Category: Preserving the Environment

Burlington, Vt. is Leading America into a Future of Clean Energy

Posted on by robbie

Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, is illustrating just what a greener future could look like.
The city now touts that 100 percent of its electricity is powered by renewable sources including wind, water and biomass. The Burlington Electric Department reached the notable figure following the purchase of  the Winooski 1 Hydroelectric Facility, located on the Winooski River, earlier this month.
While Burlington’s 42,000 residents have been encouraging electric utility providers to make the switch to greener sources, the city has been talking about achieving the milestone for around a decade. But in 2008, officials began developing an actual strategy.

“The transition in thought from 2004 to 2008 was ‘We want to do this’ to ‘This actually makes economic sense for us to do this,'” says Ken Nolan, the manager of power resources for Burlington Electric.

That “economic sense” means that residents will avoid rate increases, and according to Nolan, once the bonds for the Winooski One facility are paid off (around 20 years from now), the utility will see cost savings.
“A lot of times when you buy plants like this, you end up having to increase rates initially to drop them later,” Nolan tells The Burlington Free Press,  “and we were able to buy it without any impact and then lock in the benefits in the future.”
Of course, there will be instances in which there may not be enough wind and hydro energy to supply the city, which means they may have to generate electricity from traditional fossil fuel sources. But the goal is to amass a surplus of renewable energy when conditions are right — an excess that will be sold to other utilities.
Burlington joins a statewide movement toward ending reliance on harmful fossil fuel sources. The Washington Electric Co-operative, with around 11,000 customers throughout central and northern Vermont, reached 100 percent earlier this year.
The state has set a goal of reaching 90 percent of energy — including heat, electricity and transportation — from renewable resources by 2050. “We’re now in a position where we’re supplying Burlington residents with sources that are renewable,” Nolan says. “The prices are not tied to fossil fuels — they’re stable prices — and they provide us with the flexibility, from an environmental standpoint, to really react to any regulation or changes to environmental standards that come in the future.”
Around the country, more local governments and municipalities are working toward transitioning powering with renewable resources. For instance, after a tornado leveled Greensburg, Kansas in 2007, part of reconstruction included the installation of a 12.5-megawatt wind farm that began generating electricity in excess.
As more cities ponder ways to become greener cities, Burlington is proof that it can — and should — be done.
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Eating That Doughnut Could Cause Rhinos and Tigers to Go Extinct

Posted on by robbie

How much does a doughnut really cost? The person behind the register might know, but you should actually ask critically endangered Sumatran rhinos, tigers or orangutans for the price instead.
Many doughnut companies fry these deliciously fatty treats in unsustainable palm oil, which is cheap to ship and produce but is absolutely no good for the planet. Besides emitting tons of greenhouse gases, the burning of forests for palm oil plantations are a leading cause of deforestation, air pollution and destruction of wildlife and natural habitats in southeast Asia.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. Palm oil can be made without destroying forests or killing animals, and that’s why major doughnut companies are filling their environmentally irresponsible hole (pun intended) with a new sustainable strategy.
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Dunkin’ Brands (the parent company of Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins) announced it will now only buy palm oil from companies that protect forests and community rights for it U.S. stores. A day after Dunkin’s announcement, Krispy Kreme went a step further by committing to a 2016 deadline of sustainable palm oil across its global operation.
The move has been applauded by some environmentalists. Laurel Sutherlin of the Rainforest Action Network praised Dunkin’ Brands when they first announced their green initiatives a year ago, but she adds to NPR, “There’s still an issue that ‘sustainable’ means many different things to many different people.” Sutherlin means that there’s a proverbial gray area with the word “sustainable,” similar to how some “free-range” chickens might only have a shoebox to run around in or some “all natural” foods are made with artificial preservatives. In other words, how do these doughnut companies exactly know that their palm oil sources are entirely scrupulous?
Additionally, are these efforts even big enough to address a global environmental crisis? Calen May Tobin of the Union of Concerned Scientists calls Dunkin’s move a “half-measure” because it “needs to address the 59 other countries in which it operates, too.”
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To Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Brand’s credit, they’ve promised to commit to the following principles, according to Forest Heroes:
– No Deforestation: Suppliers must protect forests, endangered species habitat, lands with high carbon stock, and peatland of any depth.
– No Exploitation: Suppliers are required to protect human and worker rights, and obtain Free, Prior, and Informed Consent from communities for all development on their lands.
-Traceability: The companies are working with suppliers to trace all palm oil back to the preliminary plantation sources
What these doughnut companies seem to demonstrate is that the environment needs to be taken seriously. Other major brands and corporations would be wise to follow their lead because this very common vegetable oil isn’t just used for food. Palm oil is also found in 40 to 50 percent of household products including toothpaste, shampoo, cosmetics, cleaning products, detergents and more.
There’s always room for improvement when it comes to protecting our fragile ecosystem, but let’s hope these are steps in the right direction, and not just a greenwashing scheme to sell more doughnuts. The tigers, rhinos and orangutans definitely wouldn’t want that.
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The Latest Place to Grow Greens

