as if they aren’t bother some enough

So, you just get to your desk, whether at home or work.  You open up your email to see that you have 22 new messages… and, then you see that 15 of them are span and you have to go through the process of delete, delete…. de… lete.

It is annoying and a waste of time.  

But there are indications that it is also a harm on our planet, according to The San Francisco Chronicle:

 

A report being released Wednesday by security company McAfee Inc. finds that spammers are a scourge to your inbox and the environment, generating an astounding 62 trillion junk e-mails in 2008 that wasted enough electricity to power 2.4 million U.S. homes for a year.

The “Carbon Footprint of E-mail Spam Report” estimated the computational power needed to process spam — from criminals tapping their armies of infected PCs to send it, Internet providers transmitting it, and end users viewing and deleting it.

The report concluded that the electricity needed to process a single spam message results in 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere — the equivalent of driving 3 feet in a car.

So, the next time you get spam… just get more mad thinking that the energy could have been used to power your home.  oh. well.

two things about the ocean

So first, comes a report that if we continue to burn fossil fuels at our current rate, the acidification of the ocean is a certainty and a “planet changer“.  One reason is because the coral life is expected to die off within the half century.

The ocean absorbs about 1/4 of the CO2 released into the atmosphere by human activities each year, which tempers the effect of this greenhouse gas on our climate. Carbonic acid is formed when the CO2 is dissolved in the seawater, which lowers the pH (increases the acidity). An acidic ocean reduces the rate at which corals can produce their skeletons and at which other marine organisms can build their shells. And so many other marine organisms are affected by anything that takes a toll on the corals. It’s estimated that the global economy based on coral (and other related marine life) is about $16 trillion per year.

On the heels of that report, comes this report where the EPA is looking into the idea that ocean acidification is a violation of the Clean Water Act.

 

The United States Environmental Protection Agencyannounced steps to protect U.S. waters from the threat of ocean acidification under the Clean Water Act. Today, EPA issued a notice of data availability to be published in the Federal Register that calls for information and data on ocean acidification that the agency will use to evaluate water-quality criteria under the Clean Water Act.

The notice responded to a formal petition and threatened litigation from the Center for Biological Diversity that sought to compel the agency to impose stricter pH criteria for ocean water quality and publish guidance to help states protect American waters from ocean acidification. EPA’s notice marks the first time that the Clean Water Act will be invoked by the agency to address ocean acidification.

“Ocean acidification is likely the greatest threat to the health of our oceans and is occurring at a frightening rate,” said Miyoko Sakashita, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity’s oceans program. “The federal government has finally acknowledged that ocean acidification is a threat; now it must take the next step and fully implement the Clean Water Act to protect our nation’s waters from ”the other CO2 problem.”

 

All I want to say about this is that this is BIG, HUGE news.  Can you imagine if they find it is in violation and the limitations and restirictions that will then be enforced by everyone from big corporations to the US Navy.  

I like this Lisa Jackson….

farfegnugen

Admission:  my entire life, I have only owned Volkswagens.  I like them.  They have served me quite well.  I even had one that I drove for ten years, got about 300K miles on it with only one standard transmission!  These are good, GOOD cars.

So, I thought I would direct you all to this article:

Volkswagen US CEO pushes for fuel efficiency, via The Associated Press

 

Automakers must work to improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions as they struggle to deal with the toughest economic conditions in more than a generation, Volkswagen’s U.S. CEO said Wednesday.

Stefan Jacoby, president and chief executive of Volkswagen of America, told journalists at the New York International Auto Show that these changes won’t just come from hybrid and electric vehicles, but also more fuel-efficient gas and diesel models.

It continues on discussing the benefits of diesel (which VW just came out with an AMAZING version of) and the need for fuel efficiency standards that mimic the new rules set in California.

This is a company that is trying.  Yes. Could they do more?  Any automaker could do more… but, I think they are doing close to their best.

room for journalists in climate change

In a report out of the latest meeting of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the number one sentiment was that journalists were not doing their job in getting the word out about the severity of this whole global warming thing.

In fact, Katherine Richardson from the University of Copenhagen said that a new strategy is needed for communicating climate change, one that sidesteps journalists, and the money-making organizations they work for, entirely, according to Nature.

But the author of the report brings up a relevant issue:  if the scientists don’t talk to the journailists, ensuring accurate data.. who will?

