Can the running shoes we buy really help protect the environment?

According to a new list by nonprofit group Climate Counts, Nike ranked first among the world’s most climate-friendly companies.

In its second annual report, Climate Counts ranked companies based on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, support of global warming legislation, public disclosure of their efforts to address climate change, and whether they measure their impacts on the environment.

Nike ranked well in all those areas, garnering a score of 82 out of a possible 100 points. Stonyfield Farm, IBM, Unilever, Canon, General Electric, Toshiba, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard and Sony rounded out the list’s top 10.

Google, Anheuser-Busch and Levi Strauss logged the largest score improvements, each jumping over 20 points since last year. The average company score improved 22 percent over last year, when Canon was the top scorer.

Who were the losers? In a word, restaurants.

Olive Garden and Red Lobster owner Darden Restaurants, Wendy’s and Burger King each scored zero out of 100 points, while KFC and Taco Bell owner Yum Brands registered a single point for encouraging reduction of energy consumption.

Jones Apparel Group was the only other company to receive a score of zero.

For Climate Counts’ full list, click here.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University  and is a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

On April 16 President Bush gave a speech laying out a new United States climate policy goal - stabilizing US emissions by the year 2025.

During the course of this speech the President reported as progress a previous goal he had announced in 2002: that the “carbon intensity” of the US economy under his administration has been declining at the rate of about 18% per decade — the rate he targeted in 2002. Carbon intensity is the amount of carbon emitted by US fossil fuel combustion per dollar of US economic output.

There has been both just and unjust criticism about using this benchmark for progress on US climate. Just criticism is the fact that the US economy has long been ‘decarbonizing,’ including under the Clinton Administration, at a little less than 18% per decade, without any climate change policies.

The forces driving this include continual improvements in energy efficiency, structural changes in the economy like the growing information technology sector and environmental concerns unrelated to climate, like air pollution control. Therefore the US administration did not make clear to the public the actual meekness of the 2002 goal.

The US administration should not be faulted however for focusing on carbon intensity as a key metric for progress, in addition to total emissions. Carbon intensity must indeed drop if we are ever going to control emissions. It just has to do so fast enough to offset economic growth.

So, for example, the new goal of stabilizing US emissions in 2025 simply means carbon intensity has to decline at the same rate as US economic growth then: if the economy is growing at say 3%, then carbon intensity must decline at 3%. Eventually, to bring actual US emissions down, the intensity will have to decline at a faster rate than the economy is growing.

There is nothing wrong with framing climate policy this way (although many do not feel that US emission stabilization in 2025 is enough.)

Indeed, we ought to be speaking much more about carbon intensity so that it attains the same familiarity in the public mind as economic growth rates and population growth rates. It is going to be one of the most important economic and environmental numbers of the 21st century.

The Maldives has a dilemma — it fears that rising seas caused by global warming could wipe the country off the map but it doesn’t want to restrict tourists who visit the Indian Ocean coral islands in aircraft whose emissions are a cause of climate change.

Read Melanie Lee and Neil Chatterjee’s story about the problem faced by President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who is writing a book about ”Paradise Drowning” but wants to keep the tourist-dependent economy going.

What should countries like the Maldives do?

Ending poverty is the overriding goal for developing nations, but how far should they take part in fighting global warming, caused by people in rich nations on the other side of the world?

Would high green taxes on visitors help? Or would that be just a symbolic pinprick in the problem of global warming that could drive holidaymakers to pick another tropical destination?

What do you think?

The symbolic color associated with environmentalism is obviously “green.” 

From ‘green movement,’ ‘Green Party,’ ‘green collar jobs,’ to ‘Greenpeace,’ the color reference is to plants, chlorophyll, the green pigment central to photosynthesis, which is the basis of all life. Quite often, however, the chief environmental goal being advocated has little to do with plants, but rather promoting low-impact technologies, practices and lifestyles.

This is the case with “green building design” which is receiving growing attention because of the under-appreciated magnitude of building emissions worldwide. Recently, New York City audited the source of all its CO2 emissions and found that nearly 80 percent is from building energy consumption. Worldwide the estimate is closer to 45 percent, making “buildings the biggest single contributor to anthropogenic climate change - a worse offender than all the world’s cars and trucks put together.”

The vast bulk of green building design focuses on efficient heating, cooling, lighting,  insulation and window technologies. All of these are great things of course, but what’s not mentioned in the Nature article is a truly ‘green’ building technology - living green roofs and living walls. These are technologies that introduce plants into building facades, especially rooftops.

