L.A. Green Bean

photo by Madhav Pai When Katie Couric allowed T. Boone Pickens to speak on CBS last week—I won’t call it an interview as Couric didn’t real probe any of Pickens’ statements to any great degree—he admitted that The Pickens Plan isn’t about greening the United State’s energy supply per se, it’s about energy independence. Fair enough, if the end result is a radical increase in renewable energy I can, to a cer...

Enamore creates lingerie for the sustainable seductress/seductor. Green Air Radio interviews the CEO of Converted Organics, a compost factory. EcoLibris reviews Mandy Haggith's book, Paper Trails: From Trees to Trash - The True Cost of Paper. Chemically Green interviews the makers of Kudzu Ethanol. Daily Fuel Economy Tip shares their thoughts on why a switch to electric cars would be easy. Most Hugga...

(Image from Mixed Soup) Yesterday, we noted that Japan's government has named six "Eco Model Cities" as environmentally friendly model cities and will provide them with financial support. One of them was Kitakyushu. What is striking about the projects are the diversity of ideas how to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Kitakyushu is an industrial city in south western Japan that used to be known as a very polluted place to live. That started to change in the late...

Driving The Highway Budget Myth: The "Last Bastion Of Socialism In America" For over 5 decades, US transportation projects have been budgeted based on a pair of myths: that public transit funding is an increasing drain on Federal and state highway budgets; and, a corollary, that fuel taxes cover the costs of highways and bridges. These mistaken beliefs feed hostility toward bicyclists and pedestrians who transgress on 'something we drivers pay for.' (Never mind that bicyclists and pedestrians often drive cars and trucks.) Via::

Trees have emerged victorious in a California dispute that pitted redwoods against solar panels. Six months ago, Silicon Valley residents Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett were criminally convicted because their redwoods shaded the 10-kilowatt solar system on neighbor Mark Vargas' roof. Ultimately, Treanor and Bissett were forced to trim their trees and paid $37,000 in legal fees. To avert future disputes, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday signed a new law that holds that if trees were planted before solar panels were installed, the solar-panel owner cannot force the trees to be trimmed or chopped. If the solar panels came first, a civil lawsuit can be filed, but the law disallows criminal prosecution of folks with foliage. The original incident ain't over yet, though: Vargas has sued Treanor and Bissett again, alleging not only that their trees shade his solar panels, but that the trees' roots damage an underground storm drain and that their row of redwoods violates state laws that disallow spite fences.

sources: Sacramento Bee, The Mercury News, Palo Alto Online, The New York Times

Streetsblog There are no hard data yet, but lots more people are out on bikes this summer, and lots more novice cyclists are ending up in hospital. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Cycling advocates say this could be the Summer of Splat on local roads. Take the area's dearth of bike paths, add aggressive Atlanta motorists, then toss in bikers who haven't been on the roads for decades. Presto — the buns are busting all over town. "We're seeing more peopl...

In the ongoing food versus fuel discussion, using waste products from agriculture or municipal waste is often cited as being the solution as to how to produce liquid biofuels without impacting available agricultural land and increasing food prices. Producing liquid biofuels from wood waste is promising from the standpoint of availability, but is more difficult to turn into usable fuel than other products. However, a new breakthrough from China, reported on in New Scientist, offers a potential solution to this problem.

The Bush administration is trying to push through a new workplace safety rule to weaken workers' protections against toxic chemicals before Bush's term ends, according to The Washington Post. The rule, which has not been made public, would mandate a reevaluation of the methods used to measure risks to workers from toxic exposure in the workplace. The rule would also require the U.S. Department of Labor to entertain additional challenges to its risk assessments before establishing new limits on exposure to chemicals. So far, work on the proposal has reportedly been fast-tracked and has been conducted largely in secret, drawing sharp criticism from worker advocates. "This is a guarantee to keep any more worker safety regulation from ever coming out of [the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration]," said workplace safety professor David Michaels. "This is being done in secrecy, to be sprung before President Bush leaves office, to cripple the next administration," he said. Once it's published, the rule will be open to public comment for 30 days.

source: The Washington Post

We often talk about the benefits of local, fresh food, but here is another we have not thought about before: the footprint of refrigeration. So many processed foods move from reefer trailer to refrigerated case in the store to the freezer in your house, what does that use in energy? Over at the Ethicurian, Marc crunched the numbers and found that the entire food industry uses 1.02.1016 BTUs of energy per year, the equivalent of 1,760,000 barrels of oil. Refrigeration uses up 14.9% of that (the hatched part of the graph above) or 262,000 barrels of oil, or 464,546, MWhr....

A recent New York Times column on sunscreen has been getting a lot of traction on the internet, and since it's partly about, um, us, we thought it was worth a response.

In the column, author Tara Parker Pope quotes Dr. Warwick L. Morison as saying of EWG, "What they are doing is developing their own system for evaluating things." He's right, to a degree, but the method we use is far from "arbitrary" as Morison suggests. In fact, our assessment is based on sunscreen industry data and other published studies on sun protection.

Morison doesn't mention that the Skin Cancer Foundation, where he sits as chairman of the Foundation's photobiology committee, also has their own system for evaluating sunscreens. Unfortunately, SCF's methods fall short.

At a cost of $10,000 to the manufacturer, the Skin Cancer Foundation endorses sunscreen products based on an evaluation that fails to consider two critical factors: whether or not the product protects against UVA protection, and whether the ingredient soaks through the skin and raises health concerns. A quick scan of the sunscreens they endorse reveals several products that don't contain a single approved UVA-screening chemical -- including a product made specifically for kids. Did you catch that? The Skin Cancer Foundation actually endorses a children's sunscreen that provides completely insufficient protection from UVA rays.

