Eating for the Climate

Ever wonder if there's something to environmental pressure to change your way of eating for the sake of the planet? Salon examines the issue of global warming and food in an article excerpted briefly below and offers some (tentative) answers and advice in the process:

The No. 1 cause of global warming is burning fossil fuels for electric power. Still, the group raises an important point. A November 2006 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report found that livestock accounts for 18 percent of global warming emissions worldwide, more than the entire transportation sector.
Here in the U.S., livestock's impact is not quite so extreme: Six percent of our greenhouse gases come from livestock production, compared with 19 percent from cars, light trucks and airplanes. Still, for conscious eaters, those statistics are worth fleshing out.
According to the FAO, livestock production is a top cause of the world's many environmental problems: deforestation, acid rain, dead zones in the ocean, land degradation, water pollution, species extinction and, most threatening of all, global warming. "We looked at every step of the commodity chain, from feed production to consumption," says Henning Steinfeld, chief of the FAO's livestock policy branch.
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/.

Vermont Rock Point Power Challenge

Rock Point Power Challenge

Please join our pioneering efforts to take Rock Point off the power grid.
Share your ideas for becoming a sustainable community
Let’s Challenge others to Share their Power
Join in discussions leading us into an action plans for a more self- sustainable future.
We need your knowledge, expertise and support to achieve our goal.
To Share the Power, we need each other.

Share The Power !
Monday, November 12, 2007 4pm – 8pm.
Bishop Booth Conference Center
6pm Light Dinner
Chili Cornbread, Dessert

RSVP by November 8th to one of the following:
Debi Paterson, Executive Director
Bishop Booth Conference Center, 658-6233
Chuck Courcy, Rock Point Property Manager, 355-8737

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/.

An "Evangelist' for Sustainability

The New York Times has published a profile of green businessman Ray Anderson, excerpted below:

What Ray Anderson calls his “conversion experience” occurred in the summer of 1994, when he was asked to give the sales force at Interface, the carpet tile company he founded, some talking points about the company’s approach to the environment.
At a plant in LaGrange, carpet scraps are collected for reuse.
“That’s simple,” Mr. Anderson recalls thinking. “We comply with the law.”
But as a sales tool, “compliance” lacked inspirational verve. So he started reading about environmental issues, and thinking about them, until pretty soon it hit him: “I was running a company that was plundering the earth,” he realized. “I thought, ‘Damn, some day people like me will be put in jail!’ ”
“It was a spear in the chest.”
So instead of environmental regulation, he devoted his speech to his newfound vision of polluted air, overflowing landfills, depleted aquifers and used-up resources. Only one institution was powerful enough and pervasive enough to turn these problems around, he told his colleagues, and it was the institution that was causing them in the first place: “Business. Industry. People like us. Us!”
He challenged his colleagues to set a deadline for Interface to become a “restorative enterprise,” a sustainable operation that takes nothing out of the earth that cannot be recycled or quickly regenerated, and that does no harm to the biosphere.
The deadline they ultimately set is 2020, and the idea has taken hold throughout the company. In a recent interview in his office here overlooking downtown Atlanta, Mr. Anderson said that through waste reduction, recycling, energy efficiency and other steps, Interface was “about 45 percent from where we were to where we want to be.”
Use of fossil fuels is down 45 percent (and net greenhouse gas production, by weight, is down 60 percent), he said, while sales are up 49 percent. Globally, the company’s carpet-making uses one-third the water it used to. The company’s worldwide contribution to landfills has been cut by 80 percent.
“He bet his entire company,” said Bob Fox, an architect who specializes in “green” buildings and who, like Mr. Anderson, is a member of the advisory board of the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment. “It worked out probably better even than he hoped. He has set the mark for every other corporation in this country.”
And in the process, Mr. Anderson has turned into perhaps the leading corporate evangelist for sustainability. He had a head start, he acknowledges, because he ran his company and controlled its voting stock. But he can make the case effectively, he said, because his Interface experience teaches that sustainability “doesn’t cost, it pays” — in customer loyalty, employee spirit and hard cash. He says Interface sustainability efforts have saved the company more than $336 million since 1995.

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

Is Green Your School Color?

Check out the 2007 College Sustainability Report Card to see if your Alma Mater is listed, and how they are doing on sustainability.

Visit us a www.irejn.org.