EPA Putting Tighter Leash on Makers of Flea and Tick Products
Posted by Mary Catherine O'Connor March 18th, 2010 
View Comments
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has outlined plans, announced last year, to place new restrictions on products designed to prevent flea and tick infestations on cats and dogs.
The agency is taking action because in 2008 it received nearly double the number of reports of adverse reactions and, in some cases, death, in dogs and cats who were treated with the pesticide products, as compared to the number received in 2007. Of the 44,263 reports in 2008, 600 resulted in the death of an animal.
The EPA’s Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances formed a task force and reviewed many reported incidents, finding that two pesticides, cyphenothrin and permethrin, were linked to reports of adverse reactions to the topical treatments. The EPA’s research also showed that small dogs more commonly showed adverse reactions to the treatments, compared to medium or large dogs. And overall, cats had more adverse reactions that dogs.
Can the EPA’s Lisa Jackson Rally Black Communities Around the Environment?
Posted by Amelia Timbers March 16th, 2010 View Comments
Although environmental harm is disproportionately concentrated in low-income communities and communities of color, so far the green movement has largely been one of white people. The EPA’s latest top gun, Lisa Jackson, is its first African American administrator and also the first EPA administrator unafraid to speak frankly about the important overlap between environmentalism and race.
Although leaders tout the promise of green jobs uplifting urban populations, this heyday hasn’t arrived yet. Instead, the environmental movement has so far failed to meaningfully engage communities of color, though these communities often bear the brunt of environmental sins such as toxic dumping, contamination, landfills and plants that wealthy NIMBYs fought off. For the most part, typical environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace have not addressed domestic environmental justice issues, or have only done so narrowly.
What if Doing Well Means Getting Sued?
Posted by Leon Kaye March 16th, 2010 View Comments
Dr. Peter Cappelli of Pennsylvania University’s Wharton School recently finished a study that suggests Indian firms succeed because they often have a strong social mission. Doing well financially is possible, Cappelli and his team of researchers assert, because they are “doing good.” Indeed, a cursory look at large Indian corporations offers commendable mission statements: Tata Group’s value and purpose include a goal to “improve the quality of life of the communities” in which it serves. Reliance Industries Inc. equates growth with care for good health, safety, the environment, and people. Many Indian conglomerates list an impressive range of projects that improve the lives of Indians and citizens abroad. Cappelli concludes, therefore, that American business leaders should serve all of a company’s stakeholders, not just its shareholders.
Unfortunately, US law is in the way of any company striving to do good.
Defining Corporate Citizenship
Posted by Cindy Mehallow March 15th, 2010 View Comments
How much of a role should business play in tackling global questions such as climate change, unemployment, restoring trust in the aftermath of the financial crisis and distributing international aid? What is the nature and extent of the private sector’s responsibility in resolving these issues? At what point should corporations step alongside government and help shoulder some of the burden? These questions, which go to the very heart of defining corporate citizenship and corporate social responsibility, are some of the issues that will be discussed at the Economist’s 2010 Corporate Citizenship Conference kicking off this week. In light of the financial crisis, this year’s convocation will rightfully explore restoring trust and increasing transparency in the financial markets and job creation, in addition to balance in international aid and post-Copenhagen strategies for moving forward.
The conference line-up features a veritable who’s who of big names in sustainability and leading thinkers from the public sector including: Diana Taylor managing director of Wolfensohn & Co. and former president of the World Bank; US Department of Labor deputy secretary Seth Harris; Loews Hotels chairman and CEO Jonathan M. Tisch; and Steve Case, co-founder of America Online and chairman and CEO of Revolution. A highlight will be a conversation with President Bill Clinton who will likely provide an update on the Clinton Global Initiative.
Plot to Stop AB32 Thickens
Posted by Mary Catherine O'Connor March 12th, 2010 View Comments
You might want to start taking notes on the effort in California to shelve the state’s landmark emissions control legislation, the Global Warming Solutions Act (aka AB32). It’s getting interesting.
