Environment Forum

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:

More from Tom Darden:

Make It Right partnered with award-winning architects who worked pro bono to design homes based around the needs of lower ninth ward residents. Design features such as covered porches and wide front stairs allow residents to maintain social connections to their neighborhood, preserving the "culture of engagement" that characterized the neighborhood prior to Hurricane Katrina.

Other design features such as large windows maximize daylight, and high ceilings facilitate passive heating, cooling, and ventilation. While the aesthetic is contemporary, many of the designs are inspired traditional New Orleans design, and reflect the unique spirit of the community.

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.

The 16th century castle in Devecser has surely seen a lot but now looks over hundreds of homes doomed to demolition. Kolontar, the village right under the alumina pond has even been compared to Chernobyl, the infamous home of a nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine in 1986.

But a comparison of this sort only adds more damage to the grief: The red mud, as bad as it looks, is not highly radioactive, which was the case with Chernobyl. What makes the red sludge dangerous is alkali, which can dissolve skin as water dissolves soap. Eating up shoes and rubber boots, alkali left villagers with second- and third-degree burns.

Unfortunately, Alkali is all too familiar to Hungarians.

“Heartbroken maids would drink [alkali-rich] laundry detergent in the 19th century,” Dr. Zoltan Komaromi, secretary of the Hungarian Medical Chamber, said. “Alkali dissolves the esophagus immediately so drinking it used to be a popular way of committing suicide.”

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.

“People don’t realize when they buy a $200 tiger cub that it grows into a full-grown tiger, which means a huge enclosure and costs about $5000 a year just to feed,” says Leigh Henry, an animal conservation expert at WWF. “So you end up with a lot of unwanted animals that are very poorly regulated.”

These unwanted animals are a potent lure to poachers, who can use parts and products from these backyard tigers to sell on the lucrative black market. Because many of these beasts are untraceable — it can be tougher to adopt a dog from a U.S. animal shelter than to sell a privately owned tiger — many wind up in Asia, where tiger parts and products are used in traditional medicine.

The trade in these unwanted privately owned tigers can threaten wild tigers by feeding the market, Henry says.

Wild tigers are preferred for traditional medicine, but poached privately owned tigers are much cheaper. As long as any tigers are filtering into this market, wild ones are under pressure — and not just from poachers, according to Henry. Their natural habitat is being destroyed by logging and agriculture, and humans are moving into areas where tigers used to live.

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?”

I started asking myself related questions long ago. Where do we look to derive value? What’s the source? As I talked with people, did research, and listened more intrusively to my own internal voice, I realized that in the process of choosing and buying we are actually being engulfed (essentially consumed), by the stuff in our lives.

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.

“If you look at biofuels, cellulosic biofuels  …  you take agricultural waste, you separate out … the cellulose, then you throw a bunch of enzymes at them. And these enzymes are there in the cow’s gut, or termites, that break down this long chain polymer, this cellulose, into small bits and pieces called sugar molecules. And then you take those sugar molecules and feed them into another bug and then you produce gasoline,” he said.

The costly part of this process, Majumdar said, is growing these enzymes in a bio-reactor instead of in a cow.

“What this company’s doing is a very interesting idea. They take the gene sequences that produce enzymes and put them in the plant itself, so when the plant grows, it produces the enzymes free of cost.” But isn’t there a risk that the plants wouldn’t grow, since they would carry enzymes that would make the plants self-digesting? One possible solution is what this start-up company is trying: make the enzymes inactive, and activate them later by changing temperature, humidity or acidity.

“It’s supposed to chew itself from the inside,” Majumdar said, with evident delight. “And I call this ‘putting the cow inside the plant.’ It’s an amazing idea. Now I don’t know whether it’s going to work, but if it does, you essentially eliminated the cost of those enzymes, which is the really expensive part, and you create a more competitive pathway for biofuels than what is traditionally being done.”

For more from the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit, click here.

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.

We knew it was alkaline, with a potent bite. We knew it was a lot more dense than regular silt, making moving around in it very tiring – and its toxicity meant no touching, so we could not hold onto anything for support. Falling over was not an option, because the toxic stuff could damage you to the point of visible wounds or cause damage to your eyes, and render your gear inoperable.

My hands were sore and dry and cracked open after a few days, even though I did not exactly touch the stuff all the time.

Wearing a mask was a health necessity, but it made work very difficult as your breath fogs up the eye piece. Wiping it was not an option, on account of your filthy hands.

