You and your 300 friends have supported 2,928,941.7 square feet!
Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 221,148.3 square feet.
You have supported: (0.0)
Your 300 friends have supported: (221,148.3)
American Prairie habitat supported: 68,854.1 square feet.
You have supported: (17,979.8)
Your 300 friends have supported: (50,874.3)
Rainforest habitat supported: 2,638,939.3 square feet.
You have supported: (189,159.0)
Your 300 friends have supported: (2,449,780.3)
0 Replies
Stradee
2
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Wed 25 Feb, 2009 09:39 pm
@danon5,
Dan, for years we've been fighting for GM regulations, labeling, alerting consumers, and voting to halt the planting of frankenseed in major farm counties in California, sending Monsanto packing. It doesn't much matter what the hell bush does now, only what he attempted to do - and if enough people get involved, we can stop gm products from invading more of wildlands and habitat.
oh, not forgetting that when bushco's buddies cleared forest lands, they replanted with frankentrees!
Beth, can connect to the leaderboard listing individual clickers, but not the team leaderboard. Any luck finding answers at Care2?
0 Replies
sumac
2
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Thu 26 Feb, 2009 11:45 am
February 26, 2009
Mr. Whipple Left It Out: Soft Is Rough on Forests
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Americans like their toilet tissue soft: exotic confections that are silken, thick and hot-air-fluffed.
The national obsession with soft paper has driven the growth of brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted Northern Ultra and Charmin Ultra " which in 2008 alone increased its sales by 40 percent in some markets, according to Information Resources, Inc., a marketing research firm.
But fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.
Customers “demand soft and comfortable,” said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia Pacific, the maker of Quilted Northern. “Recycled fiber cannot do it.”
The country’s soft-tissue habit " call it the Charmin effect " has not escaped the notice of environmentalists, who are increasingly making toilet tissue manufacturers the targets of campaigns. Greenpeace on Monday for the first time issued a national guide for American consumers that rates toilet tissue brands on their environmental soundness. With the recession pushing the price for recycled paper down and Americans showing more willingness to repurpose everything from clothing to tires, environmental groups want more people to switch to recycled toilet tissue.
“No forest of any kind should be used to make toilet paper,” said Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and waste expert with the Natural Resource Defense Council.
In the United States, which is the largest market worldwide for toilet paper, tissue from 100 percent recycled fibers makes up less than 2 percent of sales for at-home use among conventional and premium brands. Most manufacturers use a combination of trees to make their products. According to RISI, an independent market analysis firm in Bedford, Mass., the pulp from one eucalyptus tree, a commonly used tree, produces as many as 1,000 rolls of toilet tissue. Americans use an average of 23.6 rolls per capita a year.
Other countries are far less picky about toilet tissue. In many European nations, a rough sheet of paper is deemed sufficient. Other countries are also more willing to use toilet tissue made in part or exclusively from recycled paper.
In Europe and Latin America, products with recycled content make up about on average 20 percent of the at-home market, according to experts at the Kimberly Clark Corporation.
Environmental groups say that the percentage is even higher and that they want to nurture similar acceptance here. Through public events and guides to the recycled content of tissue brands, they are hoping that Americans will become as conscious of the environmental effects of their toilet tissue use as they are about light bulbs or other products.
Dr. Hershkowitz is pushing the high-profile groups he consults with, including Major League Baseball, to use only recycled toilet tissue. At the Academy Awards ceremony last Sunday, the gowns were designer originals but the toilet tissue at the Kodak Theater’s restrooms was 100 percent recycled.
Environmentalists are focusing on tissue products for reasons besides the loss of trees. Turning a tree to paper requires more water than turning paper back into fiber, and many brands that use tree pulp use polluting chlorine-based bleach for greater whiteness. In addition, tissue made from recycled paper produces less waste tonnage " almost equaling its weight " that would otherwise go to a landfill.
