What are you doing this sunday?
We are need of people to help get the word out about the South Street Green Festival.
Walk around the city, collect signatures, put up posters, and hand out post cards.
If this sounds fun please meet this Sunday at 10 am at 533 south 17th street
For more information about the volunteer […]

Friday, September 8th, 5 PM - 6:30 PM
Tabernacle United Church
3700 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104
http://www.sbnphiladelphia.org
You’re invited to join us to learn about the Sustainable Business Network’s new Healthy Home Building Block (H2B2) and to share information about your business with other like-minded businesses and people interested in creating a healthier home. If you […]

 Its hard to push the message to adults when it comes to saving our enviornment. Telling someone to recycle is like pulling teeth nowadays! But its even harder to push this sell to children. Children need guidance in their lives , why can’t we pitch saving the earth at a early age. Children shouldn’t have […]

I just heard about this website, carbon footprint, that let’s you calcuate how much carbon you are contributing. i am on vacation right now up in maine, definitely enjoying the outdoors - went blueberry picking in the mnts yesterday, so don’t have a chance to calculate my own, but will give it a shot […]

Pittsburgh is at the forefront of the nation’s green building movement. Depending on the day, Pittsburgh had either the most or the second most green buildings in the country. This reputation is beginning to recast in people’s minds their ideas about Pittsburgh, formerly thought only as the smoky Steel City.

In this podcast, PennFuture’s D.J. Trischler talks to Pittsburgh leaders to get the latest on energy efficient and environmentally friendly building in southwestern Pennsylvania. We hear first from Green Building Alliance (GBA) Executive Director Rebecca Flora. GBA is a national leader in creating market demand for green building through education, publicity, and project facilitation. Rebecca explains how the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification process for buildings works, and how policies that promote green building are missing, but needed. Later she discusses how green building has actually begun to attract people to Pittsburgh.

D.J. also speaks with Gary Saulson, Director of Corporate Real Estate at PNC, one of the nation’s largest financial services companies, headquartered in Pittsburgh. PNC’s Firstside Center in Pittsburgh, at 650,00 square feet, is one of the world’s largest LEED-certified buildings, and has been recognized with more than 20 awards. Gary is a believer in green buildings, and has overseen many additional PNC projects. PNC intends to stay green, because they value the energy savings and healthier work environment. They’ve also created design prototypes for LEED-certified bank branches.

We also hear from Pittsburgh City Councilman Bill Peduto, who earlier this year introduced legislation at the city level to create incentives for developers to build green. If adopted, projects within the City of Pittsburgh that are LEED-certified could get waivers to enable them to increase density (adding extra floors, for example). But Peduto firmly believes that even without such incentives, Pittsburgh will continue to lead on LEED, because it makes so much sense for developers.

Energy conservation is one effective way to reduce your contribution to global warming, and to help prevent harmful pollution from coal-fired power plants. The cleanest watt of electricity is the one you don’t use! To learn more about PennFuture’s Cool Pennsylvania Campaign, visit our web site. You can also make the switch easily to a renewable source of electricity. Visit www.cleanyourair.org to find out how. As always, we welcome your comments and feedback. Click on "comment" below, or e-mail us at podcast (at) pennfuture (dot) org.

State regulators are currently accepting public comments on Gov. Rendell’s much-needed plan to cut mercury pollution from the state’s coal-fired power plants by 90%.
Despite the public health and environmental threats posed by mercury pollution in Pennsylvania (the state advises citizens to limit their consumption of fish from our waterways because of mercury pollution, for instance), […]

I was forwarded a link to a five-part series by the L.A. Times called Altered Oceans yesterday and today, I’m two parts deep into it. It’s a very in depth look into what is happening to our oceans.
Oceans once thought to be so vast and so quickly healing scientists used to think that any […]

This is about as outrageous as it gets. A story is emerging from New Jersey that a daycare center was allowed to open on the site of a closed thermometer factory. As many as 30 children (and perhaps more) were potentially exposed to high levels of mercury at the center. They are currently being tested for mercury poisoning. According to one report:

FRANKLIN TWP., N.J. - August 9, 2006 - Parents want to know how it could have happened in Franklin Township, New Jersey. How could a day care center have been built on top of a former mercury thermometer factory that was once too polluted for human occupancy? …

…The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, the township, and the owner of the building, Jim Sullivan Incorporated, have come under fire since the DEP found unsafe levels of mercury in the day care center last month. Tracy Rogers is one of the many parents whose child has showed symptoms of mercury poisoning…

