Brooklyn’s New Culinary Movement

To get the slightly battered convection oven for their new Brooklyn chocolate factory, Rick and Michael Mast traded 250 chocolate bars.

The chocolate is as good as legal tender for Andrew Tarlow and Mark Firth, owners of Marlow & Sons, the restaurant and specialty shop that bartered away the oven. “We can’t keep it in stock,” Mr. Tarlow said. “It sells better than anything else.”

About two years ago the Masts were trading truffles for beers at a local bar. Now Mast Brothers Chocolate has a national following as one of the few producers in the country, and the only one in the city, to make chocolate by hand from cacao beans they’ve roasted, in that oven. These days, with a kitchen and a bit of ambition, you can start to make a name for yourself in Brooklyn. The borough has become an incubator for a culinary-minded generation whose idea of fun is learning how to make something delicious and finding a way to sell it.

These Brooklynites, most in their 20s and 30s, are hand-making pickles, cheeses and chocolates the way others form bands and artists’ collectives. They have a sense of community and an appreciation for traditional methods and flavors. They also share an aesthetic that’s equal parts 19th and 21st century, with a taste for bold graphics, salvaged wood and, for the men, scruffy beards.

Rick Mast, 32, said he and his brother were initially attracted to the borough because it was cheaper than Manhattan. “But now I think the real draw is the creativity,” he said. “In Brooklyn, to be into food is do it yourself, to get your hands dirty, to roll up your sleeves. You want to peek in the kitchen in the back, as opposed to being served in the front.”

Gabrielle Langholtz, the editor of Edible Brooklyn, which chronicles the borough’s food scene, said it has grown along with the arrival of what she calls the “new demographic.”

“It’s that guy in the band with the big plastic glasses who’s already asking for grass-fed steak and knows about nibs,” Ms. Langholtz said.

“Ten years ago all of these people hadn’t moved to Brooklyn yet,” she added, comparing Brooklyn today to Berkeley in the 1970s. “There’s a relationship to food that comes with that approach to the universe,” Ms. Langholtz said. “Every person you pass has read Michael Pollan, every person has thought about joining a raw milk club, and if they haven’t made ricotta, they want to.”

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British Fight Climate Change With Fish and Chips

As he has done frequently over the last 18 months, Andy Roost drove his blue diesel Peugeot 205 onto a farm, where signs pointed one way for “eggs” and another for “oil.”

He unscrewed the gas cap and chatted nonchalantly as Colin Friedlos, the proprietor, poured three large jugs of used cooking oil — tinted green to indicate environmental benefit — into the Peugeot’s gas tank.

Mr. Friedlos operates one of hundreds of small plants in Britain that are processing, and often selling to private motorists, used cooking oil, which can be poured directly into unmodified diesel cars, from Fords to Mercedes.

Last year, when the price of crude oil topped $147 a barrel, a number of large companies in Europe and the United States were spurred to set up plants to collect and refine used cooking oil into biodiesel.

The global recession and the steep drop in oil prices have now killed many of those large refining ventures. But smaller, simpler ones like Mr. Friedlos’s are moving in to fill the void with their direct-to-tank product, having been deluged by offers of free oil from restaurants.

A tumble of tin containers now sit on the farm. Some dealers here offer fill-ups in suburban yards and barns. Others — like John Nicholson, founder of a small company in Wales — deliver jugs of green car fuel to the doors of hundreds of customers, much like a vehicular milkman.

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Building Green Houses for the Poor

When most people hear the term "green building," they probably imagine something like Bank of America's (BoA) soon-to-be-completed Midtown Manhattan headquarters. The skyscraper will have floor-to-ceiling insulating glass walls, automatic light dimming, water recycling, air filtration and on-site power generation. Those green features have helped make the BoA Tower the first skyscraper to win a Platinum Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating, the highest possible such award. They also helped ensure that the tower won't be cheap — the project is estimated to cost about $1 billion.

