Green Storm

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April 20, 2008

Eat SERE GRAPES: Though ultraripe wines have been fashionable in the Napa Valley for more than a decade, climate change appears to be forcing the issue. While recent summers were cool, most Napa winemakers agree that 10-year averages are the hottest in memory. Too often, a result has been overripe grapes, and the cooked flavors and throat-searing alcohol that accompany them. If temperatures continue to rise even slightly, Napa could be in trouble. Most superior grape-growing regions enjoy cool summer nights, which allow vines to recover from the stress of the day’s heat. Lose that, and you’re left with grapes better suited for bulk wines. “If average nighttime temperatures increase even a few degrees,” says Andrew Walker, a professor in the department of Viticulture and Enology at the University of California at Davis, “then there’s really no difference between Napa and the Central Valley.’ Tony Truchard, whose Truchard Vineyards is located in Carneros, Napa’s coolest pocket, says: “If I could start the California wine industry over again, I wouldn’t plant on the valley floor at all. It’s too hot, and it’s going to get hotter.” But those mature vineyards are considered Napa’s most prestigious. And Napa retains other desirable attributes. “In Napa, we’ve got rootstocks we like, soils we think are the best,” Pat Garvey, an owner of Flora Springs Winery and Vineyards, says. “We’re not going anywhere.” Instead, Garvey and others have set out to mitigate the heat’s effect. The mandate is clear: undo everything that was done in the name of ripeness during the 1990s. Those cabernet clones imported from Bordeaux because they ripen so easily? Rip them out and plant something more reluctant. Vines positioned near the ground to soak up radiant heat? Install a trellis system and pull them higher. Wineries have started planting vineyards on a northeast-southwest axis, which minimizes strong afternoon sunlight. They add cover crops — clover, bell bean — to compete with the vines and prolong the fruit’s maturation process. And they’re removing fewer leaves. “We used to try for as much sun as possible, but we’ve backed off,” says Doug Shafer of Shafer Vineyards. “Shading has become really important. Without it, we get roasted fruit.” Trying to reduce alcohol in the winery is like trying to bring a snapshot into focus in the darkroom, but it can be done. Perhaps the most widespread technique, though one rarely acknowledged, is dilution. “You use what we call ‘Jesus Units,’ because they turn water into wine,” says the owner of a Napa Winery known for its elegant cabernets. Manual sorters, previously employed to detect rot, now look for overripe grapes. “It’s a large investment in labor, but it makes a significant difference,” Michelle Edwards, the winemaker at Cliff Lede Vineyards, says. “Last harvest on some properties, I removed as much as 10 percent of the grapes off the table because they were desiccated. ” These changes cost money, but they’re less costly than allowing wines to carry such alcoholic heat that nobody wants to drink them, and less drastic than abandoning Napa cabernet altogether. Still, the future might include grape varieties that do better in hot weather, like Grenache and Syrah. “If it keeps getting warmer, maybe we have to think about that,” Shafer says. “Maybe cabernet won’t always be king here. I have a hard time saying that, but it could be the answer.’ BRUCE SCHOENFELD __________ CARBON COOKOUT?: Barbecuing, as any guy grilling a flank steak will tell you, is as much about process as product. Propane gas versus charcoal is typically a debate about flavor, not carbon-dioxide emissions. But let’s ask anyway. Which is greener? Probably charcoal, according to Tris West, an environmental scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, who last year calculated emissions from the two methods. He says that since charcoal is derived from wood — and thus trees that took in atmospheric carbon as they grew —

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burning it on the grill is pretty close to a “net zero” in terms of carbon emissions. Propane, by comparison, is a fossil fuel that adds to greenhouse-gas accumulations. West cautions, though, that it gets a little more complicated than that. Even if burning charcoal is technically greener, it may release particulates into the atmosphere. (Food scientists also warn that it can be less healthful.) It’s good to know that your choice won’t effect any significant change in mass carbon emissions. By West’s estimation, the total amount of carbon dioxide released from barbecue grills on July 4 is on the order of .003 percent of the annual U.S. total. JON GERTNER __________ BETTER LIVING WITH LIVESTOCK: Like that of most dairy farmers, Abe Collins’s financial well-being is linked to the quantity and quality of the milk his cows produce. But, he’ll tell you, milk is not the most valuable product that comes from the 130 acres of Vermont grassland he farms. Collins is a leading figure in a nascent movement known as carbon farming, which operates partly on the principle that proper livestock management leads to the rapid development of topsoil and increased plant growth. If Collins has his way, his milk money could be dwarfed by income based on the ability of his pastures to mitigate climate change. Collins practices a grazing methodology known as mob stocking, which involves rotating livestock through small paddocks that are not regrazed until the forage has returned to knee-height. While some farmers turn their cows out in the spring and might move them a few times over the summer, Collins moves his 80 dairy cows as many as eight times each day. The payoff for his labors? The high concentration of manure serves as fertilizer, while complete plant regrowth allows for creation of the healthy root clusters needed to build soil. And drought-prone regions benefit from the clustered hoof prints, which capture what meager moisture falls from the sky. Charles Rice, a soil microbiologist at Kansas State University, says the potential is vast. “With proper land management, we could sequester an additional 160 million metric tons of carbon annually.” That’s about 10 percent of total U.S. emissions. Collins isn’t just promoting a new climactic model; he wants a new agricultural paradigm, whereby farmers are paid for “eco-system services” and beef and dairy livestock shed the stigma of environmental evildoers for a new identity as a tool in the war on global warming. “Yes, the current model of industrial livestock farming is detrimental to our environment,” Collins admits. “But what I’m talking about has nothing to do with the current model.”

Meanwhile, the soil on his fields continues to deepen by a few inches annually, Collins claims, and his pastures have become so thick in energy-laden plants that he’s been able to eliminate grain inputs, saving tens of thousands of dollars a year. “The most powerful tool we have to heal our climate is locked up in feedlots,” he says. “We just need to open the gate.” BEN HEWITT __________ IS LOCAL ALWAYS BETTER?: From start to finish — from planting seeds to disposing scraps — the food sector accounts for roughly 25 percent of an American’s ecological footprint, according to Susan Burns, a managing director at the Global Footprint Network in Oakland, Calif. “Choices about what to eat have about the same impact, environmentally, as choices about how to drive or transport ourselves,” she says. The average supermarket product travels 1,500 miles to reach the shelf, but Burns concedes that, from a carbon perspective, it can be confusing being green. There’s no one accurate carbon footprint calculator for foods, yet. “To give specific numbers between an apple trucked from Washington State to Massachusetts and a papaya shipped to the grocery store,” Burns says, “you’d have to know everything from the fuel efficiency of the truck to the kind of fertilizer that was used, to the kind of ship the papaya was shipped on.” It is the locavore’s dilemma that organic bananas delivered by a fuel-efficient boat may be responsible for less energy use than highly fertilized, nonorganic potatoes trucked from a hundred miles away. Even locally grown, organic greenhouse tomatoes can consume 20 percent more resources than a tomato from a far-off warm climate, because of all the energy needed to run the greenhouse. Various organizations like the British

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grocery chain Tesco and the Global Footprint Network itself are trying to design accurate calculators both for carbon outputs and for general ecological impact. But not having them is no reason not to act. Burns recommends the following steps. First, break the packaging habit: “It’s not uncommon for food packaging to use more energy in production than the food it contains,” she says. Next, make it a goal to eat foods that are at once organic, local, seasonal and low on the food chain. Local keeps down the transportation miles.

Organic eliminates the high energy costs of pesticides and fertilizers. Seasonal foods do not need greenhouses or long periods of refrigeration. And she notes that the food chain matters, carbon-wise: the CO2 impact of a pound of beef can be 250 times as great as that of a pound of carrots. (Of course, even the most sustainably raised legume racks up carbon points in an inefficient refrigerator.) Lastly, some of the most troublesome aspects of the food cycle occur in disposal. Rotting food is itself an ecological concern, because methane, a byproduct and a greenhouse gas, has an enormous impact on global warming. “Compost and advocate for compost,” she says. TESS TAYLOR __________ SPUDS: The Carbon Trust, an organization formed by the British government to figure out ways of shrinking the carbon footprint of commercial businesses and in the public sector, is currently working with a number of companies, including Cadbury Schweppes and Coors Brewers. The first to invite the trust’s scrutiny — and the only company to get a carbon-reduction label on its packaging so far — was the British potato-chip maker Walkers. Among the recommendations adopted is sending the waste oil from frying the potatoes to a biodiesel outfit. Walkers says it has reduced carbon emissions from each package of chips by 14 percent and it uses 45 percent less water in its factories than it did eight years ago. But sometimes a company bumps up against the nature of its products. The trust proposed that Walkers use potatoes with less water content: moister potatoes are heavier to transport and take longer to fry. A potato with lower water content “seemed like a silver bullet,” says Euan Murray, the trust’s general manager for carbon footprinting. “It’s turned out to be a bit trickier than that.” (Drier potatoes do not keep as long.) Last year Walkers took a different step, buying only British potatoes and saving a bundle on transport miles. LIA MILLER __________ REALLY SLOW FOOD: To make a hay-box cooker, you don’t necessarily need hay. Nor do you need a box. A guy in Australia made his using an old plastic cooler and a piece of discarded polystyrene packaging; others have used tea chests, sacks and baskets. The important thing is to want to make one in the first place.

So why would you want to make one? Advocates claim that using a hay-box cooker — essentially a carbon-neutral Crock-Pot — can reduce the amount of energy you use to cook by up to 80 percent. That makes them popular in places like rural Kenya, where firewood is hard to come by, but they were also used in Britain during World War II fuel rationing. The first step is to find a box large enough to fit a good-size pot. Pad the bottom with about four inches of hay, pillow stuffing, shredded newspaper or anything else that insulates. Fill your pot with the ingredients for soup or stew, cover it tightly, bring it to a good hard boil and let it simmer for 5 or 10 minutes. Then transfer the pot to the hay box. Pack the sides and top with a thick layer of insulation, and close the box. Four to eight hours later, your low-carbon meal should be ready for eating. DASHKA SLATER __________ THE HIGH PRICE OF BEEF: Late in February, the governors of Maine, Rhode Island, Washington, Maryland and other states received letters from Lindsay Rajt of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, asking them to encourage the citizens of their states to become vegetarians. The governors of those states

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have been fighting for tighter vehicle-emissions standards as a way to combat climate change. That made them a target for the folks at PETA, who argue that the climate impact of the car pales in comparison to that of the cow. A 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization found that livestock production accounts for 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions — more than all forms of transportation combined. Meat’s supersize impact comes from fuel- and fertilizer-intensive agricultural methods of growing feed, all the power needed to run slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants and the potent greenhouse gases produced by decomposing manure. Pork, lamb and poultry all have their impacts, but beef is undoubtedly the Hummer of the dinner plate. Sixty percent of the deforestation in the Amazon River basin between 2000 and 2005 can be attributed to cattle ranching; much of the remainder was cleared to raise corn and soy for feed. And cows, once fed, burp — a lot. Each day, a single cow can burp as much as 130 gallons of methane, a greenhouse gas that traps more than 20 times more heat per ton than carbon dioxide. Trimming the amount of meat Americans eat would not only help the planet — a mere 20 percent reduction is the equivalent of switching from a Camry to a Prius — but would also be likely to reduce obesity, cancer and heart disease. Until recently, it was only animal rights groups like PETA that were willing to ask Americans to forgo the pleasures of the flesh. That changed in January, when Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and a vegetarian), uttered four little words: “Please eat less meat.” He continued: “This is something that the I.P.C.C. was afraid to say earlier, but now we have said it.”

DASHKA SLATER __________ PAPER OR PLASTIC?: It sounds like a big step forward in environmental awareness — Whole Foods, the eco-friendly grocery chain, will ban conventional plastic shopping bags in its 270 stores. San Francisco has banned them in some places; so have Uganda and Bangladesh. But paper bags, it turns out, are hardly an ideal replacement. To ensure sturdier bags, most producers use primarily new paper, which means cutting down more trees. Then chemicals are used in the production of the bags to give them strength. According to a study by Franklin Associates, a consulting firm, plastic bags require significantly less energy than paper over the course of their life cycle, from manufacturing to transportation. Indeed, because paper bags are seven times bulkier, on average, than plastic bags, it takes a lot more energy to transport paper bags to grocery stores. Bulk matters on the other end too: paper bags take up nine times as much room in landfills, and recycling plastic uses 91 percent less energy than recycling paper. Which isn’t to say that Whole Foods has it wrong about plastic bags. Most are made from a nonrenewable resource, petroleum, and contain their own mix of toxic chemicals. They may be more energy-efficient with recycling, but only about 1 to 3 percent of plastic bags are recycled, compared with about 10 to 15 percent of paper bags. And millions of the 100 billion bags Americans throw away each year end up as litter, clogging storm drains and choking sea animals. A third way may be the only good choice. As part of its ban on regular plastic bags, for instance, San Francisco is encouraging stores to switch to cornstarch-derived plastic bags, which break down in about a month and release no harmful chemicals. And many stores have started to encourage shoppers to bring reusable cloth bags, or to offer them for sale at a cheap price. CLAY RISEN

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April 20, 2008 THE GREEN ISSUE

Live CHARGE THYSELF: When Freeplay’s windup radio came out in 1996, it set the standard for eco-tech purity. Originally meant to deliver information to isolated populations lacking electricity, the Freeplay was a shortwave radio that ran only on human power. Thirty seconds of winding time produced 40 minutes of listening time. And now it’s starting to gain allies in its heretofore lonely battle against the battery (which Americans currently consume at the rate of three billion a year). An Idaho start-up called M2E Power is in the forefront of kinetically charged consumer electronics. Having just secured $8 million in venture capital, M2E (“motion to energy”) expects to introduce a biomechanical-energy harvester within 12 to 14 months — a device about the size of an iPhone that, when carried by a “low-active person” during the course of a couple of days, will generate a charge sufficient to power your cellphone for an hour or two. The ultimate aim is a self-charging cellphone. Bad news for the battery industry, yes — but M2E isn’t all about moon-eyed idealism: half of its business model is devoted to military applications. Sony’s Odo products, on the other hand, are a line of toys — camera, music player, etc. — that run when you crank, twirl or shake them. There are, alas, no plans to sell them. But when they started appearing at future-design shows this year, they resonated deeply with trend bloggers, an influential and conflicted group that is dedicated to ecological correctness but also likes really cute gadgets. No less fantastic is the equally conceptual Bamboo Phone imagined by the Dutch designer Gert-Jan van Breugel. Powered by a hand crank and made of bamboo, it also contains seeds, so a tree will shoot up in the landfill where it’s buried. WM. FERGUSON __________ GREENER PIT STOPS: Even the most grease-stained “turnwrench” acknowledges that auto racing may be difficult to justify in the climate-change era. Driving endless miles around a track for spectacle may soon be looked upon as a capital offense. Nascar and the other racing disciplines are aware of this and are taking steps to prevent a reaction. While ethanol-based fuels may not be the magic bullet that politicians describe when campaigning in Iowa, for motor sports they represent a great leap forward from the leaded gasoline that Nascar phased out just last year. The Indy Racing League (for open-wheel cars, not the stock cars of Nascar) switched to 100 percent ethanol last season. The American Le Mans Series is into the next biofuel generation, with the Corvette Racing team using a cellulose-based blend derived mainly from wood waste instead of corn. Nascar is the big dog, though, and a switch to ethanol would not only be a P.R. coup, but it could also inspire the sport’s fanatically loyal and brand-specific fans to look into alternatives to gasoline.

