RECENT ARTICLES

Saving the Forest from your Bathroom

National Hispanic Coalition Launches STEM Initiative

Fake NY Post Tells Real Story on Climate Change

On Energy, We’re Finally Walking the Walk

The Traffic of Black Gold on the U.S.-Mexico Border

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Saving the Forest from your Bathroom

Did you know? Americans could save more than 400,000 trees if each family bought a roll of recycled toilet paper- just once.

Click here to download the tissue guide to your iPhone or to get a paper version.  The Guide makes it quick and easy to find out which brands of facial tissues, toilet paper, paper towels, and napkins are truly green and which should be avoided.

Greenpeace and countless activists have asked Kimberly-Clark (K-C) to help save the Boreal forest since 2004, when the Kleercut campaign was launched. In a tremendous victory for ancient forests, including the Boreal, the company that makes popular brands like Kleenex, Scott, and Cottonelle has announced a new policy that places it among the industry leaders in sustainability, bringing the Kleercut campaign to a successful completion.

Kimberly-Clark has set a goal of obtaining 100 percent of the wood fiber used in its products – including the flagship brand Kleenex – from environmentally responsible sources. By 2011, Kimberly-Clark will ensure that 40 percent of its North American fiber is either recycled or certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) – a 71 percent increase from 2007 levels, representing over 600,000 tonnes of fiber. Also by 2011, Kimberly-Clark will eliminate any fiber from the North American Boreal Forest that is not FSC-certified.

“The revised standards are proof that when responsible companies and environmental advocates come together, the results can be good for business and good for the planet,” said Scott Paul, Greenpeace USA Forest Campaign Director. “Kimberly-Clark’s efforts are a challenge to its competitors. I hope they pay close attention.”

K-C’s sustainability policy: Not just about protecting the Boreal

The Canadian Boreal Forest is North America’s largest ancient forest, providing habitat for threatened wildlife such as woodland caribou and over 1 billion migratory birds.

But clearcutting doesn’t just wipe out the biodiversity of a forest – it wipes out an essential carbon storehouse. Canada’s Boreal Forest stores an estimate 186 billion tones of carbon, 27 times the world’s annual fossil fuel emissions — meaning that a victory for the Boreal is also a victory for the climate.
While protecting the North American Boreal Forest has been a focus of the Kleercut campaign, K-C’s policy is about protecting Endangered Forests the world over. Greenpeace would not have agreed to anything less.

Because of K-C’s place in the paper products market, the company’s new policy will send a strong signal to its competitors, Procter & Gamble and Georgia Pacific, that creating a policy that protects ancient forests is a key element of sustainable business.

National Hispanic Coalition Launches STEM Initiative

WASHINGTON, D.C: On September 14th, 2009, the National Association for Hispanic Education (NAHE) hosted an inaugural launch event for its new Hispanic STEM Initiative. There, NAHE formally presented the Hispanic STEM Initiative’s Advisory Committee to leading Hispanic organizations in the nation’s capital. The event will be held at the offices of the Self Reliance Foundation, one of the founding members of the Hispanic STEM Initiative’s Advisory Committee.

The purpose of the Hispanic STEM Initiative is to form strategic collaborations between stakeholder groups and organizations in order to maximize education outcomes for Hispanic students in the STEM fields, such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

“There has long-existed a wealth of assets in the form of human ingenuity, talent, expertise, and experience among Hispanic groups and organizations,” stated Adam Chavarria, President of NAHE.

“The Hispanic STEM Initiative Advisory Committee will draw on these assets to increase and expand positive educational outcomes for Hispanic students in STEM disciplines,” said Mr. Chavarria.

“At the meeting, the Advisory Committee reviewed the Initiative’s five-year action plan and also expand upon the recommendations it recently submitted to the White House Office of Science and Technology in regards to increasing Hispanic participation in STEM fields,” added Maite Arce, Advisory Committee Member and Sr. Programs and Policy Director for the Self Reliance Foundation.

Mike Acosta, Advisory Committee Member and MAES National President, considers this convening to be “…of urgent importance, given that less than 2% of the scientific stem workforce is Hispanic and almost twenty percent of the country’s youth population is Hispanic.”

