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The Color of Justice |
The nonprofit Color Of Change (COC) calls itself “the country’s largest online racial justice organization.” Formed in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina by activist James Rucker and current progressive CNN host Van Jones, COC aims “to respond to injustice and move decision-makers in corporations and government to create a more human and less hostile world for Black people in America.” Its campaigns focus on achieving racial, media, and economic justice, as well as working to reform the criminal justice system.
The group has brought about several important victories in its ten years of operation, which include pressuring news networks to drop Lou Dobbs (CNN), Glenn Beck (Fox News), Pat Buchanan (MSNBC), and Bill O’Reilly (Fox News) off the air in light of ongoing racist commentary. The staff helped get justice for the “Jena Six” a group of Black teenagers who COC says were excessively charged and sentenced after defending themselves during a campaign of racist harassment at school. They’ve gotten Clear Channel to remove vote-suppressing billboards from Black and Latin-American neighborhoods. They successfully pushed for the removal of the confederate flag from the South Carolina state capitol. And they’ve weakened the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which the group calls a “dangerously effective” right-wing policy group that is responsible for funneling corporate dollars to politicians to create laws that roll back worker rights and environmental protections, and that “dismantle the gains of the Civil Rights movement.”
Like Green America, Color Of Change runs campaigns that hit companies in the pocketbook, as the group presses for corporate accountability. The group has also started embracing divestment as an activist tool, helping to encourage investors to divest $60 million from the private-prison industry.
Green America has worked with Color Of Change to promote the group’s Blood Money campaign (see more, next page) and its action last year to pressure corporate CEOs to leave Trump’s business councils.
Green America’s Tracy Fernandez Rysavy talked to Brandi Collins—who holds a law degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is Color Of Change’s senior campaign director for media, democracy, and economic justice—about her work, the group’s important wins, and how economic justice and civil rights are inextricably intertwined.
Green American/Tracy: Color Of Change was founded in part as a response to Hurricane Katrina. How has your mission evolved since then?
Brandi Collins: I don’t know that the mission itself has evolved. I think the core is always going to be to build power for Black folks and redefine the rules of what’s possible in our society, although we definitely see through a wider lens than just Black folks. We know that in order for us to achieve justice, we all have to win. Communities left on the margins have to win.
If anything, we’ve reaffirmed our mission as we see more and more the structural inequities that continue to work against us and keep us from moving forward toward a collective vision of another world where anything is possible. Where the American dream can feel real for all of us and not just a lucky few.
Green American/Tracy: What do you see as the connections between economic justice and civil rights?
Brandi Collins: At the end of the day, to me, everything is a combination of an economic or a media justice issue. So even when you talk about environmental justice and who suffers, where corporations feel comfortable dumping toxic waste and who they feel will suffer in silence, and why coal mines are built near certain communities, and why Black and Brown kids have higher levels of asthma, oftentimes, that comes down to an economic justice issue.
All of these different issues—whether tax or economic policies that you see on the local or federal level, or paid child care subsidies, or who most benefits from a tax credit, like the ones we’ve seen rolled out by this administration, versus social safety net programs—are both civil rights and economic justice issues.
Green American/Tracy: Your executive director Rashad Robinson has said that Color Of Change doesn’t just go after the Nazis and white supremacists—you go after the institutions that occupy the mainstream and make racism possible. Can you elaborate?
Brandi Collins: It’s tied to something the leadership here has thought deeply about, and that’s about understanding leverage as means to build power.
It’s not enough to stop who’s causing the pain. But [we have to look at] who benefits from the pain. We’ve seen very acutely the role that Silicon Valley and financial institutions have played in allowing white nationalism to thrive.
[For example], as we go online, information is gathered about us to create a data profile. Everything we click on, every article we share, every pair of boots we buy works toward creating this profile of who the internet thinks we are.
A story that we saw consistently with Dylann Roof [the white supremacist who murdered eight Black churchgoers and their pastor in Charleston, SC, in 2015] and others is of someone who has questionable views on life, or people of color, Black folks, and becomes increasingly more radicalized through their online experience.
The more the internet receives you as someone with white nationalist, alt-right views, the more it’s like, “Well, here are ten more people you can follow on Twitter who have more radical views than you. Here’s a bunch more articles you can share with your friends that talk about Black-on-Black crime or other false narratives.”
It radicalizes people. When you think about it through that lens, then there’s a certain amount of accountability that Silicon Valley needs to have.
A white nationalist doesn’t care about what Color Of Change thinks about their views. But Silicon Valley cares what Black and Brown folks think of them because they want our money, they want our data. So we have more leverage over them.
Same thing with our Blood Money campaign, [which asks the major credit-card and payment-processing companies to cut off hate groups from their financial services]. We worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center to discover that a lot of white nationalists were using PayPal and different financial institutions to support their sites—to be able to expand, to be able to go into places like Charlottesville, Berkeley, Portland, and create chaos.
Now it’s not like these financial companies can say, “Well, we’re making billions and billions of dollars off of white nationalists, so we don’t want to mess with our bottom line.” They were making pennies on the dollar.
But for those white nationalist groups, that $200,000 that they bring in each year allows them to keep their site open, allows them to travel to all sorts of places, allows them to amplify their message of hate.
Again, do they care about Color Of Change or what Black people think about what their site is doing? No. But do financial institutions care that millions of people are coming to them and saying, “We’ll cut up our credit card today. And we’re going to go out and talk about how you have blood on your hands because of Charlottesville, because the [white nationalist perpetrators] used money they got through your financial system in order to go there in the first place”?
Now the financial companies want to have a discussion. Now they’re able to cut off the financial flow that’s allowing these groups to thrive.
[Editor’s note: In August 2017, as white nationalists converged on Charlottesville, VA, for a rally, one drove his car through a group of counter-protestors, killing activist Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others. As the Green American reported in our Fall 2017 issue, all four major credit card companies, as well as PayPal and Apple Pay, have agreed to cut off white supremacists from their services. Color Of Change notes that they still have hate groups using their services, and it continues to pressure the companies to develop and implement an anti-hate Acceptable Use Policies and divert resources to enforce them.]
