Use Community: Smaller Footprints, Cooler Stuff and More Cash

By Alex Steffen

If we want to build a society which is both prosperous and sustainable, we're going to need to innovate ways of delivering the material goods which underpin that prosperity at a small fraction of the ecological cost they exact today. We must learn to live large while leaving tiny ecological footprints.

We have extremely huge footprints today. If every person lived as the average wealthy American does today, we'd need almost ten planets worth of resources to sustain ourselves, while the gap between our consumption and the capacities of the planet's natural systems has already crossed into overshoot, threatening mass-extinctions and catastrophic climate change.

If we're going to have a bright green future -- if we want to avoid living out the rest of our lives in one long emergency, a kind of constant Katrina -- we need to reinvent our lives now, immediately, on a radical scale. British researchers found that in order to reach sustainable prosperity, Londoners would have to shrink their ecological impacts 80% in the next four decades. For affluent Americans, the number may be more like 90%. And the more we learn about the extent of the damage we're causing the planet, the shorter our timeframes for change become. I suspect that we need to be thinking more along the lines of cutting our impact in half in the next ten years.

Impossible, you say? I think not.

I believe that three main barriers present themselves...

To read the rest go to WorldChanging.com

Cadillac out to beat Lexus to zero-emission luxury

/sci-tech/article/28941

By Kevin Krolicki

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - General Motors Corp, looking to regain momentum against Toyota Motor Corp, sees a chance to beat the Japanese automaker to market with the first zero-emission luxury car.

GM seized the spotlight at a technology conference this week to show off a hydrogen- and battery-powered Cadillac concept car designed to run up to 100 miles per hour while emitting only water vapor.

Executives said the Cadillac Provoq fuel-cell concept vehicle showed GM is serious about challenging Toyota and its Lexus luxury brand for sales to the growing number of wealthy buyers looking to make an environmental statement on the road.

"We think we'll be able to take back some of the ground that Toyota owns today," said Cadillac general manager Jim Taylor, part of a team of GM executives who unveiled the Provoq concept outside of the established circuit of auto trade shows.

Taylor said Cadillac had suffered in competition with Lexus in California and other markets because of Toyota's lead in developing fuel-saving hybrid variants and in becoming recognized as the environmentally sensitive choice.

"We've got a misperception -- particularly on the West Coast -- that we're not working on this, that we're not interested in this," Taylor said of GM.

GM's hope is that the fuel-cell powered Cadillac Provoq (pronounced "provoke") will challenge that view and build on the positive reception for the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid GM is rushing to market in another effort to beat Toyota.

The Volt and the Provoq are intended to run on GM's "E-Flex" architecture, a system the automaker is developing for a range of upcoming electrically driven vehicles.

For now, GM is sticking with an aggressive goal of selling the Volt by 2010, while also conceding that launch date could be delayed because of the challenge of developing a new generation of powerful lithium-ion batteries.

GM, like other major automakers, typically declines to specify whether concept cars like the Provoq will be turned into showroom models, a process that can take three to four years.

ROAD READY?

But GM executives in Las Vegas this week for the Consumer Electronics Show said the largest U.S. automaker was already developing the fifth-generation fuel-cell stack needed to power the Provoq and expected to take that version into production.

GM, which believes it has a lead in fuel-cell technology, said the fuel-cell stack shown in the Provoq was half the size of its current version with more power.

GM's fourth-generation fuel-cell technology, which combines stored hydrogen with oxygen to produce electricity, is being used in a test group of 100 vehicles that the automaker calls the largest experimental fleet of its kind.

Cadillac's Taylor also said GM's luxury brand represented the logical choice for the automaker's first widely available fuel-cell vehicle first because its wealthier customers were willing -- and in some cases eager -- to pay more for cutting-edge technology.

"That's been our mission as part of the GM family," Taylor said.

Historically, GM has used Cadillac to roll out a range of technologies that found wide application -- like its OnStar communications service -- and some that fizzled like night-vision, he said.

