Category — Climate

The Telegraph reports that — surprise! — we humans are consuming our natural capital  (food, fuel, and other resources) faster than the earth can either replenish them or absorb our wastes. Last year, we began eating into our capital on September 23; this year’s Overshoot Day will fall on August 21 (according to the New Economic Foundation, humanity first went into global ecological debt on December 19, 1987). For a fuller explanation of this grim metric, read here.

Australia sends a lot of ships, laden with iron ore, to Japan. Then the ships head back to Australia, carrying seawater as ballast. Australia is a dry country, in dire need of fresh water. Japan currently discharges almost all of its treated sewage, which started as fresh water, into the sea. Do you see where we’re going here? Read this article in Asahi Shimbun, which describes how and why Japan may soon be selling its treated sewage to Australia, for use in those iron-ore operations (and replacing the use of fresh water expensively derived from sea water).

This is a pilot project, and I’m sure there will be some kinks to work out, but I believe we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this water reuse and recycling in the future. (Transporting water, which is heavy, ain’t cheap: but in this case waste water is replacing sea water on a ship that’s got to get back to Australia anyway.) Fresh water is a precious and finite resource. Yes, it recycles and cleans itself as it moves from one physical state to another, but with more and more people on the planet, polluting water faster than we or Mom Earth can clean it, there’s less of the stuff to go around. Why discharge expensively treated wastewater into the ocean when it can be used yet again in industry or — depending on its level of treatment — for agriculture or human consumption? (For that matter, why use expensively treated drinking water merely to flush away human waste?) To see how Orange County, California, cleans its waste water to a level fit for drinking, check out my article in the New York Times Magazine.)

Annie Leonard (of Story of Stuff fame) and Free Range Productions aren’t the only folks turning out clever videos on consumer habits and climate change. Here’s a German production called “The Bill” by a group called Germanwatch.

The Reformed Broker and Time Mag’s Curious Capitalist write about Fiji Water’s defensive p.r. campaign (does anything justify the brand’s existence?), and the overkill of the company’s Rob Six, vp for corporate communications.

This is how confusing writing on serious topics for women’s magazines can be: I looked online for my story about fresh-water shortages in Elle magazine (it’s called Tapped Out) and spent several seconds wondering if this image was a strappy high heel.

I’m happy to write for Elle – it makes an effort to cover important nonfashion subjects. And at a recent reading (and singing, in addition to signing) from his recent The Thoreau You Don’t Know at Brooklyn’s Book Court, Robert Sullivan thanked many folks, including his stalwart editor at Vogue, and said:  “Behind every semi-successful nonfiction writer . . .  there stands a women’s magazine.”

Good Magazine has a nifty illustration of the virtual and actual water gallons behind  various foodstuffs and household habits. As you’ll see, beef is a killer.

The Boston Globe has a story today on scientists studying the carbon footprints of various ordinary things, including bottled water. Tap water, of course, has a much smaller carbon footprint than any bottled water, but one researcher, Edgar Blanco, at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, found that water imported from France and Fiji had less of an impact than water bottled in the U.S. How’s that? You’ve got to look not just at distance traveled, he says, but also at the energy source for bottling plants. From the story:

<In France, such plants use electricity generated mostly by nuclear energy, and in the Pacific Islands, geothermal is a common energy source; both are clean from a carbon dioxide standpoint. In the United States, by contrast, bottling plants are powered mostly by fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. … That doesn’t mean you should run out and buy imported French water. Nobody suggests that greenhouse gas emissions alone should govern consumer decisions; after all, there are many other environmental considerations – such as the radioactive waste from nuclear plants – not to mention factors such as price and taste.>

In Charles Fishman’s excellent Fast Company article on Fiji Water, the bottling plant ran on diesel generators – definitely not carbon neutral. (Icelandic Glacial water, on the other hand, uses geothermal or hydroelectric power at its plant.) At any rate, ships filled with Fiji Water still ply the ocean and trucks still cross our highways. Life cycle analyses can be confusing, but one thing I know for certain: decent tap water flows – thank you, gravity – through my pipes.

Last week I went to a screening of Food, Inc., a celluloid version of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma directed by Robert Kenner. Pollan and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) narrate the story of where our food comes from, why it’s so cheap, and the high price it exerts on food workers, the nation’s health, and the environment (though I would have liked to have seen a lot more on agricultural impacts to our soil, water, and air). Like Fuel, which I’ll eventually get around to blogging about, Food, Inc. has high production values (lots of aerial shots, propulsive music, snazzy graphics and animation). It reminds us how little we know about our food and, even worse, how little we’re allowed to know about our food: our regulatory agencies do a better job protecting the increasingly concentrated and powerful food industry than they do consumers. One woman left the screening muttering, “I’ll never eat ground beef again.”

