- Determining the amount of greenhouse gases in products to allow for comparison is not so easy. This example shows that it took a year and $100,000 to do one type of product, so imagine how hard it will be to do this with all boxes, bags, and tins of foods in a grocery store. - Editor
Is Your Product Good for the Climate? Here’s How to Prove It
BSF manufactures a variety of window films, which are retrofitted to the inside of glass surfaces, allow sunlight to penetrate windows while reducing solar heat gain. BSF recently completed a climate declaration — the greenhouse gas emission portion of an environmental product declaration (EPD), a lifecycle assessment of a product’s environmental performance. The climate declaration analyzed film, finding that, when installed, the films prevented more GHGs from entering the atmosphere over time than was expended in their manufacture, shipping, installation and expected end of life disposal and recycling.  The cost to produce the climate declaration was just over $100,000. The document took a year of work to assemble, requiring a cradle-to-grave lifecycle analysis. One motive for BSF’s climate declaration came from the company’s customer base: queries, lots of them. “Our sales team was reporting increasing questions from our international customer base,” Fremont says. “Customers wanted to know if our product was really carbon neutral or carbon negative.” These questions have been raised around the globe.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS212248723520100824

What Is A Climate Declaration

An increasing attention on climate change has driven the demand for new ways to provide information on products and services climate impact. Purchasers and consumers are asking for information to make climate conscious purchase decision.
Climate declarations are based on quality secured scientific methods. They provide a holistic approach on products and services climate impact and can be used by purchasers and consumers who want to take climate considerations in their purchases.
http://www.climatedec.com/  

- This may not be as precise as the above example, but this campaign is worth considering. Of course, less “stuff” in “Reduce” is often better, too. It’s no longer what you can afford- it’s what the Earth can afford to continue giving us. Think in what we call here “Earth Dollars”.  - Editor
 

Back-to-Cool- Shopping with Climate Change in Mind
Before you spend another dime, there are a few things you should know. The back-to-school shopping season is second only to the holiday shopping season in generating revenue. All that (“stuff”) requires energy, packaging, and transportation — all contributing factors in climate change.
The nonprofit organization Climate Counts is a collaborative effort to bring consumers and companies together in the fight against global climate change. In order to promote awareness among consumers, Climate Counts scores companies on their climate impact.
For the Back-2-Cool Campaign, Climate Counts is taking a look at back-to-school ads from the apparel, electronics, food products, and Internet/software industries to keep consumers informed about the actions of the companies behind the ads. Join the Back-2-Cool Campaign and become a climate-conscious consumer.
We’re getting results- between 2008 and 2009, 90 percent of companies scored by Climate Counts improved their scores by at least 22 percent. Those companies have taken steps to measure their climate footprint and reduce their climate impact.
Consumer choices matter. You can have an impact with your voice — call them, email them, tell them why you are taking your business to the competition… and you can have an impact with your wallet. When it comes to the bottom line, companies will take action to protect their brand and their reputation.
http://www.care2.com/greenliving/back-to-cool-shopping-with-climate-change-in-mind.html

- Want more time, better health, clearer conscience, more fun, and more money? Join the No Impact movement and begin your empowerment while joining with others. National No Impact Week starts August 29th! Come on- get your feet wet, challenge yourself, and make new friends- there are numerous options. – Editor
 
SIERRA CLUB NO IMPACT WEEK 8/29
For one week, remove yourself from consumerdom, lower your environmental impact, and improve your quality of life by focusing on what’s really important to you. Starting August 29th, thousands of people across the world will take part in the No Impact Week! To experience the difference low impact living can have for yourself, click to register and receive the new and improved how-to manual. http://action.sierraclub.org/site/PageNavigator/NAT_noimpact

FINDING LOCALS
Joining a MeetUp group is a great way to get support and inspiration from local No Impact Week participants! Check out our MeetUp page here to find one in your area. Can’t find one? Start your own! Once you’re set up, email us to receive the workshop manual, which has everything you’ll need for sparking meaningful discussions and activities. www.meetup.com/No-Impact-Project/

PLANET GREEN TV HOUSE PARTIES
Call up your peeps and host an end of the summer No Impact House Party! Planet Green will broadcast the television premiere of No Impact Man August 28th at 10pm EDT.  We’ve partnered with Sierra Club to create a toolkit with fun activities, provocative discussion questions, and ideas for actions you can take to make a difference. Download it here.  No TV? No problem. You can rent the film or stream it free from Netflix.
http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tv/reel-impact/no-impact-man-lives-life-with-less.html

NO IMPACT WEEK FOR UNIVERSITIES
This fall, nearly 30,000 college students nationwide will take part in our customized University No Impact Week! Schools include Ohio State University, Indiana University-Purdue, Rollins College, and Arizona State University. It’s a great way to get students involved in and excited about environmentalism, and to introduce them to all the great green resources on campus. If you’d like us to create a week with your school, click here for more details. http://noimpactproject.org/experiment/universities/

