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.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
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.”
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