Authorities on climate change are irreplaceable in informing the media, whether they do so by being a reliable source for science reporters, by writing op-eds in mainstream newspapers or by contributing to blogs. With recent cuts in core science reporting staff, such as those at CNN, it is especially vital that scientists continue this service to society. It would be better still if they combined this with more direct communication through avenues such as blogs, which are becoming increasingly important resources for reporters and interested citizens (Nature 458, 274–277; 2009). But such efforts should be seen as complementary to, rather than as a replacement for, mainstream media. By embracing both, scientists may well see their messages begin to permeate more effectively.

quote of the day, 4/14/09

 

“Recklessness is the only word. I mean, we have to recognise the scale of the risk. If we go on at anything like business as usual, we’ll be at concentration levels by the end of this century which will give us around a 50-50 chance of being above five degrees centigrade relative to, say, the 19th century. We humans are only 100,000 years old. We haven’t seen that for 30 to 50 million years. We haven’t seen three degrees centigrade for three million years. The idea that humans can easily adapt to conditions like these …” He lets the proposition tail away, too foolish even for words.

Nicholas Stern

unions

So, I will not pretend to know much about unions.  I know some people swear by them, others think they are awful.  All I know is I had family members that were in a union and I was told to never cross a picket line.

Therefore I am posting this article in order to let you decide for yourself what you think of it all…  maybe add a comment to educate me and the other readers why unions are good or bad.  Will this article change your opinion of going to Starbucks or Whole Foods?  Do you think it is right that two of the largest American companies are doing something illegal, despite your position on unions?

Are Starbucks and Whole Foods Union Busters?, via Mother Jones

Shortly before the inauguration of President Barack Obama, the manager of a Whole Foods grocery store in the San Francisco Bay Area gathered his employees in a conference room for a chat about labor organizing. “This is not a union-bashing thing whatsoever,” the manager began, adding, however, that he’d called the meeting because Whole Foods believed Obama would sign the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation intended to ease unionization that was opposed by the company’s lobbyists. According to a tape of the meeting obtained by Mother Jones, the manager went on to imply that joining a union would lead to reprisals: “It’s interesting to note that once you become represented by the union,” he said, “basically everything, every benefit you have, is kind of thrown out the window, and you renegotiate a contract.”

“I think it’s probably fair to construe [that comment] as a threat,” concluded Tim Peck, a representative of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in San Francisco, after Mother Jones read him quotes from the meeting, one of several anti-union trainings held by the company in recent months. Peck pointed out that labor law bars employers from threatening to strip benefits from workers in retaliation for unionizing. “The ‘flying out the window’ [comment] kind of suggests that the benefits are gone,” he noted. Legally, “that wouldn’t pass muster.”

interesting things to read

State of the Nations – III The Environment, via Scoop

I didn’t read parts I or II, but part III is quite interesting:

The earth’s resources are finite. They are being fought over and consumed at a rate that is not sustainable. It is a problem that goes well beyond the most publicized problem of climate change. It is interesting that in a supposed free trade world, the military has to be such a big part of the effort to control resources. It is a complete and full contradiction without any gray areas. Even without resource wars, given the artificially created demands of western society, we would rapidly deplete many resources and continue to increase the levels of pollution, environmental damage, species extinction, climate change and other environmental disasters that are occurring. It simply cannot continue.

Has global warming really stopped?, via The New Scientist

(psst… I’ll give you a hint… nope)

We show that the climate over the 21st century can and likely will produce periods of a decade or two where the globally averaged surface air temperature shows no trend or even slight cooling in the presence of longer-term warming.

Lying in Wait, via Chemical and Engineering News

someone has been using the ocean as a trash receptacle…

 

The find earlier this month off the Oahu coast by researchers from theSchool of Ocean & Earth Science & Technology (SOEST) at theUniversity of Hawaii, Manoa, on behalf of the U.S. Army is likely just part of the more than 8,000 tons of chemical agents that the Army reportedly dumped off the Hawaiian shores at the end of World War II. But this cache is only a small fraction of all the munitions and bulk containers holding chemical weapons agents that were routinely scuttled in the ocean.

According to Army documents, large quantities of shells, mines, solid rocket fuels, propellants, radioactive materials, and chemical weapons were dumped into the ocean not only off U.S. shores but all around the world. And on at least 74 occasions, the Army knowingly dumped hazardous chemical agents such as mustard, lewisite, phosgene, and VX off U.S. coastlines. Records of exact locations of such dumps can be hard to find, only partly for security reasons.

this green house

by Matt DeNoto

I do a lot of my TV watching over at Hulu, where I can watch full length shows (and feature films) for free, and with less commercials than watching them on an actual network.

That’s where I discovered Building Green, a PBS offering that applies Green philosophy to the most practical application possible: the building of a home.

