There’s great info in this Treehugger article by our very own Jeff McIntire-Strasburg, and the NRDC has created polarbearSOS.org so you can get involved and stay informed about the reality of climate change as it relates to the polar bear.

Life as they once new it, is ending. And they never had the opportunity to see it coming…

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This holiday season meal planners have another good reason to choose locally grown food, according to a national conservation group. A new analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) shows that transporting foods shorter distances results in less smog-forming and global warming pollution.

“Many home cooks and restaurant chefs already know that local food is fresher and tastier,” said Dr. Gina Solomon, a physician and senior scientist at NRDC. “But there’s another good reason to choose locally grown food: it’s healthier for people and our planet.”

Most produce in the United States travels an average of 1,500 miles before being sold, according to NRDC. The distance traveled is even higher when food is shipped across the globe. “The typical American meal contains ingredients from at least five countries outside the United States,” said Solomon. “Those food miles all add up, and the result is more pollution, threatening the air we breathe and our planet’s climate.”

[...]

Consumers can prepare tastier meals while reducing pollution by looking for local foods with help from a new feature on the NRDC web site. They can look up their state and time of year to find out what foods are in season locally. (See www.nrdc.org/health/foodmiles/) For example, in Northern California in late November there are dozens of local foods to choose from, including almonds, artichokes, carrots and oranges. In New York State, this time of year is good for apples, broccoli, cabbage and turnips.

The NRDC web site offers other tips such as shopping for food at farmers markets. That’s not just good for the environment and public health; it also benefits family farmers, as well as the local economy. When shopping elsewhere the group advises checking labels to identify foods that traveled shorter distances. Another suggestion: people can ask their favorite grocery stores and restaurants to carry more local foods.

Happy, healthy holidays!

The paper industry is one of the biggest environmental bad guys in big industry. According to NRDC,

"The pulp and paper industry may contribute to more global and local environmental problems than any other industry in the world. Paper manufacturers reach deep into species-rich forests for virgin timber, razing trees, polluting waterways and destroying precious wildlife habitat. Pulp and paper mills that use virgin timber are major generators of hazardous air pollutants, including dioxins and other cancer-causing chemicals. And the industry is the third largest industrial emitter of global warming pollution."

The average American uses 741 pounds of paper a year. We can reduce this excessive paper usage by narrowing the margins. Changethemargins.com is a campaign to do just this. The campaign’s goals are to:

• Convince Microsoft to change the default margin settings in Microsoft Word to .75 on all sides. The more convenient it is for people to change their habits, the better chance there is that they will actually do so.
• Persuade five corporations to officially sanction narrower margins for all company documents. In this way, people will get used to seeing documents with this formatting as the standard, as opposed to the exception. Never underestimate the power of peer pressure.
• Challenge five universities to adopt narrower margin settings as the standard for their students and faculty, and include this information in their course guidelines.

Changethemargins.com has started a petition to Microsoft to change the default margins to .75" on all of its software, of which there is no technical reason for the current default settings of 1.25". It has been my experience that some printers do not like margins smaller than this, but you can experiment with your own printer to see how small you can make your margins. Here are some more astounding facts on paper from Changethemargins.com:

• It takes 17 pulpwood market-sized trees and 390 gallons of oil to make a ton of paper
• That ton of paper, when disposed of, takes up nearly 8 cubic feet of public landfill space.
• That public landfill is approximately 36% waste paper products.
• Each one million pages of paper not printed saves 85 pulp trees.
• Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper every year — enough to build a 12 foot high wall of paper from New York to California.

There are other ways you can reduce your paper usage in the office. Use the print preview feature to be sure that there are no errors in formatting before printing. Furthermore, always print double-sided, or use scratch paper when possible. I am always shocked to find the majority of the paper in the bin at the recycling center has only been used on one side. The little things do add up! Even a fraction of an inch can save paper.

What happens to the air we breathe when plug-in hybrids become commonplace in a few years? Are we going to suddenly need hundreds of additional electrical plants to make all that extra electricity for the power that is no longer being supplied by gasoline? Would wide-scale switching from gasoline vehicles to plug-in electric vehicles be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire?

