U.S. action sought on bay

As scientists and activists warned of the catastrophic effects that they said higher ocean temperatures and rising sea levels would have on the Chesapeake Bay, the governors of Maryland and Virginia called on lawmakers Wednesday to formulate a federal response to global warming.

Speaking before a Senate panel Wednesday, Gov. Martin O'Malley said the time had come for national programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, automobiles and other sources.

more from the Baltimore Sun

Plastics from the bread basket

Biodegradable plastic clamshell food containers and compostable utensils already fill picnic baskets, and some furniture cushions contain foam partially made with soybean oil. These new plastics, which rely increasingly on corn and soy instead of petroleum for their material feedstocks, are often labeled as "green". That tag, as well as increasingly competitive costs in comparison with petroleum-based plastics, has drawn big names such as agriculture giant Cargill and Dow Chemical Co. to the bioplastics table.

Last year, U.S. domestic production of plastic resins—used for goods such as vinyl siding for houses and furniture foam—amounted to more than 113 billion pounds (lb). About 7% of a barrel of crude oil (the U.S. imports approximately 20,000 barrels a day) becomes plastic or other products. But processing that petroleum to make plastics takes more energy than processing vegetable oil, says Steve Robb, executive director of the Business and Technology Institute at Pittsburg State University (PSU), which is in Kansas. And vegetable oils, unlike petroleum, are a renewable resource.

more from ES&T News

Stop sprawl to curb emissions, environmental group says

California can boost its fight against global warming while cutting time, fuel and money wasted in traffic congestion if its local governments revamp sprawl-promoting planning policies, a newly formed coalition of environmental and "smart" planning groups declared Thursday.

For a quarter century, local governments have promoted and subsidized vast islands of tract houses in one place, office parks and shopping malls in another and miles of expensive roadways and other infrastructure linking them, notes the first report by ClimatePlan, a group of nine primarily environmental groups that includes the Oakland-based Transportation and Land Use Coalition, the National Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club.

"This trend of poorly planned growth — sprawl — forces Californians to spend more time behind the steering wheel each year," the report says.

While this problem of sprawl-created congestion and environmental degradation has seemed intractable for decades, the groups hope that the "political climate change" behind reducing greenhouse gases could spur real changes in the way Californians build and redevelop their communities.

"There should be so much new money available if they want to do it right," said Stuart Cohen, executive director of TALC. Even a small portion of the $20 billion or so in transportation funds doled out by the Legislature and the California Transportation Commission each year could reward such local jurisdictions,
he said.

more from the Oakland Tribune

Global warming's rising seas projected to overtake coastal spots

Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.

In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.

Global warming _ through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding _ is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.

Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.

Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians _ the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John Edwards' place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring Break.

That's the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by The Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University of Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50 years, others say 100, and still others say 150.

from the AP via NewsDay

Green as houses

DAVID HOVEY junior runs his hands over the steel beams of his home, and smiles. Tucked on a hillside in Scottsdale, Arizona that overlooks Phoenix, the property is stunning. It is made entirely of glass and recycled steel. The floor is elevated, leaving intact a 150-year-old ironwood tree. Overhangs keep out the sun. The building is environmentally friendly, but also marketable. Mr Hovey, who runs an architectural company called Optima, thinks many people will want a house just like this.

America is now enamoured of all things green. A study by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) found that some 90% of home-builders are now using green ideas. In 2005 the study found a 20% increase in the number of new homes that were environmentally responsible: water-efficient, energy-efficient, built of nature-friendly materials. Last year, the figures were up another 30%.

Green building has become big business. Banks such as Bank of America are adding more green financing packages. Shops selling green building supplies are springing up, as are giant shows. The world's largest exhibition for residential builders is West Coast Green, held in San Francisco. Last September almost 9,000 attended; 4,000 more are anticipated this year. In its honour San Francisco has proclaimed next week “West Coast Green Week”. Christi Graham, the president of West Coast Green, says lower building costs are helping the movement. It used to cost at least 15% more to build using eco-friendly ideas and products, but today they add only 1-3% to the cost of construction, she says.

more from the Economist

Long legacy of fossil fuels

The oceans have long memories. Researchers recently reported that even if humans change their carbon-producing ways, some of the impacts of anthropogenic climate change, such as higher ocean temperatures, will last for at least a century. Now it appears that the long-term legacy of burning fossil fuels may last for hundreds of thousands of years, according to new research published in Tellus B (DOI 10.1111/j.1600-0889.2007.00290.x) in September.