Many parents have retained attorneys to handle the matter. Philadelphia’s NBC-10 has posted a timeline of the facility’s history - and it’s clear that there was some weirdness going on with respect to the history of the facility. But to answer the question, “how could it have happened in Franklin Township, NJ” … I can answer that without much fear of contradiction …

New Jersey has the highest local property tax rates in the United States. It’s a constant struggle for local municipalities to work up budgets that can at least maintain services, or get by without cutting another school program. So, when there’s an opportunity in a small town like Franklin Township to actually get a commercial tax rateable on the books, they jump at it. Code Officials are under tremendous pressure from local elected officials to look the other way when there’s a question on whether or not a particular use is appropriate for a specific site. Zoning and Planning officials rarely look beyond the potential tax revenue from a commercial endeavor, unless they’re pressed by local residents.

I’m sure that New Jersey is not unique in this particular tax dynamic. There is constant pressure to do anything to avoid raising taxes. The local governments of every town in the U.S. are constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul…and someday, the bills are going to come due. In the past 30 years, the GOP has sucessfully ingrained the notion into people that taxes are evil, evil, evil - at least for rich people and corporations.

Grover Norquist’s “drown government in a bathtub” mantra resulted in the Katrina mess last year. In the coming years, there will be many more children contaminated by mercury (and worse) because of environmental shortcuts and local elected officials under extreme pressure to do anything other than raise property taxes even slightly - even if it’s looking the other way when a daycare center is built on a contaminated site.

“How could it happen?”, the parents of Franklin Township ask plaintively. The answer and root cause for the parents? Look no further than yourselves and the last time you bitched about your property tax bill.

Yes, this is an outrage, but it’s a completely predictable outrage. We get the level of government services that we’re willing to pay for, whether it’s local, state, or federal. And as a result, it would not be surprising to find that there are many more Kiddie College Daycare center scenarios just waiting to be discovered elsewhere in the U.S.

The warning signs are all around us — the legacy of the industrial age is ushering in dramatic changes to the global climate. There’s no longer any use in even debating the issue, because the empirical data is too overwhelming, except for the looniest of flat earth theory adherents.

What remains to be seen (and debated) is the longer range impact of climate change. Warning signs certainly abound there, as well. What everyone wants to know, though, is “ok, so how am I impacted?” The plight of the polar bears, as tragic as it might be, just doesn’t touch a nerve with most people on a personal level. In fact, the real impact of climate change is mostly charted on such a distant calendar that our short attention span society figures there’s always tomorrow to fix the problem.

The magnitude of the changes being documented is not “fixable”, in a classic sense. We can make adjustments to our own personal habits, maybe even dramatic shifts in carbon-based fuel usage could take place (were the global political will available to do so), but the die is pretty much cast at this point. Remaining questions include, “well, should I buy some future beachfront property in the Poconos, then?”.

A column today on Counter Currents discusses the collapse of the Greenland Ice Shield, and potential ramifications. It’s not pretty. Lest you think that some tree hugging alarmist is ringing the claxon again, consider that the column is based on a U.S. Navy survey that suggests there will be no sea ice left in the Arctic Ocean as soon as 2016.

2016. Let that date roll off of your brain for a moment.

10 years from today, the Arctic Ocean could be as liquid as the Atlantic and Pacific. That’s a scary thought not only for the polar bears, but for every human on the planet. I was looking at a world map a little while ago, and when you consider the size of Greenland, and the implications of a large part of that semi-continent just slipping into the sea, it should cause everyone to pause. The mechanism for the collapse of the Greenland ice shield is well known, and it doesn’t take an array of supercomputers to predict the impact. It’s relatively simple physics.

There are no answers, there’s no way to reverse the impact of the industrial age on a climate that’s already adjusted (in negative ways) to mankind’s prescence on the face of the earth. Dinosaur’s roamed the globe for millions of years, but were gone in, geologically speaking, a moment in time.

It’s kind of funny, in a way. I was thinking back to one of George Carlin’s best rants that I first heard many years ago. The meat of Carlin’s monologue goes like this:

…The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles…hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages…And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet…the planet…the planet isn’t going anywhere. WE ARE!

We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance…

Indeed. Pack your shit. Pack your kid’s shit, the parent’s shit, and the pet cat’s shit. It’s isn’t going to be pretty, and it’s going to get ugly a lot sooner than we’re being led to believe, I’m afraid.

I’m a lot more concerned about an environmental armageddon in my lifetime than the biblical four horsemen of the apocalypse. Come to think of it, perhaps they already visited, and we just didn’t take notice.