Still, trees and tree quality remain a contentious issue. Although brands differ, 25 percent to 50 percent of the pulp used to make toilet paper in this country comes from tree farms in South America and the United States. The rest, environmental groups say, comes mostly from old, second-growth forests that serve as important absorbers of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. In addition, some of the pulp comes from the last virgin North American forests, which are an irreplaceable habitat for a variety of endangered species, environmental groups say.
Greenpeace, the international conservation organization, contends that Kimberly Clark, the maker of two popular brands, Cottonelle and Scott, has gotten as much as 22 percent of its pulp from producers who cut trees in Canadian boreal forests where some trees are 200 years old.
But Dave Dickson, a spokesman for Kimberly Clark, said that only 14 percent of the wood pulp used by the company came from the boreal forest and that the company contracted only with suppliers who used “certified sustainable forestry practices.”
Lisa Jester, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble, the maker of Charmin, points out that the Forest Products Association of Canada says that no more than 0.5 percent of its forest is harvested annually. Still, even the manufacturers concede that the main reason they have not switched to recycled material is that those fibers tend to be shorter than fibers from standing trees. Long fibers can be laid out and fluffed to make softer tissue.
Jerry Baker, vice president of product and technology research for Kimberly Clark, said the company was not philosophically opposed to recycled products and used them for the “away from home” market, which includes restaurants, offices and schools.
But people who buy toilet tissue for their homes " even those who identify themselves as concerned about the environment " are resistant to toilet tissue made from recycled paper.
With a global recession, however, that may be changing. In the past few months, sales of premium toilet paper have plunged 7 percent nationally, said Ali Dibadj, a senior stock analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, a financial management firm, providing an opening for makers of recycled products.
Marcal, the oldest recycled-paper maker in the country, emerged from bankruptcy under new management last year with a plan to spend $30 million on what is says will be the first national campaign to advertise a toilet tissue’s environmental friendliness. Marcal’s new chief executive, Tim Spring, said the company had seen intense interest in the new product from chains like Walgreens. The company will introduce the new toilet tissue in April, around Earth Day
Mr. Spring said Marcal would be able to price the new tissue below most conventional brands, in part because of the lower cost of recycled material.
“Our idea is that you don’t have to spend extra money to save the Earth,” he said. “And people want to know what happens to the paper they recycle. This will give them closure.”
February 26, 2009
Editorial
Mr. Obama’s Energy Future
During his run for the White House, Barack Obama pledged to transform the way Americans produce and consume energy. Such promises come cheap on the campaign trail. In the real world they cost money and political capital. This week, in his speech to Congress, Mr. Obama made clear that he is ready to spend both to combat climate change and reduce this country’s dependence on fossil fuels.
Obviously, a lot of very heavy lifting lies ahead. The president must persuade everyone from Congress to American taxpayers to the Chinese leadership to follow. We applaud his vision and urge him to push forward.
Mr. Obama listed energy, along with health care and education, as critical to the nation’s economic future. He urged Congress to send him legislation that would place a mandatory and steadily declining cap on carbon emissions from power plants and other sources. This would require emitters to invest in more efficient plants and cleaner fuels and, at least initially, is likely to lead to higher energy prices.
It was impossible to listen to him without drawing contrasts to the early Bush days " to former President George W. Bush’s swift renunciation of his campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide and his easy and unsubstantiated assumption that fighting climate change could only damage the American economy.
Mr. Obama’s commitment has been more than rhetorical. Five weeks into his presidency, he has signaled a readiness to regulate greenhouse gases from cars, trucks and new power plants, to require more fuel efficient vehicles and to invest heavily in energy efficiency " including high speed rail and weatherizing homes " as well as renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
Nearly one-tenth of his economic recovery package, $80 billion altogether, is devoted to these purposes.
