Entries associated with the tag "Environment":

I am not astonished at the existence of Dr. Vino's blog, but who knew there was an American Association of Wine Economists? (Thanks, Whet.)

Dr. Vino in a recent post waxes lengthy and eloquent on the carbon footprint of various wines, and reaches a conclusion I think somewhat similar to that of the omniscient Michael Pollan: local makes a lot of difference. A few tidbits:

"Shipping premium wine, bottled at the winery, around the world mostly involves shipping glass with some wine in it. In this regard, drinking wine from a magnum is the more carbon-friendly choice since the glass-to-wine ratio is less. Half-bottles, by contrast, worsen the ratio.

"Shipping wine in bulk from the source and bottling closer to the point of consumption lowers carbon intensity.

"Light packaging material such as Tetra-Pak or bag-in-a-box has much less carbon intensity...

"There’s a 'green line' that runs down the middle of Ohio. For points to the West of that line, it is more carbon efficient to consume wine trucked from California. To the East of that line, it’s more efficient to consume the same sized bottle of wine from Bordeaux, which has had benefited from the efficiencies of container shipping, followed by a shorter truck trip." 

And on and on. If you like this sort of thing, you'll want to read the whole thing, or better yet, the full study titled "Red, White and 'Green': The Cost of Carbon in the Global Wine Trade," (pdf), which is AAWE Working Paper no. 9.

But nerdliness has its limits. Speaking as someone who can lose all focus when confronted with the wonderful maps that show how many days it will take to ship something from La Porte to Laramie, I say stop it! Environmentalist wine connoisseurs shouldn't spend their time on such things. They should lobby Congress to impose a hefty carbon tax ASAP, so that we all get the message loud and clear from the price stickers on Ripple and everything else.

Nothing less will help, because nobody has time to go around calculating the carbon footprint of every damn thing they do/eat/drink. That's what markets are for.

Hat tip to Kitry for pointing out this long, dispiriting article by Ben Elgin in Business Week:

"Hailed as an environmental pioneer, FedEx says on its Web site that it is 'committed to the use of innovations and technologies to minimize greenhouse gases.' [I didn't find these exact words there, but plenty like them.] With 70,000 ground vehicles and 670 planes burning fuel, the world's largest shipper is a huge producer of heat-trapping gases. Back in 2003, FedEx announced that it would soon begin deploying clean-burning hybrid trucks at a rate of 3,000 a year, eventually sparing the atmosphere 250,000 tons of greenhouse gases annually from diesel-engine vehicles. 'This program has the potential to replace the company's 30,000 medium-duty trucks over the next 10 years,' FedEx announced at the time. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded the effort a Clean Air Excellence prize in 2004.

"Four years later, FedEx has purchased fewer than 100 hybrid trucks, or less than one-third of one percent of its fleet. At $70,000 and up, the hybrids cost at least 75% more than conventional trucks, although fuel savings should pay for the difference over the 10-year lifespan of the vehicles. FedEx, which reported record profits of $2 billion for the fiscal year that ended May 31, decided that breaking even over a decade wasn't the best use of company capital. 'We do have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders,' says environmental director Mitch Jackson. 'We can't subsidize the development of this technology for our competitors.'"

If capitalism depends on short-term returns over long-term, we're in real trouble. Read the whole thing for a quick critique of Renewable Energy Credits as well.

Reader readers knew about Wangari Maathai and her tree-planting Green Belt Movement more than a decade before she won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize -- and before a change of Kenyan government turned her from an activist on the run to Kenya's assistant minister for the environment.

She got her higher education in the US in the 1960s, and not all of it in the classroom. As she told the Progressive in 2005, "While I was in the United States, Kenya became independent from the British, in 1963. For me, it was a moment to celebrate that finally we were free, as Martin Luther King was crying out at that time. And I thought we were going to enjoy our freedom, we were going to be happy, we were not going to be oppressed anymore. Little did I know what lay ahead. But when I encountered violations of human rights by my own people, my experience in the United States gave me the courage to stand up and say this is not right."

She's back in town this weekend to discuss her book Unbowed: A Memoir at the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel, cosponsored by the university and the Chicago Humanities Festival (Sunday -- free but reservations required), and to dedicate a native woodlands garden at the Al Raby High School for Community and Environment at 3545 West Fulton (Saturday). 

