Seas rising and warming

According to this entry in the New York Times "Dot Earth" blog, the world's oceans are rising and getting warmer faster than expected. (See excerpt below):

The study, by Australian and American researchers, reviewed millions of measurements of ocean temperatures taken using a particular instrument on submarines and other vessels over four decades. The researchers found a subtle error that, when fixed, shows that the rate at which seas warmed and rose between 1961 and 2003 was about 50 percent greater than previous estimates.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 26 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.Check out the National IPL Blog.
Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

Green Energy in Middletown, CT

Landfill Gas Project Moves Forward

Middletown’s Common Council unanimously approved an agreement with business partners gathered by the Jonah Center for Earth and Art to move forward on the landfill gas project.

What are the environmental benefits of this project?

Assuming methane emissions of 150 cubic feet per minute (a reasonable estimate), flaring the gas to destroy the methane would reduce annual greenhouse gas emission equivalent to removing 2900 cars from the road. Utilizing this same methane to fuel a 350 KW generator would be equivalent to reducing annual greenhouse gas emissions from an additional 2800 passenger vehicles or powering 280 homes for one year. (Source, U.S. EPA Landfill Methane Outreach Program).

Endurant Energy LLC (Oak Terrace, IL) is the “developer;” Environmental Credit Corporation (State College, PA) will market the greenhouse gas reduction credits; William Charles Waste Companies (Rockford, IL) will determine the best location for the wells. Highland Power (Brockton, MA) will arrange for the local test well drilling. This initial phase of the project will determine the amount and quality of the gas emerging from the landfill. If there is sufficient gas, a 350 kW electricity generator will be installed to supply power to the grid.
Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 26 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.Check out the National IPL Blog.
Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

LED Lights, Bargain or Ripoff?

Salon's Enviro-expert Pablo takes on LED lights. Read an excerpt below:

A 7W LED can be compared to a 10W CFL, which also emits 500 lumens. The closest incandescent bulb that I could find was a 460-lumen or 40W bulb. The next thing is to compare the efficacy of the bulbs. This is done using the measure of lumens per watt, or light emitted per electricity input. The incandescent bulb has an efficacy of 12 lumens/watt while the CFL has an efficacy of 50 lumens/watt, only to be outdone by the LED at 71 lumens/watt. So it's clear that LEDs are by far more efficient than incandescent bulbs. But does this justify forgoing CFLs in favor of LEDs? At over $50 per bulb, the high upfront cost will give everyone pause. But is the long lifetime or the high efficiency worth the cost?
A 10W CFL, available online for $6.90, has an expected median lifetime of 10,000 hours. While this is about 10 times longer than the life expectancy of an incandescent bulb, it is only one-fifth the expected life of the LED. So LEDs have the potential of cutting down on ladder time by a factor of 50 over incandescent bulbs! At about 25 cents apiece, the incandescent has by far the lowest upfront cost, which is why many people still use them. If we normalize the cost of all the bulbs over a 50,000-hour period, the incandescent bulbs cost $12.50, while CFL bulbs cost $34.50, and the LED bulb costs $59.95. But, as you may already know, the upfront cost of a bulb is by far the cheapest part. It's the electricity required to operate the bulb that adds up.
Over a period of 50,000 hours, a 40W incandescent bulb will use 2,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh). At 15 cents per kWh, this will put $300 in the pocket of your local utility, bringing the total cost of the incandescent bulb, over 50,000 hours, up to $312.50. The CFL bulb only uses 500kWh over the same time period, or $75, totaling $109.50. Finally, the LED bulb will use 350kWh for $52.50, with a total cost of $112.45. So, in this example, the LED light does cost a few dollars more but the difference is negligible. Think of the time you will save by not running to the store to buy bulbs and climbing the ladder to change them.



