The Windy City Blows Away Plastic Bags

Wow, this is good news.  Many cities, even states, like RI, have looked at a ban on plastic bags, but this is the first major step we've seen and we applaud Chicago for taking it.  Keep in mind this reduces use of fossil fuel to manufacture the bags, distribution and then the obvious trash (we've all see plastic bags blowing across our highways and littering our parks and cities) they create that is eliminated.

Let's make this an international standard.  This story, and much more, are on our main site this week and are included with our weekly update:  http://www.renewablenow.biz/governmental-green.html.



"Paper or plastic?” will no longer be a choice in Chicago, starting next year.

As expected, at an April 30 city council meeting, Chicago aldermen voted 36-10 to ban plastic bags at chain and franchise stores. The ban goes into effect for large retailers in August 2015 and one year later for shops smaller than 10,000 square feet. Family-owned stores and restaurants will not be affected.

All stores will have to provide or sell reusable bags, recyclable paper bags or compostable plastic bags and have the option of charging for the disposable bags.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been supportive of the ban once small, family-owned businesses were exempted, as part of his larger plans to improve Chicago’s waste management and recycling systems.

Alderman Proco “Joe” Moreno spent more than two years spearheading the anti-bag effort in Chicago and has called single-use plastic bags “a relic of yesterday’s economy,” insisting that no jobs or business will be lost because of the ban.

Is this a model for other cities across the U.S.? Some who fight for the environment have issues?

Environmentalist and executive director of Bring Your Bag Chicago, Jean Jordan, lambasted the bag ordinance in her own Tribune op-ed the day before the vote, saying that without a fee, the effort “masquerades as a piece of environmental legislation” that will not help stop litter or lower cleanup costs.

“The problem with the absence of a fee is that consumers aren’t encouraged to change their behavior: They will choose the ‘free’ bag, while retailers embed the costs of those bags in their product prices. A small fee is not punitive. It’s an educational tool that triggers consumer awareness of disposable bag waste,” she wrote.

Also noted from the plastics industry, according to them : that paper bags have a higher carbon dioxide footprint than plastic ones and compostable bags “are the worst of both worlds” if they don’t actually make it to a proper industrial composting facility.

For plastics industry groups, for whom concern about manufacturing jobs continue to mount as bag ban ordinances pile up around the country, the answer is simple: recycling programs.

“Comprehensive plastic bag recycling education would have been the better option for Chicago’s environment and would have preserved consumers’ freedom of choice. We are exploring all options to reverse this terrible decision,” APBA’s Califf said in an April 30 news release.

“It is extremely unfortunate that the Chicago City Council passed an ordinance that could destroy plastics manufacturing jobs in Chicago and other areas across the country that recycle these valuable products,” said SPI President and CEO William Carteaux.

For us here at ReNewable Now, this is a very interesting real life model that we can monitor and research deeper and truly see if the benefits outweigh the negatives.  And for any of our readers out there who can share their knowledge on which is worse for the environment, COMPOSTABLE BAGS or PLASTIC, we would like to hear and share what you know with our readers.

Climate Change Law Suites/Accountability will bring sustainable changes

We will not run the whole article, but will give a link, but this piece just touches on the incredible legal changes cascading towards us that will pin full responsibility on the major generators of carbon and will bring compliance and substantial reductions in very short order.

We are blessed with reams of data, collected over many years, that give us insight into the risk of continuing to run on a fossil-fuel based economy.  That same data is pretty compelling evidence, presented by lawyers to judges and juries, to implicate companies high on the list of carbon discharge.  It is very much like the forensics used to track factories that discharged pollutants into our rivers and ground eco-system.  The ramifications--the monetary pain--has been significant for those brought to justice.

Keep in mind, even on a much smaller basis, we are all guilty.

This is a game-changer, in a very big way, in the fight to restore health to our atmosphere.  We will put together a radio show on this:

"Source - http://www.thenation.com/article/179459/want-stop-climate-change-take-fossil-fuel-industry-court#

In November 2013, American climate scientist Richard Heede, of the Colorado-based Climate Accountability Institute (,http://www.climateaccountability.org/ ) published a paper with a revolutionary thesis. After nine years of researching the energy industry in dozens of countries, he concluded that nearly two-thirds of the world’s carbon dioxide and methane emissions dating back to the dawn of the industrial era were the responsibility of just ninety companies. Heede called them the “carbon majors.”  See http://www.climateaccountability.org/carbon_majors.html

Not surprisingly, the biggest players were publicly owned fossil fuel corporations like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, along with state-held or nationalized energy monopolies in countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia. Just five investor-owned companies—BP, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, ExxonMobil and Shell—produced enough fossil fuel to account for 12.5 percent of human-generated CO2 since 1854. Seven of the carbon majors are cement manufacturers, a particularly noxious, carbon-intensive industry. The eighty-three energy producers on Heede’s list extracted, refined and marketed the oil, gas and coal that have powered modern civilization. Along the way, they started the process that will ultimately cause our climate system to crash.