"Affected species have three possible responses to global climate change," write Robert Sullivan of Argonne National Laboratory and Milt Clark of USEPA's Region V in the March issue of Chicago Wilderness Journal: "change, move, or die."

They admit they can't answer their article's title question, "Can Biodiversity Survive Global Warming?" because ecosystems are complex and different climate models predict different degrees of warming. But "it is believed that the net effects of global climate change will favor invasive species -- those opportunists that can quickly exploit the new ecological niches that will open up as native species ...cannot adapt.... The additional stresses on ecosystems (along with higher temperatures) will also likely favor vector-borne diseases such as the mosquito-spread West Nile virus that has devastated populations of many bird species in the Chicago area."

Dying is as easy as ever, but moving isn't. Roads, cities, suburbs, and farms have broken up habitats, so that "species that could once move long distances freely to seek more favorite habitat are now faced with numerous man-made barriers," increasing the invasives' advantage. "Habitat fragmentation also reduces the genetic pool from which species can draw to evolve new mechanisms to cope with change."

The article is heavily footnoted to the scientific literature, some of which is accessible on-line free, including a thorough 35-page 2006 review, "Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change" by Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas, who notes that "documented rapid loss of habitable climate space makes it no surprise that the first extinctions of entire species attributed to global warming are mountain-restricted species," specifically frogs in the Costa Rican cloud forests. On a mountain, the only way to stay cool is to move up, and pretty soon you run out of mountain.

Meera Subramian writes at Gristmill about Munir Virani, who oversees the South Asian Vulture Crisis project at the Peregrine Fund:

"He and many others in his field have become the equivalent of hospice workers. They come to know and care for their ward, but they are working in defense mode, backs pressed up against a wall of looming threats to all forms of life on earth -- terrestrial and aquatic; mammalian, avian, and amphibian."

I had no idea there was a south Asian vulture crisis, and it's all but over. "By all reckoning, it's too late for the vultures. By the time scientists isolated a livestock drug as the cause of the deaths, 95 percent of the population had crashed in less than a decade, and there weren't enough left in the wild to begin a captive breeding program. ... Munir Virani and other conservation biologists are gathering information from the dwindling wild world so that someday, in some imaginable future when one single species isn't dominating and altering the entire planet, we will have the scientific information to guide us."

Meanwhile they are "monitoring to extinction." Read the whole thing. 

Everyone's jumping on the environmentalist bandwagon these days, and they all want to steer.

Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, writing in the Boston Globe, says "Smart environmentalism has three key elements. First, policies should be targeted toward the biggest environmental threat: global warming. Second, our resources and political capital are limited. This means we must weigh the benefits of each intervention against its costs. Third, we must anticipate unintended consequences, where being green in one place leads to decidedly non green outcomes someplace else."

I love the way economists think. If every policy wonk were legally required to reflect on trade-offs and unintended consequences, the world would be a better (and quieter) place. But when you're good with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Glaeser adds, "The most effective way to reduce emissions [of greenhouse gases] is to charge people for the social costs of their actions with a carbon tax."

Unfortunately he stops there. Like today's generation of best-selling atheists, who repeat David Hume and Bertrand Russell without noticing that their arguments persuaded few, Glaeser repeats the standard economic prescription without acknowledging its political difficulty. Everyone hates traffic congestion too, and it's been well known for years that the way to cure traffic congestion is to tax it by charging time-of-day tolls, but it never gets done.

What's the second-best strategy when you know perfectly well that the best one's a nonstarter? Remember, Ed, you're an environmentalist now, so shrugging your shoulders and going off to teach your next class is not an option.

(Good discussion on some points at Mark Thoma's Economist's View. And George Monbiot's new book Heat popularizes and refines a potentially nifty idea for a carbon-rationing system. I don't know if Monbiot's right, but the last writer I read who made it seem so easy to combine deftness, personality, and sheer intellectual energy was named George Orwell.)

Some environmental problems are hard to grasp. Some aren't. Giles Slade nails it in the new Mother Jones:

"Yes, the secret is out. After 13 months of heavy use, the lithium-ion battery of the iPod can lose more than half of its functionality. You'll find that even though you recharge more often, your iPod can fade out by the end of a long day. Simply put, even though an iPod can cost you $350, these digital music players are designed to be disposable.

