I’ve been saying for years that we have the technology to fix many of the worlds environmental problems; we lack only the will. And new, exciting technologies to go deeper in the quest for solutions are being released all the time.
I just read about a great example: an ultrabsorbent “nanosponge” that drinks up spilled oil, but doesn’t absorb water. It’s even reusable! What a wonderful world!
An AP story on the Republican Convention in today’s paper puts it this way:
Mitt Romney conceded Sunday that fresh controversy over rape and abortion is harming his party and he accused Democrats of trying to exploit it for political gain.
“It really is sad, isn’t it, with all the issues that America faces, for the Obama campaign to continue to stoop to such a low level,” said Romney, struggling to sharpen the presidential election focus instead on a weak economy and 8.3 percent national unemployment.
Let me see if I get this straight:
And please, finally, let’s not forget that the Republicans have no legitimate claim to run on economic issues. Not only did George W. Bush turn the largest surplus in history—that he inherited from Bill Clinton, who built a remarkable ecnomic recovery after the disaster of the Reagan-Bush years—into a raging deficit, not only did the economy crumple under years of deregulation and defanging the watchdogs, but the Republicans have sabotaged Obama’s recovery efforts over and over again, with the expressly stated goal of making him a one-term president. Even so, housing starts are up, private-sector jobs are up, and the stock market is waaaay up.
And let’s not forget Romney has made it quite clear he will be the president of the 1%. Those of us in the 99% will not find a friend in Romney-Ryanomics.
Joseph Welch asked Senator Joe McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” He’s often misquoted as asking “have you no shame, sir?” That second question is the one I pose today to Mitt Romney.
Los Angeles Unified School District, a massive consumer of single-use plastic, has banned Styrofoam under student activist pressure—the first district in the nation to do so. And the school district superintendent, John Deasy, will put the topic on the agenda of a district superintendent’s conference.
This is great news—but I have to question why the district switched to compostable disposable trays. It’s certainly more ecological, and probably cheaper, to buy a commercial dishwasher and switch to not only reusable trays, but reusable dishes as well. I would think the materials savings would cover the costs of the machine and the employees to run it, as well as create some needed employment.
Too much goes into the landfill. Good article on Sustainable Brands about how manufacturers can and should be recapturing the materials, and how the US lags behind many other countries on this.
This article in the New York Times feeds a lot of people’s ideas about what it means to live a green lifestyle: a guy all by himself in the desert, living off the grid in a dwelling he pieced together out of old shipping containers.
That scares a lot of people. Heck, it scares me! But it’s important to note that John Wells, the occupant of said desert paradise, is happy. He’s got a few hundred thou in the bank and he’s there because he wants to be.
I know people like that. My friend Juanita’s no-plumbing, no-electricity hilltop cabin that she and her late husband built by hand is as frugal a dwelling as I know, and culturally about as far from the New York City that both Mr. Wells and I chose to leave behind as it’s possible to get.
But the point I want to make is this: you can still live a green lifestyle and enjoy all the creature comforts and social conveniences of modern life. Consider Amory Lovins, energy futurist extraordinaire, whose spacious and gadget-filled 4,000-square-foot home was sustainability state-of-the-art when it was constructed in 1983. In the cold, snowy Colorado Rockies (just outside Aspen), he doesn’t need a furnace, or an air conditioner—and his monthly electric bill could be made back by skipping a couple of lattes per month at a fancy coffee shop..
Frugal, green lifestyles can be about comfort, ease, lower maintenance costs, and even luxury. They don’t have to be about deprivation—unless, like John Wells, you don’t think of being a hermit in the desert as deprivation, but as liberation. It’s his choice, and I say, go for it.
Ray Anderson, CEO of InterfaceFLOR, took his company from a traditional petroleum-based carpet maker to a green pioneer whose name comes up frequently when people talk about merging deep sustainability
AND profitability
Anderson pioneered the idea of modular carpeting, so that if one area is worn out, you can just pop in a couple of new carpet squares instead of replacing the whole darn thing.
In his last years, Anderson created an ambitious program geared toward making Interface a zero-waste company.
Triple Pundit gives us a behind-the-scenes look at Ray Anderson, one year after his passing—written by Giulio Bonazzi, Chairman and CEO of Italy-based Aquafil Group—a supplier and friend to Anderson whose company created a process to recover and recycle polyamide 6, a carpeting component.
I just came back from my local cafe, where I had a second iced coffee in the compostible cup I’d saved from yesterday (which I did compost when I’d finished it)–and discovered this article about edible coffee cups from Italian coffee giant Lavazza.
We’ve been doing this with ice cream for about a century–why not coffee?
It sounds good in principle–but I have questions:
Still if they can work through these issues, it’s a great concept. Obviously, I haven’t tried these cups. It’s totally possible they’ve worked through all these issues and more. I wish them well; they certainly get points for creative thinking and cross-pollination from different market sectors.
I’m a long-time fan of Van Jones, and one of the things I love is that he can frame things in ways that those on the other side of the political continuum can relate to.
Too often, the left frames things in its own language (often couched in liberal guilt)—and the right dismisses us as silly and naive. Listen to minutes 30 to 35 of this speech to see how Van Jones puts the argument for going green into an issue of individual economic liberty, and turns the don’t-subsidize-solar argument into a compelling Tea-Party-friendly argument for ending oil subsidies (why doesn’t he talk aobut nuclear, which would not exist as an industry without subsidies?)
Later in the talk, he discusses solar and wind as farmer power, cowboy power, etc. And demonstrates that organic farming is traditional, and that we should return to our roots after a century of “poison-based agriculture.” And calls not for subsidy for green initiatives, but for green as entrepreneurship, enterprise, and job creation—arguments that both liberals and conservatives should relate to.
Kafka must be having a good laugh over this.
LEED certification for US government buildings has been a huge success story:
Since 2003, the General Services Administration (GSA)’s 91 LEED-certified and 219 pending buildings, totaling over 14 million certified square feet of space, can take credit for:
In and out of government, both the business case and the planetary case for LEED are clear:
In the last twelve years, LEED has aided the development of better products, better designs, better engineering, and better buildings. LEED has now grown into the most widely used high-performance building rating system in the world. Today more than 12,300 commercial projects and over 20,000 residential units have achieved LEED certification. An additional 1.6 million square feet of space is certified every day.
The business case for LEED is unassailable. It saves U.S. businesses and taxpayers millions of dollars every year. Furthermore, an organization’s participation in the voluntary LEED process demonstrates leadership, innovation, conservation stewardship and social responsibility, while providing a competitive advantage. All of these are reasons why small businesses, Fortune 100 companies, homeowners, governments and non-governmental organizations are using LEED to save money and save resources every day.
Now the latest idiocy in Congress is to try to force the GSA to abandon the well-respected LEED rating system. Why? To protect the interests of toxic chemical manufacturers whose products can’t qualify for LEED certification.
Earth to Congress: getting rid of toxics is part of how you get green buildings. Duh!
If you think Congress should allow the GSA to continue using LEED in its building design criteria, here’s a petition you can sign. It’ll be turned in Tuesday, so go and sign it now before you get distracted.
I was out of the country and missed this important news: it is now illegal to conduct fracking in the state of Vermont.
Fracking—a highly toxic method of extracting natural gas by filling rocks with poisonous chemicals and blowing them apart—has been linked to severe water pollution, among other problems.
This continues Vermont’s record of progressive legislation that includes forcing the owners of Vermont Yankee to abide by the end of its original licensing term (unfortunately overridden by a federal judge who, in my opinion and the opinion of many others, wildly overreached his authority) and providing universal health care.