Now Bill is working on a global campaign called 350, raising awareness about atmospheric levels of carbon and the urgency to act. Brighter Planet is joining the movement by hosting a round-table podcast with Bill later this month and launching Brighter Planet’s 350 Challenge – a campaign to help bloggers join the fight to stop climate change. For the first 350 bloggers that join the challenge, Brighter Planet will donate 350 pounds of carbon offsets to US-based renewable energy projects in their name, with a total goal of 122,500 pounds - that’s like turning off nearly 38,000 light bulbs for a day!

Here’s your chance to “Ask Bill” your latest questions about climate change, his work, and what you can do to join the movement to create a sustainable future. Submit your question to askbill@brighterplanet.com - one question will be selected to be read on the podcast with Bill later this month. After the podcast, we’ll start regularly posting your questions and Bill’s answers on the Brighter Planet blog (which we will link to here in the C3 blog!).

With both landfills and food costs rising, this product exemplifies the worst of our consumer culture. Let’s hope that parents clue in and opt for the far more environmentally sound and cost-effective option: a reusable water bottle with an irresistibly kid-friendly design!

From Gawker.com

4:52 pm on Thu May 1 2008
By Hamilton Nolan

About Time That Children Had Their OWN Water

It’s bottled water—for kids! Fortified with vitamins, minerals, and especially good old H2O. Finally, no more arguing with your kids to hush up and drink their Evian. Yves Behar has designed this “Y Water,” featuring bottles that are also toys. And Kanye West loves it! I think I heard of this “bottled water that kids love” idea back when it was called “Capri Sun.” Anyhow, I’m sure this product is both necessary, and a great value. Not to mention the obvious benefits for the plastics industry. Two fun-loving pics of children enjoying this capitalist monstrosity, after the jump.

A few quick facts about the campaign from Take Back the Filter organizer, Beth Terry:

1)  The original BRITA company in Germany has had a program to collect and recycle used filter cartridges ever since 1992.  They process them in their own facility, separating the materials and recycling or reusing them.

2)  The North American branch of the company was sold to Clorox in 2000.  Clorox has not provided any way to recycle these used cartridges.

3)  Clorox and Nalgene have teamed up for their FilterForGood campaign to encourage people to give up bottled water and opt instead for the combo of reusable bottle and BRITA filter, to cut down the amount of plastic bottle waste.  This is a great effort.  But Clorox has not addressed the plastic waste from the water filters themselves, as the BRITA company has done in Europe.

4)  We would like Clorox to follow the principal of Extended Producer Responsibility and either redesign its filter cartridges to be refilled (the best option) or create a take-back recycling program, such as already exists in Europe.

5)  Why BRITA and not other water filter companies?  We are starting with BRITA because the technology for recycling already exists in Europe, BRITA is the most popular water filter system in the U.S., and Clorox is making a bid for the green consumer at this time with its purchase of Burt’s Bees and its development of Green Works cleaning products.

What do we want people to do?

1) Sign our petition

2) Send us their used BRITA cartridges so we can deliver them en masse to Clorox

3) Write a letter to Clorox (or send an email or make a telephone call)

4) Spread the word

Want to keep on saving– both dollars and the planet? Check out the following link from Instructables.com and learn how to easily refill a “disposable” Brita filter for a tiny fraction of the cost of a replacement cartridge.

Enjoy!

Humans’ beef with livestock: a warmer planet

American meat eaters are responsible for 1.5 more tons of carbon dioxide per person than vegetarians every year.
By Brad Knickerbocker — Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the February 20, 2007 edition

As Congress begins to tackle the causes and cures of global warming, the action focuses on gas-guzzling vehicles and coal-fired power plants, not on lowly bovines.

Yet livestock are a major emitter of greenhouse gases that cause climate change. And as meat becomes a growing mainstay of human diet around the world, changing what we eat may prove as hard as changing what we drive.

It’s not just the well-known and frequently joked-about flatulence and manure of grass-chewing cattle that’s the problem, according to a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Land-use changes, especially deforestation to expand pastures and to create arable land for feed crops, is a big part. So is the use of energy to produce fertilizers, to run the slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants, and to pump water.

“Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” Henning Steinfeld, senior author of the report, said when the FAO findings were released in November.

Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, reports the FAO. This includes 9 percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide. Altogether, that’s more than the emissions caused by transportation.

The latter two gases are particularly troubling – even though they represent far smaller concentrations in atmosphere than CO2, which remains the main global warming culprit. But methane has 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2 and nitrous oxide has 296 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.

Methane could become a greater problem if the permafrost in northern latitudes thaws with increasing temperatures, releasing the gas now trapped below decaying vegetation. What’s more certain is that emissions of these gases can spike as humans consume more livestock products.