As for their disposal, LED lights, unlike CFLs, contain no mercury and many of them are compliant with the European Union's Reduction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive. Like CFLs they do contain electronic circuits, which are hard to separate back into individual materials for recycling. But with a life span of 50,000 hours, the relative amount of waste created will be quite minimal.
There are still some limitations to LEDs. The best idea is to figure out your lighting needs and speak with a lighting professional at a local lighting store or at LED Waves to find the solution for you. Be sure to tell them if you are looking for area lighting or spot lighting, bright light or colored light, indoor or outdoor, on/off or dimmable. There are a growing number of options in the LED bulb market and you should be able to find the right bulbs for you. An exciting lighting innovation that comes with the commercialization of LED lighting is the versatility of LEDs in creating changes in brightness and color using a computer controller. It's now possible to wake up to a simulated sunrise or to set the mood for a romantic dinner at the touch of a button.
Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 26 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.Check out the National IPL Blog.Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

By the time I get to Phoenix, there may be no water

Lake Mead, water source for Phoenix and Las Vegas, could run out of water soon, according to this story in the New York Times (see excerpt below):

Lake Mead, the vast reservoir for the Colorado River water that sustains the fast-growing cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas, could lose water faster than previously thought and run dry within 13 years, according to a new study by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Lake Mead, which serves as a reservoir for the Colorado River and sustains fast-growing cities in the Southwest, has a 50 percent chance of becoming unusable by 2021, researchers say.
The lake, located in Nevada and Arizona, has a 50 percent chance of becoming unusable by 2021, the scientists say, if the demand for water remains unchanged and if human-induced climate change follows climate scientists’ moderate forecasts, resulting in a reduction in average river flows.
Demand for Colorado River water already slightly exceeds the average annual supply when high levels of evaporation are taken into account, the researchers, Tim P. Barnett and David W. Pierce, point out. Despite an abundant snowfall in Colorado this year, scientists project that snowpacks and their runoffs will continue to dwindle. If they do, the system for delivering water across the Southwest would become increasingly unstable.
“We were really sort of stunned,” Professor Barnett said in an interview. “We didn’t expect such a big problem basically right on our front doorstep. We thought there’d be more time.” He added, “You think of what the implications are, and it’s pretty scary.”

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.
Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

What, Me Worry? Mad Magazine Tackles Global Warming

Mad Magazine, the rag that taught generations of Americans how to be wiseacres, is taking on global warming in its next issue, with the help of ten pulitzer prize-winning political cartoonists, according to an article in the New York Times (excerpt below.)

The “usual gang of idiots,” as the editorial staff of Mad magazine lovingly describes itself, produces cultural and political parody every month. For the next issue, however, the gang has recruited some very special help.
“Why George W. Bush Is in Favor of Global Warming,” a two-page spread that the magazine calls an exposé, has been illustrated by 10 Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists. They try to offer reasons why environmental apocalypse might be a good thing for President Bush, with observations like, “His worries about how future generations will remember his presidency won’t matter if there are no future generations.”
Other potential upsides are that Iraq could literally be melted off the earth, and rising oceans could submerge lefty strongholds like New York, Boston and San Francisco.
The artists include Mike Peters, who won the Pulitzer in 1981 for his work in The Dayton Daily News in Ohio, and Matt Davies, who won in 2004 for The Journal News of White Plains.
John Ficarra, the editor of Mad, and Sam Viviano, the art director, assembled the team. Mr. Ficarra, who had the idea to find 10 Pulitzer winners, described himself as the Captain Kirk of the operation, and Mr. Viviano, who recruited the cartoonists, as Sulu. “You even said, ‘Make it so,’ ” Mr. Viviano said to Mr. Ficarra during a joint telephone interview.
They said that the artists were all happy to participate. “Everybody, for the most part, who works in humor today has some kind of influence from Mad,” Mr. Viviano said.
“And they still managed to be successful,” Mr. Ficarra added.
A writer for the magazine, Jacob Lambert, came up with the reasons why President Bush might like global warming, and the cartoonists took it from there. Some of them followed the editors’ guidance faithfully, others submitted variations.
Mad, of course, has a history of lampooning politicians, particularly embattled Republicans. In recalling favorites, Mr. Ficarra and Mr. Viviano were quick to mention a parody of the movie poster for “The Sting,” which substituted Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew for Paul Newman and Robert Redford; instead of lighting cigars with currency, the politicians lighted subpoenas. A more recent poster was “Pirates of the Constitution,” which depicted President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the tag line, “Now subverting a government near you!”
Mad, first published in 1952, says that the average age of its readership is 26, a statistic that Mr. Ficarra explains this way: “Median age is 19. Mental age is 9. Mental age of the editorial staff dips down a little lower, around 3.”

