Blogs / Better Planet

Four Democratic senators called on EPA chief Stephen Johnson to resign yesterday: Barbara Boxer of California, who is chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. They basically accused Johnson of perjury. They also announced they’d asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to look into prosecuting him.

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This is one of the most important stories of the year, decade if things further sour.

The World Trade Organization is almost dead. That’s the take from the New York Times. With India, China and, of course, the United States being blamed, the WTO has abandoned trade talks. Trade agreements are the organization’s entire mission. Nations can still create bilateral agreements between themselves. But this effectively shuts poorer countries out of the international marketplace. Poorer countries need a voice. Shutting them out of talks, or creating agreements that do not include them (or disadvantage them), is not only disheartening, it’s bad for the planet.The most amount of environmental degradation occurs in poor countries with weak or nonexistent environmental standards. The WTO had the opportunity to raise the bar for these nations, giving them hope of participating in the world market while at the same time requiring better environmental practices. That opportunity has been lost. (WTO critics say, mind you, that the organization’s bylaws were already so flawed that they actually prevent discrimination based on any kind of environmental standards anyway.) Poorer nations will now go the cheap route to producing products. That means without environmental consideration: illegal logging, toxic ingredients, non-sustainable practices, you name it.

Optimists can look for — and hope for — a better WTO, or successor organization to wear the crown. This one looks as though its time has come and gone.  

The Associated Press just published an internal memo the EPA’s chief of staff sent to managers telling them to not let staffers cooperate with the agency’s own inspector general but forward the info requests to him. In addition to the inspector general, employees aren’t supposed to talk to congressional investigators (!) or reporters (no “!”).

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The European Bioplastics Association says a million tons of bioplastics are poised to hit the market over the next three years replacing petroleum-based plastics that are the Earth’s scourge.

Bioplastics are made of “compostable” materials that biodegrade (starches, sugars, soy, hemp, etc.) whereas traditional petroleum-based plastics don’t biodegrade — they just get smaller and smaller. To be sure, bioplastcis are more expensive to produce–between 20% to 100% more–than traditional plastics, but the surge in the price of oil has narrowed the gap. Climate Change Corp. has a very thorough analysis piece on the future of bioplastics. It bottom lines: “The idea behind bioplastic is that you could fill up a bioplastic bag with food waste and throw other bioplastic products like drinks bottles, disposable plates and cutlery in a composter and within three months in theory there would be no trace.”Still, there is a ways to go: “Currently only 1% at most of bioplastics in Europe, and roughly the same in the US, is composted,” it’s noted. Gotta love the idea of being able to toss your trash with abandon.

So you no longer want to be a scourge of everything we hold dear / friend to Saudi Arabia.  You want to throw away your SUV. But how is it done? A San Franciscan named Ryan Mickle raised the question for real on a web site this month, and little by little became a web phenom.

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We hear it a lot: We can beat this [global warming]. We just need the will. We had the will to put a man on the moon and we did it…Insert whichever variation of the man on the moon analogy you prefer from any number of people: Al Gore, John McCain, Barack Obama, your neighbor Fred. Interestingly, the analogy is exactly correct. “NASA spent roughly $25 billion between 1961 and 1972 to put astronauts on the moon after John F. Kennedy issued his now-famous challenge. In today’s dollars, that same effort would have cost $150 billion. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Obama, the likely Democratic nominee, is proposing to spend that exact amount over the next decade to develop the energy- and environmental-friendly devices designed to cut energy costs and put the skids on global warming,” comments Russ Britt at Marketwatch. [Read the full story.] Will, especially political will, is the only way we are going to combat global warming to any degree. It is going to take a massive effort to regulate and invent energy to meet our increasing power demand. Now, at least, we know the financial cost. Relative to how much we spend on our military budget (about 4 times that amount), saving the planet and providing a clean source of energy to run on seems like a deal. We should take it. 

Grist has a piece up about greening your death. Some of the advice is unsurprising: have your funeral near where the people who care about you live so there are minimal transportation costs, try to get people to carpool, etc.

The interesting part is that cremation is greener than burial. You just have to tell the funeral home to take out your fillings, which contain mercury, before they burn you up. When you get buried, you generally get embalmed with toxic chemicals. There is a Green Burial Council, but the green burial industry is still in its infancy.

A Hindu friend of mine told me that Hindus traditionally don’t go in for burial or even graveyards, which is deeply enviro of them because a graveyard is big lawn maintained with pesticides.

Image: flickr/bookish in north park 

Originally developed for drought afflicted areas, xeriscaping is catching on in more temperate areas too as water becomes increasingly scarce.  

Xeriscaping is a form of landscaping where you plant native species that don’t require additional watering. As H2o Conserve points out, “grassy lawns make sense in wet climates, but in dry areas like the southwest they’re huge water-wasters. Instead, suggestions for dry climates include landscaping with rock gardens and cacti.

For the (green) thumbsketch of what it’s all about, check out eartheasy’s piece on the trend.  

A member of Plane Stupid, an English group that advocates for less flying, tried to glue himself to PM Gordon Brown yesterday.  According to Plane Stupid’s web site, he was spectacularly successful in driving home his point about Brown’s aviation policies.

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In LA, people can barely handle carpool lanes. I wonder what would happen here if we tried what Beijing just allegedly pulled off: a day when cars with odd-numbered plates have to stay off the road, then another day when the ones with even-numbered plates have to stay home. This was accomplished because their smog is actually worse than ours and they have an Olympics coming up.

If we tried that here, it would be one situation in which having a vanity plate would actually be worth it. (No numbers in WLD DOGZ). So for America I propose an alternate system: women are forbidden from driving one day, men the next. What better way to subject cultural stereotypes regarding driving habits to scientific rigor? Teenagers vs. old people would be next.

Image: flickr/zzanthras777