainable or, in the case of Secretary Chu’s white roof plan, insufficient. On balance, he said the most technically straightforward and cost-effective approach involves attempts to mimic the effect of large volcanic eruptions, like Mount Pinatubo in 1991.
Sulfur-based gases can be introduced inexpensively into the upper atmosphere, where they form sulfate particles that reflect sunlight away from the earth’s surface. As the Foreign Affairs essay notes, the cost would be a fraction of emission reduction efforts that take decades to show results.
“Basically, there was cooling despite an increase in greenhouse gases,” he sad. “The earth didn’t come to an end.” But, Professor Caldeira added, these measures “only make sense in an emergency response context.”
CO2 that dissolves in salt water produces carbonic acid that undermines shell formation in crustations and coral. The world’s oceans absorb a quarter of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to an international oceanography research network.
“This century will see the end of coral reefs for the next tens of thousands of years,” said Ken Caldeira, a professor of environmental science in the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a co-author of the paper.
Earlier this week in Britain, the filmmaker David Attenborough joined marine biologists in calling attention to the situation.
In fact, coral depletion has the potential to be a major economic disaster as well as an ecological catastrophe. An essay in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs noted that approximately 100 million people living in coastal areas worldwide depend on coral reef ecosystems for their livelihoods. The problem is that attempts to artificially cool the atmosphere, though necessary to avert more polar melting and the release of methane trapped in sub-arctic tundra, won’t slow the build-up of greenhouse gases.
Geoengineering solutions have received a surge of attention in recent months, even though ideas for mechanically altering the atmosphere trace back to the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. Some scientists are experimenting with techniques to fertilize oceans so increased plankton growth will absorb excess CO2. Others have studied methods for reflecting sunlight, like seeding white clouds with sea water, launching solar reflectors or painting roofs white, as Energy Secretary Steven Chu famously suggested earlier this year.
Professor Caldeira dismissed most of these approaches as either financially unattainable or, in the case of Secretary Chu’s white roof plan, insufficient. On balance, he said the most technically straightforward and cost-effective approach involves attempts to mimic the effect of large volcanic eruptions, like Mount Pinatubo in 1991.
Sulfur-based gases can be introduced inexpensively into the upper atmosphere, where they form sulfate particles that reflect sunlight away from the earth’s surface. As the Foreign Affairs essay notes, the cost would be a fraction of emission reduction efforts that take decades to show results.
“Basically, there was cooling despite an increase in greenhouse gases,” he sad. “The earth didn’t come to an end.” But, Professor Caldeira added, these measures “only make sense in an emergency response context.”
Developing Nations Rebuff G-8 on Curbing Pollutants
The world’s major industrial nations and newly emerging powers failed to agree Wednesday on specific cuts in heat-trapping gases by 2050, undercutting an effort to build a global consensus to fight climate change, according to people following thAs President Obama arrived for three days of meetings, negotiators for the world’s 17 leading polluters dropped a proposal to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by mid-century, and emissions from the most advanced economies by 80 percent. But both the G-8 and the developing countries agreed to set a goal of stopping world temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels.
The discussion of climate change was among the top priorities of world leaders as they gathered here for the annual summit meeting of the Group of 8 powers. Mr. Obama invited counterparts from China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and others to join the G-8 here on Thursday for a parallel “Major Economies Forum” representing the producers of 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. But since President Hu Jintao of China abruptly left Italy to deal with unrest at home, the chances of making further progress seemed to evaporate.
The G-8 leaders were also grappling with the sagging global economy, development in Africa, turmoil in Iran, nuclear nonproliferation and other challenging issues. On Friday, Mr. Obama planned to unveil a $15 billion food security initiative by the G-8 to provide emergency and development aid to poor nations.
The failure to establish specific targets on climate change underscored the difficulty in bridging longstanding divisions between the most developed countries like the United States and developing nations like China and India. In the end, people close to the talks said, the emerging powers refused to agree to the specific emissions limits because they wanted industrial countries to commit to midterm goals in 2020, and to follow through on promises of financial and technological help.
“They’re saying, ‘We just don’t trust you guys,’ ” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group based in the United States. “It’s the same gridlock we had last year when Bush was president.”
American officials said they still had made an important breakthrough because the G-8 countries within the negotiations agreed to adopt the 2050 reduction goals, even though the developing countries would not.
And they said a final agreement with developing countries, including China and India, to be sealed on Thursday would include important conceptual commitments by the emerging powers to begin reducing emissions and to set a target date. Now negotiators will have to try to quantifying those commitments in coming months.
While the nations mapped out a general agreement to limit global temperature change, there remained differences between the level of commitment from developed and developing nations. The G-8 draft statement would have the major industrial powers “recognize that global emissions should peak by 2020 and then be substantially reduced to limit the average increase in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.” The statement by the developing countries would be less definitive, however, saying that scientific consensus supports such a goal.
Mr. Meyer said temperatures have already risen by 0.8 degrees and will likely rise by another 0.6 degrees just based on pollution already in the air, meaning that embracing the 2-degree goal would require major steps starting almost immediately.
While briefing reporters on Wednesday morning, Michael Froman, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser and chief G-8 negotiator, declined to specify what would be in the two agreements, but said they would signal important progress heading toward a United Nations conference in Copenhagen in December to craft a worldwide climate change treaty.
“Our view is that it represents a significant step forward in terms of adding political momentum on the key issues to be dealt with in the U.N. process,” Mr. Froman said, “but that there is still a lot of work to be done and these are difficult issues and the negotiators will be meeting going forward to try and resolve them.”
European leaders and environmental activists have placed great hope that Mr. Obama would become a powerful new leader in the struggle against climate change after succeeding President George W. Bush, who long resisted more aggressive measures sought on this side of the Atlantic for fear of the economic impact. At a previous Group of 8 meeting, Mr. Bush agreed to a 50 percent cut in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 but not to an 80 percent reduction in those produced by industrial countries like the United States. With Mr. Obama’s support, the House recently passed legislation intended to curb emissions, although not by nearly as much as the Europeans want. And China is another challenge.
“Europe wants avant-garde legislation but China is putting up resistance, which I sampled yesterday during my one-on-one with the Chinese president,” Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, the G-8 host, told reporters Tuesday evening.
China, India and the other developing nations are upset that commitments to provide financial and technological help made during a United Nations conference in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007 have not translated into anything more tangible in the interim.
Mr. Meyer estimated that the United States, Europe and other industrial nations need to come up with $150 billion a year in assistance by 2020 to help develop clean-energy technology for developing countries, reduce deforestation that contributes to rising temperatures and help vulnerable nations adapt to changes attributed to greenhouse gases.e talks.
The discussion of climate change was among the top priorities of world leaders as they gathered here for the annual summit meeting of the Group of 8 powers. Mr. Obama invited counterparts from China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and others to join the G-8 here on Thursday for a parallel “Major Economies Forum” representing the producers of 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. But since President Hu Jintao of China abruptly left Italy to deal with unrest at home, the chances of making further progress seemed to evaporate.
The G-8 leaders were also grappling with the sagging global economy, development in Africa, turmoil in Iran, nuclear nonproliferation and other challenging issues. On Friday, Mr. Obama planned to unveil a $15 billion food security initiative by the G-8 to provide emergency and development aid to poor nations.
The failure to establish specific targets on climate change underscored the difficulty in bridging longstanding divisions between the most developed countries like the United States and developing nations like China and India. In the end, people close to the talks said, the emerging powers refused to agree to the specific emissions limits because they wanted industrial countries to commit to midterm goals in 2020, and to follow through on promises of financial and technological help.
“They’re saying, ‘We just don’t trust you guys,’ ” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group based in the United States. “It’s the same gridlock we had last year when Bush was president.”
American officials said they still had made an important breakthrough because the G-8 countries within the negotiations agreed to adopt the 2050 reduction goals, even though the developing countries would not.
And they said a final agreement with developing countries, including China and India, to be sealed on Thursday would include important conceptual commitments by the emerging powers to begin reducing emissions and to set a target date. Now negotiators will have to try to quantifying those commitments in coming months.
While the nations mapped out a general agreement to limit global temperature change, there remained differences between the level of commitment from developed and developing nations. The G-8 draft statement would have the major industrial powers “recognize that global emissions should peak by 2020 and then be substantially reduced to limit the average increase in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.” The statement by the developing countries would be less definitive, however, saying that scientific consensus supports such a goal.
Mr. Meyer said temperatures have already risen by 0.8 degrees and will likely rise by another 0.6 degrees just based on pollution already in the air, meaning that embracing the 2-degree goal would require major steps starting almost immediately.
While briefing reporters on Wednesday morning, Michael Froman, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser and chief G-8 negotiator, declined to specify what would be in the two agreements, but said they would signal important progress heading toward a United Nations conference in Copenhagen in December to craft a worldwide climate change treaty.
“Our view is that it represents a significant step forward in terms of adding political momentum on the key issues to be dealt with in the U.N. process,” Mr. Froman said, “but that there is still a lot of work to be done and these are difficult issues and the negotiators will be meeting going forward to try and resolve them.”
European leaders and environmental activists have placed great hope that Mr. Obama would become a powerful new leader in the struggle against climate change after succeeding President George W. Bush, who long resisted more aggressive measures sought on this side of the Atlantic for fear of the economic impact. At a previous Group of 8 meeting, Mr. Bush agreed to a 50 percent cut in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 but not to an 80 percent reduction in those produced by industrial countries like the United States. With Mr. Obama’s support, the House recently passed legislation intended to curb emissions, although not by nearly as much as the Europeans want. And China is another challenge.