The high-tech green features of the BoA Tower certainly look impressive from the outside, but the real guts of green design can be seen farther uptown, in the economically depressed South Bronx. There, the Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDCo) — a veteran New York nonprofit — has just opened the Intervale Green housing development, a 128-unit apartment building for low-income families.

Intervale Green doesn't have the glass walls, waterless urinals or ice batteries that the BoA Tower boasts. No one would describe Intervale as cutting edge, but it is green where it counts — with more energy efficient appliances, better window insulation and energy efficient fluorescent lights, all of which will enable its low-income residents to save real money on their utility bills. "Residents will be paying 30% less for their utilities than in an ordinary building," says Nancy Biberman founder and president of WHEDCo, during a recent tour of Intervale. "For them, going green is a survivability issue. It's important for the environment, but it's really important for their pocketbooks."

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Google's Power Play

Every year, Google Inc. invites a group of global A-listers to its own Davos-style conference to think big thoughts. The event, called Zeitgeist, tends to be as pretentious as its name—captains of industry, finance, and government chattering onstage in front of about 400 of Google’s friends and customers about the fate of the internet and the world.

The 2008 version bordered on the surreal. The stock market was tanking, the bond market had flatlined, and the price of gold was surging to its biggest one-day jump in nearly a decade, an indication that investors everywhere thought the global economy was going to hell.

Yet here was Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and CEO, on a sparse stage at the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters, in a green-energy love-in with his counterpart at General Electric Co., Jeff Immelt. The pair bathed in the glow of each other’s affirmation, convinced that the two companies, working together, can save the planet. ( View a graphic showing how much energy Google's own data centers use.)

“I don’t think this is hard,” Immelt said in response to a question from Al Gore, a Google groupie. “I’d say health care is hard. Solving the U.S.’s health-care system is actually quite difficult. Energy actually isn’t hard. The technology exists; it doesn’t have to be invented. It needs to be applied.… We make the gadgets—smart electric meters, things like that. People like Google can make the software, which makes the system. That’s the key to renewable energy.”

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Amid mass migration to cities, Bolivians learn to adapt to urbanization

Latin America and the Caribbean – where 78 percent of residents live in cities – is the world's most urbanized developing region.

Sitting at 13,000 feet, the sun scorches every corner of this city, sprawled out on a plateau above La Paz. The roads teem with minivans letting out gusts of exhaust, choking already thin air. Bus drivers holler out routes, vendors barter, drivers honk horns – making for dizzying chaos.

Yet El Alto does lure. Thousands land on its doorstep each year. Today over 90 percent of its largely indigenous population comes from somewhere else – mostly the countryside.

If any city in the world is a migrant's city, it is this city, which is why it is a showcase of the future. According to the United Nations, more than half the world's population is now living in cities for the first time in history, as people move for jobs, education, and better services. By 2050, 70 percent of the world's population is expected to be urbanized.

This demographic shift poses challenges: creating new slums, overwhelming governments, and placing new demands on land and water. But most observers say the gloom-and-doom scenarios of the 1980s and '90s, in which cities were predicted to collapse and, as one expert put it, resemble the set of the darkly futuristic movie "Blade Runner," have given way to a sense of optimism. Governments, NGOs, and the migrants themselves, they say, are showing resilience in adapting to a more urbanized world.

"The cities are more crowded than ever. The problems are probably worse today.... But there is less of a sense of hopelessness now," says Robert Engelman, vice president for programs at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C. and author of "More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want."

"There has not been a passive response. There are innovative ways that people have learned how to deal with the problems."

On a recent day, a group of indigenous women participated in a workshop to develop leadership skills – a crucial component to one day becoming business owners, says CARE, the Atlanta-based NGO, which, among other things, helps poor women set up micro-businesses. All these women moved to El Alto – some from the highlands, some from the high plains – for a better life. Some relocated recently, others more than 20 years ago. Like most migrants here, their economic status is precarious. Many work as domestic servants or sell items such as soap or socks on street corners.

"The hardest thing is that you get here and everything requires money," says Isabel Aduviri, who is forming a macramé business with other women in this group. Her family of four makes ends meet because her mother still owns land in the countryside and shares the produce. But it was a trade-off she was willing to make. "In the countryside there is nothing," she says.