Posted on by robbie

While urban farms are gaining popularity in cities across the country, some metropolitans are taking them to new heights. Literally.
Instead of planting gardens on the ground, some groups are utilizing rooftops to grow food to feed customers, students and the homeless.
One such urban rooftop farm is located at Roberta’s Pizza in New York City. Located in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, the restaurant has two small rooftop greenhouse facilities that produce 20 percent of the ingredients the restaurant uses throughout its multiple locations. And on the west coast, you’ll find Project Open Hand in San Francisco. This nonprofit uses its rooftop greenhouse to produce healthy meals for the sick and elderly. All of the herbs and greens are grown in the city headquarters, prepared by the chefs and then distributed across the city.
Schools are also a popular destination for rooftop farms. At George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., a greenhouse sits atop the school’s Exploratory Hall. As part of the Department of Environmental Science and Policy, the university’s greenhouse has three rooms — each paralleling a different climate. It has also partnered with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the university’s Potomac Heights’ vegetable garden, which feeds the homeless.
Chicago features a few different schools taking a unique approach to rooftop farming. The University of Chicago’s greenhouse sits atop the Donnelley Biological Science Learning Center.  Boasting 7,500 square feet of growing space, a portion of it is also used for drug research.
There’s also a local high school getting involved in the sky-high action. The Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School in Chicago has a hydroponic greenhouse on its roof. Since the school bases its curriculum on social transformation, it views social ecology and urban agriculture as vital components. So, the school uses its greenhouse to grow food for the students, as well as it serving as an educational tool.
And so far it’s working. For one student Jaleen Starling, the opportunity to work in the garden was life changing or at least lifestyle changing.
“When we get taught something, it’s never just for us to learn,” she tells New Communities. “It’s something for us to connect to. … Until I came to this school, I didn’t pay attention to food.”
So while these farms may be high up, they’re starting a movement on the ground.
To find more urban rooftop farms growing across the country, click here.
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Can a Picture of Beautiful Scenery Get Out the Vote?

Posted on by robbie

We’re about two decades from a climate change disaster, according to a new report from accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Looking at how the world economies are measuring up to promises they made to curtail emissions, the report underscores that we’re on track to double the amount of global warming agreed upon at the 2009 United Nations summit on climate change. Clearly, it’s time to change course.
But part of that means voting the right people into power to address environmental urgency, which is why outdoor retailer Patagonia is teaming up with the art-driven, crowdsourcing platform Creative Action Network and the Canary Project (an art organization) on a campaign to encourage millennials to vote in the upcoming midterm election.
Patagonia is hoping the campaign, “Vote the Environment,” will help turn the tide this November. The initiative encourages artists to design environmentally-minded posters and screenprints, which raise money for both the project and artist as well as voting advocacy group HeadCount. Patagoina is also linking environmental records for candidates and voter registration information on the project site.