“Europe wants avant-garde legislation but China is putting up resistance, which I sampled yesterday during my one-on-one with the Chinese president,” Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, the G-8 host, told reporters Tuesday evening.
China, India and the other developing nations are upset that commitments to provide financial and technological help made during a United Nations conference in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007 have not translated into anything more tangible in the interim.
Mr. Meyer estimated that the United States, Europe and other industrial nations need to come up with $150 billion a year in assistance by 2020 to help develop clean-energy technology for developing countries, reduce deforestation that contributes to rising temperatures and help vulnerable nations adapt to changes attributed to greenhouse gases.e talks.
Climate battle moves to the Senate
President Obama's landmark energy and global warming bill squeaked through the House only after the White House made dozens of concessions to coal, manufacturing and other interests.Now, as the battle moves to the Senate, Obama faces demands for even more concessions -- including pressure to open the nation's coastlines to offshore oil and gas drilling.
The Senate also will take up a series of controversial issues that were glossed over or omitted from the House legislation. Among them: giving the government sweeping powers to approve thousands of miles of new transmission lines to carry electric power to coastal cities from wind turbines in the upper Midwest and solar power generators in the Southwest, regardless of local objections.Aware of the challenge, Obama repeatedly has called attention to the House achievement and urged the Senate to keep up the momentum."There are going to be a series of tough negotiations," he said last week. "But I think the ability of the House to move forward is going to be a prod for the Senate toward action."
Even so, with Republicans forming a near-solid phalanx of opposition and many Democrats concerned about the effects of specific sections of the bill on their constituents, the prospect is for a long, slow legislative process.Senate leaders say they will benefit from lessons learned from the way House leaders built their majority. Chief among them: the need to cut specific deals to ease the effects of new emissions restrictions -- which could translate into higher costs for businesses and rising prices for consumers -- in particular parts of the country."We need to absolutely work this bill one on one," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee that is drafting emissions limits, "because everybody's got different passions about it, different feelings about it, different hopes about it, different fears about it."Making those deals is harder in the Senate than in the House, some analysts say."In the House, you can move blocks of votes," said Daniel Weiss, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress who works on global warming issues. "In the Senate, it's hand-to-hand combat."Although a climate bill is expected to be hundreds of pages long, it will boil down to an attempt to start weaning the U.S. economy from dependence on fossil fuels.The centerpiece is the so-called cap-and-trade system, which would set limits on carbon dioxide and other emissions that scientists say are a major factor in global warming. The allowed level of such emissions would decline over time. And major polluters, such as power plants and factories, would be required to obtain permits to cover their emissions as a spur to reducing pollution.The original idea was that the government would sell the permits, but the House voted to give out many of them free to ease the economic effects.The Senate bill also is likely to include a variety of provisions designed to encourage development of energy sources, including wind and solar power. Those could include financial and legal provisions to speed construction of transmission lines to move power from the remote deserts and plains -- where it's easily produced -- to coastal cities where it's needed.The quest for new energy sources is expected to reopen the politically explosive issue of offshore drilling.Looming over all the provisions is cost -- a focal point of Republican attacks."The public is especially wary of passing this during a major recession, and public skepticism is growing about the man-made climate fears," said Marc Morano, editor of the global-warming-skeptic website ClimateDepot.com.Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them control 60 Senate seats. But more than a dozen have expressed concern over costs. They include Democrats from industry-heavy Ohio and Michigan, coal-dependent Indiana and oil-rich Louisiana.Only a few Republicans appear open to emissions limits, notably two moderates from Maine -- Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe -- and Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who championed emissions limits in his presidential campaign (though he has expressed reservations about the House bill).The Senate bill will emerge from several committees -- including the finance, foreign relations, commerce and agriculture committees -- with dramatically different memberships and priorities.The energy committee already has approved its chunk with wide bipartisan support. It includes a requirement to produce more electricity from renewable sources, but also expands drilling -- a possible deal-breaker for environmentalists.Boxer's committee will center its work on cap and trade. The House bill would cut U.S. emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050. Environmentalists expect Boxer, who said she was "looking closely" at those limits, to strengthen them.
The Senate also will take up a series of controversial issues that were glossed over or omitted from the House legislation. Among them: giving the government sweeping powers to approve thousands of miles of new transmission lines to carry electric power to coastal cities from wind turbines in the upper Midwest and solar power generators in the Southwest, regardless of local objections.Aware of the challenge, Obama repeatedly has called attention to the House achievement and urged the Senate to keep up the momentum."There are going to be a series of tough negotiations," he said last week. "But I think the ability of the House to move forward is going to be a prod for the Senate toward action."
Even so, with Republicans forming a near-solid phalanx of opposition and many Democrats concerned about the effects of specific sections of the bill on their constituents, the prospect is for a long, slow legislative process.Senate leaders say they will benefit from lessons learned from the way House leaders built their majority. Chief among them: the need to cut specific deals to ease the effects of new emissions restrictions -- which could translate into higher costs for businesses and rising prices for consumers -- in particular parts of the country."We need to absolutely work this bill one on one," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee that is drafting emissions limits, "because everybody's got different passions about it, different feelings about it, different hopes about it, different fears about it."Making those deals is harder in the Senate than in the House, some analysts say."In the House, you can move blocks of votes," said Daniel Weiss, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress who works on global warming issues. "In the Senate, it's hand-to-hand combat."Although a climate bill is expected to be hundreds of pages long, it will boil down to an attempt to start weaning the U.S. economy from dependence on fossil fuels.The centerpiece is the so-called cap-and-trade system, which would set limits on carbon dioxide and other emissions that scientists say are a major factor in global warming. The allowed level of such emissions would decline over time. And major polluters, such as power plants and factories, would be required to obtain permits to cover their emissions as a spur to reducing pollution.The original idea was that the government would sell the permits, but the House voted to give out many of them free to ease the economic effects.The Senate bill also is likely to include a variety of provisions designed to encourage development of energy sources, including wind and solar power. Those could include financial and legal provisions to speed construction of transmission lines to move power from the remote deserts and plains -- where it's easily produced -- to coastal cities where it's needed.The quest for new energy sources is expected to reopen the politically explosive issue of offshore drilling.Looming over all the provisions is cost -- a focal point of Republican attacks."The public is especially wary of passing this during a major recession, and public skepticism is growing about the man-made climate fears," said Marc Morano, editor of the global-warming-skeptic website ClimateDepot.com.Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them control 60 Senate seats. But more than a dozen have expressed concern over costs. They include Democrats from industry-heavy Ohio and Michigan, coal-dependent Indiana and oil-rich Louisiana.Only a few Republicans appear open to emissions limits, notably two moderates from Maine -- Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe -- and Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who championed emissions limits in his presidential campaign (though he has expressed reservations about the House bill).The Senate bill will emerge from several committees -- including the finance, foreign relations, commerce and agriculture committees -- with dramatically different memberships and priorities.The energy committee already has approved its chunk with wide bipartisan support. It includes a requirement to produce more electricity from renewable sources, but also expands drilling -- a possible deal-breaker for environmentalists.Boxer's committee will center its work on cap and trade. The House bill would cut U.S. emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050. Environmentalists expect Boxer, who said she was "looking closely" at those limits, to strengthen them.
Forest fires vs. forest carbon
Should forests be thinned to reduce fires, or should they be tended to store the maximum amount of carbon in their trees to prevent global warming?
It is not a simple question, as researchers at Oregon State University explain in a new study in Ecological Applications, a professional journal.
Stephen R. Mitchell, an OSU researcher now at Duke University, and other scientists studied the Coast Range and the west side of the Cascade Mountains and found that salvage logging, understory removal, prescribed fire and other techniques can reduce fire severity. But these same techniques will almost always reduce carbon storage even if the woody products that are removed are then used to produce electricity or make cellulosic ethanol, they found.
"It had been thought for some time that if you used biofuel treatments to produce energy, you could offset the carbon emissions from this process," said Mark Harmon, an OSU professor of forest ecosystems and society and a co-author of the study. "But when you actually go through the data, it doesn't work."Harmon said that policymakers should consider using forests on the west side of the Cascades, the wetter side, for carbon sequestration, and focus fuel-reduction efforts near people, towns and infrastructure.
However, the Oregon State findings may not be applicable to other forests. "It is a fertile debate," said Andrea Tuttle, former head of the California Department of Forestry and an authority on forest carbon regulation. "But be careful what forest type you are talking about." Studies of other forests have produced different results, she explained, citing a UC Berkeley study of warmer, drier Sierran forests that found that measures to increase fire resistance were also applicable to long-term carbon sequestration.
The study comes at a time when state governments and the U.S. Congress, as well as other nations, are looking to forests to offset emissions from automobiles, power plants and other sources of carbon dioxide, which, scientists say, is heating the planet to dangerous levels. Trees suck carbon out of the atmosphere and store it for long periods. California recently enacted strict rules to govern the use of offsets for carbon sequestration in forests.
-- Margot Roosevelt
It is not a simple question, as researchers at Oregon State University explain in a new study in Ecological Applications, a professional journal.
Stephen R. Mitchell, an OSU researcher now at Duke University, and other scientists studied the Coast Range and the west side of the Cascade Mountains and found that salvage logging, understory removal, prescribed fire and other techniques can reduce fire severity. But these same techniques will almost always reduce carbon storage even if the woody products that are removed are then used to produce electricity or make cellulosic ethanol, they found.
