Contact Your US Representative About Climate Change

In the spirit of the change that Focus the Nation is ultimately trying to bring about, please click here to tell your Congressional Representative that climate change should be a legislative priority.

A new geologic age is upon us

Just imagine another little section on top in which we're wearing clothes and depleting every natural resource we can get our hands on. Yippee!

From Dot Earth:

Some earth scientists are pushing to enshrine officially a decades-old idea — that Earth is now in a biogeochemical era of our own making that should be distinguished from the Holocene, the epoch that began with the end of the last ice age.

It'll be called the Anthropocene (you know, "anthro" meaning "human" and "pocene" meaning...um, yeah).

Andrew Revkin (author of Dot Earth) on the subject (also yoinked from his blog post):

"...The challenge now is to find a way to act that will make geologists of the future look upon this age as a remarkable time, a time in which a species began to take into account the long-term impact of its actions. The alternative will be to leave a legacy of irresponsibility and neglect that will manifest itself in the fossil record as just one more mass extinction — like the record of bones and empty footprints left behind by the dinosaurs.”

I really love the description of our actions being manifested in the fossil record...I mean, I don't love that it'll be a manifestation of something kindof awful, but it's sortof a neat image/description that I definitely hadn't thought about before.

Connecticut and Global Warming

In the spirit of this week's monumental EON event happening on Thursday (see below), check out this amazing film/video called "The Connecticut Plan to Fight Global Warming" below (or here). It's made by the CT Fund for the Environment. They visited EON last semester and are awesome. It's 21 minutes long-ish and certainly worth your time.

FOCUS THE NATION + party!

FOCUS THE NATION is finally happening!

Brought to you by EON, the Environmental Studies Program, Long Lane Farm, the Sustainability Advisory Committee, and the Feet to the Fire Project, Focus the Nation is a teach-in day about climate change solutions. The day includes many amazing things like discussions in classes, a keynote speaker, a bunch of panels on the different facets of climate change (such as policy responses, corporate and institutional responses, and social justice) as well as a circus. Yes, a circus.

What: Focus the Nation
When: Thursday, January 31st,
Where: see the nifty schedule for all the day's events

Okay, the other thing I wanted to say is that we're having a PARTY PARTY PARTY (called Hot Spot) at Psi U on Friday (which would be February 1st). Here comes my cheesy line that I'm really proud of: climate change is real...and while not all locations on earth will experience warming, I guarantee that temperatures in Psi U are going to be on the rise this Friday (it actually does get hot in there sometimes, right?). Tickets go on sale TOMORROW in Usdan and will be available for cheaper outside of Focus the Nation events.

The lineup:
10:00 DJ HARRISON SCHAAF
11:30 THE EBB AND THE FLOW
12:30 THE KINKY SPIGOTS

Tickets are:
$ 2 for FTN event attendees
$3 in advance
$4 at the door

Proceeds go to Oxfam America and Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice! Fun fact (kindof): Chris McCandless donated all his savings to Oxfam before he went on his adventure...into the wild. Alllllrighty.

What: Hot Spot Partay
Where: Psi U
When: 10 pm on Friday, Feb. 1st
Entry Fee: $2-$4

Double-sided printing!

Good news for being green at Wes!

Lab computers are now FINALLY (due to a loving collaboration between EON and ITS) set to print double sided by default for ALL lab printers. (Color printers will still be single sided printing only.)

THIS SAVES YOU MONEY! It costs you 7¢ to print one sheet with two sides, but 5¢ for each single sided page. Therefore, you save 3¢ for every two pages you print. For every 200 pages, you save $3. AND sooo many trees. Ohhh the savings!

There are directions next to EACH computer explaining how to turn the function off, in case you need to (which you don't).

Please print double sided whenever you can!