“We recognize that there’s an environmental crisis going on,” says Lisa Pike Sheehy, Patagonia’s global environmental initiatives director. “I feel like we’re at that tipping point, and that’s another reason why we decided to put resources behind the midterms and not just wait another two years.”

In fact, just 23 percent of that important demographic of millennials said they will “definitely be voting” in the midterm election, according to a recent poll from Harvard’s Institute of Politics. But it’s this core group of voters that are most important and care more about the environment than their parents.

“Art can inspire people to remember why they care about the environment, memories of experiences they’ve had in the environment, things that reports and talking points and press releases don’t necessarily surface in the same way,” says Max Slavkin, co-founder and CEO of Creative Action Network.

“Especially young people who get so much information and news online by scrolling through images, rather than by reading articles,” he adds. “It’s a great way to reach a new generation of people who typically are under-involved in politics in general.”

MORE: 6 Common Environmental Culprits That Need Regulation

3 Reasons Why Sunday’s Historic Climate March Could Be the Start of Something Huge

Posted on by robbie

Thousands of protestors will cram the streets of New York City this Sunday, calling on world leaders to help stop climate change. But they’ll also have another message: “Welcome to a new chapter in the fight against global warming. This time it’s going to work.”
The People’s Climate March is expected to be the biggest-ever collective action against global climate change, and organizers are hoping the protest will mark a watershed moment in their fight.
For years, scientist and activists have been pleading for coordinated action to halt the warming of the planet, but world leaders have repeatedly failed to rise to the challenge. Since the disastrous United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, global summits have not forged worldwide consensus on how to achieve the U.N.’s stated goal of restricting any future global temperature increase to no more than two degrees Celsius.
This weekend’s march is set to coincide with another one of these global meetings: The U.N. Climate Summit 2014. No decisions will be made at the event, which will be attended by 125 world leaders, including President Obama. But the summit will lay the groundwork for landmark U.N. climate conferences this December in Lima and next year in Paris.
Despite the failures of the past, organizers of the People’s Climate March see at least three reasons to hope this year.
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How This Group is Cultivating Small Farms in America

Posted on by robbie

Due to high costs of management and competition with corporations, the small farm could soon become an American relic.
But not if FarmLink has anything to say about it. Through funding and resources, this group is connecting generations of farmers to ensure that these modest-sized plots of land don’t go by the wayside.
Currently, the age of the average farmer is 58 years old, and 19 percent of farms are operated by people around 65 years of age. Additionally, there are very few young farmers taking the place of retiring ones. In fact, only six percent of farmers are under the age of 35, and since 2007, the number of new farmers dropped by 20 percent.
Most of these numbers can be attributed to the lack of land access and money, which makes entering the business difficult.
So FarmLink decided to step in. The group has multiple chapters across the country that connect experienced farmers with young novices. These older farmers pass on knowledge and expertise and in some cases, the actual farms themselves.
The group’s website offers a range of practical tips and a guidebook to help owners create succession plans. Most importantly, FarmLink is helping to sprout the next generation of farmers. Carol Ptak and her husband own Blacksmith Ranch in Rochester, Wash., which they’re looking to sell because of Ptak’s husband’s medical condition.
They hadn’t had much luck until they contacted the Washington FarmLink chapter who helped put their ranch on the map. “They have provided the opportunity to get the word out about our farm to a different audience,” Ptak tells Yes! Magazine.
And the Ptaks are just one example. With so much history imbedded into these farms, it’s about time someone started preserving their future.
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What Happens When a 13-Year-Old Girl Takes on an Oil Company?