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.

Vedanta Resources, Sterlite Industries (India) Ltd. Vedanta Resources faces a new environmental setback in India after a Madras High Court ordered the closure of a large copper smelter at Tuticorin belonging to Vedanta’s Indian subsidiary, Sterlite Industries. Claiming that “the right to have a living atmosphere congenial to human existence is part of the right to life,” the Madras court argued that toxic emissions from the copper smelter, the 9th largest in the world, posed a public health risk to the surrounding community. The Indian Supreme Court granted permission for the facility to continue to operate while Vedanta appeals the verdict.

Murphy Oil Corp. Murphy Oil recently reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department as a result of violations of the Clean Air Act at its refineries in Meraux, Louisiana and Superior, Wisconsin. The settlement, which resulted from high emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and benzene at the facilities, requires Murphy to pay $1.25 million in a civil penalty, $1.5 million for a supplemental environmental project as well as to spend $142 million for upgraded pollution control equipment at the facilities. The total settlement amount of $144.75 million represents 16 percent of the company’s FY 2010 net profit.

Target Corp. A California judge has ordered Target to stop disposing of defective goods that should qualify as hazardous waste following a lawsuit filed by several cities and the state of California that could eventually result in significant fines against the company. The lawsuit contends that Target has routinely disposed of items such as pesticides, bleach, and electronics improperly throughout the state, including 5,000 pounds of unsalable hazardous waste that was sent to a local food bank in Los Angeles. Target denies the charges and claims that it has a comprehensive program to ensure that its waste disposal is compliant with California state laws.

Enbridge In the wake of a series of environmental problems in its pipeline system in the mid-West including a damaging spill in the Kalamazoo River in July, the Wisconsin Attorney General also announced that the company faces $1 million in fines due to violations of state air pollution laws. The violations, which date as far back as 2001, include failures to maintain proper seals on gaskets and storage tanks at the company’s Superior terminal.

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).

By contrast, former U.S. Vice President Gore won a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize after describing climate change as a "planetary emergency".

But Lomborg  makes a joking comparison with Al Gore in an interview with the Reuters Global Climate and Environment Summit to illustrate how he reckons debate is often polarised between people who fear global warming means the planet is doomed and others who dismiss it all as a hoax.

Lomborg wants the world to invest $100 billion a year in research and development of new green technologies to help make renewable energies competitive with fossil fuels. The problem is, he says, that some people conclude he's suddenly embracing Gore-style action to confront climate change.

He says people usually denounce him as a denier of climate change because he says the issue is not a top priority. On the other hand, he said: "if you say as I do that we should spend $100 billion on this technology, people say: 'Oh, he's saying we must spend money, he must be Al Gore'."

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.

Fischer, who was leader of  Germany's Green Party, reckons that due to its sheer size and needed GDP growth, China will have to pursue a green economy. Without that, he writes in his Project Syndicate post, China will quickly reach limits to growth with disastrous ecological and, as a result, political consequences.

This will have serious consequences on the the way the West lives.

Consider the transition from the traditional automobile to electric transport. Despite European illusions to the contrary, this will be decided in China, not in the West. All that will be decided by the West’s globally dominant automobile industry is whether it will adapt and have a chance to survive or go the way of other old Western industries: to the developing world.

This is not the usual view of China. Many greens have long feared the impact of a huge leap in Chinese growth on the global environment -- refrigerators in a billion homes, cars in a billion garages etc.

Surprise ending to director’s oil sands visit

James Cameron did not meet expectations with his high-profile visit to Alberta’s oil sands, and that’s probably to the Canadian-born filmmaker’s credit.

An earlier contention by the director of “Titanic” and “Avatar” that development of the massive energy resource was a black eye for Canada had industry supporters in a tizzy.

Surely, his trip to oil sands plants and native communities in the region would be just another example of some celebrity seeking to burnish his green cred without knowing the real story, they said.

On the other side of the emotional debate, some green groups staunchly opposed development expected Cameron to fully side with them. They had trumpeted comparisons between the oil sands and resource extraction portrayed on the fictional planet Pandora in “Avatar.”

In the end, he proved them both wrong.

After his tour this week, he told Reuters he realized the complexities of what is the largest crude deposit outside the Middle East and a major environmental battleground, and that there are no easy answers.

Cameron impressed oil industry, environmental and political officials alike with a firm grasp of the key issues facing Alberta and Canada as the continent thirsts for the oil, and a pragmatic approach to many of them.