For years, the cows at Green Mountain Dairy here in Vermont produced only milk and manure. But recently they have generated something else: electricity.

The farm is part of a growing alternative energy program that converts the methane gas from cow manure into electricity that is sold to the power utility's grid.

But this new program is only made possible through the contribution of taxpayers:

Residents and businesses that get their electricity from the program pay a premium of 4 cents a kilowatt hour above the typical rate of 12.5 cents. Most of that money goes to the farmers, who must purchase their own equipment, which can run up to $2 million per farm. Most farmers expect to make back their investment in 7 to 10 years.

The brothers who own Green Mountain Dairy, Bill and Brian Rowell, were looking to squeeze more profit from their farm, where they have 1,050 cows and have begun acquiring 600 heifers. Milk prices had dipped and they wanted another source of income.

They also thought that the huge amount of waste their cows produced could be used for something other than fertilizer. So they decided to give electricity a try, armed with about $750,000 in federal, state and utility company grants.

It's a great story, where the Cow Power provides electricity to 300-350 homes a year.

"We're making a resource out of a waste stream," said Bill Rowell, who is running for the State Senate. In return, the Rowells receive a payment based on the wholesale cost of power, which averages about 7 cents per kilowatt hour, plus the 4-cent premium. Mr. Rowell said they earned about $200,000 from electricity annually, and with the additional cows should receive $235,000 to $240,000 in revenue from electricity.

But wait! There's more:

The Rowells are also transforming commercial waste. The farm processes about 500,000 gallons of waste and outdated ice cream from Ben & Jerry's each year and puts it in the digester. The free ice cream, which the company drops off, helps the Rowells generate more electricity and saves Ben & Jerry's the cost of disposing of it. “We’re improving our processes, and they’re improving theirs,” Mr. Rowell said.

The digester produces more than electricity. After 21 days, the waste is pumped through a separator, which siphons off the liquid into a silo and drops the solids into a barn.

The liquid manure is used as fertilizer, while the solids are used for cow bedding. The bedding saves the Rowells thousands of dollars a month on sawdust, and they sell the excess to garden stores.

Remember, though, that these programs are only made possible by all of us taxpayers getting together to contribute enough money to jump start them. Many problems are just too big for individuals to solve themselves, and that's why government intervention is necessary for certain nascent industries, like those servicing the Green Economy.

Hopefully we can turn the corner, finally, on the last 30 years of demonizing the government and realize that there is a positive supportive role for government to play in our lives. Remember: Government is only a tool, of the people and by the people, and it's not some "other" entity working against us. If we are to move forward in the new Green Economy of the 21st Century, we must move past the ideology of Ronald Reagan, who said, "Government isn't the solution, it's part of the problem." In fact, the exact opposite is the case today...

Vote wisely on November 4th with this in mind...

The National Snow and Ice Data Center has reported that sea ice in the Arctic now covers about 2.03 million square miles. The lowest point since satellite measurements began in 1979 was 1.65 million square miles, last September.

With about three weeks left in the Arctic summer, this year could wind up breaking that record, scientists said.

Yikes!

And if that wasn't bad enough, we now have methane belching out of the arctic, too:

On top of that, researchers are investigating "alarming" reports in the last few days of the release of methane from long-frozen Arctic waters, possibly from the warming of the sea, said Bill Hare, a Greenpeace climate scientist, who was attending a climate conference in Ghana. Giant burps of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas, is a long-feared effect of warming in the Arctic that would accelerate warming even more, according to scientists.

Indeed, the feedback loop might have reached the point of no return already:

"We could very well be in that quick slide downward in terms of passing a tipping point," said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the data center, in Boulder, Colo. "It's tipping now. We're seeing it happen now."

Five climate scientists, four of them specialists on the Arctic, told The Associated Press that it was fair to call what was happening in the Arctic a "tipping point."

Feeling warm and cozy?

1) Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Fruit - From Foodnews.org, this handy-dandy guide reminds you which fruit needs washing and which ones don't. Better yet, which fruits should be organic to avoid pesticides altogether. #1 worst fruit for pesticides? The beloved Peach! argh....

2) PlasticPicks - From #1 to #7, learn which ones to avoid and which ones to recycle.