Brian France, the C.E.O. of Nascar, says he is looking into moving away from gasoline, despite the great cost of re-engineering the cars’ fuel lines. Still, for a sport that is all about going in circles, it’s nice to see some new turns. ROBERT WEINTRAUB __________ SWEAT EQUITY: Many people go to the gym to become more powerful. But at California Fitness in Hong Kong, an Asian-based subsidiary of 24 Hour Fitness Worldwide, exercisers are actually powering the gym.

The program, “Powered by YOU,” was conceived by Doug Woodring, a Wharton grad, and Lucien Gambarota, a French inventor, who run an alternative-energy company in Hong Kong. When a member begins to exercise, the machine she uses captures the energy she creates as electricity (which would

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otherwise be lost as heat) and uses it to run a light above the machine. Gambarota says that a person can produce 50 watts of electricity per hour working out at a moderate pace. “If you spend just an hour per day on a machine annually, you could generate 18.3 kilowatt-hours of electricity,” he says. That’s the equivalent of powering a three-bedroom home in New Jersey for 14 hours. Since the program made its debut last year, 13 exercise machines have been hooked up; the chain plans to extend the project to its 24 other clubs throughout Asia. ABBY ELLIN __________ PETS: Americans spend more than $40 billion a year on their pets, more than the gross domestic product of all but 70 countries. An increasing share of this business is being devoted to helping companion animals tread more lightly on the planet. Jasmin Malik Chua, a correspondent for Treehugger.com, has written about how people can green their pets. “For many people,” she says, “it starts off being concerned about their pets’ health, especially after the scares about tainted pet food imported from China. After looking for safer food alternatives, the next step is finding sustainable and renewable products.” Chua, who lives with her two cats in Jersey City, champions alternative sources like recycled newspapers or wood-waste products in favor of clay cat litter (a byproduct of strip mining). Chua also urges pet owners to substitute odds and ends found around the house for expensive plastic, petroleum-based playthings. “Dogs and cats don’t care how much you spend on their toys,” she says. And sometimes merely being a responsible pet owner can have hidden environmental benefits. “Microchipping your pet could be a green act,” Chua says, noting all the gas guzzled and fliers printed when searching for a lost pet. Carol Perkins typifies the new breed of green-pet entrepreneurs. Her company, Harry Barker, sells dog beds and toys made from hemp and biodegradable poop bags made from soy and corn. Harry Barker’s dog beds are stuffed with fibers made from 100 percent postconsumer-recycled polyethylene terephthalate, which itself is made from water bottles and other discarded plastic items. “The stuffing is eco-friendly and just as fabulous as virgin polyester,” she exults.

JEFF STRYKER __________ JUNK MAIL: “We tend not to use the phrase ‘junk mail’ because ‘junk’ is in the eye of the beholder,” says April Smith, a project manager at Catalogchoice.org, a free online service for consumers wishing to avoid unwanted catalogs. Junk or not, there sure is a lot of it to behold, with Americans receiving an estimated 19 billion catalogs in the mail each year, at a cost of 53 million trees and 5.2 million tons of carbon emissions.

(This doesn’t include credit-card solicitations or entreaties from charities.) Consumers can also reduce mail by signing up free at the Direct Marketing Association’s mail-preference service (DMAChoice.org). The D.M.A.’s efforts are part of the paper and direct-mail industries’ attempts to fend off do-not-mail legislation, under consideration in a dozen states, modeled on the federal do-not-call registry. A spokeswoman for International Paper, Amy J. Sawyer, has a different defense: “The direct-mail industry generates $600 billion in economic activity annually and employs 3.5 million Americans nationwide. Mail helps consumers target their shopping and saves millions of automobile miles per year as people use the mail for everything from catalog shopping to DVD rentals.” JEFF STRYKER __________ NATURAL DEATH: Last summer a crematorium in Bath, England, announced that it would try to reduce harmful emissions by stockpiling the deceased until company burners could be filled enough to justify the 2.5 hour operation — “to minimize gas usage as an environmental issue,” an official wrote. (According to recent estimates, the cremation of a human body releases about 100 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.) But with the new measures, the officials cautioned, some bodies would need to remain

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uncremated for a day or so. The reaction? Horror and dismay, despite the good intentions. In the United States, activists have been taking on mainstream burial rites for environmental reasons, too. According to the Green Burial Council, a nonprofit organization in Santa Fe, N.M., the “death care” industry uses, in a single year, “more steel (in coffins alone) than was used to build the Golden Gate Bridge” and enough reinforced concrete to “construct a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit.” Steel and concrete have immense carbon footprints. Irrigating acres of parklike cemeteries or air-conditioning memorial buildings increases the environmental impact. “People think you’re lying there like Vladimir Lenin,” says Billy Campbell, an E. O. Wilson-quoting physician who is considered a pioneer of the United States’ green-burial movement. He began organizing environmentally supportive burials in rural South Carolina in the late 1990s, informed by a strict conservationist’s orthodoxy: no harming of plants; shallow graves (to keep the body in the soil’s “living layer”); simple shrouds or even unadorned burial directly into the ground; and a maximum of 100 bodies per acre (as opposed to 800 to 2,000 in most cemeteries). He says his company, Memorial Ecosystems, which he runs with his wife, has performed 100 burials, and he developed the ecological standards of the Green Burial Council’s approved providers. His newest site, Honey Creek Woodlands, sits amid 2,100 acres owned by Trappist monks at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, 20 miles outside of Atlanta. Graves are minimally marked and ecologically restored with sparse adornments like a wild ginger root or indigenous maple sapling. Think of it as a natural necropolis. CHRISTIAN DeBENEDETTI __________ PLANT MORE TREES: Every schoolchild knows there is no poem so lovely as a tree. But does everyone know just how green they can be? According to Deborah Gangloff, the executive director of American Forests, a nonprofit conservation group, “Three trees will sequester one ton of CO2 over a lifetime of 55 years.” She notes that a carbon calculator on her group’s Web site tells you how many trees you can have American Forests plant (for a $1 donation each) to make up for the miles you drive or the fuel you use to heat your home. “This is a feel-good thing,” Gangloff admits, “but we are really planting those trees.”

American Forests programs have planted 25 million trees since 1990. Some trees do more good than others.

When it comes to helping the environment, urban trees “can be 15 times more effective than a tree merely standing in the forest,” Gangloff says. Dan Burden, who founded Walkable Communities in 1996 in part to promote planting and maintaining trees in urban settings, claims in his booklet, “Urban Street Trees,” that “a single street tree returns over $90,000 of direct benefits (not including aesthetic, social and natural) in the lifetime of the tree.” Shade trees near residential and commercial buildings can reduce demand for air-conditioning; deciduous trees lose their leaves in winter, allowing the sun’s heat through. Researchers have developed models to guide property owners on how to preserve and plant trees strategically to realize the greatest energy savings. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, for example, determined the impact of planting shade trees and found that costs of cooling dropped 8 to 18 percent and the costs of heating declined 2 to 8 percent when a residential building was provided with a tree canopy roughly equal to two strategically placed trees. JEFF STRYKER __________ DISPOSABLE VS. COTTON: The heated debate over the environmental costs of diapers, a roughly $5 billion business, goes something like this: on one hand, the 25 billion or so disposable diapers used per year in this country are bad because they are made with petroleum-based plastics, account for more than 250,000 trees being cut down and make up some 3.5 million tons of landfill waste that won’t decompose for decades. Cotton diapers, on the other hand, now enjoying a resurgence in popularity, cost less over the long run but require vast amounts of energy from the production of cotton, the washing and the distribution.

Environmental and industry groups brandishing rival stats and studies have effectively declared a draw.

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Even an outspoken group like the Natural Resources Defense Council declines to take a trenchant position (“six of one and a half dozen of the other,” a spokeswoman says). Apparently the only way between the two sides is to do without (which means teaching babies to use a toilet) or adopt some middle-way product like gDiapers, which combine cloth and flushable elements. The late Donella H. Meadows, the founder of Vermont’s Sustainability Institute, recognized the conflict long before the carbon footprints of everyday objects were a mainstream concern. “It’s great to try to move our lives in the direction of ecological righteousness, but it’s also true that every human activity has environmental impact,” she wrote in an op-ed article that appeared in newspapers in 1990. In addressing the debate over diapers, she had what may have been the final word. “From the earth’s point of view,” she said, “it’s not all that important which kind of diapers you use. The important decision was having the baby.” CHRISTIAN DeBENEDETTI __________ COLIN BEAVAN: Last year was a time of intense lifestyle changes for the nonfiction writer Colin Beavan.

He carried his own coffee jar to avoid disposable cups, shunned plastics, moisturized with almond oil mixed with beeswax and deodorized with baking soda. He pedaled his toddler daughter Isabella around on the back of a custom-made bicycle rickshaw, while his wife, Michelle Conlin, scootered to and from her job as a financial writer at Rockefeller Center in New York City. The family did without the TV, stereo and air-conditioner. (For the last three months, they unplugged the refrigerator and turned off the lights entirely.) Beavan and his wife made their own yogurt and vinegar, grew window-box herbs and composted food scraps. He lost 20 pounds. But what he calls his “no-impact” year, structured to minimize his carbon (and ecological) footprint, was also a fun year. People still came over to play guitar and charades with the family. Now Beavan is eating at restaurants again, but only orders vegetarian and turns down paper napkins.

The lights are on in the house, but sparingly. His new sneakers are made from hemp and natural rubber.

Even Conlin, who remembers loving to shop, has bought only a few work shirts. Beavan is writing both a book about last year, which is due out in 2009 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and a daily blog (noimpactman.com) on a used computer. Coming off the no-impact rules was strange: “We went to see a Nicole Kidman movie,” he says. “I was really excited at first, but then I felt overwhelmed by the noise. We left thinking, Hey, it might be O.K. not to do this again.” Beavan and Conlin are still carrying their coffee jars: “The other day, Michelle went to go get a coffee in a disposable cup, but then she stopped them before they put it in the cup,” he says. “She came out and said it just felt wrong.” When I visited their apartment and left the lights on in the bathroom, Beavan got up to shut them off. “Wasting electricity makes you as bad as Donald Rumsfeld,” he said, gently. Later, he mused: “A lot of people think that environmental living is hard or deprives you, but we need to change the system so that it supports environmental choices. The fact is, I liked living in a more durable way.” TESS TAYLOR __________ ECO ANXIETY: Ecological degradation is not only affecting our external landscape; it’s also influencing our psychic one. Neologisms paint the picture: solastalgia is the depression caused when your local surroundings are damaged significantly; eco anxiety is a generalized worry about the environment. The therapist Linda Buzzell and the social worker Sarah Anne Edwards have defined another ailment, the Waking-Up Syndrome, and they recently wrote a paper with that title. “There is an epidemic of anxiety,” says Buzzell, who is also the founder of the International Association for Ecotherapy. “People are starting to realize that they can’t just blame the government and corporations, that it comes down to their own behavior.” We’ve reached a point where a quotidian activity like bagging groceries raises existential questions about our ecological footprint. The six stages of the Waking-Up Syndrome sound a lot like the stages of grief. First comes denial, then a slow acknowledgment. This is followed by despair and anger at the realization that, in the words of Al Gore, “We didn’t ask for it, but here it is.” LISE VAN SUSTEREN (sister to

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Greta, the Fox News correspondent) is a prominent psychiatrist whose own eco anxiety began a few years ago as she learned more about global warming. “One of the things that is true of any type of trauma is that the more you are exposed to it, just like tennis elbow, the worse it gets,” she says. Van Susteren remedied her anxiety in the same way she might counsel a patient: she managed it. She went to Nashville to train with Gore and now tours the country giving a slide show based on his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” “Anxiety is a tricky thing,” she says. “You want to be anxious enough to take action but not so anxious that you become paralyzed.” Jerilyn Ross, a practicing psychotherapist and the C.E.O. of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, points out that eco anxiety and its related syndromes have not earned official designation in the annals of psychiatry. She does, however, acknowledge that something is going on culturally. “Somebody came over to my house recently and didn’t happen to see our recycling,” Ross says. “She said, ‘Oh, don’t you recycle?’ It’s as if everybody is judging everybody now. The social pressure is really intense.” ELIZABETH EVITTS DICKINSON __________ SPORTING EFFICIENCY: You might be surprised to know that the National Football League has had an environmental director for 15 years: Jack Groh. He has been with the league since Brett Favre’s second season in Green Bay, so he has credibility when he says the league’s efforts are “not done as a P.R. stunt.”

