Carbon management software firm Enviance unveiled a new product Tuesday to help companies comply with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas reporting rules.

The construction and project management firm has installed 1e's PC power management suite on 3,000 computers in Europe, allowing the firm to make quick progress on its corporate-wide energy efficiency goal.

Medium-duty trucks, a mainstay for American fleets, produce more than 80 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. Environmental Defense Fund and PHH Arval are now offering fleet managers a framework for reducing emissions from the vehicles.

eBay made a big push Monday to get consumers to commit to using products over new ones with the launch of a new green shopping website. The company will reward the first 250,000 people who make the reuse pledge with a donation toward the protection of an acre of rainforest.

Around a third of industrialized countries carbon emissions are exported to developing nations.

Photos: Jason Houston

To say that I love coffee is
a big, fat lie. I need coffee in a chemically dependent way. Its effect upon
me is essentially the reverse of those faces-of-meth photos.

There are two things that can
really screw up a good coffee buzz (OK, three if you count skim milk). First
is the fact that conventionally grown coffee is an environmental bummer. To
quote Umbra Fisk,
“Conventional coffee production involves chemicals, deforestation, and
mistreated workers and dead birds.”

So to avoid songbird blood on your
hands first thing in the morning, buy coffee with organic, fair trade, and shade-grown certifications.
(Super-extra bonus points for triple-cert!) You’ll pay a premium for this
coffee, but it’s worth it.

But just because a coffee is
principled doesn’t mean it tastes heavenly. The second thing that can ruin a
good cup of coffee? Bad taste. I don’t know about you, but bad coffee makes me
feel like this. In order to
spare you such an experience (AHHAIAHH! So many coffees! Why is there no good
coffee? I want good coffee!), I assembled a panel of four other coffee lovers
and headed to my neighborhood roaster, Barrington Coffee. There, founders Barth
Anderson and Gregg Charbonneau hosted—but, in the interests of strict
neutrality, did not participate in—my tasting in their chic “cupping room.” 

This blind tasting provided a
“sensorial analysis” of five organic French roasts. Under Gregg and Barth’s
careful tutelage, we evaluated the dry grounds for appearance and aroma. Then,
after hot water was poured over each, we waited two minutes and then noted an
aromatic impression at “crust break”—you break up surface grounds with spoon
and sniff “dangerously close.” Next, Gregg skimmed the floating grounds, and we
tasted by aspirating a spoonful over the palate: a procedure that allows
grownups to make the very fun, loud slurping sound we’re always telling our
kids to stop making. Lastly, we let the coffee cool down and tasted it again.
(More slurping.)

And now, the results ...

Full Circle French Roast
Price: $7.49 per pound
Eco cred: USDA Organic and Fair Trade certified. A portion of every
sale is donated to Coffee Kids.
Feedback: Despite the slogan for Price Chopper’s in-store brand of
French roast—“Deep, Dark, A Perfect Ending”—  this joe was described as “mellow” by one taster and “thin”
by a few. One said it was like “truck stop coffee that’s been sitting for an
hour.” (Had this taster, who was stylishly dressed and sporting pearl earrings,
ever been to a truck stop? We’ll never know.) One comment could be have been
construed as both praise or criticism: “It’s like Starbucks.” Kindest comment:
“I could almost drink this without
cream.”

Jim’s Organic Coffee French Roast
Price: $11.95 per pound, purchased in bulk
Eco cred: Certified Organic by Quality Assurance International.
Feedback: The Web marketing copy describes this coffee as “Big,
full flavor with slightly carbonized taste.” OK, I know “carbonized” means
scorched, but the Internet also defines it as a “Swedish avant garde death
metal band.” I like “Swedish death metal band taste” much better!

One taster particularly liked
the chocolaty smell of this coffee, which he also described as “winy.”
Unfortunately, no one liked the taste. “It’s sweet but not a good sweet”
scowled one lady, while another noted its “synthetic flavor.” If you like your
French roasts real smoky, this coffee might be the one for you. One taster,
struggling for words, sipped and mused, “If you take a flip-flop and put it in
the fire ... ” The damning comments continued: “Reminds me of robusta!”—straight to a coffee snob’s heart. And, even worse: “Like instant.”