Green American/Tracy: Can you talk a bit more about your work pressuring social media companies, as well?
Brandi Collins: We’ve had a lot of different conversations with companies in Silicon Valley. Eventbrite was one interesting campaign we ran last year. We noticed that a lot of white nationalist groups and individuals were selling tickets through Eventbrite. Again, this is pennies on the dollar for Eventbrite, but it allows white nationalists to amplify a message of hate.
So we reached out to Eventbrite, Facebook, Twitter, and to their credit, all of these entities have shown a willingness to talk with us, and to say, “This doesn’t align with our values. What can we do?”
We’ve also done a lot of interesting work with Airbnb because of the online discrimination that was happening [against renters] on their platform. That’s one corporation that really came to the table and said in our meetings, “We’d rather leave money on the table and get this right than get this wrong.”
Oftentimes, these are behind-the-scenes conversations that might result in different policy changes in their most positive form. But if I’m being completely honest, there’s still so much work to do.
Green American/Tracy: You’ve also worked on diversity issues, getting Twitter to release diversity data in 2014. Why is diversity at the highest levels of a company so important?
Brandi Collins: I want to be clear we never call for diversity just for diversity’s sake because a Black face in a white place doesn’t always ensure equity.
What we’ve seen time and time again is that when judgments are being made—Is this racist? Is this a problem?—there are certain things that go over people’s heads when they haven’t had that same level of experience.
With Facebook, for example, there was a ProPublica article that came out last year where ProPublica flagged for executives at Facebook around 50 pieces of hateful content on their site that had been reported by users but were allowed [by Facebook’s Community Standards team] to stay on the site.
Facebook admitted that almost half the time, they had gotten it wrong. Their response was, “We’re hiring more and more people.” But who are you hiring? Are you hiring someone who understands implicit threats rather than explicit? Who doesn’t need to see the N-word to know that something is hateful content?
Also, when Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, and others are making decisions around the type of platform and the user experience, whose user experience are they taking under consideration?
When Uber makes a call that says they’re going to advertise in New York as, “Uber, cheaper to get to work than the train,” but they’re not willing to go into neighborhoods where people might actually benefit from being able to travel to work at a cheaper rate, what does that mean? How are we actually moving the equity of user experience?
By having diversity at all different decision points, it ensures that more of those discussions can happen internally, and you don’t have to have a Color Of Change knocking on your door when you’ve messed up, and our million members asking you what’s really going on.
We’re also doing some work around Hollywood diversity. Late last year, we released a report where we looked at the state of Hollywood writer rooms. What we see on TV and in our theaters matters.
For many people, they go through life without necessarily having an experience of what it means to have a person of a different ethnicity close to you in your life. So for a lot of white people and other folks, your experience of Blackness or what it means to be Latino or Asian is informed by what you see in the news and on TV, not necessarily by your neighbor.
Who’s in the writing room, and who’s telling those stories, and how people of color are being depicted matters.
We’re also doing work in diversifying newsrooms, because the “fake news” witch hunt led by this current administration has elevated certain mainstream news outlets, and we conveniently forget some of them are the worst when it comes to perpetuating harmful stereotypes around low-income communities and communities of color.
We released a report last year that talked about how Black families are depicted in the media. There were some interesting findings, not just things you expect to see from the more right-wing media but from a New York Times or a CNN.
Green American/Tracy: I’d love to hear more.
Brandi Collins: The report looked at 800 stories published or aired between January 2015 and December 2016 from national broadcasts and cable news outlets—ABC, CBS, NBC, the Washington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times, USA Today, and other online news sites. This study also correlated with election cycle, so these are the stories that were popping up as certain candidates were emerging.
When the media outlets we examined reported stories about poor families, they chose to feature Black families in their report nearly 60 percent of the time, even though only 27 percent of families living below the poverty line are Black.
Similarly, in coverage of welfare, 62 percent of families portrayed were Black, even though 40 percent of families receiving welfare are Black. Some of the worst offenders were Fox, CNN, the New York Times, and Breitbart—less surprising with Fox and Breitbart, a little more surprising around CNN and the New York Times.
There’s this deliberate decision-making that’s putting a Black or Brown face on poverty and on stories about who gets government benefits. Couple that with a narrative that we see consistently in media, shaped by our society, that anybody who does receive benefits or is involved in social safety-net programs is draining the system. They’re not seen as being important members of our society.
Also, poor folks are often not shown as working. But most poor folks are actually working; many have more than one job and still are not able to make ends meet. Instead of questioning why that is, there’s this built-in assumption of laziness.
When you look at whose faces are being shown when those messages are sent out, it tells a devastating story that has deep impacts from a policy standpoint, from all sorts of standpoints.
Green American/Tracy: You’ve also looked at local newsrooms as well?
Brandi Collins: When we were looking at local news, we did a report in New York, where we found that every station was over-representing Black crime by as much as 77 percent and dramatically under-reporting white crime.
There’s also another study done by our friends at the National Hispanic Media Coalition, who have led a number of different initiatives looking at the B-roll news stations use, and who’s on that B-roll, and who are spokespeople they go to, and what stories are being told. They found that every time police officers are up for budget renewals, they intentionally feed a higher level of super-predator crime stories to local stations.
The news stations are not even vetting these stories for themselves, or making distinctions like, “Are we showing an over-representation of Black folks?” They’re getting handed a stack of stories by police departments that are often disproportionately Black and Brown people, and they’re airing them.
That, coupled with a spike in super-predator stories overall means that there’s still a lot of work that still has to be done around humanizing our people. And in continuing to call out our elected officials and judges who use that sort of rhetoric as justification to pass or uphold harmful laws and legislation.
Green American/Tracy: How has Color Of Change used divestment as a tool for social justice?
Brandi Collins: I definitely want to get more into shareholder divestment. Our criminal justice team has done some work around divesting from the private-prison industry, including explicitly calling on political candidates to say that they will not accept money from the private-prison industry, especially if they want people of color to vote for them. Hillary Clinton had announced she would not when she was running her candidacy. That was some work happening behind the scenes from Color Of Change and others.
