Green Daily

Yinglin Liu writes at Worldwatch about a the success of a recent government effort to drastically cut the use of plastic bags in China. It seems that in the face of a flat out ban on the bags, people find other ways to carry food and other consumer goods. It might help, too, that plastic bag waste is so prevalent in China that it has its own name: the white pollution. Four different government agencies have worked together on this ban, resulting in a set of guidelines titled the "Administrative Measures for the Paid Use of Plastic Bags at Commodity Retailing Places."

Liu identifies one advantage of living in a country where environmental decisions are handed down from above. He writes: "as pressures on the environment and natural resources continue to rise, it is better to have smart government policies that guide consumer habits, rather than waiting for the market to force these changes. Simply relying on the market and on individual behavior may bring too little too late." Hmmm... I think I've heard that somewhere else.

We talk a lot about greening our pets here at Green Daily, and the trend seems to be reflected at major newspapers as well. Over at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's pet blog, one blogger came up with a list of ten ways to green up your pet care. The column has advice for feeding your dog, making toys, and using green cleaning practices just in case Fido likes to drink out of the toilet. There's even an easy recipe for making your own dog treats.

I also find that my dog is very good at helping to break down cardboard boxes and tubes... and anything else that looks chewable. Even more reason to detox your home!

Today the New York Times says that the White House chose not to open emails from the Environmental Protection Agency about the toxicity of greenhouse gases. Apparently, the Supreme Court required that the White House determine whether or not greenhouse gases "represent a danger to health or the environment." When the EPA concluded that greenhouse gases are pollutants, according to the Times, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue decided that the report would simply remain unopened.

President Nixon created the EPA several decades ago to address the increasing concern about environmental pollution. But according to the article, "no administration decisions have supported the regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act or other environmental laws."

Some see the EPA as weak environmentally anyway; apparently it is not yet weak enough for this administration.

From Reuters comes news of a new device made by a company called Got Wind that allows the kinetic energy from dancing to charge your cell phone. The product will be introduced through British mobile phone giant Orange who will have prototypes at the Glastonbury music festival. The device is the size of a pack of cards and combines the user's movements with a series of weights and magnets to create an electronic charge. This is one way to approach the vampire power problem we all face from leaving our chargers plugged in too much.

I bet you can build up a charge faster dancing to disco than dancing to emo. Just a guess.

Jennifer Conlin writes in the NYTimes about a new trend in honeymooning: low- to no-impact, carbon neutral, and less wasteful post-wedding trips. Many of the honeymooners mentioned in the article were already interested in environmental and social issues, or professed to be, though they traveled to places like Kenya and Spain (to be fair the folks that went to Spain lived in England). It seems like one way to lessen the carbon footprint of a honeymoon would be to stay closer to home. Another is to follow in the very light carbon footprints of those who went on wwoofing honeymoons, working with the organization World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.

If there is any single event in a person's life that involves high levels of spending and waste generation, its the whole event of unifying two people for life; any way we can green that is a step forward.

Paris has done it again. Now, in addition to their bike sharing program, the city will have a green car-sharing program with up to seven hundred pick up and drop off locations around the city. The Autolib program will provide about 4000 electric cars in the city, which residents can use through a monthly subscription service.

The city in which I live now is only about a decade behind Paris; no bike-sharing, no car-sharing, and bike lanes that suddenly end in the middle of a busy street. What does Paris have that we don't? Oh, right--the Louvre, The Eiffel Tower, great food, and people who don't already own several cars.

I just wonder if the electric cars can keep up with traffic racing around the Arc de Triomphe.

From this weekend's New York Times Magazine comes an in-depth article that looks at the plastic content of our oceans.

Donovan Hohn looks particularly at cleanup efforts at Gore Point, Alaska, by a group called Gulf of Alaska Keeper, or GoAK. Hohn does an admirable job of explaining all of the different risks posed by this and all plastic pollution, from strangled seabirds to "poison pills," created when plastic polymers absorb dangerous chemicals called persistent organic pollutants--things like Dioxin and DDT. Those pollutants could then enter the food chain more easily--a chain that we sit on top of.

While getting to polluted Gore Point for debris removal is dangerous and difficult, you can find plastic trash washing up on just about any beach. I recently visited Tybee Island, Georgia, which has its own store of plastic and other human trash floating around the marsh and the open water where tourists go to swim and surf. What should we do about this? It will take more than a cleanup effort. At some point, we'll have to stop using the things that show up in these floating trash dumps: water bottles, plastic shopping bags, and just about a million other plastic products.

From Ecogeek, comes the most exciting news I've heard in a long while: there is a possibility that fuel could be made from kudzu. If you live in the South, you know that no matter what you do with kudzu-- cut it, mow it, shred it, eat it-- it will still threaten to take over first your yard, then your house, and it might cover you and Fido in the process.

Kudzu-as-biofuel would be about as efficient a producer as corn, according to the Ecogeek write up. A longer piece about Kudzu's biofuel possibilities was also published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, a place where all you have to do is walk outside to see the plant's amazing growth abilities.

