Green Options

In the midst of a week when climate change finally stole back some of the spotlight that had been hogged by health care reform for months, the Senate fought off a potentially devastating attempt to emasculate the EPA and its recently won power to regulate greenhouse gases.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Thursday, April 23, at SolveClimate.

California regulators tonight approved the world’s first low-carbon fuel standard, a bold set of performance-based fuel rules that are being closely watched in more than a dozen other states and countries, as well as in Washington.

Many of the program’s details are still in flux, to be worked out by the Air Resources Board before the standard takes effect in 2012.

The goal was clear, though: achieve a 10 percent reduction in the carbon intensity of transportation fuels by 2020. Fully implemented, California’s LCFS is expected to cut those emissions by 15 million metric tons a year.

“The big picture is we want to incentivize the use of electricity for vehicles. … We want to incentivize innovation,” said Air Resources Board member Daniel Sperling.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on April 22, 2009 at the Eco-Libris blog.

Happy Earth Day everyone!

We wanted to write a special post for Earth Day and fortunately we have great news to report: The Book Industry Environmental Council announced last week it has set goals for cutting the U.S. book industry’s greenhouse gas emissions in 20% by 2020 (from a 2006 baseline) with the intent of achieving an 80% reduction by 2050.

This is very exciting news and as the Council pointed out in its press release, this industry-wide commitment is a global first in publishing and hence has tremendous importance.

Because of the importance of this move and its implications for the book industry, we thought it’s important to take closer look at it and analyze it from strategic and operational points of view. Hopefully later on we’ll also bring you an interview with one of the Council’s leaders.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Friday, April 17, at SolveClimate.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced today that she has determined that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to the public health and welfare. The next step is a 60-day comment period, but once that endangerment finding becomes official, it will mark a fundamental shift in how the United States addresses human sources of climate change.

So how did we get here?

The endangerment finding directly stems from the Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, but it has roots that go back more than a decade to a most unexpected source: The mouth of former Republican representative Tom Delay of Texas.

The news about octuplet mom Nadya Suleman raises serious concerns about medical ethics, profit motive, regulation, and oversight in the fertility industry. According to the CDC, 80 percent of U.S. fertility clinics don’t follow the embryo implant guidelines established in 1999 by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, and it turns out that the entire industry is self regulated.

“Assisted reproduction is a multibillion-dollar business. Like other commercial enterprises, it needs rules.” - Marcy Darnovsky, of the Center for Genetics and Society in Oakland.

In response to the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice in the last thirty years, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council has unanimously voted to prohibit fishing in nearly 200,000 square miles of Arctic waters.

A team of Taiwanese researchers has combined industrial wastewater and petroleum oil to make a new fuel that could largely eliminate the costly treatment of industrial air emissions from boilers, is an environmentally-friendly way to treat industrial wastewater, and could increase fuel efficiency by 14%.

Worldwide, many industrial processes depend on steam boilers that are powered by what’s called heavy fuel oil (HFO). In the US, where coal and natural gas are plentiful, boilers are not typically run on HFO, but many homes in the Northeast US are still heated with furnaces that use HFO. These boilers are notorious for spewing out toxins into the environment when untreated.

ExxonMobil, which has been hit before with environmental charges, will pay a $6.1 million penalty for failing to comply with pollution regulations in refineries in California, Louisiana and Texas. The company had agreed to reduce pollution in four refineries in those states, but came up short.

This post is by Environmental Defense Fund scientist Tim Fitzgerald.

The recent The New York Times story about two high school students who did DNA testing on fish shines a light once again on one of the seafood industry’s dirty little secrets — fish fraud. They found that one fourth of 60 samples of seafood taken in New York City restaurants and seafood markets were mislabeled.

But with lax FDA regulations and virtually no enforcement, the practice is more common than one would hope. In recent years, there have been numerous reports of fraud occurring around the country. Three years ago, a Times investigation also found that fish sold as wild Alaskan salmon by high-end New York City markets was mostly cheaper farm-raised salmon, selling for as much as $29 a pound. (See my previous post Plenty of Safe, Eco-Friendly Fish in the Sea.)

The U.S. Food Drug and Drug Administration, which oversees the safety of our seafood supply, defines fraud as the substitution of a less expensive fish for a more expensive kind, for example, tilapia for red snapper, farmed salmon for wild from Alaska, or basa or tra (Vietnamese catfish) for grouper.

Checklist: How to spot fish fraud

Being informed and knowing your seafood is the best way to arm yourself against fraud. Some things that should raise red flags are:

From our friends at ZapRoot: The Endangered Species Act is in grave danger (as we’ve noted here at Red, Green and Blue). Turn your online searching green and charitable with GoodSearch. And, we bring to you all new Green Gadgets.

Editor’s note: If this is your first look at Alexis Madrigal’s five-part series on California’s ethanol mandate, make sure to check out the first three installments (linked at the bottom of the page).

IV. In Which Our Hero Is Called Upon One Too Many Times

The California Energy Commission expects ethanol to continue to become more integrated into the state’s energy system. In response to Federal legislation, ethanol blends are expected to increase from about 6 percent now to 10 percent by 2012. That will drive demand from 1 billion gallons of ethanol this year to 1.7 billion gallons by 2012. Put in perspective, if the expected changes occur, ethanol use will have grown 1.6 billion gallons in a decade. The total ethanol market will be larger than the Netherlands’ entire gasoline market, and only a little smaller than Thailand’s.  As rapid changes in industrial infrastructure go, it’s spectacular.

But now a host of new regulations are forcing even more changes to liquid fuel in the state.

Our dependence on oil, rightly called an addiction, has given rise to a strong movement to kick the habit. The coalition pushing for an end to crude oil derivative use for transportation fuel comes from an odd variety of corners with distinct interests.

Responding to those concerns, the California legislature and governor have promulgated a cluster of laws and regulations designed to change the fuels you put in your car. The following table summarizes these overlapping desires made law.