As prosperity increased around the world in recent decades, the number of people eating meat (and the amount one eats every year) has risen steadily. Between 1970 and 2002, annual per capita meat consumption in developing countries rose from 11 kilograms (24 lbs.) to 29 kilograms (64 lbs.), according to the FAO. (In developed countries, the comparable figures were 65 kilos and 80 kilos.) As population increased, total meat consumption in the developing world grew nearly five-fold over that period.

Beyond that, annual global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tons at the beginning of the decade to 465 million tons in 2050. This makes livestock the fastest growing sector of global agriculture.

Animal-rights activists and those advocating vegetarianism have been quick to pick up on the implications of the FAO report.

“Arguably the best way to reduce global warming in our lifetimes is to reduce or eliminate our consumption of animal products,” writes Noam Mohr in a report for EarthSave International.

Changing one’s diet can lower greenhouse gas emissions quicker than shifts away from fossil fuel burning technologies, Mr. Mohr writes, because the turnover rate for farm animals is shorter than that for cars and power plants.

“Even if cheap, zero-emission fuel sources were available today, they would take many years to build and slowly replace the massive infrastructure our economy depends upon today,” he writes. “Similarly, unlike carbon dioxide which can remain in the air for more than a century, methane cycles out of the atmosphere in just eight years, so that lower methane emissions quickly translate to cooling of the earth.”

Researchers at the University of Chicago compared the global warming impact of meat eaters with that of vegetarians and found that the average American diet – including all food processing steps – results in the annual production of an extra 1.5 tons of CO2-equivalent (in the form of all greenhouse gases) compared to a no-meat diet. Researchers Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin concluded that dietary changes could make more difference than trading in a standard sedan for a more efficient hybrid car, which reduces annual CO2 emissions by roughly one ton a year.

“It doesn’t have to be all the way to the extreme end of vegan,” says Dr. Eshel, whose family raised beef cattle in Israel. “If you simply cut down from two burgers a week to one, you’ve already made a substantial difference.”

• Staff writer Peter Spotts contributed to this report.

Biodegradable Plastic Bag Disappears in Four Months, Along With Your Earth-Killing Guilt

The reason plastic is awesome is that it’s super durable, so it lasts forever. The problem is that it lasts forever, even when we want it to just go away and take its place in the circle life. Biodegradable plastics aren’t new, but in the past they’ve been pretty weak and expensive, so not optimal replacements for your grocery sack. Eco-geeks at the Missouri University of Science and Technology have come up with the anti-daywalker of plastic: All of its strengths, but it disintegrates in four months.

Basically they’re making plastic cocktails, which vary depending on how the plastic’s going to be used: a blend for water bottles, another for groceries, all using bio-based fillers in the polymers, so it’ll be cheaper than past biogradegradables, but still fairly strong. One possible filler is glycerol, which is a waste product of making biodiesel. Another is polylactic acid, which is made by fermenting starches, and breaks down in just 60 days—it’s a possible candidate for water bottle plastics.

Course, you could use a polycarbonate or steel bottle over and over again, and cloth grocery bags, and skip the plastic entirely, but someone’s gotta take out those bastard sea gulls. [PhysOrg via PopSci via New Launches, Image via Flickr]

From Grist:

Down to the Last Drop

Nalgene, Wal-Mart back away from BPA

Posted at 4:08 PM on 18 Apr 2008

Bottle manufacturer Nalgene will stop using plastic containing bisphenol A in response to concerns from the National Toxicology Program and the Canadian Health Department that the chemical probably shouldn’t be sucked on by kids. Nalgene says it still believes its clear, hard plastic bottles “are safe for their intended use” but says it’s responding to customers who “indicated they preferred BPA-free alternatives.” Wal-Mart also announced it would pull all baby bottles made with BPA from its shelves by early next year.

sources: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Canadian Press

see also, in Gristmill: Nalgene dumps estrogenic ingredient

From Grist:

It Came From the Mall

Bag Monsters to Educate Shoppers on the Evils of Plastic Bags

Posted by Holly Richmond on 15 April 2008
Lunchtime shoppers, beware: if you’re toting your purchases in a plastic bag in one of twelve cities tomorrow, you might encounter a Bag Monster.

From your worst shopping-related nightmares the “you can’t make this stuff up” file comes a creation of cosmetics company Lush to support the ban of plastic bags and to raise awareness of their wastefulness. “Each bag monster, which resembles a walking, talking trash heap, is made of 350 plastic bags — the amount of bags an average family of four will use in just four months,” announces the press release.