Toby Tyrrell and colleagues at Southampton University (U.K.) call the long-term effects of CO2 a "fossil fuel hangover". They modeled the movement of various forms of carbon through the ocean and the atmosphere. In the model, they imposed a huge dose of carbon on the planet from 1900 to 2300—a pulse of 4000 gigatons of carbon—to simulate the burning of all fossil fuel reserves.

At first, the modeled oceans became more acidic because of rising CO2. But over many millennia, the researchers found, oceans reached a different final steady state compared with preindustrial times. This new steady state had higher atmospheric CO2 levels than before fossil fuel burning, and the oceans were more alkaline and had higher levels of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC). A feedback mechanism causes more carbonate to dissolve in seawater, pushing even more carbon back into the atmosphere. Depending on how much CO2 humans produce in coming centuries, DIC and alkalinity could increase by 50% over preindustrial levels and atmospheric carbon by 100%.

"The system converges to a new equilibrium," the authors write. This means that the earth won't be able to recover completely from recent industrial carbon emissions, as it did in the past when CO2 levels were high. Past high levels of atmospheric carbon have been attributed to changes in earth's orbit, which occur about every 100,000 years and trigger ice ages. According to Tyrrell and colleagues, should business-as-usual CO2 emissions continue, the planet's next ice age may not come to pass for at least a half million years.

more from ES&T online

US family tries life without toilet paper

It is mid-afternoon in an airy, lower-Manhattan flat, on the ninth floor of a posh-looking building with a doorman.

It is a bit dark and there are no lights on. There is a strange quiet feel to the flat, perhaps due to the lack of any appliances - no fridge humming, no TV interference, even no air conditioning, though it is hot and humid outside.

Walk into the bathroom, and you will notice that there is no toilet paper, no bottles of shampoo or toiletries.

In the kitchen, berries and cheese are laid out on the counter and there are candles on the dining table.

This is the home of No-Impact Man, aka Colin Beavan, who describes himself on his blog as a "guilty liberal who finally snaps, swears off plastic... turns off his power... and while living in NYC turns into a tree-hugging lunatic who tries to save the polar bears".

more from the BBC

Officials look for green light

From solar power and recycling to roof-top gardens and environmentally certified building design, village and city officials throughout the Chicago area are starting to think green when new subdivisions and other projects are proposed.

More than 300 municipal officials and environmentally minded residents gathered Wednesday at Unity Temple in Oak Park to learn how to make their towns more sustainable.

"It's pretty impressive," Craig Failor, Oak Park's village planner, said as he looked at the crowded church entry. "It seems like that's the direction we all need to go. It really is the wave of the future."

The conference was sponsored by many groups, including Oak Park and Seventh Generation Ahead, a local organization that espouses the Iroquois view that the impact on the seventh generation must be considered when making decisions.

The keynote speaker was author and architect Bill McDonough, whose book "Cradle to Cradle: Rethinking the Way We Make Things" challenges the notion that environmental responsibility and a profitable bottom line can't co-exist.

more from the Chicago Tribune

New canopy for the asphalt jungle

Part of the solution to pollution and flooding from D.C. storm-water runoff is up on the roof, according to a new report.

As much as 10 percent of the water that now gets funneled into sewers and rivers around the District could be absorbed on roofs of buildings if more owners plant vegetation on them, according to the study released yesterday by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in conjunction with Howard University.

"Both green roofs and trees decrease the volume of runoff, reduce rates of runoff and improve water quality," ASLA said in its report.

Green roofs refer to buildings with plants on top of them to provide insulation and capture rainwater.

Washington is running a close second to Chicago as the city with the largest amount of green roof space.

The District had at least 301,751 square feet covered by green roofs in 2006, according to the environmental group Green Roofs for Healthy Cities. Chicago had at least 358,774 square feet of green roofs last year.

"They were the innovators," said Jim Lapides, ASLA spokesman.

