Newsweek, encroaching on territory usually mined by activist groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, has unveiled its innaugural NEWSWEEK Green Rankings, which ranks the 500 biggest U.S. companies based on their “actual environmental performance, policies, and reputation.”

The magazine pointed out that compiling such a list was a challenge “because comparing environmental performance across industries is a bit like analyzing whether Tiger Woods or LeBron James is the world’s greatest athlete—there’s an inevitable apples-and-oranges element.”

Still, it believes it’s system makes sense. To come up with the greenest company, the magazine assigned each a “Green Score” that was then compared to the average score of the collective group. You can find out more about Newsweek’s methodology here. But, in terms of weighting, Impact and Policies were each given 45 percent and Reputation received 10 percent.

The results? I’ll let you be the judge. But I found it noteworthy that the top two overall are also the top two PC makers in the world — Hewlett-Packard and Dell. And five of the top 10 are tech companies, blamed for manufacturing products that end up contributing to mountains of electronic waste in developing nations.

What do you think? Will the rankings affect who you do business with? What would your green rankings look like? Leave your comments in the box below.

By Madelyn Fairbanks

U.S.-based company Doe Run Peru and the government of President Alan Garcia are locked in a dispute over how to balance environmental health with saving thousands of jobs at the company’s La Oroya metals smelter.
La Oroya, high in the Andes east of Lima, has been called one of the most contaminated places in the world by the Blacksmith Institute, but it is a top 10 metals exporter in Peru and the economic engine of the central region of the country.

The smelter has been shut down since June after banks worried about plunging metal prices cut credit lines, strangling not only the plant’s ability to buy mineral concentrates for its refinery, but cutting off its ability to pay back other debts. Workers are restless and environmentalists are worried.

Doe Run’s parent company, U.S.-based Renco Group, bought the smelter from Peru in a 1997 privatization auction. The smelter opened in 1922. At the time of the privatization, Doe Run said it would scrub the smelter, while the government said it would mitigate decades of pollution that dusted the town’s hills before Doe Run came to town.

Renco’s CEO Ira Rennert, also owns refineries in the U.S. His company is now arguing with the government about extending an October deadline to finish the smelter cleanup. Getting an extension would allow it to tap loans again.
A 2005 study from St. Louis University indicated that 97 percent of children between 6 months and 6 years of age in the town of La Oroya have toxic levels of lead in their blood. The smelter is the town’s main source of employment.
Critics say the company should have done more to cut air and water pollution before the global financial crisis, when Doe Run Peru and its American parent company had robust profits.
In the meantime, workers at Doe Run threaten to block off area roads starting August 31 if a cleanup extension from Garcia is not given.

What is the latest and most important environmental concern these days? Global warming? Disappearing ice caps and rain forests? Reliance on non-renewable energy?

Wrong. According to a new survey sponsored by Molson Coors Brewing Co, water pollution ranked No. 1, followed by fresh water shortages, depletion of natural resources, air pollution and loss of animal and plant species.

The survey was commissioned by Circle of Blue, a nonprofit affiliate of the Pacific Institute, a water and climate think tank. It polled people in 15 countries, including the United States, Mexico, China and India, about their views on water issues including sustainability, management and conservation.

Molson Coors, maker of Coors Light and Molson Canadian beers, sponsored the survey as a first step in trying to understand how people in international markets -- where it hopes to expand its business -- view water. 

Molson Chief Executive Peter Swinburn said that as the company expands internationally, it must understand what a local community's issues are and try to address them before spending money and building a factory.

"We're a branded organinzation. We live by research and consumer opinion," Swinburn said in an interview. "To try and address a problem without going to consumers and understanding their perceptions is difficult to do."

Of the seven "focus" countries, consumers in Mexico seemed to take the problem of water pollution the most seriously, with 90 percent of respondents calling it a "very serious problem." The rest of the countries ranged from 58 percent in Britain to 71 percent in Canada.

