The Red, White, and Green

Photo via Flickr: Jurvetson

Normally, I’m an optimist where politics are concerned. I wouldn’t have started this blog if I didn’t think there was a way to bridge the divide between left and right. But lately, I’m not sure how, exactly, that’s supposed to happen. The House GOP just hijacked the spending bill as an assault against the EPA; even Olympia Snowe recently came out saying she’s never seen a more partisan Congress.

But there may be an answer. It has to do with putting people with real knowledge, real logic and actual integrity into office: scientists.

From The New York Times:

Now, several groups…want to encourage scientists and engineers to speak out in public debates and even run for public office. When it comes to global warming and a host of other technical issues, “there is a disconnect between what science says and how people perceive what science says,” said Barbara A. Schaal, a biologist and vice president of the National Academy of Sciences. “We need to interact with the public for our good and the public good.”

I couldn’t agree more. If one of our country’s greatest scientists — Thomas Edison — had been in Congress for the Tea Party’s recent energy-efficient light bulb hate campaign, he probably would have smacked Michele Bachmann on the side of the head. And then unveiled his own version of a new ultra-efficient light bulb.

–Jennifer Grayson

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Photo via Flickr: WayTru

Generally speaking, it’s easy to tell real food from fake food. As Michael Pollan says, real food is something your great-great grandmother would recognize. Fake food is everything else — i.e., what most Americans are eating these days — and it has a lot to do with why an astounding one-third of US adults are now obese.

(Quick quiz: What’s an apple? Real food. A bag of Cheetos? That’s right! Fake.)

Now that determination is about to get a lot more difficult, because genetic engineering giant Monsanto is plotting planning to introduce its GM sweet corn to the supermarket produce aisle.

From Fast Company:

Monsanto, which already controls 60% of the U.S. corn market, is including traits in the new sweet corn that make it resistant to both Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide and to insects (through the inclusion of Bt toxin, a trait that disrupts insect digestive systems and eventually kills them). As we have mentioned before, at least 21 weed species have become resistant to Roundup. And Bt toxin may have negative health effects — a recent study found the toxin in the maternal and fetal blood of pregnant women, though the implications of that aren’t known quite yet.

This is insane. If the US had any kind of labeling requirements for genetically modified food — like the rest of the civilized world — consumers would take one look at the GE symbol next to a pile of fresh corn and turn away in disgust. The stuff wouldn’t sell.

Instead, we may all unwittingly be eating ears of Bt toxin–infused kernels at our next backyard barbecue. Gulp.

–Jennifer Grayson

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Photo via Flickr: Balthazira

While all the world is focused on peak oil, other natural resources are vanishing into thin air — literally. Like helium. While it may be the second most abundant element in the universe, it may soon be one of the rarest on earth.

From this month’s issue of National Geographic:

The deflating news, says the National Research Council, is that we’re running out. Most of the world’s helium comes from beneath America’s Great Plains, where it’s trapped in natural gas. The US began stockpiling it in the 1960s, but in 1996 opted to recoup its investment and sell off the reserve by 2015. After that, other producers — including Russia, Algeria, and Qatar — will control what’s left of the global market: perhaps a mere 40 years’ worth.

We’re not just talking about a future of pathetic party favors: Helium is also crucial for military technology, space travel, and nuclear research. So why does a helium-filled balloon still only cost 99 cents? You’d think the stuff would be as precious as diamonds.

–Jennifer Grayson

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Photo via Flickr: McKay Savage

Sometime in 2011, we will reach a terrifying milestone: The world’s population will officially push past the 7 billion mark. We’ve added more than 3 billion people — the size of the entire planet in 1960 — since the year I was born.

Before you go in to holy *^%$, we’re all screwed freak-out mode, take a deep breath and read Robert Kunzig’s brilliant, mind-blowing article in this month’s National Geographic. Now. (Really: Click here.) It should be required reading for every environmentalist.

What I took away from it is this: The problem — and the solution — isn’t about population per se. As Kunzig points out, “The current population of the planet could fit into the state of Texas, if Texas were settled as densely as New York City.” It’s about consumption.

The World Bank has predicted that by 2030 more than a billion people in the developing world will belong to the “global middle class,” up from just 400 million in 2005. That’s a good thing. But it will be a hard thing for the planet if those people are eating meat and driving gasoline-powered cars at the same rate as Americans now do. It’s too late to keep the new middle class of 2030 from being born; it’s not too late to change how they and the rest of us will produce and consume food and energy. “Eating less meat seems more reasonable to me than saying, ‘Have fewer children!’” [French demographer Hervé] Le Bras says.