"It had been thought for some time that if you used biofuel treatments to produce energy, you could offset the carbon emissions from this process," said Mark Harmon, an OSU professor of forest ecosystems and society and a co-author of the study. "But when you actually go through the data, it doesn't work."Harmon said that policymakers should consider using forests on the west side of the Cascades, the wetter side, for carbon sequestration, and focus fuel-reduction efforts near people, towns and infrastructure.
However, the Oregon State findings may not be applicable to other forests. "It is a fertile debate," said Andrea Tuttle, former head of the California Department of Forestry and an authority on forest carbon regulation. "But be careful what forest type you are talking about." Studies of other forests have produced different results, she explained, citing a UC Berkeley study of warmer, drier Sierran forests that found that measures to increase fire resistance were also applicable to long-term carbon sequestration.
The study comes at a time when state governments and the U.S. Congress, as well as other nations, are looking to forests to offset emissions from automobiles, power plants and other sources of carbon dioxide, which, scientists say, is heating the planet to dangerous levels. Trees suck carbon out of the atmosphere and store it for long periods. California recently enacted strict rules to govern the use of offsets for carbon sequestration in forests.
-- Margot Roosevelt
Leaders of developing nations shun plan to cut greenhouse gases in half
The world's biggest polluters failed to reach an agreement today on a plan to cut greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2050, after developing nations decided not to sign on to the idea during an international summit here.Leaders of the Group of 8 industrial nations said they would issue a statement committing to the standard later today, pledging to cut overall emissions by 50% by the middle of the century and reducing those of industrialized nations by 80%.
But leaders of developing nations balked at the plan, according to sources who were present for the talks but asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak for the group.The major economies forum, which includes the world's leading greenhouse-gas emitters, will not issue such a joint declaration after its meeting Thursday, White House officials confirmed.President Obama's lead climate negotiator said the global standard is still on the table as the nations work toward a summit in Copenhagen in December and characterized the forthcoming MEF statement as "significant progress."
"I'd have been delighted to get to 80/50," climate point man Todd Stern said this afternoon. "We didn't quite get there. . . . This is a negotiation, and I hope we can get there down the road."President Barack Obama landed earlier today in this earthquake-ravaged region of Italy for a summit of the Group of 8 nations as his aides voiced confidence that leaders would maintain their support for economic stimulus strategies in the face of a global recession and said the best commitment that the United States could make on climate change lies with energy legislation moving through Congress.Obama, arriving in L'Aquila on a sun-drenched afternoon, was greeted by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the leaders of the other participating nations, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.L'Aquila was the site of a devastating earthquake in April that killed 300 people and crumbled historic buildings hundreds of years old. Obama was to tour the area with Berlusconi to survey the damage later in the day.Earlier today, Obama stopped off in Rome to hold closed-door talks with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano. After their meeting, Obama praised ties between Washington and Rome, calling Italy "a great friend" of the U.S.Obama said the two nations were working together to strengthen oversight of financial institutions and were "working hand in hand in places like Afghanistan to ensure that we're isolating extremists and strengthening the forces of moderation around the world."At his side, Napolitano said that the actions and initiatives of the first six months of the Obama administration "enjoyed a broad consensus in Italian public opinion." He also expressed hope that Europe would speak with one voice, to remain an influential force in world affairs.Security has been heavily beefed up for the summit. Police officers were posted on nearly every bridge overlooking highways leading to L'Aquila, about 60 miles outside of Rome.The Italian news agency ANSA reported that the nation's military had deployed 2,500 troops, Predator drone aircraft, a NATO spy plane and a Hawk missile battery to protect the leaders who will be both staying and working in L'Aquila through Friday.Michael Froman, Obama's point man on the G-8 summit, said this morning that there is a "consensus view" among the nations' leaders that "we are still in the midst of an economic downturn," and that world leaders were not planning any mass exodus from their shared plan to stimulate recovery.Leaders have said "it's time to prepare exit strategies," Froman said, "but not necessarily to put them into place yet."World leaders gathered in L'Aquila for a noontime luncheon and then a series of meetings on issues ranging from the global economy to nuclear nonproliferation and food security.Obama presided over a side meeting of the major economies with a focus on climate issues. That summit has suffered a setback with Chinese President Hu Jintao's return home to deal with deadly rioting in Xinjiang.But White House officials said that meetings today and Thursday still can be productive, and Froman rebuffed suggestions that the Italian hosts had not put together an organized session. He denied reports that the U.S. had called an emergency meeting of the summit's "sherpas" to take charge of the session."The Italian presidency has done a terrific job preparing for the summit," Froman said. "The Italians defined an agenda early on and worked methodically" on it."The way the G-8 works," he said, is "we all do our part."On the Chinese leader's departure, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, "It's our understanding that he's gone back to China, so it appears as if he won't be there to meet with the president, but we will have a delegation meet with their delegation."Asked about what the U.S. is willing to support as part of any G-8 commitment to combating global warming, Gibbs said: "The biggest thing . . . are the big steps that the House took only a week or so ago to put our country strongly on record as taking bold action against forces that are changing the temperature and the environment of our planet."The House has narrowly passed a bill demanding caps on greenhouse gas that industry emits, enabling polluters to purchase the rights for emissions from others to encourage the development of alternative sources of energy, such as wind and solar power. The measure faces a battle in the Senate, however, with Republicans criticizing a plan that will add to the cost of household energy bills over time as a "national energy tax.""There's important progress that we can make as a part of this in creating a market for clean energy jobs," Gibbs said. "So I think we've taken a strong step forward. ... Our biggest contribution to this is the steps that were taken by the House to put us strongly on record on this."Asked how the administration will define success on climate change at the G-8 summit, Gibbs said, "In many ways, success for us is going to be getting something through Congress and to his desk that puts in place a system, a market-based system that lessens the amount of greenhouses gases in the air."
But leaders of developing nations balked at the plan, according to sources who were present for the talks but asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak for the group.The major economies forum, which includes the world's leading greenhouse-gas emitters, will not issue such a joint declaration after its meeting Thursday, White House officials confirmed.President Obama's lead climate negotiator said the global standard is still on the table as the nations work toward a summit in Copenhagen in December and characterized the forthcoming MEF statement as "significant progress."
"I'd have been delighted to get to 80/50," climate point man Todd Stern said this afternoon. "We didn't quite get there. . . . This is a negotiation, and I hope we can get there down the road."President Barack Obama landed earlier today in this earthquake-ravaged region of Italy for a summit of the Group of 8 nations as his aides voiced confidence that leaders would maintain their support for economic stimulus strategies in the face of a global recession and said the best commitment that the United States could make on climate change lies with energy legislation moving through Congress.Obama, arriving in L'Aquila on a sun-drenched afternoon, was greeted by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the leaders of the other participating nations, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.L'Aquila was the site of a devastating earthquake in April that killed 300 people and crumbled historic buildings hundreds of years old. Obama was to tour the area with Berlusconi to survey the damage later in the day.Earlier today, Obama stopped off in Rome to hold closed-door talks with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano. After their meeting, Obama praised ties between Washington and Rome, calling Italy "a great friend" of the U.S.Obama said the two nations were working together to strengthen oversight of financial institutions and were "working hand in hand in places like Afghanistan to ensure that we're isolating extremists and strengthening the forces of moderation around the world."At his side, Napolitano said that the actions and initiatives of the first six months of the Obama administration "enjoyed a broad consensus in Italian public opinion." He also expressed hope that Europe would speak with one voice, to remain an influential force in world affairs.Security has been heavily beefed up for the summit. Police officers were posted on nearly every bridge overlooking highways leading to L'Aquila, about 60 miles outside of Rome.The Italian news agency ANSA reported that the nation's military had deployed 2,500 troops, Predator drone aircraft, a NATO spy plane and a Hawk missile battery to protect the leaders who will be both staying and working in L'Aquila through Friday.Michael Froman, Obama's point man on the G-8 summit, said this morning that there is a "consensus view" among the nations' leaders that "we are still in the midst of an economic downturn," and that world leaders were not planning any mass exodus from their shared plan to stimulate recovery.Leaders have said "it's time to prepare exit strategies," Froman said, "but not necessarily to put them into place yet."World leaders gathered in L'Aquila for a noontime luncheon and then a series of meetings on issues ranging from the global economy to nuclear nonproliferation and food security.Obama presided over a side meeting of the major economies with a focus on climate issues. That summit has suffered a setback with Chinese President Hu Jintao's return home to deal with deadly rioting in Xinjiang.But White House officials said that meetings today and Thursday still can be productive, and Froman rebuffed suggestions that the Italian hosts had not put together an organized session. He denied reports that the U.S. had called an emergency meeting of the summit's "sherpas" to take charge of the session."The Italian presidency has done a terrific job preparing for the summit," Froman said. "The Italians defined an agenda early on and worked methodically" on it."The way the G-8 works," he said, is "we all do our part."On the Chinese leader's departure, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, "It's our understanding that he's gone back to China, so it appears as if he won't be there to meet with the president, but we will have a delegation meet with their delegation."Asked about what the U.S. is willing to support as part of any G-8 commitment to combating global warming, Gibbs said: "The biggest thing . . . are the big steps that the House took only a week or so ago to put our country strongly on record as taking bold action against forces that are changing the temperature and the environment of our planet."The House has narrowly passed a bill demanding caps on greenhouse gas that industry emits, enabling polluters to purchase the rights for emissions from others to encourage the development of alternative sources of energy, such as wind and solar power. The measure faces a battle in the Senate, however, with Republicans criticizing a plan that will add to the cost of household energy bills over time as a "national energy tax.""There's important progress that we can make as a part of this in creating a market for clean energy jobs," Gibbs said. "So I think we've taken a strong step forward. ... Our biggest contribution to this is the steps that were taken by the House to put us strongly on record on this."Asked how the administration will define success on climate change at the G-8 summit, Gibbs said, "In many ways, success for us is going to be getting something through Congress and to his desk that puts in place a system, a market-based system that lessens the amount of greenhouses gases in the air."