Art+Environment

Check it ouuuuuut:

From the CFA website:
Festival 2008
Saturday, May 10, 12-5pm
Veteran’s Park: Located just off Newfield Street (Route 3)
Middletown, CT
Free admission

Copresented by Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts and Environmental Studies Program, the Jonah Center for Earth and Art and the City of Middletown

Feet to the Fire will assemble a diverse array of artists (you), scientists and other thinkers to address the environmental challenges that face us today on a global scale and in our own communities. Enjoy performances, art and music by campus and regional artists, while learning about the impact of climate change on our world. Award-winning choreographer Ann Carlson will premiere a new site-specific work commissioned by the Festival. The Festival also features interactive displays and exhibits on energy conservation and sustainability by environmental scientists and a farmer’s market with local organic food vendors.

If you're interested, download the artist submission form. You can also go to the CFA website and get it from there (you have to scroll down about halfway to find the blurb).

Student Forum
There's also a student forum related to the festival. It's called Environmental Art: Artistic Responses to Global and Local Environmental Issues. It'll basically be a study of visual and movement-based artworks relating to the environment (including earthworks and more socially conscious projects), along with whatever the people in the class want to study. The end project is a piece for the festival that you get credit for...! Email me (aprovo@wes) for more info.

More about the Election

I'm slowly discovering that Save Our Environment is sortof an impossible website to navigate. They DO have a campaign going on now (it's just hard to find-I found out about it in an email they sent to me). They're running a petition to urge news reporters to ask more questions about global warming when they interview the presidential candidates (out of 2275 questions, 3 were about global warming). The informational video is above and the petition is here.

Donate your clothes

Keep clothes out of the landfill! Okay, that was my attempt to connect this to environmental concerns. I know you probably aren't about to just throw away clothes. In all seriousness, though, if you don't wear something anymore (in my case, jeans that I'm finally accepting as too small for me), it would be nice to donate it to someone who actually will wear it. Keep clothes in circulation or whatnot instead of molding in your closet. So anyway, before you return to campus, dig around for jeans or old prom-type dresses and accessories. You can bring them back to school and donate to these projects:

1. Teens for Jeans


Email me (aprovo@wesleyan.edu) if you want to participate or have questions. I'll probably put a box somewhere once we get back to campus. If you don't want to go through me, you can also take the jeans there yourself (you get 20% off toward a new pair of jeans).

2. Princess Project (see here and here for official websites)
From Anna Pratt '08:

From January 20th-Mid February, I'll be collecting dress and accessory donations to give to an organization based out of San Francisco called the Princess Project. They collect old prom dresses and accessories and give them to high school students who can't afford to buy their own.

I'll be sending the dresses to their branch in Windsor (near Hartford) so that area students can have them.

So, if you'd like to donate, gather up all of your old dresses (they accept formal gowns, cocktail dress, bridesmaids dresses, and anything that's nice) and accessories (purses,jewelry, wraps, shawls) and I can pick them up once you get back to Wesleyan or you can give them to me at Fauver apts 307.

There are a few guidelines for the dresses that the organization has in order to ensure they're in good condition:

• They must be in good condition (no rips, stains, etc)
• They must be dry-cleaned
• They should be from 2002 or after (so that they're not really out of style)

Contact me with any questions: ajcpratt@gmail.com

Taking Action

I keep seeing this book around called The Lazy Environmentalist. I haven't actually read it but I don't think I agree with the message, which is basically that you don't have to sacrifice any of your lifestyle to be green (you can decide for yourself by checking out the website). Anyway, the point of my bringing that up was that the title pretty much describes me a lot of the time (as much as I hate to admit it).

One fairly important facet of environmentalism is political lobbying. For most of us, that means calling or emailing state representatives. If I had to figure out how to do that myself, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't get done (sometimes I'm an ideas person and not really an action person). Lucky for my conscience, there are a bunch of websites that set it up for you by providing convenient "take action" buttons and prefab letters (which you can customize, of course). Just as a warning, you will get emails often if you sign up for some of these lists.

