GE is expanding its successful Treasure Hunt program outside of its facilities in order to find energy efficiency opportunities in include hospitals, universities, city buildings and private sites through a new collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund. The sites will learn how to conduct treasure hunts, while GE and EDF will work to verify the energy savings and identify and disseminate industry best practices.

CFOs, CIOs and sustainability teams at large companies have used spreadsheets for years to track corporate carbon emissions.  We are now, however, at a tipping point where the benefits of carbon management software outweigh the benefits of spreadsheets. 

Congress's failure to pass meaningful climate legislation won't actually affect the behavior of most businesses all that much: They have other, more persuasive reasons for pursuing energy efficiency and sustainability.

This report from Deloitte Consulting explores how sustainability professionals at 48 companies in the U.S. address green and triple-bottom-line issues.

A new report from Deloitte surveys sustainability leaders at 48 large U.S. firms to take the pulse of green business practices, and finds widely varying definitions, levels of commitment and areas of focus for firms looking to go green.

by Tom Philpott.

Many people claim they don’t have time to cook fresh meals “from scratch.” In Tom’s Kitchen, Grist’s food editor discusses some of the quick and easy things he gets up to in ... well, his kitchen. Forgive the lame iPhone photography.

Vegetable farming is hard work—and hard work requires hearty food. Before I began earning my keep as a full-time writer a couple of years ago, I would start most mid-summer days harvesting at dawn. We would eat a light breakfast of fruit and yogurt before going out, but our real morning meal would be “second breakfast” a few hours later, typically built on whatever we were harvesting.

Late July is when we harvest our very first potatoes. In small-scale production, you harvest potatoes with a pitchfork, plunging it into the earth a foot or two from the potato plant. You uproot the plant, turning it upside down. If the gods are cooperating, handfuls of beautiful spuds present themselves. In the course of a morning’s harvest, several potatoes get “speared”—accidentally pierced by the pitchfork’s tine. We would set aside these unsellable potatoes for second breakfast.

After several hours of harvesting, washing, and packing, an enormous hunger arises. I will never forget the anticipation and satisfaction those second breakfasts of farm eggs and fresh-dug new potatoes brought.

The phrase “new potato” simply refers to potatoes that have not been preserved for winter in a root cellar. I find that, properly done, they produce roast-potato nirvana: crisp and caramelized on the outside, moist, ethereal, and sweet on the inside—each bite like like a soufflé encased in a crust.

After a strenuous recent morning at the writing table, I went to the garden and harvested some potatoes, green onions, garlic, chile peppers, and parsley. I made an old-fashioned “second breakfast” as follows:

Scrambled eggs with roasted new potatoes

Serves two

Preheat oven to 450; heat a mid-sized cast-iron pan over medium-low heat heat.

Mise en place:

Two handfuls of freshly  potatoes, scrubbed and cut into roughly uniform half-inch cubes
Olive oil
Aromatic vegetables such as two small fresh onions, sliced thin; a clove or two of garlic, chopped; and, for a little fire, a chile pepper, chopped
Three eggs
A handful of parsley, chopped
Salt and a loaded pepper grinder
A few slices of your favorite melting cheese, optional

Dry the potato chunks thoroughly with a cloth towel. This is critical: wet potatoes won’t caramelize, and they’ll likely stick to the bottom of the pan. Adjust heat under the skillet to medium, and add enough oil to generously cover the bottom of the pan. When the oil shimmers, add the potatoes and a good pinch of salt. Shake the pan vigorously, coating the potatoes with oil. If any of them stick, loosen with a spatula. When the potatoes are sizzling vigorously and you know they’re not sticking, put them into the oven. If you have a convection oven, turn on the fan. This will help them brown.

Now kill some time: do some dishes, write an email, read a Grist article.

After ten or so minutes, take the potatoes out and give them a shake. Now crack the eggs into a bowl, add a pinch of salt and a generous grind of pepper, and whisk until just uniform. Kill a few more minutes, and pull the potatoes out and give them another shake. They will be starting to brown. Add the onions, and shake the pan again to distribute them. Don’t add garlic at this point—it burns to easily.

