Newsweek’s Green Rankings: Perception meets reality

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.

U.S. metals firm in row with Peru’s government

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.

from Shop Talk:

Molson Coors-sponsored survey finds water pollution key concern

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. 

The other plan to cut car pollution? Drive less

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

Obama says greenhouse gases are hurting us — now what?

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.

California gas stations defy new pollution rule

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.”

Can the Internet save the environment?

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.

The perils of paving

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.******

Spotting Antarctic mountains, 200 km away

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:

New EPA chief ready to give California new car rules of its own?

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.