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1. 2008 Bloggies: Please Vote for TreeHugger!
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2. Plakbanterie: Refinishing Furniture, Recycling Becomes Art
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3. Mattel Refuses to Officially Recall Toy with Lead Levels Eight Times Legal Limit
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4. Bags of Change: Carrot Better Than Stick
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5. SustainStyle: Biodegradable Umbrella, Classic Winter Looks, Vegan Cupcakes + More
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6. Terrasoles: Do they Need More Soul?
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7. Green Prototype Home Displayed at World Social Forum in Mexico City
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8. Presidential Debates Brought to You By Coal
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9. President's Clean Tech Budget Add-On: How Big Is It?
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10. A Picture is Worth...Homemade Applesauce
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11. A proposal for climate philanthropists
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12. Carbon Offsets, Consumer Protection, and the FTC (Part 2)
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13. How many planets do we need?
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14. TerraPass hits 100,000
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15. Explaining Carbon Offsets
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16. There's something in the air...
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17. Dissecting Flight Carbon Calculators
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18. The elusive green collar job
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19. What should businesses do to fight climate change?
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20. $10m for a 100mpg car
2008 Bloggies: Please Vote for TreeHugger!
TH Exclusives
The 2008 Bloggies -- the Weblog Awards -- are here, and TreeHugger is honored to have been nominated as Best Group Weblog and Best Topical Weblog. It's very gratifying to see our name up there with some of the legends in the blogging world, and we really appreciate the nomination. Voting is on now, and if you like what you read here everyday, we'd love it if you'd go vote for us. You'll have to hurry, though; the deadline is 10:00 PM EST on Thursday, January 31. While you're there, show some love to our pals at Lifehacker (Best A... 
Plakbanterie: Refinishing Furniture, Recycling Becomes Art
Design & Architecture
Following the "It's not what you are that counts, it's what they think you are!" ideal, designer Johan Bruninx renews old furniture with an unusual medium: he covers scratched, dented pieces with paper packaging tape. Winding and weaving it into intricate patterns, the "refinished" furniture, which he calls "Plakbanterie," looks like more traditional wooden marquetry techniques; at a distance, it takes on the appearance of real wood. Bruninx showed the project at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduation show 2007, held during Dutch Design Week. It's a great DIY idea for... 
Mattel Refuses to Officially Recall Toy with Lead Levels Eight Times...
Business & Politics
Way back in September Mattel's chief executive Robert A. Eckert said the company "will do the right thing" when it comes to lead in toys. But 56 U.S. Lawmakers recently signed a letter headed his way that reads, essentially, "Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining." TreeHugger has been nominated for two Bloggy Awards—Best Topical Weblog and Best Group Weblog. Please vote for us now! (Hint: To find us, scroll toward the bottom of the page.)... 
Bags of Change: Carrot Better Than Stick
accessories
As we reported previously, folks like San Francisco, China, Australia, IKEA and Whole Foods are jumping aboard the ban wagon with regard plastic shopping bags. Ireland took a different approach years ago with their PlastTax of a several pe... 
SustainStyle: Biodegradable Umbrella, Classic Winter Looks, Vegan...
Fashion & Beauty
With non-stop rain in Los Angeles, we have started planning new ways to stay dry, one being to invest in an umbrella, specifically a brelli which is the first 100% biodegradable umbrella. To stay warm and still gorgeous, check out our "Dress Me" page, which is dedicated to a classic winter look with an organic ... 
Terrasoles: Do they Need More Soul?
footwear
Apparently there is a footwear market known as the "casual after sport shoe" and Terrasoles want to redefine this niche. Some of these shoes (men and women styles) are made with bamboo, recycled polyester fleece and recycled microfleece. The company say that environment is "top of mind" when they consider Terrasoles' components. "We utilize environmentally friendly elements wherever possible. Our packaging and other collaterals are being produced on recycled stocks with soy inks, and we are using high-quality fleece made from recycled materials in some travel and cold weather styles." And concluded with, "We believe that small, environmentally smart steps like these are easy to implement ... 
Green Prototype Home Displayed at World Social Forum in Mexico City
Design & Architecture
A group of 16 Mexican NGOs put together a green prototype home as part of an eco-exhibit at the World Social Forum, which concluded Sunday. While not a complete house (it was missing a roof), the prototype home, set up on Mexico City's Zocalo, or central plaza, served as a kind of shell for demonstrating various eco-technologies and materials such as solar panels and hot water heaters, gray water filters, biodegradable cleaning products, composting, and dry toilets. The project was headed up by Organi-K, a sustainability group dedicated to "Ecology in Action." According to Arnold Ricalde, direc... 