One thing irked me. In the beginning, we meet the Orozcos, a family of four with no time to cook or shop (the parents may work two jobs; dad has diabetes) and little money to spend. But the family can buy dinner at a burger joint for around twelve bucks. They know the food’s no good for them (let alone the earth), but you can’t beat the price. The Orozcos are later shown in the produce aisle of a grocery store, fretting about the high price of broccoli and oranges.

When you show a gun in the first act of a play, aren’t you supposed to use it by the 3rd? Well, the Orozcos’ problem is never solved. Subsidies keep prices for meat, corn, soy, etc, artificially low. If other vegetable growers received those subsidies, would they bring down the price of leafy greens? Possibly, but the idea is to make the cheap food, the Orozcos’ happy meal, reflect reality, not a broken system.  What I’d like to see is Pollan go onto Craigslist or Freecycle and get the family a crock pot, a pressure cooker, and possibly a rice cooker. (Yes, all energy-burning devices but there’s a greater good at stake here.) Then teach the family to start their legumes and grains — which they can buy cheaply, in bulk — in the morning, before they head out to work and school.  This won’t solve all their food and budget problems, but it may keep them off burgers and fries a few nights a week. (For ideas about how the government, through procurement programs, could encourage sustainable agriculture and make better food available to more people, read David Corn in this month’s Mother Jones.)

The filmmakers’ prescription is to vote with our forks, eat with our families, demand wholesome food, and work to change federal food policies. Somehow, even the Boss singing This Land Is Your Land, as this advice rolls at the film’s conclusion, couldn’t counteract the depression that had been creeping over me for the last hour. Omnivore was one of the most important books of the last decade; I hope this movie reaches even more people than the book did.

(And just one more quibble, if I may: why did Kenner show the horrors of the industrial slaughterhouse but then, when he moved to Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm, turn the camera away from the chicken at the crucial moment? If Kenner is comparing the inhumane slaughter of Beef Products Inc. to the conscious cutting of Polyface, he should have given this shot equal treatment.) Okay, enough: go see this movie when it opens in selected cities on June 12. Bring the person responsible for food shopping in your household.

For some time, Ellen Honigstock, a LEED-accredited architect in Brooklyn, has been blogging in a calm and professional way about her efforts to green her own home. Now’s she’s launched the Toeprint Project, a year-long project that will –oh, let’s let Ellen explain:

“Each week for 52 weeks, we will publish a different strategy aimed towards making buildings more efficient, durable, healthier for the occupants or otherwise more sustainable. We will interview experts and bring you relevant up-to-date information about pricing, the pros, cons and trade-offs inherent in various strategies and even offer discounts and giveaways whenever we can make it happen.” The strategies, she says, “will range from minor lifestyle changes to fairly complex infrastructural analyses.”

Don’t be scared by the complex infrastructural analyses. Ellen is great at explaining technical equipment and processes, and she’s honest about her findings even when they don’t jibe with what people may want to hear.

Environmental Research Letters for February 2009 has a (peer reviewed) paper by Peter Gleick and Heather S. Cooley of the Pacific Institute on the energy equivalents needed to produce bottled water. Producing the PET bottles used to satisfy global bottled water demand required the energy equivalent of approximately 50 million barrels of oil per year, the authors find. The U.S.’s share was a third of that (close to the 17 million figured offered more than a year ago). But producing the bottles isn’t everything: there’s the filling of the bottles, labeling, shipping, transporting, chilling, and so on. All told, the authors report, “we estimate that the annual consumption of bottled water in the U.S. in 2007 required an energy input equivalent to between 32 and 54 million barrels of oil or a third of a per cent of total U.S. primary energy consumption.”

A third of a percent doesn’t sound like much. Except when you consider that the end product is, more often than not, totally unnecessary.

The author’s conclude: “bottled water is up to 2,000 times more energy-intensive than tap water.” Much depends on the type of water (whether it’s filtered to the Nth degree or not, how far it’s transported, the temperature to which it’s chilled). Last summer, the Swiss Gas and Water Association did its own study and found that the environmental impact of bottled water is up to 1,000 times that of tap water (again, with all kinds of variables). Life cycle analyses are filled with variables, but we get the drift.