Rather, the attitude is that, as Groh says, “the league would be better off in its bottom line” using green principles. Groh oversees Super Bowl projects — like a reforestation program in Arizona — but he hasn’t persuaded the N.F.L. to establish green practices for its teams. Major League Baseball, however, has just done so, a fact that irks Groh: “After 15 years, that should have been us.” M.L.B. collaborated with the Natural Resources Defense Council to draw up a comprehensive program for its franchises. Reducing the environmental impact of its travel and reducing the use of unrecycled paper are primary elements; how they will be enforced is unclear. In the National Hockey League, the Players’ Association has teamed up with the David Suzuki Foundation, which created a carbon-offsets program for skaters. In the land of the Kyoto Protocol, Japanese professional baseball has enacted rules to speed up the games, shortening the time between innings, half innings and each pitch. The goal is to lop 12 minutes from each game, saving harmful emissions produced as a result of powering the stadiums. If only Groh could persuade the N.F.L. to eliminate a TV timeout or two. . . . ROBERT WEINTRAUB __________ URBAN FARMING: Jules Dervaes and three of his adult children live on one-fifth of an acre in Pasadena, Calif., a block away from a multilane highway. On this tiny sliver of land, they manage to be mostly self-sufficient. “This is our form of protest,” says Dervaes, who is 60, “and this is our form of survival.” The family harvests 6,000 pounds and more than 350 separate varieties of fruits, vegetables and edible flowers annually. They brew the biodiesel fuel that powers the family car. Solar panels on their roof reduce energy bills to as little as $12 a month. Goats, chickens, ducks and two rescued cats are in residence. Red wiggler worms turn the kitchen and garden waste into compost, which is then recycled back into the garden.

Dervaes’s father worked for Standard Oil, but his son took a markedly different path. Dervaes moved into his current Pasadena home in 1985 — temporarily, he thought. As the years passed and his hopes of relocating to the country were delayed, he “decided that he wanted to see how much we could grow here,” says his 33-year-old daughter, Anais. The family generates cash for their limited expenses by selling produce to local restaurants. Though Dervaes and his children are accustomed to the neighbors’ strange looks at their crowded lot, the local chefs don’t seem to share the skepticism. “They’ll call me in the morning and pick the amount that I need for that night,” says Jim McCardy, who owns Marstons, a restaurant in Pasadena. “The flavor is just incredible.” CHARLES WILSON

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__________ KATEY WALTER: Over the past few years, Katey Walter, a professor at the University of Alaska, has quickly made a name for herself — she’s only 32 — by publishing papers in the journals Science and Nature on methane emissions in Alaska and Siberia, where she spends several months each year doing field research. The atmospheric concentration of methane (CH4) is far below that of carbon dioxide (CO2), yet it is 25 times more potent over a hundred years as a greenhouse gas — and last year concentrations started rising after about a decade of holding steady. “Our projections suggest that as the Siberian permafrost thaws, and lakes form and expand there,” Walter says, “the amount of methane coming out of that process is equal to 10 times the amount of methane now in our atmosphere.” Walter says that most of the methane in the atmosphere, about 60 percent, comes from us — from our landfills, livestock herds, rice farms and energy development (methane is in natural gas, which occasionally leaks from pipelines and wells). The other 40 percent comes from nature. When dead plants and animals decompose on the forest floor, they produce carbon dioxide. When they decompose under water, methane is the byproduct. If you’ve ever watched bubbles coming up from the La Brea tar pits on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, you’ve seen methane burps. Siberia’s permafrost holds vast stores of ancient (and frozen) plant and animal matter; should that matter decompose under melting ice, there would be extensive burping. Another worry: warmer climates might allow “seeps” of additional methane stored deep in the earth’s crust. “The question is whether the permafrost acts as a lid” and keeps these huge natural reserves from escaping, Walter says. So the fundamental goal is keeping the planet cool and the permafrost frozen. But she adds that there can be benefits in the gas that comes from animal waste and farming and from natural seeps. “If we could capture the methane and utilize it,” Walter says, “we’re doing two good things: reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and reducing the need for shipping diesel to rural places, which is expensive and energy intensive.” JON GERTNER __________ FREE TO DRY: Alexander Lee has what he calls an immediate, IMBY (“in my backyard”) way to attack global climate change. As the founder of Project Laundry List, he is crisscrossing the country urging people to forgo electric and gas dryers — second only to refrigerators in energy consumption among common household appliances — in favor of hanging clothes out (after washing them in cold or warm water). That places him in the middle of a heated debate about aesthetics and class. Approximately 60 million Americans live in homeowner and condominium associations, and those sometimes have covenants banning clotheslines on the assumption that they look tacky and bespeak poverty, threatening both views and property values. Lee acknowledges that he has his work cut out for him. “According to the Pew Research Center, 83 percent of the population thinks the dryer is an essential appliance,” he says. Clothesline proponents are taking their case to state legislators with proposed “Right to Dry” bills. So far, 10 states have statutes limiting the ability of homeowners’ associations to restrict solar-energy systems. But except in Florida and Utah, where laws specifically mention clotheslines, the question remains whether clotheslines count as “solar-energy systems” under the statutes. JEFF STRYKER __________ JULIAN SINCLAIR: For years, Rabbi Julian Sinclair led a double life. He kept his two identities — as a yeshiva-trained Jewish scholar and a self-described economist and policy wonk schooled at Oxford and Harvard — apart. But the increasing portents of climate change convinced Sinclair that a religious response to what he calls “the biggest big-picture policy challenge we face today” is precisely what the world needs now. “The environmental movement has been overwhelmingly secular for 40 years and has achieved amazing things,” he says, “but it hasn’t yet figured out how to move people on a massive scale because it isn’t

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telling the right story.’ Sinclair says he believes that the “doom-laden apocalyptic narrative” favored by the mainstream environmental movement can paralyze rather than motivate necessary lifestyle adjustments.

Conversely, he says religion — which has been “in the behavioral-change business for 3,000 years” — offers a distinct message of hope and boasts an impressive track record of moral persuasion: “There have been watershed moments when religion has barged into public life, blown away the windbaggery of politics-as-usual and declared with irresistible force, ‘This must change now!’ ” Following the lead of the popular “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign from the Evangelical Environmental Network and Jewish sustainability organizations like Hazon (“Vision”), Sinclair helped found the Jewish Climate Initiative. He is also the author of the forthcoming book “The Green God,” in which he consults the world’s spiritual traditions for teachings about how humans can confront climate change. Regarding his own religion, Sinclair says Judaism regularly expresses spirituality through “mundane deeds that awaken deeper consciousness.”

“If going to the bathroom can be a religiously meaningful act (there’s a blessing said after doing so), then switching to C.F.L. light bulbs can be, too,” he says. Still, the economist in him urges first things first: “Shifts in consciousness can take decades that we don’t have. Trade in the S.U.V. — then let’s talk about the sacredness of the earth.” LEAH KOENIG

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April 20, 2008 THE GREEN ISSUE

Invent PAUL CRUTZEN: Geoengineering might be described as human tinkering on a global scale, especially with the goal of rebooting atmospheric processes. But potential “big fix” approaches to climate change — constructing immense space mirrors to deflect solar radiation, say — are often derided as science fiction that diverts talent and financing from more plausible solutions. John Holdren, for one, as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noted its “combination of high costs, low leverage and a high likelihood of serious side effects.” So it was with considerable surprise in late 2006 that Paul Crutzen, one of the most prominent and respected atmospheric chemists in the world, proposed cooling the earth by pumping millions of tons of sulfur into the stratosphere. It would be the man-made equivalent of a volcanic eruption, spreading a thin layer of particles around the planet and increasing its reflectivity.

Crutzen’s proposal appeared in the scientific journal Climatic Change, but the mainstream media quickly picked it up and set off a fierce debate over the ethics and efficacy of such large-scale human interference with the atmosphere. Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his work on the the ozone layer, was feeling deeply frustrated. “I saw how little action was taking place on reducing greenhouse emissions,” he says. He published his article in desperation, hoping that “maybe this is a way of reducing the heating rate in the atmosphere.” Natural science backs Crutzen up. After the massive 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, the resulting haze of sulfuric acid in the stratosphere temporarily lowered global temperatures by nearly a full degree. Doing this ourselves is complicated, of course. The sulfur would have to be carried aloft by rockets or balloons — and every year or two, at a cost of untold billions of dollars. For Crutzen, the article was intended to be provocative, to prod the discussion and encourage research.

“Although I want it to be debated, to test whether this solution is feasible, looking for side effects is very essential,” he says. Such side effects could be profound, like a diminished ozone layer. “It’s not really a nice experiment to put a million tons of sulfur into the stratosphere,” he says. “It’s a quite dirty experiment.”

MATTHEW POWER __________ STAN OVSHINSKY: “The ages of mankind have been classified by the materials they use: the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Age of Silicon. We are at the dawn of the Hydrogen Age.” So declares Stan Ovshinsky, co-founder of Energy Conversion Devices. Though few Americans know his name, his work on energy technologies has found its way over the years into every American household. Some of his earlier work made possible the ubiquitous nickel metal hydride battery; more recently, batteries have helped make hybrid electric cars like the Toyota Prius possible. Tomorrow, it could be E.C.D.’s solar technologies that green the power grid. It is no exaggeration to say that Ovshinsky, now 85, is a Thomas Edison for our age. Ovshinsky is a systems thinker who envisions the future as it should be — and then goes out and invents the scientific tools and technological wizardry needed to bring it to life. Ovshinsky foresaw, long before the oil shocks of the 1970s, that the world’s addiction to dirty fossil fuels would lead to unacceptable side effects ranging from resource wars to climate change. To get to his vision of a clean “hydrogen energy loop” that uses the sun’s energy to run a carbon-free power grid, he pioneered the field of amorphous and disordered materials science. Ovshinsky’s systems approach is in evidence at E.C.D.’s new solar factory near Troy, Mich. Several decades ago, Ovshinsky argued that solar cells should not be made as brittle crystalline panels in a costly batch process — the traditional way of making photovoltaic cells — but rather “by the mile.” He was

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ridiculed, and even some of his lieutenants at E.C.D. doubted him, but he has proved the naysayers wrong.

Ovshinsky personally designed a process involving unusual industrial gases that produces miles of thin-film solar material that is cheap, durable and flexible enough to integrate into roofs. Today, though E.C.D. is unprofitable, its solar division cannot keep up with orders and is rushing to build more factories on the founder’s novel design. When I. I. Rabi, a Nobel-winning physicist, was asked if his friend was another Edison, he reportedly said, “He’s an Ovshinsky, and he’s brilliant.” VIJAY V. VAITHEESWARAN __________ BETTER BULBS: Light-emitting diodes are familiar to most people as the little indicator lights on electronic gadgets, like the glowing red dot at the tip of a remote control; they generate light as a function of electric current rather than of heat (as in incandescent bulbs) or chemicals (as in fluorescent bulbs). In recent years, advances in semiconductor technology have led to the development of L.E.D.’s bright enough for other applications, including television screens and street lamps. But so far, few companies have been able to convert L.E.D.’s into a regular light bulb — the pear-shaped kind with the screw-in base. Unlike the filament of a traditional bulb, L.E.D.’s shine in only one direction and so must be arranged in a ring to produce a radiant light, yet without trapping the resultant heat in the glass dome. The Dutch tech firm Lemnis has figured out how to do this, and not a moment too soon. The energy bill that President Bush signed into law in December spells doom for the common light bulb. By 2020, all bulbs in the United States must use 70 percent less energy than incandescent ones do today. (A conventional bulb converts only 5 percent of the energy it uses into light; the rest is released as heat.) In the short term, consumers will very likely turn to compact fluorescents, or C.F.L.’s, which already meet the new efficiency benchmark. C.F.L.’s, though, have their own drawbacks: their coil-shaped “bulbs” emit what some consider to be a cold, blue glare, and they contain small amounts of mercury, a toxin. L.E.D.’s, by contrast, are free of mercury and use even less energy: they can be twice as efficient as C.F.L.’s. And though L.E.D. fixtures, which can cost as much as $100, don’t currently compare well with fluorescent lighting in terms of availability or price, that may change with increased production and demand. The holy grail for manufacturers is to figure out how to get L.E.D.’s, whose glow can also be slightly grim, to generate light that simulates the warm color and quality of incandescent bulbs. BELINDA LANKS __________ BLACKLE SEARCH ENGINE: In late 2006, Toby Heap, the owner of a digital media company in Sydney, Australia, read a report from the University of California, Berkeley, that found that on average black computer screens generally use less energy than white ones. Not long after, Heap noticed a posting on the ecoIron blog claiming that a black version of Google would save 750 megawatt hours per year worldwide.

That inspired him to start Blackle, an eco-conscious search engine, in February 2007. “I was hoping that my friends and family would use it, and it would help to remind them of the need to take small steps every day to save energy,” says Heap. Blackle uses Google’s custom search engine; unlike Google, which features blue, black and green lettering on a white background, Blackle’s text is light gray on a black background. As of April 6, the site claimed to have saved 549,477.533 watt hours. (A megawatt hour equals one million watt hours; Blackle updates the number daily on its home page.) Still, the savings come only from cathode-ray tube monitors, rather than the liquid-crystal display screens that are so popular today. Heap is philosophical. “I do not expect the energy savings from Blackle to change the world on their own,” he says, “but the point of Blackle is that every little bit counts.” Google has apparently taken note: on March 29, the company briefly darkened its home page in solidarity with “Earth Hour,” a worldwide conservation event.

ABBY ELLIN __________

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THE PEBBLE-BED REACTOR: Not all nuclear reactors raise the specter of Three Mile Island. Instead of using huge fuel rods, the “pebble bed” reactor encases uranium — including the stable isotope Uranium 238 — in small graphite spheres. As the reactor heats up, the Uranium 238 inhibits dangerous chain reactions.

The result is a reactor that cannot melt down. Unplug a pebble-bed reactor — shut off all its safety systems — and it will simply cool down. “There is no set of circumstances that can put the public’s health at risk,” says Tom Ferreira, a spokesman for PBMR, a South African company that is developing the reactors. “It’s physics, the laws of nature.” A safe source of power with zero emissions is a tantalizing mix for environmentalists, an increasing number of whom support nuclear power. Pebble-bed reactors don’t solve every problem; they still produce small amounts of nuclear waste. But they have other benefits. Pebble beds produce very little of the weapons-grade fissile material that spooks terrorism experts. Unlike the hulking, 1,000-megawatt nuclear plants of the 1970s and ’80s, they do not require emergency water-cooling towers; small pebble-bed reactors could be located in urban downtowns or rural communities, producing efficient local power. There is just one thing standing in the way of this new reactor: American regulations. PBMR is pushing the government to approve pebble-bed technology, but the process will probably take several years.

