President Obama has just signed an Executive Order that compels the largest consumer of energy in the US economy to invest in energy efficiency improvements to get to huge reductions in energy use by 2020.

Every Federal agency must measure, manage, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to meet specific targets by 2020. They have just 90 days to lay out a plan to meet these targets:

1. Use 30% less gas by 2020. Federal agencies buy 750,000 new vehicles every year. In normal times that’s almost 1 in every 17 vehicles sold per year. This Executive Order creates a rock-solid certain market for fuel-efficient vehicles every year from now till 2020.

2. Design all new government buildings from 2020 to be net-zero energy. Wow! Jimmy Carter might have gotten just a few solar panels up on merely one government building; The White House. But this means every new government building goes solar to cut fossil energy use to zero.

And they won’t just want solar power. They’ll need efficient windows, geothermal ground heat exchanges, efficient air conditioning, solar hot water heating, radiant flooring, tankless water heaters, great insulation… (and all this will take retrained architects, and doing that will take new classes, and those will need new instructors, who’ll need new suits…this is going to be a green jobs boom!)

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When WalMart finally unveiled their new Sustainability Index, I found the 15 questions a bit underwhelming. Especially, after all the press and fuss (you can download the questions from the WalMart web site).

For example, the first question, “Have you measured your corporate greenhouse gas emissions?” is so simplistic, that a yes answer could mean many things. Scope 1? Scope 2? Have they taken on the challenge of addressing the full supply chain?

GreenBiz.com offers some advice for getting the most out of the questions, if you are a Walmart supplier that is just beginning to think about environmental issues.

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So what do you do with them? You definitely want to keep them out of the waste stream, so obvious uses, like lining trash cans or otherwise using them for waste disposal, aren’t the best choices. You’ve got other options, though… and, as you’ll see, your choices for responsible disposal are expanding.

How to Reuse Plastic Bags

If you’re not going to pick up the dog poop with them, or line the bathroom trash can, how can you put those plastic bags to (re)use? Turns out there are quite a few upcycling options…

• Make a sweater… or a scarf: You crafty types can turn those bags into yarn… and then knit, crochet or weave with it.
• Fuse them into “cloth”: Got an iron and some old paper? You can make cloth-like crafting material out of your bags, also.
• Protect and store food: Making a trip to the farmer’s market? Put a few of those plastic bags inside your reusable one to separate and protect the food you buy. You can also use them for storage once you get your produce and baked goods home.

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SAB Ltd is the South African subsidiary of SABMiller which is the second largest brewery in the world .

Water Neutrality

In October 2008, Dr Deon Nel, Head of the WWF Sanlam Living Waters Partnership explained

“The concept of water neutrality, based on its carbon equivalent, has been used loosely over the past years; however, until now no-one has been able to quantitatively justify these claims. We believe that our scheme is the first in the world that allows participants to truly claim to be water neutral.”

Participants will replenish water supplies, by investing in projects that quantitatively supplement water supplies equal to their water usage.

Note: Water neutrality has taken on a form in certain areas that is significantly different to the process introduced here by WWF.

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]]> http://ecoworldly.com/2009/01/14/wwf-and-worlds-second-largest-brewer-replensih-water-in-south-africa/feed/ http://planetsave.com/blog/2009/01/06/nasa-says-cut-in-soot-emissions-would-slash-global-warming/ http://planetsave.com/blog/2009/01/06/nasa-says-cut-in-soot-emissions-would-slash-global-warming/#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:29:52 +0000 Andrew Williams http://planetsave.com/blog/2009/01/06/nasa-says-cut-in-soot-emissions-would-slash-global-warming/

Nasa scientists have told government’s that a simple cut in worldwide emissions of soot could lead to a dramatic reduction in the effects of global warming, as well as preventing hundreds of thousands of deaths from air pollution.

Soot contains black carbon, thought to be the second largest cause of global warming after carbon dioxide. Whilst airborne, it it spread around the globe by wind, heating the atmosphere by absorbing and releasing warmth from the sun’s rays. When it falls to the surface it also darkens snow and ice in polar regions or high mountain ranges, further reducing the Earth’s ability to reflect solar radiation.

Cutting soot emissions has a virtually instantaneous effect since it disappears rapidly from the earth’s atmosphere, unlike CO2, which can linger for hundreds of years.

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]]> http://planetsave.com/blog/2009/01/06/nasa-says-cut-in-soot-emissions-would-slash-global-warming/feed/ http://redgreenandblue.org/2008/12/08/epa-says-that-us-companies-will-pay-a-record-118-billion-on-pollution-control-in-2008/ http://redgreenandblue.org/2008/12/08/epa-says-that-us-companies-will-pay-a-record-118-billion-on-pollution-control-in-2008/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:35:25 +0000 Andrew Williams http://redgreenandblue.org/2008/12/08/epa-says-that-us-companies-will-pay-a-record-118-billion-on-pollution-control-in-2008/

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced that, as a result of its enforcement actions, U.S. companies will spend a record-breaking $11.8 billion on pollution control and projects to clean up the environment this year.