Presidential Debates Brought to You By Coal
Business & Politics
Watching the GOP debate tonight and the Democratic party debates tomorrow? Just a reminder that as in other debates so far and noted earlier by Jeremy here, they are brought to you by Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), a front for the coal industry. Read our previous post and count the questions about global warming during the debates. via 
President's Clean Tech Budget Add-On: How Big Is It?
Business & Politics
The White House website details what President Bush outlined in his State of the Union speech this week regarding a "clean energy technology" budget addition in response to the risk posed by climate change. 
President Bush is committing $2 billion over the next three years to create a new international clean energy technology fund to help confront climate change worldwide. Along with contributions from other countries, this fund will increase and accelerate... 
A Picture is Worth...Homemade Applesauce
Food & Health
Yum...there's nothing like homemade applesauce. It always tastes better when you've made it yourself. Our question is: How many food miles will this DIY job add? Have a fun green caption for this shot? Leave it in the comments section below (and, yep, that is Red Green behind the wheel). via ::MAKE: Blog... 
A proposal for climate philanthropists
Entrepreneurship
Could this man's ideas lead to a new class of sustainable Carbon Reducing Enterprises?
There are ups and downs in the fight against climate change and other issues of our day. Friday was a good day. Reuters UK broke the story that The Hewlett foundation, (update: together with other philanthropists) is planning a whopping $500 million a year fund to fight climate change. Put this in perspective -- in 2006 Hewlett distributed only $212 million.
That evening Nobel Peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus spoke at the Commonwealth club, delivering an impassioned and visionary talk on the future of capitalism and how equitable development could be spread with the power of social business entrepreneurs. Even the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof propelled the energy further with a boldly titled column Age of Ambition with inspiring stories of young entrepreneurs from Davos.
And then Joel Makower's Monday GreenBiz column brought me back to reality:
The problem, it seems, is that there aren't enough jobs. At least that's the finding of a recent study by the nonprofit group Net Impact, which found that the demand for such jobs exceeds the supply. For many reasons, it seems a shame to that these committed individuals aren't able to find what they're looking for.....What's your advice for these souls?
Is this how folk fans felt when Dylan went electric? It seems clear that the energies of the helpful are sidelined by the inability to find a career fighting the issues they care about, or find the capital to pursue their dreams of creating a better world.
Thus a modest proposal to the $9B Hewlett foundation: test the theories of Nobel peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus, and dedicate 10% of your newly announced planned Climate Fund to social business entrepreneurs. That's $50 million a year, which I predict would be the best value carbon abatement and capacity building funds ever spent.
Why would this make sense? First of all, if you're an environmental professional, you have to give Hewlett a ton of credibility for what they support -- great policy work all around the world is the result of the smart folks on the Peninsula. And it's worked for many years.
But climate change is a problem that is weaved together with issues of energy and development -- it's going to take both top down and bottoms up thinking to solve climate change. And that's where social business entrepreneurs come in.
Climate is about energy, and energy needs capital. And yet, there are many businesses in energy that are solid businesses but unglamorous economic returns with fairly serious carbon returns. In short, the traditional capital markets don't have the risk appetite for them because returns are unlikely to be huge. But young people, motivated by fixing climate change itself would relish an opportunity to work on such businesses.
These so called social business entrepreneurs could lead a new generation of business that wouldn't require annual grants, wouldn't make investor's socks roll up and down, but would contribute to lowered carbon emissions.
That's where Hewlett could fit in, placing enough investment in these carbon reducing enterprises to get them sustainable and creating emissions reductions. If they get repaid, great! Put it back into the system. If not, oh, well, how much did we pay per ton of carbon reduced? The measurement of third party benefit for Yunus' no-loss, no dividend capital model is easily quantified and reported.
If you're one of the ones job seeking, or struggling with a new green business, know that you provide a tremendous amount of hope. The river of capital, both for non profits and for profits is huge. What we need is people lined up on the banks ready to dip their proverbial cup.
Update: the nice folks at Hewlett called to say the fund is not announced yet, and they are hoping that they, along with other philanthropists, they can reach funding levels of this magnitude in the future. We look forward to an update and applauding things when they are closer to being firm.
Photo available under Creative Commons license from Flickr user Sumaiya Ahmed
Carbon Offsets, Consumer Protection, and the FTC (Part 2)
Politics
Following TerraPass' participation at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) workshop on carbon offsets held in Washington on January 8, we have now submitted our written comments. You can download them here (pdf).