First off, the Sacramento Bee reports that papers filed today in Sacramento identify Scott Folwarkow, Valero’s director of government affairs in California, and Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, as officers of the fundraising committee that is bankrolling the effort to petition for AB32 postponement. This confirms widely-held suspicions that the Texas oil company Valero–which operates two oil refineries in California (in Benicia and Wilmington)–is behind the effort to stop the effort to curb emissions in California. As more details about the funding behind the opposition effort come to light, perhaps oil company Tesoro’s role will become clearer, too.
The movement needed a sugar-daddy like Valero because the petition drive and ballot initiative will require serious funding. But ironically, one of the leaders of the AB32 opposition movement, now opposes the opposition. Pete Costa of the anti-tax group People’s Advocate, and an author of the original legislation to suspend AB32, says that the oil companies have shut him and his group out of the campaign. Costa said in an interview: “I wanted to do a grass-roots operation and involve a lot of people. But they believe they can run this thing out of the country club, and to hell with the little people of California. If they have half a million dollars, how come they haven’t reported it?”
More Solar Panels for San Jose Schools
Posted by Jim Witkin March 12th, 2010 View Comments
San Jose extended its commitment to renewable energy this week, with a ground breaking ceremony for a 3.7 MW solar project to be built at six school sites in the East Side Union High School District. The ceremony took place at Santa Teresa High School in San Jose, and was attended by district, government and business officials, as well as several student representatives.
When the six sites go online later this year, they are expected to reduce electric utility costs by more than $1.5 million in the first year, $7.6 million over five years, and provide total savings of $36 million over the life of the project. Savings come from reduced electricity costs, and also from generous state incentives and additional revenues from the sale of renewable energy credits. As for environmental benefits, the project is expected to reduce carbon emissions by more than 3,100 metric tons per year.
“Our schools will all benefit from these savings, especially in these tough economic times when they’re needed most,” said East Side Union High School District Interim Superintendent Dan Moser, in a press release issued Thursday. “Also, this project reduces our carbon footprint and allows us to incorporate solar into our teaching curriculum so our teachers and students can learn about renewable energy technologies firsthand.”
Through a series of workshops, the District’s teachers will learn how they can use hands-on solar kits and activity guides in the classroom to teach students about solar energy.
AB32: Report Forecasts Job Losses, But Governor Says Hogwash
Posted by Mary Catherine O'Connor March 11th, 2010 View Comments
A report from California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office concludes that implementation of Assembly Bill 32, or AB32, would result in near-term job losses. But Governor Schwarzenegger isn’t buying it.
AB32, or the Global Warming Solutions Act, was passed in 2006 and calls for reducing California’s emissions of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020. But an opposition group, which calls itself the California jobs Initiative, is petitioning to have AB32 suspended. The group (which may be funded in part by oil companies) claims that the law would cost California “up to 1.1 million jobs, cost the average family $3,857 annually, add nearly $50,000 a year to the average small business’s costs.”
Senator Dave Cogdill (R-Fresno) asked the Analyst’s Office to analyze the net impact that AB32 would have on jobs in California, so Legislative analyst Mac Taylor penned a 10-page report that attempts to do so, using the AB32 Scoping Plan—the government’s blueprint for implementation of AB32—as its research material. (The LOA report mentions that Scoping Plan is currently being revised, but moved ahead with its analysis of the current Plan.)
Energy Secretary Chu Fields Questions at ECO:nomics
Posted by Chris Zwicke March 9th, 2010 View Comments
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, fresh from the inaugural ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, was the final and perhaps most anticipated speaker at last week’s ECO:nomics conference. Throughout the conference, regulatory uncertainty had been the greatest complaint of energy execs and venture capitalists alike. In comparison, the recession had up to this point been addressed rather cursorily: while it has certainly sapped financing for potentially disruptive technologies, the established players at the conference largely claimed that they had not reduced their innovation spend.
*image from energy.gov
Chu’s initial remarks focused on the DOE’s R&D priorities (with fun acronyms like BEET-IT) and Recovery Act investments. His tone balancing patience with urgency, he advocated for a comprehensive energy bill with a long-term signal that “there will be a cap on carbon and that cap will ratchet down.” Referencing the shifts from wood to coal and from coal to oil and natural gas, he noted that “shifts in energy supplies take decades, typically half a century,” even when the new supplies are economically superior, but that climate change demands we do it faster. During his talk, decades were often the timeframe, e.g., to work out siting and costing issues in long range transmission with centralized renewables. At the same time, Chu invoked China, more often than climate, as a reason to hurry: “We can still be the leader in this new industrial revolution…but the train is leaving the station.”
