There are high hopes that the natural gas extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, will boost the economy and bring the United States closer to energy independence, but if the energy industry expects to break new ground and fulfill a growing demand anytime soon, they need to make friends with the people who reside near the drilling rigs.

Two new reports out last week point to the potential of how fracking, the process whereby a highly-pressured mixture of water, sand and chemicals is blasted through underground shale rock formations to release natural gas, could positively benefit our economy. One study projects that natural gas will account for nearly one-third of total U.S. energy produced by 2040, and the other one, a government commissioned report which the Obama administration is expected to partially base its shale gas policy on, shows natural gas exports providing revenue to the struggling economy under every condition considered.

A natural gas well is drilled near Canton, in Bradford County, Pennsylvania January 8, 2012. REUTERS/Les Stone

The Obama administration has largely left regulation of private land up to the states, and for many landowners, the impacts of hydraulic fracturing don’t just hit close to home… they drill right into their backyards. Last month, voters in Longmont, Colo. became the latest in the country to ban fracking within town limits. The ballot initiative was passed via a bipartisan vote and the town will likely follow in the footsteps a handful of other municipalities, including the upstate New York towns of Dryden, Middlefield and Avon, that already passed bans or moratoriums and are in the midst of legal challenges to uphold them. While local ordinances may not typically make national news, the precedent set by these local governments cannot be overstated. At the most micro level, local residents came together and threw a wedge into the plans of private industry -- industry that by the way, already have allocated millions of dollars to harvest these towns’ natural resources.

In New York, the Department of Environmental Conservation estimates that shale gas development would not only create 50,000 new jobs in the state, but may also raise New York wages by nearly $2.5 billion. So why then, is there resistance to industry moving into the neighborhood? It seems that aside from landscape degradation -- think oil rigs and waste pits in the midst of green pastures – local residents aren’t sure this bright, green economic future prioritizes their health and safety.

“There are so many loopholes in the federal level, we’re seeing cities and towns taking matters into their own hands,” said Jessica Ennis, a legislative representative for Earthjustice, a non-profit environmental law firm dedicated to protecting the environment. There are two types of exemptions that anti-fracking advocates such as Ennis are referring to. The first is the hydraulic fracturing industry’s exemptions from basic federal regulations designed to protect the environment from hazardous materials, including parts of the Natural Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Superfund Act and the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act.

Another loophole cited by fracking critics is the industry’s trade secret exemption, which allows drilling companies to withhold from the public the names of some of the chemicals they inject into the ground. A recent Bloomberg Businessweek investigation found that in the state of Oklahoma, for instance, nearly one third of all fracking fluid chemicals were withheld from public knowledge under the “trade secret” exemption. The concern here, according to Ennis, is that if you don’t know what chemicals the industry uses, you can’t independently test for their presence in the air or water.

John Krohn, a spokesman for Energy In Depth, a research, education and public outreach campaign launched by the Independent Petroleum Association of America, says the idea that the natural gas industry is unregulated is a “fallacy.”

According to Krohn, it’s unfair to say that hydraulic fracturing is exempt from environmental acts, such as the Safe Drinking Water Act, when the acts weren’t designed to regulate the oil and gas industry in the first place. “It’s like fitting a square peg into a round hole,” he says.

“The oil and natural gas process is one of the most heavily regulated industries in this nation,” Krohn says. He brought up the example of Susquehanna River Basin Commission, which has put an extensive monitoring system for the types of chemicals one would find for oil and natural gas waste water. Year after year, there has been no indication that the wastewater is negatively impacting rivers and streams, Krohn says.

But is the Susquehanna River Basin Commission able to test for the chemicals that the natural gas industry deems so-called “trade secrets?”

“I’m pretty sure we don’t, no,” says Andrew Gavin, the manager of monitoring and protection programs for the commission. “There are hundreds of chemicals used in fracking fluid,” he continued, “you could probably test for most, but it would get very expensive, very fast.”

How about the state? The natural gas industry is required to give full disclosure to state governments regarding every chemical used in their fracking fluid, including the proprietary “trade secret” chemicals. Kevin Sunday, the deputy press secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, said that while his state agency monitors for indicators of water contamination, “if there is a proprietary chemical that makes up .0007 percent of the fluid, it may not be productive to test.” It might not be cost effective, but if up to one third of fracking fluid chemicals are considered secret, as the Businessweek investigation found in Oklahoma, that’s adds up to a lot of “unproductive” fluid to ignore.

