"It's amazing we have one very minor injury and that's all."
"We could see the explosions from here," Colvin said. "We saw pools of flames come up and we watched the billows of smoke. When we first went outside there was a distinct chemical odor, but now that the plume has risen higher, you can't smell it, it's not as noticeable."
Unfortunately, experts say, deciphering the labels of personal and household products isn't as simple as selecting organic produce. There's no standard, enforceable definition of a "non-toxic" or "environmentally friendly" household cleaner, says Urvashi Rangan, senior scientist and policy analyst at Consumers Union. Such terms don't provide consumers with any real guarantees about products' ingredients, she says.
There's no real standard for "natural" or "organic" cosmetics, either, says Jane Houlihan, vice president for research at the Environmental Working Group.
The Food and Drug Administration requires that cosmetics companies test their products for safety so consumers don't develop a rash or eye infection. But it doesn't require companies to study whether products contain chemicals such as endocrine disruptors.
These chemicals — which include preservatives called parabens that are found in many shampoos and conditioners — act like hormones and are linked to reproductive and development problems in infants, Houlihan says.
People use lots of water for drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, etc. The water footprint of an individual, business or nation is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual, business or nation.
Some facts and figures Visit http://www.waterfootprint.org to find out more or visit my water fact links below:
Water conservation facts http://neutralcleaning.com/Water%20Conservation.htm
Water facts http://neutralcleaning.com/Water%20Facts.htm
No, I don't mean cost, safety, waste, or proliferation — though those are all serious problems. I mean the Achilles heel of nuclear power in the context of climate change: water.
Climate change means water shortages in many places and hotter water everywhere. Both are big problems for nukes.
The Australians, stuck in a once-in-a-1000-years drought, understandably worry about this a lot:
Operating a 2,400 Watt fan heater for one hour consumes 0.01 litres of water if wind is the energy source, 0.26 litres if solar is the energy source, 4.5 litres if coal is the energy source, or 5.5 litres if nuclear power is the energy source.
Hotter water is another serious worry: (read more here…)
And a host of middlemen have sprung up to make markets in new financial instruments created by the proliferation of green-oriented subsidies and mandates. All these players are jostling to shape the new government rules to give them the bulk of the benefit -- and hit someone else with the bulk of the burden. Ultimately, the cost will be passed on to consumers.
Big energy burners are experimenting with ways to use fossil fuel more efficiently -- and to roll out supplemental fuels. General Motors Corp., for instance, is developing more hybrid gasoline-and-electric cars, a technology it dismissed a few years ago. ConocoPhillips plans to start brewing small quantities of diesel fuel from animal fat. Utilities are experimenting with a technique to turn coal into electricity that would shoot the resulting greenhouse-gas emissions underground instead of up into the air.
Alternative-energy producers are having a field day as new regulations and subsidies, and improving technology, make their power more attractive to investors. Hosts of new projects are springing up as Wall Street sinks money into everything from wind turbines to solar panels to ethanol. Credit Suisse Group just introduced a new "global-warming index" of stocks its analysts believe will benefit from the push toward lower emissions -- one of several new green-investment instruments from major banks.
Still, skepticism is warranted. A great green future has been heralded before -- and then it fizzled. In the wake of the 1970s energy crisis, Washington adopted generous subsidies for synthetic fuel and solar panels, the oil patch diversified into nuclear energy, and Detroit retooled to crank out fuel-efficient cars. Then oil prices fell back down, and those experiments fell by the wayside.
Two factors suggest today's energy crunch -- and resulting green interest -- may prove more enduring. Unlike the 1970s oil-price spike, which was due to the temporary supply disruption of the Arab oil embargo, today's oil-price rise is due largely to rising demand from the developing world, a trend many analysts predict will intensify. By 2030, annual global energy demand is projected to grow 53% above the 2004 level, according to the International Energy Agency. Even if governments adopt more aggressive policies to encourage energy efficiency, global energy demand would still rise 37% by 2030.
What's more, there's rising pressure to confront an environmental issue virtually unmentioned a generation ago: global warming. In 2005, European governments slapped utilities and some other big industrial sectors with caps on their emissions of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, which is produced when fossil fuel is burned. Now Europe is toughening those constraints. The U.S., the world's top greenhouse-gas emitter, is considering imposing a carbon cap, too. That would amount to a new tax on fossil-fuel consumption -- over time, a spur for corporations to make serious changes.