Another campaign that I ran early on in the election cycle called on corporations to divest from the Republican National Convention [because of Trump’s xenophobic and racist rhetoric], which is a little bit different from what we typically think of when we have conversations around divestment. We called for corporations to say they will not carry water for white nationalists and will not treat [hate speech] as business as usual when it’s not business as usual.
When we have a president that calls—excuse my French—Black and Brown countries “sh*thole countries,” and you as a corporation continue to sit down with him even as you rely on our dollars to exist, something’s not right there.
Green American/Tracy: Why is it so critical to divest from private prisons?
Brandi Collins: The prison industrial complex, in general, is a system that’s built on an economy of filling beds. What does that mean for our communities? Some of the things we’ve seen happening and the conditions we’ve seen in for-profit prisons are appalling, and they don’t have even a remote level of accountability that maybe public prisons would.
They’re all funded by venture capitalists, and their ability to make money depends on putting someone in cages at the lowest possible cost to maximize their profit. When we use that as a structure, there’s immediately a huge problem in terms of what sort of treatment incarcerated people receive, and what are the motivations to re-incarcerate and the de-motivations to invest in programs geared toward lowering the likelihood that someone will come back to prison.
By the time they go through these horrible prison conditions and are coming back into society, there’s no soft landing. Before you even walk out the door, you don’t have a chance to succeed, and they’re warming up a bed for your return.
Private prisons perpetuate that cycle in a number of different ways, whether it’s people who are unable to stay in touch with loved ones, who are incarcerated so many miles away from their families, and even if their families do want to stay in touch, they’re unable to travel. Whether it’s many of those costs being pushed back on already poor communities, like forcing them to pay for phone calls and food, or all sorts of things. It’s just a bad system.
Green American/Tracy: What can white “allies” and non-Black people of color do to support Color Of Change’s work and civil rights in America?
Brandi Collins: A lot of different things. We know anecdotally we have a pretty multiracial membership. So if you join Color Of Change, we provide a lot of opportunities for you to stay engaged and a lot of different activation points in your community.
For folks who can give a little, consider giving to organizations of color. And definitely look to the leadership that is emerging from those spaces. We have always seen and continue to see an incredible amount of young, old, multiracial, diverse, LGBTQ leadership. We need to challenge ourselves to be led by those folks.
I also want to mention our work at OrganizeFor.org. This mechanism allows people to start their own petitions. If you see an injustice happening in your community, and you want to do something about it, start a petition, and we will talk to you and help you move from a petition to a win in your community.
They always say social justice people are like cynical optimists. We have to believe another world is possible. I am surrounded and uplifted by all the people doing this work. Maybe we can’t imagine that other world because maybe we haven’t experienced that other world. But the fact that we keep striving toward it and coloring it in a little gives me hope.
Connect with Color Of Change at ColorofChange.org. Sign on to the group’s Blood Money campaign at bloodmoney.org. And start your own Color of Change petition in your community at OrganizeFor.org.
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Plant a Garden, Cool the Planet |
During WWI and WWII, Europe’s ravaged farmlands were no longer capable of producing large amounts of food, which led to a famine that affected Allied soldiers. In 1917, under the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson and then head of the US Food Administration, Herbert Hoover, the US government asked its citizens to support the war effort by starting “victory gardens” to grow their own food so that more food exports could be sent overseas.
Today, leaders in Green America’s (Re)Store It! campaign are promoting the same sense of urgency and collective action by encouraging people to plant “Climate Victory Gardens.” Rather than assisting in a war effort, these local gardens help combat an impending threat that jeopardizes everyone: climate change.
Not just any old garden will have the climate impact Green America aims for with this campaign. The key to transforming traditional community gardens and urban farms into climate gardens, or gardens capable of sequestering carbon, is in embracing gardening principles that protect soil health and biodiversity.
Newly launched, (Re)Store It! aims to promote regenerative agriculture, a type of farming that turns dead or degraded dirt into rich, biodiverse soil that acts as a carbon sink. A worldwide switch to regenerative farming could reverse climate change. Scientists with Project Drawdown, a nonprofit founded by bestselling author Paul Hawken, conservatively estimate that regenerative agriculture will increase by 1 billion acres by 2050, which would draw 23.2 gigatons of CO2-equivalent from the atmosphere.
“We wanted a tangible way for people to engage with our (Re)Store It! campaign,” says Green America food campaigns director Anna Meyer. “Climate Victory Gardens are a way for everyone to help turn soil into a powerful carbon sink.”
The campaign asks gardeners to commit to ten regenerative gardening principles that serve both the environment and the soil. Each climate victory gardener makes a pledge to: grow edible plants, keep soils covered, encourage biodiversity, plant perennials, ditch chemicals, compost, integrate crops and animals (not a must, but integrating animal manure and possibly chickens can make soil richer), use people power and not mechanization, rotate plants and crops, and get to know their garden and understand its efficiency and what works best for it.
Following these principles leads to food production that supports the local economy and soil health, while curbing erosion, pollution, and pests, increasing water retention, and decreasing runoff.
Meyer notes that soil health is literally the foundation of a thriving Climate Victory Garden. Healthy soil sequesters much more carbon than dead dirt.
“It’s about making sure that you’re growing a diverse amount of plants and that you’re building up soil that has major biodiversity in it,” she says.
Meyer recommends that new gardeners get their soil tested, especially if they suspect there could be chemicals in it. For example, “if you’re living in an urban area with a history of lots of traffic, your soil could be very lead-heavy from when gasoline had lead in it, as recently as 1995,” says Meyer.
Urban food gardeners with contaminated soil may need to construct raised beds and bring in clean soil for safety. But, says Meyer, “if your urban soil is safe or easily rebuilt, our preference is for planting in the ground. It has more of an impact in terms of carbon sequestration and building up healthy, biodiverse soil.”
The Climate Victory Gardens campaign will soon launch a website that will link victory gardeners to more resources, including gardening instructions, equipment suggestions, and advice. It will also map climate gardens across the US.