Chicago urban planners started promoting green roofs after a July 1995 heat wave that filled city morgues with the bodies of 525 mostly elderly persons who succumbed to triple-digit temperatures.

more from the Washington (DC) Times

Trend is a natural

Everybody thinks about food, and lately more people are thinking about where their food comes from, counting miles instead of calories as they strive to "eat local."

"People want to know where I'm from, how far away my farm is. They want to know how far their food has traveled," said David Purpura, who sells the produce from his Middleborough farm locally. Donna Blishke, who has been growing food for 13 years on her Web of Life farm in Carver, sees the same thing. "People are much more connected to their food," she said.

The "eat local" trend, fueled by health and environmental concerns, is boosting business at farmers markets - there were 135 statewide this year, up from 88 five years ago - and prompting new food-marketing strategies.

Studies by the University of Massachusetts suggest Massachusetts could produce up to 35 percent of its own food, compared with the 12 percent it now produces. Already, Massachusetts farmers make more money selling directly to consumers than do farmers in any other state, according to the state Department of Agriculture.

Customers at area farmers markets - where business peaks this month and next - say the locally grown food is fresher and healthier. They also like that buying local supports the region's farms, which in turn helps preserve open space throughout the region.

more from the Boston Globe

Through the Forest, a Clearer View of the Needs of a People

Phung Tuu Boi reaches down to inspect one of the spiny shrubs lined up in a row before him. A few feet away, a cow grazes serenely in this emerald valley in the hills of central Vietnam.

Mr. Boi, a forester and director of the Center for Assistance in Nature Conservation and Community Development in Hanoi, points to the cow. “See this?” he says. “Very, very bad.”

An invisible poison clings to the soil beneath the cow’s muddy hoofs. During a short stretch of the Vietnam War this patch of ground served as an American Special Forces air base, and while the soldiers departed long ago, a potent dioxin from the Agent Orange that they stored and sprayed here lingers still.

Mr. Boi, a lively, passionate man whose enormous smile rarely leaves his face, has dedicated his career to repairing the ecological damage left by what people here call the American War. And while he has had much success in the last 30 years, his task is far from over.

When Mr. Boi began working here in 1975, he found an ecosystem decimated by war. Aerial spraying of defoliants like Agent Orange had destroyed large swaths of forest. Without live roots to anchor the soil, monsoon rains washed away the topsoil and its nutrients, allowing invasive grasses to take over and prevent forest regeneration.

more from the NY Times

Using Crayons to Exorcise Katrina

One of the most common images in children’s art is the house: a square, topped by a pointy roof, outfitted with doors and windows. So Karla Leopold, an art therapist from California, was intrigued when she noticed that for many of the young victims of Hurricane Katrina, the house had morphed into a triangle.

“At first we thought it was a fluke, but we saw it repeatedly in children of all ages,” said Ms. Leopold, who with a team of therapists has made nine visits to Renaissance Village here, the largest trailer park for Katrina evacuees, to work with children. “Then we realized the internal schema of these children had changed. They weren’t drawing the house as a place of safety, they were drawing the roof.”

Countless articles and at least five major studies have focused on the lasting trauma experienced by Hurricane Katrina survivors, warning of anxiety, difficulty in school, even suicidal impulses. But few things illustrate the impact as effectively as the art that has come out of sessions under the large white tent that is the only community gathering spot at Renaissance Village, a gravel-covered former cow pasture with high truancy rates and little to occupy youngsters who do not know when, or if, they will return home.

Even now the children’s drawings are populated by alligators, dead birds, helicopters and rescue boats. At a session in May one 8-year-old, Brittney Barbarin, drew a swimming pool full of squiggly black lines. Asked who was in the pool, she replied, “Snakes.”

The drawings, photographs and sculptures, about 50 of which went on display Sunday at the New Orleans Museum of Art, are a good indicator of how children are coping, said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the co-founder of the Children’s Health Fund, which has provided mobile mental health clinics to some families along the Gulf Coast. The art also shows that the trauma did not end with the hurricane.

more from the NY Times

Children's art from the exhibit

Flooding Leaves Millions Homeless In S. Asia

Soldiers in motor boats rescued thousands of marooned people and helicopters air-dropped food as the number of people made homeless after some of the worst flooding in years in India's northeast rose to 3.5 million.

About 10 million people out of the 27 million population of Assam state have been affected by flooding after rains in the past few days. More than 2,000 villages have been completely submerged.