CLIVE THOMPSON __________ THE ECO TV: An estimated 36 million new televisions will be sold in North America this year. Because most of them will be big plasma, liquid-crystal display or projection televisions, which use more power than the old cathode-ray sets they are replacing, the portion of each household’s energy bill devoted to consumer electronics is expected to grow from about 12 percent to 18 percent by 2015, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The energy bill for a conventional 28-inch television is about $30 a year. But the cost rises quickly, to as high as $200, when televisions grow into “entertainment centers” with cable and satellite set-top boxes, plus video players and recorders and game consoles. Although the notion that a flat-screen TV could be “green” might seem absurd, one company has taken direct aim at the environmentally conscious viewer with the introduction of the Eco TV, a 42-inch L.C.D. set from Philips. The Eco TV, which began appearing in stores last month, is the first of a line of models with energy-saving features. New software allows the television to consume minimal energy in standby mode. “Televisions are often set out of the box to be really bright to catch people’s eyes — to compete with the other 40 TVs on the wall in the store,” says Brooks Flynn, a spokesman for Philips. Both plasma and L.C.D. televisions require more electricity to make a brighter image. To save power, the Eco TV adjusts its backlighting in response to both the ambient light in the room and the content on the screen. There is also a power-consumption monitor showing how much energy the set is consuming. As the television industry seeks to bathe itself in a green light, the federal government is hastening to update the advice it gives consumers to sort out environmental claims. To date, the E.P.A.’s familiar “Energy Star” label for the most energy-efficient televisions has been based only on energy consumed while TVs are switched off (when they still drain power). Beginning Nov. 1, the Energy Star label will apply to televisions that “save energy while they are on and when they are off,” according to the E.P.A. JEFF STRYKER __________ STORING WIND: The problem with wind power is a fairly basic one: it works only when the wind blows.

But a new project called the Iowa Stored Energy Park is tackling this problem by acting like a giant battery, essentially storing wind for later use. When the wind is blowing, the park’s windmills generate up to a total of 200 megawatts of energy — powering a compressor that forces air into an aquifer. When the air is released, it drives two 134-megawatt turbines, producing enough power for 80,000 homes. CLIVE THOMPSON

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__________ PIG POWER: Reynolds, Ind., sits at the junction of Routes 421 and 43 on the western edge of the state, about a half-hour north of Lafayette. The current population is 540, give or take a few. If you think Reynolds sounds like an unlikely place for a cutting-edge renewable energy project, then you probably don’t know about the pigs: 150,000 of them, all sleeping and eating and, of course, defecating within a 15-mile radius of Reynolds. The project, announced in 2005 by the Indiana Department of Agriculture and christened BioTown, involves collecting the region’s effluent and other agricultural waste and piping it to a massive, $15 million “anaerobic digester,” where it will be converted to methane, synthetic gas and biodiesel. If all goes according to plan, the byproducts from the pigs will generate enough energy to supply 100 percent of the town’s electrical demand, along with an as-yet-undetermined portion of its transport fuel. Progress has not been uninterrupted: investors have come and gone and come again, and the original goal of disconnecting the town from the utility grid has been nixed, owing to regulatory complications. But according to Mark Jenner, founder of Biomass Rules, a company that provides feasibility analysis for biofuel projects, the concept and technology are viable. “This is a model that can be used in almost any rural community that has access to organic waste, whether it’s animal- or plant-based,” Jenner says. “Reynolds has the burden of being the first, and that’s always exhausting. But they’re definitely changing the way people think about things.”

With some luck — and no small amount of construction — the anaerobic digester will be up and sending a steady electrical current into the utility grid by next winter. BEN HEWITT __________ SUPERCONDUCTING CABLES: In 1911, a Dutch scientist observed that mercury, when cooled to about 452 degrees below zero, can be a perfect conductor that is, you can run electricity through it without any measurable resistance. Seventy-five years later, I.B.M. physicists working in Switzerland discovered a ceramic material that could achieve similar properties at temperatures of about minus 400 degrees. This discovery led researchers to identify compounds that could assume superconducting properties at about minus 300 degrees, a temperature that actually allows for practical applications. It is now possible, in fact, to manufacture wires made of superconducting materials, weave them into cables that can be cooled by pumping liquid nitrogen through the cores and use them to move electricity through the power grid. Why does this matter? Even good conductors of electricity, like copper, exhibit a certain amount of resistance — producing heat and inefficiency — when they carry an electrical current. Our infrastructure now loses about 8 percent of the electricity it transports from power plants to our homes and businesses. Superconducting cables, by contrast, lose almost nothing (though they do require some energy to keep them cold). More intriguing, superconducting cables could eventually bring renewable power from remote places where it is abundant —the windy plains of the Dakotas or the sun-drenched deserts of Nevada — to populous coastal cities. In theory, long distances mean nothing to superconducting cables, and each superconducting cable can carry about five times the current of a copper conduit. And if electric-power usage grows significantly in the coming years, we may need to move far more electricity from place to place. George Crabtree, the head of the material science division at Argonne National Laboratory, points out other possibilities: “We could share power across time zones or share it across weather zones. If it’s very hot in one region of the country, let’s bring it in from one that’s very cool.” Recent tests in Columbus, Ohio, and upstate New York have proved that superconducting wire can actually work in urban power grids. An installation is planned for Long Island this year and for Manhattan in 2010. Yet these test lengths are short — meters, not miles. Moreover, current prices for the cables are extremely high. Crabtree notes that they will have to come down in price significantly before utilities would consider a big rollout. Until then, there’s only one other option: government subsidies. JON GERTNER __________

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JOHN LATHAM: In 1990, well before the words “global warming” evoked images of dripping glaciers and flooded cities, the British physicist and poet John Latham theorized, in the pages of the journal Nature, that spraying atomized seawater into ocean clouds would increase their reflectivity — and cool the planet. His article sent nary a ripple through the scientific pond. Latham returned to studying lightning and writing poetry reflecting his growing unease and unrequited scientific dream: “These days I’m unsettled, spitting at the sky,/My stomach churns, I fester easily.” Now Latham, retired but working from a tidy office at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., belongs to an informal but growing climate fix-it club proposing arguably the most audacious plans known to science: shooting trillions of mirrors into space, blanketing desert landscapes à la Christo with reflective panels to bounce sunlight away from earth, lacing oceans with iron to stimulate carbon-absorbing plant growth (a k a the Geritol solution). Latham’s contribution, which he developed with his colleague Stephen Salter, proposes a fleet of unmanned, wind-powered, satellite-controlled oceangoing vessels that will spray precisely calibrated droplets of seawater into the sky, so that stratocumulus clouds reflect more solar radiation from the earth’s surface. He says that the idea of “tarting up clouds” probably originated decades ago when he and his 10-year-old son watched a sunset from a mountaintop in Wales and peered down on quicksilver clouds over the Irish Sea. His son said the clouds looked like “soggy mirrors.” Today, at 70, Latham finds that the prospect of climate change has propelled otherwise reluctant scientists to hear out people like him. “Unfortunately, when you’re speeding down the highway to hell, just about any exit, no matter how wacky, looks good,” says James White, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado. Latham recently participated in an online geoengineering group seeking better phrases to describe their aspirations. Latham prefers “climate stabilisation” — with the British spelling — because his scheme won’t reverse global warming but might “buy a little time” until humans can wean themselves from carbon. He took issue with those who characterized geoengineering efforts as a Band-Aid. “The patient doesn’t have a scratch,” he wrote. “She has a deep and possibly mortal wound. Cheers, John.” DANIEL GLICK __________ CARBON SEQUESTRATION: The United States has proven coal reserves of 275 billion tons, enough to supply our current energy needs for hundreds of years. The catch, of course, is that coal is nonrenewable, messy to extract and, worst of all, emits 10 percent more CO2 than oil and 60 percent more than natural gas when it is burned. Could coal ever satisfy our energy needs without exacerbating climate change? Only if that carbon could be stored somewhere. Proponents of carbon sequestration seek to do just that. Emissions from a fossil-fuel-burning plant would be caught before being released into the atmosphere, and the resulting billions of cubic yards of CO2 would be pumped into porous layers of rock far beneath the earth or sea.Sequestration was a central part of the plan to curb emissions that President Bush announced in his 2007 State of the Union address. The flagship project was known as FutureGen, a near-zero-emission coal plant in Illinois. But the Department of Energy canceled its support for the project in January, citing excessive costs, and it is now unclear if it will ever be built. Critics deride sequestration as pie in the ground: ruinously expensive for the amount of carbon being kept out of the atmosphere. One study found that to reduce emissions from coal by just 10 percent, a volume of CO2 equivalent to all the oil pumped annually worldwide would need to be forced underground, at a possible cost of trillions of dollars. But true believers maintain that sequestration is the only way we can supply our energy needs while stabilizing atmospheric carbon. And the Norwegian government already has a functioning carbon sequestration facility on a platform in the North Sea that pumps CO2 emissions deep into the seabed. Norway might even be able to sell excess storage capacity to other European countries. MATTHEW POWER __________ THE SMART GRID: Utilities are crafting new technologies to make the power grid ‘’intelligent” - able to

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automatically conserve energy.

1. Solar panels and windmills mounted on houses generate power. If a family is generating a surplus, they can feed it back to the utility and get paid as microgenerators.

2. ‘’Smart appliances” monitor how much electricity they’re using and shut down when power is too expensive. 3. Remote control Consumers can permit utilities to control their non-essential appliances - like pool pumps - turning them on and off to fine-tune the grid for maximum efficiency. 4. Plug-in hybrid cars refuel using clean electricity generated locally. 5. Locally-generated power avoids the 15 percent power-loss that occurs when you send electricity over long-distance power lines. “Superconducting” power lines route extra electricity from out-of-state utilities when demand spikes. 6. Wireless chips let individual houses communicate with power utilities - swapping on-the-fly information about the current price and usage of electricity. 7. Web and mobile-phone interfaces allow consumers to see how much power their appliances are using when they’re not at home - and even to turn them on or off remotely to reduce costs. 8. Energy storage.

When solar panels produce excess energy, it can be stored in batteries so houses can use clean energy at night when the sun isn’t shining. CLIVE THOMPSON

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April 20, 2008

Move HYPERMILING: Steve Chafe’s interest in hypermiling started with a $150 speeding ticket. Determined to avoid another one, he became a different man behind the wheel — one who didn’t mind getting to his destination a few minutes later. Until then, his Honda Civic had been getting 22 miles per gallon. The next tank, it got 26. Now it gets as many as 37. “The changes in my gas mileage were 100 percent a result of my thinking,” says Chafe, whose Web site, hypermiling.com, exists to spread the word about the art of mileage maximization. “Hypermiling” was coined by Wayne Gerdes, a former nuclear-power-plant worker from Chicago whose legendary feats include getting up to 200 miles per gallon in his hybrid Honda Insight. Any driver who manages to exceed a car’s E.P.A. mileage estimate can call himself a hypermiler, but it helps to have a hybrid, both because the car’s dashboard readout provides instant feedback about fuel usage and because it is capable of stratospheric gains. Gerdes’s Web site, CleanMPG.com, is a mecca for mileage-obsessed drivers, littered with discussions of braking techniques and “brag posts” from drivers who log 100 miles per gallon. “A lot of hypermilers are guys who would consider themselves — in a fun, positive way — geeky,” says Eric Powers, who runs Hybridfest, an annual gathering of hybrid drivers in Madison, Wisc., that includes an annual “M.P.G. Challenge,” where hypermiling records are set. Getting triple-digit mileage requires some fairly complex maneuvers, but the average commuter can reap substantial gains just by avoiding idling, quick accelerations and heavy braking. It also helps to keep your tires well inflated and to be in the habit of going to the farthest errand first, so that your car is warm when you embark on the next one. But the simplest way to save fuel is to observe the speed limit. That alone can increase mileage by at least 12 percent. “When I had my Geo Metro, I would go 70 or 75 on the freeway,” says the hypermiler Jerad Parish, who won last year’s M.P.G. Challenge by getting 110 miles per gallon in his 2005 Prius. “Now, I would never, ever do that.” DASHKA SLATER __________ LOW-EMISSION AVIATION: Currently, the world’s commercial jets consume more than 57 billion gallons of fuel annually and produce about 2 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. Next year, and every year for the foreseeable future, both figures will rise between 2 and 4 percent. And yet Giovanni Bisignani, head of the International Air Transport Association, has a goal: emission-free aircraft technology by the year 2057. How that will be accomplished is a bit of a mystery. “It’s going to take technology that doesn’t exist today,” says Leah Raney, global environmental affairs director for Continental Airlines. In the meantime, airlines are scrambling to conserve fuel (albeit largely because it accounts for a third of their costs). When pilots for Scandinavian Airlines fly into Stockholm-Arlanda Airport, for instance, they coast all the way from cruising altitude to the runway with their engines set on idle, reducing fuel use by about 8 percent per flight.

“If we can save 1 percent of fuel, that’s 100 million Swedish krona,” or more than $16 million, says Niels Eirik Nertun, environmental specialist for the airline. Continental Airlines has spent the past decade searching for efficiencies, even offering incentives to pilots who save fuel. Steps include washing jet engines more frequently to reduce drag and lightening everything from the brakes to the onboard magazines. The airline is also buying 25 new Boeing 787s, whose lightweight carbon-fiber construction promises a 20 percent increase in fuel efficiency. More than 50 other airlines have ordered them. Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Atlantic, has been pushing biofuels, and in February a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 flew from London to Amsterdam on a mixture of conventional and biofuels. The surrounding hoopla was a bit

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premature; only 20 percent of the fuel came from coconut and babassu oil — the rest was plain old kerosene.

But the clock is ticking. Michael Prather, an authority on aviation’s impact on the climate, notes: “It takes 20 years to get the next generation of aircraft in the air and flying. It takes 30 years to get rid of the bad ones.