The financial flows in this green push remain relatively small for now. And they're competing against a huge, and cheap, installed energy base. But investment is growing fast. What follows is a snapshot of potential winners and losers as business tries to shift its green portfolio from the red side of the ledger into the black.
Read more from --Mr. Ball is The Wall Street Journal's environmental news editor,
treehugger.comHe backed down, but the Chicago Tribune suggests that will not be the end of the issue. "The fires in Southern California, the prolonged drought in the Southeast and the shrinking flow of the Colorado River, which feeds seven Western states, have underscored the importance of water supplies in rapidly developing regions and the determination of a handful of states to hold on to a resource they see as key to their economic future."
With fresh water supplies dwindling in the West and South, the Great Lakes are the natural-resource equivalent of the fat pension fund, and some politicians are eager to raid it. The lakes contain nearly 20 percent of the world's surface fresh water.
"You're going to see increasing pressure to gain access to this [water] supply," said Aaron Packman, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University. "Clearly it's a case of different regional interests competing for this water."
The Great Lakes states and provinces are trying to put together a water compact to protect the water, and it is, of course, an international issue. In a world where planning principles and logic prevailed, one would look forward to a reversal of the migration to the southwest as people come back north for the newly temperate climate, but no, according to an environmental lawyer: there is "no way for the Great Lakes states to prevent the U.S. government from taking the water if the federal government wants to do so."
"It doesn't make economic sense to send Great Lakes water to the High Plains or the Southwest, but we know the thirsty will be calling." Read full at Chicago Tribune
quotes from Prince Charles- "The simple fact is that combating deforestation is likely to be one of the quickest and most cost-effective means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions" -"Wood can be the perfect sustainable material; it sucks up CO2 and once cut, it holds it for the life of the building." a reader writes: " I was going through the feed today and noticed a story that made me think about the other. I don't believe that there is any contradiction here. HRH is talking about the burning of forests, particularly the rainforest, to clear land for agriculture (including palm oil plantations) or to use as fuel. There is also rainforest habitat loss due to illegal logging of exotic woods for architectural uses.
The architecture and construction we show on TreeHugger (and the wood construction we promote) is built from sustainably harvested forests, usually close to the location of construction. Our favorite woods are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) who say "In many forests around the world, logging still contributes to habitat destruction, water pollution, displacement of indigenous peoples, and violence against people who work in the forest and the wildlife that dwells there. Many consumers of wood and paper, and many forest products companies believe that the link between logging and these negative impacts can be broken, and that forests can be managed and protected at the same time. Forest Stewardship Council certification is one way to improve the practice of forestry."
TreeHugger suggests that one should Choose their wood wisely, and avoid phony industry-run certification schemes.
Pick the right wood and use it wisely and there are few better, greener building materials.
FROM mongabay.com
James Kunstler, for instance, argues in his 2005 book The Long Emergency (see Rolling Stone excerpt here) that after oil production peaks, suburbia "will become untenable" and "we will have to say farewell to easy motoring." In Rolling Stone, Kunstler writes, "Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." (No -- that distinction probably belongs to China's torrid love-affair with coal power.)
But suppose Kunstler is right about peak oil. Suppose oil hits $160 a barrel and gasoline goes to $5 dollars a gallon in, say, 2015. That price would still be lower than many Europeans pay today. You could just go out and buy the best hybrid and cut your fuel bill in half, back to current levels. Hardly the end of suburbia.
The 'Comments', not this article by the GRIST were great... http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/10/29/01347/293
"Comments on ..latest post: It never ceases to amaze me how informative and helpful Romm is concerning the science of global warming, and how incurious he seems to be about solutions. In particular, he obviously is not very interested in trains or walkable communities, and I don't just mean the occasional reference.
He obviously is not doing much reading on oil. $5/gallon by 2015 is also pretty funny, if it wasn't tragic, because it will likely be much higher by then. But the point [odograph] is not exactly what the price of oil will be when, the point is that we should be seriously considering alternatives to classic suburbia, which fortunately many contributors to gristmill do."
