EPA actually doing their job

This came up today in my newsfeed. To sum up, the EPA took advantage of a little used veto they have for public works that could threaten the environment and natural habitats. In this case, it was a a flood control pumping station along the lower Mississippi delta area that has been in the works since the 40's. This project would potentially severely damage extremely important wetlands along the gulf of mexico. Not just for the wildlife, but also the natural barrier that these wetlands form against stormswells. So I say well done EPA. Keep up the good work and fight the good fight. Looks like this one will continue to be fought in the courts, but I'm jut happy that the EPA is standing up and doing what they are supposed to do.

Nature is getting Rights!!!

I found this today and had to pass it along. It would seem that Ecuador is doing something revolutionary and placing the same rights that fall onto individuals and corporations in this country on nature itself. The result being that people can sue for the rights of the environment in cases where there are mistreatments. It sounds really cool and I'm really curious and excited about what the ending result could be. Perhaps, mother nature fighting back in the courts and getting justice for pollution? Wouldn't that be incredible.

Pollution in China

A lot has been said about the state of the air quality in Beijing over the last few weeks with the Olympics now ongoing there. I'm not exactly going to jump into that debate. It is what it is, we can all make our own opinions, but a lot has also been said about the efforts that the Chinese government has made to clean up the place. This article I read today from a newspaper in Tanzania is one of them. I do think it is great that China has added all this green space to the city, and I was even commenting about it while I was watching the marathon the other day. I really have never seen a city with so much greenery. Still, a lot of the things they have done are hardly permanent, such as shutting down industry while the games are going on and banning half the cities cars from the roads are just not realistic to continue. I imagine the factories are firing back up and the gridlock will continue as soon as the flame is extinguished.

On top of that I just feel like the whole thing is just one big illusion. Great, they have spent tons of money to "clean" Beijing, but what about all the other cities where all the other 1 Billion plus Chinese live. What of all the other parts of the country that they are banning reporters from seeing. I really do feel like they are trying, but I have an extremely hard time praising a government for anything when they are detaining people without cause, deporting anyone who shows signs of protest to their government, flat out barring the media from reporting certain details, news reports about their president of the Olympic organization committee having been convicted of torture in the past and just their complete and total refusal to address the human rights issues that they promised they would adjust when they were awarded the games eight years ago.

I love that the environment is making headlines. Very few things make me as happy actually, but the problems they have in China just are not going to be solved by transplanting a few trees and rolling out a few fuel cell buses.

Yes we are still alive

I feel horrible having not posted in a while. I'm really sorry for such a big gap in posts. We are still alive I promise. It's been really hectic around here lately, but I'm definitely going to get back to business soon. We had a nice vacation to Ocracoke Island a couple weeks ago that that really recharged our batteries. I actually had a small accident where I broke one of my ribs not too long ago. I'm pretty well healed up now, so I'm ready to get back to things full speed again. Check back please. Hopefully by next time I'll have some really great stuff to talk about.

Kudzu to Ethanol

Personally, I am very against the use of ethanol to fuel cars. Mainly because as it is the main source of ethanol is corn, which is delicious... so it just doesn't make sense to me use something to run a machine that I could just as soon eat. Anyway, for those of you that live in the southeast, you know of the plaque that is Kudzu... I have found a couple good posts in the last couple weeks about the possibility of using it to create ethanol. Now that's more like it. Check out the article on ecogeek here. And this one on chemically green. This is the kind of thinking we need to encourage and pursue. The answer is out there, just not in my stomach.

Spin Dryer

I got an e-mail about this great product today, so I am passing it along to all of you. It is called a spin dryer. Basically it gives your clothes a nice fast spin after the washing machine to wring the water out of them, making it so that your drying time can be cut in half or more. Pretty cool product. Could for sure make a big difference in the electric bill.

Waste Management in Korea

A while back I stumbled upon a blog talking about living in Seoul for a period of time. Nothing too out of the ordinary about it at all except for a post about how they handled the trash there. It was really just a genius system to me. In order to encourage more recycling, they put together a system where you have to buy government issued bags for your garbage. In other words you can only use these certain bags that they sell for something like $1 a bag for your garbage. You can use any bag for recycling. So in effect instead of paying the flat rate for garbage like most of us currently do as part of our water bill, you would pay for the bags, and the more you use the more you pay. So the people that never recycle and fill their bin to the brim every week would actually pay more for their garbage pickup than someone like Anna and myself that get by most weeks with one bag of garbage.. wouldn't that be nice. Anyway, they also are using this system for compost, so you can limit your garbage even further by sending organic materials to the community compost heap. I would love something like that here, but who knows how or when anything like that would ever happen. They basically were having serious problems with landfills becoming too full too fast, so they came up with a new idea that is turning out to be a HUGE success. If you want to read more check out some of the links about it I've found. Anyone that has some ideas for how we could make this happen here, feel free to share.