“We hope that the Hispanic STEM Initiative will advance efforts to restore America’s economic competitiveness by fulfilling the nation’s need for diverse talent in the STEM fields,” he continued.

The Hispanic STEM Initiative Advisory Committee emerged from a working group of stakeholders that convened at a conference held in April 2007 on the subject of the American Competitiveness Initiative at the University of Texas at El Paso.

The primary role of the Advisory Committee is to provide advice, counsel, and support to the Hispanic STEM Initiative in the course of implementing a five-year action plan that results in positive outcomes for Latino STEM students. The Committee will guide the Hispanic STEM Initiative’s work in its seven focus areas, which include: Families & Children; PreK-20 Partnerships; Professionals in the Classroom; STEM Development; STEM Education & Research; Teacher Education/Preparation; Career and Workforce Development.

Led by the National Association for Hispanic Education, members of the NAHE’s Hispanic STEM Initiative Advisory Committee include: the Self Reliance Foundation, the Society of Mexican American Engineers and Scientists (MAES), the Inter-American Development Bank, the California State University System, El Valor, HENAAC, TODOS: Mathematics for All, the Parent Institute for Quality Education, AHETEMS, and Loyola Marymount University.

Fake NY Post Tells Real Story on Climate Change

Amidst the usual daily bustle of hurried pedestrians and newspaper vendors at Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue subway station this morning, it was easy to spot the Yes Men’s latest prank.

At first blush, the newspaper, which was distributed by volunteers across NYC today, did look a lot like the New York Post. Yet any closer examination revealed that it was clearly not your run-of-the-mill Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid.

With a giant headline proclaiming “We’re Screwed” alongside an image of lighting striking Manhattan’s skyscrapers featured on the cover, the 32-page tabloid was devoted entirely to environmental issues. Check it out online here.

Even the sports section had an environmental bent, with an entire story devoted to enumerating carbon emission cutting opportunities in pro sports (such as NOGASCAR — a hybrid car version of NASCAR).

While a full-page color ad featuring a couple making out on a beach (the kind of image one frequently sees in ads for vacation packages) advertising “sex” reminded readers that that this activity has “no emissions (of the carbon variety)” (The faux travel ad’s slogan: “Why Travel? — You Just Wanted to Get Laid, Right?”)

Outside the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway stop in downtown Brooklyn, Erica (she declined to give her last name), a young woman who’d picked up a copy of the paper with a friend earlier that morning at Union Square, stopped to talk to my friend and I about her response.

“First of all we were really scared,” she told us. She had been particularly struck by an image of a large tornado featured in the paper.

She said she soon realized “it was fake.” But she added, “It’s very possible … We need to be more environmentally conscious.”

Indeed, as Rory O’Connor points out, the fake paper’s coverage of a city report predicting “massive climate catastrophes” will hit New York City as a result of global warming is all true.

It just takes a fake NY Post to get the real story about climate change out to the city’s tabloid readers.

Source: Alternet.org

On Energy, We’re Finally Walking the Walk

The United States has entered a new energy era, ending a century of rising carbon emissions. As the U.S. delegation prepares for the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December, it does so from a surprisingly strong position, one based on a dramatic 9 percent drop in U.S. carbon emissions over the past two years and the promise of further huge reductions.

Prominent among these carbon-cutting initiatives are stronger automobile fuel-economy standards, appliance efficiency standards, and the potential to heat, cool and light buildings with carbon-free sources of electricity. On the supply side are efforts supporting the development of U.S. wind, solar and geothermal energy resources.

Even though part of this decline in carbon emissions was caused by the recession and higher gasoline prices, part of it came from gains in energy efficiency and shifts to carbon-free sources of energy, including record amounts of new wind-generating capacity. This impressive drop in carbon emissions should enable the United States to push for a steep cut in Copenhagen.
Although Congress is considering legislation that would cut emissions only 15 or 20 percent by 2020, it’s clear to me that with just a little effort, the United States could far surpass this. Given the potentially catastrophic climate change the world is facing, we should push in Copenhagen for an 80 percent reduction by 2020.

The really big gains in fuel efficiency will come with the shift to plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars. Not only are electric motors three times more efficient than gasoline engines, but they make it possible to run cars on domestic wind-generated electricity at a gasoline-equivalent cost of 75 cents a gallon. As the low fueling cost becomes more apparent, the shift to plug-ins and all-electric cars will come far faster than most policymakers anticipate.