Latin America and the Caribbean is the world's most urbanized developing region, with 78 percent of residents living in cities. In Bolivia, the urban population grew by a million – from roughly 5 million to 6 million residents – from 1999 to 2006, according to the latest numbers from the national statistics office.

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"Smart cities" mean rivalry in power, construction

In the city of the future, could power suppliers be rivaled by construction firms? An embryonic movement is growing in Europe to build "smart cities" that will challenge the status quo.

The vision is fueled by the fear of climate change and the need to find green alternatives to dirty coal, unpopular nuclear power and unreliable gas imports from Russia.

Such cities would become self-contained units, their buildings gleaning energy from the powerful weather systems sweeping across their roofs and feeding it down to homes below and vehicles in the streets.

Electric cars in the garages would double up as battery packs for when energy supplies are scarce. Every scrap of waste food, garden trimmings and even sewage would be used to ferment gas.

Facing up to the end of their traditional business model, utilities are mapping a long-term survival strategy.

"A very different business model will emerge over time," said Gearoid Lane, managing director of British Gas New Energy, the UK utility's green division. "If any energy company ignores the long-term impact on future fossil-fuel backed energy sales, they will be in for a shock."

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Climate change takes a mental toll

Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to climate change, the young man was convinced that if he drank, millions of people would die. The Australian doctors wrote the case up as the first known instance of "climate change delusion."

Robert Salo, the psychiatrist who runs the inpatient unit where the boy was treated, has now seen several more patients with psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change, as well as children who are having nightmares about global-warming-related natural disasters.

Such anxiety over current events is not a new phenomenon. Worries about contemporary threats, such as nuclear war or AIDS, have historically been woven into the mental illnesses of each generation. But global warming could have a broader and deeper effect on mental health, even if indirectly.

"Climate change could have a real impact on our psyches," says Paul Epstein, the associate director for the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

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At City’s Synthetic Fields, High Lead Levels Fuel Debate

Synthetic sports fields have become battlegrounds, with New York City’s parks and health departments on one side and some elected officials and activists on the other. One side says the turf is safe; the other says it harbors dangerous levels of lead and possibly other toxins.

On Sunday, members of New York City Park Advocates, a watchdog group, joined several elected officials and activists at Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem to highlight what they say are perils in the rubber pellets, or “tire crumbs,” used to construct the fields.

In December, the city shut down the park’s soccer field, which contains tire crumbs, after elevated lead levels were detected there. Geoffrey Croft, president of the park advocates group, said on Sunday that a lab report indicated that the field’s lead levels had been understated by the city, with some samples showing levels four times greater than the federal limits for playground soil. 

“These fields have a host of health and environmental problems, and are falling apart after only a few years,” Mr. Croft said.

The fields have become a place for old tires to go after they die — where shredded rubber and fake turf are used in lieu of soil and real grass. New York City is home to 95 such fields and playgrounds, which cost less to maintain and are better shock absorbers to bodies that hit them.

On Sunday, Mr. Croft was flanked by City Council members Eric N. Gioia and Melissa Mark-Viverito, the civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel and other activists, all of whom urged a moratorium on the use of rubber crumbs in the city’s public sports fields until an environmental impact study of the pellets is done. They also questioned the use of artificial fields, given Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s push to make the city greener.
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Turning Cooking Oil Into Fuel for the County

VATS of grease may make health advocates cringe, but Westchester County officials see excess cooking oil from the county’s 3,500 restaurants as a means of cleaner, cheaper fuel.

With seven vehicles that run solely on fuel made from cooking oil and 125 vehicles that run on a mix of cooking oil and diesel fuel, the county has begun a program to take excess oil off local restaurateurs’ hands free to use it as an alternative energy source.

At a news conference on Tuesday to announce the program, Andrew J. Spano, the county executive, hailed the program as part of the county’s continuing effort to cut costs while reducing emissions that harm the environment.