New York Manhole Covers, Forged Barefoot in India
Eight thousand miles from Manhattan, barefoot, shirtless, whip-thin men rippled with muscle were forging prosaic pieces of the urbaSeemingly impervious to the heat from the metal, the workers at one of West Bengal’s many foundries relied on strength and bare hands rather than machinery. Safety precautions were barely in evidence; just a few pairs of eye goggles were seen in use on a recent visit. The foundry, Shakti Industries in Haora, produces manhole covers for Con Edison and New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection, as well as for departments in New Orleans and Syracuse.
The scene was as spectacular as it was anachronistic: flames, sweat and liquid iron mixing in the smoke like something from the Middle Ages. That’s what attracted the interest of a photographer who often works for The New York Times — images that practically radiate heat and illustrate where New York’s manhole covers are born.
When officials at Con Edison — which buys a quarter of its manhole covers, roughly 2,750 a year, from India — were shown the pictures by the photographer, they said they were surprised.
“We were disturbed by the photos,” said Michael S. Clendenin, director of media relations with Con Edison. “We take worker safety very seriously,” he said.
Now, the utility said, it is rewriting international contracts to include safety requirements. Contracts will now require overseas manufacturers to “take appropriate actions to provide a safe and healthy workplace,” and to follow local and federal guidelines in India, Mr. Clendenin said.
At Shakti, street grates, manhole covers and other castings were scattered across the dusty yard. Inside, men wearing sandals and shorts carried coke and iron ore piled high in baskets on their heads up stairs to the furnace feeding room.
On the ground floor, other men, often shoeless and stripped to the waist, waited with giant ladles, ready to catch the molten metal that came pouring out of the furnace. A few women were working, but most of the heavy lifting appeared to be left to the men.
The temperature outside the factory yard was more than 100 degrees on a September visit. Several feet from where the metal was being poured, the area felt like an oven, and the workers were slick with sweat.
Often, sparks flew from pots of the molten metal. In one instance they ignited a worker’s lungi, a skirtlike cloth wrap that is common men’s wear in India. He quickly, reflexively, doused the flames by rubbing the burning part of the cloth against the rest of it with his hand, then continued to cart the metal to a nearby mold.
Once the metal solidified and cooled, workers removed the manhole cover casting from the mold and then, in the last step in the production process, ground and polished the rough edges. Finally, the men stacked the covers and bolted them together for shipping.
“We can’t maintain the luxury of Europe and the United States, with all the boots and all that,” said Sunil Modi, director of Shakti Industries. He said, however, that the foundry never had accidents. He was concerned about the attention, afraid that contracts would be pulled and jobs lost.
New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection gets most of its sewer manhole covers from India. When asked in an e-mail message about the department’s source of covers, Mark Daly, director of communications for the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, said that state law requires the city to buy the lowest-priced products available that fit its specifications.
Mr. Daly said the law forbids the city from excluding companies based on where a product is manufactured.
Municipalities and utility companies often buy their manhole covers through middlemen who contract with foreign foundries; New York City buys the sewer covers through a company in Flushing, Queens.
Con Edison said it did not plan to cancel any of its contracts with Shakti after seeing the photographs, though it has been phasing out Indian-made manhole covers for several years because of changes in design specifications.
Manhole covers manufactured in India can be anywhere from 20 to 60 percent cheaper than those made in the United States, said Alfred Spada, the editor and publisher of Modern Casting magazine and the spokesman for the American Foundry Society. Workers at foundries in India are paid the equivalent of a few dollars a day, while foundry workers in the United States earn about $25 an hour.
The men making New York City’s manhole covers seemed proud of their work and pleased to be photographed doing it. The production manager at the Shakti Industries factory, A. Ahmed, was enthusiastic about the photographer’s visit, and gave a full tour of the facilities, stopping to measure the temperature of the molten metal — some 1,400 degrees Centigrade, or more than 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
India’s 1948 Factory Safety Act addresses cleanliness, ventilation, waste treatment, overtime pay and fresh drinking water, but the only protective gear it specifies is safety goggles.
Mr. Modi said that his factory followed basic safety regulations and that workers should not be barefoot. “It must have been a very hot day” when the photos were taken, he said.
Some labor activists in India say that injuries are far higher than figures show. “Many accidents are not being reported,” said H. Mahadevan, the deputy general secretary for the All-India Trade Union Congress.
Safety, overall, is “not taken as a serious concern by employers or trade unions,” Mr. Mahadevan added.
A. K. Anand, the director of the Institute of Indian Foundrymen in New Delhi, a trade association, said in a phone interview that foundry workers were “not supposed to be working barefoot,” but he could not answer questions about what safety equipment they should be wearing.
At the Shakti Industries foundry, “there are no accidents, never ever. Period,” Mr. Modi said. “By God’s will, it’s all fine.” n jigsaw puzzle: manhole covers.
The scene was as spectacular as it was anachronistic: flames, sweat and liquid iron mixing in the smoke like something from the Middle Ages. That’s what attracted the interest of a photographer who often works for The New York Times — images that practically radiate heat and illustrate where New York’s manhole covers are born.
When officials at Con Edison — which buys a quarter of its manhole covers, roughly 2,750 a year, from India — were shown the pictures by the photographer, they said they were surprised.
“We were disturbed by the photos,” said Michael S. Clendenin, director of media relations with Con Edison. “We take worker safety very seriously,” he said.
Now, the utility said, it is rewriting international contracts to include safety requirements. Contracts will now require overseas manufacturers to “take appropriate actions to provide a safe and healthy workplace,” and to follow local and federal guidelines in India, Mr. Clendenin said.
At Shakti, street grates, manhole covers and other castings were scattered across the dusty yard. Inside, men wearing sandals and shorts carried coke and iron ore piled high in baskets on their heads up stairs to the furnace feeding room.
On the ground floor, other men, often shoeless and stripped to the waist, waited with giant ladles, ready to catch the molten metal that came pouring out of the furnace. A few women were working, but most of the heavy lifting appeared to be left to the men.
The temperature outside the factory yard was more than 100 degrees on a September visit. Several feet from where the metal was being poured, the area felt like an oven, and the workers were slick with sweat.
Often, sparks flew from pots of the molten metal. In one instance they ignited a worker’s lungi, a skirtlike cloth wrap that is common men’s wear in India. He quickly, reflexively, doused the flames by rubbing the burning part of the cloth against the rest of it with his hand, then continued to cart the metal to a nearby mold.
Once the metal solidified and cooled, workers removed the manhole cover casting from the mold and then, in the last step in the production process, ground and polished the rough edges. Finally, the men stacked the covers and bolted them together for shipping.
“We can’t maintain the luxury of Europe and the United States, with all the boots and all that,” said Sunil Modi, director of Shakti Industries. He said, however, that the foundry never had accidents. He was concerned about the attention, afraid that contracts would be pulled and jobs lost.
New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection gets most of its sewer manhole covers from India. When asked in an e-mail message about the department’s source of covers, Mark Daly, director of communications for the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, said that state law requires the city to buy the lowest-priced products available that fit its specifications.
Mr. Daly said the law forbids the city from excluding companies based on where a product is manufactured.
Municipalities and utility companies often buy their manhole covers through middlemen who contract with foreign foundries; New York City buys the sewer covers through a company in Flushing, Queens.
Con Edison said it did not plan to cancel any of its contracts with Shakti after seeing the photographs, though it has been phasing out Indian-made manhole covers for several years because of changes in design specifications.
Manhole covers manufactured in India can be anywhere from 20 to 60 percent cheaper than those made in the United States, said Alfred Spada, the editor and publisher of Modern Casting magazine and the spokesman for the American Foundry Society. Workers at foundries in India are paid the equivalent of a few dollars a day, while foundry workers in the United States earn about $25 an hour.
The men making New York City’s manhole covers seemed proud of their work and pleased to be photographed doing it. The production manager at the Shakti Industries factory, A. Ahmed, was enthusiastic about the photographer’s visit, and gave a full tour of the facilities, stopping to measure the temperature of the molten metal — some 1,400 degrees Centigrade, or more than 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
India’s 1948 Factory Safety Act addresses cleanliness, ventilation, waste treatment, overtime pay and fresh drinking water, but the only protective gear it specifies is safety goggles.
Mr. Modi said that his factory followed basic safety regulations and that workers should not be barefoot. “It must have been a very hot day” when the photos were taken, he said.
Some labor activists in India say that injuries are far higher than figures show. “Many accidents are not being reported,” said H. Mahadevan, the deputy general secretary for the All-India Trade Union Congress.
Safety, overall, is “not taken as a serious concern by employers or trade unions,” Mr. Mahadevan added.
A. K. Anand, the director of the Institute of Indian Foundrymen in New Delhi, a trade association, said in a phone interview that foundry workers were “not supposed to be working barefoot,” but he could not answer questions about what safety equipment they should be wearing.