"Then why not get a new battery? Good idea. But Apple deliberately seals the battery inside the iPod. Replacement costs $65 (a new 1-gig iPod shuffle costs $79), takes several weeks, and worst of all—because the new battery comes in a refurbished and wiped-clean iPod—you'll lose all your songs."

I'd love to see someone YouTube a parody of those Mac and PC commercials with this in mind. And it'll be even better when someone figures out how to make money without ripping off the customers and filling up the landfills.

Is nuclear power the best way to get energy while putting less carbon into the atmosphere?

No, but perhaps not for the reason you think. There are probably lower-priced alternatives that will replace more coal. The excellent David Roberts at Gristmill picks up on Mark Clayton's Christian Science Monitor story:

"The question is not whether nuclear power is 'acceptable' or 'good' by some subjective standard -- economic, moral, or otherwise. It's not even whether investments in nuclear power could lead to emission reductions. The question is: what is the maximum amount of climate change mitigation we can get for a given dollar of investment? Nuclear fails that test."

OK, I don't know if it fails the test or not. According to one study quoted by CSM, "Just improving a nation's energy efficiency would produce far less CO2 than a new nuclear plant (5 grams vs. 32 grams per kilowatt-hour), the study found. And it would do so at lower cost (4.8 cents vs. 5.2 cents per kilowatt-hour)."

One study isn't the whole story. But this is surely the standard by which we should judge nukes, and ethanol, and conservation, and sequestration, and solar/wind power.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution and the Economist magazine explain why buying "carbon offsets," like paying someone to plant trees to make up for your airplane flights or electricity usage, aren't as wonderful an idea as they may sound. (von at Obsidian Wings refutes wingnut attempts to exaggerate the point.)

There's a lot of wonkery involved, but here's the gist:

"Many readers profess puzzlement as to how carbon offsets could fail to reduce one's carbon footprint.  The answer is that they probably do reduce one's carbon footprint, but by nowhere near the one-for-one ratio that seems to be implied by the extraordinarily low price of carbon offsets.  Unless they are implemented under a cap-and-trade system [where there are legal limits on the total amount of carbon emitted], these sorts of environmental efforts are plagued by something called the rebound effect, which is to say that using more efficient technologies causes the price to fall, which causes people to use more of the carbon-emitting substances in question." (Economist)

It gets worse:

"Furthermore if you simply buy less of a non-storable good such as electricity, price to other demanders will go back down and social quantity consumed will not change." (Cowen)

There really is no substitute for some kind of collective action to start reducing carbon consumption. That can take either command-and-control forms like regulating and subsidizing, or market-based forms like cap-and-trade systems or a carbon tax. That discussion is about to heat up on both federal and state levels, as David Greising reports in Friday's Tribune.

Riverbend, a "girl blog from Iraq," lists nine ways to tell if your country's in trouble, starting with "the UN has to open a special branch just to keep track of the chaos and bloodshed, UNAMI," and  "the abovementioned branch cannot be run from your country."  (Hat tip to Sam Smith's Progressive Review.)

Gristmill lists the ten most bizarre environmental events of 2006, including, "When Chevy offered net surfers the opportunity to edit their own Chevy Tahoe ads online, enviros grabbed the opportunity to match slick, soaring shots of SUVs rolling over mountainous terrain with titles like 'Gas Guzzler!'" Joel Makower has a more sober list, on which Wal-Mart's green makeover ranks #1.  [CORRECTION FROM COMMENTS:  Wal-Mart was one of ten; the list was not prioritized.]

Dan Gilmoor at the Center for Citizen Media makes ten predictions about blogging and journalism in 2007, in the form of a multiple-choice quiz. For instance, "5. Most newspaper executives will: A. Continue to downsize their newsrooms without any real plan for the long term. B. Complain incessantly about competition from online advertising competitors. C. Remain suspicious of citizen media except as a possible way to save money. D. Innovate at the edges, not in the core functions."

At Guardian Unlimited Tim Radford lists the 11 most interesting science books coming out in the next few months. Best title:  How Many Light Bulbs Does It Take to Change a Planet? Best synopsis: the book about various "gloriously implausible but not necessarily impossible ideas ... including, of course, the proposition that we will all be reassembled as cyber-identities in a cosmic computer and experience a subjective eternity in the last crushing seconds of time." See ya there. (Hat tip to Butterflies and Wheels.)