We have to plan now.” DASHKA SLATER __________ WATER WINGS: Earthrace, a sleek and futuristic 78-foot, wavepiercing trimaran, is scheduled to leave the Vulkan Shipyard in Sagunto, Spain, later this month for a second attempt at breaking the round-the-world powerboat record (74 days 23 hours 53 minutes) set in 1998. The skipper, Pete Bethune, from New Zealand, is out to make a point as well as set a record: the Earthrace voyage seeks to be completely carbon neutral. The boat runs on biofuel derived from leftover cooking oil and from soya and canola oils from sustainable sources. The use of biofuel reduces the boat’s CO2 emissions by 78 percent, compared with conventional diesel. All of Earthrace’s carbon emissions, including those produced by shipping biofuel ahead to various ports of call, will be offset by purchasing credits from downwithcarbon.org. A former oilexploration engineer, Bethune is now a committed environmentalist. He spent years raising funds for the $3 million vessel, which is built in part from hemp and other recycled materials. For the boat’s first voyage, in 2006, he and two crew members underwent liposuction, producing 10 liters of human fat — or enough biofuel to propel the boat 15 kilometers. JEFF STRYKER __________ GAS-FREE NATION: In January, Shai Agassi announced that his California-based company, Project Better Place, would help convert Israel into the first gasoline-free car-loving nation. The plan will get rolling with the mass-market introduction of nearly emission-free electric cars, to be made by Renault and Nissan.

The Israeli government will offer tax incentives for their purchase. Project Better Place (backed by $200 million in venture capital) will construct up to 200 battery-exchange stations and 500,000 parking spots with charging capacity; then it will lease to drivers the lithium-ion batteries that power the cars. A similar system is in the works for Denmark. Agassi says an electric vehicle that gets 100 miles per charge will bring the public on board. “We are not trying to build a cool sexy car, or a new model for public transport, or force people to walk to work,” he says. “We love our cars; we love our freedom.” But he wants people to give up gas. To that end, his company will offer subscription plans with incentives, perhaps even a free car to anyone who purchases a long-term “fuel” plan. Other monthly plans will be based on kilometers driven. When combined with subsidies to reduce the cost of batteries and a network of plentiful and easy-to-use charging stations, he says, the barriers that have long thwarted electric-car champions will fall. SARAH WILDMAN __________ KITE-SAILING TANKERS: The last wind-powered cargo ships sailed around Cape Horn in the 1940s, having been relegated to nostalgic obsolescence by steam and then internal-combustion engines. But if a German company called SkySails succeeds, wind energy will once again power the global shipping trade.

Instead of sails mounted on masts, huge, computer-controlled kites flying 1,000 feet over the water will harness the wind. Attached to ships by polyethylene-fiber ropes, SkySails’ oval-shaped kites are similar in design to those used by kite surfers and paragliders. With an area of 1,615 to 10,764 square feet, the kites can generate up to 6,800 horsepower and, in ideal conditions, cut a ship’s fuel consumption by as much as a third. Ninety percent of global trade in goods is moved by sea, and the high-sulfur diesel fuel used by most of the world’s 90,000 cargo ships accounts for an estimated 4.5 percent of the global output of carbon dioxide and 20 percent of the sulfur dioxide. The shipping industry burns 2.1 billion barrels of oil annually. SkySails claims that a universal application of its technology could keep 146 million tons of carbon out of the

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atmosphere each year. (An American company called KiteShip is working on a cargo-kite concept of its own.)

But would that be worth the effort? While shipping’s proponents hold that bulk freight by sea is far more efficient by volume than other means of transportation, it has been estimated that the shipping industry’s CO2 emissions could increase by a third by 2020. Critics of the kites contend that other projects to reduce emissions could have greater impact and that the sail technology would never work on the largest ships, half-million-ton oil tankers. Still, cargo kites aren’t merely a question of green religion; they’re also about plain old economics. Fuel costs are at an all-time high, and those savings could help a shipping company’s bottom line. To prove the technology’s potential, last December a 10,000-ton merchant ship called the Beluga SkySails left the port of Bremerhaven, Germany, for Venezuela. Its engine power was supplemented by a 1,700 square-foot kite. The computer-controlled kite system can cost $395,000 to nearly $4 million, but Stephan Wrage, the inventor and managing director of SkySails (“My friends called me an eco-freak,” he says), claims it can save around $1,500 or more a day in fuel costs. The ship made the crossing on time and under budget. MATTHEW POWER __________ BIKETOWN MELLOW: Johnny, a play on maillot jaune, French for “yellow jersey,” was Lance Armstrong’s nickname during his Tour de France days. Next month, Mellow Johnny’s will be the name of a multiuse facility Armstrong is backing in Austin, Tex., that features bicycle sales and repairs, a cafe, bicycle parking for downtown residents and commuters, spin classes and showers. The old 18,000-square-foot, yellow-and-red-brick building was, in previous incarnations, a Pearl beer distributorship and a homeless center. Armstrong and his general partner, Bart Knaggs, say they wanted to use as much of the existing infrastructure as possible. The showers from the shelter days seemed like an ideal incentive for bike commuters in a city that experiences spring and summer temperatures for much of the year. “If you want people to ride an hour to work, and their workplace doesn’t have a gym and it’s 100 in summer,” Armstrong says, “you can’t go to work that way.” While Mellow Johnny’s is a for-profit endeavor, Knaggs says he hopes that offering “one bazillion” bicycle-parking spaces at a nominal fee will have a positive environmental impact. “It’s more about shifting a local mind-set about alternative transportation,” he says, a nod to the fact that Texans — even those in this, the most liberal, eco-conscious city in the state — often feel dutybound to drive even to the corner store. And how does Mellow Johnny’s propose to meet its own energy needs? With conventional sources, though pedal power may put a little energy into the grid. “We’re looking for ways to use pedal power so that we can charge up the building a little bit,” says Armstrong, who, while he has no immediate plans to work the register, might be the one whose r.p.m. runs the espresso machine. SPIKE GILLESPIE __________ GHOST BIKES: To judge from ad campaigns and civic initiatives, the solution to climate change is simple: ride a bike, save the earth. The hundreds of ghost bikes throughout the world, however, silently testify to a darker truth. A memorial to a cyclist killed in traffic, a ghost bike springs up in the days after the crash — never, in the parlance of the cycling activists responsible for the ghost bikes, an “accident.” It is spray-painted stark white and chained to a street sign and often bears a commemorative plaque. Unlike the crosses on highway shoulders, briefly noted in a passing blur, ghost-bike memorials are sidewalk monuments meant to spark debate, if not dread. These eerie urban shrines stand as reminders that however free and healthy and green our bicycles make us, the green revolution might actually be a revolution, and revolution can be dangerous. WM. FERGUSON __________

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THE COMPRESSED-AIR CAR: Guy Nègre, a onetime Formula One engineer, has created a car that runs on compressed air. It gets up to 120 miles per tank in the city; you can fill it up in as little as three minutes; its emissions are minimal. A working prototype has been available for more than 10 years. So why aren’t we all whooshing around in cars that run on air? Well, Nègre’s car isn’t magic. The engine needs energy to run a generator to fill the car’s carbon-fiber tanks. And at speeds greater than 35 miles per hour, the efficiency of the compressed-air engine diminishes, and a fuel-burning heater kicks in. But the engine hasn’t been the real challenge; selling the idea has. That task may become easier when the first compressed-air cars hit the road in India, where Nègre’s company, MDI Enterprises, has finally attracted a powerful business partner: Tata Motors. India’s largest carmaker, Tata reportedly paid MDI about $25 million for the exclusive rights to produce and sell their compressed-air technology in India. MDI’s business model is as unusual as its engine.

The company will not sell fleets of compressed-air cars to drivers, but hundreds of small “turnkey” car factories to franchise holders. Shiva Vencat, Nègre’s associate and a franchisee in the American Northeast, maintains that this removes all middlemen and yields a savings of at least 30 percent. The end product: a locally sourced automobile. There are obstacles — most notably, the matter of filling the tanks. The 50-cent air pump in the back of a gas station won’t cut it. Vencat envisions a series of “air stations” not unlike today’s Exxons and Sunocos. In this regard, he expresses faith not only in alternative energies but in capitalism as well. “The invisible hand,” Vencat says, “will eventually find a way for air to be sold.” WM. FERGUSON __________ HEAVIER LOADS: In Canada, commercial trucks ply the freeways at a maximum gross weight of 138,000 pounds. But on nearby United States Interstate highways, trucks are generally limited to 80,000 pounds.

And while state-level exemptions exist, the United States has one of the lowest weight limits for trucks among developed countries. That’s not so good for the environment. Lower weight limits require more trucks to haul the same amount of stuff, driving up congestion, fuel consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions. By 2004, three years after Britain raised its own weight limit from 90,390 pounds to 97,000 pounds, an analysis of data from the British Department for Transport concluded that the move was annually cutting out 83.2 million vehicle miles traveled (v.m.t.) and 149,914 tons of carbon dioxide. And this was before the country completed its shift to bigger rigs; after that, the department predicted, savings could be 27 percent greater. Few such estimates for the United States exist, though a five-year comprehensive study completed by the Department of Transportation in 2000 found that a similar switch could save as many as 8 billion v.m.t. (Heavier rigs might seem more dangerous, but according to a controversial study in 2002 by the Transportation Research Board, accidents could be expected to decline because of the reduction in truck-v.m.t.) One big expense, however, would be infrastructure improvements: bridges would need billions of dollars in upgrades to handle the greater weights. But as last year’s Minneapolis bridge collapse shows, the nation’s infrastructure is in need of a major overhaul anyway, one that could be financed in part by taxing shippers that move to the higher weight limit. Could it happen? Not likely. A survey in 2003 conducted by the Transportation Research Project, an advocacy group, found that 9 out of 10 Americans oppose higher weight limits, even after hearing the arguments in their favor. CLAY RISEN

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April 20, 2008 THE GREEN ISSUE

Act A CLEAR SENSE OF EMISSION: Carbon-dioxide equivalents may be the most complicated currency on world markets today. A basic exchange works like this: When a company like the Gap commits to reducing emissions but cannot, or chooses not to, cut the energy used to move clothes across the globe, it finances someone else’s green project. Rather than put $100, say, toward reinventing its shipping system, the Gap may spend $20 to plant trees or invest in a clean utility. If a new power plant is needed in India, carbon investments from the Gap and others make it possible to build a more expensive wind farm instead of a coal plant. Win-win, the logic goes: because carbon emissions are a global problem, it doesn’t matter where they are reduced. The system of carbon trading exploded after the Kyoto Protocol and in 2006 sustained a $30 billion market representing nearly 1.7 billion tons of traded carbon dioxide. The market extends beyond signatories to include companies that participate voluntarily. These days, even individual consumers are joining in to pay offset retailers somewhere between $3 and $40 per ton in order to counter the carbon they emit driving to work or just running their refrigerators. But individuals are confronting many of the same uncertainties that companies and countries have been navigating under the Kyoto Protocol. First, how to determine your emissions? There are several calculators on the Web, but they yield different answers. “When you fly, the fuel efficiency of your plane varies,” Jeff Swenerton, a spokesman at Green-e, an offset-certification program, points out. He says that calculators, for example, don’t factor in that “all things being equal, different airplanes of the same model can have wildly different burn rates.” Once you have a carbon figure, which offsets should you buy? Certification isn’t standardized either. Part of the problem is in the measuring: how old should a replanted forest be before it earns credit? What if it gets logged or burns?

Another issue: how do certification schemes verify that the projects they invest in add real, new carbon reduction to the market? Should credits subsidize solar power in a city that already gives solar tax breaks?

There are social questions too: should certification only make sure that carbon hasn’t entered the atmosphere, or should it include other goals, like sustainable development? Some argue that if a project generates less carbon but disrupts a local community, it forces the poor to take responsibility for the pollution of the rich and reinforces a model of development that created the problem of global warming in the first place. Although it has been muddled by competing standards, the market is maturing. The Voluntary Carbon Standard, created by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and two other nongovernmental organizations, is widely seen as a benchmark of quality assurance, and carbon credits certified by it sell for between $5 and $15 per ton. Credits certified by a competitor, the Gold Standard, sell for between $8 and $40 per ton, while offering additional standards for sustainable community development. “We can’t necessarily rely on a country’s environmental standards as adequate,” says Michael Schlup, director of the Gold Standard. He also adds, “We need to give something to people and places who are giving us emissions reductions safely.” (The V.C.S. recognizes that the Gold Standard offers an added virtue.) Russell Simon, a spokesman for the nonprofit carbon retailer Carbonfund.org who admits the carbon-certification business “really is a baffling market,” says he thinks that a battle over standards can be healthy, but that one or two companies need “to emerge and build trust in their brand of certification.” He adds, “It is a bit like the wars we used to have at the beginning of using the word ‘organic.’ Now we agree what that means.” TESS TAYLOR __________