Though likely small in size, Climate Victory Gardens have the potential to enrich entire communities. The increase of local food production spurred by gardens also cuts down on the transportation needed to export foods into various cities, thereby reducing CO2 gas emissions. And as people learn about the importance of climate gardening at home, Green America hopes they will start demanding food grown with regenerative techniques.
“It goes along with the saying that it’s not about a stone; it’s about the ripple it creates,” says Meyer. “In the case of Climate Victory Gardens, that ripple spreads outward in the form of community engagement and educating a generation about climate change—all while we work together to stop the climate crisis.”
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Smart Homes and Privacy |
Your computerized car can pinpoint where you are as you drive. Your wireless computer and phone have microphones and cameras that hackers could access. Your smart TV collects data on your viewing habits to better target you with ads. Smart home devices promise convenience, but they also carry the danger of whittling away at our privacy.
In addition to exercising care with connected, wireless devices for health reasons, it’s important to keep privacy considerations in mind when inviting connected devices into your home, as well as when investing in smart-tech companies, and when developing policy (or contacting your Congressional representatives about it).
A 2017 report from the Internet of Things (IoT) Forum asserts that manufacturers should do the following to protect people’s privacy: Only gather data with strong permission from customers. Be transparent about how they collect and use data. Keep explanations clear and simple, rather than vague. Delete data immediately once it’s been used.
The report also notes that policymakers must get involved in privacy protection. “Relying on market forces alone to embed strong privacy practices in the IoT is a flawed approach,” the report states.
In 2016, EU regulators created the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), to establish standards for data protection for products sold in the EU. US policymakers have been much slower to act. In March of 2015, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) created a devision to study the links between smart devices and privacy. And this past August, four Senators introduced the bipartisan Internet of Things Cybersecurity Act, which would require devices sold in the US to meet minimum security requirements. It’s not as robust as the GDPR, but it does ensure that devices include some security protections against hackers.
At least 42 states introduced more than 240 bills or resolutions in 2017 related to cybersecurity, including those that would instill mandatory protections from cyberattacks and rules for the disposal of data a company collects.
As US consumers wait for privacy laws to catch up with smart technology, it’s important to take steps to protect yourself.
At Green America, we advise purchasing “more stuff” only when you need it. Simply put, it saves resources and money. Sticking with your older or analog technology has the added benefit of helping to preserve your privacy.
When you do purchase a smart device, take care to read data-collection notices. If the company doesn’t give you control over whether and how your data is stored or used, think about whether you truly need that device. Turn off functions you don’t need that are connected to the internet. Use strong passwords for your router and all devices, taking care to create a unique password for each one. (A password tracking program like LastPass can help you keep track of them.)
Also, don’t use smart devices that come with a default, hard-coded password. Experts note that those are exceedingly simple for hackers to attack. Instead, look for devices that have at least a two-factor authentication process. What that means is that in addition to requesting a password, you’ll need to provide a security key or a one-time code received via text or e-mail to access them. A thumbprint or eye scan works, too.
You can also look for the TRUSTe mark. Companies with this independent certification may display the mark on their devices, showing that they meet strong standards for privacy protection, transparency, accountability, and customer choice in the collection and use of personal information.
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Staying Connected the Old-Fashioned Way |
Smart devices can help us stay connected, but if you’ve been at a family gathering where everyone has their nose in a smartphone, you know that they can also contribute to isolation.
Sometimes, old-fashioned analog solutions can be the best way to strengthen relationships and form new ones in your community. Here are a few of our editors’ new favorites.
Celebrate Neighborday
For the past several years, GOOD magazine has designated the last Saturday in April as Neighborday, “a holiday all about getting a little face time with the folks who share your walls and fences.”
How you celebrate is up to you: Leave kind notes in your neighbors’ mailboxes. Bring them some yummy baked goods. Organize a neighborhood clean-up or a book or clothing swap. Or throw a block party and invite them all over for a barbecue or potluck.
Download GOOD’s Neighborday toolkit and register your event.
Set Up a Little Free Library
Got a bunch of extra books on hand that you probably won’t need again? Consider setting up a Little Free Library, which are popping up in cities and towns across the US.
To start one, all you do is buy or construct a box on your property—preferably at eye level. Then, pack the box with your old books and invite your neighbors and visitors to leave a book or take a book. Little Free Libraries have become so common that many people now recognize them on sight, so you shouldn’t have to put a ton of effort into starting the process.
Little Free Libraries are great ways to share resources, and they can provide a catalyst for fun conversations about books with your friends and neighbors.
Get free building and installation plans at LittleFreeLibrary.org. The site also allows you to post your library on its world map, to help others find it.
Plant a Climate Garden for All
Green America’s (Re)Store It! program aims to promote regenerative agriculture, a type of farming that builds healthy soil and turns it into a carbon sink. Now, you can get in on the action and get to know your neighbors by setting up a Climate Victory Garden for your community to share.
Any food garden can be a Climate Victory Garden (see p. 4). Inspired by the Allied Victory Gardens in WWII, these gardens turn the dirt in your backyard into a restorative, climate-cooling patch of healthy soil. All you have to do is use regenerative farming techniques like rotating plants, avoiding chemicals, planting cover crops, and more. Find resources to grow a climate garden.
And get tips on turning your garden into a community garden from the American Community Gardening Association.
Install a “Bucket List” Wall
Started by artist Candy Chang, Before I Die walls are part of a global art project that invites people to contemplate their lives and goals, and share them with others.
Communities, libraries, museums, and other venues in 70 countries have created “Before I Die” walls. The premise is simple: You set up a chalkboard or set out some sticky notes near a wall and ask people to write down a goal or dream they want to accomplish in their lifetime.
“Each wall is created by local residents who want to make a space in their community to restore perspective and share more with one another. Each wall is a tribute to living an examined life,” says the organization.
Chang released a book in 2013 with her favorite “Before I Die” responses, which include “... create a typeface of my own”; “...see where my Grandma grew up”; and “...stop being afraid.”
To view more examples and apply for free resources, visit beforeidie.city.
Share Your Stuff and Skills
The Green American has featured several ways to swap goods and share talents in past issues—like swapping child-, pet-, or elder care; starting a meal co-op; launching a home repair team; or starting a community solar project. Have other ideas? Send them to editors@greenamerica.org, and we’ll print them in a future issue.