GM is not alone in pushing for a wider roll-out of fuel-cell technology that had been confined to test labs until recently. Honda Motor Co Ltd will begin leasing a small number of its FCX Clarity fuel-cell sedans to drivers in Southern California later this year for $600 per month as part of a three-year program.

"There's been a lot of process in fuel cells since we've been working on them, more than some skeptics thought," GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner told reporters.

But Wagoner cautioned that the success of fuel-cell vehicles depended on bringing down their cost and increasing the number of hydrogen refueling stations from the current handful in markets such as Los Angeles.

"Putting in a hydrogen infrastructure is going to be challenging and it's going to require some vision and leadership at the government level. Will that happen here? Maybe. Will it happen in China? Maybe," Wagoner said.

(Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Guide to Buying “Green” Paper

28 Nov 2007
Brussels, Belgium – From packaging paper to office paper and tissues, the WWF Guide to Buying Paper makes it easy for any organization to understand the most important environmental impacts of paper-making and to source responsibly-produced paper products, thus reducing their environmental footprint.

The new guide — launched today at the European paper industry’s annual Paper Week — includes a scorecard that enables buyers to evaluate the environmental performance of current and future suppliers on recycling, responsible forest management, pollution and climate change.

The guide also provides recommendations on how to work with suppliers towards improvements.

Taking responsibility
Paper has been an integral part of our cultural development and is essential for modern life. But the world´s paper consumption has quadrupled in the last 40 years and is growing further.

This tremendous expansion threatens the last remaining natural forests, and the people and wildlife who depend on them, in many regions around the world. Pulp and paper processing also releases vast amounts of greenhouse gases and a wide range of polluting compounds into the environment.

"Paper buyers and producers need to take responsibility for their activities," said Duncan Pollard, WWF International's Conservation Practice and Policy Director.

"We will now intensify the work with organizations buying large amounts of paper to implement the recommendations outlined in the new guide. It is important that paper buyers influence their suppliers to minimize their environmental impacts on biodiversity loss, climate change and water and air pollution.”

Responsible buying
The need for a buyers' guide to responsible paper purchasing and use emerged from discussions WWF had with a number of major paper buyers: Canon, IKEA, Lafarge, McDonald’s and Unilever. Other buyers have also expressed interest in the new WWF tools.

"We welcome these new WWF initiatives in enhancing the environmental performance of the paper industry," said Bob Latham from the Paper Merchant Robert Horne.

"They help to improve transparency and data access. It is vital that paper producers and suppliers provide sufficient and verifiable information to buyers so that they can make informed choices. The WWF Paper Guide can certainly help here."

Tetra Pak sees the WWF Guide for Buying Paper as an important tool for understanding the environmental performance of the forest and paper industries.

"The guide provides comparable data for buyers and decision-makers," said Lena Dahl, Forest Policy Officer at Tetra Pak International.

"Tetra Pak has been assessing its global paper board suppliers' performance for a number of years, evaluating nearly the same parameters. We are now investigating whether we can take some lessons from the WWF Paper Scorecard and incorporate these into our supplier evaluation."

"The Scorecard captures a selection of important environmental parameters and presents them in a way that is easy to understand," added Björn Lyngfelt, Vice President of Communications at SCA Forest Products.

"We have applied the scoring system on its products and will make the results available to its customers. As for all market instruments, at the end of the day it is the paper customers that will decide the usefulness of the Scorecard.”

WWF will credit transparency and responsibility of paper buyers and producers by offering its new Paper Toolbox as a web-based “meeting place” and resource centrr on environmental issues.

Read the guide and get more information at Panda.org

Official: Organic Really is Better

By Jon Ungoed-Thomas

THE biggest study into organic food has found that it is more nutritious than ordinary produce and may help to lengthen people's lives.

The evidence from the £12m four-year project will end years of debate and is likely to overturn government advice that eating organic food is no more than a lifestyle choice.

The study found that organic fruit and vegetables contained as much as 40% more antioxidants, which scientists believe can cut the risk of cancer and heart disease, Britain’s biggest killers. They also had higher levels of beneficial minerals such as iron and zinc.