As chair of the committee that heads up these assessments, Dr. Morison may not be paid for his work, but he might realize that the organization could be perceived as having a vested interest in defending the products they endorse. The Skin Cancer Foundation's limited and financially conflicted method does not protect consumers.

Our scientists go beyond these limited factors to assess if products provide full-spectrum UV protection, and if they end up in the body in significant amounts. We base our assessments not just on SPF ratings (UVB protection), but also on industry models of UVA protection and peer-reviewed scientific studies on exposures and health risks from sunscreen chemicals.

Dr. Morison's critique of EWG's methods would be more productively aimed at FDA, which has failed to finalize the sunscreen safety standards they began developing 30 years ago. Currently, sunscreens aren¹t required to protect from damaging UVA radiation, manufacturers can (and do) use misleading claims like "instant" and "all-day" and "waterproof" protection, and many brands contain chemicals that absorb through the skin into the blood, raising potential health concerns.

What it comes down to is this: not all sunscreens are the same. We highlight products the provide solid UVA and UVB protection without putting potentially toxic chemicals into the blood of people who use them. Oxybenzone is a chemical to avoid because there's clear evidence that it gets into our blood, and because there's some data implicating it in hormone disruption and UV-related damage. There are sunscreens on the market that offer better protection without all those health risks. Why on earth wouldn't we recommend them?

The Environmental Working Group recommends products that work without posing significant health concerns. The Skin Cancer Foundation and the FDA should ensure that they are doing the same. With more than a million cases of skin cancer diagnosed each year, people can't afford to wait any longer.

Welcome to SustainStyle, a weekly digest from the writers at 1plus1, a blog dedicated to eco-friendly fashion. SustainStyle runs every Wednesday. Organic by John Patrick is named one of the 10 finalist for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. Katharine Hamnett offers new designs on her online shop, including a tank vest we "LOVE". An Interview with Chloe Sevigny tells us why she is always head of her ...

Dutch designer Joost van Bleiswijk designs everything from candelabras to wall units out of stainless steel, all laser cut and interlocking. "A combination of fireplace, altar and cabinet. This piece is as a conclusion of cabinet designs over centuries." It is also extraordinarily heavy and over the top, but there is method in this madness. He describes his method of working in Dezeen: "From archetypical drawings I create the objects as flat components by computer. The method of sliding different elements into one and other, and how t...

photo: Getty Images While it’s not quite celebrity-style coverage, in the sense of reporting what the Texan former oil-man had for lunch, TreeHugger certainly gives T. Boone Pickens his due time. And as he’s in the middle of spending $58 million promoting his vision of how the U.S. can achieve energy independence through increasing wind power and natural gas, he definitely stays on the radar. Yesterday Pi...

credit: Getty Images/NASA Wildfires in Alaska and Canada Had Net Cooling Effect Proving that climate science can be anything but intuitive, researchers report that large wildfires could have a net cooling effect. Led by Robert Stone, at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the team studied the wildfires that ravaged Alaskan and Canadian wilderness in 2004. The work is credited with creating a better understanding of the impact of particles and smoke in the atmosphere, which has been one factor of uncertaint...

"We have to drill offshore. we have to do this. Oil executives say in a couple years we could be seeing results from it. So why not do it? We need to do it." TreeHugger on Offshore Drilling Climate Change? What Climate Change? : TreeHugger Conserving Beats Drilling , and Is F...

If I had a nickel for every prospective parent I know who changed their lifestyle for the better when they knew they were expecting I’d be a wealthy man indeed. But they just may be a bit late to the party. No pun intended. And that’s because a controversial idea, called epigenetics, indicates those late nights in smoke filled rooms, that stress filled entry level job, or that apartment you rented next to that major, pollution-spewing roadway when you were young and broke may just be exacting their toll on the DNA of your child today. ...

In 1921 Edmund Rumpler wowed the Berlin Auto Show with the Teardrop. The engine components were enclosed in a tub underneath, and from the top it had a teardrop shape. The public thought it was ugly, it was hard to steer, there was no trunk space and it evidently was "outrageously expensive." Thinking it looked futuristic, Fritz Lang bought then at deep discount and blew them all up in his movie Metropolis. In 1979, Volkswagen took one of the two remaining cars and put it in its wind tunnel. They found that it had a drag coefficent (CD value) of only 0.28, bette...

The Bush administration proposed rules [PDF] for U.S. oil shale development Tuesday that include charging lower royalty rates for oil-shale production on public lands than it does for other oil and gas drilling. The lower royalties are meant to encourage oil-shale production since, as it turns out, the energy- and pollution-intensive process of cooking rocks before pumping out the resulting oil is still up to three times more expensive than extracting already-liquid oil. "It is basically recognition that in the beginning there has to be a lower royalty to recognize the pioneering nature of this business," said the executive director of the National Oil Shale Association. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne had a different take on the economics of oil-shale development, saying the high costs of production are finally beginning to make sense. "For years, the cost of extracting oil from shale exceeded the benefit, but today that calculus is changing." (Thanks, high oil prices!)

source: Associated Press
new in Muckraker: Bush admin's effort to spur oil shale production won't do much for consumers in short run
see also, in Gristmill: It's a 1980 flashback, as energy price spikes make oil shale economical once again