3) Top Five Synthetic Chemicals to Avoid - Parabens, Phthalates, Triclosan, Petrochemicals, & Coal Tar. Yuck! Read about where these chemicals appear in our daily diet of purchases, from hair dye to antibacterial agents, some causing cancer...Yuck!

4) Pocket Seafood Selector - From Best to OK to Worst Choices, learn which fish are filled with mercury, which are over fished, and which fish are farmed in environmentally harmful ways. Also available at the Monterey Bay Aquarium website.

Impress your friends at dinner! Score that winning point with your date! Turn your mom into an environmentalist! Save the Planet!

The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows.

From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say. The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets.

"These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, 'Look how badly you are treating me,'" said Dr. Josep-Maria Gili, a leading jellyfish expert, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years.

Indeed, the message these little critters are really sending is more like, "GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER, HUMANS!"

How many other little signals do we need before we change our ways and stop damaging the planet? The call to, "Save the Planet," is really more like, "Save the Humans!"

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

It's a fascinating way to look at the problem of overconsumption. For instance, did you know that it takes something like 70 garbage cans of "stuff" to make just one garbage can of "stuff" that you end up throwing out?

It's time to figure out a way to disassemble the process set up over the past few decades that has created this overconsumption so that we can use less and spend more time on family, friends, and other "stuff" that really makes us happy.