The second spell of flooding in less than a month has also spread across parts of Bangladesh.

Around half a million were left marooned in their swamped villages on Tuesday after water was released from the flooded reservoir of a hydroelectric plant.

A dam official said the water was released from the reservoir to protect the plant. Hundreds of homes, huge areas of crops and infrastructure have been damaged.

In India's Assam, about 3 million people are living in temporary shelters, government buildings and schools, officials said.

"The situation is grim," the chief minister of the tea- and oil-rich state, Tarun Gogoi, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Around 400,000 ha (one million acres) of farmland have been flooded.

Since the annual monsoon rains began in June, about 50 people have been killed in Assam.

In the neighboring state of Manipur, at least 55,000 people have been rendered homeless and are staying in more than 30 relief camps.

Road links to the tiny state of Sikkim, which borders China, remained disrupted as a large stretch of the main highway connecting the state with rest of the country was blocked by landslides.

The regional weather office in Guwahati -- the main city in the country's northeast -- forecast more rains in the next 48 hours.

Prices of essential commodities have shot up across the region as landslides and flooding blocked highways at many places and trucks carrying food and medicines were stranded.

The chief minister of Manipur, Okram Ibobi Singh, ordered officials to release government food supplies for victims.

In Bangladesh, where about 850 people have died since late July, another 10 died overnight. Around 1.5 million are homeless or marooned, officials said.

Officials said the latest floods had started to ebb slightly in the country's north.

from Reuters via the NY Times

Green Acres

Gail Carson would like you to know something about the EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI): it is not a commune. "It's the first question people ask when they visit," says Carson, a pleasant, shy woman who runs a bed-and-breakfast at the upstate New York village. But you could be forgiven for not believing her.

At the moment, Carson, 66, is speaking to a circle of about 20 fellow ecovillagers who have gathered in the purple August twilight outside one of the community's common houses, where they've just polished off a group meal of broccoli pasta (regular, as well as wheat-free for the allergic). The 160 members of EVI eat several meals a week together, prepared by rotating teams of volunteer cooks. They share laundry machines, babysitters, organic produce, TVs (for the few who watch), even cars. If all this togetherness doesn't make EVI a commune, that's because it's potentially much more: a clean, green village hoping to show the rest of us how to live a fully modern life while reducing our environmental footprint to little more than a tiptoe.

"We're trying to create an attractive, viable alternative to American life," says Liz Walker, 53, who co-founded EVI in 1991 and still serves as its philosophical engine. "For us this feels like the way people should live on the earth."

Americans have sought out companies of like-minded souls since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, organizing around religion, politics, philosophy and--by the time the 1960s rolled around--long hair, free love and poor hygiene. But today that need for community is paired with a desire to live in harmony with the environment. The result is the ecovillage, and EVI is hardly the only one of its kind. The Global Ecovillage Network lists 379 such groups, from EVI in Ithaca to Findhorn in the wilderness of Scotland, and there are even some in cities like Los Angeles and Cleveland.

more from Time Magazine

New suit of armor

"I can remember sitting with the president and telling him that there were three major issues with New Orleans. One is levees. The second is levees. And the third is levees."
DONALD POWELL, President Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator

As the corps of engineers works to gird us from the storm, the pace of building levees will only accelerate.

In the next four years, the Army Corps of Engineers expects to undertake one of the largest engineering projects in the nation's history, raising existing levees, replacing temporary flood gates and building new structures in eastern New Orleans.

Two years after most of the city flooded, the rapid pace of construction in dozens of spots along the levee system surrounding the New Orleans area soon will get even more intense as the corps proceeds with plans for a flood protection system that can withstand a hurricane with an estimated 1-in-100 chance of hitting Louisiana in any given year.

Federal Gulf Coast recovery czar Donald Powell said such short-term projects - and the greater level of protection now being planned for the future - reaffirm the federal government's commitment to making the region safe for rebuilding. Powell recently recalled stressing the importance of flood protection to President Bush soon after being appointed to the recovery post.

"I can remember sitting with the president and telling him that there were three major issues with New Orleans," he said. "One is levees. The second is levees. And the third is levees."