Dean Baker at Beat the Press offers ten resolutions for writers on economics, for instance: "Unless a reporter can identify the cause of a run-up in stock prices, he/she cannot say whether it indicates good news for the economy as a whole. Therefore, it should not be reported as good news."

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate ranks the ten most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006. Guantanamo was only #9. Be afraid, speak out anyway, and don't forget the ACLU.

The country's 56th National Historic Chemical Landmark was designated October 25 in Cincinnati, commemorating the development of Procter & Gamble's top-selling laundry detergent Tide.

At the American Chemical Society you can learn all about the struggle to find a combination of chemicals that would clean clothes better than soap, culminating in the new product introduced 60 years ago. Sample quote:

"Prior to the debut of Tide, laundry was washed with soap flakes which provided limited cleaning, dulled colors, and left whites drab. In hard water, soap left a ring of scum around the tub. Tide cleaned better than soaps, and it was mild, allowing it to be used initially to wash dishes as well as clothes."

There's also a whole page on the history of Procter & Gamble.

Can you say "phosphate pollution"? Evidently not if you work for the ACS. There is no National Historic Chemical Landmark about the subsequent history of pollution by detergents and what it has cost to deal with it. For that you can Ask Umbra at Grist magazine. If you like your information more exotic or more detailed, check out this handy summary from South Australia (PDF) and this law-school paper from the University of Colorado. (Don't bother checking NPR's blog, though.)

And while you're checking, just remember that the ACS calls itself "the largest scientific society in the world," not "Procter & Gamble's PR firm."

A Treehugger headline last weekend: "Powerwash Graffiti shows Chicago is Grey, Not Green," taking snarky note of the city's smoky in-town coal plants (covered in the Reader by Mick Dumke last December and Kari Lydersen in 2003) and the American Lung Association's ongoing campaign against them. Commenters at Treehugger debate whether the Crawford and Fisk plants are that big a deal, and in the new Atlantic James Fallows (paid subscriber only) turns an appalled eye on Beijing, where the smog is so bad he expects 2012 Olympians to fall like ninepins, clutching their chests.

Critics can always contrast Chicago's extravagant claims to ultimate greenness with its reality. But in intercity competition lies hope, whether it's for the Olympics or not.  After all, the U.S. took better care of its poor and minorities back when a Communist enemy stood ready to publicize every failure.

"The history of genetically modified foods doesn't feature a history of testing appropriate to their innovative character." That's Vivian Weil, longtime head of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She and University of Chicago geneticist Jocelyn Malamy did a thorough job of setting the table at the Illinois Humanities Council's genetics program last Saturday, identifying and distinguishing the issues around genetically modified foods, but that didn't leave the audience much time to eat. (IHC has an associated blog with some discussion.)

Malamy's key point is that not all GM plants pose the same questions. "Round-Up Ready" transgenic plants are resistant to herbicide, so that farmers can control weeds by spraying more and cultivating less. They pose questions of environmental damage from added chemical use. "Bt" transgenic plants have a bacterial gene inserted that makes them toxic to European corn borers; the issue is whether they might poison desirable insects or cause Bt-resistant borers to evolve over time.

Malamy also ran down questions (and her answers) that apply to both current GM plants and future ones:

Is the process of adding or altering genes harmful to consumers?  (No.)

Could specific transgenes be toxic?  (Maybe.)

Can transgenic pollen spread to other crops or wild relatives?  (Yes.)

Could specific transgenic plants be detrimental to the environment?  (Potentially.)

Other food issues don't apply specifically to GM crops but are problems with industrial farming in general: the use of pesticides, growing monocultures of the same crop, hybrid seeds that farmers can't save, and agribusinesses' aggressive enforcement of their patent claims.

Both GM plants and GM foods should be tested for safety, said Malamy. "I would advocate activism to make sure agencies are in place" to do this job properly, she added.

The panelists even had a little philosophical dust-up about how to put GM in context. Moderator Bruce Kraig of Roosevelt University and the Culinary Historians of Chicago began the day by saying, "Genetic manipulation began millennia ago," implying that GM foods are not significantly different from strains of cattle selectively bred over generations for milk or beef production. Malamy qualified this, saying, "There are limits to breeding. You can't breed for resistance to the corn borer, because no such trait exists in the plant to start with. But other plants have it." And Weil was equally hesitant: "This is an innovation in breeding. There is a break -- now we have the ability to bring genes from sources not previously available."