Link1, Link2, Link3, Link4

two good articles today

Well, good is not necessarily the correct word, but interesting, infuriating or important may actually be better for this one. The Union of Concerned Scientists ran a little bit of a survey with the EPA. Just to see really how much current policy is dictating what data they are putting out, how the finding may have been edited by current administration, etc. It turns out to be quite a bit. Coming from someone in a scientific field, I am completely unsurprised by these findings, but at the same time can tell you that nothing is as frustrating to a scientist than someone coming in and manipulating your data to say what they want it to, or to challenge your assessments with no scientific evidence on the contrary. We currently have political officials with no scientific background coming in and changing scientific findings to match what they want, and this is not the first time I have heard of this sort of censorship going on under the current administration. This stuff is bad and really needs to stop.. Anyway, the article says it all better than I can, definitely a good read.

The second article is a study performed by the Environmental Defense Fund. The basic rundown is that they wanted to find out what it would actually cost our economy to put a cap on carbon emissions with a cap and trade program. What they came up with was approximately 1% of the GDP... hardly the crippling cost that we have been led to believe. The other important tidbit is that it will become more and more expensive to perform the longer we wait. So lets get it done already.

Get rid of your Nalgene bottles

If you haven't already, get rid of all your Nalgene Bottles. You know the popular clear hard plastic bottles that seemingly EVERYONE has and carries around with them. These plastics contain what is being described as a very harmful ingredient called Bisphenol A (BPA). I read an article about this several months ago in the Green Guide, and at the time it was becoming a hot issue, with cities like San Francisco banning it. Also, at the time, the people at Nalgene were defending their product and playing the there is not enough evidence to say our products are unsafe card. I recall going to their webpage at the time that I read this and they even had a special link to their own information on BPA, claiming their products were safe and all studies to that point where inconclusive.

Well, now that Canada is planning a ban, and the National Institute of Health is saying it is toxic, they are phasing it out over the next few months and offering many non-BPA alternatives. It would seem to me that they saw these bans coming a while ago.. They did offer some alternatives before, but they were not marketed nearly as much as the Polycarbonate bottles that everyone knows so well. That may just be the cynic in me, but if they DID see this coming and planned accordingly, how on earth do they explain the continued sale of a product that they knew would be classified as unsafe in the near future?

There is also a huge buzz going about where they are using these plastics in baby bottles. The green guide has also hit on this as well (in 1999!!), but it is back in the news because of these most recent studies. How is this for a response from a plastic company representative, "There is nothing new in this report," said Steven Hentges, executive director of the American Plastics Council's Polycarbonate Business Unit. "The data that is presented has been known for years and, most importantly, data of that type has been reviewed by government agencies around the world in their comprehensive reviews on BPA and, in every case, they reach a conclusion even after considering this kind of data that polycarbonate baby bottles are safe for use."

Basically there is no ban yet, but many producers admit they are BPA is unsafe, but they downgrade the amounts that are leached and they plan to keep selling them anyway. I personally really wish we would remove the phrase "safe level" from our vocabulary. If we know something is unsafe... why have ANY of it?

top 20 bills in NC Assembly - Part 4 (#1-5)

Part 4 (#1-5) of the top 20 bills in the NC general assembly

This is it.. the final part. Check out part 1, part 2 and part 3 if you haven't yet.

And on we go.

5. Senate Bill 1493/House Bill 1232 - Fund State Water Infrastructure Commission
The State Water Infrastructure Commission would of course identify the state's water needs and develop plans to meet them. Then monitor the implementation of the plans.

4. House Bill 1179 - Clean Cars Program/Funds
This would establish a low emissions vehicle program in North Carolina. This would basically adopt the low-emissions vehicle program that they have in California for the state of North Carolina, effective for cars sold after 2009 model year. There is a lot of info included in this bill, so if you are interested I recommend reading up. Needless to say, any bill that will require the phase out of vehicle emissions is a good thing.

3. Senate Bill 927/House Bill 1073 - Green School Construction Loan Fund/Program
This basically allows for schools to get no interest loans for the purpose of green constructions or renovations. With the number of schools going up in the state every year (especially Wake County) there is no reason why they shouldn't be building as green as they can, and this would help them cover a lot of those costs.

2. Senate Bill 1522/House Bill 990 - Land and Water Conservation Bond Act of 2007
This one looks to have been sat on a bit, but there is no reason to think we couldn't get it moved back up and pushed through. It would authorize the issuance of bonds, provided passing of vote to address the statewide needs of land conservation, Water Quality protection and Historic preservation. We are talking about a lot of money here (up to $1 Billion), that is needed in a bad way for conservation around the state. I can only hope that this one gets revisited.

1. Senate Bill 634/House Bill 557 - North Carolina GREEEN Act
This act is to grow a renewable and energy-efficient economy in North Carolina by establishing a Green Business Fund to be administered by the state energy office to provide seed grants to develop North Carolina's green economy. This version of the bill allows for $15 Million a year to be divided between Bio-fuels, Green Building and general Green Entrepreneurship. This one is important to me for clear reasons, but not only because I am trying to start a green business. I think becoming a leader in this industry can pay huge dividends for this state in the future.

With elections coming up, etc. it is on all of us to make sure the folks running know what we think is important and the type of things we want them to work on for us. All of these bills may not work out in these particular iterations, but we can at least draw some attention to them. Check out the state board of elections for info on all the candidates. E-mail them, call them, whatever. but let them know what you want. Maybe something can eventually get done.