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.

Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

Eco-Movies in Wallingford

Free movies on environmental topics are being held at First United Methodist in Wallingford. Start time is usually 6:30. Contact Al Satton for info/directions. The schedule is below:

FUMC Community Film Series Schedule

February 1st
An Inconvenient Truth (2006) Rated PG Director Davis Guggenheim. Al Gore’s passionate campaign for the environment is documented. He presents global warming facts without being too political. He did win the Nobel Prize!!

February 8th
Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006)
Amid ever-increasing gas prices, this documentary delves into the short life of the GM EV1 electric car. How could such an efficient, green-friendly vehicle fail to transform our garages and skies? Through interviews Chris Paine (former EV1 owner) seeks to answer the question. This documentary is quite informative and entertaining.

March 7th
Too Hot Not To Handle (2006) Rated G Directors Maryann DeLeo and Ellen Goosenberg Kent. Documentary on how global warming effects our environment and the measures needed to reverse the trend.
Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.
Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

Climate Talks Stall

The New York Times reports on the stalemate in this article (excerpt below):

By THOMAS FULLER
Published: December 12, 2007
This article was reported by Thomas Fuller, Peter Gelling and Andrew C. Revkin, and was written by Mr. Fuller.

NUSA DUA, Indonesia — As a United Nations conference on global warming here entered its final stretch, the United States and the European Union remained deadlocked on Tuesday on whether countries should commit now to specific emissions reductions in an agreement that may not be finalized for two more years.
Over the weekend, officials from the United Nations, backed by the European Union and many developing countries, offered a draft plan for talks over the next two years, including a statement that dangerous warming can be avoided only if industrialized countries cut emissions by 2020 to levels 25 to 40 percent below those of 1990.
But on Tuesday the United States held firmly opposed to such language.
This year’s studies by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that centuries of warming, rising seas and species extinctions would probably result unless there were sharp curbs in climate-warming emissions within a few decades.
“Logic requires that we listen to the science,” said Stavros Dimas, the European Union’s environment commissioner. “I would expect others to follow that logic.”
The Bush administration opposes including hard targets at this stage in the talks. Other countries, including Japan and Canada, are beginning to side with the United States on the need for any new climate agreements to include meaningful steps by fast-growing countries like China and India. And calls for concrete limits have consistently been refused by those nations.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.
Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org

Sally Bingham of Interfaith Power and Light on CNN

CNN filmed a segment about our own Sally Bingham of national Interfaith Power and Light. It is showing periodically over the next few days and you can also see it on the CNN website. The segment is called Preaching Green.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.
Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

Anglican Bishop of Liverpool Speaks to DC Area Faith Leaders

Forty-five Muslim, Jewish and Christian clergy and community leaders gathered October 24 for a breakfast on the role of faith communities in caring for creation. The Right Reverend James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool (Church of England), Imam Yahya Hendi, Secretary General and Founder of Imams for Human Rights and Dialogue, and Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb, President of the Washington Board of Rabbis, spoke about faith foundations for active engagement in care of creation care and environmental justice.
“We are pleased to work with faith communities in the DC region to build a sustainable future,” said Allison Fisher , program director for Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light (GWIPL). “From our three speakers, we heard strong calls to reach across religious differences to work together to provide leadership to the growing response to global warming.” At the end of the morning, 22 of the local faith leaders pledged to incorporate creation care into sermons or support a lay-lead creation care effort in their community.