The fracking technique has spurred an intense, high-powered environmental debate. On one hand, last week’s studies point to its ability to not only help America gain energy independence, but also positively contribute to the economy, especially in rural areas that the recent recession impacted severely. On the other hand, it might be difficult to keep up with demand if local residents, who possess the right to vote, don’t have the right to know what exactly are the chemicals injected under the land they live on.

Starting Dec. 1, 2011, Reuters.com is changing the way it publishes news about companies that make money supporting the environment or damaging it. We are saying goodbye to the Green Business section.

Reuters will continue to bring you the clean economy news you need to know. Our top-notch team of correspondents around the world will continue to cover issues like the Keystone XL pipeline, the solar trade war with China and the Durban U.N. Conference on Climate Change. The biggest stories, as always, will appear on our homepage, like those about plummeting carbon prices. But we will not be packaging green business stories on their own real estate any longer, and we will not be showcasing news by our esteemed editorial partners including Matter Network, InsideClimate News and GreenBiz.com.

Stories about energy will be published here, and those about environmental policy and climate change can be found here. And Reuters online editor Carla Tonelli can still be found on twitter (@carla_tonelli).

One of the goals of the sustainability movement is to integrate its objectives into all facets of business. In this light, Reuters.com is ahead of the game as we enter a time when solar panel companies are mainstream enough to be on the regular business page and not siphoned off to a private green niche.

Of course, green companies, technology and economies are not going away. At Reuters.com we embrace this opportunity to bring the business of the environment into the fold of the rest of the site, and welcome you to continue your dialogue with us as we branch out to yet another new chapter.

Curious about new financial innovations to accelerate the global transition to a low-carbon economy, I attended the recent United Nations Environment Program Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) summit in Washington, D.C. This was a gathering of big money and those who shape its flows – pension funds, insurance companies, policy wonks and political negotiators.

Not surprisingly, I found nothing mind-blowing.

Our intentions are good, but we move – as always – incrementally. Catastrophic climate change still doesn’t fit our spreadsheets. Pension funds still rely on voluntary principles of risk avoidance.

But hats off to Paul Abberley, CEO of Aviva Investors out of London, England, for the best idea of the conference. Abberley wants to translate, directly, the good intentions of pension contributors into the fiduciary duty of investment managers.

Anyone on the carbon scene knows we’re at a standstill. There are bright spots like California’s brand new cap and trade regulations and Ontario’s Green Energy Act, and there are always some intrepid businesses that carve out a market for their piece of low-carbon infrastructure.

Energy retrofits are occasionally aggregated to attract a few hundred million dollars. But the big money, the trillion dollars a year we need deployed to move the needle on carbon, still sits in the wings.

Large capital will not be unlocked without political direction and price certainty on carbon, no matter how progressive or well-meaning a fund manager might be. So it’s around the COP merry-go-round we go again.

Two decent attempts to break this impasse are the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). Between the two programs, large capital flows were supposed to gush into the low-carbon sector.

Identifying a company’s exposure to carbon risk should reduce capital flow to high-carbon industries.

Adherence to responsible long-term thinking is meant to deliver better long-term returns.  CDP and PRI are meant to be filters to enable a fund manager to deliver better long-term performance. They are meant to change investment decisions.

But do they?

Probably not.

The CDP is voluntary, and until the carbon risk is made tangible, it remains an afterthought in everyday investment decisions.

The PRI has become more a method of measuring what you’re already doing, rather than changing how you do it.  It’s a way of generating metrics, not changing decisions.

So along comes Abberley’s deceptively simple idea.

Imagine a teacher, a pension fund, and an investment manager. The teacher contributes bi-weekly to the fund. And an investment manager, somewhere down the line, invests that money. There’s no real link between the two. If you asked the teacher how they would like their money invested, they might say “I want a decent return, and I want to retire in a decent world.” Voila.  Buliding a decent world means making different investment decisions. If that intention is passed through to the investment manager, we’d change capital flows.

Sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

It’s a way of making tangible the fiduciary duty of the investment manager to the funds contributors – directly, and not through third-party metrics like PRI.

To do it, just aggregate the expressed opinions of all those teachers, police officers, factory workers and public servants. Survey, anyone?