Over the course of 13 episodes, home designer and host Kevin Contreras brings viewers along on his journey of building his very own green dream home. Because the building process is broken up over a whole season, Kevin is able to go in depth to each facet of the design, discussing with experts the pros and cons of the ever-expanding array of green options.

One immediately attention-getting detail about the house is that the walls will be insulated with straw bales. The builders literally stack straw bales where the walls will be, then cover them with chicken wire and plaster over it. According to the show, this will offer excellent insulation and protect against termites while preserving a delicate natural resource (trees) by using an abundant material often seen as a waste product by farmers. It’s also saving the project a lot of money. The only ‘downside’ mentioned so far (I’m only 3 episodes in) is that the outer walls of the house will need to be two feet thick.

 

Kevin’s driving concern is the high number of toxic chemicals that find their way into our living spaces, often causing the air inside our homes to be significantly less healthy than the outside air. But that’s just one part of keeping the house green. From adding fly-ash to the concrete that becomes the foundation to capturing rain water for use in the home, every aspect of the house has been considered. Reusing materials, energy efficiency, buying locally, all of these are factored in to every decision.

 

Of course, as one can see from the ‘Reviews & Discussions’ section on the Hulu page for the ‘Foundation’ episode, there are still plenty of points of contention about the choices being made. One commenter blasts the home for having steel supports, even though Kevin addresses the alternatives and explains his reasoning in the episode. Other commenters argue that the home is too big for Kevin’s small family.

Overall, the show is well-balanced in its approach to the various green options. There are a lot of factors to every part of the process, and all must be taken into account, including preserving the quality of life we as a society have come to expect from our homes.

With a light, fun tone and tips in every episode about how viewers can make small changes to green up their homes right now, Building Green is an important part of the discussion about how we start to work Green into everything we do.

For more information, visit Building Green’s website

Get the scoop on the live music scene in your area and hit a show tonight. Check out TourTracker.com!

THIS is how you treat your children

Aboriginal leaders say they’ll evacuate 700 kids affected by harmful fumes, via Canadian News

 

A remote First Nations community in northern Ontario is preparing to evacuate about 700 children over fears that harmful fuel fumes are making them ill, an aboriginal leader said Thursday.

Plans are underway to airlift the children out of Attawapiskat First Nation near James Bay this month, even though it could cost millions of dollars, said Grand Chief Stan Louttit.

“Both levels of government refuse to help,” he said.

please make Mc-D’s a Mc-Don’t

Seriously.  SERIOUSLY.

After you read this, if you need further proof that the agri-business, fast food, triple hamburger on every corner industry is not serving your best interest… well then, I hate to say it, but there is no hope for you.

McDonald’s Aims for a Low-Pesticide Potato for Its French Fries, via Reuters.

McDonald’s, the largest fast-food chain the world and the largest buyer of potatoes in the United States, is under pressure from shareholders to do something about pesticide use on the potatoes it buys. To avoid a shareholder resolution on the subject, McDonald’s has agreed to “survey its U.S. suppliers compile a list of best practices in pesticide reduction and recommend those best practices to its global suppliers.

Essentially, three major shareholders was threatening to demand that McDonald’s reduce its purchasing of pesticide laden potatoes.  But, since corporate decided to look into it on their own, it is not a “requirement”, as much as it is a, “it would be nice if you were to do this, please.”

First off, yummy to the pesticide filled french fries you all have been ingesting, unknowingly.

Second, just some information:

Potatoes have been on or near the list of the Environmental Working Group’s dirty dozen foods with the most pesticide residue for years. That means, according to a government analysis, that after a typical person buys a typical potato and prepares it in a typical way, it’s among the fruits and vegetables most likely to be laced with pesticides.

“Farmers often spray on a weekly basis, or even more frequently to try to prevent blight. They also spray herbicides to kill the tops of the plants at the end of the growing season to make the underground tubers easier to harvest. Over 40 toxic pesticides are used on potatoes including ethoprop, mancozeb, chlorothalonil, EPTC and metribuzin.

Most of these pesticides are linked to serious chronic effects such as cancer, endocrine disruption and reproductive/developmental effects. Many leach to groundwater and contaminate surface waters. Intensive potato cultivation and pesticides usage have been implicated in the high rates of rare cancers in young children in rural western Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada. The island farming community of about 14,000 has experienced occurrences of osteosarcoma, several lymphomas, Ewing’s sarcoma, and a number of myeloid leukemia cases, all among children.”

So, the good news is that McDonald’s is under pressure to put its growers under pressure.  And, they are in a position to do that, since they buy a lot of potatoes.  The bad news.. is it too little too late?  And, pressure is one thing, demanding is another.

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