Soda Tax Ideas Grow Among Local Governments
Posted by Tori Okner March 8th, 2010 View Comments
The notion of a soda tax has taken on new importance over the last few weeks as local governments increasingly consider the proposition–the term is loosely used to encompass any tax on sweetened beverages, both to be paid by the consumer and the producer. This week, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter put forth his 2011 budget proposal, including a 2 cent-per-ounce tax on sugary drinks. Last week, Colorado Governor Ritter signed a series of tax bills in an effort to keep the budget balanced and, in the process, implemented a similar tax. Two weeks ago, California Democratic Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez introduced a bill to tax sugary drinks. In New York, 2010 marks the second year that Governor Paterson has proposed taxing sugary beverages, and similar proposals are gaining traction across the country.
The possibility of a soda tax grabbed headlines at Triple Pundit and with mainstream media last September when President Obama deemed it worth consideration in an interview with Men’s Health. At the time, no such tax had been proposed in Congress. Earlier in the year, the Senate Finance Committee included it in a paper on funding options for health care reform. Yet, despite several reputable reports in support of the tax, published by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, researches at UCLA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Committee did not suggest a National Soda Tax in its 2009 Health Reform Proposal. Reaction to the omission by the Committee lead to prescient stipulation that state government would adopt soda tax before the federal government.
A Day of Energy at ECO:nomics
Posted by Chris Zwicke March 5th, 2010 View Comments
Allan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal, suggests that the Journal started its ECO:nomics conference several years ago largely because of the near certainty of federal carbon legislation. At the third annual ECO:nomics conference this week, prospects for such legislation (e.g., a price on carbon) are murkier. This uncertainty was one of the key themes running through a suite of energy-focused sessions on the conference’s main day. The sessions covered a wide spectrum of the energy sector, from fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) to renewables (solar and wind); from established electric utilities to young ventures with potentially revolutionary technologies.
Credit: inhabitat.com
For the most part, the traditional energy executives carefully advocated for their place in a diversified energy portfolio and avoided aggressive, competitive comparison to each other. Though it may not have been universally accepted, the prevailing notion that ALL of these energy sources (nuclear included) are necessary in the near future went largely unchallenged. Further reinforcing the coalition-like atmosphere was the general preference, among those who were asked about it, for a national clean energy standard that includes nuclear and clean coal rather than a narrower renewable energy standard. The audience, able to weigh in on several questions via voting devices, tended towards a similar mindset, answering the questions “Can coal be clean?” and “Should America build significantly more nuclear power plants?” in the affirmative 56% to 44% and 66% to 34% respectively. In fact, the only truly feisty debate of the day was between thinkers Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute over the low cost potential of renewables and whether energy efficiency reduces or increases consumption (Jevon’s paradox).
Film Exposes Overfishing Practices, Fishes for Answers
Posted by Mary Catherine O'Connor March 4th, 2010 View Comments
I’ve a fear of oceans. Lakes—even the biggest ones—I don’t mind. I love them, in fact, having grown up in Chicago and attending college on the shores of Lake Superior. But oceans, and their rip tides and undertows, have always struck me as sinister.
Ironically, just after returning from a week on a beach in Baja, where I started coming to terms with these fears, I watched The End of the Line, a newly released documentary that makes the case for why the oceans should be afraid of us.
The film, which Ted Danson narrates and Robert Murray directed, delves into the depravity we’ve brought to the world’s oceans through centuries of wanton fishing (and, obviously, consuming) fish from oceans around the world.
State of the World Forum Moved to Brazil as Washington Disappoints
Posted by RP Siegel March 2nd, 2010 View Comments
In early February, the State of the World Forum announced a decision to cancel their Climate Leadership Summit scheduled for this week in Washington because, in the words of Forum President Jim Garrison, “this is simply not the right time to convene a major conference of this kind in the nation’s capitol.” Because, as the conference organizers concluded from the lack of commitment in Copenhagen and events thereafter, “it would have virtually no impact on either the thinking or the agenda with which the U.S. Congress and the president are now engaged.”