• The 146 million cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks in America, between them, produce seven times the power of all US power plants combined.
• The supply of energy is volatile, and will get more so as we move to renewables like wind and solar. Those sources only produce energy some of the time.
• The demand for energy is also volatile, going up during the day and when it's hot outside.
• Storing energy, by doing things like pumping water uphills into reservoirs, is expensive and cumbersome. And those energy sources can't provide the small bumps in power needed to ensure that AC electricity is running at 60 hertz at all times.

All of which opens up an amazing opportunity for owners of electric vehicles -- be they electric, hybrid, or fuel cell. Those vehicle owners can basically become baby energy traders, fueling up their cars at night, when electricity is cheap, or at the pump. And then plugging their cars into the grid, where they can sell energy back to the grid for much more than they paid for it.

Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware has already set up his electric Scion to do just that; it's been earning him $300 a month since 2009.

This is a fantastic idea, and it's a no-brainer, really, that all electric cars should have the ability to power the grid, rather than just drawing power from it. The number and size of power plants is a function of peak electricity demand; if electric-car owners collectively can help meet peak demand, then that means we need fewer power plants. And, the revenue from selling that electricity would help offset the extra cost of buying an electric car in the first place.

The batteries in electric cars are expensive and valuable pieces of technology which go unused for most of the time. Let's put those things to use, and make money doing so! The only real question is why this isn't happening already.

This week the U.S. House of Representatives passed a rather unusual bill directly addressed to Europe.

Through the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act H.R. 2594, America’s legislators want to tell American airlines not to respect an EU law.

This seems to me a rather unorthodox course of action, but here in the EU we are confident that in the end the United States will respect our legislation, just as the EU respects U.S. legislation and U.S. lawmakers’ authority in U.S. airports.

After all, there is nothing new or unusual in requiring airlines to meet certain rules which, given the global nature of the industry, have international ramifications.

As Congressmen who opposed the House bill pointed out, the United States itself requires international airlines to comply with a wide range of U.S. laws when it comes to passenger, baggage and cargo security in order to do business in the U.S. Other laws also require overseas ports to put in place certain security measures before cargo can be sent to the U.S.

If the U.S. wants to handle emissions from aviation differently, that is fine; our legislation clearly envisages that if a country outside the EU takes ‘equivalent measures’ to address aviation emissions then all incoming flights from that country can be exempted from the EU system.

We are ready to engage constructively with the U.S. and all other partners about such an approach. We also recognise and encourage agreeing to global measures to reduce GHG emissions from aviation. In the event of such agreement, we could adapt our legislation.

To us, what matters, is that aviation also contributes to fighting climate change.

Why is this important?

Our law addresses a major environmental issue of our times, namely the vertiginous growth in carbon emissions from aviation which is contributing to global warming and climate change. The global body for civil aviation, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), estimates that emissions from the sector will increase by up to 88 percent between 2005 and 2020 and by up to 700 percent by 2050.

Such growth scenarios are completely at odds with the internationally agreed objective of holding global warming below 2C (3.6F) compared with the temperature in pre-industrial times. To respect that ceiling, all sectors will need to contribute.

Despite work and pressure from the EU, states in ICAO have not yet agreed on a global solution to limit aviation emissions. No one has fought harder than the EU to find a global solution- and we are still trying to reach agreement.

Faced with the urgent need to address climate change, the EU chose to go forward by bringing the aviation sector into our emissions trading system (ETS) while continuing to press for a global solution.

The EU ETS is a cap and trade system designed to keep emissions covered by the scheme within a pre-defined limit. It’s a pollution ceiling. While the EU ETS is moving towards making industrial installations buy their allowances, airlines will receive more than four in five of their allowances for free. For next year the figure will be 85 percent and for the period 2013-2020 it will be 82 percent.

Our legislation applies to all airlines taking off from or landing in the EU, whatever their nationality. We have made the fair choice of applying a measure to all airlines and therefore avoid creating unacceptable distortion of competition.

Being in the ETS means that airlines will need to have emission allowances that cover the emissions along the entire route of flights to and from the EU.

This approach is specifically provided for in ICAO’s Guidance on Emissions Trading, which considers the alternative – delimitation based on national airspace – as “impracticable.”

ICAO recognised as far back as 2004 that market-based measures have a role to play in tackling aviation emissions, that among such measures emissions trading is preferable to taxes and charges, and that emissions trading for international aviation was better implemented by including aviation in States’ own trading systems than by creating a new, single ICAO system.