1. Union of Concerned Scientists: This group sends action alerts fairly frequently if you subscribe to the UCS Action Network. They also include a personalized email in the action emails they send you (so all you have to do is click "Take Action" and you can send an email to whatever representative or official needs to be contacted for that campaign). They run a lot of campaigns ranging from food safety to energy issues. There are also some newsletters you can subscribe to (a digest specifically about food and one entitled "green tips"
2. Sierra Club: This website has too many actions to count (see, I told you I was lazy). Once you become a registered user, you get personalized actions as well as an action history (cool). There are actions under such categories as "America's Wild Legacy," "Safe and Healthy Communities," and "Smart Energy Solutions"
3. Environment America: This organization is a federation of 23 state environmental groups whose focus is "to build support for federal legislation." It's a pretty easy site to navigate--there are sections for each issue (New Energy Future, Stopping Global Warming, Healthy Oceans, Clean Air, etc) and on most pages there is a "take today's e-action" box. Here's the Environment Connecticut website.
4. Save Our Environment: Like the Sierra Club website, this one has a personalized actions and action history profile type thing. It's harder to tell if some of these actions are up to date, but hey. The fact is, they're partnered with Ben & Jerry's to create a website called Lick Global Warming, which includes a Global Warming Game called "Ben & Jerry's Eco-Mission." Definitely worth a look.
   
5. Clean Water Action: This is a more specific website about...water-related issues. Okay. They offer national campaigns as well as state-by-state listings of petitions and such. Right now there's a campaign underway regarding the Clean Water Act ("The Bush Administration is attempting to redefine what waters would be protected under the Clean Water Act by issuing a series of policies that offer "no protection" for our critical water resources"). They're accepting public comments until January 21st, so that's something you could do now if you're interested.

If you know of any other helpful websites or whatever, leave a comment!

Eco Blogs

Winter break is good for blogging (you know, during commerical breaks of the Top Model marathon). In addition to our blog (which I know you read avidly, right?), you might want to check out these blogs for some other perspectives:

1. Dot Earth: this blog is a New York Times blog about global warming. "In Dot Earth, reporter Andrew C. Revkin examines efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits. Supported in part by a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Mr. Revkin tracks relevant news from suburbia to Siberia, and conducts an interactive exploration of trends and ideas with readers and experts."
2. RealClimate: this is basically a blog (I don't think they explicitly call it one, but hey) run by scientists. "RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science."
   
3. No Impact Man: this blog is a guy's record of a project begun in November, 2006. New York City resident No Impact Man (plus his wife, toddler, and dog) seek to have no net impact on the environment during their one-year experiment. I guess it's still going because he's still updating the blog...
4. Save Your Trash: "Because there is no such thing as away..." I found out about this story a few days ago on the news. Basically, this guy from Berkeley (Ari Derfel) saved ALL of his trash for a year. Here's the original news article about it (he also has some links to news videos about the project on his blog).
   

How Green is Your Candidate?

Since today is the day of the New Hampshire Primary, I added a green candidates widget to the blog (it's underneath the "Beyond Wes" links section). Check it out! Grist has a really great section on their website about each of the candidates (My favorite part is the chart).

As I was exploring the chart, I realized that I definitely didn't understand what the deal is with the cap-and-trade system and the carbon tax. Well, now what I understand is this:

First of all, there are different types of cap-and-trade. One is called grandfathering, in which carbon credits are basically given to corporations for free. The other is auctioned cap and trade, in which credits are auctioned (duh, I know, but bear with me). Anyway, the difference is a question of who keeps the revenue (with grandfathering, the companies hold on to it). With both the auctioned cap and trade and the carbon tax the government keeps the money.
A big point of difference between the cap and trade system and the carbon tax thing is that the carbon tax provides price certainty (the price of carbon is set) whereas the cap and trade system provides certainty about the actual emissions reductions (all that is from this article, which I found through this article (also informative), which I found through Grist).

There was a lot of back-and-forth about the issue on Grist in early 2007, so if you're interested in reading more, here's a list of some relevant articles.

Gary Yohe's position is in favor of a carbon tax. Here's an excerpt from a Scientific American article that appeared in November:

SA: What is a good policy solution?