For every 10,000 gallons of cooking oil collected, the county could save about $25,000 in diesel fuel costs, Mr. Spano said. It could also provide savings to restaurant owners, many of whom rely on private disposal services to haul away frying oil that cannot be reused, he said.

“This is a product that restaurants would normally have to pay to take away,” Mr. Spano said.

More important, the program will aid the county in its continued push to reduce its impact on the environment, officials said.

Joseph D. Simoncini, who oversees the county’s fleet of 3,800 vehicles, as well as its equipment that runs on gasoline or diesel, said the yearlong experiment of mixing vegetable oil with diesel to fuel vehicles had been so successful that there is room to expand the effort to another 350 vehicles.

It cost $4,500 to retrofit each of the seven vehicles that run solely on vegetable oil — two educational and training vehicles, including the Veggie Van; three trucks; and two tractors — Mr. Simoncini said. However, running vehicles on a mix of vegetable oil and diesel costs very little, he said.

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Biofuels more harmful to humans than petrol and diesel, warn scientists

Corn-based bioethanol has higher burden on environment and human health, says US study

Some biofuels cause more health problems than petrol and diesel, according to scientists who have calculated the health costs associated with different types of fuel.

The study shows that corn-based bioethanol, which is produced extensively in the US, has a higher combined environmental and health burden than conventional fuels. However, there are high hopes for the next generation of biofuels, which can be made from organic waste or plants grown on marginal land that is not used to grow foods. They have less than half the combined health and environmental costs of standard gasoline and a third of current biofuels.

The work adds to an increasing body of research raising concerns about the impact of modern corn-based biofuels.

Several studies last year showed that growing corn to make ethanol biofuels was pushing up the price of food. Environmentalists have highlighted other problems such deforestation to clear land for growing crops to make the fuels. The UK government's renewable fuels advisors recommended slowing down the adoption of biofuels until better controls were in place to prevent inadvertent climate impacts.

Using computer models developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the researchers found the total environmental and health costs of gasoline are about 71 cents (50p) per gallon, while an equivalent amount of corn-ethanol fuel has associated costs of 72 cents to $1.45, depending on how it is produced.

The next generation of so-called cellulosic bioethanol fuels costs 19 cents to 32 cents, depending on the technology and type of raw materials used. These are experimental fuels made from woody crops that typically do not compete with conventional agriculture. The results are published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Changing how we live and eat, one fig at a time

At 2 o'clock in the morning, most people in this college town are holed up studying, headed home from a bar or curled up in bed.

Asiya Wadud, however, is reaching for the weeping branches of a tree on the south side of the UC Berkeley campus, picking olives. A handful of her friends are helping. There is a little beer, a little wine; it's part merrymaking, part urban harvest.

"Don't worry about sorting them," she says, dropping a handful into a paper bag. An alarming fraction of the fruits are mottled and a little wormy-looking. "We'll do that tomorrow."

Wadud, a bartender at Alice Waters' Chez Panisse, has become obsessed with saving city-grown fruit from being wasted, which is why she heads out in the darkness, stripping smallish green orbs from the branches of this unassuming tree rooted in a patch of grass between the street and a concrete wall.

She's also part of a growing movement of super-local eaters and activists interested in food not from the nearest farm, but from down the block. When she moved to south Berkeley four years ago from Ohio, she was struck by California's ubiquitous fruit and by the way people let it rot, as if backyard apples and figs were something unremarkable.

She gathered the courage to knock on strangers' doors and ask whether she might try one of their ripe plums, or sample a pear. No one refused; in fact, she says, people seemed relieved to share, as if the prospect of wasted food were a constant weight she was helping to lift.

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There's Gold In Them Thar Sewage Plants

A sewage treatment plant in Japan has turned out to be a gold mine — literally. Officials say they've retrieved nearly 2 kilograms of gold per metric ton of ash from the sludge they incinerate. That's almost 50 times what miners find in Japan's Hishikari Mine — one of the world's top gold mines. Plant officials believe they're getting so much gold because of manufacturers in the area that use the precious metal in making precision instruments.

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