In other words: our system gives airlines a clear incentive to become more efficient and pollute less.

That is in everybody’s interest.

And where airlines do need to buy additional allowances through government auctions, the auction revenues will be used to tackle climate change in the EU and third countries. To ensure transparency, the EU Member States will publish reports on how they spend the revenues.

How much will our system add to the cost of a ticket? Any increase will be modest at most. They will largely depend on whether the airlines decide to pass on the market value of the 85 percent allowances they get for free. Costs can thus range between $1.40 and $8.60 a ticket each way on a transatlantic or other long-haul flight at current carbon prices.

Let’s take the example of a one-way flight from New York to London. The estimated CO2 emissions per passenger would be around 385 kilograms. The value of the allowances that need to be surrendered would be $5.40 per passenger at current carbon prices but, given the high level of free allowances to airlines, the actual cost for the airlines would be only around $1 to $2 – which can hardly be an insurmountable issue for them.

Europe’s legislation is a key contribution to global climate action. We encourage others to join in our efforts.

___________________

This opinion article was first published on AlertNet, a Thomson Reuters Foundation Service.

(Photo shows a passenger aircraft silhouetted against the rising moon in New Delhi May 7, 2009. REUTERS/B Mathur)

If the Nobel society had an award for sustainability, it would resemble the Katerva awards, a new international prize for the most promising ideas and efforts to advance the planet toward sustainability.

Minus the money.

Katerva, the new UK-based charity, today announced winners for 10 individual categories, who are now shortlisted for a single grand prize to be awarded in New York on Dec. 7.

Awards are for “game-changers and industry breakers; ideas that leap efficiency, lifestyle, consumption and action bounds ahead of current thinking,” their website says.

It’s the result of a year of vigorous review involving a network of “spotters” and organizations around the world that nominated more than 150 programs and ideas for the honor. Nominees were required to be ongoing, active and capable of scaling up.

The 2011 winners in their individual categories are:

Behavioral Change –

350.org

Activist organization founded by Bill McKibben to mitigate the climate crisis through online campaigns, grassroots organizing and mass public actions by volunteers in 188 countries.

Economy -

Ebay’s worldofgood.com

The world’s largest multi-seller marketplace for socially and environmentally responsible shopping.

Energy and Power -

Barefoot Power

Providers of alternative light sources such as LED lights and polycrystalline solar panels for homes in 15 developing countries.

Food Security –

The China Study

Written by Dr. T. Colin Campbell and his son Thomas M. Campbell III, The China Study is the most comprehensive study of nutrition ever conducted and findings conclusively demonstrate the link between nutrition and heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

Human Development -

Solar Autoclave

Low-cost, solar powered device used to safely and reliably sterilize surgical instruments in developing countries.

Materials and Resources –

Sanergy

Provides low-cost sustainable franchised sanitation centers throughout Kenya.

Transportation -

Nissan Leaf

Zero-emission, all-electric, mainstream vehicle from a major global automobile manufacturer.

Urban Design –

Freshkills Park

The New York City Parks and Recreation department is transforming Freshkills Park into a 2,200 acre park that restores the natural environment.

Protected Areas – no recipient

Gender Equality – no recipient

Each of the winners now enter competition for the grand prize of intellectual support “to aid winners in intelligently growing and accelerating their impact on the world.” This includes introduction to a number of partner organizations and business thought leaders Ken Blanchard and Marshall Goldsmith.

Grand prize jury members include:

Jeremy Rifkin, author author and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends Jeremy Rifkin

Marina Silva, Brazilian environmentalist and politician Marina Silva

Gunter Pauli, director of the Zero Emissions Research Initiative

Jean-Michel Cousteau, Explorer, Environmentalist, and Educator

Mary Robinson, former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights

Lord St. John of Bletso, member of the UK House of Lords and cleantech advocate

Dr. J. Craig Venter, U.S. biologist known for sequencing the human genome

John Elkington, executive chairman of Volans and founder of SustainAbility

(Photo above shows 2000 Students from Massey High School in Waitakere City, Aotearoa New Zealand, assemble on their field to show their support for 350.org International Day of Climate Action, Oct 24, 2009. REUTERS/Handout/Steve Campbell/350.org)

The U.S. Department of Energy announced this week $60 million in funding for scientists to develop “revolutionary research” to lower the cost of solar power systems.