Last week, corps officials said the Bush administration would ask Congress for another $7.6 billion - on top of the $7.1 billion already appropriated - to ensure that the majority of projects are completed by the start of the 2011 hurricane season.

Even as contractors scurried to complete emergency repairs to damaged levees and walls during the two years after Hurricane Katrina, corps engineers have been working on designs for the next level of protection, which will include:


* Raising and widening most levees in the area from between 2 feet and 10 feet, with the highest towering 28.5 feet above sea level. Most will be raised again another 1.5 to 2 feet by 2057 to compensate for increased water levels that might result from subsidence or global warming.

* Replacing existing gates and floodwalls with taller, stronger structures, most of which will be built to the higher, 2057 protection levels.

* Building a new levee and new gates strategically located to dramatically reduce the threat of storm surge to the Industrial Canal and central New Orleans.

more from the Times Picayune

download a pdf of the graphic from TP

Thousands in the flood map danger zone

MORE than 100,000 Scottish homes and businesses are at risk of being flooded because of climate change ministers have warned.

The Scottish Government today published a detailed national map showing the areas most in danger of being deluged by rising water levels.

The document reveals that almost 12,000 properties in Glasgow and around 8,000 in Edinburgh are in officially designated flood zones.

The announcement comes on the eve of Scotland's first national summit on flooding, which aims to prevent any repeat north of the Border of the dreadful scenes witnessed in England and Wales in June.

A report launched to coincide with the publication of the map reveals that almost 4% of Scotland's 2.5 million properties are in danger of being flooded.

The map shows that 11,500 homes and 250 businesses in Glasgow are located in at-risk locations, as are 7,850 properties in Edinburgh, 3,000 in Stirling, 1,461 in Dundee and 1,042 in Aberdeen.

more from the Scotsman News

Melting ice cap triggering earthquakes

The Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off.

Scientists monitoring events this summer say the acceleration could be catastrophic in terms of sea-level rise and make predictions this February by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change far too low.

The glacier at Ilulissat, which supposedly spawned the iceberg that sank the Titantic, is now flowing three times faster into the sea than it was 10 years ago.

Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said in Ilulissat yesterday: "We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at 2 metres an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 metres deep. That means that this one glacier puts enough fresh water into the sea in one year to provide drinking water for a city the size of London for a year."

He is visiting Greenland as part of a symposium of religious, scientific, and political leaders to look at the problems of the island, which has an ice cap 3km thick containing enough water to raise worldwide sea levels by seven metres.

Yesterday Christian, Shia, Sunni, Hindu, Shinto, Buddhist and Jewish religious leaders took a boat to the tongue of the glacier for a silent prayer for the planet. They were invited by Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of 250 million Orthodox Christians worldwide.

more from the Guardian of London

Mali’s Farmers Discover a Weed’s Potential Power

When Suleiman Diarra Banani’s brother said that the poisonous black seeds dropping from the seemingly worthless weed that had grown around his family farm for decades could be used to run a generator, or even a car, Mr. Banani did not believe him. When he suggested that they intersperse the plant, until now used as a natural fence between rows of their regular crops — edible millet, peanuts, corn and beans — he thought his older brother, Dadjo, was crazy.

“I thought it was a plant for old ladies to make soap,” he said.

But now that a plant called jatropha is being hailed by scientists and policy makers as a potentially ideal source of biofuel, a plant that can grow in marginal soil or beside food crops, that does not require a lot of fertilizer and yields many times as much biofuel per acre planted as corn and many other potential biofuels. By planting a row of jatropha for every seven rows of regular crops, Mr. Banani could double his income on the field in the first year and lose none of his usual yield from his field.

Poor farmers living on a wide band of land on both sides of the equator are planting it on millions of acres, hoping to turn their rockiest, most unproductive fields into a biofuel boom. They are spurred on by big oil companies like BP and the British biofuel giant D1 Oils, which are investing millions of dollars in jatropha cultivation.

Countries like India, China, the Philippines and Malaysia are starting huge plantations, betting that jatropha will help them to become more energy independent and even export biofuel. It is too soon to say whether jatropha will be viable as a commercial biofuel, scientists say, and farmers in India are already expressing frustration that after being encouraged to plant huge swaths of the bush they have found no buyers for the seeds.

more from the NY Times

2 Recent Storms Show Forests Help Blunt Hurricanes’ Force

There is no way to stop hurricanes, but two fierce storms that slammed ashore recently on the Caribbean coast of Mexico and Central America show the importance of forests and mangrove swamps in slowing them and lessening their human toll.