In other words: STOP SHOPPING!!

~~~~~~

After you watch the video, you can then follow these 10 steps to help us get to a new paradigm.

For many people, summer is the time to take the cooking and parties outdoors. If you want to create the perfect patio environment, keep the natural environment in mind as well; by choosing products that conserve resources and minimize pollution, you can enjoy your outdoor surroundings while also preserving them.

The article details greener building material, furniture, grills, lighting, and insect control. For instance:

Avoid using electric or propane-fueled bug traps, which contribute to global warming. Instead, consider natural alternatives to repelling pests such as burning citronella candles or surrounding your patio with plants that repel insects (such as marigolds or geraniums).

Read on, oh Suburb Dwellers...

We believe that these days, sustainable seafood of the highest quality and taste is only possible when it comes from artisans who carefully cultivate or harvest with a depth of tradition, stewardship, and respect for the communities and precious ecosystems in which we all eat and live.

CleanFish, which works with around two dozen aquafarms and wild fisheries, has become a valued resource for all kinds of environmental groups. Says president Tim O'Shea:

"Folks from the David & Lucile Packard Foundation recently called us and said they know shrimpers in Mexico's Sea of Cortez who want to become more sustainable but are afraid they won't find customers who'll care."

Thanks to CleanFish, those shrimpers now sell their Fisherman's Daughter brand of sustainable shrimp to restaurants like Akasha in Culver City, California.

Support CleanFish by telling the next restaurant in which you eat to contact them in order to purchase their food from these small eco-conscious fisheries!

It depends on what we eat:

Right now, there is enough grain grown on earth to feed 10 billion vegetarians, said Joel E. Cohen, professor of populations at Rockefeller University and the author of "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" But much of it is being fed to cattle, the S.U.V.'s of the protein world, which are in turn guzzled by the world's wealthy.

Theoretically, there is enough acreage already planted to keep the planet fed forever, because 10 billion humans is roughly where the United Nations predicts that the world population will plateau in 2060. But success depends on portion control; in the late 1980s, Brown University's World Hunger Program calculated that the world then could sustain 5.5 billion vegetarians, 3.7 billion South Americans or 2.8 billion North Americans, who ate more animal protein than South Americans.

So, was Malthus correct when he predicted that the earth's population explosion would sink us into depravity?

As Harriet Friedmann, an expert on food systems at the University of Toronto, pointed out, Malthus was writing in a Britain that echoed the dichotomy between today's rich countries and the third world: an elite of huge landowners practicing "scientific farming" of wool and wheat who made fat profits; many subsistence farmers barely scratching out livings; migration by those farmers to London slums, followed by emigration. The main difference is that emigration then was to colonies where farmland was waiting, while now it is to richer countries where jobs are.

Dr. Friedmann argues that there is a Malthusian unsustainability to the way big agriculture is practiced, that it degrades genetic diversity and the environment so much that it will eventually reach a tipping point and hunger will spread.

It's even more sinister according to Dr. Cohen, of Rockefeller University: "Americans like Malthus because he takes the blame off us. Malthus says the problem is too many poor people."

Indeed, the rich Western nations think that global warming is due to new developing nations around the world:

Or, to put it in the terms in which the current crisis is usually explained: too many hard-working Chinese and Indians who think they should be able to eat pizza, meat and coffee and aspire to a reservation at Chez Panisse. They get blamed for raising global prices so much that poor Africans and Asians can't afford porridge and rice. The truth is, the upward pressure was there before they added to it.

Finally, as the author properly points out, the US and other European nations subsidize their already-rich farmers at the expense of their poorer brethren around the globe::

America has always been charitable, so the answer has never been, "Let them eat bean sprouts." But it has been, "Let them eat subsidized American corn shipped over in American ships." That may need to change.

Exactly...

Shifting just one day per week of red meat consumption to chicken, fish, or eggs achieves a reduction equivalent to 760 miles of driving. Shifting one day of red meat per week to fruits and veggies is the equivalent of 1,160 miles of driving. Swapping red meat entirely for other meats reduces the equivalent of 5,340 miles of driving. And going fully vegetarian is practically like giving up a car: 8,100 miles of driving. And when you think about it, this is good news for most of us. Cutting down food miles can actually be rather difficult. Cutting back on meat is fairly simple.

It's very clear that cutting down in red meat consumption cuts your carbon footprint considerably. Not only are you cutting down your demand for "Killer Cow Emissions," but you'll be cutting down on your artery-clogging fat intake. And in case you need some ideas on how to make the shift to a more veggie-friendly diet, you can read this recent article from cookbook author and food writer, Mark Bittman in the NY Times:

Let's suppose you've decided to eat less meat, or are considering it. And let's ignore your reasons for doing so. They may be economic, ethical, altruistic, nutritional or even irrational. The arguments for eating less meat are myriad and well-publicized, but at the moment they're irrelevant, because what I want to address here is (almost) purely pragmatic: How do you do it?

I'm not talking about eating no meat; I'm talking about cutting back, which in some ways is harder than quitting. Vegetarian recipes and traditions are everywhere. But in the American style of eating -- with meat usually at the center of the plate -- it can be difficult to eat two ounces of beef and call it dinner.

Cutting back on meat is not an isolated process. Unlike, say, taking up meditation or exercise, it usually has consequences for others.

The keys are to keep at least some of your decisions personal so they affect no one but yourself and, when they do affect others, minimize the pain and don't preach. (No one likes a proselytizer.)

The article goes on from there, and TerraPass has written about him, as well:

The tips aren't all that surprising. Just solid good sense. Buy less meat. Stop making protein the center of the plate. Learn some new recipes.

You can even watch the following 20 minute video of Bittman giving a talk at a recent TED presentation:

Capturing carbon from these plants may become a lot more important soon. Emissions from coal-fired power plants already account for about 27 percent of American greenhouse emissions, but as prices for other fuels rise, along with power demand, utilities will burn more coal. And if cars someday run on batteries, a trend that $4-a-gallon gasoline will accelerate, then the utilities will burn even more fuel to generate the electricity to recharge those batteries.

It's much easier to control the carbon emitted by a few hundred power plants than from the millions of cars and chimneys cranking out the stuff now. The only problem is that we haven't built a carbon-sequestering power plant yet, and as it turns out, it's very hard to get that first one built:

Supplying electricity is not like most other businesses. Unlike the companies that make microchips, clothing for teenagers or snack foods, the companies that make electricity can see no advantage in going first. This is true for the traditionally regulated utilities that can charge everything to a captive class of customers (if regulators approve), and it is also true for the "merchant generators," who build power plants and sell their output on the open market.

Basically, no one wants to go first, which is why the government must be involved in jump-starting this industry.

The point was illustrated by a recent decision by the Virginia State Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities, to turn down an application by the Appalachian Power Company to build a plant that would have captured 90 percent of its carbon and deposited it nearly two miles underground, at a well that it dug in 2003. The applicant’s parent was American Electric Power, one of the nation's largest coal users, and perhaps the most technically able. But the company is a regulated utility and spends money only when it can be reimbursed.

The Virginia commission said that it was "neither reasonable nor prudent" for the company to build the plant, and the risks for ratepayers were too great, because costs were uncertain, perhaps double that of a standard coal plant. And in a Catch-22 that plagues the whole effort, the commission said A.E.P. should not build a commercial-scale plant because no one had demonstrated the technology on a commercial scale.

It's exactly because of this Catch-22 situation that the Federal government needs to take charge of this nascent industry, and it's just egregious that we've wasted the past eight years without building one carbon-sequestering power plant.

Let's not wasted anymore time...

Now, in this country right now, we are spending $2 billion a year subsidizing the big four sports: baseball, basketball, football and hockey. It accounts for all of the profits of that industry and more. Now, there may be individual teams that make money, but the industry as a whole is not profitable. And that's astonishing because the big four leagues are exempt from the laws of competition. By the way, irony is not dead, because here are people who are in the business of competition on the field who are exempted by law from the rules of economic competition.

George Steinbrenner is getting over $600 million for the new Yankee Stadium in New York. The New York Mets are getting over $600 million. In fact, the City of New York gave them money to lobby against the taxpayers to get more money. Rudy Giuliani gave $50 million to the two teams for that purpose.

Johnston also points out the connection between tax-payer subsidized sports stadiums and the demise of public parks, with the concomitant repercussions of urban violence:

At the same time that we're doing this, we are starving our public parks for money. And I show in Free Lunch how the rise of urban gangs and now suburban gangs is connected to this. We used to have all sorts of programs in this country after World War II for young men and young women on Saturdays and during the summer and school holidays, where even if you didn't have any money -- didn't matter that your parents didn't have any money, because -- and I know this because I did it as a child -- you could go to any one of a half-dozen different places, and there were organized activities to keep you out of trouble. After all, idle hands are the devil's workshop is not exactly a radical new idea. Well, we've cut and cut and cut those programs to fund two different subsidies: one to sports teams' owners, one that goes to Tyco, General Electric, Honeywell and some other big companies. And, lo and behold, we've had a big rise in urban violence because of the vacuum being filled by young people who no longer have these organized activities.

This issue is particularly relevant to the new Yankees Stadium going up in the Bronx today, as the NY Times is reporting:

The cost of replacing two popular parks where the new Yankee Stadium is being built has nearly doubled. At the same time, several of the eight new parks, which were supposed to be completed before the new stadium opens next spring, have been delayed by as much as two years, according to city documents.

None of the replacement parks have been completed, and construction on several has not yet started; however, the parks department has built a temporary replacement park on a parking lot in the area, opened a ball field this spring at a school almost a mile to the east, and is building a sports field at a recreation center about a mile to the north.

As Johnston discusses in his book, local residents are pissed:

"We've lost our biggest park, and what we've been reduced to is this parking lot,” said Anita Antonetty, 51, a South Bronx resident, referring to the temporary park at Jerome Avenue and East 161st Street. "We lost hundreds of trees that were 80 years old, and now there's this monstrosity of cement across the street from where people live."

These delays are going to last FIVE years, while the stadium is scheduled to open on time next year:

The delays mean the neighborhood will go at least five years without some of its sports fields: Stadium construction in Macombs Dam Park started in 2006, and the permanent replacement park will not be completed until 2011. "The real emphasis was on building a stadium for the Yankees, and the community and the parks were an inconvenient afterthought," said Christian DiPalermo, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, an advocacy group. "The Yankees couldn't miss a season, but it was O.K. for the community to miss five years of parkland and be shut out of a community benefits agreement."

The new Yankees stadium is straight up corporate welfare, and when it affects the parks system, it hits the trifecta of appearing in our DEMOCRACY, EARTH, & MONEY sections - a perfect example of Consilience, where seemingly disparate ideas are actually connected in more than one way.

It's up to us to fight corporate welfare and focus on our neighborhoods and community building. Let's stop the transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest, a practice which is eating at the moral fiber of this country and turning our society upside down.