The DOE SunShot Initiative is baiting researchers to increase efficiency of commercial solar power (CSP) systems and lower costs to six cents per kilowatt hour by the end of the decade. 

The initiative is being called a “sign of the times for the sector“, and comes amidst accusations the government is squandering taxpayer money on businesses doomed to fail, best exemplified by recently bankrupt solar heavyweight Solyndra.

The DOE says the SunShot CSP grant is meant to look beyond short-term innovation and explore transformative concepts with the “potential to break through performance barriers like efficiency and temperature limitations,” the DOE announced. It wants scientists to think big.

With billions invested in multiple CSP plants throughout the southwestern states, improving CSP generation to the point where it can once again compete with cheaper solar photovoltaic panels appears to be an important priority for the DOE, writes Energy Matters.

China may have cornered today’s subsidy-dependent markets for solar cells in recent years, but they have not yet won the race to make solar energy cheap. writes Jesse Jenkins at Forbes.

(Photo shows U.S. President Barack Obama lifting a solar panel as he tours Solyndra, Inc., a solar panel manufacturing facility in Fremont, California May 26, 2010. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

Pitt and Damon play Will and Bill, the krill, in “Happy Feet Two,” the sequel to the 2006 dancing-penguins animated feature. Both films have conservation themes. The latest movie  opens  in mid-November.

These Hollywood names might help shine a spotlight on krill at a time when the species is under pressure, according to the Pew Environment Group. An international meeting under way now in Hobart, Tasmania, is expected to consider more protection for these tiny animals, which penguins, seals and whales depend on to survive.

Increasing demand for krill as feed for industrially farmed fish and for nutritional supplements has pushed the krill fishery beyond a sustainable level, the conservation group said in a statement. Krill fishing in some areas could outpace efforts to protect the well-known animals that rely on it.

“Existing efforts to regulate krill catch must be sustained and enforced, so that animals such as penguins and seals are not competing against industrial fishing vessels just to survive,” said Gerry Leape, a senior officer at the Pew group.

New fishing technologies enable fleets from multiple countries process krill continuously, bringing in much higher catches than a decade ago. An accelerating loss of sea ice that provides essential habitat for krill adds to the problem and threatens to deplete stocks in key feeding areas for penguins, seals and whales.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources is meeting in Tasmania from October 24 through November 4, and the Pew Environment Group is asking delegates to the commission to require observers on all krill-fishing vessels, set up a dedicated fund to monitor krill predators, and maintain smaller divisions of the ocean to manage krill to prevent local depletion that will harm penguins and other animals.

Photo credits: REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch (Matt Damon and Brad Pitt  arrive for the screening of their movie ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ in a Berlin cinema December 15, 2004.)

REUTERS/Mike Blake (baby green sea turtles eat krill from the hand of senior aquarist Bryan Mercer, Sea World, San Diego, July 2, 2003)

Becky Kelley directs the Climate and Clean Energy Agenda at the Washington Environmental Council. Any opinions expressed are her own.

We could smell the sweet winds of change all the way up in Washington State last week, when California adopted final rules to implement a cap and trade program to reduce climate pollution across its economy, beginning in 2013.

California got it right. Cap and trade is a policy at the scale of the problem: big, complex policy to deal with a big, complex problem.

The state’s action to embark on cap and trade, along with a suite of other essential clean energy, energy efficiency and clean transportation polices, matters far beyond its borders.

It is especially important in light of national legislative inaction. With so much at stake, it is extraordinary to consider that Congress is not taking action on climate change to protect Americans’ interests across the country.

States like California, and my own Evergreen State, Washington, are left to take matters into their own hands.

Perhaps it’s more apt to call these winds of change bittersweet.

Here in Washington, back in 2009, Governor Chris Gregoire, legislators, and advocates unsuccessfully sought state legislation to join a regional cap and trade program with California.

Like California, Washington has climate pollution reduction requirements in state law, and a wide range of existing policies to drive the transition to cleaner energy.

Yet, a recent report by the state demonstrates that we aren’t on track to meet our 2020 targets for ramping down climate pollution. To do that, we need more transformational policies.

As EPA moves forward under the Clean Air Act requiring emissions reductions from big polluters like coal-fired power plants and oil refineries, California’s cap and trade program and Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative will serve as working models of a market-based alternative.