Research by the government's waste reduction agency, Wrap, found that one third of all food bought in is thrown away - of which half is edible. Wrap will claim that this discarded food is a bigger problem than packaging, as the food supply chain accounts for a fifth of carbon emissions and decomposing food releases methane, the most potent of the greenhouse gases. 'If we stopped the amount [of food waste] that we could stop, it would be the same as taking one fifth of cars off the road,' said Liz Goodwin, Wrap's chief executive. The campaign will urge people to plan meals, write - and stick to - shopping lists, make smaller portions, and learn to prepare and cook leftovers and food which is past its prime. Among the supporters is the National Federation of Women's Institutes, set up during the First World War to help women make the most of the food available. Read more from Guardian
Last week Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, called for a five-year moratorium on biofuels, saying it was a "crime against humanity" to convert food crops to fuel at a time when there are more than 850 million hungry people in the world. Read more by Andrea Hopkins
The sweet notion that making a company environmentally friendly can be not just cost-effective but profitable is going up in smoke. Read this monumentally silly article at Business Week but also look at the very good slide show, with their take on who is going green and who is just a greenwashing poseur.
Auden Schendler learned about corporate environmentalism directly from the prophet of the movement. In the late 1990s, Schendler was working as a junior researcher at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank in Aspen led by Amory Lovins, legendary author of the idea that by "going green," companies can increase profits while saving the planet. As Lovins often told Schendler and others at the institute, boosting energy efficiency and reducing harmful emissions constitute not just a free lunch but "a lunch you're paid to eat."
Inspired by this marvelous promise, Schendler took a job in 1999 at Aspen Skiing Co., becoming one of the first of a new breed: the in-house "corporate sustainability" advocate. Eight years later, it takes him six hours crisscrossing the Aspen region by car and foot to show a visitor some of the ways he has helped the posh, 800-employee resort blunt its contribution to global warming. Schendler, 37, a tanned and muscular mountain climber, clambers atop a storage shed to point out sleek solar panels on an employee-housing rooftop. He hikes down a stony slope for a view of the resort's miniature power plant, fueled by the rushing waters of a mountain creek. The company features its environmental credentials in its marketing and has decorated its headquarters with green trophies and plaques. Last year Time honored Schendler as a "Climate Crusader" in an article accompanied by a half-page photo of the jut-jawed executive standing amid snow-covered evergreens.
But at the end of this arid late-summer afternoon, Schendler is feeling anything but triumphant. He pulls a company sedan to the side of a dirt road and turns off the motor. "Who are we kidding?" he says, finally. Despite all his exertions, the resort's greenhouse-gas emissions continue to creep up year after year. More vacationers mean larger lodgings burning more power. Warmer winters require tons of additional artificial snow, another energy drain. "I've succeeded in doing a lot of sexy projects yet utterly failed in what I set out to do," Schendler says. "How do you really green your company? It's almost f------ impossible."
But failed to mention : Johnson and Johnson has proclaimed a 17% reduction in carbon emissions since 1990, based largely on RECs. Without the credits, the pharmaceutical giant has seen a 24% increase.
That's true . . . apart from the fact that Johnson and Johnson is not merely a "pharmaceutical" company . . . but it also fails to tell the whole story.
At first blush, a 24 percent increase in carbon emissions since 1990 does sound significant. And contrasted with the company's claimed 17 percent reduction, it almost makes J and J sound dishonest or hypocritical.
The City of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the newest LED City™, expects to install more than 1,000 LED streetlights beginning next month. The City anticipates a 3.8-year payback on its initial investment. The LED lights typically burn five times longer than the bulbs they replace and require less than half the energy. The LED streetlights currently installed in Ann Arbor are based on the New Westminster Series made by Lumec, Inc., which contain LED light engines from Relume Technologies, Inc. The light engines are based on the performance-leading Cree XLamp® LED.Full implementation of LEDs is projected to cut Ann Arbor's public lighting energy use in half and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2,425 tons of CO2 annually, the equivalent of taking 400 cars off the road for a year. Detroit Edison, Ann Arbor's local utility provider, will meter the new LED streetlights with the intent to gather sufficient information to develop new LED-based tariffs.
One of the reasons LED light clusters quickly became popular on traffic lights is because long-lasting LEDs reduce maintenance costs, increase public safety (no completely dead lights at rush hour) and avoid traffic blockages during maintenance. A similar rationale lies behind the increasing popularity of LED clusters in automotive lights. The advantages of LED street lights, similarly, are significant beyond mere payback on energy savings.