Typical dark rooftop temperatures in summer sunlight can reach extraordinary levels of 150 degrees F (~65 degrees C) or more. It makes little sense not to address such an extreme building heat source in green building design. Moreover, in cities, rooftops, among other dark, impervious surfaces like streets and parking areas are a chief contributor to the “urban heat island” effect which elevates the temperature and climate in cities well above surrounding suburban and rural areas. This extra heat can be deadly during heatwaves, especially if air-conditioning is not available or fails during blackouts. Resident proximity to high-floors and rooftops was a risk factor in both the deadly 1995 Chicago and 2003 European heat waves.

Green roofs harness the unrivaled power of plants to remain cool when exposed to sunlight during the summer, as I showed in my last post. There is an ever-increasing palette of plant choices available, but the most common and reliable are “sedums.”  They are members of the succulent family of plants and are very tough in surviving all sorts of weather conditions, including extreme heat and droughts.  The plants grow in a porous medium that is usually a few inches deep, depending on the building structural support.

Green roofs give back to the urban environment in multiple ways however. Along with urban heat source reduction they are great at reducing storm-water runoff from buildings as well. This runoff leads to a ubiquitous problem in cities known as “combined sewer overflow” where combined sanitary and runoff water is released to nearby waterways because of limited water treatment capacity. Green roofs can also create new ecological habitats that are generally limited in urban areas. It’s estimated that New York City may have 10 or more times the area of Central Park available for green roof adoption. 

Green living walls, including ivies and vines, are a more challenging technology and will take longer to develop into a common building practice. But already fascinating potential properties of living walls are being noted, such as how in summer they can provide shade to cool buildings down, while in the winter they will allow light to penetrate and warm the building.

If these green building facade technologies catch on, along with traditional street trees, plants will partially re-conquer the urban spaces they originally occupied, and make cities much more liveable for us in the process.
 

There are plenty of ways to get around New York City, not all of them savory — subway, bus, car, taxi, bike, shoe-leather — but few offer the environmental cachet of the plug-in electric motorbike. Sleek, slim and silent, the Vectrix two-seater owned by filmmaker Michael Bergmann is definitely preferable to rocketing around town under almost any other kind of power. The ride from the East Side to the West Side one recent evening was an absolute pleasure, with less ambient noise than a golf cart as we zoomed across Central Park.

“I’ve always felt that enjoying life in New York to the fullest requires a way to get around New York,” Bergmann said later in an e-mail. “A way that’s quiet and up on the surface so you can enjoy the varied life and changing neighborhoods as you travel. That requires a vehicle that’s street legal (so I don’t worry about being stopped or having it confiscated), always available, that isn’t hard to park, that doesn’t contribute to congestion or pollution (air or noise), that can carry the amount of stuff one ordinarily carries, and carry a passenger as well. So as soon as I found out about the Vectrix I wanted one.”

Vectrix, headquartered in Rhode Island, first started selling its electric plug-in motorbikes in Europe and is now expanding in the U.S. market. The company bills its plug-in model as “an advanced zero-emission, battery-powered motorcycle,” with comparable performance to a 400cc gas-powered motorcycle.

Bergmann and his wife Meredith, a sculptor, use the bike as their principal mode of transport around Manhattan. The Vectrix gets parked and plugged in in the underground garage at their apartment house, where they pay for half a parking space, with electricity included. It gets about 40 miles (65 km) to a charge, which is enough to get around New York’s five boroughs, and Michael figures the company’s claim that it can get up to 62 miles (100 km) per hour is accurate, since he’s been able to accelerate uphill on the FDR Drive, no mean feat.

Bergmann has always been an early adopter of new technology, and he’s no exception here. You can see what he’s done in the film world.

He admits there’s one drawback: the price. His model cost $11,000. But he reckons that, because of where and how he and his wife live, “it will pay for itself in taxis not taken in two years.”

Perhaps 50 million people took part in a global Earth Hour campaign to turn out the lights for an hour at 8 p.m. on Saturday to put attention on global warming, organisers said. Did you?

    In Australia, one survey showed that more than half the adults turned off the lights, they said. Bangkok saved 73.3 megawatts, or the equivalent of switching off 2 million fluorescent lights, and organisers said electricity use dropped 8.7 percent in Toronto, Canada.

    You don’t have to be a tree-hugging socialist to see that it makes sense to turn off unnecessary lights and electrical appliances, although it obviously only makes sense if you do so all the time and not as a gimmick one Saturday night a year.