Posted on by robbie

Ever wonder what’s so bad about fracking?
The process — which is a nickname for hydraulic fracturing — involves a highly pressurized mix of water, chemicals and sand to release gas and oil from rock formations.
Fracking, which has caused drilling to spike across the country, is also accused of causing a variety of health and environmental problems, from creating millions of barrels of toxic waste a day to causing earthquakes, as well as polluting the air and our bodies.
Thirteen-year-old Nalleli Cobo from South Los Angeles is one of the many faces of fracking. Since 2010, she and her family have been living across the street from an AllenCo Energy Inc. facility in University Park, an urban oil-drilling site.
“The AllenCo oil site has gotten me sick,” she says in the slideshow below. “I have heart problems, I get nosebleeds frequently, I get headaches and I have stomach pain.” Her mother and grandmother (as well as others in the community) weren’t asthmatic until three years ago, around the same time the site opened. As Nalleli’s mother, Monic Uriate tells ABC7 last September, the fumes from the site were so noxious that she and her neighbors couldn’t even walk outside or open their windows.
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The family cannot simply move away from their home: “Unfortunately this community, we don’t have the economic position to move to another place so easy,” her mother says. The Los Angeles Times writes that their neighborhood, which is close to the University of Southern California, is home to low-income housing, day-care centers and schools.
That’s why Nalleli and her family joined a community effort called People Not Pozos (People Not Oil Wells) to permanently shut down the wells. Brave Nalleli, at the tender age of 12, was passing out flyers, speaking at press conferences and urging local leaders to close the site.
After 260 official complaints to air quality officials from residents over four years, a lawsuit was filed against the facility by the Los Angeles city attorney. An inspection from the EPA found that AllenCo did not meet recognized industry standards and practices of the Clean Air Act to prevent accidental air releases of hazardous substances, resulting in a $99,000 fine and a temporary shutdown of the University Park facility last November.  The company agreed to spend about $700,000 to make improvements.
With any luck, the shutdown will last much longer, and Nalleli and her neighbors can continue breathing air that has noticeably improved since the temporary closure of the oil fields. The Natural Resources Defense Council notes that in February, Los Angeles became the biggest city in the country to approve a moratorium on fracking, and city leaders will soon draft an ordinance zoning fracking and other harmful extraction methods out of city limits.
In the second video below, Nalleli asks the Pope to shut down the wells, which are owned by the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angles. (The English version starts at the 2-minute mark.)

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When You Want to ‘Buy Local,’ These Programs Make Doing So Easy

Posted on by robbie

You’ve probably heard about community supported agriculture (or CSA) — a program where you pay up front and every week, a box of fresh, locally grown produce appears on your doorstop. Since its initial conception in western Massachusetts in the 1980s, such programs have been popping up across the country.
For consumers, it’s a great way to connect with high quality products and their community. And, due to their popularity, other industries have since jumped on the bandwagon.
One such group is local breweries. As of 2013, there were 1,500 microbreweries in the U.S. producing their own craft beer. While many of us may not know how to get our hands on these beverages, community-supported breweries (CSB) are solving that problem. For a set price, participants can sign up to receive craft beer every month for six to 12 months. Purchases are made directly from the producer, who sometimes throw in a few extra benefits, such as member-only events.
If beer isn’t your thing, community-supported art might be more appealing. In each program, commissioned artists will produce about 50 pieces of work. Patrons can then choose one piece of artwork from each artist, ranging in price from $50 to $500.
The first community-supported art program, the Minnesota-based Springboard for the Arts organization, began five years ago. Today, 40 groups nationwide offer community-supported art programs. One of their key components is interaction: Patrons attend “pick-up parties” where they collect their purchases and meet the featured artists.
Not to be outdone by artists, writers are also getting in on the action. Small, independent publishing houses are making a name for themselves through community-supported publishing programs by offering their members newly-released books fresh off the press or even discounts on all existing titles.
While the products may range in diversity and purpose, the main point is that these programs offer people a way to connect to their local community.
“It’s a model people already understood,” Andy Sturdevant, artists resources director at Springboard for the Arts tells Yes! Magazine. “People like to know where the things they buy come from, whether that’s food or whether that’s artwork.”
And in a world of corporations and big-box stores, that transparency and personal touch is often all that’s needed.
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The United States’s First Carbon-Neutral City Is…