Happy Meatless Monday.

–Jennifer Grayson

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Photo: Cheyenne Ellis

While we’re all griping about how ugly CFLs look (the federal phaseout of incandescent light bulbs begins in 2012), over a quarter of the world — 1.5 billion people — lives in darkness.

Living without electricity may sound quaint in this fast-paced, BlackBerry-blinking world, but it’s not: No light means kids can’t do their homework in the evening when they get home from school and work days are cut short because people have to start preparing dinner in the mid-afternoon.

The kerosene (read: fossil fuel) lamps that most of the developing world relies on are also a source of dangerous indoor air pollution, to which 1.6 million deaths are attributed each year. Not to mention 190 million tons of CO2.

The sustainable solution? The Nokero solar light bulb. The latest model requires no training to use, last six hours on a single charge, and can even withstand rain and other tough weather conditions.

The bulbs are being used to light refugee camps in Pakistan after the devastating floods this summer; now, football (not the American kind) great Didier Drogba is working with Nokero to help bring solar light to the 537 million Africans who live without electricity.

Why not help his efforts and donate a ray of hope to someone in need this holiday season? Click here.

–Jennifer Grayson

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With all the talk about cell phones and cancer, I’ve been constantly reminding myself to use a headset with my BlackBerry Curve, which was disturbingly ranked one of the worst phones (highest radiation risk) by Environmental Working Group.

Problem is, I don’t always remember to bring my headset with me wherever I go, so I’m left to: a) conduct a conversation using the Curve’s crappy speakerphone (my mom insists she can only hear every other word I say); b) cringe as I finally give up and hold the phone a couple inches from my ear; and c) try to get the other person off the line as fast as humanly possible.

The solution: An anti-radiation BlackBerry case from Pong Research (also available for the iPhone), which has been shown by FCC-certified laboratories to reduce exposure to cell phone radiation by 60 to 85 percent. Admittedly, the technical jargon on the website reads like pseudoscience, but rest assured that the gadget really works: After publishing an initially skeptical review last year, Wired magazine had to eat its words after taking a Pong case to a radiation lab and confirming that the company’s claims are indeed credible.

The debate rages on as to whether cell phones are actually harmful to one’s health, but the possibility has enough people worried that legislators in San Francisco just passed a law requiring retailers to label phones for radiation risk. I’m not taking any chances: I’ll be ordering my Pong case before the 50 percent discount offer ends on July 31.

–Jennifer Grayson

P.S. I am still BlackBerry-free, true to my Earth Day promise: I disconnected the email service, so I only use the device as a phone.

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So the news came in last week from the Union of Concerned Scientists, and it ain’t optimistic: Evidently, harsh heat waves like the one to recently strike the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states are going to become all-too common; so much so that in the not-too-distant future, large regions of the earth — including parts of Africa, China, and the United States — could become uninhabitable.

According to Matthew Huber, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University and a member of UCS, if nothing is done to curb fossil fuel emissions at their current level, then the earth could see a rise in average global temperatures by as much as 15 degrees Farenheit over the next 200 to 300 years. His research shows that under those conditions, if a heat wave were to occur in the hotter/more humid regions of the world, most people would not be able to survive outside for more than a few hours.

A recent Stanford University study warns that we may not even have to wait centuries; we could see a marked increase in the number of heatwaves in as little as 30 years.

So what can you do, right now, to help stop this from happening? It’s simple, won’t cost you anything (in fact, it might even help you save money), and will reduce your greenhouse gas footprint as much as if you went out and leased a Prius: Join the Meatless Monday movement.

–Jennifer Grayson

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[Watch video on YouTube]

Right now, we’re all focused on the immediate threat of the BP oil spill. After all, 60,000 barrels of crude a day are pretty tough to ignore. But there’s another, more insidious type of oil pollution threatening the future of our oceans, and that’s the accumulation of petroleum-based plastics.

You may have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a massive floating landfill (roughly the size of Texas) in the Pacific Ocean comprised of 3.5 million tons of plastic trash — but that’s not the only one: There are four other patches, or gyres, spanning our globe.