GY: I prefer a carbon tax for lots of reasons. I think that it would be easier to administer. There are a few thousand points of entry for carbon in the U.S. economy and a few tens of millions points of entry for carbon into the atmosphere. The revenue from a tax could be used for lots of smart things, like technology research and development or reducing the regressivity of the climate tax by lowering the income tax. You could also pay to reduce the vulnerability of people who work in sectors particularly hard hit by climate policy. Or the carbon tax could be used to underwrite carbon mitigation options; you could, for example, buy back the carbon if someone has taken the initiative to develop a way to capture and store it.
I don't prefer cap and trade in the case of carbon dioxide, even though it worked for sulfur dioxide in this country. Unlike acid rain damage, which depends on current sulfur emissions, all you need in the case of carbon is for the average emissions to fall in a predictable trajectory so their sum over 100 years falls below a desired target. Whether it's high or low in one particular year doesn't matter. It is most economically efficient to allow emissions to bounce around an average as they move along a lowering trajectory. A tax allows that, cap and trade doesn't.

Bottled Water Results

Way back when (by which I mean a couple months ago) we held a bottled water challenge at the farmer's market. Finally, the results are in!*

Out of 172 total participants, the following preferred:

Filtered: 74 or 43%
Tap: 37 or 22%
Bottled: 39 or 23%
No preference: 22 or 13%

Alright, so tap and bottled were pretty close (I'm going to come right out and say that I was really hoping tap water would win). But whatever, I'm going to console myself by providing you with a link to this National Geographic article about how bottled water isn't your best option. And this link that demonstrates how pretty Sigg water bottles are.

*Which means I finally remembered where I wrote them down.

New Year Ushers New Laws Regarding the Environment

New Year's Day brought much more than 2008. Several new state laws and local ordinances regarding the environment also took effect on January 1. Some of the new laws as of Tuesday include:

-Maine retailers must accept used cell phones for recycling
-North Carolina businesses that sell alcohol must recycle beverage containers
-Oregon is including fuel-saving guidelines in its drivers manual, which will be included on future tests for new drivers
-The city of Chicago sales tax on bottled water increased by five cents
-Illinois mandated energy-efficient light bulbs in buildings larger than 1,000 square feet
-Minnesota banned mercury in everything from new stoves and barometers to over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and toiletries

New Laws for Connecticut after Jan. 1 include:

-Expanding a temporary state sales tax exemption for passenger cars that get at least 40 miles per gallon to all passenger trucks and vans with the same fuel efficiency. The exemption runs from Jan. 1 of this year to July 1, 2010.

-The state's secretary of the Office of Policy and Management must prepare a plan to encourage the use of biodiesel heating oil blends in state buildings and facilities.

-A new rebate program will be established for residential electric customers who replace their old air conditioners with ones that meet federal Energy Star efficiency standards. The rebates range from $25 to $100 for room air conditioners, depending on the cost, and at least $500 for residents who replace a central air unit. The program runs until Sept. 1, 2008.

-Each car or light-duty truck in the state's fleet must have a fuel efficiency rating in the top third of vehicles in its class. And between Jan. 1, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2009, at least 50 percent of the state's purchased vehicles must be alternative-fueled, hybrid, electric or plug-in electric vehicles. It must be 100 percent starting Jan. 1, 2010.

Middletown High School to Run on Fuel Cell in Fall

By the fall of 2008, Middletown High School will install a fuel cell thanks to a state grant of $800,000. The fuel cell is expected to generate about 20 percent of the school's total electrical load at a cost less than buying the electricity off the power grid.

What’s Your Consumption Factor?

Interesting Op-Ed in the Times by Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel) about the exorbitant—and woefully unsustainable—levels of consumption in the developed world, especially the United States.

Also, here's a good Times editorial about the environmental agendas of the presidential candidates. Thankfully, these issues have garnered much more attention than they ever did in 2000 or 2004, but will widespread environmental concern just be a passing fad like it seems to have been in the 70s? Maybe the realities of global warming will make this time around very different.