Bishop Jones shared how his own focus on the environment developed through a series of discussions he had with British school children during the millennium year. Challenging religious communities to put their faith into action, Jones said, “We are caught up in a disease of consumption and that is what is afflicting the earth. So last year for Lent in the Diocese of Liverpool I called a carbon fast.” A carbon fast would have more value than giving up chocolate or candy that some choose. He reported that by the end of the carbon fast “people weren’t ready to resume their previous consumption levels; it made them think about their life.”

Imam Hendi shared the unique response he gives to the question, “Where are you from?” Hendi explained that he says, “I am from dust. I am a Dustian. ... I try to remember that I come from dust, and therefore I am someone who tries to find that harmonious relationship with the dust from which one comes.” Hendi went on to encourage humanity to come together as Dustians, to move together to protect our mother earth.
Religious communities contribute multi-generational thinking to the broader society, added Rabbi Dobb. Multi-generational thinking will “lead to some very different outcomes than when we are focused on quarterly profit earnings reports and other much shorter cycles of time that the dominant society would have us focus on. As people of faith, we can take the long view. When we take the long view, what’s two cents per KWH more to make sure the electricity that lights our sanctuaries and fellowship halls could come from wind or biomass instead of from coal? Intergenerational thinking will begin to change our action.”
The breakfast workshop, ‘Caring for Creation: How to Build a Sustainable Future,’ was co-sponsored by the British Embassy and Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light.
Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.htm

Enjoy discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

Green Voting

In an Op Ed, columnist Thomas Friedman suggests that the greatest act you can do to green your life happens at the ballot box:
Choose the right leaders. It is so much more important to change your leaders than change your light bulbs.
Why? Because leaders write the rules, set the standards and offer the tax incentives that drive market behavior across a whole city, state or country. Whatever any of us does individually matters a tiny bit. But when leaders change the rules, you get scale change across the whole marketplace. And the energy-climate challenge we face today is a huge scale problem. Without scale, all you have is a green hobby.
Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.htm
Enjoy discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/.

A Waterless West?

Will climate change leave the American West a barren desert? The New York Times magazine tackles that scary topic in a long article briefly excerpted below:

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”
In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.htm

Enjoy discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/.

Calling all Religious Leaders

An opportunity for US clergy and heads of religious organizations to take action!
Unite with fellow faith leaders in calling on our national representatives to treat global warming as a moral responsibility. Sign an Interfaith Declaration on the Moral Responsibility of the U.S. Government to Address Global Warming.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 22 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.htm

China Breaks Pollution Records

The New York Times posts yet another extensive and disturbing article about China's out of control pollution problem. Read an excerpt below:

BEIJING, Aug. 25 — No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades and big dollops of public wealth to undo.
But just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.
Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.
Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics.
Environmental woes that might be considered catastrophic in some countries can seem commonplace in China: industrial cities where people rarely see the sun; children killed or sickened by lead poisoning or other types of local pollution; a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of the ocean no longer sustain marine life.
China is choking on its own success. The economy is on a historic run, posting a succession of double-digit growth rates. But the growth derives, now more than at any time in the recent past, from a staggering expansion of heavy industry and urbanization that requires colossal inputs of energy, almost all from coal, the most readily available, and dirtiest, source.
“It is a very awkward situation for the country because our greatest achievement is also our biggest burden,” says Wang Jinnan, one of China’s leading environmental researchers. “There is pressure for change, but many people refuse to accept that we need a new approach so soon.”
China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.
More pressing still, China has entered the most robust stage of its industrial revolution, even as much of the outside world has become preoccupied with global warming.
Experts once thought China might overtake the United States as the world’s leading producer of greenhouse gases by 2010, possibly later. Now, the International Energy Agency has said China could become the emissions leader by the end of this year, and the Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency said China had already passed the milestone.
For the Communist Party, the political calculus is daunting. Reining in economic growth to alleviate pollution may seem logical, but the country’s authoritarian system is addicted to fast growth. Delivering prosperity placates the public, provides spoils for well-connected officials and forestalls demands for political change. A major slowdown could incite social unrest, alienate business interests and threaten the party’s rule.
But pollution poses its own threat. Officials blame fetid air and water for thousands of episodes of social unrest. Health care costs have climbed sharply. Severe water shortages could turn more farmland into desert. And the unconstrained expansion of energy-intensive industries creates greater dependence on imported oil and dirty coal, meaning that environmental problems get harder and more expensive to address the longer they are unresolved.
China’s leaders recognize that they must change course. They are vowing to overhaul the growth-first philosophy of the Deng Xiaoping era and embrace a new model that allows for steady growth while protecting the environment. In his equivalent of a State of the Union address this year, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao made 48 references to “environment,” “pollution” or “environmental protection.”
The government has numerical targets for reducing emissions and conserving energy. Export subsidies for polluting industries have been phased out. Different campaigns have been started to close illegal coal mines and shutter some heavily polluting factories. Major initiatives are under way to develop clean energy sources like solar and wind power. And environmental regulation in Beijing, Shanghai and other leading cities has been tightened ahead of the 2008 Olympics.

Support Your Local Farmer

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a growing phenomenon, thanks in part to local congregations like the one featured in this article excerpted from the San Mateo County Journal.

On Wednesday evenings, faith and produce mingle at Atlanta’s Congregation Shearith Israel synagogue.
As parents gather to collect their children from Hebrew school or attend lectures, many also pass through the social hall, where they collect boxes of tomatoes, peaches, spinach and other organic produce.
It’s a blending of physical and spiritual sustenance that Rabbi Hillel Norry calls the best of Jewish values in action, and it’s just one of a growing number of faith-based community supported agriculture (or CSA) programs nationwide.
“We’re taking Jewish ideals of justice, economics, health, ecology, well-being and responsibility and putting them to work in the real world in a way that makes our lives and the life of the farmer better,” Norry says.
Fueled by growing interest in local food, CSAs have gone from just a few during the 1980s to about 2,000 today. They operate on the simple premise of enlisting community support for area farms, then rewarding that support with food.
In most cases, people buy shares in participating farms, paying a set amount upfront. For the Atlanta group, it’s $700, though most CSAs cost between $400 and $600. In exchange, the farmer delivers to them a weekly share of the crops, usually for 20 weeks or more. Consumers get good, local food; farmers get guaranteed income.
Of course, interest is contingent on caring about where one’s food comes from. But for some faiths, that concern is built in. Many Jews and Muslims follow kosher and halal tenets, which detail how foods can be raised, processed and stored.
For others, it’s a natural extension of existing concerns about the ethics and values of food and eating, issues important to groups such as the Iowa-based National Catholic Rural Life Conference.
Under the group’s leadership, several organic farms with CSAs have been established on or are planned for church-owned land in Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and Ohio, many of them operated by orders of monks and nuns.
“We’re still at the beginning of this ethical food system revolution,” says Brother David Andrews, the conference’s executive director. “Only a small percentage of our institutions and dioceses are doing this, but as consciousness of things like global warming, the obesity epidemic and diabetes grow, support for this will continue to grow.”
Launched this spring, Shearith Israel’s program is one of 10 Jewish CSAs created during the past three years as part of a project called Tuv Ha’aretz, Hebrew for both “the best of the land” and “good for the land.”
Under the auspices of Hazon, a New York-based nonprofit that also runs Jewish environmental bike rides and a blog on Jews, food and contemporary issues, Tuv Ha’aretz was started at New York’s Congregation Ansche Chesed.
“We needed 40 families to start, and we had 80 sign up,” says Nigel Savage, Hazon’s founder and director.
And interest elsewhere is strong, too. Tuv Ha’aretz coordinator Leah Koenig says she frequently gets e-mails from people around the country asking for information on starting a CSA in their synagogue or Jewish community center.
In Atlanta, Aaron Marks, a law student, said he and his wife joined the CSA for their 16-month-old son. “We’d heard a lot of scary reports about growth hormones and pesticides and wanted to try to keep his diet as chemical-free as possible,” he said. “We’re both concerned about the environment, and the fact that we’re doing something that might have a direct effect is good.”
Frieda Socol, a member of Shearith Israel since before her wedding 57 years ago, says the fresh CSA produce has started to take center stage at her Friday night dinners, when her family comes together to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath.
“I’ve learned a lot, finding out just exactly what can be done with some of these sometimes rather strange vegetables we have,” she said. “They’ve made Friday night dinner more interesting.”
Tuv Ha’aretz also runs CSA programs in St. Paul, Minn., Houston, Berkeley, Calif., Philadelphia and Washington, and even provides them with relevant biblical passages and other Jewish texts for inclusion in weekly CSA newsletters.
Hazon hopes to share its CSA model with other faiths and is seeking funding to launch joint efforts with the National Catholic Rural Life Conference and Faith In Place, an ecumenical environmental group in Chicago.