At the Shakti Industries foundry, “there are no accidents, never ever. Period,” Mr. Modi said. “By God’s will, it’s all fine.” n jigsaw puzzle: manhole covers.
Is a Coal Production Boom Imminent?
Though the price of coal has plummeted in the downturn and it is expected to remain weak in the near-term, coal markets “are ultimately likely to rebound with a roar,” Rick Navarre, the president of Peabody Energy, one of the world’s largest coal companies, was quoted by Reuters as saying last week.
His optimism may be well founded. Coal use tends to decline in a recession along with weaker demand for electricity and steel, which are industries that rely on the fossil fuel. But a number of reports this week suggest that the industry is already girding for a future boom.
According to a report by Bloomberg this week, Macarthur Coal, an Australian company that is the world’s biggest exporter of pulverized coal, plans to double production over the next five years.
The report also suggested that Australia’s Dalrymple Bay port, the world’s third-largest coal export terminal, may increase its cargo-handling capacity as producers of the fuel boost output. Macarthur is a big user of the Dalrymple terminal.
Meanwhile, demand is also set to soar in California, according to a new study released Tuesday by the advocacy group Environment California and reported by The Los Angeles Times.
Mr. Navarre said Peabody Energy, which operates mines in the United States and Australia and exports much of its coal to Asia, was expecting China and India to account for half of the growth in global coal demand over the next five years, according to the report.
In a separate Bloomberg report this week, Kaamil Fareed, a senior trading manager at the Coal and Oil Group, which supplies coal in India and Pakistan, said coal imports in India would probably more than double to 100 million tons by 2012.
And Coal India, the world’s biggest coal producer, is also seeking to speed up mining approvals, the reports said, to help it boost production to meet shortfalls in supply.
His optimism may be well founded. Coal use tends to decline in a recession along with weaker demand for electricity and steel, which are industries that rely on the fossil fuel. But a number of reports this week suggest that the industry is already girding for a future boom.
According to a report by Bloomberg this week, Macarthur Coal, an Australian company that is the world’s biggest exporter of pulverized coal, plans to double production over the next five years.
The report also suggested that Australia’s Dalrymple Bay port, the world’s third-largest coal export terminal, may increase its cargo-handling capacity as producers of the fuel boost output. Macarthur is a big user of the Dalrymple terminal.
Meanwhile, demand is also set to soar in California, according to a new study released Tuesday by the advocacy group Environment California and reported by The Los Angeles Times.
Mr. Navarre said Peabody Energy, which operates mines in the United States and Australia and exports much of its coal to Asia, was expecting China and India to account for half of the growth in global coal demand over the next five years, according to the report.
In a separate Bloomberg report this week, Kaamil Fareed, a senior trading manager at the Coal and Oil Group, which supplies coal in India and Pakistan, said coal imports in India would probably more than double to 100 million tons by 2012.
And Coal India, the world’s biggest coal producer, is also seeking to speed up mining approvals, the reports said, to help it boost production to meet shortfalls in supply.
Pickens Drops Plan for Largest Wind Farm
. Boone Pickens, the legendary oilman, has abandoned his plan to build the world’s largest wind farm, according to a report in The Dallas Morning News that was confirmed by a spokesman for Mr. Pickens.
The report states that Mr. Pickens will instead build a handful of smaller wind farms around the Midwest. Possible locations include Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Kansas and Texas.
The Texas Panhandle was to be the site of the original wind farm.
Mr. Pickens has said in the past that he had to delay his wind plans due to the financing difficulties that have hit wind farms across the country in the last nine months, along with a fall-off in natural gas prices.
The latest scaling back, according to the Dallas paper, is due to transmission constraints. Texas plans to build about $5 billion worth of transmission lines to help carry the wind from the western part of the state, but they will not go where Mr. Pickens had hoped. Originally, he had even planned to build his own transmission lines.
Meanwhile, Mr. Pickens has embarked on a round of media appearances to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the launch of his energy plan, which promotes natural gas as a fuel for cars – as well as greater use of wind energy in electricity generation – as a method of getting the nation off of foreign oil.
In an early-morning appearance on Squawk Box, a CNBC show, Mr. Pickens said that while the climate bill was “extremely important and all,” he was still focused on getting the nation off foreign oil.
“The security issue doesn’t go away,” he said.
The report states that Mr. Pickens will instead build a handful of smaller wind farms around the Midwest. Possible locations include Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Kansas and Texas.
The Texas Panhandle was to be the site of the original wind farm.
Mr. Pickens has said in the past that he had to delay his wind plans due to the financing difficulties that have hit wind farms across the country in the last nine months, along with a fall-off in natural gas prices.
The latest scaling back, according to the Dallas paper, is due to transmission constraints. Texas plans to build about $5 billion worth of transmission lines to help carry the wind from the western part of the state, but they will not go where Mr. Pickens had hoped. Originally, he had even planned to build his own transmission lines.
Meanwhile, Mr. Pickens has embarked on a round of media appearances to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the launch of his energy plan, which promotes natural gas as a fuel for cars – as well as greater use of wind energy in electricity generation – as a method of getting the nation off of foreign oil.
In an early-morning appearance on Squawk Box, a CNBC show, Mr. Pickens said that while the climate bill was “extremely important and all,” he was still focused on getting the nation off foreign oil.
“The security issue doesn’t go away,” he said.
Thin Ice the Norm in Warming Arctic
The thick durable sea ice that routinely cloaked much of the Arctic Ocean in colder decades in the 20th century is increasingly relegated to a few clotted places along northern Canada and Greenland, according to the latest satellite analysis of the warming region.
The following video gives you a fascinating view of one patch of sea ice through 90 days, provided by a webcam left behind by researchers who annually set up camp near the North Pole to check ocean and ice conditions up close. The new analysis, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research on Tuesday, is the latest of many findings supporting the idea that the region has shifted to a new state in which seasonal ice, which forms in winter and melts in the summer, dominates. This is the main reason biologists have concerns for the long-term welfare of polar bears, which have a harder time sustaining their weight and reproducing when summertime ice is thin. At the same time, the shift bodes well for shippers, like the German company Beluga, that have plans to start sending goods from Asia to northern Europe through the fabled, but long impassible, Northern Sea Route over Russia.
The study, conducted by scientists from NASA, the University of Washington and the California Institute of Technology estimated changes from 2003 to 2008 in the total volume and thickness of what’s called multi-year ice, the yards-thick floes that can persist through a summer (here’s some video I shot while standing on a mix of old and thinner ice in 2003), and seasonal ice, which can grow to 6 feet in thickness in winter but vanishes in summer.
For a look at how this summer’s Arctic sea-ice season may unfold, visit Sea Ice Outlook 2009, where more than a dozen groups of ice researchers are posting experimental forecasts of how the ice is likely to fare. There’s a strong consensus that the season will see much less sea ice than the average for the period monitored by satellites (from 1979 onward), but is unlikely to see the extent of open water measured in 2007.
The following video gives you a fascinating view of one patch of sea ice through 90 days, provided by a webcam left behind by researchers who annually set up camp near the North Pole to check ocean and ice conditions up close. The new analysis, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research on Tuesday, is the latest of many findings supporting the idea that the region has shifted to a new state in which seasonal ice, which forms in winter and melts in the summer, dominates. This is the main reason biologists have concerns for the long-term welfare of polar bears, which have a harder time sustaining their weight and reproducing when summertime ice is thin. At the same time, the shift bodes well for shippers, like the German company Beluga, that have plans to start sending goods from Asia to northern Europe through the fabled, but long impassible, Northern Sea Route over Russia.
The study, conducted by scientists from NASA, the University of Washington and the California Institute of Technology estimated changes from 2003 to 2008 in the total volume and thickness of what’s called multi-year ice, the yards-thick floes that can persist through a summer (here’s some video I shot while standing on a mix of old and thinner ice in 2003), and seasonal ice, which can grow to 6 feet in thickness in winter but vanishes in summer.
For a look at how this summer’s Arctic sea-ice season may unfold, visit Sea Ice Outlook 2009, where more than a dozen groups of ice researchers are posting experimental forecasts of how the ice is likely to fare. There’s a strong consensus that the season will see much less sea ice than the average for the period monitored by satellites (from 1979 onward), but is unlikely to see the extent of open water measured in 2007.
New Nuclear Plant for Ohio Pondered
An American utility and a French nuclear reactor manufacturer will study whether they can build a reactor in southern Ohio, at a moribund plant for enriching uranium, officials of both companies and the state of Ohio announced on Thursday.
The Portsmouth plant, in Piketon, Ohio, was built by the Atomic Energy Commission and ran from 1954 to 2001. The enrichment business was later spun off by the federal government into a private company, the United States Enrichment Corporation. U.S.E.C. is trying to develop a new kind of centrifuge to enrich uranium for use in nuclear power plants. But it has had trouble finding financing, and is competing against well-established companies that already use centrifuges.
Ohio officials, though, hope for a “clean energy park” with a reactor and the enrichment plant. Because the old enrichment process used so much electricity, the site has strong grid connections, and cooling water is available. It is also in a region hungry for industrial development.
Duke Energy will study the site with Areva, the French reactor vendor.
At the announcement, the chief executive of Duke, Jim Rogers, said, “We face the indisputable fact that our nation and our world are transitioning to a low-carbon future.”
“Today, with the creation of this clean energy park demonstration project, the partners in this alliance, the state of Ohio and our country, are edging a little further across the bridge to that future,” he said.