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A Living Building Challenge? Accepted! |
Buildings that simply mitigate environmental damage aim too low, says the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). People shouldn’t have to settle for buildings that don’t improve their lives and the environment around them. Now, they don’t have to thanks to the ILFI’s Living Building Challenge (LBC), which the nonprofit touts as the world’s most rigorous sustainable building certification.
The Living Building Challenge goes beyond green-building certifications, like Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and Cradle-to-Cradle, by elevating the goal from environmental mitigation to regeneration.
Every act of design and construction on a living building should “make the world a better place,” according to the ILFI.
The Living Building Challenge: A Building That Gives Back
As its name hints, successfully completing the Living Building Challenge is no easy feat.
To earn full certification, builders need to meet high green standards in seven focus areas, called “petals”: eco-materials, health, a sense of place, water conservation, energy efficiency, equity/accessibility, and beauty.
Builder teams earn individual petal certifications as they complete each portion of the challenge. Once they achieve all seven petals, demonstrated through performance data over 12 consecutive months, the ILFI awards full living building certification.
The ILFI uses the metaphor of a flower because, notes the organization, a living building “should operate in the same clean, efficient, low-impact manner as a flower.”
“Often when people talk about sustainability issues, they think mostly about natural resources, but the Living Building Challenge is also socially related and community related. It requires a broader way of thinking,” says Kathleen Smith, vice president of the Living Building Challenge.
This broad way of thinking transforms into action when builders meet the LBC’s seven petals:
Materials:
The LBC’s Materials Petal ensures that living buildings are made from regenerative, nontoxic materials. Projects cannot use any of the toxic and hazardous chemicals on ILFI’s Red List, which include asbestos, lead, phthalates, PVC, and more. ILFI’s “Declare” database lists the hundreds of healthier construction materials and products acceptable for use in living buildings.
Living buildings also have to use a one-time carbon offset provider to offset construction-related emissions.
To meet the LBC’s materials requirement, the project team for Washington University’s Tyson’s Living Learning Center , a fully certified Living Building in Eureka, MO, gathered woods from the Tyson Research Institute’s 2,000-acre sustainably managed forest property. The Eastern Red Cedar and Hard Maple trees in that local forest supplied wood for the Tyson Living Learning Center’s exterior sidings, trims, and floors.
Sourcing wood near the property site also fulfilled another living building mandate: that a certain amount of construction materials (as well as all hired consultants) come from the region.
The project team also replaced doors made with lead and sustainably harvested wood (which contained formaldehyde) with stainless steel, salvaged wood doors, and salvaged hardware.
Health:
Since Americans spend 90 percent of their time indoors, the buildings in which we work, learn, and live have a lasting impact on our overall health. Indoor air pollution from cleaning products and other sources can trigger respiratory problems like asthma as well as eye irritation, coughs, and headaches. 
To the creators of the LBC, health and happiness go hand in hand. In addition to developing protocols for everyday operations like cleaning, and complying with high standards for indoor air quality such as the international ASHRAE Standard 62, design teams must also embrace the idea of biophilia, or the belief that human beings have a natural desire to interact with nature.
After receiving full LBC certification in April 2015, Seattle’s Bullitt Center became the world’s first certified living office building. The Center’s project team used biophilic design as a fundamental principle guiding architecture, engineering, construction, and operation, says Denis Hayes, president and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation (and the founder of Earth Day).
“Our heavy timber structure wraps office spaces in warm, natural wood, and our large operating windows provide ample natural daylight as well as views of nature in the adjacent park,” he says. “Our occupants have responded positively to these features and many others. We know people are more productive, as well as healthier and happier, when they are able to enjoy natural daylight and surrounding views, and the tenant companies have responded favorably.”
Place:
To avoid disturbing their surrounding environment, living buildings do not occupy more space than they need. The LBC’s Place Petal requires project teams to only select sites where there is already existing development and that aren’t too close to sensitive habitats like wetlands, primary dunes, and virgin prairies. 
Living buildings promote agriculture and participate in ILFI’s Habitat Exchange program, wherein project teams match land space used for construction with purchased off-site space set aside for future habitat preservation.
Last June, the Alice Ferguson Foundation’s Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Environmental Center became the 13th building in the world to earn complete Living Building certification. Located on Hard Bargain Farm in Accokeek, MD, the foundation aims to connect students to the natural world, sustainable agricultural practices, and the cultural heritage of the Potomac River watershed.
“Our goal in investing in [the LBC] is so that we could truly walk the talk. It’s [also] to share what we have learned every day with the students that we serve who get to see this building in action,” says Alice Ferguson Foundation president and CEO Lori Arguelles.
She says she hopes the thousands of students who visit the center each year take what they learn from the building back home with them: “Even if your home isn’t a green building like this, it doesn’t mean that you can’t apply the principles of low water usage, or be conscious of your electricity usage, or think about composting and waste reduction through recycling.”
Water:
Changing the way people think about water waste is a major principle of the Water Petal. Living buildings capture, purify, and recycle all the water they need to operate on site.
The Cafritz Foundation Environmental Center, for instance, sits on top of a well. The Center pumps well water for drinking, showering, and washing hands, and it purifies graywater on-site. Waterless toilets and urinal composting systems also reduce water usage. A subsurface irrigation system collects and returns waste water to the ground.
Energy:
The LBC requires that buildings use on-site renewable energy systems that meet 105 percent of a living building’s energy needs, meaning that buildings must provide their own energy for everyday operation and then some. Projects usually meet the LBC’s “net-positive” energy imperative by using renewable systems, often solar, that can feed excess energy back into the grid. They must also have batteries to store energy in case of an outage.
Seattle’s Bullitt Center uses a 244 kW rooftop solar array to generate electricity. When the array produces more energy than needed, the excess energy transfers to the public utility grid, where it’s accessed by other energy users. The Bullitt Foundation, which owns the building, receives credit and is able to pull energy from the grid in the winter when there is less sunlight.