Global Warming Petition

Avaaz.org has put together a petition to the world's leaders demanding that they tackle climate change now, decisively and together. Click the link if you'd like to sign on.

Petition To World Leaders: Climate change is the greatest threat facing our world today - and we are almost out of time to stop it. You must tackle this problem now, decisively and together. Start working toward a new global agreement this year. Set binding global targets for emissions to avert catastrophic climate change. Take bold action immediately - and we will join our efforts with yours.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 22 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.htm

Live Earth to Reach 2 Billion

Get ready to rock, world. Live Earth is coming tomorrow to a stadium, TV or house party near you. Read about it in the Kansas City Star (article below.)

Live Earth is ambitious by any standard: eight concerts featuring the biggest names in music, playing for a 24-hour period across the globe, all for the cause of global warming.
But like its template — 2006’s Live 8, the global concert devoted to poverty in Africa — the mission of Live Earth is somewhat amorphous. Its aim is to “trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis.”
Whatever Live Earth’s accomplishment Saturday, it will be difficult to measure. Former Vice President Al Gore, who partnered with Kevin Wall in founding Live Earth, believes the world needs to rise up as one giant vox populi to influence “a new political reality.”
“The tipping point in the political system will come when the majority of the people are armed with enough knowledge about the crisis and its solutions that they make this cause their own,” Gore said. “Then, you will see the entire political system shift dramatically.”
Wall, an Emmy-winning concert producer who produced Live 8, hopes Live Earth will change attitudes about global warming and spark a larger movement.
“This concert is not the solution,” Wall says. “Maybe we can make the noise, maybe we can be the town crier.”
Live Earth will send proceeds to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit organization chaired by Gore. Tickets for the U.S. concert range from $83 to $348.
Wall was originally inspired to put on Live Earth after seeing “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Oscar-winning documentary on Gore’s global-warming slideshow.
“The question I kept asking myself is, ‘What can I do?’ ” Wall says.
Concerts are scheduled for Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.; London; Johannesburg, South Africa; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Shanghai, China; Tokyo; Sydney, Australia; and Hamburg, Germany. A band of scientists also will perform in Antarctica, stretching Live Earth across seven continents.
More than 150 artists will perform, including Madonna, the Police, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Alicia Keys. Sixty short films and 30 public service announcements have been produced, which will be broadcast between performances.
Also planned are more than 6,000 parties in 119 countries, ranging from home viewings to museum festivals. The concerts will be broadcast on TV and the Internet.
Part of the thrust of Live Earth is to communicate what consumers can do to minimize their impact on the environment.
“The problem with it is that it’s a very complicated issue,” Wall says. “When you think about yourself recycling a piece of paper, how does that connect to an iceberg in the North Pole?”
Wall and Gore also have taken measures to maintain the concert’s green integrity by enlisting the support of the U.S. Green Building Council and John Picard, a former member of President Clinton’s Green White House task force. Live Earth is intended to be an eco-friendly event with power supplied from renewable energy sources and ground travel from hybrid or high-efficiency vehicles where possible.
“This is going to be the greenest event of its kind, ever,” Gore says. “The carbon offsets and the innovative practices that are being used to make this a green event, I think will set the standard for years to come.”