NPR's Bryant Park Project touched briefly today on the latest environmental disaster to hit the west: a pine beetle invasion. You might think that pine beetles aren't such a big deal, but I used to work at the Forest Service, and the sheer amount of research done on various types of these beetles is mind-boggling.

Such an invasion can kill trees in large areas and mess up the lumber supply. BPP interviewee Elise Thatcher says that the lodgepole pines in Colorado are at an age (80 years) that is tastiest to pine beetles, and warmer temperatures in the area mean that there are fewer cold snaps which used to control beetle populations.

When NPR's The Bryant Park Project talked to Professor Kenneth Deffeyes about the effect drilling in Alaska might have on oil prices, he said (surprise) that the oil market (and its ups and downs) does not depend solely on the United States. This article is the first of a BPP multi-part series that will consider the rising prices of oil and oil production in the U.S. and worldwide.

Drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) --you know, where the polar bears live--would not make a big difference, says Deffeyes, because of the huge increase in demand on oil from China, India, and the Middle East. It would take at least five years to get the oil from ANWR he estimated, and when prompted, Deffeyes said that drilling in ANWR "might do a little" to ease oil prices. Or, we could use less oil.

Deffeyes wrote the book Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak and has worked in the past for Shell Oil, the U.S. Army, and Princeton University.

And by the way: when I googled "ANWR" the first two hits directed me to a dot org website whose tagline is "jobs and energy for America." The site promotes, among other things, "The American Independence and Price Reduction Act." Talk about doublespeak.

Today's New York Times offers an article by Allison Areiff about SB08 in Monterey, California. No, she's not covering this year's hard-partying spring break. This is the annual Sustainability Below the Surface conference.

Throughout the article, Areiff considers where we are now with green design and asks why things still have to have "whole-grain hippie-ness" to be really green (Or, why can't green products be more stylish)? She also touches briefly on greenwashing and the oxymoronic idea that making more green stuff will save the planet.

Her best example of good green innovation is Benjamin Pender's revolutionary idea of providing water not in plastic bottles but in unlimited-supply fountains in San Francisco's public places, which apparently was inspired by a trip to Paris, France. Pender's concept drawing, complete with water bottle refilling stations, looks cool, but shouldn't we all have picked up this idea in kindergarten?

Today Ecofriend tells us of a solar device allows you to recharge your laptop computer wherever you are (as long as there's sunlight). The device generates up to 12 volts of power and plugs into your laptop via USB cord.

The providers of this nifty gadget, Merry, Kawamura, Ganjavian, also offer a USB-powered water boiler, a purse that glows on the inside, and a set of eating utensils that fit on your fingertips. Also advertised is a trash bin divider--handy for keeping your recyclables sorted, but I wonder how long it will take folks to figure out that a sheet of cardboard would work just as well?

Has anyone tried any of these solar power options for laptops? What do you think?

This post is part of a series about environmental justice, or EJ for short. For a few in-depth definitions of EJ, visit the EPA, Justice Net, or the Sierra Club.

Here's a nicely written piece from Atlanta Magazine about someone who has been working on environmental justice issues for a long time; Faye Bush has, for years, been investigating the relationship between the high proportion of illnesses in her neighborhood in Gainesville, Georgia, and the waste dump that the neighborhood sits atop, along with several nearby factories.

This article also offers just one example of the intimate relationship between justice and environmental issues. The Newtown Florist Club, which now focuses its work on environmental issues, originally formed as a sort of charity to help buy funeral flowers for families in the area. Newton's mother was one of the eleven housewives that founded that group. Social, environmental, and health problems are so intimately linked that as soon as we begin addressing one, it seems that inevitably we start seeing connections to the other two.

If you really want to see what's going on in this town, take one of Bush's "toxic tours." You can do those in person or online--just don't drink the water.

From the New York Times' Dot Earth Series comes a report about a project where a consortium of concerned scientists, citizens, and businesses have created The Great Turtle Race (tagline: "They're going faster than you think." Ouch). This is the second year of the race, where nearly a dozen leatherback turtles are tagged and tracked as they move through the ocean. The idea of the race is to follow the turtles, via the website, to see which turtle first reaches the international date line.

A Youtube video is included at the Times article, as is a cavalier comment about the lack of turtle's usefulness to the world. The Great Turtle Race website doesn't comment on the ideal world ratio of snarky reporters to turtles, but it does illustrate pretty specifically how global warming will only make things worse for the turtles.

NPR's The Bryant Park Project interviewed their own correspondent, Robert Krulwich, today about the first World Science Festival in New York this week and its effort to make science appealing to the masses. A few items in the news might help with that as well, like the space station's broken toilet and climate change.

The conference attempts to put science in context for everyone: poets, accountants, kids, humanities majors-- really, everyone--using "art, music, dance, literature, dialogue and debate." The conference has a great speaker's list, including novelist Alan Lightman, journalist Charlie Rose, dancers, artists, business owners, and scientists galore. Events at the festival include talks on green building, sustainable cities, and even green consumerism.

Reminds me a bit of Beakman's World, though I can't help but wonder if one way science might be more appealing is if it was presented by someone other than a guy with a Lyle Lovett haircut and a tattooed rat.

Too bad the conference is only in New York. I can think of several other places where it might be more useful

Listen to the article here.