In addition to scaring unsuspecting plastic bag hags, more benign protesters will distribute educational material. Lush will also provide interested shoppers with a free, reusable tote. “Tote bags can be sturdy, stylish, and last longer than most relationships,” observed Lush North America CEO Mark Wolverton in an April press release.

Seattle didn’t make the cut, but be on the lookout for the Bag Monster if you’re a mall-crawler in NYC, LA, Carmel, Pasadena, Aspen, Boulder, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston, Portland, Philadelphia, or Washington, D.C.

Bush Revises Strategy on Curbing Greenhouse Gases

The Associated Press
Wednesday, April 16, 2008; 5:09 PM

WASHINGTON — President Bush on Wednesday called for a halt in the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 and urged other major polluting nations to develop national goals to address climate change.

In a Rose Garden speech on global warming, Bush expressed concern that Congress might pass climate legislation that would hurt economic growth. Critics of his energy policy have argued that the Bush administration has dragged its feet in addressing the problem. But Bush argued that his staff was working intently to address the contentious issue about greenhouse gases believed responsible for the warming of the Earth.

While setting a broad goal, the president offered only a general outline _ and few specifics _ about how to achieve the objectives. Bush’s proposal was quickly denounced by congressional Democrats and environmentalists as falling far short of what is needed to stabilize the concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

Bush said unilateral action by the United States, however, will not make a dent in fixing the problem.

“Like many other countries, America’s national plan will be a comprehensive blend of market incentives and regulations to reduce emissions by encouraging clean and efficient energy technologies,” Bush said. “We’re willing to include this plan in a binding international agreement, so long as our fellow major economies are prepared to include their plans in such an agreement.”

The United States and other countries agreed at a meeting in December in Bali, Indonesia, to work to set firm targets for reducing greenhouse emissions by the end of 2009, as a follow-up to the Kyoto reduction targets that expire in 2012.

The president also called for putting the brakes on greenhouse gas emissions from electric power plants within 10 years to 15 years.

“We’re doing a lot to protect this environment. We’ve laid a solid foundation for further progress. While these measures will bring us a long way toward achieving our new goal, we’ve got to do more in the power-generation sector,” the president said.

“To reach our 2025 goal, we will need to more rapidly slow the growth of power sector greenhouse gas emissions so that they peak within 10 to 15 years, and decline thereafter,” he said. “By doing so, we will reduce emission levels in the power sector well below where they were projected to be when we first announced our climate strategy in 2002.

“There are a number of ways to achieve these reductions, but all responsible approaches depend on accelerating the development and deployment of new technologies,” Bush added.

Senate Democrats said the president’s plan would allow continued growth of greenhouse gases for nearly two decades during which the government estimates U.S. heat-trapping emissions will grow. U.S. emissions from electric power plants alone are expected to grow by 16 percent.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Environment Committee, called Bush’s new climate strategy “worse than doing nothing … the height of irresponsibility.”

The new goal for curtailing greenhouse gas emissions is an attempt to short-circuit what White House aides call a potential regulatory “train wreck” if Congress doesn’t act on climate change. The president’s speech was aimed at shaping the debate on global warming in favor of solving the problem while avoiding heavy costs to industry and the economy.

The president remains opposed to a Senate bill that would require mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions, calling that proposal unrealistic and economically harmful.

“I believe that congressional debate should be guided by certain core principles and a clear appreciation that there is a wrong way and a right way to approach reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” Bush said. “Bad legislation would impose tremendous costs on our economy and American families without accomplishing the important climate change goals we share.”

Bush expressed concern over a possible rush to address the Earth’s warming through a hodgepodge of regulations under existing federal laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act.

All three presidential candidates _ Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain _ favor a more aggressive program on climate change than does Bush, all supporting mandatory limits on greenhouse gases.

Senate Democratic leaders plan to begin debate in June on legislation that would cap greenhouse gases and allow polluters to ease some of the cost by buying emissions credits. This cap-and-trade approach is aimed at cutting the emissions by 70 percent by mid-century. The House also is moving toward considering a cap-and-trade proposal. And many industry lobbyists have become resigned to some type of cap-and-trade proposal moving forward, if not this year probably next, and are trying to find ways to limit the damage.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., called Bush’s announcement a “late, insufficient and insincere effort” by the president.

“No matter how hard he tries to square the circle, there will be no American leadership on climate change if President Bush insists on appeasing congressional Republicans by refusing to support a responsible cap-and-trade policy that achieves the levels of emission reductions called for by our nation’s top scientists,” Kerry said.

Meanwhile, many environmentalists maintain that the congressional debate may be overtaken by the courts.

The Environmental Protection Agency already is under orders from the Supreme Court to determine whether carbon dioxide is endangering public health or welfare. If so, the court said, the EPA must regulate CO2 emissions.