The survey included a "water concern index" which measured people's concern about water issues by aggregating their concerns about water pollution, lack of safe drinking water, lack of water for agriculture and the high cost of water.

According to that index, Mexico and India were much more concerned than average. China and Canada were right above average. Britain, the United States and Russia showed below-average concern.

Swinburn said conserving water can improve its profit margins by reducing costs, while helping people get access to clean water increases the health and economic vibrancy of a community, making it a stronger potential marketplace. 

"From the microcosmic level of our margin through to the broader social impacts, it affects our bottom line," Swinburn said, proving that risks related to the world's fresh water supply ripple through the beverage industry.  

Another interesting point concerned responsibilty for ensuring clean water. Respondents in Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States said they believed that water companies were the most responsible, followed by the government, large companies, citizens, farmers and non-governmental organizations.

In Canada, China, India and Mexico, respondents thought the government should be most responsible.

Following the discussion on water, Swinburn took a few moments to answer Reuters' questions about its business outlook for the rest of the year.

The feds are taking on California’s plan to limit tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases and discussing the idea of low carbon fuel, but California has one other major idea to curb vehicle pollution, says the state senator who pushed through the tailpipe emissions law, Fran Pavley. The idea: drive less.

“No matter what we do on the clean car regs, with the gross of the state… and the sprawl out into the suburbs and the rural areas, we are going to be going in the wrong direction. And that’s something the federal government hopefully will eventually look at — land use,” she said by phone, when asked about next steps for vehicle pollution.

2008’s Senate Bill 375 by Darrell Steinberg set up targets for coordinated planning of transportation, land use and housing with regional reduction targets for greenhouse gases. At the time the bill passed, California was expecting its population to rise to 46 million by 2030 from 38 million.

Photo by REUTERS/Larry Downing

The Obama administration’s move to declare climate-warming carbon pollution a danger to human health was quickly hailed by environmental groups and leading liberals as a long-overdue shift from the Bush era and a historic first step toward regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

In making the announcement, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson said that solving the problem would not only clean up the air but also “create millions of green jobs and end our country’s dependence on foreign oil.”

She says the way to do it is for Congress to pass comprehensive climate change legislation while at the same time averting a “regulatory thicket” that unduly burdens governments and businesses.

But announcing that greenhouse gases are bad and getting the likes of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to agree with you is the easy part.

 Manufacturers and industry groups, concerned that they will end up shouldering the cost of cleaning up the atmosphere, were wary.

And, speaking of thickets, it will be no easy task getting such monumental policy change as a renewable portfolio standard for utilities, a cap-and-trade program or a carbon tax through Congress during an economic recession.

So, what do you think?  Do you agree with the EPA?  Can Obama get it done during a recession?  Should he? What do you expect him to do first? And if you had his ear, what would be tops on your wish list?

Top photo: Reuters/ Lucy Nicholson (the Los Angeles skyline)

Bottom photo: Reuters/ Fred Prouser (a downtown Los Angeles freeway)

Wednesday is the deadline for California’s gas stations to install sophisticated nozzles and hoses to control vapor emissions at the pump, and the Los Angeles Times reports that some one in five station owners are in open defiance of the new state order.

Gas station owners say that the new equipment is so expensive that buying it during the worst economic slump in decades would put them out of business.

“It may be necessary to protect public health, but it’s unaffordable,” James Hosmanek, who owns a Chevron station in San Bernardino, told the newspaper.

Hosmanek, who has already laid off eight employees as his business struggles to survive the recession,  said banks and equipment lenders have rejected his requests for some $60,000 in loans he would need to buy eight new nozzles and hoses and that “even if I could get the funding, I couldn’t make the payments.”

He told the Times that the owner of a Shell station down the street complied with the new order by putting the equipment on credit cards, a solution he calls “financial suicide.”

Hosmanek and his fellow resistance fighters are hoping for a last-minute reprieve with the help of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who last week asked the state legislature to give the station owners another year to comply. And a Democrat Assemblyman has introduced legislation that would provide $8 million in grants to the stations.