Some utility industry officials say they are unlikely to be able to build without federal loan guarantees. In 2005, Congress authorized $18.5 billion in loan guarantees that would cover 80 percent of the building of reactors, but that now appears likely to pay for only a handful of them. Nuclear supporters in Congress do not appear to have the votes to authorize additional guarantees.
But Mr. Rogers, in a telephone interview, said, “I’m confident I can fund it. Most of our fleet in Ohio, which is coal-fired, will be retired over the next 15 to 20 years, and we’re going to need to replace it, and this plant will be a good candidate to replace that capacity,” he said.
The plant would be built as a regulated generator, not a merchant generator, and state approvals will allow the company to begin collecting money before it is finished, he said. Duke is looking for additional partners. He would not specify a target price or a target date for breaking ground. “This is the beginning of the beginning,” Mr. Rogers said. “It’s a very long process to build a plant in this country but if you don’t get started, you won’t get it done.”
Anne Lauvergeon, the chief executive of Areva who was in Ohio for the announcement, said in a telephone interview that nuclear power was the only choice for reliable, low-carbon energy, but that the financing was an issue for Areva’s customers, not for Areva itself. The plant would provide 4,000 to 5,000 construction jobs and 500 to 700 permanent jobs, she said.
Michael Rencheck, chief executive of Areva’s American subsidiary, said, “There’s a very good workforce here, a solid, firm foundation of people that know how to build and construct big industrial complexes, as well as operate and maintain them.”
If built, the reactor would be one of a series of plants planned by UniStar, a joint venture to build Areva plants, formed by Constellation Energy and
The Portsmouth plant, in Piketon, Ohio, was built by the Atomic Energy Commission and ran from 1954 to 2001. The enrichment business was later spun off by the federal government into a private company, the United States Enrichment Corporation. U.S.E.C. is trying to develop a new kind of centrifuge to enrich uranium for use in nuclear power plants. But it has had trouble finding financing, and is competing against well-established companies that already use centrifuges.
Ohio officials, though, hope for a “clean energy park” with a reactor and the enrichment plant. Because the old enrichment process used so much electricity, the site has strong grid connections, and cooling water is available. It is also in a region hungry for industrial development.
Duke Energy will study the site with Areva, the French reactor vendor.
At the announcement, the chief executive of Duke, Jim Rogers, said, “We face the indisputable fact that our nation and our world are transitioning to a low-carbon future.”
“Today, with the creation of this clean energy park demonstration project, the partners in this alliance, the state of Ohio and our country, are edging a little further across the bridge to that future,” he said.
Some utility industry officials say they are unlikely to be able to build without federal loan guarantees. In 2005, Congress authorized $18.5 billion in loan guarantees that would cover 80 percent of the building of reactors, but that now appears likely to pay for only a handful of them. Nuclear supporters in Congress do not appear to have the votes to authorize additional guarantees.
But Mr. Rogers, in a telephone interview, said, “I’m confident I can fund it. Most of our fleet in Ohio, which is coal-fired, will be retired over the next 15 to 20 years, and we’re going to need to replace it, and this plant will be a good candidate to replace that capacity,” he said.
The plant would be built as a regulated generator, not a merchant generator, and state approvals will allow the company to begin collecting money before it is finished, he said. Duke is looking for additional partners. He would not specify a target price or a target date for breaking ground. “This is the beginning of the beginning,” Mr. Rogers said. “It’s a very long process to build a plant in this country but if you don’t get started, you won’t get it done.”
Anne Lauvergeon, the chief executive of Areva who was in Ohio for the announcement, said in a telephone interview that nuclear power was the only choice for reliable, low-carbon energy, but that the financing was an issue for Areva’s customers, not for Areva itself. The plant would provide 4,000 to 5,000 construction jobs and 500 to 700 permanent jobs, she said.
Michael Rencheck, chief executive of Areva’s American subsidiary, said, “There’s a very good workforce here, a solid, firm foundation of people that know how to build and construct big industrial complexes, as well as operate and maintain them.”
If built, the reactor would be one of a series of plants planned by UniStar, a joint venture to build Areva plants, formed by Constellation Energy and
The Green New Deal
The financial crisis has stoked widespread concern that momentum toward policies on climate change and sustainability is about to stall.
European governments are among those that are using the crisis as an excuse to ease back on the pace at which they had promised to tackle climate change.
Now, leading figures in environmentalism and conservation are fighting to make the case that saving the planet also will save the economic system.
Earlier this week, Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told me governments should consider requiring bankers and financiers to check whether their investments faced climate-related liabilities like pending lawsuits or legislation related to global warming.
Mr. de Boer said that loans that aren’t vetted for climate liabilities are just as vulnerable as the poorly vetted real estate loans for new houses responsible for triggering the current crisis. He said governments could implement the new rules when they sold many of the banks they have taken into public ownership back into private hands.
On Wednesday Achim Steiner, the executive secretary of the United Nations Environment Program, launched an initiative in London called the Global Green New Deal in a deliberate echo of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plan to tackle the Great Depression.
The New Deal “set the stage for the biggest economic growth the world has seen,” said Mr. Steiner. “Today we need similar vision, urgent action and strong political engagement to direct financial flows and manage markets to deal with the even greater global challenges of our time,” he said.
Mr. Steiner’s message is that massive government investment into industries creating jobs to tackle climate change is the same medicine that could help prevent a prolonged descent into economic misery and reduce bills for imported energy.
Other business opportunities include clean-tech ventures, sustainable agriculture, conservation, and the intelligent management of the planet’s ecosystems.
Mr. Steiner’s organization is proposing to spend $4 million on a study of these ideas, led by Pavan Sukhdev, the head of the global markets business in India for Deutsche Bank, with most contributions toward the cost of the study coming from Norway, Germany and the European Commission.
The research should be completed in two years, but it is a fair bet the final report will make the case that governments should invest more money in creating green jobs, as well as protecting forest lands and other parts of the so-called “ecosystem infrastructure.”
European governments are among those that are using the crisis as an excuse to ease back on the pace at which they had promised to tackle climate change.
Now, leading figures in environmentalism and conservation are fighting to make the case that saving the planet also will save the economic system.
Earlier this week, Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told me governments should consider requiring bankers and financiers to check whether their investments faced climate-related liabilities like pending lawsuits or legislation related to global warming.
Mr. de Boer said that loans that aren’t vetted for climate liabilities are just as vulnerable as the poorly vetted real estate loans for new houses responsible for triggering the current crisis. He said governments could implement the new rules when they sold many of the banks they have taken into public ownership back into private hands.
On Wednesday Achim Steiner, the executive secretary of the United Nations Environment Program, launched an initiative in London called the Global Green New Deal in a deliberate echo of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plan to tackle the Great Depression.
The New Deal “set the stage for the biggest economic growth the world has seen,” said Mr. Steiner. “Today we need similar vision, urgent action and strong political engagement to direct financial flows and manage markets to deal with the even greater global challenges of our time,” he said.
Mr. Steiner’s message is that massive government investment into industries creating jobs to tackle climate change is the same medicine that could help prevent a prolonged descent into economic misery and reduce bills for imported energy.
Other business opportunities include clean-tech ventures, sustainable agriculture, conservation, and the intelligent management of the planet’s ecosystems.
Mr. Steiner’s organization is proposing to spend $4 million on a study of these ideas, led by Pavan Sukhdev, the head of the global markets business in India for Deutsche Bank, with most contributions toward the cost of the study coming from Norway, Germany and the European Commission.
The research should be completed in two years, but it is a fair bet the final report will make the case that governments should invest more money in creating green jobs, as well as protecting forest lands and other parts of the so-called “ecosystem infrastructure.”
Buying Into the Green Movement
HERE’S one popular vision for saving the planet: Roll out from under the sumptuous hemp-fiber sheets on your bed in the morning and pull on a pair of $245 organic cotton Levi’s and an Armani biodegradable knit shirt.
Stroll from the bedroom in your eco-McMansion, with its photovoltaic solar panels, into the kitchen remodeled with reclaimed lumber. Enter the three-car garage lighted by energy-sipping fluorescent bulbs and slip behind the wheel of your $104,000 Lexus hybrid.
Drive to the airport, where you settle in for an 8,000-mile flight— careful to buy carbon offsets beforehand — and spend a week driving golf balls made from compacted fish food at an eco-resort in the Maldives.
That vision of an eco-sensitive life as a series of choices about what to buy appeals to millions of consumers and arguably defines the current environmental movement as equal parts concern for the earth and for making a stylish statement.
Some 35 million Americans regularly buy products that claim to be earth-friendly, according to one report, everything from organic beeswax lipstick from the west Zambian rain forest to Toyota Priuses. With baby steps, more and more shoppers browse among the 60,000 products available under Home Depot’s new Eco Options program.
Such choices are rendered fashionable as celebrities worried about global warming appear on the cover of Vanity Fair’s “green issue,” and pop stars like Kelly Clarkson and Lenny Kravitz prepare to be headline acts on July 7 at the Live Earth concerts at sites around the world.
Consumers have embraced living green, and for the most part the mainstream green movement has embraced green consumerism. But even at this moment of high visibility and impact for environmental activists, a splinter wing of the movement has begun to critique what it sometimes calls “light greens.”
Critics question the notion that we can avert global warming by buying so-called earth-friendly products, from clothing and cars to homes and vacations, when the cumulative effect of our consumption remains enormous and hazardous.
“There is a very common mind-set right now which holds that all that we’re going to need to do to avert the large-scale planetary catastrophes upon us is make slightly different shopping decisions,” said Alex Steffen, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability issues.