Posted on by robbie

The Silicon Valley city of Palo Alto is already well-known for its tech startups and Stanford University, but did you know it’s also one of the greenest cities in the country?
According to Slate, the northern Californian city is officially the first city in America whose electricity supply is 100 percent carbon-neutral.
Carbon-neutral — which isn’t the same as carbon-free — means the city makes no net release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. About half of Palo Alto’s energy supply is hydroelectric power (which isn’t technically free of fossil fuels), but the city has also purchased renewable energy credits to offset this half of their energy supply, Grist notes. Think of it as offsetting emissions by planting trees.
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Going carbon-neutral is not only better for the planet, it’s only costing residents about $3 more a year. Grist reports that Palo Alto will eventually be receiving power from a variety of renewable sources, hoping to meet 23 percent of its energy supply from solar, 11 percent from landfill methane recovery, and 12 percent from wind power by 2017.
So how did Palo Alto unplug itself from the grid? It’s a combination of forward-thinking Palo Altans and the fact that the town is the only one in California that owns all of its utilities. Unlike the rest of the state (that gets its juice from Big Power company PG&E), Palo Alto gets to decide how residents get their gas, water, power and other services, Slate reports.
Last March, the city’s leaders voted for Palo Alto to use only 100 percent carbon-free electricity. “Palo Alto has been a leader in reducing its carbon emissions,“ Mayor Greg Scharff said of the decision, “but when we realized we could achieve a carbon neutral electric supply right now, we were compelled to take action. Climate change is one of the critical challenges of our generation and we hope our actions will inspire others to follow suit.”
Palo Alto has been eco-minded for several years — eventually hoping to run entirely on green power. Slate writes that back in 2007 the city established its “Climate Action Plan” of achieving 33 percent renewable energy by 2015 and ultimately, a carbon neutral electricity supply. Currently, the city is on track to reach 48 percent renewable power by 2017.
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How Utah Stopped a Power Company’s Ridiculous Bid to Tax the Sun

Posted on by robbie

When it comes to embracing the power of the sun, some companies can act like they’re living under a cloud.
That’s what happened in Utah, when utility provider Rocky Mountain Power (RMP) tried to propose a $4.65 monthly fee on homeowners who have solar panels on their roofs to help cover the “fixed” costs of maintaining the power system.
The Deseret News pointed out that Utah could have become the third state — after Arizona and Georgia — to levy this “sun tax” on solar users, even though their homes use less power and even put excess power into to the grid with the energy generated by their panels. The fee would have impacted 2,500 households in the state.
Thankfully, common sense prevailed. After thousands of angry comments and a six-hour public hearing, the Utah Public Service Commission (the state’s utility regulator) rejected RMP’s bid, saying that the power company failed to prove why the fee was reasonable or justified.
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“What a bright day for Utah’s future,” says Sarah Wright, executive director of Utah Clean Energy. “This order protects energy choice in Utah, and recognizes the potential solar has to benefit all Utahns.”
As the Deseret News reports, it’s a win for residents such as Jim French, who invested $21,000 (an amount that was significantly reduced after federal and state tax credits and rebates from RMP) to install solar panels on his Salt Lake City home.
“When we moved to Utah, we became aware that the great majority of power is generated from coal-fired power plants,” French tells the publication. “I wanted to do what little I could to contribute to clean energy.”
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However, the fight is definitely not over yet. The AP reports that the utility hopes the commission will revisit the issue. Additionally, everyone else in the state will see their rates go up. On the same day of the commission’s ruling in favor of solar, they also approved a 1.9 percent increase on all residential customers — upping power bills by an average of $1.76 a month. The price hike, will net the utility an astounding $35 million in the next year.
If anything, it’s likely that this increased fee will make more people want to make the switch to renewable energy. With America trying to ditch its reliance on fossil fuels, the forecast for solar looks sunny.
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