     You can choose from many reasons - you may be worried about climate change, you may want to end a national addiction to oil with prices at $100 a barrel, or curb a dependence on foreign energy supplies.

    Still, I wonder how you estimate how much electricity was “saved” on Saturday. Electricity use typically declines as the evening goes on and people go to bed, starting with kids around 8 p.m., so it may be easy to overstate ”cuts” at 8 p.m. 

    I had a look at the power consumption figures from the Nord Pool exchange for Denmark, a country heavily involved in Earth Hour to try to find out: electricity use did seem to fall faster than normal.

     The Tivoli funfair, the royal palace and the opera house all turned off the lights at 8 p.m. for an hour — there were so many lights out that you could see stars shining from the centre of Copenhagen. The Danish capital will host of a U.N. conference at the end of 2009 meant to agree a new global climate treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, so many people got involved.

    The country’s electricity consumption fell 6.5 percent in the hour from 8 p.m. compared to use the previous hour, more than a decline of 4.7 percent the same hour a week earlier. And it then fell 5.5 percent in the hour from 9 p.m., faster than 5.0 percent on March 22. Less electricity was consumed from 8-9 p.m. than on any other Saturday night this month.

    OK, so there might have been other factors like the temperature steering power use over an evening but it surely indicates that every little bit does count?

Millions of people around the world are set to turn off lights and electrical appliances at 8 p.m. local time on Saturday, March 29, to highlight the problem of global warming.

Landmarks from the Sydney Opera House to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco  plan to turn off their lights for the event, pioneered by Australia last year.

Organisers of “Earth Hour” say the idea is to make people aware of the links between global warming and electricity, which is usually generated by burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil which emit greenhouse gases. They say 24 large cities around the world are taking part.  Last year 2.2 million Sydney residents switched off the lights.

I suppose that if you were in space and it went to plan, you might see successive bands of the earth dim slightly on the stoke of 8 p.m. — a bit like a slow Mexican wave in a soccer stadium.

Then again the dimming will probably be hard to spot: street lamps and other lights needed to discourage a one-hour bonanza for burglars or muggers will stay on.

Is this is a great idea or just a gimmick?

Have past initiatives to raise public awareness of the way individuals can help fight climate change, such as the Live Earth concerts organised by former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore in July last year, had a lasting effect?

Will you be turning off your lights?

   It was like a scene from the future. A carpark brimming with fuel-cell and hydrogen-powered cars, while fuel-cell buses ferried delegates to lunch near the modern conference centre outside Tokyo.

   Japan was determined to display its green credentials at weekend G20 talks, one of the biggest meetings of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters since last December’s Bali gathering. Even conference staff were given chopsticks and traditional “bento” boxes that could be reused instead of the usual throw-away items.

    Inside the conference hall, though, delegates were more interested in substance than style as they discussed ways to agree on a global pact by the end of 2009 to curb growing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

    And for most delegates, Japan came up very short indeed.

   Japanese ministers told the gathering, ranging from G8 nations to big developing countries China, India, Brazil and Mexico, that combining individual emissions reductions targets for industries is one way to come up with national goals to fight climate change.

   But the plan met resistance from developing nations and a number of rich nations in the group that said the idea lacked clarity and didn’t fully cater to poorer states’ individual circumstances for their industries.  It was also unclear if the targets were voluntary or mandatory.

   Developing nations say they need more money and clean energy technology from rich nations to clean up their steelmills and power stations and that developed nations should do more to curb their emissions, too. That means clear and binding emissions targets.

   The European Union said Tokyo should get serious by adopting an emissions trading scheme, something Japan’s powerful business lobby has been reluctant to adopt until recently.

   But Japan, the world’s number two economy and fifth largest greenhouse gas emitter, balks at fixed emissions targets, preferring other benchmarks that have attracted criticism for being vague. This might seem strange for a nation whose ancient capital, Kyoto, is where the protocol was agreed more than a decade ago and is also struggling to meet its Kyoto reduction targets.

     Japan’s prime minister said earlier this year the government would instead back a global energy efficiency target of 3o percent by 2020 and spend billions in R&D in achieving this. Tokyo also backs a 50 percent emissions reduction target by 2050 but hasn’t fully settled on the base year.

   Europe, by comparison, says it backs a reduction of at least 20 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels but is struggling to enact laws to achieve this, keen to ”avoid excessive costs for member states”.

       All this means the world is a long way from agreeing by the end of next year a global pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol, whose first period runs to the end of 2012.

   What do you think of global climate change negotiations and their chances of success?