Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
The Green Gauge: Kimberly-Clark, NCR face pollution charges
Leading this week’s Green Gauge, a breakdown of companies in the news for behavior affecting the environment, are Kimberly-Clark and NCR who are being sued along with seven others for PCB pollution dating back more than 50 years.
Selections of headlines about publicly-traded companies were made by Christopher Greenwald, director of data content at ASSET4, a Thomson Reuters business that provides investment research on the environmental, social and governance performance of major global corporations. These ratings are not recommendations to buy or sell.
Kimberly-Clark Corp. and NCR Corp.
The long-lasting risks of environmental pollution were revealed recently, as the U.S. Department of Justice filed a major law suit against Kimberly-Clark, NCR, and nine other companies to pay for continued clean-up and environmental restoration work relating to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) pollution in Wisconsin’s Fox River and Green Bay from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. Although $300 million has already been paid for clean-up efforts at the site, the Department of Justice claims that $550 million of additional clean-up and $400 million of natural resource restoration work is still required. The lawsuit claims that the companies originally responsible for the pollution have resisted taking full financial responsibility for the clean-up costs as well as the efforts necessary to repair the long-term damage to natural resources that resulted from the pollution.
Zijin Mining Group Company Ltd.
Chinese authorities sued Zijin Mining for nearly $3 million following the collapse of a tailings dam near a tin mine controlled by the company. In addition to the significant environmental damage caused by the resulting pollution, 28 people are dead or missing as a result of the dam’s collapse. The incident follows another recent pollution incident at one of the company’s gold mines in China in July that killed more than 2,000 fish.
from PopTech:
Making it right in New Orleans
PopTech speaker Tom Darden is the executive director of the Make It Right Foundation, the organization started by Brad Pitt to rebuild affordable, green homes in New Orleans' lower ninth ward. Make It Right has already built 50 homes and are in the midst of construction for another 30. Their initial goal is to build a total of 150.
So far, Darden has helped raise $36 million for the foundation. In 2009, Darden was named Louisiana's Young Entrepreneur of the Year by the Small Business Administration. After being in New Orleans for four years now and having worked with the foundation since 2007, Darden explains why his work is so essential and how these types of homes can transform a family's quality of life:
from For the Record:
Hungary drudges through this toxic spill
I wish it were the awarding of its 14th Nobel Prize that is putting my country in the news these days.
Instead, Hungary is back on the world stage because of a disastrous chemical spill. An avalanche of a highly alkaline mud that could fill 440 Olympic-sized swimming pools has broken through the shoddy containment walls at an aluminum plant not far from the Lake Balaton region. As a result, nine people have died and 250 were injured. Wild and farm animals have perished, and lands and little summer gardens that were the villagers' food and staple for winter have been ravished.
Backyard tigers
Would you keep a tiger as a pet?
A puppy-sized tiger cub can be bought in the United States for as little as $200, and there are probably about 5,000 such backyard tigers across the country, about the same number of privately owned tigers in China, according to World Wildlife Fund.
That is far greater than the approximately 3,200 wild tigers worldwide, compared to the estimated 100,000 wild tigers a century ago. The growing number of these animals in captivity poses a threat to the species in the wild, WWF reports.
from PopTech:
Does our economy make us happy?
By Lisa Gansky
The opinions expressed are her own.
Does our economy make us happy?
The crash-and-burn of the financial system, a prolonged recession, and high unemployment obviously cause us enormous distress. We are forced to ask ourselves, “What can we afford now?”
The collapse has also made many of us rethink what we care about. We're finally asking, “Are all these things we’ve been buying (and probably still making payments on) truly making us happy?”
Could “putting the cow inside the plant” make a new biofuel?
The Next Big Thing in biofuel might involve genetically engineered plants that digest themselves, making it cheaper to turn them into fuel. That’s one of the new ideas that Arun Majumdar finds fascinating. As the head of the U.S. Energy Department’s ARPA-E – the path-breaking agency that aims come up with efficient, green energy solutions — Majumdar said this concept is one of a few dozen that are in the development stage now.
Majumdar let his enthusiasm show as he described this project at the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit on Thursday. He was talking about a project in its early stages at Massachusetts-based Agrivida.
from Photographers Blog:
A toxic work environment
Bernadett Szabo spent eight days photographing the disaster that enveloped part of Western Hungary after a reservoir of red sludge, an alumina factory by-product, burst on October 4 and released one million cubic meters of highly toxic sludge that killed eight people, injured 120, and destroyed nearly 1,000 hectares (2,400 acres) of land. Here’s her account of working in the field under the adverse conditions she found.
This work required a whole lot more caution than normal when covering a different type of disaster story, like a flood for example. There’s water there, and mud, and you can sink and all, but that’s only water. This red sludge is toxic.
The Green Gauge: Vedanta, Sterlite ordered to shut smelter
This month, Vedanta Resources and subsidiary Sterlite Industries (India) Ltd. made headlines for posing a public health risk to the surrounding community in southern India with pollution from a large copper smelter. They share the top spot in this issue of The Green Gauge, a breakdown of companies recently in the news for winning or losing credibility based on environment-related activity.
Selections of companies were made by Christopher Greenwald, director of data content at ASSET4, a Thomson Reuters business that provides investment research on the environmental, social and governance performance of major global corporations. These ratings are not recommendations to buy or sell.
from Summit Notebook:
Will Bjorn Lomborg be compared to Al Gore?
Bjorn Lomborg (left) worries that people will conclude he's becoming like Al Gore (right).
At first sight, that sounds unthinkable.
Lomborg, a Danish statistician who wrote the book "The Skeptical Environmentalist", argues that the world should develop cheap new green technologies before taking radical steps to fight global warming (...echoes of the policies of former U.S. President George W. Bush).
from MacroScope:
Will China make the world green?
Joschka Fischer was never one to mince words when he was Germany's foreign minister in the late '90s and early noughts. So it is not overly surprising that he has painted a picture in a new post of a world with only two powers -- the United States and China -- and an ineffective and divided Europe on the sidelines.
More controversial, however, is his view that China will not only grow into the world's most important market over the coming years, but will determine what the world produces and consumes -- and that that will be green.