Heede’s paper, published in the journal Climatic Change, is arguably the most provocative piece of scientific research in the climate field in years. However, except for a dismissive reference in a New York Times blog and a small piece in the Los Angeles Times, the major American media outlets ignored it.

But the lawyers didn’t.

In September, two months before Heede’s article was published, leading environmental attorneys from around the world met with Heede at a confidential workshop at American University in Washington, DC, to discuss what role his findings might play in lawsuits that could force fossil fuel companies (or their government regulators) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Matthew Pawa, a climate attorney based in Massachusetts, calls Heede’s work “hugely important.”

“What Heede did helps assign blame. It’s a list with names and numbers. It individualizes responsibility in a way that had not been done before,” says Pawa, who brought a suit against ExxonMobil and other carbon majors seeking climate-related damages for an Alaskan Eskimo village that will be largely engulfed by the Chukchi Sea within a matter of decades.

One well-established environmental lawyer is in the preliminary stages of putting together a lawsuit employing Heede’s statistics. Other attorneys were quick to praise the study, but cautioned that no one has yet hit upon a legal theory that can use Heede’s work to force the carbon majors to cough up some of the astronomical sums that experts believe must be spent worldwide to adapt to rising seas, heat waves, droughts and other extreme-weather events caused by climate change—not to mention help pay for the damage already caused.

“You really need the science to do anything legally,” says Sharon Eubanks, the former head of the Justice Department’s “tobacco team,” which got a federal judge to award a civil judgment against the major cigarette companies in 2006 under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. “Policy, litigation—all of that follows the science,” she adds. “But that’s far from all you need. You need a legal theory that fits the facts and can survive attack in a real courtroom.”

As Pawa explains it, “We’re where the tobacco lawyers were before they started winning. It takes time and it takes persistence for the legal theories to evolve and mature.”

While the industry scoffs at the importance of climate-change lawsuits, Big Carbon is thought to be taking them very seriously in private—especially after a federal appeals court found in 2005 that US cities and even individuals suffering economic and other damages from climate change had standing to sue under the National Environmental Policy Act. The plaintiffs included the cities of Oakland, California, and Boulder, Colorado, along with several members of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, ranging from a maple tree farmer to a marine biologist. An analyst with the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation called the idea of such a lawsuit “nuts”—but within four years, a federal judge had ruled for the plaintiffs, opening the courthouse doors to new classes of litigants.

Some legal analysts believe that fossil fuel producers could be vulnerable to fraud or civil conspiracy charges if it can be legally proved that companies like ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal spent millions funding climate-change-denying organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Greening Earth Society, while internally acknowledging that the science supporting anthropogenic (i.e., human-caused) climate change was a settled issue. That could put Big Carbon in roughly the same position as Big Tobacco was in the early 1990s, when cigarette makers continued to cultivate public doubt about their product’s harmfulness long after they had accepted that it was addictive and deadly. As the tobacco suits lurched forward, documents—as well as some infamous congressional testimony—proved the industry’s bad faith, swaying public opinion against tobacco. It was that, along with the massive wave of lawsuits by all fifty state attorneys general, that helped persuade Congress to bring the cigarette makers under the federal regulatory umbrella.

In the case of energy, anthropogenic climate change has been accepted science since at least 1990—meaning that the coal, oil and gas industries have been on notice for at least twenty-five years that they are making the planet uninhabitable. It was also in the early ’90s that the energy industry began to aggressively push what it pretended was a “counterscience” of climate-change denial, even as it continued to dump a substantial portion of total historic CO2 emissions into the earth’s atmosphere..."

BP oil spill, four years later, still taking a toll on fisherman

This is interesting timing on this story--we will be staging a live event in RI at the end of May, and will broadcast live, a debate on this very subject:  Has BP come up significantly short on their PR effort to convince the world they've put their best effort forward?