Preparing these comments gave us the chance to summarize our views on what it takes to deliver high-quality, independently verified offsets to consumers and businesses. We described our rigorous procedures for selecting offset projects that balance out the carbon emissions from daily activities such as driving, flying, and home energy use.
Full disclosure
Disclosure and transparency are the hallmarks of TerraPass' approach to consumer protection. We back up our claims with a published list of supported projects. That list includes:
The TerraPass Product Content Label
- location
- project type and details
- offset standard used
- names of validator and/or verifier
- verified emission reductions in tons
These figures are included in our annual verification report. We also engage an independent audit firm to confirm that consumer purchases are matched by an equivalent amount of carbon reductions (pdf). Finally, we include a Product Content Label (pdf) with every TerraPass.
Independent Standards
In our written statement, we highlighted two independent carbon offset standards that can help protect consumers: the Green-e Climate program and the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS).
Both Green-e Climate and VCS were reviewed by hundreds of stakeholders (e.g., carbon experts, industry participants, and environmental and consumer groups) and went through several versions before final release.
It is too early to assess the impact of these standards, but TerraPass and other offset providers are moving towards adopting them in 2008. We believe that the voluntary market will coalesce around Green-e Climate and VCS -- an outcome that will strengthen consumer confidence in carbon offsets.
Next steps
The FTC will analyze the dozens of formal comments it received and make recommendations. Among the agency's options are to update the federal Green Marketing Guides.
Whatever the FTC decides to do, the dialogue inspired by the in-person workshop and the public comment process will further clarify what's necessary to ensure that offsets are credible and lead to actual carbon reductions. That's a positive development for everyone who wants to participate in solutions to global warming.
How many planets do we need?
General
What do 236 cylinders of propane and the weight of a female African elephant have in common? Answer: they're both equivalents of the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the average American car in one year.
So are you any the wiser on exactly how much 12,500 lbs of CO2 really is? Or how this relates to the (far, far) bigger picture of climate change?
Probably not. Imagining elephants and propane tanks doesn't really get to the concrete implications of our daily consumer decisions. Even this page of emissions data equivalents lends itself to John Nash style mathematical ponderings, rather than clear understanding and action. And yet waking people up is precisely the goal of the calculations.
So I was excited to find the Consumer Consequences calculator today. It works on this premise:
The Earth couldn't support its 6.6 billion residents if everyone lived like a typical American. Consumer Consequences will tell you how many planets it would take to support your lifestyle on a planetary scale.
It's a fun calculator with some interesting ideas in it. Although you don't get an accurate carbon footprint reading (it doesn't pretend to give you one, to be fair), it will tell you how many times over we'd use up the earth's resources if everybody lived like you. Or me.
NB: Screen grab of the game not with my own numbers!
TerraPass hits 100,000
TerraPass news
It happened on January 16th at 6:40pm Pacific Standard Time: Heraldo Botelho, of Palo Alto, CA, purchased a flight offset for his upcoming trip to visit his family in Brazil.
This is Heraldo's first time buying a TerraPass. He told us:
I worry about the environment, but I still wanted to visit my family. I wanted to do something about the carbon emissions that causes: the only option is flying in airplanes and that wastes a lot of fuel.
Heraldo, 30, bikes every day to his job in customer support at a software company. But, as he rightly points out, "I can't bike back to Brazil -- yet".
So until that day, TerraPass will be working hard so that our customers have a surefire way to balance out their energy use with verifed carbon reductions. We offer our thanks to Heraldo and to the thousands of you who have helped TerraPass catch on and grow each year.
Explaining Carbon Offsets
Carbon Offsets can be difficult things to explain: we hear this from TerraPass members, telling us of their experiences explaining offsets to their friends; we know it ourselves when we try to write for this blog or our website explaining how small amounts of money can make real differences to the environment.
And we see it on a regular basis in the media, as journalists and commentators grapple with the issue and try to make sense of the proactive individuals and companies that reduce their carbon footprints and use offsets to balance what remains.
So it was refreshing to hear a piece on NPR's Quest program this morning that explained (better than we sometimes do ourselves!) how offsets work, and how consumers should pick between the different companies that sell them.
You can listen to the piece here
There's something in the air...
Transportation
In 2006 the charismatic British entrepreneur Richard Branson announced plans to reduce the environmental impacts of flying. He planned fuel-saving measures such as towing aircraft to the runway and the establishment of a Virgin Fuels division, funded with profits from his transportation companies.
As the founder and part owner of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin America, Branson is well placed to worry about the damage of airline emissions, both to the environment and to his industry. And the price of oil must be a source of some concern, too.