Return skillet to oven. Check them every five minutes or so, shaking each time. When they are nicely browned and slightly shriveled, they are ready. At that pount, add the garlic, chile (if using), and a good lashing of black pepper. Shake and taste for seasoning. (At this point, you will have sublime roast potatoes. You could stop here, and omit the eggs above.) Add the eggs to the pan, which will still be sizzling hot. With a wooden spoon, stir gently, incorporating the eggs into the roast potatoes. When they have not quite set, top with sliced cheese and return to oven for a minute or two to melt. They will emerge from the oven well-set and ready to eat immediately.

Top with chopped parsley.

Served with strong coffee, you’ve got a classic Maverick Farms second breakfast. Paired with a green salad, it also works as a light dinner that cries out for a crisp white wine.

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by Adam Browning.

While Congress was busy breaking our hearts and hopes for a clean energy future, guess what was happening in Delaware? 

Progress, that’s what. Yesterday, Gov. Jack Markell (D) signed into law a suite of clean energy bills, including a state Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard requiring 25 percent renewable energy, and some excellent solar-specific policies.

It would be very nice if Congress would take care of this on a national level, but in the off chance that they don’t, it can be done state by state. It’s where most of the action has taken place to date, and, well, unfortunately I don’t see that changing. 

Good work, Delaware. 

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Can the renewable electricity standard be saved?

by Steph Larsen.

Right now, I’m facing a problem shared by scores of farmers—beginning and experienced—across the country. I have four lambs that have been raised entirely on grass, and I know there are customers eager to buy them.

I just don’t know who they are.

The irony of selling directly to consumers is that while farmers gain the largest share of the food dollar this way, it also forces them to be marketers—something they may not have the skills, let alone the time, to be successful.

As I’ve said before, I don’t yet consider myself a farmer, but I’ll use myself as an example anyway. I have a demanding full-time job that I love, and I often spend my evenings and weekends tending to and experimenting with the things we’re growing. Someday we’ll get to the point where we have enough products to start selling them in addition to eating them. But will we have time to grow them and spend so many hours a week trying to find customers for them?

There is another way.

Nebraska, where I live, has an online, statewide farmers’ market modeled after the successful and innovative Oklahoma Food Co-op. Both create a central location for producers and consumers to find each other. The original idea was the brainchild of Robert Waldrop, who still serves as the president of the Oklahoma Food Co-op. From the looks of their website, they, like many food co-ops, rely on their board and volunteers to keep things running smoothly. Our Nebraska version, on the other hand, does employ at least one person part time.

Once or twice a month depending on the season, the dozens of producer members of the Nebraska Food Co-op go online and list what products they have available and in what quantities. This time of year, it’s bursting with all the fresh veggies that make summer so grand. There’s always a wide variety of meat available, this being Nebraska, and I can find eggs, home-canned goods, natural beauty products, and honey year-round. There’s even an organic miller that provides me with breakfast cereal, whole-wheat flour, hulled barley, and other grain products I’ve never heard of.

Consumer members, who pay an annual membership fee, have a set period of time to shop, selecting a “drop site” where they’ll pick up their order. The inventory decreases in real time, so when that last bunch of Swiss chard is gone, it’s gone. On the appointed day, producers relay their products in to a central location, via drop points, where orders are put together and sent back out to the drop points. When my order gets to me, every item has my name, the farm it came from, and what’s inside the brown paper or plastic package.

I’ve been a member of the Co-op for 2 years, so I’ve gotten to know the consumer side of the operation. It gives me access to things I wouldn’t have heard about otherwise, with the convenient bonus of not having to travel to each one individually. Our drop point is a small family farm about 7 miles from my office. They have freezer space for the meat we order, and I always have a nice chat with the farmers as I write out the check. The added bonus is that I can pick up the raw milk that the farmer produces at the same time, which can’t be sold through the co-op because in Nebraska, raw milk must be sold on-farm.  