A report jointly issued by the National Resources defense Council (NRDC) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) addresses some of these questions in greater detail. It is worthwhile to think about these questions as these technologies get closer to widespread implementation. Unintended consequences of increasing numbers of electric cars already include concerns about the very quiet operation of electric hybrids when their gas engines are not running, and the potential hazard these vehicles now pose for blind pedestrians, who have much more difficulty detecting the approach of these vehicles than ordinary internal combustion vehicles.

"Among study’s key findings:

• Widespread adoption of PHEVs can reduce GHG emissions from vehicles by more than 450 million metric tons annually in 2050 — the equivalent to removing 82.5 million passenger cars from the road
• There is an abundant supply of electricity for transportation; a 60 percent U.S. market share for PHEVs would use 7 percent to 8 percent of grid-supplied electricity in 2050
• PHEVs can improve nationwide air quality and reduce petroleum consumption by 3 million to 4 million barrels per day in 2050"

Keeping a few dozen coal-burning power plants clean, and adding extra equipment to further clean their exhaust output is far easier and more cost-effective than carrying out the changes necessary to clean the exhaust systems for millions of vehicles. Greater efficiency is possible for a fixed installation, like a coal plant scrubber, than is practical for any on-board equipment that a car has to carry around.

Generate more juice to power cars, and greenhouse gas emissions from power plants will rise, even as the carbon dioxide pouring out of tailpipes declines. However, it’s not an equal tradeoff, because even dirty electricity produced on a grand scale is cleaner than running millions of internal-combustion engines. According to the 2006 DOE study, switching to PHEVs would yield an average net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 27 percent per car. In California, which has the country’s cleanest electric-generation system, the figure would be 40 percent. (Popular Mechanics)

Some additional electricity will neeed to be generated to offset transmission losses from electricity traveling through wires, but that is balanced somewhat by the reduction of tanker trucks needed to deliver gasoline from refineries to fueling stations across the country (a transmission loss in petroleum fuel, as it were). Recharging of plug-in vehicles will most likely take place in the evening, when electrical demand is already off-peak. With very little extra equipment, intelligent recharging can be timed to take place when demand on the grid is lowest.

Rewiring existing garages with adequate electrical service to be able to supply the vehicles without causing a household fire hazard may be one of the biggest hurdles to overcome for many plug-in hybrid owners. Existing wiring may be only marginal for vehicle recharging in many cases.

The likely outcome of increasing numbers of plug-in hybrids (and other electric vehicles) seems likely to be a net environmental positive.

Cross-posted at EcoGeek.org

Link: NRDC press release
via: Popular Mechanics

It would take a book to chronicle the eco-disaster that is the Bush Administration, and thankfully Robert F. Kennedy Jr. already wrote that book. If you're looking for a laundry list of Bush's environmental misdeeds, the NRDC can help with that, too. Here, we'll take a look at just a few of Bush's worst environmental offenses:

• The Kyoto Protocol - Even after promising to regulate carbon emissions in his 2000 campaign, Bush promptly pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto Treaty shortly after taking office. Sure, Kyoto is flawed in some ways and would have required industrialized countries like the United States to re-prioritize and take immediate steps toward emissions reductions and renewable energy development. That was the point, wasn't it? But Bush didn't work to make the adjustments that would have made Kyoto a better and fairer agreement. He simply took his ball and went home.

• Cheney's Energy Task Force - In 2001, President Bush formed a task force to help him develop a national energy policy and appointed Vice President Cheney to head it. Their meetings were held in secret and most of the participants were not disclosed. Though many of the Task Force's documents have yet to be released completely uncensored, it is known that several of Bush and Cheney's old oil friends, including Enron's top brass, were influential contributors. It is also known that the Task Force's final recommendations heavily favored oil, gas, and coal companies. The Nation reported in 2002:

When Cheney and [Enron CEO Kenneth] Lay met in April 2001, Lay handed Cheney a three-page "wish list" of corporate recommendations. Representative Henry Waxman, the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, ordered an analysis of the memo against the final report of the task force; it shows that the group adopted all or significant portions of the recommendations in seven of eight policy areas. Seventeen policies sought by Enron or that clearly benefit the company… were included.