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FOOTPRINT TRACKING: To develop a label that lets a consumer know exactly how much CO2 was released in creating a product is an enormous challenge. A modern corporation can have thousands of suppliers scattered across several continents, all producing their own pollution. Despite the obstacles, many companies are trying to conduct carbon audits. Wal-Mart, for example, decided to examine the supply-chain emissions of seven product categories. Timberland is attempting to assess the environmental impact of its shoes and has investigated not only its own emissions but also the emissions of some of its suppliers. The company was surprised to find that transportation may account for less than 5 percent of its greenhouse-gas emissions — while almost 80 percent may come from making the leather, a process buried deep in its supply chain. Cows produce huge amounts of methane, which turns into CO2 in the atmosphere. Because the hide makes up roughly 7 percent of the cash value of the cow, Timberland took responsibility for 7 percent of the cows’ emissions. “The hide is a waste product of the meat industry,” Betsy Blaisdell, manager of environmental stewardship for Timberland, says. “There is some argument about whether we should account for those emissions, but we do.” Calculating a product’s carbon footprint means confronting similar questions about what and how to measure. A program called the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative is developing standards that will allow companies to calculate their indirect emissions with some precision. But reliable carbon labels are probably years away, says Arpad Horvath, an associate professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who is currently examining the life cycle of some two dozen consumer products. “When people talk about a universal carbon-labeling program policy,” he says, “I tell them they need to hold their horses a little.” CHARLES WILSON __________ SHINE ON: Sunshine is free, but producing and installing the photovoltaic panels that convert sunshine into electricity is expensive — up to $40,000 for the average home. The panels will pay for themselves eventually, but that’s cold comfort to anyone looking to raise the initial investment. As the actor Ed Begley Jr. put it in a recent infomercial for solar energy, “If the mobile-phone industry required you to invest $10,000 to get your wireless service, and it was your responsibility to maintain and repair the network, would you have a cellphone?” Begley’s infomercial appears on the Web site of Citizenre, a company that will rent you panels it installs itself. But Citizenre has yet to deliver a single system, open the photovoltaic-panel factory that was supposed to make its plan possible or even announce any financing for the factory, leading some in the industry to worry that it will end up generating more ill will than kilowatts. Whether or not Citizenre can deliver on its promises, Begley’s critique remains apt. We don’t expect users of conventional electricity to build their own backyard power plants, so why do we expect solar customers to buy and install their own photovoltaic panels? Travis Bradford, founder and president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, says he thinks that expectation is about to go the way of the rotary phone. The change has already happened in the commercial sector, where solar is now more likely to be sold as a service than a product. On the residential side, a company called Sun Run offers Californians a similar arrangement to the one proposed by Citizenre, although Sun Run’s customers still have to pay about a third of the upfront costs. Yet as solar-panel costs go down and electricity rates go up, that equation is likely to improve. “Over the next few years,” Bradford predicts, “anyone who wants a customer to make an upfront payment for solar will lose the deal to someone who doesn’t.’ DASHKA SLATER __________ WALK THE WALK: In many parts of the country, walking has become as quaint a pastime as spinning yarn or playing the bagpipes. Between 1977 and 1995, the number of daily walking trips taken by adults declined by 40 percent — while more than a quarter of all car trips are now shorter than a mile. Those under-a-mile journeys fall into the zone that new urbanists call “walkshed”: the area a person can reasonably cover on foot. People whose walksheds teem with shops and restaurants have more reason to walk than

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those whose don’t, so it was only a matter of time before someone tried to quantify a neighborhood’s pedestrian-friendliness. Last summer, a trio of Seattle software developers started walkscore.com, which calculates the number of potential destinations within walking distance of any given address and then produces a rating. If your neighborhood scores 90 or above, you can easily live there without a car; if it scores under 25, you’ll be driving to the backyard. More than a million addresses were searched in the site’s first month. Matt Lerner, one of the site’s developers, knew the concept had arrived when a condo in Seattle hung out a gigantic banner that said “Walk Score 100.” “People react really negatively to phrases like ‘density,’ ” he says, “but they react really positively to phrases like ‘walkability.’ ”Walk Score’s popularity may be a sign that walking is making a comeback, fueled by both rising gas prices and widening waistlines. An economics researcher at Washington University in St. Louis suggests that raising gasoline prices by $1 a gallon would reduce American obesity by 9 percent. Another study posits that if every American spent 30 minutes a day walking or cycling instead of driving, we would collectively cut carbon emissions by 64 million tons and shed more than three billion pounds of excess flab. All of this sounds great in theory, but most people find that their good intentions falter when faced with the extra time it takes to walk. Yet Alan Durning, an environmental researcher whose blog about living without a car inspired Walk Score, argues that walking may be the ultimate timesaver. He cites a British study that suggests that for every minute you walk, you live about three minutes longer. “You’re not using time,” Durning argues; “you’re generating time.”

DASHKA SLATER __________ GOOD TURNOFFS: At 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 28, residents in West Texas came home from work and turned on their appliances — at precisely the moment when the wind died down in local wind farms. Power plummeted by more than half. The grid neared collapse. So the utilities put in a frantic call to ConsumerPowerline. The company practices “demand response”: it pays electricity consumers to turn out the lights when demand is too high. Within seven minutes, ConsumerPowerline instructed several major corporations to turn down their heat and lighting — removing 70 megawatts of demand — and a blackout was narrowly averted. Successes like this are why demand response has become one of the most powerful green techniques for protecting the nation’s overtaxed power grids. When a blackout looms, utilities call a small coterie of demand-response firms. These firms prearrange for major users of electricity — factories, shopping malls, skyscrapers — to shut down all nonessential electricity in exchange for payments, often totaling tens of thousands of dollars each year. It’s expensive, but far less so than a blackout that cascades across the country. The infamous Northeastern blackout in August 2003 cost an estimated $7 billion.

Demand response is, in essence, an inversion of the traditional logic of power generation: instead of paying to create power, you pay money to reduce the need for it. The procedure has been particularly popular in major cities, where grids are strained to the limit. ConsumerPowerline controls 300 huge buildings in New York alone, where hastily brokered turnoffs by Macy’s and major hotels prevented the spread of a 2006 blackout in Queens — a blackout that lasted for more than a week — into Manhattan. “If you’re someone who’s controlling 100 buildings at once, and with a flick of a finger you can change their energy behavior,” says Gary Fromer, ConsumerPowerline’s C.E.O., “that’s very powerful.” CLIVE THOMPSON __________ BEYOND WASTE: Zero waste, a state of eco-utopia far beyond ordinary sustainability, raises the notion of planetary stewardship to a sweeping level: instead of using, we should reuse; instead of dumping, we should compost. A number of municipalities, including Seattle and Boulder, Colo., have made zero waste a guiding ambition. The daunting challenge is that so many consumer products are neither recyclable nor compostable. Worse, they’re made with highly toxic chemicals. Reducing the impact of these products may depend less on finding better ways to dispose of them and more on discovering how to remake them — or on

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no longer making them at all. A number of green certifications exist for “healthier” consumer products, but for the past three years, a small firm in Virginia known as MBDC has been awarding a “Cradle to Cradle” certification, or “C2C,” to certain items that satisfy a rigorous philosophy espoused by its founders, the green architect William McDonough and the environmental chemist Michael Braungart. The duo have long held that, as McDonough recently put it, “waste is basically stupid.” Theirs is a business-friendly credo. Corporate growth isn’t in itself problematic; nor should sustainability mean getting by with less. Rather, the firm endorses rethinking the way products are designed and manufactured. To get a C2C seal of approval, a product needs to be made from components that are either “technical nutrients” (which can be recycled or repurposed) or biological nutrients (which can degrade naturally, like compost). “Instead of saying zero waste, we say let’s just eliminate the concept of waste,” says Jay Bolus, an environmental engineer who is in charge of the MBDC certification process. C2C has mainly been a business-to-business endeavor, and only a few of the 100 products that have won MBDC certification — Herman Miller chairs, United States Postal Service envelopes — are familiar to consumers. But C2C is expanding, and next year, according to Bolus, there should be 400 or 500 products with the logo. To McDonough, his certification is a point of entry into the world that he’s imagining. “It honors intention,” he says. “And I think that’s really important, given that we have to redesign nearly everything.” J0N GERTNER __________ COMPOST FEAST: Twice each year, the sanitation workers of San Francisco gather with city officials to eat a very nice free meal — local wineries supply wine, farms provide greens and a San Francisco sanitation worker who also fishes commercially brings his catch. It’s a feast that the sanitation workers themselves have helped grow, by delivering 350 tons of food scraps daily to the city’s composting facility. In San Francisco’s “Fantastic 3” system, residents sort their refuse into three bins: recyclables, food scraps (including meat) and trash. Food scraps and recyclable material are picked up free, but residents pay to have trash hauled away.

These incentives have enabled San Francisco to divert 70 percent of the city’s trash from landfills. The composting program — the largest in the United States — also curbs a lot of the city’s emissions. When San Francisco researched its carbon footprint, it found that 20 percent of its emissions came from rot, specifically the methane produced by decomposing food waste. While it’s possible to run a methane-capture program at a landfill, up to two-thirds of the gas may still be lost. Composting is much more efficient: the methane is reabsorbed, and the city ends up with a viable product to sell to farms, golf courses and vineyards. Ten years later, 2,000 restaurants and most residents separate their garbage, and the sanitation workers of San Francisco get an additional reward of well-made foods. TESS TAYLOR __________ READY-TO-WEAR: In recent years, organic fibers and sustainably produced textiles have moved into the fashion world, with everyone from edgy Heatherette to ultrasquare Wal-Mart seeking green rewards.

According to one industry count, 20 major brands and 1,200 smaller ones are producing organic lines.

Eco-fashion has even birthed an entire marketing subindustry of its own, with firms like OrganicWorks helping producers and retailers sell environmentally friendly clothes. But not every claim to organic provenance is equal. “Greenwashing” is as prevalent in the clothing sector as it is in all sorts of other industries, like the oil business. According to a survey of over 1,018 “green” consumer products by the environmental marketing firm TerraChoice, only 1 was completely free of inflated or unverifiable claims.

Because apparel purchases are often made on the spur of the moment, buyers may be less likely than usual to research manufacturers’ assertions. Last year, The New York Times exposed one trendy fashion label, Lululemon Athletica, which had claimed that one of its lines of yoga gear was made with seaweed. But lab tests showed that the clothing contained none of the minerals that indicate its presence — findings that Lululemon disputed, although it withdrew the seaweed claim in Canada at the request of authorities there.

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Green fashion is a great way to connect with eco-conscious consumers, who then drive more conventional manufacturers to follow suit. But if consumers get the idea that green claims are inflated or unbelievable, the entire trend is threatened. That’s why a number of eco-fashion marketers are pushing standardized labels for green clothing, the equivalent of existing imprimaturs like Energy Star and Green Seal. Still, let the buyer beware: TerraChoice’s survey found that several products carried the labels even when they weren’t up to standard. CLAY RISEN __________ RETURNS ACCEPTED: With little fanfare, the New York City Council recently passed legislation that holds computer, TV and MP3-player manufacturers responsible for collecting and recycling their products once consumers discard them. This new system is expected to divert millions of tons of toxic materials from landfills and incinerators, and it may lead people to consider garbage in a whole new way. According to the United Nations, 95 percent of a product’s environmental impact is determined before purchase — in the harvesting of resources and the processes of manufacturing, packaging and shipping. “Every step in the supply chain involves some kind of carbon impact,” Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says. Forcing companies to think about their products after they’re sold is likely to spur them to make things in a gentler, more ready-to-recycle way in the first place. Hershkowitz first called for radically reconsidering garbage responsibility 15 years ago in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly.

He proposed that companies collect and manage the eventual waste from their products. This is already the law for electronic waste in the European Union. A weary veteran of environmental battles, Hershkowitz says he isn’t sure the United States is determined enough to catch up. Could New York City be the pioneer?

Hershkowitz says, “In the realm of electronic waste, I think the answer is yes.” EMILY BIUSO __________ ADAM WERBACH: A few years ago, Adam Werbach looked like many other environmental activists — sporting polar fleece and guzzling fair-trade coffee in a windowless basement office. But in January, Werbach’s environmental consulting firm, Act Now, was acquired by the advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi.

Overnight, the modest San Francisco-based company, renamed Saatchi & Saatchi S (for sustainability), was charged with making green living irresistible to a billion consumers worldwide. The first task is to galvanize Saatchi & Saatchi’s 4,500 employees around the world through institutional changes (a no-fly week, e.g.) and the Personal Sustainability Project, which encourages individuals to make small changes — like carpooling and quitting smoking — that are meaningful personally and good for the world. “As far as I’m concerned, I just got 4,500 allies,” Werbach, 35, says. But some activists view the merger as a serious affront to grass-roots environmentalism — like David waltzing with Goliath. (It’s a reaction he’s familiar with, having also faced harsh criticism for Act Now’s work with Wal-Mart.) As a former president of the Sierra Club (at age 23) and a current board member of Greenpeace International, Werbach is sympathetic to the assumption that he is selling out. But Werbach counters that when the environmental movement defines sustainability myopically (by focusing on ecology to the exclusion of social, cultural and economic health) and relies on scare tactics to change behavior, it accomplishes little more than choir preaching. “I was the captain of the ship driving straight into the iceberg,” he says of his tenure as an activist. Now, he suggests, it’s time for a change. “We’ve spent too much time saying, ‘Do this because the polar bears are dying,’ ” he says. “Instead, we need to say, ‘Do this because it brings about success and happiness in our businesses and families.’ ” LEAH K0ENIG __________ PLANE TRUTHS: Early in February, Standard Life, a major British investment firm, announced it would