Newman’s Own Organics French
Roast
Price: $7.99 for 10 oz
Eco cred: This coffee is sourced and roasted by Green Mountain Coffee,
a Vermont roaster with a corporate ethic that includes fighting climate change,
which is good because some coffee growers are going to get hosed by it. It
is also USDA & QAI Organic and Fair Trade certified; while it’s not
certified bird friendly, it “typically is grown under a shade
canopy,” emailed a spokesperson.
Feedback: It seems wrong to speak critically of the dead, especially when the late Mr.
Newman has given $250 million to charities worldwide. But technically, only the
dead’s coffee got dissed badly. The kindest comment for this java—billed as
“a dignified dark roast with a passionate French undercurrent”—came at the
cool-down: “It gets worse with time, but this one would be OK by me.” Disparate
comments: “sourish”  ... “funny tongue-feel”
... “dirty.” The most damning comment was from a cranky taster who skipped her
morning coffee in order to participate in the tasting: “I wouldn’t even drink
this after a hangover. It’s bitter and shitty.”

Sun Coffee Roasters Organic
French Roast
Price: $5.99 per 10 oz (on sale! regularly $7.49)
Eco cred: USDA Organic, Fair Trade certified, and Bird Friendly,
which is good considering that the term “sun coffee” means coffee that is the
opposite of shade-grown. For those of us in southwestern Massachusetts, this is
regional coffee roasted in nearby Connecticut, 55 miles away.
Feedback: “It has chocolate in the nose! I’d drink it!” exclaimed
one participant, who said this coffee was the “richest.” The cranky taster (see
“shitty” comment, above) said, “It’s the only one I’d drink.” Another said,
“Nice chocolaty flavor.” But its noirish-ness may have been too much for one
detractor, who said it “desperately needs cream.”

Equal Exchange
Price: $9.19 per 10 oz
Eco cred: Organic certification by Oregon Tilth and
Fair Trade certified. Not shade grown, 
but Web FAQ says the company is “currently exploring the range of
options for shade-grown certification that are now available to us.”
Feedback: This coffee, according to a wine-loving taster, “had more
structure.” Another concurred that it had “some depth.” More than one panelist
described it as “rich,” and its smell offended no one.  Cranky lady pronounced it “ashy.”
Strangest comment of the day: “Skunky smell, but in a really good way!”

The bottom line

After the tasting the above
coffees, we tried Barrington Coffee’s in-house
organic French roast, which had been roasted the prior day. The
results were quite shocking: The panel unanimously found it to be delicious.

And it wasn’t because Barth and
Gregg were our gracious hosts. (Trust me—this group had Tourette’s-like
honesty.) This fresh stuff was straight-to-your-brainstem yummy: smooth, rich,
chocolaty.

The point worth remembering here is that coffee is perishable;
freshly roasted stuff is best. So, if you are able and lucky, find yourself a
small, local roaster. The coffee will not only be fresher, but your direct
relationship with them will allow to you ask questions to determine whether or
not its production is sustainable. Some smaller roasters such as Barrington may
source their beans from small growers who lack certifications, but whose
practices are nonetheless praiseworthy.

Short of that, reach for Equal
Exchange, which our panel ranked the highest. (Although, strangely enough, the
comments toward Sun were kinder. So, gas up your morning tank  with that one, too.) And despite the
grumpiness of this panel, it should be noted that the ranked coffees were more
alike than different—so much so that one taster gave up and essentially
dropped out of the tasting, declaring “I can’t make heads or tails of any of
these, and I’m wearing gay* coffee shoes.”

But really, no matter what your
taste, you’re off to great start by choosing environmentally principled coffee.

*This
comment was in no way meant to offend the gay community. Trust me; I
pinkie-swear that this particular Massachusetts panel fully supports gay
marriage. And while we’re at it, we’re all really sorry about Scott Brown. And apropos
of nothing but the spirit of fending off potentially pissy comments: This
tasting was vegan. We didn’t oppress a cow by taking her cream.

Related Links:

Ask Umbra on down comforters, soapy gray water, and canned tomatoes

Coffee hit by global warming, growers say

USDA releases strict new pasture rules for organic dairy

Related Links:

Ask Umbra on Annie Leonard and The Story of Stuff

Ask Umbra on shoe polish, socially responsible investing, and Facebook

Ask Umbra’s pearls of wisdom on booze

Photo: Fast CompanyShopping malls, those bastions of American consumerism, have not been immune to the recent economic downturn. In a recent piece by our own Greg Lindsay, we looked at the impending decline of the
mall, which is part of the “single-use environment” category of real
estate development that will slowly disappear over the next thirty
years, according to one developer. But what will replace these
environments, and more importantly, what will happen to the massive
malls of today?

One possible solution can be seen in Cleveland’s Galleria mall. The
mall lost many of its retail shops over the past few years, leaving
gaping holes in the greenhouse-like space. So employees of the Galleria
came up with the idea for the Gardens Under Glass project, a so-called
urban ecovillage inside the mall that features carts of fruits and
vegetables grown on-site. The project was recently given a $30,000
start-up grant from Cleveland’s Civic Innovation Lab.