EPA’s continued action is essential to leveraging comprehensive national climate policy that can ultimately help bring about global policy at the scale of the global problem.

It seems likely that a healthy dose of reality may re-ignite the stalled conversation about climate policy in Congress.

Polluters will look to their left and see direct regulation: reduce pollution at your facility, period.

They will look to the right (pun intended) and see a flexible, market-based approach that enables lower-cost reductions. And if they get squeamish, there’s always the comfort that early versions of cap and trade were architected by an attorney in G.H.W. Bush’s White House.

California’s relevance to the national debate also derives from its size. As the world’s eighth-largest economy, its policies drive innovations that will ultimately find markets across the country.

We’ve already seen California leading the way on policies to clean up climate pollution.

In trickle-up environmental policy, the Clean Cars revolution begun in California was modeled by many other states, including Washington in 2005. This state-led pressure ultimately led to the Obama Administration in 2010 finalizing improved national fuel economy standards and a first-ever greenhouse gas emission standard for new cars.

In trickle-up environmental policy, the Clean Cars revolution begun in California ultimately led to the Obama Administration in 2010 finalizing improved national fuel economy standards and a first-ever greenhouse gas emission standard for new cars.

In fact, California’s climate policy revolution has been led as much by businesses and venture capitalists seeking clear government signals on which to base investments, as by its concerned populace imagining a cleaner future.

Tell us the destination and the rules of the road, businesses said, and we’ll chart a path to get there.

Citizens joined with businesses to tell Texas oil companies to take a hike when Valero, Tesoro and their ilk sought to roll back California’s foundational climate law in 2010—it went down with a 61 percent ‘no’ vote, a resounding show of support for California’s climate leadership.

It’s worth putting down the poms-poms for a moment to acknowledge a few inconvenient truths.

Will California’s cap and trade program work perfectly from the beginning? Owing to a combination of political realities and the pitfalls of being a policy pioneer, the answer is undoubtedly no.

However, its architects have sought to incorporate lessons painfully learned by Europe’s emissions trading program, and have committed to evaluating and addressing concerns by environmental justice advocates about the possibility of localized pollution harming poor communities.

And with opponents poised to eviscerate California for any missteps, officials’ motivation could hardly be higher to iterate, learn and make it work.

When the Centers for Disease Control, the insurance industry, and the U.S. military all identify climate change as a serious threat to U.S. health and security and begin the hustle for solutions, it is clear the winds of change are blowing. Those institutions are not partisan, and they are pragmatic to a fault. Health, national security, and billions of dollars of assets are on the line.

While DC dawdles, California leads. Let’s hope they get some company soon.

(Photo above shows a wind farm in Palm Springs, California, February 9, 2011. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson)

In a project called Arctic Home, Coke plans to turn 1.4 billion of its soft-drink cans white for the first time in its history, replacing the familiar red with an image of a mother polar bear and two cubs making their way across the Arctic. There will also be white bottle caps on other drinks the company sells. The new look is to show up on store shelves from November 1 through February 2012.

The whole point is to raise money to protect a far-north area where summer sea ice will probably persist the longest, WWF and Coke said in a statement. The Arctic Home plan is to work with local residents to manage as much as 500,000 square miles of territory to provide a home for polar bears.

Coke and polar bears are something of a classic combination, according to the company’s Katie Bayne, who said in a statement that the big white bears were first introduced in the beverage-maker’s advertising in 1922. But the color change is more than tin-deep. Coca-Cola is making an initial $2 million donation to World Wildlife Fund to support polar bear conservation work. Those who buy the white cans can text the package code to 357357 to make individual donations of $1, or donate online at ArcticHome.com. The company plans to match all donations made with a package code by March 15 up to $1 million.

“Polar bears inspire the imagination,” Carter Roberts, CEO and president of WWF, said in a statement. “They’re massive, powerful, beautiful and they live nowhere else except the Arctic. Their lives are intimately bound up with sea ice, which is now melting at an alarming rate. By working with Coca-Cola, we can raise the profile of polar bears and what they’re facing, and most importantly, engage people to work with us, to help protect their home.”

Photo credits: REUTERS/Geoff York/World Wildlife Fund (World Wildlife Fund photograph taken along the western shore of Hudson Bay in November 2010 shows a female polar bear with two cubs near Churchill, Canada, in this image released to Reuters on February 9, 2011.

New Coke cans (World Wildlife Fund/Coca-Cola)