The EPA calculates that the moves will result in a best ever reduction in pollution of 3.9 billion pounds per year, nearly four times the reduction achieved during 2007.

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]]> http://redgreenandblue.org/2008/12/08/epa-says-that-us-companies-will-pay-a-record-118-billion-on-pollution-control-in-2008/feed/ http://gas2.org/2008/08/27/us-could-cut-fuel-use-50-by-2035/ http://gas2.org/2008/08/27/us-could-cut-fuel-use-50-by-2035/#comments Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:24:13 +0000 Andrew Williams http://gas2.org/2008/08/27/us-could-cut-fuel-use-50-by-2035/

A new report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Energy Initiative predicts that a 30-50% reduction in fuel consumption is possible in the US over the next 25-30 years. Initially, this will be achieved through improved gasoline and diesel engines and transmissions, gasoline hybrids and reductions in vehicle weight and drag. In the longer term, the study concludes that plug-in hybrids and, later, hydrogen fuel cells may begin to have a significant impact on fuel use and emissions.

The report, ‘On the Road in 2035: Reducing Transportation’s Petroleum Consumption and GHG Emissions,’ summarizes the results of an MIT research project that assessed the technology of vehicles and fuels that could be developed and commercialized during the next 25 years.

The research team assessed the effect of new vehicle and fuel technologies on the performance, cost and lifecycle emissions of individual vehicles. It then assessed the effects on the total on-the-road fleet of introducing these technologies using “plausible assumptions about how rapidly they could be developed, manufactured and sold to buyers to replace existing vehicles and fuels or to add to the existing fleet.”

Other key findings include:

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]]> http://gas2.org/2008/08/27/us-could-cut-fuel-use-50-by-2035/feed/ http://greenbuildingelements.com/2007/06/06/what-about-your-corn-footprint/ http://greenbuildingelements.com/2007/06/06/what-about-your-corn-footprint/#comments Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:37:54 +0000 Philip Proefrock http://greenbuildingelements.com/2007/06/06/what-about-your-corn-footprint/ Image Credit: USDA/Wikimedia CommonsAmericans eat a lot of corn. Sure there's cooked corn and corn chips and corn flakes and cornbread and the myriad other varieties found in the average American market. And, with the arrival of summer, there is now corn-on-the-cob (though here in the upper midwest: the sweet corn at the local supermarket right now is trucked in from Florida, not locally grown).

But in addition to its recognizable forms, where the corn is recognizable as corn, there are untold numbers of additional places where we don't recognize it, but where corn forms the substance of our diet. And most of that has been highly processed.

I've been reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan recently, and it has been a very enlightening read. One of the most shocking things to discover was just how much corn is suffused throughout the typical American diet.

Pollan enlisted a scientist at Berkeley to do a breakdown of the percentage of corn in a range of McDonald's foods. They found that more than half of the content of most of the items they studied (French fries were the only exception) was corn-based: "Soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French fries (23 percent). What in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of the mass spectrometer, to be a meal of a far more specialized kind of eater." These numbers seem unreasonable, until you consider that the beef and the chicken were fed a diet consisting mostly of corn, that sweeteners (particularly high fructose corn syrup), oils, and other food additives are manufactured from corn by-products.

Turning around the American diet to reduce the amount of corn we consume is not going to be an easy task. And it's not even necessarily a problem with the amount of corn that we eat as it is a problem with the way that we eat so much of the corn that we eat. Eating isn't even the only way we consume corn now. We're also putting it into our gas tanks as ethanol. In many ways, corn is emblematic of the larger issue of the industrialized, over-processed way so much of our consumption has been herded. More than anything, we need to become more enlightened about the wider effects of our consumption choices.

Corn is an energy-intensive crop to grow. It takes hundreds of pounds per acre of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce the glut of corn that becomes feedstock for so much of the industrialized American diet. The politics and complexities of government farm subsidies are nearly overwhelming, and certainly far beyond the scope of what I can write about here, but they are certainly a sizable part of the equation as well.

Along with trying to eat more local food and more whole food (meaning unprocessed or less-processed food, not the grocery chain), reducing the amount of corn in your diet is something to consider. From an overall green perspective, reducing your corn footprint could be one of the best things you can do. I haven't seen any hard numbers for it yet, but the advantages could be numerous. Reducing the amount of corn in your diet will help to reduce both carbon emissions and chemical pollution with farm runoff. And many of the corn by-products in food are sources of empty calories, so reducing the corn in your diet can also be a healthier step.

Cutting high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) out of your diet is going to be particularly difficult, because that sweetener has made its way into all manner of products. I started looking for bread that was not made with HFCS, and found it was a lot harder to find than I imagined. Almost all bread has HFCS high up on the ingredients list. One local store brand had a decent loaf that did not contain HFCS, but it was only sporadically available. More recently, a couple of the stores we shop at have had decent, store-label organic bread that is HFCS-free (organic HFCS is a virtual oxymoron, so organic choices are a good way to limit HFCS). But it's still in more of the foods I eat than I would like.

 

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