Get the rest of the story from our friends at Fast Company.

Related Links:

Demolishing density in Detroit

Garden Girl TV: indoor gardening, part four

Putting Wal-Mart’s green moves in context

If you’ve ever wondered how Grist’s famous (and mysterious) pun machine works, wonder a little less. We present you with a glimpse into its inner workings: a list of rejected punny headlines scooped up from the last week’s digital cutting room floor. Please, enjoy the witticisms and groan at the miss-icisms.

Story: James Cameron: I’m the greenest director of all time!

Rejects:
Titanic balls
Titanic ego
Winner: Opening Pandora’s box office

Story: Common weed killer chemically castrates frogs, study finds

Rejects:
Ampheminist revolution
No balls in his court
Weed whack her
You’ve got (no) male
My chemical romance
Chemical attraction
Winner: The wrong kind of chemistry

Story: The latest musical trend is annoying the Senate into climate action

Rejects:
It’s the E.N.D. of the world as we know it
Tonight’s gonna be a good fight
I’ve gotta feeling
Face the music
Winner: Democra-peas

Story: British scientist in climate controversy admits emails were ‘awful’

Rejects:
Hit unsend
Discard draft
But not (unl)awful?
Electronic disappointment
Winner: Electric slide into infamy

Story: Garden Girl TV: indoor gardening, part three

Rejects:
Hour of power tools
Start your power tool engines
Tool time
Winner: Drill baby drill

Story: Fifteen states have polluter-driven resolutions to deny climate threat

Rejects:
Dirty state of affairs
State of change
Legis-hate
Winner: Legis-hating change

Story: Peepoo bags help the developing world take off a load

Rejects:
A quick and feces solution
Feces to fix
Dropping off the kids at the Peepool
A load of crap
Unloading excess baggage
Making the biodegrade
Peepoo de toilet
Winner: Fecal matters

Story: Tech startup’s pollution detector aids enviro justice group

Rejects:
Drive by methane
Drive by polluting
Drive by justice
Track test
Action tracked
Breathe analyzer
Google fracks
Breath analyzer
Winner: Frackin’ busted

Story: Is ‘Birdemic’ the best/worst apocalyptic thriller of all time?

Rejects:
There is no cure
Birds on the brain
Bird brained
Terror in the flight
Flock you
Birds of a feather flock things up
Winner: Flocked up

Related Links:

Live Chat with David Roberts

A treat for your Valentine: grass-fed steak in red-wine sauce

Welcome Grist Friends with Benefits

Last week, I documented that the public supports trains and auto efficiency standards and renewable requirements, along with other policies sometimes slandered as “command & control” over emissions pricing. This week: some historical perspective on why the public is right, and mainstream environmental groups are wrong.

Historically U.S. infrastructure, the basis on which this nation developed, was never some magical response to supply and demand.

The Erie Canal would not have been built without rights of way given away to the builders. Land given to homesteaders and farmers made us one of the world’s great farming nations. Railroads were built because the great railway companies were granted land a mile out from their tracks to compensate for construction costs.  Or think of the telegraph, one of the first types of public infrastructure to receive not only grants of rights of way, but massive direct public cash subsidies. And it is worth remembering that none of this was built on empty land; American Indians were slaughtered or driven away for every one of these things. Much of the work on that stolen land was done by slaves. I can’t imagine a “green tax” that could have compensated for that. 

And that is not something that ended in the 19th century. Airports and water ports are mostly built with public funds and mostly built on public land and water. Utilities use public rights of way. Water pipes and sewer pipes, electricity lines, gas lines, old school phone lines, broad band fiber optic lines, television, radio, cell phone, and other wireless spectra all use public resources and are often built with public money. Any transport more advanced than a deer path also depends on right of way grants. Not just trains, but automobiles, bikes. Even walking paths need some construction and maintenance.

Any society that needs infrastructure more complicated than that built by hunter-gatherers will need public involvement, whatever “public” means in that particular society. And there is no way for such public infrastructure to be technologically neutral. Let’s take the automobile as an example.

Modern zoning requirements pretty much forbid housing and retail and government services to mix together in the right ratios to a community truly walkable. Further, the requirement that housing developments supply a certain amount of parking, along with the requirement of setbacks from the streets, make it even more difficult to design communities that are really suitable to live in for people who don’t want to drive. A lot of the so-called new urbanism is simply relaxing some of the restrictions that forbid creating walkable developments. And all the rules about parking and setbacks and so on are also huge subsidies to automobiles. I’ve heard figures that various parking regulation provide subsidies in the form of free parking of about $5,000 per automobile per year. And that is just parking. I wonder how much developer built roads, and city built streets funded from property taxes add to this, not to mention street maintenance also funded from property taxes.