“The trees secure the ground and offer a buffer from the storms,” said the Rev. José Andrés Tamayo, a Roman Catholic priest and leading Honduran environmental advocate. Forested areas are shrinking, particularly in Central America, and the environmental degradation is one of the reasons that even what would be a run-of-the-mill rainstorm elsewhere can cause deadly floods and mudslides here.

Hurricane Felix, with 160 mile-an-hour winds, burst ashore on Tuesday in one of the most forested areas of northern Nicaragua and southern Honduras. Although the storm devastated coastal communities, authorities were crediting the trees with sapping it of some of its strength.

“The forests are obstacles for the advance of hurricanes,” said President Manuel Zelaya Rosales of Honduras. The bodies of 24 Miskitos, whose fishing boat had capsized, were found Thursday near the coast of Honduras, said a federal lawmaker for the Honduran region, Carolina Echeverría. Dozens of people were missing. Damage reports have yet to come from at least 70 percent of the villages and towns along the Nicaraguan coast, said a federal disaster official, Jorge Ramón Arnesto Soza.

The hurricane has killed at least 71 people.

In Honduras, Mr. Zelaya acknowledged that hurricanes had become more dangerous with the deforestation that has ravaged the countryside. “We’re trying to correct this, but it will take a decade or more.” In fact, Honduras has suffered the greatest percentage of forest loss of any country in Latin America. Studies show that it has lost more than a third of its forest cover since 1990.

more from the NY Times

Cultivating a Crop of Hope

When it grows high and thick in midsummer, the crop that might fill Virginia's gas tanks, revitalize its farm belt and keep its mud and manure out of the Chesapeake Bay looks like . . . weeds. Like the world's most overgrown lawn.

At a Virginia Tech agricultural research center here, in this small town west of Fredericksburg, the switchgrass plot is an unruly, waving thicket of seven-foot-tall green stalks. But it only looks neglected: This is one of the center's most prized plants, a formerly obscure prairie grass now projected to be a major source of farm-grown fuel.

"That'd be some energy, right there," said Dave Starner, the center's superintendent, holding a freshly cut bundle of it.

Researchers across the country think that switchgrass could help supplant corn as a source for the fast-growing ethanol industry. In Virginia, some officials are trying to make the state the Iowa of the new cash crop. They're urging farmers to grow it and envision dozens of refineries that will turn the stalks into fuel.

more from the Washington Post

A values debate: green vs. historic

Chuck Weikel wants to grow a garden of drought-resistant grass on his roof, figuring it would cool his house more than the black rubber covering.

While environmentalists are embracing "green roofs" on buildings, Weikel's home isn't ordinary: He lives on one of Annapolis' most colorful, historic streets.

Weikel plans to stand before the city's Historic Preservation Commission next week with the first applications for a green roof and a front yard rain barrel in the Historic District, forcing the panel to take up the question of whether allowing green construction can co-exist with its mission of protecting the city's Colonial heritage.

"I think from a philosophical standpoint, there would be a tension between historic preservation of a significant residence and green technology," said Sharon Kennedy, commission chairwoman. She declined to discuss the merits of a specific request before the commission.

The commission, which consists of a seven-member panel appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the City Council, reviews all building permits for facades within the Historic District.

While it has limited enforcement abilities, the panel is known for its strict decisions, once rejecting a resident's plastic rose lattice or, more recently, requiring Starbucks to shrink its sign on the front of the Maryland Inn.

more from the Baltimore Sun

Storage facility takes green push to heart

Built from 80 percent recycled materials and powered by solar energy, with a moving van running on biodiesel, family-owned Bridge Storage is a leader in its industry.

Self-storage, a $22 billion industry, is "not exactly green yet, but we're heading in that direction," said Mike Scanlon, president of the national Self Storage Association in Virginia. "Some innovators, like this company (Bridge), are leading the way for the rest of us."

Bridge Storage also may emerge as a lodestar for the greening of Richmond, a city encumbered with a reputation for violence and crime, and whose residents recently elected environmental activist Gayle McLaughlin as mayor.