The genuine solution, he and other critics say, is to significantly reduce one’s consumption of goods and resources. It’s not enough to build a vacation home of recycled lumber; the real way to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to only own one home.
Buying a hybrid car won’t help if it’s the aforementioned Lexus, the luxury LS 600h L model, which gets 22 miles to the gallon on the highway; the Toyota Yaris ($11,000) gets 40 highway miles a gallon with a standard gasoline engine.
It’s as though the millions of people whom environmentalists have successfully prodded to be concerned about climate change are experiencing a SnackWell’s moment: confronted with a box of fat-free devil’s food chocolate cookies, which seem deliciously guilt-free, they consume the entire box, avoiding any fats but loading up on calories.
The issue of green shopping is highlighting a division in the environmental movement: “the old-school environmentalism of self-abnegation versus this camp of buying your way into heaven,” said Chip Giller, the founder of Grist.org, an online environmental blog that claims a monthly readership of 800,000. “Over even the last couple of months, there is more concern growing within the traditional camp about the Cosmo-izing of the green movement — ‘55 great ways to look eco-sexy,’ ” he said. “Among traditional greens, there is concern that too much of the population thinks there’s an easy way out.”
The criticisms have appeared quietly in some environmental publications and on the Web.
GEORGE BLACK, an editor and a columnist at OnEarth, a quarterly journal of the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently summed up the explosion of high-style green consumer items and articles of the sort that proclaim “green is the new black,” that is, a fashion trend, as “eco-narcissism.”
Paul Hawken, an author and longtime environmental activist, said the current boom in earth-friendly products offers a false promise. “Green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase,” he said. He blamed the news media and marketers for turning environmentalism into fashion and distracting from serious issues.
“We turn toward the consumption part because that’s where the money is,” Mr. Hawken said. “We tend not to look at the ‘less’ part. So you get these anomalies like 10,000-foot ‘green’ homes being built by a hedge fund manager in Aspen. Or ‘green’ fashion shows. Fashion is the deliberate inculcation of obsolescence.”
He added: “The fruit at Whole Foods in winter, flown in from Chile on a 747 — it’s a complete joke. The idea that we should have raspberries in January, it doesn’t matter if they’re organic. It’s diabolically stupid.”
Environmentalists say some products marketed as green may pump more carbon into the atmosphere than choosing something more modest, or simply nothing at all. Along those lines, a company called PlayEngine sells a 19-inch widescreen L.C.D. set whose “sustainable bamboo” case is represented as an earth-friendly alternative to plastic.
But it may be better to keep your old cathode-tube set instead, according to “The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook,” because older sets use less power than plasma or L.C.D. screens. (Televisions account for about 4 percent of energy consumption in the United States, the handbook says.)
“The assumption that by buying anything, whether green or not, we’re solving the problem is a misperception,” said Michael Ableman, an environmental author and long-time organic farmer. “Consuming is a significant part of the problem to begin with. Maybe the solution is instead of buying five pairs of organic cotton jeans, buy one pair of regular jeans instead.”
For the most part, the critiques of green consumption have come from individual activists, not from mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network. The latest issue of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, has articles hailing an “ecofriendly mall” featuring sustainable clothing (under development in Chicago) and credit cards that rack up carbon offsets for every purchase, as well as sustainably-harvested caviar and the celebrity-friendly Tango electric sports car (a top-of-the-line model is $108,000).
One reason mainstream groups may be wary of criticizing Americans’ consumption is that before the latest era of green chic, these large organizations endured years in which their warnings about climate change were scarcely heard.
Much of the public had turned away from the Carter-era environmental message of sacrifice, which included turning down the thermostat, driving smaller cars and carrying a cloth “Save-a-Tree” tote to the supermarket.
Now that environmentalism is high profile, thanks in part to the success of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the 2006 documentary featuring Al Gore, mainstream greens, for the most part, say that buying products promoted as eco-friendly is a good first step.
“After you buy the compact fluorescent bulbs,” said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, “you can move on to greater goals like banding together politically to shut down coal-fired power plants.”
John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, argued that green consumerism has been a way for Wal-Mart shoppers to get over the old stereotypes of environmentalists as “tree-hugging hippies” and contribute in their own way.
This is crucial, he said, given the widespread nature of the global warming challenge. “You need Wal-Mart and Joe Six-Pack and mayors and taxi drivers," he said. “You need participation on a wide front.”
It is not just ecology activists with one foot in the 1970s, though, who have taken issue with the consumerist personality of the “light green” movement. Anti-consumerist fervor burns hotly among some activists who came of age under the influence of noisy, disruptive anti-globalization protests.
Last year, a San Francisco group called the Compact made headlines with a vow to live the entire year without buying anything but bare essentials like medicine and food. A year in, the original 10 “mostly” made it, said Rachel Kesel, 26, a founder. The movement claims some 8,300 adherents throughout the country and in places as distant as Singapore and Iceland.
“The more that I’m engaged in this, the more annoyed I get with things like ‘shop against climate change’ and these kind of attitudes,” said Ms. Kesel, who continues her shopping strike and counts a new pair of running shoes — she’s a dog-walker by trade — as among her limited purchases in 18 months.
“It’s hysterical,” she said. “You’re telling people to consume more in order to reduce impact.”
For some, the very debate over how much difference they should try to make in their own lives is a distraction. They despair of individual consumers being responsible for saving the earth from climate change and want to see action from political leaders around the world.
INDIVIDUAL consumers may choose more fuel-efficient cars, but a far greater effect may be felt when fuel-efficiency standards are raised for all of the industry , as the Senate voted to do on June 21, the first significant rise in mileage standards in more than two decades.
“A legitimate beef that people have with green consumerism is, at end of the day, the things causing climate change are more caused by politics and the economy than individual behavior,” said Michel Gelobter, a former professor of environmental policy at Rutgers who is now president of Redefining Progress, a nonprofit policy group that promotes sustainable living.
“A lot of what we need to do doesn’t have to do with what you put in your shopping basket,” he said. “It has to do with mass transit, housing density. It has to do with the war and subsidies for the coal and fossil fuel industry.”
In fact, those light-green environmentalists who chose not to lecture about sacrifice and promote the trendiness of eco-sensitive products may be on to something.
Michael Shellenberger, a partner at American Environics, a market research firm in Oakland, Calif., said that his company ran a series of focus groups in April for the environmental group Earthjustice, and was surprised by the results.
People considered their trip down the Eco Options aisles at Home Depot a beginning, not an end point.
“We didn’t find that people felt that their consumption gave them a pass, so to speak,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “They knew what they were doing wasn’t going to deal with the problems, and these little consumer things won’t add up. But they do it as a practice of mindfulness. They didn’t see it as antithetical to political action. Folks who were engaged in these green practices were actually becoming more committed to more transformative political action on global warming.”
Stroll from the bedroom in your eco-McMansion, with its photovoltaic solar panels, into the kitchen remodeled with reclaimed lumber. Enter the three-car garage lighted by energy-sipping fluorescent bulbs and slip behind the wheel of your $104,000 Lexus hybrid.
Drive to the airport, where you settle in for an 8,000-mile flight— careful to buy carbon offsets beforehand — and spend a week driving golf balls made from compacted fish food at an eco-resort in the Maldives.
That vision of an eco-sensitive life as a series of choices about what to buy appeals to millions of consumers and arguably defines the current environmental movement as equal parts concern for the earth and for making a stylish statement.
Some 35 million Americans regularly buy products that claim to be earth-friendly, according to one report, everything from organic beeswax lipstick from the west Zambian rain forest to Toyota Priuses. With baby steps, more and more shoppers browse among the 60,000 products available under Home Depot’s new Eco Options program.
Such choices are rendered fashionable as celebrities worried about global warming appear on the cover of Vanity Fair’s “green issue,” and pop stars like Kelly Clarkson and Lenny Kravitz prepare to be headline acts on July 7 at the Live Earth concerts at sites around the world.
Consumers have embraced living green, and for the most part the mainstream green movement has embraced green consumerism. But even at this moment of high visibility and impact for environmental activists, a splinter wing of the movement has begun to critique what it sometimes calls “light greens.”
Critics question the notion that we can avert global warming by buying so-called earth-friendly products, from clothing and cars to homes and vacations, when the cumulative effect of our consumption remains enormous and hazardous.
“There is a very common mind-set right now which holds that all that we’re going to need to do to avert the large-scale planetary catastrophes upon us is make slightly different shopping decisions,” said Alex Steffen, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability issues.
The genuine solution, he and other critics say, is to significantly reduce one’s consumption of goods and resources. It’s not enough to build a vacation home of recycled lumber; the real way to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to only own one home.
Buying a hybrid car won’t help if it’s the aforementioned Lexus, the luxury LS 600h L model, which gets 22 miles to the gallon on the highway; the Toyota Yaris ($11,000) gets 40 highway miles a gallon with a standard gasoline engine.
It’s as though the millions of people whom environmentalists have successfully prodded to be concerned about climate change are experiencing a SnackWell’s moment: confronted with a box of fat-free devil’s food chocolate cookies, which seem deliciously guilt-free, they consume the entire box, avoiding any fats but loading up on calories.
The issue of green shopping is highlighting a division in the environmental movement: “the old-school environmentalism of self-abnegation versus this camp of buying your way into heaven,” said Chip Giller, the founder of Grist.org, an online environmental blog that claims a monthly readership of 800,000. “Over even the last couple of months, there is more concern growing within the traditional camp about the Cosmo-izing of the green movement — ‘55 great ways to look eco-sexy,’ ” he said. “Among traditional greens, there is concern that too much of the population thinks there’s an easy way out.”