In a sentence: genetic modification isn't the end of the world, but it's definitely not business as usual, and so far the government hasn't regulated it well.

There's an old joke about an ultraconservative Republican senator who was going to have a library named after him--shaped like an incinerator.

Like many old jokes, the Bush administration has rendered this one inoperative by turning it into policy. (And, yes, I know this isn't new news.) It's closing Environmental Protection Agency libraries around the country due to budget cuts. A succinct report with links is at Biolaw. Also at the American Library Association.

Raizel Liebler posted a well-reported story on the Chicago situation at Third Coast Press in July. Meanwhile the Region 5 library here has already gone away. The official theory is that the public and agency employees will get their information on the Web. But as government-employee union officials explained in a June 29 letter,

"The National Environmental Publications Information System, EPA's repository of electronic documents, currently holds about 13,000 documents. But the Agency has a total of about 80,000 documents that should be retained; most of these are not available in any electronic format."

Employees are concerned that these shutdowns will "impede the agency's daily enforcement capabilities and would also render EPA unprepared to respond to emergencies."

Region 5 still does offer some publications online--a total of eleven, one of which is the "Happy Earth Day Activity Book."

  What is Wal-Mart, really?

• Wal-Mart is way liberal. Charles Fishman at Fastcompany.com: "In the next 12 months, starting with a major push this month, Wal-Mart wants to sell every one of its regular customers--100 million in all--one swirl bulb [compact fluorescent light, or CFL]. In the process, Wal-Mart wants to change energy consumption in the United States, and energy consciousness, too. . . . It's a bold goal, a remarkable declaration of Wal-Mart's intention to modernize and green up a whole line of business using market oomph. Teaming up with General Electric, which owns about 60 percent of the residential lightbulb market in the United States, Wal-Mart wants to single-handedly double U.S. sales for CFLs in a year, and it wants demand to surge forward after that."

• I said, Wal-Mart is way liberal. Mya Frazier in Advertising Age, August 24: "In an unprecedented push, Wal-Mart Stores has hired a gay-marketing shop, joined the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and begun discussions with activist groups about extending domestic-partnership benefits to its employees."

• Wal-Mart is way conservative. The company is well-known for its fanatical anti-union stance. Michael Barbaro and Stephanie Strom in the New York Times: "As Wal-Mart Stores struggles to rebut criticism from unions and Democratic leaders, the company has discovered a reliable ally: prominent conservative research groups like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute," to which it's given $2.5 million over six years.

• Wal-Mart is way powerful. Ezra Klein at Tapped: "Wal-Mart has the size, power, and will to dictate the behavior of their sellers [suppliers, such as GE], meaning their decisions can essentially set norms, prices, and wages throughout the entire economy. They may use that power [known as monopsony] for good, they may use it for bad. But they are using it." (More from Barry Lynn.) It is actually a form of central planning.

• Maybe Wal-Mart is the nation's Mayor Daley. People on both sides of the aisle may do what Chicago environmentalists did in March 2003, when Daley consulted no one and used his power to wipe Meigs Field off the map: swallow hard and say nothing about huge power being wielded arbitrarily, because the power was used to further their cause.

Mark Kastel and his colleagues at the Cornucopia Institute in Wisconsin are keeping a close eye on how factory farms sneak into organic agriculture by exploiting loopholes in federal regulations. Writing in the Nation, Felicia Mello comes up on the same problem from the workers' point of view.

As anyone who's tried it knows, growing plants organically involves subsituting labor (weeding) for capital (a bottle of herbicide). Mello gives the figures for Grimmway, a California megafarm growing baby carrots: "In a conventional field, one worker can spray weeds with pesticides at a cost of $30 per acre . . . .  Organic farming requires crews of laborers for weeding that can cost up to $1,000 per acre."

Are the workers at least better off for not having to deal with pesticides?  Yes, but not as much as environmentalists such as myself would think.  Between 1990 and 1999, almost half of the major insurance claims (i.e., more than $5,000) paid to California farmworkers were for strain injuries.  Just 1.5 percent had to do with pesticides. Cesar Chavez knew what he was doing when he made outlawing the short-handled hoe a cause.