With carbon cuts, it’s time to stop talking about political feasibility and start talking about scientific necessity. The science is scary. We need not go beyond ice melting to see that civilization is in trouble. The Greenland ice sheet is melting. If it were to melt entirely, and that obviously would take a few centuries, sea level would rise by 23 feet. The latest reports suggest that we are looking at a rise in sea level of up to six feet this century. Such a rise would inundate part or all of many low-lying coastal cities, such as London, Miami, New Orleans, Alexandria and Shanghai, producing millions of refugees. Such a rise would also inundate the rice-growing deltas of Asia, devastating harvests in Bangladesh and Vietnam.
The melting of the glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau will deprive the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze and Yellow rivers of the ice melt that sustains their flow during the dry season and the irrigation systems that depend on them. Let us not forget that China is the world’s leading producer of wheat and rice. India is number two in each. Anything that reduces their grain harvests will raise food prices everywhere.

If the United States pushes for an 80 percent cut, will the rest of the world follow? In particular will China, now the world’s leading carbon emitter, cooperate? And what about India?

In times past, if countries resisted international initiatives, the international community could resort to trade boycotts, export embargoes or tariffs on exports from the offending countries. Bilateral penalties are also an option. The United States is, after all, China’s largest export market.

On the renewable front, China’s wind-generating potential is seven times its current electricity consumption. Although a late starter, China is building wind farm complexes on a scale the world has not seen before. In recent years, the United States has led the world in new wind generating capacity, but within the next year, China will overtake the United States, moving so fast we might not even see it go by.

Source: The Washington Post

Author: Lester R. Brown, the president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of the forthcoming “Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.”

The Traffic of Black Gold on the U.S.-Mexico Border

The theft of gas and other oil products is a relatively new crime that in just a few years has become a serious threat to Mexico’s financial stability.

The crime involves both drug cartels and corrupt government officials in Mexico and an undetermined number of oil refineries and companies in the US who have been willing to buy such stolen fuel.

Fuel trafficking has grown exponentially and has been linked to Mexican drug cartels whose infrastructure and criminal webs of corruption in governmental offices has streamlined the flow of this stolen goods across the border.

Just Tuesday, the US government awarded 2.4 million dollars to Mexico as part of a settlement in a case where a small refinery in Houston was found guilty of having imported stolen fuel from across the border.

This crime is where drug cartels are now diversifying their activities into fuel theft especially grave for Mexico, because, as president Felipe Calderón admitted recently oil administered by government owned company Pemex is the source of 40% of the federal income in Mexico.

According to Mexican authorities the majority of thefts can be attributed to the now famous group of gunmen “Zetas” the most violent arm of the Golf Cartel, apparently in charge of the transport and distribution of the stolen fuel inside Mexico but also into the United States and Central and South America.

The names of American companies currently under investigation for the purchase of stolen fuel has not been revealed by Federal US authorities but it is well known that “big names” are responsible in making stolen products available to US consumer gas tanks.

Both the US and Mexican governments are working together and earlier in 2009 Mexican authorities froze 149 bank accounts with millions of dollars, believed to be a result of the illicit sell of gas, diesel and crude oil products by “Zetas.”

An on July 30th, retired army general Miguel Estrada Martínez, head of Pemex Segurity was arrested by Federal Police accused of aiding in the fuel robbery operation.

Along with Estrada, many of his aides and workers were also questioned, computers and cell phones were seized in the hopes of finding sufficient evidence to prosecute them as having clear links between public officials and this organized crime groups.

But despite arrests the loss in fuel theft has reached new heights.

The stolen fuel market has been on the steady rise since 2007 as Pemex security officials find more illegal takes every year.

According to Pemex numbers,190 illegal takes where found in the first semester of 2009, where at least 2 million and 88 thousand fuel barrels where taken, marking an astonishing 10% increase in comparison to the same period just last year.

Pemex data analysis suggests 44.2% of the takes where found in Veracruz, 28 % in Mexico State but many others where found in Hidalgo, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Oaxaca, Sinaloa, Jalisco, Tlaxcala, Durango, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Puebla and Baja California.

Source: La Prensa San Diego

Author: Mariana Martinez