If you ever wonder why new urban neighborhoods are so seldom real neighborhoods, it is because that is not allowed. If you wonder whatever happened to small town main street, the answer is: they outlawed it.

If any right wing libertarians have made it this far, they probably are shouting “yes, yes, oh god yes, get big gubmint out of the way and everything will be fine!” Unfortunately it is not that simple.

Yes there have been some really bad choices in these regulations, but that does not mean we can leave development unregulated. Hate zoning? OK, but do you want to allow a toxic waste dump next door to your house? Would you be OK with an all night strip club, with loud music keeping you awake, and drunks who stagger out to vomit on your porch? And you’d probably prefer that any home you rent or own meet fire safety standards, have climate control and ventilation that works.  I personally prefer the earthquake codes that saved lives in Chile to the lack of such regulations that killed hundreds of thousands in Haiti. And when it comes to appearance, if you have a block filled with lovely 19th century homes, you probably don’t want a glass pyramid plopped in the middle of them.

We can’t do without regulations. We can’t make such regulation “neutral”. The best we can do is explicitly choose what we want regulation and public investment to accomplish, and focus our rules and our public investments on those goals. The minimal state is not an option and never has been. Adam Smith, the inventor of the term “the invisible hand” favored fire regulations, free public education, building safety codes, and (in emergencies) wage and price controls. As someone concerned with supporting an infant capitalism, and overthrowing the remnants of feudalism, he would have laughed at the idea of capitalism without a strong state. And yes, Adam Smith was overoptimistic about the ability of such regulation to contain the dark side of capitalism. But, given when he wrote,  he may be excused his errors, especially since even then he was a far clearer thinker than the fuzzy headed right wing libertarians who consider themselves his true heirs today.

I think he did invent (or at least promote) a fundamental error that explains why the role price can play in replacing other forms of regulation is often overlooked. He thought of price as reflecting a balance between supply and demand. To some extent price does reflect those things. But price also reflects power. In Adam Smith’s time, price often reflected the ability to kill people, seize their land by force, and then work that land with slaves. Today the price of a pound of rice reflects in part the Haitian market for that rice developed by applying financial pressure to a series of Haitian governments, and forcing them to destroy their domestic capacity to produce their own rice. The price of sugar in the United States reflects in part the embargo against Cuban competition. (Protecting the American sugar industry is not the only reason for that embargo. But it would be naïve to think that is not a serious motivation in U.S. Cuba policy.)

That is why we have to see “getting prices right”, whether through a carbon fee or other means as marginal in making change. It is not useless, is even necessary. But “getting prices right” can never be the main driver of change. It can never be of equal importance with other types of policy.

I know that in today’s world people often find historical arguments unconvincing. “Why you talking about old stuff?” So the next post will contain contemporary data showing that right now, at this very moment, price is a weak driver of change.

Related Links:

On rooftops worldwide, a solar water heating revolution

A messy but practical strategy for phasing out the U.S. coal fleet

Challenging conventional wisdom on renewable energy’s limits

AFP - Conservationists warned Wednesday that Malaysians' voracious appetite for turtle eggs could drive the marine creatures to extinction on its shores.

AP - The government sent investigators Tuesday to examine a Prius that sped out of control on a California freeway, and Toyota said it wanted to interview the driver as the besieged automaker dealt with a high-profile new headache that raised questions about the safety of its beloved hybrid.

Reuters - U.S. safety regulators and Toyota dispatched teams on Tuesday to inspect a Prius that sped out of control on a California freeway a day earlier, as the automaker struggled to reassure consumers shaken by its recall crisis.

You might think that measuring the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be a priority. If you did think that, though, you would be wrong

IN NEGOTIATIONS on nuclear weapons the preferred stance is “Trust but verify”. In negotiations on climate change there seems little opportunity for either. Trust, as anyone who attended last year’s summit in Copenhagen can attest, is in the shortest of supplies. So, too, is verification.

Barack Obama was asked when he was in Copenhagen whether a provision by which countries could peek into each others’ assessment processes was strong enough to be sure there was no cheating. He answered reassuringly that “we can actually monitor a lot of what takes place through satellite imagery”. That statement conjured up thoughts of the sort of cold-war satellite system that America used to identify and count Russian missiles. But the president was being a bit previous; at the moment, no such system exists, because America’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a satellite that would have fulfilled the role, was lost on launch this time last year. The purpose of OCO was to work out the fate of carbon dioxide that is emitted by industrial processes but does not then stay in the atmosphere—about 60% of the total. ...