SCREENINGS FOR COMMUNITIES OF FAITH
Hosting a screening of No Impact Man is a great opportunity for your community to get together to discuss environmental issues and take action. And thanks to generous support from the 11th Hour Project, faith-based organizations are invited to participate in our special community-screening event for free. In addition, participants are eligible to purchase copies of No Impact Man the book at half-off retail price. If your faith group would like to screen No Impact Man, please contact Lindsay@noimpactproject.org   http://noimpactproject.org/experiment/universities/

- We all have idols, and last week, I got to listen to one of mine. It was partly the ground-breaking Club of Rome work that influenced me away from my intended career and on to population, environment, and climate change. With such an important message, why weren’t all the City decision makers there at the talk? How do we get other cities to listen? Dr. Meadows had read our Sustainable Santa Fe Plan- great! - and while he congratulated us on its importance and value, he said that if population and consumption levels are not included in a climate plan, we can not become sustainable. It’s true. If we cut our emissions, for example 50%, but double the number of people, we have not become more sustainable.

For those of you who have been reading Climate Today for at least a year will not have had any surprises- his talk covered Peak Oil, population growth, the lag time of climate change, the need for local adaptation and relocalization, voluntary simplicity with reduced consumption, etc.

Here are a few gems from his talk that are worth remembering and sharing:
- 50% of all the oil consumed by humans has been consumed since 1984, creating a world we now view as normal, but this high energy usage can not continue.
- We are moving into the “Post Petroleum Age.”  In 2006, 9 billion barrels of oil were discovered, but we consumed 31 billion barrels that year. World consumption of oil is currently 5 to 6 times the amount that is being discovered, so we are using up our savings account, which can not continue.
- Prepare yourself for less available energy. It appears now that the government in the coming years will have to resort to some kind of rationing or quotas, similar to World War II. Just raising prices harms the poor.
- The “biocapacity” of the earth has been surpassed, and we are currently overshooting, which, if continues, is always followed by collapse. We are now consuming 140% of resources with demands accelerating against the world’s ecosystems. These trends include not only fossil fuels but also groundwater, greenhouse gases, the destruction of agricultural soils, the degradation of natural resources, the gap between the rich and the poor, the supply of fish, etc.
- Embodied energy is the energy used to create and ship the things that we import. We have to fully recognize the energy and resources used in other places like China if we are to reach sustainability.
- The world’s population will be going back down this century. It is only a matter of how.
- It is unlikely that waiting for the Federal government will work. Politicians want to get re-elected, and therefore fail to make the essential significant structural changes required to convert to sustainability.
Thank you Dr. Meadows for speaking so frankly. - Editor

Dennis Meadows probably doesn’t mean to be a downer at a cocktail party. But the researcher, who has spent decades studying Earth’s capacity to endure human population growth and extractive economies, says we’ve run out of time to turn around our global version of the Titanic.
Call him a realist. “We’re not talking about problems our grandchildren will have to deal with. We’re talking problems we’ll deal with in the next three to five years,” said Meadows, professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire and winner of the 2009 prize for original and outstanding achievements from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan. Meadows thinks humans can adapt to what is around the corner, such as higher fuel costs and warmer weather. Rebuilding local food supplies, living within an area’s existing water resources and producing energy locally from renewable sources are all ways communities can prepare for what’s ahead, he said.
Meadows and colleagues from the Club of Rome, a think tank focused on global challenges, produced a report in 1972 called “The Limits of Growth.” Their research concluded humans and their economies would outstrip the earth’s resources if growth wasn’t limited.
They updated the report in 2004 and found that on a planet-wide scale, humans hadn’t made much progress on saving the Earth’s resources. “We’ve seen so much population growth and industrial growth that we’re worse off then we were 20 years ago,” Meadows said. Now, it is too late to stop climate change, he believes. “Even if you lower CO2 emission to zero, we’re still going to see climate change from existing emissions for hundreds of years.” For people in general, it means learning to live well on less, he said - less energy, less water, less stuff.
http://www.santafe.edu/news/item/researcher-talks-climate-change/
For an 8 minute video that is not as clear as his 1 ½ hour talk but gives a flavor- http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6209

- I went to the cohousing conference Sustainability through Community (www.cohousing.org/2010/overview) in Boulder this past weekend since my work and heart are in sustainability, and I live in cohousing. It was gratifying to hear the plenary speakers have a clear view of just how much and how fast we need to change to save our planet. The new element was how to relate this urgency to cohousing. When people visit our Commons cohousing, they ohh and ahh over its lovely landscaping and how adorable it is that the kids are constantly having a blast. Yet, the potential is far deeper. We who live here know the value of sharing resources such as tools and Common House, but now we must probe deeper into “Waking Up from the American Dream.”