Equity: Many buildings are not constructed with people of various ages, abilities, and socioeconomic backgrounds in mind, but ILFI wants to change that. The LBC’s Equity Petal requires project teams to follow ILFI design guidelines that are “human-scaled” not only in architectural design, but in equitable accessibility, too.
Living buildings include features for disabled individuals such as ramps, sizable elevators, and windows that open to provide fresh air and sunlight.
The LBC also aims to construct buildings that are economically and regionally inclusive. ILFI recognizes that in order to achieve equitable access to nature and green buildings, outdated zoning standards that prohibit green-building practices, and private ownership that excludes communities from natural destinations and natural resources like clean air, soil, water, and lands have to change.
Home to three living buildings—the Bullitt Center, the Bertschi School Living Science Building, and McGilvra Place Park—the City of Seattle has reaped the benefits of evolving policy such as its Living Building Pilot program, which provides incentives for projects pursuing the Challenge.
“Throughout the project, the City of Seattle was an important partner, starting with the development of the Living Building Pilot Program,” says the Bullitt Foundation’s Hayes. “Such a policy framework is a critical piece of the puzzle, especially when you consider the Bullitt Center bumped up against dozens of codes and regulations—both proscriptive and prescriptive—that would otherwise have prohibited development of our forward-facing project.”
For many communities outside of Seattle, the need for pro-green building policy reform is pressing. According to a report by the peer-reviewed Environmental Health Perspectives journal, low-income and minority communities in the US currently live with the worst built-environment conditions, which exacerbates health disparities.
“If a Living Building is only for the wealthy, it’s not serving the vision of making a living future. We want everyone to have access to a living building,” says Smith. “There are even some health care organizations and hospitals that are realizing ... that the best preventative medicine and best way to reduce [health care] cost is to improve the quality of affordable housing.”
Beauty:
The LBC’s Beauty Petal isn’t as much about looks as it is about effort. Living buildings do not have to subscribe to any particular aesthetic, but they should be designed to reflect the beauty found in nature.
For many living buildings, the idea of beauty transcends physical meaning. The Te Kura Whare building in Taneatua, New Zealand, the only certified living building existing outside of the US, features the vibrant works of Tuhoe artists. Finding inspiration from traditional Tuhoe symbols, proverbs, and the surrounding Te Urewera forest region, these artworks speak to both the proud history and promising future of the Tuhoe people.
A Living Future for All
There are currently 390 projects around the world that are pursuing Living Building certification, but only 15 fully certified living buildings exist today. (However, 70 more projects have been Petal or Zero Energy certified.) The time and cost it takes to achieve all seven petals make the construction of a Living Building a true challenge with many benefits for those who complete it.
The Alice Ferguson Foundation spent 11 years and $4.8 million completing the Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Environmental Center. The Alice Ferguson Foundation hopes to develop case studies and an institute for ecological studies to share the information it gathered during its journey to LBC certification.
Currently, ILFI is working with eight housing developers in Alaska, DC, California, Illinois, Texas, and Washington to make living buildings more affordable and accessible. ILFI’s Affordable Housing Pilot Project borrows key principles from the Living Building Challenge to develop single-room, family, and mixed-use homes.
“Driving down the cost is in the policy advocacy we do,” says Smith. “While something may cost more up front, the strategies you use to make a living building save money in the long run. If there are incentive programs or finances in place that cover the cost, that makes [the construction process] better.”
Though persuading companies and local governments to invest in regenerative building designs might be an uphill climb, challenges seem to be ILFI’s thing.
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The Bright Future of Solar Power |
Solar is booming. Solar power is now cheaper than coal in some parts of the world, and generating power from the sun is likely to be the lowest-cost energy option globally in less than ten years, according to Bloomberg. In many places around the world, solar is already the lowest-cost option.
Even the big utilities are moving rapidly toward solar (and wind, which is also poised to best coal in terms of cost). The New York Times reports that Xcel Energy—which provides electricity to the middle of the country, from Colorado to Texas to Michigan—has asked for proposals to build large wind and solar power plants in Colorado, and bids are already coming in lower than the operating costs for coal plants. West Coast energy provider Pacific Gas & Electric has committed to making renewable energy, including solar, 55 percent of its power portfolio by 2031. Many experts think that California will hit the 50 percent renewables mark by 2025—maybe even sooner.
Compounding solar’s impending energy dominance, researchers are exploring new ways to generate solar energy for human needs. Innovative methods of harnessing solar power, like stick-on solar tiles and solar roof shingles, may be coming soon to your neighborhood.
Solar Power for Every Home
Sunflare, a Los Angeles-based startup, is looking to become the next solar heavyweight with its lightweight panels. Compared to conventional solar panels, Sunflare’s panel products have the same metallic blue look, but not much else in common.
The company’s panels are thin, flexible, and lightweight. Instead of silicon and glass, Sunflare uses a stainless steel substrate with copper, indium, gallium, and selenide to make a semiconductor that’s only a few micrometers thick.
Rectangular Sunflare panels come in both standard and custom sizes. With super-thin panels come more possibilities. Rather than relying on heavy aluminum frames and skilled installers, Sunflare panels will stick almost anywhere with a special adhesive, and because they’re flexible, they can follow a curve instead of being limited to flat installations.
If a branch shades a traditional solar panel on a home’s roof, it will trigger the shutoff of that panel or a series of panels, explains Sunflare’s chief marketing officer Elizabeth Sanderson. She notes that Sunflare panels have more diodes that help bypass just the shaded area. In addition, these unique panels can be used with off-grid homes that can’t support regular panels, like trailer homes, tiny homes, or RVs.
One of Sunflare’s first customers stuck the panels onto her tiny home in Spain, allowing her to live off the grid. And Vistabule, a camping-trailer manufacturer, has worked with Sunflare to incorporate panels into the roof of its teardrop-shaped trailers.
Sanderson says she’s excited about the products’ commercial applications: “Silicon panels are four times heavier than the Sunflare panels.
Warehouses and distribution center roofs often can’t handle that kind of weight. Also, commercial building owners aren’t very happy when they have to puncture their roofs to install racking. But they are happy with Sunflare installation; it’s peel and stick. And the panels are durable and can provide more insulation for the building. It’s a win-win-win.”
Because Sunflare is in the initial phases of scale-up and in the beginning of its technology lifecycle, its prices are about 50-100 percent higher than traditional panels. However, that gap narrows as you take its much cheaper installation costs into account. Sunflare is currently ramping up as it awaits safety certification for commercial membrane roofs this month.
Solving the Storage Problem
Of course, one can’t talk about new ways to integrate solar without talking about Tesla. With its big money and perpetual media buzz, Tesla has moved quickly from the car industry into residential solar.
In the past, one big concern with solar was how to store power generated during the day for use at night. In 2015, Tesla launched its Powerwall, a giant solar-storing lithium ion battery that solves that issue. Each Powerwall battery can hold ten Kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity. By comparison, a car battery holds about 1.2 kWh.
The Powerwall is the best-known of a few products that let people store solar energy. LG, Panasonic, BMW, and Nissan, as well as several start-up companies, all sell “home batteries” similar to the Powerwall. (Nissan uses recycled batteries from
its electric cars to power its xStorage battery, which is about $1,000 cheaper than Tesla’s.)
Solar Roof Tiles
Tesla began taking orders for its Solar Roof last May. Solar Roof tiles look identical to regular roof tiles—whether you have basic gray shingles, slate tiles, or clay Spanish tiles. But Tesla tiles generate solar power, invisibly. The Solar Roof currently comes in four styles and can be installed on the entire roof or just on the sunny side.
Consumers thought it would be years or decades before the Solar Roof would hit the market. But in January 2018, Tesla confirmed that the roofs had been installed on homes of company executives, and installation has begun at the homes of non-employee customers.
Tesla has an online calculator to estimate how much you’ll spend on a Solar Roof per month based on the size of your roof, minus the value of the energy your Solar Roof would generate and any available tax incentives. For Green America associate editor Eleanor Greene’s 990 square-foot roof in Washington, DC, and $90/month energy bill, the calculator estimated her net cost at $37/month (compared to an average $22/month for regular roof shingles) over the 30-year life of the roof’s solar capacity.
Tesla guarantees the tiles will last through the life of your house (or infinity, whichever comes first) even if the solar capacity stops working after 30 years.
Tesla recently announced it would put kiosks in 800 Home Depot stores across the country to sell its solar panels, Powerwall batteries, and Solar Roofs, and Lowe’s is in talks to sell Tesla solar products as well.
Invisible Solar Power
Though they may sound like an enviro-fantasy, solar windows could be on the market soon. A solar window is a transparent glass window that uses sunlight to create electricity, just like a solar panel.
Bad news first: solar windows are still in the development stage in the US. The purpose of a window is to let light through, but solar window technology requires striking the right balance of captured light for energy and remaining light that can brighten a room.
The good news is that companies in the US and abroad have produced solar windows that work, suggesting that these technologies may be available to consumers sooner than we think.
In 2017, SolarWindow Technologies announced a partnership with Triview Glass Industries to create SolarWindow™ products that can generate electricity. The key to this new invention is in SolarWindow Technologies’ liquid transparent coatings that make the glass act as a photovoltaic device.
Once it reaches the commercialization stage, the Maryland-based company plans to use these windows to turn skyscrapers into vertical power generators.
“Our company is essentially writing the chapter on large-area commercialization of organic photovoltaic devices and panels,” says CEO John A. Conklin.
Buildings consume 40 percent of electricity in the US, and the company anticipates that SolarWindow coatings could cut the annual $150 billion dollars it costs to pay for their electricity in half, according to company models, which feature SolarWindow on all four sides of a commercial building.
In addition to its commercial glass products, the company is developing window glass for residential homes.
Meanwhile, Physee, a power company in the Netherlands, has patented similar solar windows made with transparent double-paned glass. Physee has already successfully installed these PowerWindows in commercial office buildings in Amsterdam’s Zuidas business district and plans to install 1,850 square meters of them in Amsterdam’s BOLD apartment high-rise.
Solar Paint
In June 2017, Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) announced that its researchers have developed a solar paint that could eventually generate solar power on its own.
Led by Dr. Torben Daeneke, the team invented a paint made with titanium oxide, a common ingredient in paint and sunscreen, and synthetic molybdenum-sulphide, a compound that absorbs moisture in the air. The chemical combination uses both sunlight and moisture to convert water into hydrogen fuel, as well as oxygen.
Dr. Daeneke explained to the Sydney Morning Herald that the final product of the paint would need to include membranes that can harvest hydrogen selectively for energy use.
In the past, hydrogen energy has depended on unclean processes like the burning of fossil fuels. RMIT’s paint demonstrates that hydrogen can be a clean energy source when hydrogen is generated with renewables.
Solar in the City
Danny Kennedy has been in the solar business a long time, as a clean energy advocate at Greenpeace in the ’90s who went on to found rooftop solar company Sungevity in 2007. He’s part of Green America’s Solar Circle, which has brought together industry leaders to push the solar industry into quicker progress since 2002. Now, Kennedy works with green entrepreneurs at the California Clean Energy Fund, an early stage fund for clean-energy projects, and Powerhouse, an incubator for clean-energy startups.
He’s excited about anything that makes solar easier to get to customers. But what he really gets a kick out of is seeing people starting to put solar panels in unexpected places—like solar-powered trash cans from Bigbelly. (He doesn’t have a working relationship with this company.)
“Who knew you needed that? Because solar is cheap enough for people to put an engine in a trash can, municipalities can buy trash cans that compact the trash and can call to be emptied when they’re full,” Kennedy explains. “The result is less litter on the streets and more efficient litter collection, which saves cities tens of thousands of dollars.”
Kennedy names bikesharing systems as another model that wouldn’t be the same without solar—especially dockless systems like that of the company Mobike, which Kennedy met with last summer. Mobike bikes have a solar panel in the bike basket, connecting the bike’s lock and GPS to a phone app, so customers can easily locate, reserve, and unlock the bikes they want to use. Without solar, the whole automated process would require a very expensive battery, Kennedy says. He adds that providing more bikeshare options means fewer trips by car, so it decreases traffic pollution and congestion.