Now that I’m also a producer, this method offers a lot of advantages for someone like me. The first is time: I don’t have to commit to being at a market stall several hours a week for the duration of the growing season, and thanks to the relayed distribution system, I don’t even have to drive that far. The second is scale—because the entry cost is low, I can start with putting just a few items up to test the market and grow from there.

And of course, because someone else is responsible for the marketing, it leaves me a lot more time to do things like contemplate a high tunnel to extend my growing season. The co-op prints and distributes promotional materials, plus members spread the word: based on the steadily increasing number of products in the last few years, it seems to be working. Consumers still can build a relationship with the producers they buy from by reading the profiles of each producer, which detail their individual practices and philosophy.

Other states and regions are starting to use similar online farmers market models, or create even bigger-scale ones like Ecotrust’s Foodhub. The Oklahoma Food Co-op does their best to help by providing their software free and sharing a long list of lessons they’ve learned.

As a producer, the Nebraska Food Co-op will give me an opportunity to experiment with things and expand my production slowly. Unfortunately, it can’t help me sell my lambs, because I don’t plan to use a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse when it’s time for them to become chops.

In this case, then. I’ll have to do my own marketing pitch. So, dear readers: If you know anyone who wants to buy a grassfed lamb “on the hoof,” so to speak—send them my way.

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by David Roberts.

In the U.S. Senate, it requires 60 votes out of 100 to do anything—to proceed to debate, to pass a bill, to amend a bill, to confirm a political appointee or a judge—anything. This is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned and it’s not in the Constitution; it’s a result of unprincipled abuse of informal practices by an increasingly nihilistic Republican Party.

The dysfunctional state of the Senate has damaging consequences that extend into virtually every corner of American politics. There’s just one in particular I want to focus on today: It gives progressives a complex!

Take environmentalists. Just last week, the climate bill, into which they’d poured countless hours of effort, lobbying, campaigning, arguing, and advocating, died an unceremonious death. Not surprisingly, this set off a round of self-recrimination and mutual recrimination. “Why did we fail?” they cried in anguish. Was it the messaging? Too much climate, not enough jobs? The reverse? Was the strategy too focused on Congress and not enough on the grassroots? Too many compromises? Too few? Could Obama have saved it? And on and on.

But step back for a moment and think about it. Climate and clean energy are incredibly difficult issues for any number of reasons. Yet environmentalists pulled together a huge coalition of businesses, religious groups, military groups, unions, and social justice groups. They got a majority of U.S. citizens on their side, as polls repeatedly showed. And—here’s the kicker—on the back of all that work, they got a majority of legislators in both houses of Congress on their side.

In a sane world—and in other developed democracies—that’s what success looks like. Environmentalists did what they were supposed to do, and they did it well! They should be proud of themselves. It’s not their fault Republicans are abusing idiosyncratic features of Senate governance to make reform prohibitively difficult.

The fact is, on a consequential, far-reaching, forward-looking, regionally charged set of issues like climate and energy, getting 60 percent of the country on your side is difficult enough. But getting 60 votes in the already-unrepresentative Senate is just an absurdly high bar. Theoretically, 40 senators representing under 10 percent of the population can block the will of the other 90 percent!

At least for the time being, it seems unlikely any combination of messaging, mobilizing, and lobbying can put a substantive climate bill over the top in the Senate. But that’s just because the Senate is broken.

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by Daniel J. Weiss.

This article was cross-posted from the Center for American Progress.

The Senate has taken Americans on an energy and climate roller coaster over the past year as Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and others attempted to craft legislation that would increase investment in clean energy while cutting global warming pollution.

Yet Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) last week acknowledged that the Senate would not debate an energy and global warming bill because it lacked support from a super majority of 60 senators. Sen. Reid noted on July 22 that, “We know we don’t have the votes [for a bill capping emissions].”