Kids thriving in cohousing

 
The first speaker was David Wann (http://www.davewann.com/), who gave an articulate explanation of voluntary simplicity, begging us not to “Drop the Egg that Belongs to the Future.” He’s coming out with a book in January- The New Normal: Agenda for a Healthy Planet, but his other books are excellent, too. For cohousing, his vision is to have cohousing become political- as examples of a more sustainable lifestyle, we need members on City Councils, we need to be activists, “converting shame to pride.” The psychological and social aspects of shared living can replace the emptiness of the mainstream American lifestyle that relies on consumption rather than social connectedness. Get him to come speak at your conferences- you won’t regret it.

Conference Chart- the US has 2% of the world’s oil resources, yet we use 25% of the oil.
Do we want to continue this? Think of the dolphins and turtles that are dying. 

Two and a half days of speakers and sessions revealed so much. How to reduce energy- new cohousing is creating net zero energy buildings- no need to wait for 2030! Older ones can use DER- Deep Energy Retrofits. One cohousing estimates that their energy savings have saved $720,000 in energy bills! One family used only 1 tank of gas in an entire year in part because the resources they needed were right there!  How to reduce waste- composting, fun clothing swaps, shared resources, permanent give-away bins, etc. How to eat locally- community gardens, a CSA on your own land, strong ties with coops and nearby CSA’s, a formal commitment to eat organically, and more. You have never wanted to plant potatoes? Well, when your community is having a “Cinco de Mayo” potato planting party, with chips, salsa, beer and music- you won’t want to miss the fun party!  And get the job done amidst laughter and camaraderie!

There is no doubt that cohousing has the potential to become powerful incubators of “The New Normal” where less is more, used is great, sharing is better than possessing, growing food, seeing solar panels and clothes lines are the norm, eating with your friends regularly means walking a few yards, having no more babysitting worries- and more! Even outside of cohousing, we all need to replace our unprecedented material expectations with healthy psychological bonds.  - Editor

Water- Growing food needs water. Some experts predict that by 2015, two-thirds of the world’s people will live in water-stressed countries.* Even if only half of this prediction were true, it’s a serious global issue. Since life does not go on without plants, an

This latest report from the USDA is a real eye-opener! Our food systems are getting less and less sustainable just when we must be building resilience and sustainability in this essential that no one can do without! - Editor  

Energy used by the US food system accounted for 80% of the increase in American energy use between 1997 and 2002, according to a recent report from the USDA’s Economic Research Service. Other remarkable conclusions of the analysis include:

Food system energy use increased by 22.4% while total energy use rose by just 3.3%.

On a per capita basis, total energy use actually fell by 1.8%, but food system energy use was still up by 16.4%.

Putting food on the plate of the average American required 2.4 million BTU more in 2002 than in 1997. (To put this in context, total per capita energy consumption of 20 nations was less than 2.4 million BTU in 2002.)

The period between 2002 to 2007 likely saw another jump in food system energy use that far exceeded the increase observed in the rest of the US economy.

What we eat matters. Non-essential foods - alcoholic beverages, baked goods, snack foods, and pet foods -accounted for the biggest component of the increase observed between 1997 and 2002. The amount of energy used to get fresh fruits and vegetables to our plates also increased as we opted for pre-cut portions and convenience packaging. The report calls for food prices to accurately reflect energy consumption throughout the supply chain, to signal consumer choices that reduce energy use as energy prices rise.

For the report- http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/ERR94/ERR94.pdf
http://energyfarms.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/accounting-for-increasing-energy-use-by-the-us-food-system/

“Wasting away again in Petroleumville, hoping for my addiction to halt.
Some people claim that there’s an oil rig to blame and I know it’s my own damn fault!”
http://climateprogress.org/2010/05/24/luckovich-cartoon-bp-oil-spill/

QUOTES
“No one goes and tries to drill in a mile of water if they can think of somewhere easier to do it,”
Chris Skrebowski, a former strategist for British Petroleum
and
“If you want to drill less, you have to significantly decrease your demand for the stuff.
 Patting ourselves on the back for fining BP, increasing safety standards, making more areas off-limits to drilling doesn’t get at the fundamental problem . . .
which is our high consumption of oil.”
Peter Maass, the author of the 2009 book, “Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil.”

Gulf spill reminds America- The era of ‘easy oil’ is over
To meet the world’s boundless thirst for oil, drillers are searching in the sand and mud of remote western Canada, the tough shale rock of North Dakota and more than a mile under the seas off the southern U.S. coast, where a drilling accident has sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. Why are we going nearly to the ends of the earth and the bottom of the seas for oil?

The answer, say many experts, is that we’re consuming as much oil as we ever have but the era of “easy oil” is in our rearview mirror and receding fast. Production from onshore oilfields in the U.S. has been declining since the 1970s, and near-shore production along the Gulf of Mexico peaked more than a decade ago.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/07/93754/gulf-spill-reminds-america-the.html