Programs including vocational training in solar installations by city-sponsored RichmondBUILD are seen as ways to counteract Richmond's image and bolster its economy.

The same could be said of facilities such as Bridge Storage, which in 1998 reclaimed an abandoned structure once used for drug trafficking and prostitution said owner James Wright. After considerable cleanup and construction, the company opened for business in 2001.

An environmental pioneer, Wright, 77, founded a recycling and reclamation firm, Flux Processing and Supply, in 1958. But he doesn't see himself as a leader.

more from the Contra Costa Times

Orinda's new City Hall likely to be a gold-standard green building

The most novel features in Orinda's snew City Hall aren't the cork floor tiles, or the ceiling fans, or the bathroom partitions made of recycled yogurt containers.

What's unique is a series of wall signs that bear the words "open windows." They light up when City Hall's cooling system snaps off, alerting workers to take advantage of the building's potential for natural ventilation.


"It's a social experiment," said Henry Siegel, a partner in Siegel & Strain Architects, the building's designer. "It requires users to interact more with a building than usual."

The signs are part of an aggressive attention to environmental details that is expected to make the 14,000-square-foot structure the first City Hall in California to win a coveted Gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. But Orinda City Hall demonstrates something else as well: how the newfangled craze for sustainability can translate into comfortable, even homey buildings.


When Orinda in early 2004 selected Siegel & Strain to design city offices that emphasized conservation, this affluent Contra Costa suburb was ahead of the curve. Increasingly, though, such efforts color all facets of the development landscape - driven in some cases by government edict, in others by the quest for a badge of honor or a marketing tool.

more from the SF Gate

Heat blamed in the deaths of 16

Southern California's heat wave is suspected in the deaths of at least 16 people, officials said Monday as utilities struggled to fix power transformers overloaded by eight days of extreme weather that is expected to finally cool today.

The deaths included an elderly couple in Valley Village who had told neighbors they were trying to keep their air conditioner off to save money, a 45-year-old woman separated from two friends after their car crashed in the desert and a Pasadena woman in her 80s whose body was discovered in her apartment, where the temperature was 115 degrees.

Hundreds of utility crews spent Monday trying to restore power to about 64,000 households, some of which have been without electricity for three days.

"We felt like we were being tortured," said Matthew Lorenzen, 28, whose Los Feliz home lost power several times Saturday, Sunday and Monday. "It was just horrible -- lots of still, hot nights."

The National Weather Service said those nights will be cooling, at least a little, beginning today as the heat wave ebbs.

Temperatures, which reached the upper 90s on Tuesday in places like Woodland Hills and Van Nuys, were expected to drop 5 to 10 degrees today with the arrival of a low-pressure front, said Stuart Seto, a weather specialist for the National Weather Service. Temperatures will continue to fall gradually through the rest of the week.

Twelve of the deaths reported occurred across a wide section of Los Angeles County, including the San Fernando Valley, the Fairfax district and downtown L.A. Three victims were found in San Bernardino County and one in Riverside County.

more from the LA Times

In Rail Link, Angelenos See a Door to Prosperity

While Carlos Sanchez, a guitarist, waits in front of Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights to be picked up for his next job, he likes to look at a mural behind the plaza’s kiosk on First Street.

The mural, with colorful squares and spheres and scenes of local flavor, is reminiscent of the work of Mexican muralists like David Alfaro Siqueiros, but it is functional, too. It hides construction of a light-rail link that supporters in Boyle Heights and neighboring East Los Angeles say will change the face of their communities.

Boyle Heights, part of the City of Los Angeles, and East Los Angeles, an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, have long been home to thousands of Latinos. Both communities are cut off geographically from the city’s beach districts and central business areas.

The light-rail train, set to begin running in 2009, will allow passengers to get to areas throughout the county. For many low-income residents, like Mr. Sanchez, 38, who do not own cars, the train will replace bicycles, unreliable buses and costly taxis.

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Rising sea level worries shoreline areas

Washington's low-lying capital city is a bit nervous in planning a new $38 million City Hall near the shoreline of Puget Sound, fearing that global warming and rising waters could submerge much of the downtown in this century.