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exclude airlines from its socially responsible funds because they contribute to global warming. The move puts airlines in the same category as tobacco companies, pornographers and arms dealers. (A report by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research calculates that if aviation continues to grow, Britain will have to eliminate completely every other source of emissions in order to meet its goal of a 60-percent cut in greenhouse gases by 2050.) When an American Airlines flight took just five passengers from London to Chicago last month, the conservative Daily Mail portrayed the event as an “environmental crime,” claiming that “each passenger on the plane had a massive carbon footprint of 43.2 tonnes of CO2.” Joss Garman, a founder of Plane Stupid, which made international headlines this winter by dangling antiaviation banners from the roof of Parliament, says that getting on a plane “is the most environmentally damaging thing you as an individual can do, other than setting a forest fire.” Airplanes account for only about 3 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, but their impact is augmented because they emit other global warming gases and produce contrails, or plumes of ice crystals, that trigger the formation of heat-trapping cirrus clouds. And with a global growth rate of 5 percent a year, aviation emissions are among the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gases. In the United States alone, aircraft traffic is expected to rise 60 percent by 2025. Airlines will join the European Union’s carbon-trading program in 2011, and politicians there have proposed increasing taxes on both very long and very short flights. In the United States, however, aviation’s climate impact has stayed off the radar, even though American carriers produce almost half the world’s aircraft exhaust. Five states and three environmental groups petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency in December, demanding that it regulate jet emissions under the Clean Air Act, but the request has received little attention. Danielle Fugere, a regional program director for Friends of the Earth, one group that petitioned, says, “It’s difficult, because most people associate planes with vacation.” DASHKA SLATER __________ CYNTHIA ROSENZWEIG: To talk to Cynthia Rosenzweig, a scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, is to confront the vulnerability of a huge city with hundreds of miles of exposed coastline. Rosenzweig’s team assesses the impacts of future climate changes on the New York metro area and advises local agencies on adaptation strategies. The greatest peril is floods from storm surges: they could be devastating if even modest rises in sea levels occur. “It’s not just the threats to Wall Street; it’s also our low-lying communities in Brooklyn and Queens,” she says. The city’s two airports are located on drained coastal wetlands, she adds. Train lines are vulnerable; so are highways. For now, she advises agencies that are making regular repairs to roads, runways and other infrastructure to think ahead. Adapt while renovating, in other words, rather than retrofit after a walloping coastal storm. City hospitals should plan for more frequent heat waves (they’ll occur four times as often by midcentury), and Hudson Valley farmers may need to consider planting warmer-weather fruits. “Even if we stopped all greenhouse-gas production now, we’re talking another 0.6 degrees Celsius in any case over the coming century,” she says. The rise in sea level may proceed on its current pace — it’s now about 0.1 inch per year — or it may not. Rosenzweig’s goal is for the metro area to act quickly if accelerated rates of melting continue. As she puts it: “We need a regional dialogue. What do we protect? We can’t protect it all; it will be too expensive. So where do we build up the sea walls? And if those very extreme risks begin to look more likely, then we can think about going all the way to something like the U.K. has with a tidal barrier on the Thames.” Already, similar exploratory work is being done in New York. JON GERTNER __________ HOW GREEN IS MY BUILDING? Building green is all the rage. And these days, building green means building LEED. An acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, LEED is a set of guidelines issued in 2000 by the nonprofit United States Green Building Council. Developers get points in a variety of categories, like energy efficiency and water usage. Twenty-nine points out of 69 gets them

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certified; more points earn silver, gold or platinum plaques. There are other green standards out there, but LEED is the leader: the federal government now requires that new official buildings above a certain size be LEED-certified, and several cities have adopted similar measures. But LEED may be more trouble than it’s worth. Developers end up having to bring in a small army of consultants and reviewers to approve every step. The folks at the Urban Ecology Center in Milwaukee, known as one of the greenest buildings in the Midwest, declined certification because of $75,000 in anticipated excess costs. At the same time, if you’ve got the cash, LEED is an easy system to game. As critics like to point out, a $395 bike rack and a multimillion-dollar low-energy A.C. system both get one point. Nor does the point system consider regional particularities; two critics wrote in a 2004 paper that “water conservation is more of a priority in hot, dry climates, yet the U.S.G.B.C. awards the same number of credits for water conservation in Seattle as in Phoenix.” Another problem: LEED neglects the importance of a building’s life cycle. An energy-efficient heater may be great at first but require constant maintenance or replacement, making it a net environmental negative over time. Detractors’ biggest complaint is that by relying on a cumulative point system, LEED encourages developers to nitpick over individual details rather than creatively approach a building’s overall sustainability — making the sum of a building’s LEED points less than its parts. “I’d much rather see B.T.U. and CO2 requirements and let the professional community solve the problem,” the architect Thom Mayne told the journal Architectural Record. “If you give proscriptive requirements, it stagnates new development and research.” To its credit, the U.S.G.B.C. is working hard on a next-generation set of guidelines. But with other standards emerging, like the Green Globes, LEED may be left behind. CLAY RISEN __________ GREEN-COLLAR WORK FORCE: During the presidential campaign last winter, the Democratic candidates were in accord on at least one subject: the United States economy needs a big, bold green-jobs program — perhaps even what Hillary Clinton was calling a “green collar” revolution. The phrase has become highly contagious. Its appeal lies in its symmetry: by investing billions of dollars in renewable energy technologies, the United States government would accelerate the country’s transition to an environmentally sustainable energy system while creating millions of new jobs (estimates vary from two million to five million over the next 5 to 10 years). Green-collar jobs wouldn’t only be for engineers or Ph.D.’s; they would also include organic-food-industry workers, solar-panel installers, wind-turbine repairmen and green-home retrofitters. “This isn’t just the most important environmental question facing the country, it’s the most important economic question facing the country,” says John Podesta, the former chief of staff to Bill Clinton whose Center for American Progress has been churning out policy papers outlining how a green-collar economy would work. “Rather than make this just an environmental issue, arguing that this is central to the U.S. economy is a very compelling message.” While Beltway wonks have been planning political strategies, a number of nonprofits and big-city mayors (Cory Booker in Newark, Adrian Fenty in Washington) have been trying to initiate green-collar jobs programs. The movement’s unofficial spokesman is probably Van Jones, whose work with disadvantaged youth in Oakland led him to help found Green for All, which seeks $1 billion to create 250,000 new green jobs by 2012. There is a danger, Jones says, that the rewards of a green revolution could be confined to an “eco-elite” of people building solar homes and driving hybrids. That, he says, would be a hollow victory. “Here’s how you know you’re winning against global warming,” he says: “Do you see millions of people working on the problem? If you’re serious about this crisis, you should be able to look out the window and see that.” The new green icon shouldn’t be the polar bear, or the hybrid, he says: “It should be the guy with the green hard hat on, and a tool belt, fixing America.” JON GERTNER __________ COOL ALLEYS: Chicago spent the last 150 years building a reputation as a brawny, industrial town, with

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acres of warehouses and miles of train tracks. But Mayor Richard M. Daley wants to make Chicago the greenest city in the country. Perhaps his most successful project is Green Alleys, a plan to resurface the city’s alleyways with environmentally friendly materials, including permeable asphalt, permeable concrete and light-reflecting concrete. Currently some 1,900 miles of alleys — that’s 3,500 acres — have conventional impermeable surfaces, and most lack sufficient drainage to sewers. So when it rains, basements flood and standing water mixes with chemicals in the streets before draining into the city’s waterways. Permeable surfaces, on the other hand, allow water to seep through to the ground; the soil then filters out the pollutants. The light-reflecting concrete, meanwhile, is much lighter in color, reflecting the sun’s heat rather than absorbing it — in effect, cooling the city. Since it began six pilot projects in 2006, Chicago has resurfaced 15 to 20 alleys a year, and it plans to finish 30 this year. Janet Attarian, who oversees the project as the sustainability coordinator for the Chicago Department of Transportation, has fielded calls from dozens of towns and cities across the continent interested in initiating their own green-alleys programs. “I feel we’ve started a revolution,” she says. CLAY RISEN __________ WORKING OFFSETS: Depending on your perspective, carbon offsets are either a nifty way to balance carbon emissions that can’t be helped or the equivalent of medieval indulgences, letting people pay as little as $5 to erase the sin of flying from New York to Los Angeles. Jared Blumenfeld, the director of San Francisco’s 66-person Department of the Environment, seems to believe the latter. “Salving your conscience means you’re not taking other meaningful actions to reduce your carbon footprint,” he says. But when Blumenfeld read that the global offset market would be enormous by 2012, he decided that San Francisco should have one of its own. Unlike in a commercial program, these offsets would all be in San Francisco, where people could see their impact. His staff initially assumed the city would plant trees — they absorb carbon. But it turns out that an urban tree, which absorbs only about 22 pounds of carbon per year, costs about $350 to plant and $35 to $45 a year to water and maintain. Add it up and that’s $2,500 to offset a ton of carbon, or about $975 to counter that trip from New York to Los Angeles. Commercially available carbon offsets typically cost between $3 and $40 per ton. Blumenfeld says he thinks that’s too cheap, but he still wants the city’s offsets to cost less than $100 per ton. Eventually the city settled on three programs: installing solar panels and replacing inefficient refrigerators in low-income housing units and converting used restaurant grease into biodiesel. Each program meets the key offset criterion of additionality — that is, the carbon savings happen only when someone pays for them. The biodiesel program, which will happen first, starting this spring, has already given the department a taste of the complexity of its project. First, staff members had to calculate the cost of collecting the grease, converting it to diesel and delivering it to the pump, factoring in everything from permits to nozzles. Then they had to figure out how much carbon the process would generate and weigh that against the carbon benefit of converting waste into fuel. Finally, every person involved in the collection and refinement process had to sign agreements promising that the resulting carbon credits will belong to the city of San Francisco and won’t be sold to anyone else. “The green economy is nothing more than positive intentions interlocking with traditional economics,” explains Ben Jordan, a civil engineer who works with Biofuel Recycling Cooperative, which will administer the program. “The details are intense.” The entire San Francisco Carbon Fund is expected to be up and running within a year.

Its first customers will be city departments offsetting employee travel. Eventually, the fund will be open to the public, and Blumenfeld says he hopes the largest purchasers will be San Francisco-based corporations like Charles Schwab and the Gap. As the offset market grows, he says, companies are finding it hard to locate enough legitimate credits to meet their needs; it’s also a lot easier to verify that someone in San Francisco has a new, energy-efficient refrigerator than it is to determine whether someone has chopped down the tree you paid to have planted in Bangladesh. DASHKA SLATER

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__________ FAME IS GOOD: Edward Norton helps low-income families obtain solar panels; Daryl Hannah champions biodiesel; Robert Redford is at the forefront of the League of Conservation Voters’ effort to make global warming a presidential priority. So how do stars get aligned with causes? “A lot of it is through networking and friendships,” says Lindsay Guetschow, outreach director for stopglobalwarming.org. From her perspective, the ideal “is to find unlikely messengers.” Laurie David, who founded stopglobalwarming.org and was a producer on the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” has worked with many celebrities on projects like the comedy special “Earth to America!” and a college tour with Sheryl Crow. She says she gets calls weekly from entertainers who want to help. “There isn’t anybody I wouldn’t want to get involved,” she says. EMILY BIUSO

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April 20, 2008 THE GREEN ISSUE

Build EARTH WORKS: It seems the designers of the sod hut were on to something: living beneath a layer of dirt can be a good thing. When built correctly, a roof garden acts as natural insulation, keeping a building warm in winter and cool in summer. In urban settings, green roofs help mitigate runoff problems, absorbing, cleaning and straining rainwater and reducing the load on city sewers. One of the big factors delaying the widespread use of green roofs in the United States, however, particularly on the tops of old buildings, is how much soil weighs. Soil — or, more accurately, “growing medium” — is a matter of mixture. Sand and clay, the mineral matrix in which the fertile humus lodges, are heavy, and the average roof can bear only 30 to 40 pounds a square foot. To make lightweight soil, green-roof designers have typically replaced clay and sand with ceramics and shales, adding air to make these materials less dense. And now there’s garbage. Over the last few years, Paul Mankiewicz, executive director of the Bronx-based Gaia Institute, has designed one of the lightest, least-expensive soils on the market by using a patented process in which he blends locally made compost with recycled polystyrene, binding the two with a gel. “The soil has a small carbon footprint because the materials are local, diverted from the waste stream — we’ve got plenty of old polystyrene right here in New York,” Mankiewicz says. “And you don’t have to factor in the energy costs of firing and shipping the ceramics.” Even wet, the soil, at six inches deep, weighs only 15 pounds a square foot (natural soil weighs 60). Mankiewicz estimates that if every roof in New York were greened, the city would gain 26 square miles of new plants, and temperatures could drop by several degrees in summer, depending on the density of the plant cover and how much water was used. “Now to get an inexpensive system in place to water those gardens with a building’s gray water,” he says. “That’s my next dream.” TESS TAYLOR __________ BIOTECH: BioTech Boulder Community Hospital in Colorado became the first LEED-certified green hospital in America in 2003. But it took a waste audit financed by the Environmental Protection Agency to uncover a problem no one at the hospital had really thought about. Twenty percent of all the waste in the hospital’s Dumpsters, the auditors determined, consisted of just one item: blue wrap, which was used to sterilize surgical equipment — and then thrown away after one use. Boulder Community’s sterile-processing director requested $120,000 in hard containers for sterilization. Used tools are tossed into the hard containers, the containers and the tools are sterilized together and then reused again and again. By eliminating blue wrap, and by keeping it out of the trash, the outlay for the hard containers was recouped in just a year and a half, and there’s a fifth less trash in the waste stream, according to Kai Abelkis, Boulder Community’s sustainability coordinator since 2001. Recycling confidential documents instead of shredding them has cut costs by $90,000, Abelkis says. Switching to energy-efficient light bulbs has saved another $40,000. These and other success stories at Boulder Community have landed Abelkis speaking gigs this year in Australia and Canada. Other hospitals are starting to factor environmental impact into their business plans. “Twenty years ago there were cigarette machines in the lobby,” Abelkis says. “Nowadays you’d never think of smoking in a hospital. The culture’s changed, and continues to change.” ROBERT ANDREW POWELL __________

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HOW-TO SOLAR: The roof-mounted solar photovoltaic panels 1. generate electricity, which feeds into a device, an array disconnect 2., that allows the electricity to be turned on or off. An inverter 3. converts dc electricity to ac, making it compatible with common 110-volt household appliances, before it passes through a familiar circuit-breaker box 4. In a system like this one, excess electricity is returned to the utility grid 5.; in most states, homeowners earn an electrical “credit” they can use during cloudy periods. Currently, solar photovoltaic panels cost about $5 per watt, but new thin-film technologies could lower costs to less than $1 per watt within the next decade. BEN HEWITT __________ WASTE LAND: Earthships — solar homes made of natural and recycled materials — are all about waste: aluminum cans molded into walls, dirt-filled tires stacked like bricks. To hide their pedestrian appearance, the tires are plastered with adobe or cement. Michael Reynolds, an architect — he calls himself a biotect — living in Taos, N.M., came up with the concept in the mid-’70s. Motivated by the energy crisis, his ambition was to build an affordable home that would produce energy (from wind and solar power), collect water and snow in cisterns, contain and treat sewage and manufacture biodiesel fuel. Reynolds says he took his cue from Noah and his ark. He likes to boast that his creations have a total annual utility bill of a mere $100. In 1989, Reynolds started the first Earthship community, called Rural Earthship Alternative Community Habitat (REACH) on 55 acres just north of Taos. In 1994, a sustainable subdivision, called the Greater World Earthship Community, was built on 633 acres. Today, there are Earthship developments all over the world.