Via::Cree & Treehugger
On the heavily polluted town of Port Arthur, Tex.:
WOW- I think they have a ton of jobs for a guy who thinks like this in China...
Read the full story in Water & Wastewater News.
Rain and snow in rural areas of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States contain nitrate that has been traced to power plants and other industrial facilities hundreds of miles away, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study.
Although vehicles are the single largest emission source of nitrogen oxides in the Northeast and Midwest, distant stationary sources may have a greater impact on nitrate found in rain and snow, USGS officials stated. Link from Laura B.(www.lib.wmrc.uiuc.edu)
Contents of an albatross' stomach. . . R: A trapped turtle [An] enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii. Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been monitoring the Garbage Patch for 10 years. . . The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.
Built right, green schools are productive learning environments with ample natural light, high-quality acoustics and air that is safe to breathe.
Schools everywhere are going green, nurturing children while saving money. Get the facts and learn how you can make the case to build green schools.
(1% of the world's energy goes into the manufacture of chemical fertilizer - Source here).
...Forget about how you’ll afford gas to put in your car to get to work as declining production, increasing demand, and the devaluation of the dollar push us towards $100/barrel oil. What needs to be understood is that peak oil likely means peak food. About 17% of US energy use goes into agriculture. The food in the grocery store that you buy traveled a long way to get to you, and it was probably grown with fossil-fuel intensive fertilizers and pesticides. As of 1994, it took 400 gallons of oil and equivalents to feed each US citizen, and that number has probably gone up.
However, the bank finds that this rapid conversion of food to fuel will put increased inflationary pressures on food prices.
By the end of next year we predict food inflation will be running well over five per cent. As ethanol production rises to nine billion gallons in 2009, food inflation will approach seven per cent, its highest level in more than 25 years. ...like tortillas, but they are spilling over to other grain prices as farmers scramble to expand corn production at the expense of other crops. Grain prices are the strongest they have been in memory while global inventories continue to shrink to record lows.
—Jeff Rubin, Chief Economist and Chief Strategist at CIBC World Markets
Ninety-five percent of the ethanol currently produced in the US is distilled from corn. The Administration has set a target to raise ethanol production from a level of roughly one billion gallons a year in 2000 to 35 billion gallons a year by 2017.
Rubin notes that huge subsidies are needed to achieve these goals as corn-based ethanol production is simply not economically efficient—not even with $100 per barrel oil. The key reason is the huge amount of energy that is required in first growing and harvesting the corn, transporting it to the distiller, distilling the ground cornmeal into ethanol and then transporting it by truck and train to users across the country. These more costly transportation methods are required because ethanol cannot be transported in conventional pipelines.
These subsidies, worth some $8 billion in 2006, have stimulated the sector as ethanol production hit six billion gallons a year in mid-2007. At this rate of growth, CIBC World Markets expects the Administration's target will be reached by 2012, a full five years early. The report estimates that subsidies will rise to "a staggering level" of more than $25 billion when production reaches the 35 billion gallon target by 2017 or sooner.
By Mike Millikin greencarcongress.com
That's what the US Green Building Council Prez said about the new Aldo Leopold Legacy Center when it presented its LEED Platinum certification. "This building does things that people are dreaming about," said council president Rick Fedrizzi. "There are people out there saying, 'Somehow, somewhere a building will be able to do that.' This building is doing it today."
Celebrating the life of Aldo Leopold, considered by many as the father of wildlife management and of the United States' wilderness system, the Wisconsin building has an amazing list of features; Kubala Washatko Architects note:
-Underground earth tubes supply fresh, tempered air to the facility in all seasons;
-Wood was harvested onsite from trees originally planted by Aldo Leopold;
-the zero net energy building generates over 50,000 kWh of electricity annually.
There is lots of technical information on the site but not much about the actual architecture, and the website designer is so completely crop-crazy that I could not find a single decent picture of the building; the first picture is from the architect's website.
'The Legacy Center has a 39.6 kilowatt (kW) solar electric (photovoltaic) system on its roof, the second largest in Wisconsin. Our PV array consists of 198 panels and can generate 60,000 - 70,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per year. Each kWh equals the electricity used to keep a 100 watt light bulb lit for 10 hours."