Not surprisingly, given the state of the American economy, his speech dwelled less on the perils of climate change and more on the economic promises of clean energy. He spoke of the profit to be gained by American industries and workers if the United States took the lead in investing in manufacturing wind turbines, more efficient solar panels and next-generation batteries " reminding his audience that on these fronts China, Germany and Japan are doing better than we are.
This was smart. Emphasizing the economic potential of a program that will carry a substantial price tag is surely one good way of selling it.
There also are extraordinarily thorny questions of design. Congress’s last effort produced a bill of nightmarish complexity. To get one through this year or even next will require all of Mr. Obama’s persuasive skills.
Merely acknowledging a problem is not the same as addressing it. It has been four decades since Richard Nixon urged Congress to free the nation from its dependence on foreign oil, and the country is more dependent than ever. It has been well over a decade since the world’s industrialized nations agreed in Kyoto, Japan, to control global-warming emissions, and emissions continue to rise. Mr. Obama is challenging not just the country, but history.
0 Replies
sumac
2
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Thu 26 Feb, 2009 11:47 am
Budget Expects Revenue From Limits on Emissions
By Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 26, 2009; A04
A mandatory cap on the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, which President Obama embraced on Tuesday as central to his domestic agenda, would be designed to generate badly needed revenue for the government while addressing arguably the world's most pressing environmental issue.
Today, the White House will unveil a budget that assumes there will be revenue from an emissions trading system by 2012.
Sources familiar with the document said it would direct $15 billion of that revenue to clean-energy projects, $60 billion to tax credits for lower- and middle-income working families, and additional money to offsetting higher energy costs for families, small businesses and communities.
In testimony to Congress in September, Peter Orszag -- then director of the Congressional Budget Office and now Obama's budget director -- estimated that revenue from a cap-and-trade bill that died on the Senate floor last year would have reached $112 billion by 2012 and would have kept rising afterward. By 2020, Orszag estimated, a cap-and-trade program might generate $50 billion to $300 billion a year.
But only hours after Obama's speech Tuesday to Congress, the cap-and-trade proposal triggered a heated exchange among senators on a key committee, underscoring that efforts to come up with a system that limits emissions, puts a price on carbon and allows industries to trade pollution allowances will be a difficult sell on Capitol Hill, especially in the current economic crisis.
A federal cap-and-trade program, which many scientific and policy experts see as key to curbing dangerous levels of global warming, would create a new commodity -- in the form of the allowances permitting industries to discharge specified amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- and a market for that commodity that would be worth tens or perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars, along with a complex new regulatory system.
The political battle on the Hill is largely divided along regional, rather than party, lines: Although lawmakers from coastal states see a carbon cap as a critical goal whose public and long-term economic benefits would outweigh its costs, most Republicans and some Democrats from the middle of the country fear that it would hurt their states' economies, dependent as they are on fossil fuels and manufacturing.
At a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on climate science yesterday, Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) called any cap-and-trade system "a huge unfair tax" that "would devastate the Midwest." Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) referred to it as "a trillion-dollar climate bailout."
But the panel's chairman, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), countered that a cap-and-trade system "isn't a bailout. It's revenues coming into the government."
"We think it will be a boon for our economy," she added. "To say the people in this room don't care about jobs -- that's ludicrous."
The extent to which states rely on coal-fired utilities, which produce about 40 percent of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, helps influence how their elected officials view the prospect of curbs on carbon. In Indiana, 94 percent of power comes from coal-fired plants, while in Florida -- which relies more on nuclear plants that do not emit greenhouse gases -- 30 percent of electricity comes from coal. In California and Rhode Island, 1 percent of electricity comes from coal; in Vermont, none.
Most analysts predict that over time, placing a price on carbon will spur technological innovation and ease American dependence on foreign oil, while probably driving up energy prices in the short term.
Although so far the mechanics of a cap-and-trade system have been debated mostly by business executives and a small but growing group of policy experts, the implications could be far-reaching. It would create a new commodity and a market to trade it worth tens of billions of dollars. It would create property rights where none exist today.
