By Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 25, 2006
While the political debate over global warming continues, top executives at many of the nation’s largest energy companies have accepted the scientific consensus about climate change and see federal regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions as inevitable.
The Democratic takeover of Congress makes it more likely that the federal government will attempt to regulate emissions. The companies have been hiring new lobbyists who they hope can help fashion a national approach that would avert a patchwork of state plans now in the works. They are also working to change some company practices in anticipation of the regulation.
“We have to deal with greenhouse gases,” John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., said in a recent speech at the National Press Club. “From Shell’s point of view, the debate is over. When 98 percent of scientists agree, who is Shell to say, ‘Let’s debate the science’?”
Continue Reading Energy Firms Come to Terms With Climate Change
Posted by Paul on November 25, 2006
By Corby Kummer
The New York Times
November 23, 2006
Boston — A recent article in the Montreal newspaper La Presse quoted growers as claiming that within a few years Canada would be a larger producer of cranberries than New England.
That the article was written in French only pointed up the hurtfulness of the boast. Canada is already the biggest harvester of lobster, that other quintessential symbol of New England — even if the Pilgrims regarded it as little more than trash fish, unworthy of a place of honor at the original Thanksgiving table (the only sure items at which were deer and wildfowl, according to Kathleen Curtin and Sandra Oliver’s “Giving Thanks”). Bad enough already that Wisconsin produces more cranberries than Massachusetts. Must we cede to Canada those too-tart, hard-to-love, health-giving remnants of a time when New England agriculture had national significance?
Well, yes. Cranberries and any number of Thanksgiving Day staples are probably headed north thanks to global warming, as Dr. Paul Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, told me recently. Dr. Epstein looks at the future, and it’s not so hot for native foods, or at least not for those that grow in the United States.
Continue Reading Thanksgiving’s Moveable Feast
Posted by Paul on November 23, 2006
By H. Josef Hebert
Associated Press Writer
Nov 21, 2006
The Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that pesticides can be applied over and near bodies of water without a permit under the federal Clean Water Act. The decision brought immediate criticism from an environmental watchdog group and from a senator involved in environmental issues. They said it would make it easier to pollute the nation’s lakes and streams.
But the EPA said the two specific circumstances in which clean water permits no longer will be needed will add to public health by allowing for better eradication of pests.
Continue Reading EPA exempts some pesticide use
Posted by Paul on November 22, 2006
Group Asks USDA to Fully Investigate Organic Product Misrepresentation
Cornucopia, WI - The Cornucopia Institute, the nation’s most aggressive organic farming watchdog, has filed a formal
legal complaint with the USDA asking them to investigate allegations of illegal “organic” food distribution by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Cornucopia has documented cases of nonorganic food products being sold as organic in Wal-Mart’s grocery departments.
“We first noticed that Wal-Mart was using in-store signage to misidentify conventional, nonorganic food as organic in their upscale-market test store in Plano, Texas,” said Mark Kastel of The Cornucopia Institute. Subsequently, Cornucopia staff visited a number of other Wal-Mart stores in the Midwest and documented similar improprieties in both produce and dairy sections.
Continue Reading Wal-Mart Charged with Selling Nonorganic Food as Organic
Posted by Paul on November 15, 2006
Popularity of Farmers Markets, Natural Grocery Stores Helps Cultivate a Rise in Niche Farms
By Michael S. Rosenwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 6, 2006
This is where Michael Pappas farms: not in the great wide fields of Iowa or in California’s industrial salad bowl, but in Lanham. He is eight miles from the Washington Monument, three or four turns from the Beltway, at the end of a long road in a residential neighborhood. He’s growing crops on 2 1/2 acres with 2 1/2 employees.
How’s life? “Lately, it’s really pretty good,” Pappas says, in the middle of his fall harvest at a place he calls Eco Farms. He points out some lemon verbena, which he sells to chef Michel Richard for his D.C. restaurant, Citronelle, considered one of the country’s best. Nearby he has a little patch of wild arugula for chef Johnny Monis at Komi. He’s also got mesclun salad, basil, peppers, radishes, carrots, beets and pineapple sage, not to mention plenty of customers at a co-op, other restaurants, local grocery stores and a gourmet caterer.
Pappas has, on this hilly field, created what few people thought was possible in the age of industrial farming: a small organic operation that is both environmentally and economically sustainable. Like dozens of other farmers across the region, he has leveraged the grass-roots-turned-mainstream popularity of farmers markets to expand the market for locally grown produce to restaurants, caterers, grocery stores and even college dining halls. Pappas, who is single and has no children, typically can’t afford to eat at Citronelle, but he says he’s making a nice living.
Continue Reading A Growing Trend: Small, Local and Organic
Posted by Paul on November 06, 2006
Science Matters by David Suzuki
October 20, 2006
Most of us are all too aware of what it’s like to live in financial debt, but what about ecological debt?
On October 9th, according to the Global Footprint Network, humanity went into ecological debt for the year, where demand for resources and the production of waste outpaced the planet’s capacity to produce new resources and absorb those wastes. In other words, we ceased to live off the ecological services provided by the planet and started consuming the ecosystems themselves.
The date is merely symbolic, as in reality human consumption of resources and production of waste is highly varied across the planet. In some areas, we’re already going into debt at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day. Other areas, however, are far less exploited and we may never reach those particular ecosystems’ ecological limits during the year.
Continue Reading Going into debt a risky proposition
Posted by Paul on November 03, 2006