The results of those recommendations are still Bush Administration policy today, which is no doubt why Bush and Cheney have fought so hard over the years to keep the full, uncensored records of the Task Force unavailable for public consumption.

• Renewable Energy Research and Development - This one is easy: Bush constantly uses the State of the Union address or other high-profile events to promote the idea of increased funding for renewable and clean energy, and then cuts that funding time and time again. This type of behavior inspired a popular book by the next Senator from Minnesota.

• Clear Skies, Healthy Forests - It's not just the condescending Orwellian language that has pushed progressive environmentalists to new heights of indignation, but also the genuinely awful policy changes that proposals like the Clear Skies initiative and the Healthy Forests Act reflect. "Clear Skies" does nothing to combat global warming and weakens a variety of existing laws and regulations on air pollutants. "Healthy Forests" takes the idea that no trees equals no forest fires and lets logging companies run with it.

These are just a few of the blights on the Bush enviro-record. There are many more. I invite you to use the comments below discuss which of Bush's crimes against nature make your head spin the most.

The response from the right to many progressive criticisms of Bush's environmental record usually takes the form of, "It's the economy, stupid!" There are two basic flaws with the "economy above all" argument. First, why is it assumed that the investments made in renewable energy technology, pollution reduction, (actually) healthy ecosystems, and so on, will result in no return on investment? We aren't talking about the Star Wars Missile Defense system. In the long run, green investments will pay off far more than building another coal-fired power plant or drilling another oil well in ANWR. We can grow the GDP without sacrificing the future. It's the sustainable economy, stupid!

Second, if you'll excuse my bleeding heart, what meaning does "strong economy" have if, in a generation from now, kids are fighting wars over the last reserves of drinkable water and smoking the equivalent of three packs of cigarettes a day just breathing? Sometimes the invisible hand has an equally invisible relevance. That is a concept that George W. Bush seems unable or unwilling to grasp even at its most fundamental level, and that inhumane, myopic view is clearly reflected by his almost total lack of genuine leadership on environmental issues.

Want to discuss Ryan and Jimmy's posts further? Visit the Red, Green and Blue discussion forum.

They did, however, help continute the "debate" on carbon dioxide's connection to rising global temperatures. CO2 may be necessary for life, but too much of it causes global warming. Really, it does! Look:

No, it isn't proof. Scientists don't often speak in the language of proof and absolute truths. With that said, the above variation of a graph developed and published in the journal Nature by J.R. Petit in 1999 shows a striking correlation between the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and temperature over the last 450,000 years. The graph also shows that the earth does a lot of its own regulating of both CO2 and temperature, a truth that climate change and CO2 connection skeptics are all too eager to point out. Fair enough, but in that entire 450,000 year span, CO2 parts per million levels were never above 300. Today, atmospheric CO2 concentration has surpassed 380 ppm, and is climbing rapidly (think Al Gore riding the lift up to the top of the screen in An Inconvenient Truth).

Will the temperature line in the graph follow the CO2 line's lead? The earth hasn't needed this degree of self-regulation for at least 800,000 years. Worse still, we haven't yet experienced the full consequences of this astonishing carbon dioxide concentration.

It isn't just me and Al who say so. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report confirmed the CO2 connection and the human responsibility for the dramatic increase in its atmospheric levels. They concluded (PDF):

Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.

"Very likely" is defined as a greater than 90% probability. As summarized in the UK's Independent, the IPCC also reported:

The target for stabilising CO2 levels in the atmosphere which some scientists and politicians increasingly hope to aim for - an upper limit of 550 parts per million - would probably involve a rise of 3C, perhaps one as high as 4.5C, and almost certainly no lower than 1.5C, the report says.

But a 3C rise would bring about enormous damage to agriculture, weather patterns and ecosystems across the world with catastrophic effects on human society.