The vast majority of Democrats were ready to support a scaled-back bill that would decrease carbon pollution only from power plants while excluding coverage for transportation and manufacturing. Some Republican support was necessary for passage, yet no Republicans publicly supported this action. This included opposition from Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz), Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), and others who had voted for previous global warming bills.

Republican opposition, combined with a handful of Democratic senators who also opposed action, was enough to sink even this modest step. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), a lead sponsor of the companion House energy and climate bill, observed that “Republicans pulled out of the talks, and it’s just that simple ... There’s not another answer.”

Leader Reid had no alternative but to bring a much more limited energy bill to the Senate floor, and he introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Accountability Act, S. 3663 today. This bill is no substitute for comprehensive clean energy and global warming legislation. But it does deserve Senate passage because the bill makes progress in several critical areas. It would:

Nearly all of these proposals come from existing legislation, and many of them have Republican coauthors. Here’s what you need to know about the primary provisions of the “Clean Energy Jobs” bill, as well as the original bills and their cosponsors.

Oil spill response and accountability

The BP oil disaster was a 100-day nightmare that caused more than 180 million gallons of oil to flood from the ocean bottom into the Gulf of Mexico and onto American shores from Texas to Florida. This disaster is the largest ever, but it is no freak occurrence.

A Washington Post analysis found “a steady stream of oil spills dumping 517,847 barrels of petroleum ... into the Gulf of Mexico between 1964 and 2009 ... they poured twice as much as oil into U.S. waters as the Exxon Valdez tanker did when it ran aground in 1989.”

The Reid bill would make BP pay for the damages from the BP catastrophe and hold big oil companies responsible for future spills. It would enhance safety requirement measures to prevent future blowouts or spills.

Primary provisions:

Source legislation and bipartisan support:

Big Oil Bailout Prevention Liability Act, S.3305: The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed this bill by a unanimous voice vote on June 30, 2010.

The Outer Continental Shelf Reform Act of 2010, S.3516: The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee passed this bill by a unanimous voice vote on June 30. Ranking Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said that the bill would “help restore Americans’ confidence in our ability to safely produce our oil and gas resources, and we did it in a transparent, truly bipartisan process.”

Big Oil Bailout Prevention Trust Fund Act, S. 3306: Sponsored by Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), four other Democrats, and one Independent.

Reducing oil consumption and improving energy security

The BP oil disaster is yet another reminder that the United States must dramatically reduce its oil use to enhance energy security and economic prosperity. Americans currently spend $1 billion per day on oil imports, and one out of every five barrels of oil consumed in the United States comes from countries classified as “dangerous or unstable” by the U.S. State Department. The “Clean Energy Jobs” bill would reduce oil consumption via investments in natural gas vehicles and electric cars.

Primary provisions:

Source legislation and bipartisan support:

The NAT GAS Act, S. 1408: Sponsored by Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Harry Reid (D-Nev.), and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

Electric Vehicle Deployment Act, S. 3442: Sponsored by Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).

Clean energy jobs and consumer savings

One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas pollution is to simply use less energy in our homes. The Reid bill provides incentives for homeowners to invest in simple and effective energy savings measures that will lower electricity bills and return these savings to families’ pockets. These incentives will also create thousands of jobs in energy efficiency technology sales and installation.

Primary provision:

Source legislation and bipartisan support:

Home Star Energy Retrofit Act, S. 3177: Sponsored by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Protecting the environment

Moving to a more sustainable energy future is not just about using energy and fuel more efficiently; it is also about protecting our existing land and water resources. The Land and Water Conservation Fund provides most of the federal funds to purchase land acquisitions for conservation and recreation. It protects 7 million acres, nearly two-thirds of which are federal lands.

The LWCF is supposed to supply $900 million in revenue annually, mostly from offshore oil and gas leasing. But Congress has frequently raided the fund for other purposes. Only $432 million was appropriated to land acquisition in fiscal year 2010. And there is a $30 billion backlog in federal land acquisition needs because of funding shortfalls. The Reid bill would supply a consistent amount of funding for federal land conservation.