Citing the “paralysis to which Washington has succumbed with regard to any action on global warming,” the forum has turned their eyes to other nations that might serve as more convincing role models in the quest to take the kind of urgent, large scale, meaningful action that the consensus of the scientific community deems necessary with ever-deepening alarm.
Forum President Jim Garrison elaborated his position in an exclusive statement to Triple Pundit:
Three Big Companies Gave USCAP The Shaft
Posted by Gina-Marie Cheeseman February 26th, 2010 View Comments
This article has been updated since it was originally published.
ConoccoPhillips recently pulled out of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of businesses and environmental groups. Conocco is the third company to pull out, after the British oil giant, BP, and equipment manufacturer, Caterpillar. Conocco’s chairman and CEO, Jim Mulva said in a statement, “House climate legislation and Senate proposals to date have disadvantaged the transportation sector and its consumers, left domestic refineries unfairly penalized versus international competition, and ignored the critical role that natural gas can play in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.”
Mulva continued, “We believe greater attention and resources need to be dedicated to reversing these missed opportunities, and our actions today are part of that effort. Addressing these issues will save thousands of American jobs, as well as create new ones.”
Why a National Renewable Energy Standard *Is* a Jobs Bill
Posted by Amelia Timbers February 25th, 2010 View Comments
Last week, the American Wind Energy Association held a webinar that went through a study by Navigant Consulting, pointing to the many ways passing a national renewable electricity standard would lead to an economic boon across the U.S.
It seems that the FOXNews message that a climate change bill would hurt job growth is untrue. (Surprised?) Paired with rigorous renewable energy standards, Navigant Consulting suggests that 274,000 blue collar construction jobs could be added in areas of the country that need both jobs and renewable energy. While Navigant based its assumptions on the big “if” that climate change legislation passes both houses, however its study should increase the momentum toward such a result.
What’s New
Where We’re Going
NY: Mar. 24
FT Investing in a Sustainable Future - Learn how investors are using new techniques to generate returns on responsible investments and hear about the latest trends in CSR activities.
SF: Apr. 14-16
Navigating the American Carbon World - Looking at the status of climate policy in 2010 and how climate initiatives will move forward with or without new policy.
Chicago Apr. 28-29
LCA Sustainable Supply Chain USA How To Measure, Prioritize And Reduce Social And Environmental Impacts In The Most Effective Manner
April 28-30
SF: Social Enterprise Summit/World Forum
SF: May 20-21
Microfinance USA 2010 - The place where microfinance practitioners, investors, and enthusiasts meet.
Monterey: Jun. 7-10
Sustainable Brands 2010 - Explore The Power of "And" at this year's highly anticipated SB10 conference - a 3p favorite since it's inception. Join more than 700 business and brand strategists, designers and sustainability executives for three days of extraordinary conversation.
July 29-30
GRI Certified Sustainability Reporting Course - Get the tools needed to fully assess the sustainability of business activities and to reduce the negative impacts of day-to-day operations.
LA: Sept. 1-2
Women in Green Forum - Recognizing the achievements of women across the vast range of environmental industry sectors.
Partners
University of Kansas Green Jobs Tweets
- RT @aridayguerrero: http://twitpic.com/1977jc - we got a mysterious panel shattering incident #greenjobsku
- Feels so good: 1 trip to In-N-Out, 7 solar panels (and one broken one), and countless songs later - we're finally done. #greenjobsku
- Solar panels installed, work was exhausting but rewarding. Bringing sustainable living to east Oakland. This is just the start #greenjobsku
- done done & done! we couldnt turn the panels on today but some day soon they'll be of energy saving use to a well-deserving fam #greenjobsku
- day didnt go as planned, but seeing 8 panels we installed is incredible #greenjobsku
- Allstate Awarded Prestigious LEED(R) Building Certification
- NetHope Receives Productivity Software Donation from Adobe
- Boston College Conference features two more dynamic voices
- The North Face Joins Ceres' Network of Companies
- Triple Canopy Donates and Delivers Humanitarian Aid to Haitian Earthquake Victims
Recent Comments