But public health and environmental groups are fighting back, saying that the gas stations have long known the new rules were coming.

“We are extremely disappointed in the governor’s action,” Bonnie Holmes-Gen of the American Lung Association told the paper. “California must not bend to pressure from a small group of gasoline station owners who are using the current economic situation as an excuse.”

Photo credit: Reuters/ Fred Prouser (a Chevron station in California)

Could a constant search of the Internet help protect the environment by picking up early hints about pollution or signs of climate change such as desertification, droughts or heatwaves?

A study issued on Thursday hints that it could.

A scuba diver in the South China Sea off Malaysia (above, picture by David Loh of Reuters News) might write a blog if corals looked damaged by ‘bleaching’ – algae that give reefs their colours can start to die off because of higher sea temperatures. It might just turn out that divers far away in Australia, the Caribbean or elsewhere were starting to notice the same thing — perhaps setting off alarm bells about global warming.

“The Internet has the possibility to link up anecdotes to see if there’s a pattern,” said Tim Daw of the University of East Anglia who was among the authors. All that would be needed is an automated trawl of the Internet to pick up the information.

Daw told me, for instance, that he’s from Scotland where villages in the northwest had suffered a population explosion of millipedes. ”People have had their houses overrun,” he said. No one knew why.

That sort of pest invasion might make it to a local online newspaper – the sort of snippet that might just fit a wider picture of environmental change, perhaps because of global warming.

Already, outbreaks of disease are tracked online by the Canadian-developed Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), for instance, which picks up many early hints of medical emergencies.

So could an Internet search ever be smart enough to save the planet?

As outlined in this story, the Chesapeake Bay’s famous crab fishery is threatened by rampant development as an increasing portion of its watershed succumbs to urban sprawl. In this video, Bruce Sidwell of the environmental group Friends of Sligo Creek explains how increased erosion brought on by development has forced Montgomery County, Maryland to armor its sewer lines to prevent sewage from leaking into Sligo Creek, and then into the Bay.

This disc on a look-out point by a British Antarctic research station shows places more than 200 km (125 miles) away — and on a clear day you can see them.

The air in Antarctica is so clear, dry, cold and dust- and pollution-free that you can see mind-boggling distances. 

Jenny Island on the disc — part of a memorial for Kirsty Brown, a diver who died in a leopard seal attack in 2003 — is 21 km away and is in the centre-right on the picture below:

Cape Brown Alexander, just to the left of Jenny Island, is 203 km distant. You can’t see it with the resolution of the photo on the right and it’s hard to tell sometimes if that lump in the distance is an iceberg or land.

Mountains here look deceptively close — there are no roads, no buildings, no trees to give a sense of perspective.

“It’s like slicing the top off the Alps and putting them in the sea,” said Pete Convey, a biologist at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), at the Rothera base.

Below is Athena Dinar, BAS spokeswoman, at the memorial, on a hillside about 50 metres above sea level just above Rothera:

Environmental Protection Agency chief-to-be Lisa Jackson said science would be her guide on policy – and that may mean California is in the driver’s seat on setting new global-warming-style regulations on cars. (Not to mention the nearly 20 other states ready to follow in its footsteps.)

Jackson said she would reconsider whether California should get a waiver from the EPA that would allow it to regulate carbon pollution from cars, the San Francisco Chronicle said. The Bush administration has said no to such a waiver - but Jackson said she would focus on the science.

“She said today ‘I’m going to do it’. I mean, she didn’t say that — but I don’t think the auto industry has any doubt,” Sierra Club chief Carl Pope said shortly after a Senate confirmation hearing for Jackson. “She didn’t have to signal that strongly.”

Environmentalists see the waiver as one of the biggest issues facing incoming President Barack Obama.

Pope also interpreted her answers as meaning she would move to regulate carbon pollution from stationary power sources. The U.S. Supreme Court said EPA could treat greenhouse gases which contribute to global warming as pollution — but the agency has not under President Bush.

PHOTO: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst