A special report digs deep and uncovers a massive mess of PFCs in the environment. View this article: Are there firefighting foam chemicals in your drinking water? ; ; ;
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Are there firefighting foam chemicals in your drinking water?
Wrapping paper is one of those things that looks beautifulfor the few minutes a gift is under a tree or put into the hands of the recipient. Otherwise, it’s a big environmental, and sometimes financial, drain. As far as the planet goes, the amount of paper wasted on wrapping is staggering. Stanford University reports if every American family wrapped just 3 presents in re-used materials, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields! Worldwide, wrapping paper spending reaches $2.6 billion yearly. That’s a lot of money to throw away.
Here’s a better idea: Wrap gifts in fabric or containers that can be re-used. For example:
* Japanese Wrapping Cloths – These beautiful cloths come in various sizes and in different themes. Some are very Christmas-y, but others feature flowers and Japanese cultural icons. They’re reasonably priced and can be used over and over again.
* Cloth Christmas Gift Bags – These reusable bags are made from 100 percent cotton and are tied with a ribbon made from 100 percent recycled plastic bottles. They’re available in various sizes and for wine bottles.
* DIY Cloth Gift Bags – Make your own gift bags by sewing three sizes of fabric together, pinking the top with pinking shears and then tying a reusable ribbon around the top. Care2 offers instructions on making your own reusable burlap bags herejust dress them up with a bright and colorful ribbon, and you’re done.
* Reusable Grocery Shopping Bags – For $.99, you can get a reusable shopping bag, either grocery store sized or, at a place like TJ Maxx or Marshall’s, jumbo sized. Putting even larger gifts in a bag saves so much time and paper wrapping, and people invariably love having a bag like this to reuse after the holidays are over.
* Towels & Napkins – Cloth towels and napkins are particularly good for wrapping small kitchen utensils, jars of special spices and sauces, organic coffee or tea, or chocolate.
* Holiday-themed Cardboard Boxes – Decorated cardboard boxes come in a variety of sizes and shapes, so you can use them for clothing, games, food, beauty products and more.
* Socks – Whether you use holiday-themed socks or something more practical, socks can make the perfect “container” for jewelry, cosmetics, a small book, a special knick-knack, small battery chargers and other items. Tie them together at the top with shoelaces and you’ve given gifts within gifts.
* Reusable Food Containers – Use an empty (and clean) cardboard oatmeal canister, a stainless steel pot with a lid, a covered glass casserole dish or something else fun and whimsical. It’s fun to try to guess what might be inside such an unusual wrap.
* Bento Box – All of the compartments in a Bento Box make it perfect for cosmetics or beauty products, jewelry, or other small items. Use the stackable boxes for kid’s toys, like items for a doll house.
* Glass Vase or Bowl – One of the loveliest gifts I ever got was a bunch of Narcissus bulbs already set in stones, in a beautiful antique glass blowl. The bulbs flowered and then died, but I still have that bowl, a treasured gift from a good friend.
What’s your favorite eco-friendly way to wrap a gift? Please share!
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5 Eco-Friendly Holiday Gift Wrap IdeasWhat’s in Your Starbucks Gingerbread Latte?
10 Gifts That Also Give to Wildlife
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.
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By Suzanne Jacobson 3 Dec 2015commentsShare
Remember when eating sustainably meant just having to choose between a local, non-organic tomato and an organic one flown in from Chile? Well, those were the good ole days.
Now, thanks to advances in genetic engineering, our food choices are about to get a lot more complicated. Take China, for example. Instead of debating the merits of a pesticide-free Caprese salad over a low-emission salsa, Chinese consumers might soon have to choose between cows flown in from Australia and ones grown in a cloning facility in the northern city of Tianjin.
As Bloomberg noted last month, China recently received a shipment of 150 live Australian cattle via 747 — the first of many shipments to come, as the country struggles to meet its citizens’ growing demand for beef:
China will eat an extra 2.2 million tons of beef a year by 2025, according to Rabobank — enough to make 19 billion quarter-pounders. The demand pushed up Chinese prices fourfold since 2000 to about $10 a kilogram in
June — making them among the most expensive in the world and more than double the benchmark rate in Australia.… Part of the reason for growth is a change in diet. For centuries, China’s favored meat has been pork, partly because backyard pigs not only supplied meat, but were good at turning waste into manure. Until recently, beef — once known as “millionaire’s meat” — was very rare. With China’s recent rapid urbanization and the rise of a middle class, that’s changing.
And because of beef’s demotion from “millionaire’s meat,” in addition to importing both live cattle and frozen, ready-to-eat beef from the Aussies, China is also gearing up to start mass producing cloned cattle, The Washington Post reports:
The commercial cloning project is a joint venture between Sinica (a subsidiary of Boyalife Group), Peking University’s Institute of Molecular Medicine, the Tianjin International Joint Academy of Biomedicine, and South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation. The plan is to finish completion of the $31 million commercial cloning facility in the first half of 2016, and then start production of 100,000 cattle per year. Within five years, the facility plans to ramp up to 1 million cattle a year.
If you’re someone who likes to buy grass-fed beef from an independent farmer at your local farmer’s market, then chances are, you’re not gonna like airborne beef or cattle clones. But as our own Nathanael Johnson pointed out earlier this summer in our Meat: What’s smart, what’s right, what’s next series, those quaint ranchers aren’t going to cut it when it comes to feeding a growing world population.
So the question is: Would you opt for a farm-raised cow that just endured a 13-hour flight standing in its own feces, or a local cow that came from a lab? Think carefully, because China isn’t the only country starting to merge farm and laboratory. Last month, the FDA declared a salmon genetically modified to grow to market size in half the time of regular salmon safe for human consumption. The fish will be the first genetically engineered animal to hit U.S. markets and will no doubt spawn a lot of debate over what we should be eating.
And it’s probably best to get that debate rolling sooner rather than later. Because as silly as agonizing over local vs. organic tomatoes might seem now, agonizing over air-lifted vs. cloned cattle might not be far behind as we hone our ability to manipulate genes.
Just this week, in fact, a bunch of scientists and ethicists met in Washington, DC., to discuss the prospect of genetically engineering humans. Crazy, right? Actually, China already tried to do something like that earlier this year. And according to The Washington Post, the country is similarly nonchalant about cloning humans:
According to Boyalife’s chief executive, Xu Xiaochun, the plan is to move on from cloning cattle for food purposes to cloning primates for research purposes. And from primates, guess what the next step would be? Yep, humans. “The technology is already there,” Xu says. “If this is allowed, I don’t think there are other companies better than Boyalife that make better technology.” Right now, the company is just being “self-restrained” about cloning humans until all those bothersome moral and ethical questions go away.
Oy. If we’re gonna start talking about genetically engineered humans, I’m gonna need to fuel up. Should I get the cloned cattle steak or the GM-salmon burger?
Source:
What happens when Chinese supermarkets start selling beef from a test tube
, The Washington Post.
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A Grist Special Series The Paris climate talks: Yes oui can!
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One of the interesting things about the GOP primary race is that uber-conservative Ted Cruz is a bit of a dove when it comes to foreign policy. It’s not always easy to see this behind the bellicose rhetoric favored by Republicans, but even at the very beginning of Cruz’s campaign he said things like, “It’s worth noting, in eight years, the largest country Ronald Reagan ever invaded was Grenada.” In the four debates so far, Cruz has adopted less hawkish positions than most of the other candidates, and today he spelled out his national security stance in an AP interview:
While promising to destroy the Islamic State, beat back aggression from Russia, China and Iran, and ensure extremists don’t infiltrate the U.S. homeland, Cruz also places notable limits on his approach to national security. While Syrian president Bashar Assad is undoubtedly a “bad man,” removing him from power would be “materially worse for U.S. national security interests.” He is unwilling to send more U.S. ground forces into the Middle East and rejects the idea that torture can serve as an appropriate interrogation tool.
“We can defend our nation and be strong and uphold our values,” he says. “There is a reason the bad guys engage in torture. ISIS engages in torture. Iran engages in torture. America does not need to torture to protect ourselves.“
But if Cruz is generally trying to position himself as the most conservative candidate running, why the restraint on foreign policy? Brian Beutler argues that it’s because Cruz understands the conservative base better than Marco Rubio and some of the other candidates:
Cruz is highly attuned to the views and grievances that animate Republican voters, even when they are out of step with the right-intellectual consensus. One of these arenas, where the right-wing position on a left-right axis fails to neatly line up with Republican voter sentiment, is foreign policy.
Though they share a desire to be tough on terrorism, grassroots conservatives, unlike many Washington hardliners, don’t want the U.S. mired in unbounded entanglements. Here, the rightmost position—Rubio-esque neoconservatism—is identified with the dreaded Washington establishment, while organic conservative preferences are reflected in broad support for less militarily adventurous candidates. Republican voters trust Donald Trump to fight terrorism more than any other candidate by a wide margin….These voters consider anti-terrorism a priority but are uninterested in a return to the George W. Bush doctrine. It’s why Trump’s line about “bombing the shit/hell” out of ISIS is such a hit with his supporters—but those supporters would also rather Russia get bogged down in an ugly war than us.
It’s also why Cruz isn’t crouching against Rubio’s foreign-policy attacks, but counter-striking with a ferocity, and an approach, that will surprise the shapers of conventional wisdom.
This difference is likely to become sharper over the next month or two. Both Rubio and Cruz probably think it’s helpful to carve out some concrete differences with the other, and both probably think their version of foreign policy is better attuned to the current Republican id.
So who’s right? I wouldn’t presume to guess at the details of the Republican id at the moment. But I will say that both Iowa and New Hampshire probably still bear traces of traditional conservative isolationism, and Cruz’s approach might go down pretty well there. Once the primary moves to other states, who knows? But wins in the first two states sure wouldn’t hurt Cruz’s chances.
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Ted Cruz Is Counting On Republican Voters To Be Less Bloodthirsty Than Most People Think
Mother Jones
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At least 100 people have been killed in a wave of attacks throughout Paris.
Police stormed the Bataclan concert hall, where terrorists took scores of hostages at a concert by California band Eagles of Death Metal.
Attacks hit at least seven sites, including multiple shootings and bombings.
Two suicide attacks reported.
French Prime Minister François Hollande mobilizes military and shuts down borders.
Update, 11/13/15, 7:17 pm: The AFP wire service reports that around 100 people were killed at the Bataclan concert hall, according to police. That figure is in addition to those killed during other attacks around the city.
Update, 11/13/15, 6:58 pm: Police have told BFMTV, a French news channel, that the police raid on the Bataclan concert hall is over and two attackers were killed.
Update, 11/13/15, 6:42 pm: The AFP wire service and France24 confirm that French police have stormed the Bataclan concert hall where as many 100 people are being held hostage.
Update, 11/13/15, 6:36 pm: French officials have confirmed that attacks took place in at least seven locations throughout Paris. According to the Associated Press, police say at least two of those were suicide attacks.
A wave of terrorist attacks struck Paris on Friday night, killing at least 35 people and sowing panic around the French capital. French President Francois Hollande called the string of shootings and bombings that took place in at least three locations throughout the city “a night of terror.”
Attacks in Paris confirmed at four locations. https://t.co/1nbO9rE6YI pic.twitter.com/snfnhT1AXn
— Quartz (@qz)
Hollande said on Friday evening that French authorities had called soldiers onto the streets to reinforce the police, and announced that France was declaring a state of emergency and reinstating border controls in order to prevent attackers from escaping the country. At the time of his speech, shortly before 6:00 pm Eastern time, he said that the attacks and security operations against them were still ongoing.
#BREAKING Paris city authorities call on residents to stay home after deadly attacks
— Agence France-Presse (@AFP)
“Once again we’ve seen an outrageous attempt to terrorize innocent civilians,” said President Obama on Friday, offering his condolences to the French people and pledging the US’ full cooperation. “We stand prepared and ready to provide whatever assistance the government and people of France need to respond,” he said, saying the US would help “go after any terrorist networks that go after our people.”
Reports say at least one gunman opened fire at a restaurant called La Petite Cambodge, killing at least 35 people according to sources who spoke to the Associated Press. Another shooting took place at the Bataclan concert hall, where news reports from the BBC, CNN, and others say up to 100 people have been taken hostage by unidentified attackers.
Local media also reported a third shooting attack at the Les Halles shopping center in central Paris at around 5:35 Eastern time, more than an hour after the initial reports of shootings and bombings began.
Meanwhile, an explosion also occurred near the Stade de France, where the French national soccer team was playing against Germany. Hollande, who was attending the game, was evacuated according to French television station iTELE. The explosion could be heard clearly during the game, as captured by the live feed of the match.
This is a developing news story, and details will be added as they become available.
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It’s an area half the size of Rhode Island. Shutterstock The desert in Southern California could be in for a climate-friendly makeover, after the Obama administration released its plans to develop more renewable energy projects on federally owned land. On Tuesday the Interior Department released the final version of a plan that would open up about half a million non-contiguous acres—half the size of Rhode Island—for projects such as wind and solar farms in the Mojave Desert and surrounding areas. It would also more than double the amount of land dedicated to protecting delicate desert ecosystems that are home to vulnerable species, including the desert tortoise. The Mojave Desert, which stretches across most of Southern California, is a potential gold mine for clean energy. Earlier this year, the world’s largest solar farm opened there, near Joshua Tree National Park. According to Interior, the desert and the its surrounding area have the sun and wind potential to support 20,000 megawatts of renewable projects, about equal to the amount of solar energy installed nationwide today. In announcing the plan, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said that public lands will “play a key role” in helping the United States meet its goal of procuring 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources (excluding large hydro dams) by 2030—up from about 7 percent now. But over the past few years, efforts to develop all that potential have sparked clashes between clean energy buffs and conservationists who don’t want to see pristine landscapes blanketed by vast arrays of solar panels. One pioneering project, the Ivanpah Lake solar farm, became a pariah after environmental groups said that it encroached on tortoise habitat and that its sunlight-concentrating panels were blasting superheated rays into birds’ flight paths and killing tens of thousands of them. Subsequent estimates put the death toll much lower, but the Ivanpah controversy underscored just how hard it can be for government planners to find common ground between competing environmental interests. The new plan (finalized in October but made public Tuesday) is meant to clear the air by painstakingly analyzing a 2 million-acre swath of Southern California and offering a comprehensive take on where to focus clean energy development. Scientists and planners from a host of agencies stockpiled research on wildlife, water, agriculture, historic and cultural sites, and other features in an effort to find spots that have high renewable energy potential with minimal environmental impact. In the map below, the pink and red areas are where the Bureau of Land Management recommends that private developers focus their efforts. Orange and blue hatching shows areas proposed for conservation: BLM Anyone who wants to build a wind or solar farm in these areas still has to go through the normal permitting process that any development on public land has to clear. But the plan is meant to help developers avoid headaches by showing them the areas that the feds have already decided are either not ecologically sensitive, or that are already too degraded to worry much about building in. That’s a departure from the previous modus operandi, in which federal officials made case-by-case decisions on each proposed project. “It’s a real change from how BLM has approached renewable energy development in the past,” said Erica Brand, California energy program director at the Nature Conservancy. The agency, she added, is “protecting desert landscapes by directing development to areas that are more degraded.” Similar reviews of private and state-owned land will be released over the next year. And you can bet that there will be plenty of interest from renewable energy companies. California has the country’s most favorable investment climate for renewable energy, according to Ernst & Young, and the state recently adopted the country’s most aggressive renewable energy target: 50 percent of its electricity mix by 2030. That’s up from 20 percent now. “The [Mojave] Desert has some of the most intact natural landscapes in the lower 48,” Brand said. “As we transition to cleaner energy sources, and work to meet our climate goals, we also have to keep those natural resources intact.”
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This Map Shows Where the Next Clean Energy Gold Mine Is
Salazar: On Energy, Expect Four More Years of the Same
Turbine Plans Unnerve Fans of Condors in California
Obama on Climate Change: “No Challenge Poses a Greater Threat to Future Generations”
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From fork to farm: Startup recycles grocery store food waste into organic fertilizer
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By Suzanne Jacobson 10 Nov 2015commentsShare
Trying to get Americans to raise the gas tax is like trying to get kids to eat healthy. Deep down, both suburban car lovers and sticky little humans know that their respective standoffs are nothing more than ideological grandstanding, and that paying a bit more at the pump and knocking back those peas and carrots won’t actually be the worst thing ever. But here we are, cruising around crumbling infrastructure with our cheap gasoline. And there’s little Joey, starving to death at the kitchen table.
Here’s Grist’s own Ben Adler laying out the very real problems with this standoff — the tax one, not the peas and carrots one:
There is perhaps no more vicious, self-reinforcing cycle in American life today than our dependence on automobiles. We subsidize suburban sprawl through favorable tax treatment, we mandate it through zoning codes, and we socialize the costs of the pollution it causes. We then end up with communities segregated into shopping, offices, and homes, so spread out and car-oriented as to make walking impractical.
… With so much driving necessary to get anywhere, and far too many SUVs on the road, it’s no surprise that Americans are averse to raising taxes on gasoline.
Gas taxes are how we fund federal transportation spending. Currently, the gas tax is just 18.4 cents per gallon, the same as it was in 1993 — and one-third less once adjusted for inflation. Because we haven’t raised it for two decades, we have developed a shortfall for currently authorized spending — and that doesn’t even begin to address the considerably larger amount we should appropriate to fix our crumbling transportation infrastructure.
But a new study published in the journal Energy Policy has revealed a glimmer of hope. Through a series of online surveys conducted between 2012 and 2014, two sociologists at Michigan State University found that people were significantly more likely to support a gas tax hike if they were told that a) the money would go toward energy-efficient transportation, b) the money would go toward infrastructure repair that current taxes couldn’t cover, or c) the money would be refunded equally to all Americans, rather than given to the U.S. Treasury’s General Fund.
(Note to Joey’s parents: One thing that didn’t work was telling survey respondents how much other countries paid for gas. So, you know, maybe stop talking about how much the neighbor girl loves her broccoli.)
To design these surveys, the MSU researchers used what’s called “fear appeal literature.” This is mostly worth pointing out because the world should know that such a thing exists. But also, it’s kind of important. According to the researchers, the findings of such literature show that: “for people to take action against a threat, it is not sufficient that they believe that the threat is severe and that they are susceptible to its consequences. They also must believe that there are practical ways of protecting themselves against the threat.”
Makes sense. People want to know that their sacrifices actually matter. That’s why if I ever have kids, I plan to convince them that we’re all constantly on the verge of spontaneous combustion and that a healthy diet is the only thing keeping the flames at bay. I’ll practically have to pry those Brussels sprouts out of their terrified little hands!
Source:
How voters would accept higher gas tax
, MSU Today.
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Industrial Evolution: A Grist special seriesWe speak with the scientists, artists, and thinkers who see a high-tech, sustainable future on the horizon.
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How to sell the gas tax to people who hate taxes and love driving
READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS
The Eco-friendly Guide to Guilt-Free Green Living and Stress-Free Simplicity
Genre: Self-Improvement
Price: $1.99
Publish Date: April 15, 2014
Publisher: Cleis Press Start
Seller: The Perseus Books Group, LLC
Most eco-friendly books start with terror-inducing lists of the carcinogenic chemicals you are liberally slathering all over every single surface in your house, painting most people as as unwitting eco-villains, happily Lysol-ing your way straight to hell. Well, readers can just relax and unpack the (plastic) bags no guilt trips today! At this point I think we all know that cleaning with bleach is bad and pop cans should go into the recycling we’re beyond that, yes? All You Need is Less is about realistically adopting an eco-friendly lifestyle without either losing your mind from the soul-destroying guilt of using a plastic bag because you forgot your reusable ones in the trunk of your car (again), or becoming a preachy know-it all whom everyone loathes from the tips of her organically-shampooed hair to the toes of her naturally sourced recycled sandals. It’s all gotten kind of complicated, hasn’t it? These days you’re not green” enough unless you quit your day job and devote your entire life to attaining an entirely carbon neutral lifestyle or throw out all of your possessions and replace them with their new green” alternatives. This whole eco-friendly thing seems to have devolved into a horrific cycle of guilt, shaming and one-upping, and as a result people are becoming exhausted and getting annoyed and, oh my god, we are living in a world where one of my grocery bags says This reusable bag makes me better than you.” It doesn’t have to be this way. It is possible to take easy baby-steps towards a more earth-friendly lifestyle without stress, guilt, or judgy eco-shaming. Top eco blogger Madeleine Somerville is here with really original ideas on how to save money and the planet. Her ideas are even fun! Somerville has emerged as the voice of reason on urban homesteading that is stress-free, sanity-based and above all do-able. From the book: Stop Using Disgusting Dryer Sheets Do y'all know that most dryer sheets coat use animal fats to coat your clothes with that 'fresh' fragrance? Yeah. It's disgusting. Switch to wool dryer balls, they're simple to make (plus a fun craft project for kids) and they work like a hot damn. Use Jars Instead of Travel Mugs 1. You can screw on the lid and literally throw a jar full o' coffee into your purse (no more balancing keys, coffee, files etc!) 2. It takes immense resources to manufacture and sell all those plastic/metal travel mugs which are often lost/forgotten You have old food jars hanging around anyway, why not make use of them? If they break or get lost,at least they were used one more time before reaching their final destination. I always get lots of compliments on my coffee jar.
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