"Emission allowances could be the greatest creation of property rights since the 19th-century settlement of the West," Dallas Burtraw, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, said in a speech last week at Georgetown University.
Carl Pope, the executive director of the advocacy group Sierra Club, said he has been surprised at the extent to which Obama has made green energy a priority and has based his economic plan on the assumption that this sector will drive the nation's financial recovery. "Obama's talking about this as the economic equivalent of war," Pope said in an interview. "His administration sees that the green economy is the only train leaving the station, and they are eager to hitch onto it to pull us out of this crisis."
The cost of carbon emissions, and hence the revenue the government would receive from auctioning carbon allowances or permits, remains highly uncertain. In Europe, which has a cap-and-trade system, the price of carbon has fluctuated between about 10 and 30 euros (currently $13 to $38) a ton. With world economies in recession, European prices have slumped.
U.S. experts have varying estimates for what the allowances might cost, all based on unknowable factors, such as whether the cost of solar and wind power will fall or whether industry will come up with an economic way to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions. Such advances might make it cheaper to cut emissions than to buy allowances.
John W. Rowe, the chief executive of Exelon, the nation's biggest nuclear power producer, said one consultant estimated that carbon allowances would cost $50 a ton. "Personally, I believe they will be closer to $70 or $100 a ton," he said.
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) favors a ceiling on the price of carbon allowances, but his ceiling is well below what most energy experts think will be needed to generate the investment and innovation that would achieve big reductions in emissions. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who co-sponsored Bingaman's bill and remains a key swing vote in the Senate, said at yesterday's climate hearing that he sees global warming as "a central issue" but could not support a bill that was based on "speculative" technological advances.
0 Replies
sumac
2
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Thu 26 Feb, 2009 11:48 am
Rocket with NASA global warming satellite crashes
38 mins ago
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. " A rocket carrying a NASA satellite crashed near Antarctica after a failed launch early Tuesday, ending a $280 million mission to track global warming from space.
The Taurus XL rocket carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory blasted off just before 2 a.m. from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. But minutes later, a cover protecting the satellite during launch failed to separate from the rocket, a preliminary investigation found.
The 986-pound satellite was supposed to be placed into a polar orbit some 400 miles high to track carbon dioxide emissions. The project was nine years in the making, and the mission was supposed to last two years.
Scientists currently depend on 282 land-based stations " and scattered instrumented aircraft flights " to monitor carbon dioxide at low altitudes.
"Certainly for the science community it's a huge disappointment," said John Brunschwyler, Taurus project manager for Orbital Sciences Corp., which built the rocket and satellite. "It's taken so long to get here."
The rocket landed in the ocean near Antarctica. A group of environment ministers from more than a dozen countries met on the southern continent this week to get the latest science on global warming.
NASA said it will convene a team of experts to investigate the loss of the satellite.
The observatory was NASA's first satellite dedicated to monitoring carbon dioxide on a global scale. Measurements collected from the $280 million mission were expected to improve climate models and help researchers determine where the greenhouse gas originates and how much is being absorbed by forests and oceans.
Last month, Japan successfully launched the world's first satellite to monitor global warming emissions.
Carbon dioxide is the leading greenhouse gas and its buildup helps trap heat from the sun, causing potentially dangerous warming of the planet. Carbon dioxide emissions rose 3 percent worldwide from 2006 to 2007, according to international science agencies.
Every grocery store chain sells 'green' bath tissue. Doesn't anyone shop???
Also, if you check the prices at wharehouse stores {costco, sam's, etc.} you'll find that buying the higher priced eco unfriendly brands in bulk, the cost per unit isn't as economical as you might think.
0 Replies
Stradee
2
Reply
Thu 26 Feb, 2009 03:59 pm
@sumac,
Amazing
A satellite capable of measuring carbon and its affects on the enviornment crashes back to earth.
Perhaps if nations began doing something about green house gases...