Professor Carlo Leifert, the co-ordinator of the European Union-funded project, said the differences were so marked that organic produce would help to increase the nutrient intake of people not eating the recommended five portions a day of fruit and vegetables. “If you have just 20% more antioxidants and you can’t get your kids to do five a day, then you might just be okay with four a day,” he said.

This weekend the Food Standards Agency confirmed that it was reviewing the evidence before deciding whether to change its advice. Ministers and the agency have said there are no significant differences between organic and ordinary produce.

Researchers grew fruit and vegetables and reared cattle on adjacent organic and nonorganic sites on a 725-acre farm attached to Newcastle University, and at other sites in Europe. They found that levels of antioxidants in milk from organic herds were up to 90% higher than in milk from conventional herds.

As well as finding up to 40% more antioxidants in organic vegetables, they also found that organic tomatoes from Greece had significantly higher levels of antioxidants, including flavo-noids thought to reduce coronary heart disease.

Leifert said the government was wrong about there being no difference between organic and conventional produce. “There is enough evidence now that the level of good things is higher in organics,” he said.

Reprinted from the London Times
Read more about organic food and living at DrGreene.com

China's Pollution Problem Goes Global

Can the world survive China's headlong rush to emulate the American way of life?

By Jacques Leslie

WESTBOUND ON THE EASTBOUND BEIJING EXPRESSWAY

Long before Mr. Zhang's crowning highway maneuver, I'd realized that his flamboyant unpredictability was an asset. I'd hired him as driver and guide for a three-day trip from Beijing to Inner Mongolia on the recommendation of a Chinese environmentalist who'd enumerated all of Mr. Zhang's virtues except the most important—his suppleness under pressure, which would enable us to overcome the obstacles that are a constant feature of travel in China.

Of course, Mr. Zhang's chief qualification was that he was an environmentalist, or, more precisely, a fellow environmental-disaster tracker. Now, having toured choked rivers, depleted forests, and grasslands that had ceded to encroaching deserts, we were near the end of our trip, with nothing in front of us but a two-hour jaunt down the broad, brutish Beijing Badaling Expressway to the capital. Ms. Lei, my delicate translator, had announced her wish to get back to Beijing before her four-year-old boy went to bed, and we were running late. Mr. Zhang's swashbuckling solution was a "shortcut": Instead of fighting his way along the paved, but circuitous, road to the highway, he sped down a narrow dirt path that held the promise of providing a more direct route. Within minutes he was doubling back on himself, loudly grinding gears as he cut through dust-shrouded cornfields and drought-stricken cherry orchards while peasants leaped out of our way and into the foliage. By the time Mr. Zhang found the expressway, the shortcut had cost us an hour.

I already knew that China's roads are some of the world's most dangerous. A quarter of a million people die on them each year—6 times as many as in the United States, even though Americans possess 18 times as many cars—and the entire system is plagued with soul-withering traffic jams prompted by police inspectors who extract "fees" from coal-truck drivers. Lines of trucks often extend behind inspection stations for miles; truckers have waited in them for as long as two weeks.000 And now we couldn't get on the expressway because traffic was at a standstill behind a toll station. An abhorrer of inertia, Mr. Zhang cut across six lanes to the only booth with a short line and cockily paid the toll. For a moment we basked in his NASCARish dexterity. Then he slammed on the brakes. In front of us, the road was clogged with coal trucks lined up behind an inspection station far down the road. We'd been funneled into a classic Chinese bottleneck.

Unfazed, Mr. Zhang made a 180-degree turn and headed west on the eastbound expressway. I braced for the inevitable crash. Then, just before we regained the toll station, he swung right and headed for the center divider, past a gigantic, disabled semi stuck perpendicularly to the flow of cars. The half-dozen policemen who stood around the truck gave no sign of noticing us. Through a gap in the divider, Mr. Zhang found an eastbound lane reserved for passenger cars and turned into it; as we sped toward Beijing, we saw that the line of motionless coal trucks extended for miles. Drivers dozed or ate dinner on top of their cargo. On this tottering foundation, the world's most dynamic economy has been erected. What globalization offers, it also takes away.

To read the rest of the article go to MotherJones.com