The figure of 550ppm represents a doubling of atmospheric CO2 compared with the level pertaining before the Industrial Revolution. The current CO2 level is about 382ppm, having risen from 315ppm 50 years ago, and is rising by more than 2ppm annually, with the rate increasing.

The IPCC, a collection of more than 2000 of the world's top climate scientists, concluded without reservation that climate change is happening, that humans are responsible, and that emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is one significant culprit. But can their findings really be trusted? The NRDC writes:

• Overall, the IPCC report will include work from more than 2,000 scientists appointed by more than 130 countries…

• The process is rigorous, based on open and transparent peer review.

• The Summary for Policymakers is reviewed line-by-line by scientists and government experts to ensure that it is a completely accurate reflection of the detailed scientific findings and that all comments have been fully considered.

• The IPCC brings fresh eyes to the issue — 75 percent of Fourth Assessment Report writers were not involved in the Third Assessment.

Now that we all agree that carbon dioxide is a major contributor to climate change, I know what your next question will be: "But what about the much discussed 'issue' of 'global warming' on SUV-free Mars?" Well, unless you're planning on buying a timeshare there, it's not much of an issue at all. More importantly, that globe isn't really warming, at least not in terms that have any parallel here on earth.

Some warming has been observed over the past 30 years, but it is largely confined to Mars's South Pole Cap region. To the extent that any truly "global" warming has occurred on Mars in recent years, it is a warming trend with decidedly unearthly roots. Mars's climate, unlike the earth's, is highly sensitive to immense dust storms. When these storms are active, the dust absorbs the sun's heat and warms the thin Martian atmosphere. When the storms aren't active, no such warming happens. Massive dust storms are not a cause of global warming or much of anything else on earth, making the comparison of the two planets' climate mechanisms crude at best and grossly misleading at worst.

Coming back to our little blue world, it is important to remember that carbon dioxide is not the only cause of global climate change. Other greenhouse gasses like nitrous oxide and methane are intense heat trappers as well, and their levels have also increased dramatically in the earth's atmosphere in the Industrial Age.

It's not just gasses, either. A variety of feedback loops also intensify warming trends. For instance, ice at the poles does our planet the great service of bouncing sunlight away from the surface and back out into space. When this ice melts, however, the (no longer white) water molecules absorb the sun's heat instead of radiating it away. The oceans warm. More ice melts. More heat is absorbed… Vicious, isn't it?

That viciousness is why we need to take immediate steps to curb carbon emissions and other climate change triggers. Mandatory carbon caps? Market-based carbon reduction incentives? Individual carbon taxes (while reducing personal income taxes)? I'm for it. All of it.

Now.

Temperature and CO2 image credit: Woods Hole Research Center

Want to discuss Ryan and Jimmy's posts? Leave a comment, or go to the Red, Grenn, and Blue discussion forum.

In association with the Stop Global Warming Virtual March (started by An Inconvenient Truth Producer, Laurie David), the NRDC (National Resource Defense Council) has released a new slick website that encourages each one of us to get involved and 'Beat The Heat.'

How's it work? Well, you simply enter in your name, where you live, what you're passionate about, and BAM!, you're on the map. There are several ways you committ yourself to helping — from buying energy efficient appliances to purchasing a hybrid to encouraging your state government to 'become a part of the solution'.

The site does a nice job of analyzing the severity of climate change from a practical view of 30,000 ft. For any friends or relatives still on the fence about the issue, such information is particularly helpful. For the committed environmentalist, there's a helpful form you can fill out to send to congress asking for support. The email specifically asks members to co-sponsor the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act of 2007 — which caps greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the Bush Administration still refuses to go near such restrictions so it will be interesting to see how well the legislation fares.

So, check out the site — and get your name up there! The more involved, the better!

Link: Beat The Heat!

Energy Star

The last specifications were issued back in 1992 - ancient in computer years - garnering at least 90% of PCs on the market today the Energy Star label. The new specifications, due out in July, are aimed at power supply efficiency and idle power consumption.

The Natural Resources Defense Council helped Energy Star come up with the new standards. And they're not just stopping at computers - the increasingly popular flat screen tvs are getting their own set of Energy Star specdifications.

Via CNET