Organic growers aren't much more likely to favor farmworker unions than are conventional growers. Mello does profile one grower who's making a go of it with a union contract, but more typical is the single mother farmworker who told her, "I buy food grown with chemicals so I can save to buy something else."

Read the whole thing.

FYI: Industrious Gristmill blogger David Roberts asks if there are ways to get people to "care about the broader food system," but suggests only flavor or distance-traveled labeling. Mello reports that there is already an organized effort at some kind of social labeling as well.

Appalachian State University economist John Whitehead scribbles on the back of the envelope at Environmental Economics:

"According to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. generates almost 6,000 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year. At four dollars per metric ton, the cost of reducing carbon emissions by 70 percent, about what scientists say needs to be cut to avoid climate change problems, is $16.8 billion, about 0.14 percent of annual GDP. Not too costly with the help of market forces, right? My guess is that this is a case of low hanging fruit and the marginal cost is increasing."

Note #1:  $16.8 billion is very roughly one-twentieth of what has been spent so far on the Iraq war.

Note #2:  where did Whitehead come up with the four-dollars-per-metric-ton figure?  Well, from the Chicago Climate Exchange, where 175 participants (corporations and governments) pay real money for the "right" to emit defined amounts of greenhouse gases.

The New York Times profiled Chicago Climate Exchange founder Richard Sandor July 30 (in an article not available for free online).  The exchange describes itself as "North America’s only, and the world’s first, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission registry, reduction and trading system for all six greenhouse gases (GHGs). . . . Members make a voluntary but legally binding commitment to reduce GHG emissions. By the end of Phase I (December, 2006) all Members will have reduced direct emissions four percent below a baseline period of 1998-2001."

So how do you actually make the reductions so as to have something to trade on the exchange? Writing in National Journal, Margaret Kriz lays out the means we have at hand. According to the best expert opinion, these are all we've to to work with to avoid disastrous climate change, and none of them is a silver bullet.  They are:

• Energy Efficiency: could handle "15 percent, possibly more, of your overall [electric] generation load," according to an industry researcher.  (Most of the solutions now being pushed by the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center fall into this category.)

• Nuclear Power: expensive, and there's nowhere to put the waste. (Questions raised elsewhere: is there enough uranium or cooling water?)

• "Clean" Coal: it's about time for a new generation of power plants, and the question is, will they use new technology?

• Hybrid Vehicles: Plug-ins would save more.  (So would more politicians like Jimmy Carter, the kind who can set a good example.)

• Wind Power: benefits from a federal production tax credit, but needs high-power transmission lines to get the electricity from the Great Plains (where the wind is) to where the people are.

• Biofuels: ethanol from corn is the biggie, but it cuts CO2 emissions by only about 10 percent, "once you factor in the petroleum used in the farm equipment and the fertilizer used to grow and harvest the corn." Duh.

• Sequestration: capture the carbon dioxide and stuff it underground or under the ocean. Feasible but not cheap.

Unfortunately, picking the right combination of technologies is harder with the Cheney administration bollixing things up. Here's David Talbot introducing a special issue of Technology Review:

"Cleaner technology--in which carbon dioxide could be captured and sequestered--is ready to go into new coal plants now (see 'The Dirty Secret,' by David Talbot). Similarly, improved versions of today's nuclear power plants await construction (see 'The Best Nuclear Option,' by Matthew L. Wald). Unfortunately, implementation of cleaner technologies has been thwarted by federal aimlessness. The Energy Department keeps changing its nuclear-research strategy, and a 'FutureGen' zero-emission coal demonstration project announced three and a half years ago by President Bush hasn't yet picked a site."

When he's home, Erik Olsen is in Lakeview. When he's at work, he's at the city's Department of Construction and Permits, running the accelerated permit program for city buildings that meet some basic green standards. (As Olsen told me earlier this year, "Routine projects involving three or fewer units can typically be approved on a fast track within ten days, following a process that can be diagrammed on a Post-it.")

In his spare time he runs GreenBean, "a news and discussion forum dedicated to reporting on built, in-progress, and unbuilt green building projects in Chicago."  Projects--eight so far in the 312 and 773--are posted with owners' consent independent of the City of Chicago.