The criticisms have appeared quietly in some environmental publications and on the Web.
GEORGE BLACK, an editor and a columnist at OnEarth, a quarterly journal of the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently summed up the explosion of high-style green consumer items and articles of the sort that proclaim “green is the new black,” that is, a fashion trend, as “eco-narcissism.”
Paul Hawken, an author and longtime environmental activist, said the current boom in earth-friendly products offers a false promise. “Green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase,” he said. He blamed the news media and marketers for turning environmentalism into fashion and distracting from serious issues.
“We turn toward the consumption part because that’s where the money is,” Mr. Hawken said. “We tend not to look at the ‘less’ part. So you get these anomalies like 10,000-foot ‘green’ homes being built by a hedge fund manager in Aspen. Or ‘green’ fashion shows. Fashion is the deliberate inculcation of obsolescence.”
He added: “The fruit at Whole Foods in winter, flown in from Chile on a 747 — it’s a complete joke. The idea that we should have raspberries in January, it doesn’t matter if they’re organic. It’s diabolically stupid.”
Environmentalists say some products marketed as green may pump more carbon into the atmosphere than choosing something more modest, or simply nothing at all. Along those lines, a company called PlayEngine sells a 19-inch widescreen L.C.D. set whose “sustainable bamboo” case is represented as an earth-friendly alternative to plastic.
But it may be better to keep your old cathode-tube set instead, according to “The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook,” because older sets use less power than plasma or L.C.D. screens. (Televisions account for about 4 percent of energy consumption in the United States, the handbook says.)
“The assumption that by buying anything, whether green or not, we’re solving the problem is a misperception,” said Michael Ableman, an environmental author and long-time organic farmer. “Consuming is a significant part of the problem to begin with. Maybe the solution is instead of buying five pairs of organic cotton jeans, buy one pair of regular jeans instead.”
For the most part, the critiques of green consumption have come from individual activists, not from mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network. The latest issue of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, has articles hailing an “ecofriendly mall” featuring sustainable clothing (under development in Chicago) and credit cards that rack up carbon offsets for every purchase, as well as sustainably-harvested caviar and the celebrity-friendly Tango electric sports car (a top-of-the-line model is $108,000).
One reason mainstream groups may be wary of criticizing Americans’ consumption is that before the latest era of green chic, these large organizations endured years in which their warnings about climate change were scarcely heard.
Much of the public had turned away from the Carter-era environmental message of sacrifice, which included turning down the thermostat, driving smaller cars and carrying a cloth “Save-a-Tree” tote to the supermarket.
Now that environmentalism is high profile, thanks in part to the success of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the 2006 documentary featuring Al Gore, mainstream greens, for the most part, say that buying products promoted as eco-friendly is a good first step.
“After you buy the compact fluorescent bulbs,” said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, “you can move on to greater goals like banding together politically to shut down coal-fired power plants.”
John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, argued that green consumerism has been a way for Wal-Mart shoppers to get over the old stereotypes of environmentalists as “tree-hugging hippies” and contribute in their own way.
This is crucial, he said, given the widespread nature of the global warming challenge. “You need Wal-Mart and Joe Six-Pack and mayors and taxi drivers," he said. “You need participation on a wide front.”
It is not just ecology activists with one foot in the 1970s, though, who have taken issue with the consumerist personality of the “light green” movement. Anti-consumerist fervor burns hotly among some activists who came of age under the influence of noisy, disruptive anti-globalization protests.
Last year, a San Francisco group called the Compact made headlines with a vow to live the entire year without buying anything but bare essentials like medicine and food. A year in, the original 10 “mostly” made it, said Rachel Kesel, 26, a founder. The movement claims some 8,300 adherents throughout the country and in places as distant as Singapore and Iceland.
“The more that I’m engaged in this, the more annoyed I get with things like ‘shop against climate change’ and these kind of attitudes,” said Ms. Kesel, who continues her shopping strike and counts a new pair of running shoes — she’s a dog-walker by trade — as among her limited purchases in 18 months.
“It’s hysterical,” she said. “You’re telling people to consume more in order to reduce impact.”
For some, the very debate over how much difference they should try to make in their own lives is a distraction. They despair of individual consumers being responsible for saving the earth from climate change and want to see action from political leaders around the world.
INDIVIDUAL consumers may choose more fuel-efficient cars, but a far greater effect may be felt when fuel-efficiency standards are raised for all of the industry , as the Senate voted to do on June 21, the first significant rise in mileage standards in more than two decades.
“A legitimate beef that people have with green consumerism is, at end of the day, the things causing climate change are more caused by politics and the economy than individual behavior,” said Michel Gelobter, a former professor of environmental policy at Rutgers who is now president of Redefining Progress, a nonprofit policy group that promotes sustainable living.
“A lot of what we need to do doesn’t have to do with what you put in your shopping basket,” he said. “It has to do with mass transit, housing density. It has to do with the war and subsidies for the coal and fossil fuel industry.”
In fact, those light-green environmentalists who chose not to lecture about sacrifice and promote the trendiness of eco-sensitive products may be on to something.
Michael Shellenberger, a partner at American Environics, a market research firm in Oakland, Calif., said that his company ran a series of focus groups in April for the environmental group Earthjustice, and was surprised by the results.
People considered their trip down the Eco Options aisles at Home Depot a beginning, not an end point.
“We didn’t find that people felt that their consumption gave them a pass, so to speak,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “They knew what they were doing wasn’t going to deal with the problems, and these little consumer things won’t add up. But they do it as a practice of mindfulness. They didn’t see it as antithetical to political action. Folks who were engaged in these green practices were actually becoming more committed to more transformative political action on global warming.”
How Green Is a Nudist Vacation?
With summer upon us, how many green vacationers’ fancies will turn to thoughts of nudism?
Going without clothes on beaches and other vacation spots is commonly called naturism — a description that implies helping the planet, as some practitioners claim to be doing.
Spending more time with nothing on stems waste and pollution in all sorts of ways, according to an article by Kathy Blanchard on The Naturist Society’s Web site.
“Living more hours naked each day results in a dramatic drop in my laundry, which in turn reduces my water and energy use (along with my related bills),” Ms. Blanchard wrote. “It also reduces the amount of soap I release, in my case, into the Puget Sound.”
She also advocates naturist holidays — staying close to home wherever possible, to cut down on fuel usage — but sometimes traveling to places where it is possible to leave the car behind and backpack or paddle naked into the wild.
“For those few days, we use virtually no fuel, our diet is minimal with low ecological impact, and we return healthier,” she wrote, adding that the “trips are coolly green clothes-free vacations.”Where to go? France is already a top destination for “textilists” (a term some naturists use to describe clothes-wearers) but also seems to be one of the most appealing spots for vacationing in the buff. According to the tourist authority in the Aquitaine region on the French Atlantic coast, “ ‘green’ naturism is growing fast in popularity.”
Of the 1.5 million people who practice naturism in France, nearly a third come to Aquitaine, while “foreign naturists” account for more than half of vacationers in the centers and campsites across the region. (Presumably their fossil fuel use in transportation could cancel any climate benefits of going clothes-free.)
In the Swiss Alps, nude hiking in winter seems to be a growing phenomenon — although some locals are trying to outlaw the practice, as my colleague John Tagliabue wrote this year.
The prospect of winter raises another issue: for people going without clothes, global warming may have a fringe benefit. Michael Hewitt says in an article in the article in The Independent that a few nudists seem happy that the demise of winter may be in the offing. However, others may side with groups like EcoNudes, which believes that living in the buff has “a positive effect on global warming, climate change and society.”
Going without clothes on beaches and other vacation spots is commonly called naturism — a description that implies helping the planet, as some practitioners claim to be doing.
Spending more time with nothing on stems waste and pollution in all sorts of ways, according to an article by Kathy Blanchard on The Naturist Society’s Web site.
“Living more hours naked each day results in a dramatic drop in my laundry, which in turn reduces my water and energy use (along with my related bills),” Ms. Blanchard wrote. “It also reduces the amount of soap I release, in my case, into the Puget Sound.”
She also advocates naturist holidays — staying close to home wherever possible, to cut down on fuel usage — but sometimes traveling to places where it is possible to leave the car behind and backpack or paddle naked into the wild.
“For those few days, we use virtually no fuel, our diet is minimal with low ecological impact, and we return healthier,” she wrote, adding that the “trips are coolly green clothes-free vacations.”Where to go? France is already a top destination for “textilists” (a term some naturists use to describe clothes-wearers) but also seems to be one of the most appealing spots for vacationing in the buff. According to the tourist authority in the Aquitaine region on the French Atlantic coast, “ ‘green’ naturism is growing fast in popularity.”
Of the 1.5 million people who practice naturism in France, nearly a third come to Aquitaine, while “foreign naturists” account for more than half of vacationers in the centers and campsites across the region. (Presumably their fossil fuel use in transportation could cancel any climate benefits of going clothes-free.)
In the Swiss Alps, nude hiking in winter seems to be a growing phenomenon — although some locals are trying to outlaw the practice, as my colleague John Tagliabue wrote this year.
The prospect of winter raises another issue: for people going without clothes, global warming may have a fringe benefit. Michael Hewitt says in an article in the article in The Independent that a few nudists seem happy that the demise of winter may be in the offing. However, others may side with groups like EcoNudes, which believes that living in the buff has “a positive effect on global warming, climate change and society.”
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