~~~
Watch the David Kay Johnston interview on Democracy Now!

Dramatic evidence of the break-up of the Arctic ice-cap has emerged from research during an expedition by the Canadian military.

Scientists travelling with the troops found major new fractures during an assessment of the state of giant ice shelves in Canada's far north.

According to another scientist on the expedition, Dr Luke Copland of the University of Ottawa,

"We're seeing very dramatic changes; from the retreat of the glaciers, to the melting of the sea ice.

"We had 23% less (sea ice) last year than we've ever had, and what's happening to the ice shelves is part of that picture."

And yet another researcher, Derek Mueller of Trent University, Ontario, remarked:

"I was astonished to see these new cracks. It means the ice shelf is disintegrating, the pieces are pinned together like a jigsaw but could float away."

It seems like every new discovery up there just reinforces the idea that the Arctic is just melting away...

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it's not an easy one to answer. I don't know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in "An Inconvenient Truth" came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That's when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

Pollan is one of the great environmental writers of our time and is always cogent and clear as he builds his case throughout the essay. Don't miss it - as well as his others!

Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated in a published paper that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan -- a Camry, say -- to the ultra-efficient Prius.

Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

How much meat do we Americans consume?

Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government's recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein.

Protein from plants works just fine, and the 30 grams or so we get from non-meat sources is plenty in one day.

The health issues are one thing, the impact on the environment is another:

Perhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers' becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production. "When you look at environmental problems in the U.S.," says Professor Eshel, "nearly all of them have their source in food production and in particular meat production. And factory farming is 'optimal' only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff becomes costly -- even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag -- the entire structure of food production will change dramatically."

And then there's the issue of whether it's moral to eat meat in the first place:

Animal welfare may not yet be a major concern, but as the horrors of raising meat in confinement become known, more animal lovers may start to react. And would the world not be a better place were some of the grain we use to grow meat directed instead to feed our fellow human beings?

That's an issue that is complicated and involved, that's for sure. But in the meantime, we can certainly focus on how meat-eating is harming the environment:

Mark Rosegrant of the International Food Policy Research Institute says he foresees "a stronger public relations campaign in the reduction of meat consumption -- one like that around cigarettes -- emphasizing personal health, compassion for animals, and doing good for the poor and the planet."

And the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, in its detailed 2006 study of the impact of meat consumption on the planet, "Livestock's Long Shadow," made a similar point: "There are reasons for optimism that the conflicting demands for animal products and environmental services can be reconciled. Both demands are exerted by the same group of people ... the relatively affluent, middle-to-high-income class, which is no longer confined to industrialized countries. ... This group of consumers is probably ready to use its growing voice to exert pressure for change and may be willing to absorb the inevitable price increases" of alternative food choices.

Or as Michael Pollan so aptly puts it in this essay of his: "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's ambitious dream to remake New York City streets with an elaborate plan for congestion pricing appeared to die Monday in a private conference room on the third floor of the State Capitol.

It was there that Democratic members of the State Assembly, who control the chamber, held one final meeting to debate the merits of Mr. Bloomberg's plan, ultimately conferring -- in secret -- before Sheldon Silver, the speaker, emerged to announce the outcome. The opposition was so overwhelming, he said, that he would not hold an open vote of the full Assembly, though many Republicans were supportive of Mr. Bloomberg.

It's pretty outrageous that the speaker, Sheldon Silver, wouldn't even hold an open vote on one of the biggest environmental issues this city has faced in the new century. Our representatives are supposed to be employed by us, but how can we decide if we want to keep someone in their job if they vote in secret? It's totally unacceptable and really is one of the "biggest cop-outs in New York's history," as Bloomberg's office remarked.

Silver's rationale for holding the secret meeting?

"The congestion pricing bill did not have anywhere near a majority of the Democratic conference, and will not be on the floor of the Assembly," Mr. Silver, who represents the Lower East Side of Manhattan, said after his meeting with fellow Democrats.

Bruno, the Republican majority leader, remarked, "We were prepared to bring it to the flooor if it served any meaningful purpose." Mr. Bruno continued: "It's 354 Million dollars that is there to help clean up the environment, the pollution in New York City, the congestion, the efficiency, the effectiveness and its, I think, kind of a lark, but, well, we're not taking it up today and the Assembly already indicated it's dead."

What a joke that it didn't even make it to the floor for a vote.