The towing idea never made it out of the departure lounge: Boeing warned that their 747s weren't designed for so much load on the nose of the plane, and that this would increase maintenance costs.
But there is significant progress to report elsewhere: Virgin recently announced that in February it will fly a 747 from London to Amsterdam using a kerosene biofuel mix. The company hasn't said what the fuel will be made from, only that it will come from a "very sustainable" source. Of course, biofuels themselves aren't carbon-free. But depending on the type of fuel (and the carbon intensity of its growth and production) the plane's footprint should still be significantly reduced.
Whatever the future may hold for biofuels, this is pretty awesome news. Even though we still don't know exactly how much impact air travel has on the environment (see Tom's post for more on this), it's clear that it is an awful lot, and growing. Even if biofuels aren't the eventual answer to replacing gasoline, this still represents enormous progress in the journey to finding a substitute.
Virgin is the first commercial airline to experiment with biofuels. But other smaller outfits have made significant progress, too. Green Flight International flew a L-29 Russian military aircraft on 100% biofuel at altitudes up to 17,000 feet in October last year. The company is now planning a round-the-world trip in a Lear Jet powered entirely (and solely) by biofuel.
Dissecting Flight Carbon Calculators
Transportation
Flying is complex enough, so we try to make purchasing TerraPass flight offsets pretty simple. But if you've been searching around trying to get a more accurate handle on your carbon footprint, you may have noticed that lots of online calculators give you different results.
Consumer Reports looked into this issue in a recent article. They compared the results of sixteen calculators for a New York to Los Angeles flight: the total carbon emissions varied by a factor of three. The Consumer Report's advice to consumers is pithy, but less than satisfying:
Generally, the more explanation it gives and the more info you're asked to input, the better
So, fasten your seatbelt and I'll dig in to the question a bit more and try to explain the differences. Please note that for this analysis I've corrected a Consumer's Reports error (tons vs tonnes) on a number of entries.
Your flight details please
Flat earthers aside, let's agree that NY and LA are in fact 2,467 miles apart (yes, I am prepped for flames on great circle routes). For this distance, the per-mile emissions factors range between .39 lbs and 1.36 lbs per mile.
Why the differences? First, check for how much information is included about the specific flight. Shorter flights emit more per mile than long flights because a disproportionate amount of energy is used in taking off and landing.
Only three calculators account for this (one of them is ours), and among them their adjusted per-mile emissions factors range from 0.36 to 0.40 lbs per mile, a much tighter spread. The others use more general emissions factors, which range from 0.40 to 0.70 lbs per mile.
Of course if we had access to the actual airline data, we could go even farther and include factors such as aircraft type, actual capacity factor, connections, cargo loading, seat type, even your own baggage allowance.
May the force be with you?
The second big difference is something called radiative forcing: an effect that tries to account for the interactions of a plane's emissions in the stratosphere. Here the culprits are oxides of nitrogen (NOx) whose upper atmosphere chemistries create a warming effect as they produce ozone, and a cooling effect as they reduce methane.
Six of the eleven calculators use it, four simply double the emissions and the other two multiply them by 2.7. Multiplying by the range of per mile emissions factors above, you can quickly see how a wide range of estimates are produced.
TerraPass doesn't use radiative forcing for two reasons. First, we don't yet see consensus in the science. Second, every time we ask the main standard setting body, the World Resources Institute (WRI), for guidance, they advise us to avoid using a radiative forcing number until they have settled the science.
We're not alone, here's a short list of folks NOT using radiative forcing:
- EPA's Greenhouse Gas reports omit it (although they href="http://www.epa.gov/otaq/climate/420r06003.pdf">discuss it as a factor in 2006)
- California Climate Action Registry General Reporting Protocol
- DEFRA (like the EPA except they serve tea)
- The UK Parliament's environment committee who had this to say:
There is still no scientific consensus on the [radiative forcing] factor, its size or temporal impact, and recent research indeed points towards its likely inappropriateness for the calculation of climate effects above and beyond those delivered by carbon.
To add further credence to this last little bullet, on a panel I spoke at last week at the Transportation Research Board, both Anja Kollmus from Tufts / SEI and an official from the FAA pointed out that the traditional manner of calculating radiative forcing is inappropriate and that further research is needed.
And that's why, just like on the project side, we're going to stick to the standard for now and report aviation emissions with the traditional six greenhouse gases.
The elusive green collar job
Environmentalism
Someone help me puzzle this out:
Proposition 1: a shift to renewable energy and energy efficiency will result in a boom in green collar jobs, good service-industry work that can't be outsourced. This proposition is attractive because it holds forth the promise of a grand alliance between greens and the labor movement. See, e.g., Tom Friedman and everyone who posts on Grist.