Primary provision:

Source legislation and bipartisan support:

Land and Water Conservation Authorization and Funding Act, S. 2747: Sponsored by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) with 16 cosponsors, including Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.).

Hydraulic fracturing chemicals

The recent development of technology to unlock and produce “shale gas” from deep within the Earth has dramatically expanded the technically recoverable supply of natural gas. This is a cleaner, domestic fuel that can replace dirty coal to produce electricity or foreign oil to power vehicles.

The “hydraulic fracturing,” or “fracking,” process can produce air, water, and groundwater pollution, including toxic ingredients such as diesel fuel. Gas producers do not have to disclose the chemicals they inject deep underground to recover the gas. The Reid bill would require transparency so that governments, first responders, and citizens have the right to know about the toxic chemicals used to produce this gas.

Primary provision:

Source legislation:

Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act, S. 1215: Sponsored by Sens. Robert Casey (D-Pa.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Conclusion

Comprehensive clean energy and global warming legislation stalled in the Senate because senators are opposing policies that once enjoyed bipartisan support. Reid has crafted legislation using bipartisan measures to address the BP oil disaster, reduce families’ energy bills, create jobs, cut oil use, and protect the environment. Yet despite previous bipartisan support, senators are attacking provisions in S. 3663. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) opposes the Right to Know provision for fracking chemicals. He would keep the public in the dark about the toxic chemicals used in shale gas production.

The American Petroleum Institute—big oil’s lobbyists—are fiercely opposed to requiring BP and other oil companies to be completely responsible for the economic damage from their blowouts and oil spills, so many senators who enjoy big oil support oppose it too, even if they helped write the provisions.

Politico reports that, “Republicans have said they’d support a modest increase of the cap—perhaps up to $2 billion—or a provision to allow the president to set a liability cap. But oil companies have fought fiercely against the prospect of unlimited liability, which would require them to foot the bill for all spill damages ... A spokesman for [Sen.] Murkowski said that even though she authored a key provision in the Senate bill, she will likely vote against it.”

Sens. Alexander, Burr, Graham, Hatch, Murkowski, and others will hopefully vote for S. 3663 because it includes provisions that they coauthored. If so, then the Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Accountability Act, S. 3663, can clear the high 60-vote hurdle and pass the Senate. It’s not the comprehensive clean energy and global warming reform that the United States needs, but it would take important steps forward toward that goal.

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AP - A Canadian company whose pipeline leaked hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into a Michigan river was warned by government regulators in January that its monitoring of corrosion in the pipeline was insufficient.

AP - Water gurgling from a well is flooding Craig Gautreaux's rice and crawfish fields, turning the farm into a wetland for migratory birds whose usual Gulf of Mexico wintering grounds are threatened by the oil spill.

AP - Even when the oily sheen starts fading from the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, it manages to become bad news for fishermen.

A potent mix of heat, haze, alcohol and corruption

RUSSIA’S ability to deal with its legendarily severe winters is a source of national pride. But now Russia’s survival skills have been tested by the hottest summer since records began, 130 years ago. In the country’s central region temperatures have not dropped below 30°C since mid-June; in recent days the mercury has risen as high as 37°C.

A haze from forest and peat-bog fires around Moscow has enveloped the city, turning the multicoloured domes of St Basil’s Cathedral into ghostly apparitions. Moscow’s air is polluted at the best of times, but this smog, heavy with carbon monoxide, makes breathing difficult. Outside the city a swathe of farmland the size of Portugal has been destroyed. ...

The capital’s filthy atmosphere has improved at last

HEMMED in by mountains and volcanoes, Mexico City is the perfect smog-trap. At its altitude of 2,250m the air is already thin; on days when the toxic “cream”, as the familiar brown cloud of pollution is locally known, descends on the city, it is hard to breathe. Locals used to joke that the only life that could survive in the skies was jumbo jets.