"The design team thought carefully about the Legacy Center. They considered not only its energy efficient features and green design aspects, but worked meticulously through how the building would fit into the larger context of its local environment, the people who use it, and the landscape of rural Wisconsin: in short, the way the Legacy Center would inhabit its world."
"The pine trees Aldo Leopold and his family planted in 1935-1948 are a major building component in the Legacy Center. In the form of structural columns, beams, and trusses, as well as interior paneling and finish work, Leopold lumber is featured in all three of the Legacy Center buildings."
More information but not much in the picture department at:Aldo Leopold Legacy Center
James Lovelock, father of the Gaia Hypothesis and foremost representative of the OMFG we're all totally f*cked!!1! school of green thinking:
In Lovelock's view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. "The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia," Lovelock says. "How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable." With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes -- Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin. Read more from David at the Grist
| Read the full story in Environmental Protection.
|
Haase comments ...
Did heat, rusted plates doom bridge?
… authorities are analyzing what role the 91-degree heat on Aug. 1 might have played in increasing stress on the already-weakened L-11 gusset plate, which connected four steel beams located near the bridge's south end. Like the New Orleans levees that failed during Katrina, this bridge was not well-designed. In particular, it apparently could not handle the consequences of the cold and heat that Minneapolis is subjected to: (more…)
A little-known island continent of floating toxic plastic garbage, 
"The world soon will not be able to produce all the oil it needs as demand is rising while supply is falling. This is a huge problem for the world economy," said Hans-Josef Fell, EWG's founder and the German MP behind the country's successful support system for renewable energy.
The report's author, Joerg Schindler, said its most alarming finding was the steep decline in oil production after its peak, which he says is now behind us.
The results are in contrast to projections from the International Energy Agency, which says there is little reason to worry about oil supplies at the moment.
However, the EWG study relies more on actual oil production data which, it says, are more reliable than estimates of reserves still in the ground. The group says official industry estimates put global reserves at about 1.255 gigabarrels - equivalent to 42 years' supply at current consumption rates. But it thinks the figure is only about two thirds of that.
Britain's oil production peaked in 1999 and has already dropped by half to about 1.6 million barrels a day.
Has anyone in the state department reviewed a complete study of the groundwater table draw down from "bottled water" and corn ethanol production?
The state department should put the obvious correlation between increased corn ethanol and bottled water production water usage with national drought trends.
Overlaying national aquifer table draws from corn ethanol production and biomass usage locations over national drought maps based on the last five years reflect an obvious and disturbing trend...
Projected production of ethanol is 5-6 Billion gallons in 2007. "The production of which requires 5-7 Gallons of "very clean" water to produce PER GALLON" or 24-42 Billion gallons of clean water to manufacture.
Factoring in crop usage may push this number to 780 Gallons of water for 1 Gallon of ethanol. This number easily hits the trillions.
U.S. FUEL ETHANOL Industry biorefineries and Production CAPACITY
Ethanol Total Capacity will be 13,485,000,000,000 by 2010 - that is way to many 0's
Using a "conservative" estimate, this is Trillions of gallons of precious water.
Bottled water factories...are using more than 18 million barrels of oil and up to 130 billion gallons of fresh water a year to create 41 gallons of bottled water.
Opppss... there goes 89 Billion gallons of fresh water, because I was to lazy to use the tap or a drinking fountain.
i.e. national groundwater table draw down we are currently seeing.
Conclusion:
If they are trying, the real way to destroy the National Economy and cause a drought of biblical proportions, would be to "produce bottled water with ethanol".
Instead of using 18 million barrels of oil to make our pretty water bottles we take to soccer games, we could produce bottled water with ethanol that has a net energy loss of 20-30%.
This would take the energy of 23 million barrels of oil and maybe we could blow out 100 trillion gallons combining the two.
Oh wait, that IS what the nation is trying to do. Yikes.
See more data correlation and summary info:
U.S. Drought monitor
http://www.drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html
http://www.drought.noaa.gov
Water Implications of Biofuels Production in the United States (2007)
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12039&page=35
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12039&page=37
Ethanol's Water Shortage (wall street)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119258870811261613.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks
Ethanol Total Capacity and energy loss
http://www.ethanolrfa.org/industry/locations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_ethanol
Bottled Water Boom Has Environmental Drawbacks
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2007/May07/bottledwater.html