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at http://www.irejn.org/.

Chief Sustainability Officer

An increasing number of companies are hiring Chief Sustainability Officers to up their green credibility, according to an article in the New York Times excerpted below:

The new environmental chiefs are helping companies profit from the push to go green.
“Environmental vice presidents usually spend company money, but this new breed is helping companies make money,” said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. The upshot, said Geoffrey Heal, a business professor at the Columbia Business School, is that “what started out as a compliance job has evolved into one that guards the value of the brand.”
The titles vary, mixing and matching “chief” and “vice president,” “sustainability” and “environmental,” making it impossible to track how many people fill the role. But whatever they are called, the new environmental chiefs — many of them named in the last two years — wield extraordinary power.
They are exploring partnerships with vendors and customers to create green products — and they have the power to close the deal. They are also getting a vote — often, the deciding vote — on product research and advertising campaigns.
Since he became Dow Chemical’s first chief sustainability officer in March, David E. Kepler has been talking to Dow’s technology, manufacturing and finance people about alternative fuels and green products. “We usually agree,” Mr. Kepler said. “But if a critical environmental issue is in dispute, I’ll prevail.”
Linda J. Fisher, the chief sustainability officer at DuPont, scuttled the purchase of a company that was not in a “sustainable” business. “We’re building sustainability into the acquisition criteria,” she said.
And when two business chiefs at General Electric blanched at the cost of developing green products, Jeffrey R. Immelt, G.E.’s chairman, gave Lorraine Bolsinger, vice president of G.E.’s Ecomagination business, the research money. “I have an open door to get projects funded,” she said.
The evolution was probably inevitable. Corporations are facing demands from all quarters to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and to buy and produce green products. So, many chief executives are urging their managers to “figure out what products they should sell in a warming world,” said Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at http://www.irejn.org/.

A Billion Climate Refugees

That's billion with a "B." A billion people, as in just under one sixth of the world's population, could be displaced by climate changes, according to a report being released this week. An article about the report in The Age says,

GLOBAL warming will create at least 1 billion refugees by 2050 as water shortages and crop failures force people to leave their homes, sparking local wars over access to resources, a leading aid agency has said.
Published to mark Christian Aid Week, the report said the numbers of displaced people would dwarf the refugee crisis that followed World War II. Released yesterday, the report, Human Tide: The Real Migration Crisis, said that unless urgent action was taken, the added problems brought by environmental changes would spiral out of control.
Christian Aid said that as the developed world was responsible for most of the climate-changing pollution, it should bear the brunt of the cost of helping those worst hit by it — the poor.
"We believe that forced migration is now the most urgent threat facing poor people in the developing world," said lead author John Davison.
Scientists predict that average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 3 degrees this century because of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, causing floods and famines and putting million of lives at risk.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that by 2080, up to 3.2 billion people — a third of the planet's population — will be short of water. Up to 600 million will be short of food and up to 7 million will face coastal flooding.
"We estimate that, unless strong preventative action is taken, between now and 2050 climate change will push the number of displaced people globally to at least 1 billion," the Christian Aid report said.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