We hope to have a BP rep, and other oil-industry reps there, along with reps from the National Wildlife Federation and Texas A & M/ Hart Institute.  In the meantime here's one perspective from Huff Post (with the link to the news report:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/20/bp-oil-spill-still-taking-a-toll_n_5182552.html?utm_hp_ref=green

"The BP oil spill, often called the worst man-made environmental disaster of our time, first began four years ago today. On April 20, 2010, BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded, causing more than 200 million gallons of oil to spew into the Gulf of Mexico. 11 workers on the rig died, and the resulting cleanup has already cost BP more than $26 billion.

But for many fisherman along the Gulf, despite all the time and money spent to try and heal the region, lasting effects are still taking their toll. The Gulf Coast's oyster populations, home to about two-thirds of American supply, have been in decline since the spill.

Byron Encalade, a fisherman along the Gulf Coast, joined HuffPost Live's Josh Zepps to discuss the ongoing impacts of the spill.

"You have to start to recovery, we haven't started to recover." he said. "We're 4 years out now, and we haven't saw the first sign, and most of the businesses, I know my business is at a 100 percent loss. Right now we're solely relying on BP to keep it's word, something they haven't been doing. The oysters are not recovering."

However, BP has said oyster populations were not impacted by the spill, providing this comment to HuffPost Live:

"Multiple sources of data indicate that oil and dispersant compounds did not affect oyster populations in 2010 after the spill occured. A Louisiana report from 2010 after the spill states that 'no direct oiling of sampled reefs was noted during annual sampling of public oyster seed grounds in Louisiana. Field notes from 2010, 2011 and 2012 NRD sampling to not document a single visibly oiled oyster bed.'"

But Encalade said that couldn't be further from the truth.

"Well, I'm going to say this, and God knows that I'm tired of being politically correct: BP's lying." he said. "I was out there on that boat ... that's one of the biggest lies ever told."

Take a look at the oysterman's story above, and watch the clips below to hear more about the ongoing recovery throughout gulf communities, four years and billions of dollars later."

Five anthropogenic factors that will radically alter northern forests in 50 years

Thanks to Science Daily for posting  a terrific article on the anthropogenic factors potentially reshaping our northern forests.

Today, we are going to record a segment with Brian Keane, president, Smart Power, on the Showtime series on climate change.  From Hollywood to science to the yet unborn, climate change has started to define our future relationship with our planet.  We hope to reach out to an expert who predicts dire consequences, which cannot be reversed, for our economic dependence on fossil fuel   Perhaps the alarmist can rally immediate and global action needed to stave off decades or a century of destruction.

Look to our main site today...renewablenow.biz...for more on the Showtime series and all things relevant to the business side of green:

U.S. Forest Service study suggests climate is not the only factor ushering in change.

Credit: Image courtesy of USDA Forest Service - Northern Research Station

In the most densely forested and most densely populated quadrant of the United States, forests reflect two centuries of human needs, values and practices. Disturbances associated with those needs, such as logging and clearing forests for agriculture and development, have set the stage for management issues of considerable concern today, a U.S. Forest Service study reports.

The report -- Five anthropogenic factors that will radically alter forest conditions and management needs in the Northern United States -- was published recently by the journal Forest Science and is part of the Northern Forest Futures Project, an effort led by the Forest Service's Northern Research Station to forecast forest conditions over the next 50 years in the 20-state region extending from Maine to Minnesota and from Missouri to Maryland. The study is available at: http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/45716

"In our research, we found five short- and long-term factors that will be highly influential regardless of the nature and magnitude of the effects of climate change," said lead author Stephen Shifley, a research forester with the Northern Research Station. "Addressing these issues today will make northern forests more resilient to the effects of climate change and to any other natural or anthropogenic disturbances in the long term."

The five factors identified the study are:

Northern forests lack age-class diversity and will uniformly grow old without management interventions or natural disturbances. Nearly 60 percent of northern forest land is clustered in age classes spanning 40 to 80 years; young forests (age 20 years or less) are only 8 percent of all forests in the region; and forests older than 100 years are 5 percent of forests.

The area of forest land in the North will decrease as a consequence of expanding urban areas. Cities in the 20-state region are expected to gain another 27 million people in the next 50 years and grow by about 5 million hectares.

Invasive species will alter forest density, diversity, and function. The U.S. North has the dubious distinction of having the greatest number of invasive insects and plants per county due to nearly three centuries of active commerce, diverse tree species that provide suitable habitats, and the means for invasive species to spread.