Proposition 2: the optimism over green-collar jobs is a classic example of the make-work bias, a widespread economic fallacy that mistakes amount of work for wealth creation. The actual effect of greenhouse gas reductions on labor markets is unclear, so environmentalists should stick to environmental policy. See, e.g., various environmental economists.
I don't have a clever opinion here, although I will say that the case for a positive labor impact from energy efficiency measures seems decently solid. Efficiency is, after all, an unambiguously good thing for the economy as a whole. If it costs us less to get the same amount of stuff, we're all richer. Certainly this is a nice thing for consumers, and because energy industries tend not to be labor-intensive, we can expect that wealth creation at the expense of energy producers will be a net benefit for employment as well. I think.
The impact of renewable energy, on the other hand, is more difficult to suss out. More to the point, it's not clear that anyone has sussed it out. Discuss.
Photo available under Creative Commons license from Flickr user billjacobus1.
What should businesses do to fight climate change?
David Douglas, the VP of Eco Responsibility at Sun Microsystems, suggests that green-minded businesses should look outside their own operations to the carbon footprint of their supply chains and customers:
Carbon neutrality is a step in the right direction, but for many companies, its only a very small part of the overall impact they could have. It is in the best interest of those companies, as well as our collective best interest, that they take a broad view and prioritize appropriately across all of their potential environmental opportunities.
For the purpose of illustration, Douglas uses the Toyota Prius. Toyota can do more good for the world, he suggests, by designing energy-efficient products than by minimizing emissions from its own operations. Ideally every company should be doing both, but if Toyota has to choose a place to focus its efforts, fuel-sipping cars are the higher priority.
This is a worthy sentiment. One problem, though, is that the Prius is a cherry-picked example. For most businesses, the relative environmental impact of suppliers, operations and customers can be tricky to gauge. CIO Magazine points out that it's hard enough to know the carbon content of a bunch of bananas sitting on a store shelf, much less a piece of electronics made of parts sourced from thousands of different suppliers.
Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Carbon neutrality is a great place for most businesses to start, both because measuring your carbon footprint is the first step toward reducing it, and also because your own impact is most directly under your control. (For a quick estimate of your organization's emissions, check out our online calculator.)
But for many or most organizations, it also makes sense to look beyond your own walls at your suppliers and customers, who may be your greatest source of leverage in fighting climate change.
$10m for a 100mpg car
Energy conservation & technologies
At this week's North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) there has been news of a hybrid truck, a hybrid Jeep, and even a hybrid sports car, but none of them comes close to 100mpg. Not yet.
The new Dodge Ram (introduced alongside 120 steer, which were marched through Detroit city center) was accompanied by the news that a hybrid version of the truck will be available in 2010. Chrysler's VP Jim Press told NPR that this makes the truck very environmentally friendly:
If you look at the CO2 emissions of the fuel use, which vehicle uses more -- a little car or a big truck? Big truck does. So we're actually saving a lot more per mile driven than on a small car.
Of course, driving a Prius over the same distance will produce fewer emissions. But if you need a big truck, this definitely helps.
There's also a plug-in hybrid sports car on display. For a mere $80,000 you can fetch yourself a limited edition "Karma" (really? Karma?) which is packed full of lithium-ion batteries to provide 50 miles of "emissions-free full-electric driving". The car's designer, Henrik Fischer, claims the Karma is "more environmentally friendly than the Toyota Prius".
Fischer's claims are based on the notion that plug-ins are "emissions free", something that is only possible if your plug-in's socket and upstream power supply is itself emissions-free. Most electricity is still generated by coal or gas-fired power stations, and these are decidedly not emissions-free.
I was pleased to see this point made in an engrossing piece in this month's Wired Magazine. The article reveals details of some of the first entrants for the latest innovation challenge from the X Prize Foundation. The $10m Automotive X Prize will be awarded to the team that can win races with a 100mpg car. The rules haven't yet been finalized, but they fall into three main areas:
- the car must get at least 100 miles to the gallon
- produce less than 200 grams of greenhouse gases per mile
- mass production has to be feasible, with plans in place to produce at least 10,000 a year
Hidden in the detail is the observation that any non-gasoline fuel (including plugging into the electricity supply) will also have to be accounted for in equivalent emissions rates for that particular supply. Best hope they're not racing in Kansas (where emissions generated from electricity average at 2lbs carbon per kWh).
This looks like a fascinating challenge. Wired explains that 43 teams are already working hard to claim the prize, which won't be awarded until 2010.
Picture by Misha Gravenor of Wired.com.
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