Amazingly, there hasn’t been a whole lot of media coverage of these five gyres; maybe images of six-pack rings and plastic rope floating in the water aren’t as dramatic as, say, those of birds and other marine life drowning in thick oil. But that doesn’t mean this trash isn’t having as equally a detrimental effect: Forty-four percent of all seabird species have been documented with plastic in or around their bodies, leading to blockages, starvation, and even death.

This, from the new organization 5 Gyres, which is partnering with organizations like the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and the Surfrider Foundation to actively explore and document the plastic pollution in our oceans.

Want to see for yourself what an oceanic garbage patch looks like? Check out the video, above, from a 5 Gyres expedition to the North Atlantic Gyre earlier this year. Then, click here to find out ways to reduce your own plastic trash footprint.

–Jennifer Grayson

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Photo via Flickr: Jeferonix

Methane. It’s what led to the explosion that caused the Deepwater Horizon to burn and sink in the first place, unleashing a torrent of crude into the ocean that has now surpassed the Exxon Valdez as the worst oil spill in United States history. The gas is also still being released along with the oil: According to BP, the mixture spewing from the ocean floor is about half methane and other gases, and half petroleum compounds. Oh, and it’s a greenhouse gas that’s 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

A powerful greenhouse gas. That makes up half of the estimated 500,000 to 1 million gallons of oil leaking each day. Of which an unknown portion is escaping into the atmosphere. Why is no one talking about this?

When I contacted Jeff Chanton, a professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science at Florida State University who has been closely following the BP spill, he was quick to point out that the immediate short-term threat to the ecosystem in the Gulf, is, of course, the oil itself. But, he says, “Methane is undeniably bubbling out with this oil and escaping to the atmosphere. This will exacerbate the greenhouse effect.”

How much so is not so clear. Based on Chanton’s recent research looking at natural oil seeps on the sea floor, he estimates that anywhere from 10 to 50 percent of the methane released might make its way into the air. This, he says, is because the oil actually forms a protective coating around the methane bubbles, allowing the gas to escape to the surface instead of being dissolved in seawater and consumed by natural methanotrophic bacteria.

“We looked at several sites this past summer, and at one of the sites, the natural seep was very oily,” he says. “At the site that was very oily, we did find elevated methane concentrations in the atmosphere over the site. But another site that was more shallow, where the bubbles were not oily, we didn’t see that. So the oil helps the methane get to the surface by kind of armoring the bubbles and then they don’t dissolve as much.”

So now, for the holy cow analysis: For calculation’s sake, let’s use the natural gas leakage figure given last week by BP: 15 million cubic feet a day (although based on BP’s oil spill estimate at that time of 5,000 barrels a day, that figure is probably a lot higher).

According to the EPA Interactive Units Converter:

1 cubic foot (CF) methane (CH4) = .04246 pounds of CH4
15 million CF CH4 x .04246 = 636,900 pounds CH4 = 318.5 metric tons CH4
318.5 metric tons CH4 = 6,066.9 metric tons CO2 equivalent a day

For comparison, that’s more than a third of daily CO2 emissions for the entire New York metro area.

Any other number crunchers want to take a crack at it?

–Jennifer Grayson

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The federal phase-out of the traditional incandescent bulb won’t go into effect until 2012, but already the market is starting to shift. Yesterday, I went to my local Walgreens to pick up a replacement appliance bulb for my refrigerator, and was shocked to see that the top three shelves of the light bulb section were stocked with compact fluorescents (CFLs); only a few incandescent stragglers lingered on the bottom shelf.

This is great news for the environment (CFLs offer a 75 percent reduction in energy consumption), but not for my vanity. I replaced all the bulbs in my apartment with fluorescents years ago, of course, but I still cringe every time I catch a glimpse of my yellow-tinged skin in the hallway mirror. There are those who claim that decent CFLs do exist, but I have yet to find one.

But at long last, a truly flattering energy-efficient bulb may be making its way to a drugstore near you. GE announced yesterday that its 40-watt replacement Energy Smart LED bulb will be available late this year or in early 2011. The staggering sustainability stats: The lamp-style bulb will consume a mere 9 watts, provide a 77 percent energy savings over incandescents, and last 17 years. And, unlike a CFL, the GE bulb will contain no mercury.

The expected price tag of $40 to $50 may make some customers balk, but considering that one bulb could “light your kid’s bedroom desk lamp from birth through high school graduation” (or so the press release boasts), consumers are just going to have to start thinking a little more long-term when it comes to their finances. And the planet.

–Jennifer Grayson

Related post:
WATCH: LED lighting saves life of chocolate Easter bunny

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