Climate Change Event at Mercy Center

Faith Communities Engage with Global Warmning

Wednesday May 9, 7-9 pm

Free program

Mercy Center* in Madison, Connecticut
Contact 203.245.0401 or betty@mercybythesea.org. to register [see http://www.mercybythesea.org/ for directions]*

[unfortunately for some with mobility challenges, the only space avialablethat evening is upstairs]

Join us to share resources and to learn what various faith communitiesand organizations are doing to learn about and take action on globalwarming. Following shared reflection and viewing of the interfaith video, "God's Creation and Global Warming", participants will share experiences and resources. We will explore ways to help congregations engage with issues ina faith context, and seek ways to move beyond resistance and obstacles toidentify significant actions they can take right now that can lead to a moresustainable future for the whole community of life. Please bring handouts and resources to share. Refreshments will be served.

Jeanie Graustein, the Environmental Justice Ministry Coordinator for theOffice of Urban Affairs of the Archdiocese of Hartford, will facilitate thediscussion. There will also be input and resources from Rabbi Andrea Cohen-Kiener, of Congregation Pnai Or, Director of the Interreligious Eco-JusticeNetwork of CT, who is unable to attend, but who has worked with numerous congregations taking action on energy efficiency. Mercy Center is a spiritual retreat and conference center for human development.

Mercy Center offers a hospitality that reveres the valueand uniqueness of each person, and hosts and develops programs thatenhance the quality of life in a changing world. For more information,contact Mercy Center Guest Services at 203.245.0401

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

A Little Trouble with Big China

China is causing talks on the next Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change report, due out Friday, May 3, to stall, according to the LA Times.

China, on pace to become the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, has emerged as the major stumbling block in approving a United Nations report on how to stabilize global warming and generate the trillions of dollars needed for the endeavor.The report, to be released Friday in Bangkok, Thailand, is the third of four installments being issued this year by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.The first two reports, on the causes and effects of global warming, were largely scientific documents. The new report outlines a specific strategy to charge polluters for their emissions.China, which is powering its industrial development with its massive coal reserves, has been pushing for wealthy nations to bear the bulk of the blame — and eventually the costs.At the same time, China has tried to downplay the responsibility of developing nations like itself, according to some delegates at the weeklong U.N. meeting in Bangkok.Negotiations over the report have slowed to a crawl."China has been the biggest obstacle," said one participant, who did not want to be identified because the talks were closed.A bigger dispute looms as negotiations enter their final day.Debate over the economic feasibility of quick action, which pits the United States against Europe, was postponed earlier this week.In formal comments obtained by The Times, the U.S. delegation suggested that reducing emissions immediately could be too costly."The main issue is the interpretation of costs, whether it is reasonable or affordable," said a European scientist who helped write the draft now being revised. "Some studies say we can afford it. The question is whether we have to do it."The U.N. reports on global warming, which have been released periodically since 1990, are not binding agreements. But they have become powerful in forging an international consensus on climate change.Scientists and policymakers from more than 100 countries have been involved in drafting the documents.The United States is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for 25% of all emissions, followed by China and Europe.The U.N. report suggests that stabilizing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere would require charging polluters up to $100 per ton of carbon by 2030, according to a draft of the report, which was obtained by an environmental group and provided to The Times.The idea is that if polluting becomes too expensive, industries will adopt new technologies to reduce emissions.The most stringent, and most expensive, scenario in the draft seeks to hold temperature increases below 3 degrees Fahrenheit. It would require global emissions to peak in 15 years and fall to half of current levels by the middle of the century.By 2030, the annual costs of mitigation would amount to 3% of global gross domestic product — about $2 trillion, or a year's worth of economic growth.The most lenient scheme would cost 0.2% of GDP in 2030. Emissions would peak in 55 years, allowing temperatures to rise by as much as 7 degrees.The last U.N. report, released in April, said such warming would be catastrophic, with rising sea levels, flooding and drought affecting billions of people.