Management intensity for timber is low in Northern forests and likely to remain so. A low propensity or low capacity for forest management reduces options for addressing perceived problems such as low forest diversity, invasive species, and other insects or disease problems.

Management for non-timber objectives will gain relevance but will be challenging to implement. An unintended consequence of reduced timber harvesting may be reduced capacity to subsidize other restoration activities -- either through revenue from timber sales or through manipulation of vegetation and woody fuels during logging.

Actions that researchers and land managers can take to address these issues include:

• Develop quantifiable state and regional goals for forest diversity.
• Understand the spatial and structural impacts of urban expansion on forests.
• Develop symbiotic relationships among forest owners, forest managers, forest industry and the general public to support contemporary conservation goals.
• Work to understand the many dimensions of forest change.

"The northern quadrant of the United States includes 172 million acres of forest land and 124 million people," said Michael T. Rains, Director of the Northern Research Station and the Forest Products Laboratory. "In the next 50 years, the link between forests and economic and human health will grow. The Northern Forest Futures Project is helping identify the individual and collective steps needed to ensure healthy and resilient futures for trees and people alike."

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Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by USDA Forest Service - Northern Research Station. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length

Recycle Your Old Gadgets With Apple and Get A Gift Card

It is great to programs that everyone can participate and help eliminate waste.  Kudos to Apple for their recycling program.

"Most people are pretty eager to get the latest of the shiny electronic gadgets as soon as they come out. Apple is now encouraging that rush, but with an eco-friendly twist: they’re now offering gift cards in exchange for your old electronics.

Apple’s Reuse and Recycling Program will recycle any device and, if it’s not particularly ancient, will issue a gift card equivalent to the item’s worth. They explain on their website, “Turn that iPhone, iPad, or computer — Mac or PC — you’re not using anymore into something brand new. Send it to us and we’ll determine if it qualifies for reuse. If it does, that means your device has monetary value that we’ll apply to an Apple Store Gift Card, which you can use for purchases at any Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. If your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or PC doesn’t qualify for reuse, we’ll recycle it responsibly at no cost to you.”

Apple contracts with PowerON, a California-based reseller of used and refurbished Macintosh hardware and software. They’ll issue the fair market price for your old item and will also send you a convenient shipping package.

Get the full details on how the program works on Apple’s website."

Photo credit: Anthony Hall / Shutterstock.com

The History and Power of Earth Day

How do you get 1 billion to act in faith and spirit the same day every year for 40 years? How do you harness that energy and devotion into daily action? How do you inspire the world to build a cleaner, brighter future?

The Earth Day Network has done that since the 1970s. Now led by Kathleen Rogers, our guest, this ground-breaking group, with a long and illustrious history, today helps the world plant a billion trees, cajoles us into millions of acts of green, and quietly helps lead business and employees into an emerging green economy.

In a wide-ranging interview, Kathleen tells us how political unison, linking Republicans and Democrats, motivated by the anti-war movement, helped give birth to Earth Day. Led back then by young Dennis Hayes, their DC-based group quickly helped push much needed environmental legislation, laws that today continue to help govern us.

Their dedication to educating the world on crafting a sustainable planet has never wavered, as you are about to learn.

Enjoy this segment as you reflect on, as we did, a moment in time that changed the world and is slavishly remembered every April.

Valparaiso University's Solar Powered Furnace

Students at Valparaiso University's James S. Markiewicz Solar Energy Research Facility have constructed a solar powered furnace capable of reaching temperatures of over 1,650 degrees Celsius.
  
A 6m x 6m sun-tracking heliostat is situated outside of the furnace building and directs the light toward the concentrator; which is composed of 306 curved mirrors. Between the heliostat and the concentrator are a set of louvres that regulate the amount of light available to the concentrator.
 
The concentrator and a magnifying glass focus the light on a solar thermal reactor. The temperatures attained inside the reactor allow for a wide range of chemical reactions and associated research; including converting water into hydrogen fuel and splitting compounds such as zinc oxide without any resulting waste.
 
According to a report on The Atlantic, one of the team's major goals is to produce magnesium with 90 percent less fossil fuel energy and 93 percent less carbon emissions. Magnesium can play an important role in making vehicles lighter - it's around 35 percent lighter than aluminium; however traditional processes are energy and carbon intensive.
 
The team have been awarded a $2.3 million Department of Energy grant to develop their "green magnesium" process. READ MORE