How to predict the consistency of snow

“THE wrong type of snow” became famous as a lame excuse in Britain in February 1991 when, caught out by a cold snap, British Rail blamed severe disruption to its services on problems clearing unusually soft and powdery snow from its tracks. But British Rail had a point. There are, indeed, different types of snow—and people who live in mountainous areas, or visit to ski, like to know which ones to expect. Forecasting what sort of snow will fall is not easy. But a pair of researchers at the University of Utah think they have cracked the problem.

Jim Steenburgh and Trevor Alcott carried out their research in the Alta ski area, which is about 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) up in the Wasatch range. Good record-keeping at the resort, including precipitation measurements that are taken automatically every hour, allowed them to analyse 457 snowfalls that took place between 1999 and 2007. ...

The coup de grace that shatters ice shelves is administered by ocean waves

IN 2008 part of the Wilkins ice shelf on the edge of the Antarctic peninsular suddenly disintegrated. It was seen by some as a portend. If other, larger shelves—huge ice sheets that have slipped off the land but are not floating freely on the sea—were to break up in a similar way, their non-floating ice (which is not subject to Archimedes’s principle that it displaces its own weight of water) would be converted into floating ice (which is), and the sea level would rise.

The Wilkins shelf may or may not have been the victim, ultimately, of climate change. Regardless of what weakened it, though, it was not rising temperatures that caused the sudden break up. Peter Bromirski of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego thinks he knows what did: a little-studied phenomenon called infragravity waves. ...

Why hasn’t the carbon price fallen further?

SOMETHING curious has been happening in the carbon markets. They are entirely political creations—even the most inventive financial engineers would not, on their own, have come up with the idea of a difference in value between the air people breathe in and the air they breathe out. Yet traders seem pretty uninterested in political cues. At the chaotic end of the Copenhagen climate summit in December, prices in the largest market in carbon-dioxide emissions, the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), did drop from €14.60 ($20.50) to €12.70. But that still left the price of a tonne of carbon dioxide comfortably above its lowest level last year.

The Democrats’ subsequent Senate-election loss in Massachusetts, which dealt a crippling blow to the prospects of an American cap-and-trade system that would have greatly expanded world carbon markets, had even less effect. And the announcement this week of the commitments to carbon reduction that countries were willing to accept under the Copenhagen “accord” caused scarcely a ripple. ...

Increasing scrutiny of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and, in particular, its chairman, should lead to reforms

THE past month has not been a good one for Rajendra Pachauri (pictured above), the charismatic chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and director general of TERI, an Indian research institute. His numerous positions on boards and industrial advisory panels, in India and beyond, have led to charges of conflicts of interest. His intemperate defence of mistakes about Himalayan glaciers in the most recent IPCC report had to be followed by a public statement of regret as it became clear that the IPCC had indeed been wrong—and that its source has been a magazine article rather than a piece of scientific literature. And, to cap it all, public mockery of mildly salacious passages in his recently published novel (he writes poetry, too) has added further spice, if not substance, to the stories.

The mistaken claim about the glaciers—that they could disappear by 2035—“never really came to my attention” before the end of last year, Dr Pachauri maintains, though the opportunities for it to have done so were numerous. Syed Hasnain, the researcher cited by press reports as a source for the number (though he denies saying it), is now a consultant at TERI, though Dr Pachauri says he “hardly interacts” with him. The claim featured prominently in a presentation that Anastasios Kentarchos of the European Union gave at a TERI meeting where Dr Pachauri was to deliver a “keynote” address. Dr Pachauri, however, says he left without attending any of the actual sessions. Pallava Bagla, who brought the story to wide attention in Science last November, says he discussed the matter with Dr Pachauri and e-mailed him about it. Dr Pachauri says the discussions were just a question at a press conference that he did not really take on board, and that he read no such e-mails. ...

Climate scientists have delivered a powerful riposte to their sceptical critics with a study that strengthens the case for saying global warming is largely the result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.

Former US Vice President Al Gore on took aim at skeptics who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change, saying he wished it were an illusion but that the problem is real and urgent.

The whole of the world's instrumental temperature record ? millions of observations dating back more than 150 years ? is to be re-analysed in an attempt to remove doubts about the reality of global warming.

The explorer Pen Hadow is mounting a new expedition to the Arctic to research ?climate change's evil twin? ? the acidification of the oceans caused by emissions of carbon dioxide.

Click here to see a map of the expedition.

Atmospheric levels of methane, the greenhouse gas which is much more powerful than carbon dioxide, have risen significantly for the last three years running, scientists will disclose today ? leading to fears that a major global-warming "feedback" is beginning to kick in.