Climate change experts say one of the most profound and visible effects of global warming will be felt along the thousands of miles of shoreline along the Pacific Coast and the Sound, where even a rise of a few feet can submerge vast acres of prime farm, forest, businesses and residential land, sending folks heading for higher ground and new ways of coping.

Experts predict the global sea level rise could increase as much as 23 inches in the next hundred years.

Living on the southernmost shores of Puget Sound, Olympia leaders and townspeople are used to keeping watchful eye on the sea, since tidal surges can waterlog or threaten a downtown built on mud-flats and fill.

One of the state's epicenters of environmental activism, Olympia wrote its first sea-level assessment 14 years ago and created global warming panels even before that. The city holds community "call to action" forums, complete with scary map projections of how downtown would look like under various scenarios.

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Power to the People: Run Your House on a Prius

WHEN Hurricane Frances ripped through Gainesville, Fla., in 2004, Christopher Swinney, an anesthesiologist, was without electricity for a week. A few weeks ago, Dr. Swinney lost power again, but this time he was ready.

He plugged his Toyota Prius into the backup uninterruptible power supply unit in his house and soon the refrigerator was humming and the lights were back on. “It was running everything in the house except the central air-conditioning,” Dr. Swinney said.

Without the Prius, the batteries in the U.P.S. unit would have run out of power in about an hour. The battery pack in the car kept the U.P.S. online and was itself recharged by the gasoline engine, which cycled on and off as needed. The U.P.S. has an inverter, which converts the direct current electricity from the batteries to household alternating current and regulates the voltage. As long as it has fuel, the Prius can produce at least three kilowatts of continuous power, which is adequate to maintain a home’s basic functions.

This form of vehicle-to-grid technology, often called V2G, has attracted hobbyists, university researchers and companies like Pacific Gas & Electric and Google. Although there is some skepticism among experts about the feasibility of V2G, the big players see a future in which fleets of hybrid cars, recharged at night when demand is lower, can relieve the grid and help avert serious blackouts.

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Vanishing lakes prove impact of man

A GENERATION ago it was a vast deep blue sea teeming with life. Now the Aral Sea is sick and green and a fraction of the size it once was.

What was once a living mass of water brimming with fish providing a living for the thriving fishing villages on its shores is now, 40 years later, a slimy dark green mess suffocated by pollution and vast swathes of salt mountains.

These images, from the latest edition of one of the world's most authoritative atlases, show the stark changes global warming and mankind have wrought on the face of the planet.

Across the world, map makers are having to redraw coastlines, reduce the size of seas and lakes and reclassify types of land to keep up with the rapid changes transforming our planet.
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Organic farming is gaining traction

A little luck and a bit of trickery got farmer Harold Wilken through his first years growing organic feed without pesticides.

By luck, he planted the red clover next to the corn; Japanese beetles that typically feed on corn silks were more attracted to the clover blossom. A careful rotation -- wheat, alfalfa, corn, soybeans, repeat -- helped too.

"Root-worm beetles learned to lay their eggs in soybean stubble so they would be there for the corn the next year," he said. "We confuse them."

These are the kinds of blessings that farmers rely on during what can be a tumultuous process: a transition to organic farming. Three years ago, Wilken began converting 94 acres of farmland in Danforth, just south of Kankakee, but this harvest is the first time he will see the premium prices that organic feed and vegetables can pull in.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture requires three years without pesticides, herbicides or synthetic fertilizers before it will grant the coveted organic seal. It's a period of trial and error, and the workload can double long before the profits do.
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Queens Residents to Get Disaster Aid

Queens was designated a federal disaster area yesterday because of intense flood damage to hundreds of homes during a storm on Aug. 8, federal officials said.

The designation will make low-interest loans and grants available to Queens homeowners for repairs, replacement of lost property and temporary rentals. Homeowners can register online or by calling toll-free hot lines set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Last week, Gov. Eliot Spitzer asked the agency to declare Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island storm-related disaster areas. Brooklyn and Staten Island were hit by tornados, but the bulk of the damaged properties were in Queens — 1,359 buildings, compared with 189 in Brooklyn and 21 on Staten Island. Of those, 460 residences in Queens, 76 in Brooklyn and one on Staten Island were deemed uninhabitable by a FEMA inspection team.

Queens neighborhoods that were particularly hard hit included Woodside, Elmhurst and Middle Village.

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