Carbon dioxide is the leading greenhouse gas, so named because its accumulation in the atmosphere can help trap heat from the sun, causing potentially dangerous warming of the planet.

At the same time, the Interior Department has been told by another court to decide whether the polar bear should be brought under the protection of the Endangered Species Act because of disappearing sea ice _ a phenomenon blamed by scientists on global warming.

“If these laws are stretched beyond their original intent, they could override the programs Congress just adopted. … Decisions with such far-reaching impact should not be left to unelected regulators and judges,” Bush said.

This article, published last Friday in Time magazine, highlights the health risks associated with global warming. And in doing so, it demonstrates why climate change is not just about rising sea levels, but also inherently an issue of social and economic justice.

Just added: a similar article on the topic from the Denver Post.

Can Climate Change Make Us Sicker?

Friday, Apr. 04, 2008 By Bryan Walsh

–> The World Health Organization (WHO) and other global health bodies are working to remind us of that fact. On March 31 the American Public Health Association (APHA) launched its first blueprint for combating the health impacts of climate change, and on April 7, WHO will dedicate its annual World Health Day to the intersection between disease and global warming. The message is that severe climate change could fundamentally weaken global public health, that doctors need to be ready to deal with the consequences — and that there is a moral case to be made for reducing carbon emissions to save future lives. “If you look at climate change over the long term, it will profoundly affect the pillars of public health: water, sanitation, air quality and sufficient food,” says Dr. David Heymann, Assistant Director-General for Health Security and Environment at WHO. “The fact is that human health should be at the center of the political debate on climate change, but right now that’s not the case.”

The first step to making that case is understanding exactly what warmer temperatures will do to us and our diseases — and few scientists know more about the topic than Patz, a member of the UN’s Nobel Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (Hear Patz talk about global warming and health on this week’s Greencast.) As temperatures increase, and hotter, drier summers become the norm in regions that were once temperate, powerful heat waves — like the one in Europe in 2003, which killed an estimated 35,000 people — will take a toll. At the same time, climate models suggest that rain could become less frequent overall but more intense when it does fall, leading to a double whammy. Longer and fiercer droughts in some areas will worsen hunger, but severe rainstorms carry an increased risk of water-borne diseases like cholera. “It’s not just warming, it’s climate change,” says Patz. “It’s changing the air cycle, creating more extreme flooding, more extreme droughts.”

For some diseases, climate change will be boon. Take malaria — right now, the insect-borne disease is mostly confined to hot tropical areas, which is why you don’t need to take quinine when you’re hiking through Central Park. But if temperatures increase, the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite will be able to expand their range, while more intense rainstorms will give them more places to breed. A report this year by Australia’s Center for Epidemiology and Public Health estimated that between 20 to 80 million more people will be living in malarial regions by 2080, as the parasite expands its range; another study released on April 3 by British doctors raised the possibility that insect-borne diseases — virtually unknown in the cool U.K. — could hit the British isles thanks to climate change. “There’s real worry about malaria,” says Heymann. “Malaria becomes a more threatening disease as it spreads to new areas where people lack immunity because they haven’t had it before.”

WHO and other bodies are pushing to strengthen the global public health system in preparation for the changes that global warming might bring. That means readying societies to deal with heat waves — ensuring that the most vulnerable elderly aren’t left on their own — and improving defenses against vector-borne diseases, with anti-malaria nets and medicines like artemisinin. Such preparations will be especially needed in those parts of the developing world — sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia — that will bear the brunt of climate change. But Patz would also like to see public health tackle carbon emissions directly, cutting off global warming at the source. For him, carbon dioxide should be treated as a pollutant that damages human health, albeit indirectly, and it’s in our medical interests to reduce it. “Energy policy becomes one and the same as public health policy,” says Patz.

Policies that cut carbon emissions can have a direct positive impact on human health now as well. Imagine how much better off our environment and our cholesterol levels might be if more of us biked to work rather than drove — or if city planners put greater emphasis on designing more walkable communities and ensuring sustainable public transportation. But the reality is that climate change is happening today, and will be worse tomorrow, even if we manage to pull together a global effort to reduce carbon emissions, which seems less likely and more difficult every day. (A commentary in the April 3 edition of Nature argued that the technological changes needed to decarbonize energy could be much harder than we thought; meanwhile, over in Bangkok, diplomats at the U.N. climate conference last week made little progress on hammering out the successor to Kyoto.) If there is money to be spent on preparing the world for the health impacts of climate change, the priority should be adapting our public health system to a warmer world, versus spending on carbon mitigation. Global warming to some degree will be inevitable — but human suffering needn’t be, if we’re smart enough to prepare.