There's plenty of technical talk on the site-- hey, the guy's an engineer!--but Olsen, true to the blog medium, isn't all promotional all the time. He has both praise for and misgivings about One South Dearborn, for instance:

"Like essentially all new office towers in Chicago, this is an all-electric building, including electric resistance heat, which is almost never environmentally preferable (see here or here--scroll almost to bottom--to understand why). Although one man's rantings can't change the market in Chicago, I will always complain about this. For commercial office towers it isn't quite as egregious because they primarily require cooling, but the electric heat trend seems to be growing in residential buildings as well."

On a happier note, he has this to say about the Washington Park SRO (5000 S. Indiana). Its architect, Piekarz Associates PC, "had little prior green experience, but because of the owner's directive, was and is willing to learn how to meet the project's green goals. There are many other local architects with little green experience diving in head-first, and they are to be applauded for the efforts."

Over at Gristmill, Jason Scorse--an environmentalist who believes in market principles, and an economist teaching at the Monterey Institute of International Studies--posted his four favorite policies for cleaning up the world:

"Eliminate all natural-resource subsidies.  Subsidies to timber companies, fishermen, farmers, and the oil and gas industry are by far the most damaging environmental policies engaged in by governments around the world." These subsidies both encourage environmental degradation and make natural resources seem cheaper than they are, making it hard for alternatives to compete.

"Expand property rights in areas where they are weak or non-existent.  The areas in the world where we witness the greatest levels of environmental degradation (the oceans, many large tropical forests, and the atmosphere) are those where property rights are absent, unclear, or poorly enforced." Whether held by individuals, groups, or governments, make those rights clear.

"Empower society with information.  Basic environmental science is something that will be underfunded in a pure 'free market,' because it is rarely profitable; therefore, governments should do more to support scientific research."

"Enlarge green markets through government purchases.  Since governments are some of the largest buyers of natural resources in the world (e.g. paper, power, food), their purchases have a huge impact on markets and the environment."

There are some interesting comments both at Gristmill and at Environmental Economics, where Scorse also posted.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Adam Bilsky (aabilsky@comcast.net) of DePaul's Management of Public Services Graduate Program would like to know "what obstacles currently face supporters of green residential building in Chicago, and what action steps might remove them to stimulate market demand." If you'd like to help, take  his survey (confidentiality promised) before Thursday at surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=355372368977. It's not excessively long.

"The midwest is the fulcrum for global warming solutions," argues the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center. "The midwest has the largest concentration of old, dirty coal plants that produce large amounts of CO2 which cause global warming, and the Midwest is the center of the United States' transportation industry. The midwest is the most important region in the most important country in the world when it comes to solving our global warming problems." Full strategy paper here.

The ELPC is best known for serving as the legal firm for the midwestern environmental movement on public-policy issues like logging of national forests in Wisconsin, high-speed rail, and renewable-energy portfolio standards. Now it's going beyond policy to the personal, with a list of seven steps anyone can take to retard global warming.

The first step the center recommends is to replace regular light bulbs with compact fluorescents. Like many environmental improvements, this requires you to put up more money up front in order to save $11.38 per bulb per year--plus one slightly less damaged planet. 

Browse your heart out:

• Under "Human, Labour & Social Rights," Wal-Mart employees praise their employer for coming to LA.

• Under "Climate Change & Atmosphere," downstate behemoth Archer Daniels Midland seductively superimposes gas pumps on corn plants.

• And the Evangelical Environmental Network asks (and answers) the question "What Would Jesus Drive?"

“Much of the latest science suggests that climate change will take place faster than we thought,” says Lloyd’s of London in its new 360 Risk Project report, “Climate Change: Adapt or Bust.” (PDF)

“The industry must take a new approach to underwriting, looking ahead and not simply basing decisions on historical patterns," reads the report. "Insurer pricing and capital allocation models must be updated regularly--and not just in extremis--to reflect the latest scientific evidence.” Lloyd’s suggests that insurers need to reconsider their portfolios as well as their underwriting policies--and that people need to quit moving to hazardous areas (i.e. the coasts) and to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.

Now why do you suppose Lloyd’s is far more worried about climate change than the U.S. government or a number of “think” tanks that profess devotion to the free market? Maybe it has something to do with the fact the Lloyd’s faces real consequences in the market if it disregards a pressing danger. And maybe, just maybe, it's because the current Republican administration and the “think” tanks are subject to some incentives that encourage them to take mediocre fiction writers more seriously than the overwhelming weight of peer-reviewed climate science.

(Hat tip to Joel Makower.)