In Taos, you can rent a fully furnished and very high-tech Earthship — with high-speed wireless Internet access and digital satellite TV — for $135 a night. Reynolds, who is featured in Oliver Hodge’s recent documentary, “Garbage Warrior,” also runs workshops where he teaches people how to build their own earth-friendly houses, but for those who’d rather figure it out themselves, there’s his three-volume step-by-step series on how to build your own Earthship. Otherwise, you can hone your Earthship-building skills by traveling this summer to the Netherlands Antilles to help erect one (the cost is $350 a week, not including room and board or airfare). And Fannie Mae is now exploring environmental loans that might include Earthships. Though the average price hovers around $175 a square foot, it’s possible to spend more: in 1989, the actor Dennis Weaver built a $1 million, 10,000-square-foot Earthship in Ridgway, Colo. Call it an Earthyacht. ABBY ELLIN __________ A NEW LEAF: The first thing most visitors notice about the LEAFHouse is the interior design: the wall of windows and the spine of skylights; the kitchen with concrete and reclaimed-wood counters that follow the natural contours of the tree; the glowing waterfall encased in the living-room wall. It takes a moment to remember that the house is a test lab of advanced green-design technology. Those skylights support 34 photovoltaic panels that produce 770 kilowatt-hours a month — enough to power the household. That kitchen counter has an induction-cooking surface that runs on electromagnetic energy. The windows are clad in specialized shutters that adjust to the amount of exterior sunlight and help regulate the temperature inside. And the waterfall is a one-of-a-kind liquid desiccant system that uses calcium chloride to remove humidity from the air, mitigating the need for air-conditioning. A team from the University of Maryland created the LEAFHouse for the Department of Energy’s third Solar Decathlon. At last fall’s competition, the 800-square-foot prototype earned second place out of 20 for its ability to run completely off the grid and for its design, inspired by a leaf’s capacity to harvest solar energy. The home offers a glimpse into the future of energy-efficient living — but don’t call it sustainable. “We think that’s an uninspiring buzzword,” says Julie Gabrielli, an architect who served as a faculty adviser. “Nature is abundant. This house is about being lush and beautiful while having a light footprint.” A Web-based program called the Smart House Adaptive Control system, or SHAC, runs things. Created by two computer-engineering students, the Jetsons-like

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system monitors the house and adjusts the interior environment in sync with the exterior weather. If it’s sunny, SHAC dims the lights. If the extended weather report calls for clouds, SHAC warns you to conserve solar-energy reserves. Empyrean International, which manufactures the prefabricated Dwell Homes, is working with the Maryland team to bring it to market in 2009. ELIZABETH EVITTS DICKINSON __________ POINT SYSTEM: Twelve years ago, Boulder, Colo., implemented a Green Points program, encouraging builders to incorporate energy-saving and resource-saving features. A new house of, say, 4,000 square feet needs to earn at least 40 green points before its blueprints are approved. Each energy-saving addition is worth a certain number of points: insulated, precast concrete in the foundation is 2 points; planting up to five shade trees in the yard gets up to 5 points; energy-efficient windows or bolting photovoltaic panels to the roof can fetch as much as 10 points. The program was beefed up in February: now every new home must be tested for energy efficiency before it can be occupied. Houses must be disassembled rather than simply torn down, and at least 65 percent of the concrete, wood and other materials must be recycled; 50 percent of waste from the construction of a new house in place of an old one must also be recycled. Though Boulder aims to achieve zero-waste construction with this program, the city has been criticized for creating a unique set of rules instead of simply following the construction guidelines of the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council. But what else would you expect from a city that decided to conform to the Kyoto Protocol whether or not the U.S. government ever ratifies it? ROBERT ANDREW POWELL __________ LEARNING FROM KANSAS: Before Greensburg began to live up to its name, it was a dying town in rural Kansas. Then, last May, it was ravaged by a tornado, and most of its 1,400 residents were left homeless.

Some saw hope in the devastation. “We were left with a blank slate,” says Daniel Wallach, a resident from a nearby town who started Greensburg GreenTown, a nonprofit group devoted to making the place the ultimate energy-efficient community. There will be a biodiesel plant, LEED-certified churches and schools and geothermal-powered homes. “Ninety-five percent of the town was destroyed,” Wallach says. “You don’t get opportunities to reimagine towns from scratch.” Already, 26 public and commercial buildings (including the John Deere dealership) and half of the town’s homeowners have committed to sustainable rebuilding, Wallach says. The endeavor hasn’t gone unnoticed: Leonardo DiCaprio produced a documentary series about the town that will be broadcast on Discovery Planet Green, formerly the Discovery Home Channel, in June. The radical re-creation of this conservative farming town may seem unlikely, but the project, Wallach says, “gives meaning to our pain and suffering.” EMILY BIUSO __________ SKY HIGH: “Skyscrapers consume more energy and materials because of their height,” says Ken Yeang, a Malaysian architect based in Britain and a pioneer of “bioclimactic” skyscrapers. So his designs, like this prototype for a 26-story tower in Singapore, take into account the local climate and try to make the best use of air, wind, sunlight and local vegetation to cool and heat the structure. “If you can’t get away from the building’s form,” Yeang says, “you have to try to make them as green and germane as possible.” CHARLES WILSON. __________ FACTORY FRESH: Food manufacturers in the United States produce more than 105 million tons of carbon-dioxide emissions a year. That bothered John Z. Blazevich, the president and chief executive of Contessa Premium Foods in Los Angeles, so he decided that his new factory would minimize energy use. But

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to build his “Green Cuisine Plant,” the first LEED-certified frozen-food manufacturing plant in the country, Blazevich had to collaborate with the U.S. Green Building Council, which had yet to establish any standards for the industry. Contessa needed a four-million-cubic-foot facility that, because the company makes frozen food, would be almost entirely temperature-controlled — kept between 5 and 40 degrees — and energy efficient. Among the plant’s innovations is a heat-recovery system that captures the wasted energy produced by refrigeration compressors and uses it to heat water. A special loading dock minimizes the loss of refrigerated air, reducing temperature fluctuation — and thus energy use. A solar-power system cuts carbon-dioxide emissions by an amount equal to 730,000 pounds a year. In all, the building, which was completed in January, will produce two million pounds less carbon dioxide than a conventional plant of its size. That, Blazevich says, is the equivalent of keeping 200 cars off the road for a year, even as Contessa produces nearly 150 million pounds of frozen food. ABBY ELLIN __________ GREEN ACRES: Last July, a Florida real estate entrepreneur, Frank McKinney, broke ground on one of the largest, most expensive homes to be certified by the U.S. Green Building Council and the Florida Green Building Council. According to McKinney, the place, which he calls Acqua Liana, or “water flower,” is 3 times as large and 25 times as expensive as any home trying to gain certification by the U.S.G.B.C. The 15,000-square-foot home is being built on spec in Manalapan, Fla., and will be finished, McKinney says, next year. For a mere $29 million, the house’s owner will have enough solar panels to generate as much electricity as two average-size homes consume; a water system that collects and treats sufficient “gray” water (water used to wash dishes or bathe in, for example) to fill the average swimming pool every 14 days; pools, ponds and misters that will reduce the interior temperature two to three degrees below that of neighboring properties; and the satisfaction of knowing that enough reclaimed wood was used in construction to equal 10.5 acres of Brazilian rain forest. ABBY ELLIN

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April 20, 2008 THE GREEN ISSUE

Learn HOW GREEN IS MY CAMPUS?: At the University of Washington, the custodians follow a detailed green-cleaning policy. Spills are wiped up with Green Seal-certified disinfectants. Paper-towel dispensers are stocked with postconsumer recycled content. The commitment to the environment is evident all across campus. Dining Services buys local, organically grown food. The school’s fleet of cars and trucks contains more than 300 hybrid and alternative-fuel vehicles. The president, Mark Emmert, who adopted a policy on environmental stewardship when he took office in 2004, says: “For us it’s certainly a component of the image of who we are and what we want to be. Our students like it, our faculty likes it and our community here in the Pacific Northwest likes it.” Washington is one of only six schools to receive an A-, the highest grade attained on the 2008 College Sustainability Report Card, published annually by the Sustainable Endowments Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Grades were determined from public data and surveys of school administrators, then broken down into eight categories, from “Green Building” to “Shareholder Engagement.” The other schools with top marks are Carleton College in Minnesota, Harvard, Dartmouth, Middlebury College and the University of Vermont. The 200 schools with the largest endowments in the U.S. and Canada were graded. Four schools received F’s: Samford University in Birmingham, Ala.; Regent University in Virginia Beach; Howard University in Washington; and the Juilliard School in New York.

ROBERT ANDREW POWELL __________ THE IN CLUB AT M.I.T.: The goal of the Energy Club at M.I.T. is to give students “the tools they need to become fluent in all things energy,” Daniel Enderton, the group’s co-president, says. When Enderton, who is in his fifth year as a doctoral candidate in climate physics and chemistry, first arrived at M.I.T., the school’s approach to energy research was “somewhat Balkanized,” he says, with many people working “in their own worlds.” But in 2004 a group of graduate students from a class on sustainable energy began to meet weekly at the Muddy Charles Pub in Cambridge to share research ideas. These conversations evolved into a cross-disciplinary gathering of curious engineers, scientists and business students from the Sloan School of Management. Lara Pierpoint, the club’s vice president, is working on a Ph.D. in engineering systems, a program she began after getting a dual master’s in technology policy and nuclear engineering. “You can’t just do this in a lab,” she says. “There is absolutely no way to solve the energy crisis with just technology.” The club, she adds, brings together people who “speak all of the languages necessary for solving this huge, complex problem.” There are now 750 members of the Energy Club, most of them graduate students. Each October, the club organizes Energy Night, which Enderton says is meant to be “quite literally a party around energy at M.I.T.” It’s an M.I.T. kind of party. Groups of students and professors meet to show their work and the knotty problems it presents, hoping to capture both the attention and the imagination of Energy Club members and others. Last year, 1,200 people participated. The club also sponsors an annual spring conference that attracts researchers from academia, energy start-ups and established businesses and venture capitalists like John Doerr who are making the transition from an intellectual and financial interest in information technology to one in energy. “This is a good time to start a career in energy,” Enderton says.

“These are such long time-scale problems that we’re grappling with. But they’re also very ripe right now. You can’t help being sucked into the allure of all this.” AARON RETICA

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__________ MAJORING IN GREEN: Time was, environmental-studies majors ran campus recycling programs. Now they run national campaigns. In 2004, the former student activists Kassie Rohrbach (Connecticut College), Liz Veazey (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Billy Parrish (Yale) and Arthur Coulston (University of California, Santa Cruz) helped form the Energy Action Coalition, which swelled quickly and now has tens of thousands of members. Eighteen months ago, the E.A.C. started its first major initiative: the Campus Climate Challenge, which aims to persuade 1,000 campuses (including elementary and high schools) to go carbon neutral, or at least commit to using 100 percent clean energy. For those interested in pursuing a green-friendly career, Boston Architectural College now offers a green-design certificate that can be completed online; Carnegie Mellon and the University of Texas at Austin offer master’s degrees in sustainable design. At the University of Texas, students can take classes like Topics on Sustainable Development, in which the teacher, Steven Moore, brings together architecture, law, engineering and business students to tackle environmental problems. College students who want to blend the old (beer drinking) with the green should look up a group of students and their professor at M.I.T. Their solar-powered bottle sorter should do the trick. CHRISTIAN DEBENEDETTI __________ VEGAS’S NEW GAME: Eco School DesignA few years ago, Paul Gerner began to gather a group of architects in Las Vegas to ask them what it would take to design a public school that used 50 percent less energy, cost much less to build and markedly enhanced student learning. The resounding response was disbelief. “I think half of them fell off their chairs,” Gerner says. Gerner manages school facilities for Clark County, Nev., a district roughly the size of Massachusetts. By 2018, 143,000 additional students will enter the already crowded public-education system. Gerner needs 73 new schools to house them. Four architecture teams are nearly finished designing elementary-school prototypes; they plan to construct their schools starting in 2009. The district will then assess how well the schools perform, and three winners will replicate those designs in 50 to 70 new buildings. Green schools are popping up all over, but in Clark County, which stands out for its scope, such aggressive targets are difficult because design requirements like more natural light for students bump up against the realities of a desert climate. “One of the biggest challenges is getting the right site orientation,” Mark McGinty, a principal at SH Architecture, says. His firm recently completed a high school in Las Vegas that applied for LEED Silver certification. “You have the same building, same set of windows, but if you orient it incorrectly and it faces the sun, it will be really expensive to cool.’ Paradoxically, the man responsible for one of the most progressive green-design competitions is skeptical about many sustainable-building ideas. “I don’t believe in the new green religion,” Gerner says. “Some of the building technologies that you get are unfeasible. It’s a lot of snake oil. I’m interested in hard-core engineering that works.” But he wouldn’t mind if some green features inspire students. He says he hopes to install renewable-energy systems that expose them to the process of harvesting wind and solar power. “You never know what’s going to spark the interest of a child to study math and science,” he says. ELIZABETH EVITTS DICKINSON __________ WENDY WENDLANDT: As president of Green Century Capital Management, Wendy Wendlandt oversees two “green” mutual funds. Though it’s a rare argument to hear from a money manager, she says the highest possible returns are not everything for her funds. “It shouldn’t come as a surprise that you are going to make a little bit less if you’re not investing in a huge polluter like Exxon Mobil,” she says. Though Green Century has had years in which it outperformed competitors, returns of both funds have been about 2.5 percent below the industry average over the last three years. The emergence of half a dozen green mutual

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funds suggests that not all money managers (or their clients) care only about the bottom line. Most of these funds screen out holdings in oil, tobacco and companies with poor environmental profiles. Some (like Winslow Green Growth) invest only in “clean” small-cap companies and in areas like renewable energy; Green Century buys emerging green technologies as well as larger corporations, like Coca-Cola, whose policies they aim to shape as activist shareholders. One proposal by Green Century spurred Whole Foods to remove baby bottles that contained a chemical that mimics estrogen. “I am not sure it’s true that if we just all change our individual actions, we could change the world,” Wendlandt says. Green Century is a way of “making a difference using the power of money.” CHARLES WILSON

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