Yet the smog is lifting. The average concentration of ozone, one of the most common pollutants, is about half its level in the early 1990s, when the air was at its dirtiest (see chart). In those days the national ozone limit of 0.11 parts per million was breached for at least an hour on nine days out of ten. Yet last year over half the days were below the cap. Joggers are back in parks and wildlife is airborne once more: a hummingbird regularly looks in on The Economist’s offices. ...

Cutting carbon is appallingly complex as well as costly

ALTHOUGH Britain’s energy companies are no longer nationalised industries, they are still, to some extent, arms of the Treasury. When the government decides on a way to make Britain greener—such as joining the European emissions-trading scheme, which puts a price on carbon, or the renewables obligation, which subsidises wind, biomass and solar power, or levies to pay for carbon sequestration and storage or renewable heating—utilities pay for it and pass the costs on to their customers. As such policies grow in ambition, so does the bill to consumers.

On July 27th, as part of its new “annual energy statement”, the Department of Energy and Climate Change put some numbers to this effect. Green policies will raise domestic gas prices in 2020 by 18% and electricity prices by 33%, it said. For nondomestic users the impact will be greater—24% and 43% respectively—and other estimates put the figures higher still. ...

The Senate’s retreat from cap and trade might, one day, lead to a carbon tax. For now it leaves a dreadful mess

NO ONE expected a bang; but the idea of a cap on America’s carbon emissions died with barely the bathos of a whimper. Despite months of legislative fiddle piled on procedural faddle, no one ever drafted a bill with a carbon cap, and the sort of trading system necessary for industry to meet its demands, that stood a chance on the Senate floor. So the majority leader, Harry Reid, finally decided the whole issue should be quietly flushed away (see article). With the mid-term elections sure to swing heavily away from Mr Reid’s Democrats, there is now no possibility of comprehensive climate-change legislation in America for years.

Given the murkiness of some of the bathwater involved (maybe we’ll let you have a little cap and trade if you’ll let us go on emitting neurotoxic mercury, said the electric utilities), it is easy to lose track of the attractions of the baby. America is the largest per-person emitter of carbon dioxide among the world’s big economies, and the second-largest emitter overall. If the risks of global damage through climate change are to be reduced, America’s emissions need to come under some sort of control, both because of what they do to the climate and because of the message such control would send to the world’s other large emitters—and in particular to China, the largest. ...

The Democrats abandon their efforts to limit emissions through legislation

“THE one approach I will not accept,” said Barack Obama in June of Congress’s faltering efforts to fight global warming, “is inaction.” Instead, the president instructed America’s lawmakers to “seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels”. Yet the energy bill unveiled by the Democratic majority in the Senate on July 27th does nothing of the sort. Harry Reid, the majority leader, having earlier abandoned as hopeless an effort to limit America’s emissions of greenhouse gases through a “cap-and-trade” scheme, is proposing nothing more substantial than subsidies for home insulation and trucks that run on natural gas. (The bill also removes the $75m cap on oil firms’ liability for damage from offshore spills, in response to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.)

Mr Obama has said he will fight on for a weightier bill. But the prospects do not look good. Mr Reid complained that inveterate Republican opposition had prevented the Senate from taking up the cap-and-trade scheme passed by the House of Representatives last year. That is true: even Republican senators who had supported the idea in the past, such as John McCain and Lindsay Graham, had pointedly backed away from it in recent months. ...

The microscopic plants that support all life in the oceans are dying off at a dramatic rate, according to a study that has documented for the first time a disturbing and unprecedented change at the base of the marine food web.

Moves to boost investment in renewable energy and nuclear power stations were set out by the coalition Government yesterday as it promised to reduce Britain's dependency on fossil fuels and cut carbon emissions.

It's not quite being at the controls of the Starship Enterprise. But it's on the way there.

Damselflies don't sound like they'd do anything as dramatic as invading anywhere, and the dainty damselfly sounds like it would do so least of all. But that's what's happening in southern England, as several species of these delicate, smaller relatives of the dragonflies cross over from the continent and start establishing populations here.

Climate change threatens to undo years of work to tackle poverty in developing countries, a report warned today.