A Bright Future
In 2016, solar became the fastest growing source of energy in the US, and the biggest employer of all energy industries, with around 370,000 employees, compared to 187,000 in all fossil fuels combined, according to the US Department of Labor. The price of solar fell 165 percent from 1975 to 2015, as the megawatts installed globally surged from two to 65,000 in the same period, according to a report by Bloomberg and the Earth Policy Institute.
Given the harsh realities of the climate crisis, the world’s impending approach to peak coal and peak oil, and the rapid adoption of solar worldwide, Kennedy says the future looks very bright indeed for solar power, and he expects more solar innovations to
keep coming.
“The US pioneered something world-changing, literally,” says Kennedy. “Photovoltaics, invented by Bell Labs in 1954, already have and are going to continue to completely transform civilization until we become a completely solar-powered society.”
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Smarter, Safer Energy Savers |
The popularity of smart thermostats is on the rise. Devices like Google’s Nest use a feature called “geo-fencing” to use sensors in your home and the signal on your mobile phone to turn themselves to an eco-friendly lower setting while you’re away. Some take a few days to learn your heating and cooling habits, then adjust your thermostat accordingly while you’re in your house or apartment, or will allow you to program and schedule settings. Many will give you regular reports on how much energy you’re saving and send you warnings if the temperature ever plummets to the point where a pipe could burst.
You can also find smart lighting that you can dim, brighten, shift colors, and turn on and off via an app. Or smart switches that allow you to turn the devices they’re connected to on and off, program them to a timer, or even check for “phantom load” power leaks (energy that drains from a device when it’s turned off) via an app. And then there are full-house monitors that connect to your breaker box and monitor your energy use all throughout your home, generating energy-use reports and pinpointing energy drains (say it with us) via an app.
Sounds nifty, right? But nearly all the new energy-saving tech Green America’s editorial team found requires a wireless connection. And, say many experts, wireless devices may not be the healthiest things you can bring into your home.
The good news is, you can cut your home energy use by 50 percent or more without wireless.
EMF Radiation and Health
Back in 2011, the Green American sounded a warning about EMF radiation, particularly that emitted from cell phones, since people hold them close to their heads and bodies.
EMF radiation is produced by electricity as it moves through a wire. The National Cancer Institute notes that there are three different types of EMF radiation: extremely low frequency EMFs, like those emitted by electrical wiring and corded devices. On the other end of the spectrum are high-frequency EMFs like X-ray and gamma-ray radiation that are known to damage DNA, which can lead to cancer.
In the middle, you have radio-frequency EMFs, which are emitted by wireless networks, smart meters, cordless phones, and cell phones.
These wireless devices can harm human health, says Dr. Devra Davis, a scientist who is the president of Environmental Health Trust, lectures at top universities and medical schools, and literally wrote the book on cell phones and EMFs: Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family (Dutton, 2010).
“All wireless devices from smartphones to wireless laptops to baby monitors come with FCC warnings that they are not safe to use if held directly on the body because the radio frequency emissions can exceed government limits,” says Davis. “There is a growing body of experimental evidence showing that cell phone and wireless radiation is linked to miscarriages in pregnant women, lower sperm counts, increased brain tumors, and changes in blood markers that can lead to inflammatory conditions like arthritis and cancer.”
Cell phone and wireless radiation are the same type of radiation, says Davis. But cell phones are more of a worry since most people place them directly next to their heads, and children are handed them as toys.
“Every millimeter away gives you 15 percent less radiation,” says Davis.
But, she notes, wireless devices in close proximity to our bodies may still expose us to unhealthy amounts of EMF radiation: “For many smart tech devices, whether it’s a dryer, fridge, washing machine, we don’t even know where the wireless components are implanted. We don’t know where they’re located, how often they’re on.” And that, she says, could be a problem.
EMF Warnings Abound
In recent years, more and more respected bodies have issued warnings on wireless and cell phone radiation, particularly with children, whose bodies absorb more of it than adult bodies do.
In 2011, the World Health Organization classified radio-frequency radiation from cell phones, wireless, and other devices, as a “possible human carcinogen,” the same category into which it places jet fuel and lead.
In 2011, researchers from the National Institutes for Health released a study that found altered brain activity on PET scans when a cell phone was held up to a person’s head.
In 2011, scientists at Yale University found increased levels of hyperactivity and memory problems in mice exposed to wireless radiation in utero. Shortly thereafter, Yale and Harvard scientists issued warnings to pregnant women to reduce their exposure to wireless radiation.
In 2012, scientists at Kaiser Permanente published a replication study in Scientific Reports after finding pregnant women exposed to “real-world” levels of non-ionizing radiation (which includes EMF radiation) had nearly three times more miscarriages than women who weren’t exposed.
Belgium, France, Australia, Russia, the UK, India, Finland, Turkey, Canada, and the EU have all recommended reducing children’s exposure to wireless and cell phone radiation.
In December 2017, the state of California issued guidelines to help reduce children’s exposure to wireless and cell phone radiation.
And in February, the National Toxicology Program released the results of a multi-year study on mice and rats. It found that male rodents exposed to high levels of EMF radiation grew rare, malignant tumors in the brain and heart.
“Genome research shows that humans differ genetically from rats by three percent,” says Davis. “Every agent that we know causes cancer in humans will also produce it in animals when adequately studied.”
In addition, Davis points out that the fine print in most cell phone user manuals generally warn people to keep the phones about an inch from your body, and away from pregnant women.
Save Energy Without Wireless
While new technology can make saving energy easier to do from your couch, it’s very possible to drastically cut your home energy use without it.
In our 2010 Efficiency First! issue, we laid out techniques for improving your home efficiency by 50 percent. Find our handy, updated infographic to help you do.
For example, you can easily find an inexpensive, non-wireless programmable thermostat. Just programming your thermostat to heat or cool less when you’re away or sleeping can cut your home energy use by ten percent.
You don’t need smart switches to remind you to turn off the lights. Put a sign or sticker near your lightswitches to remind your household to avoid lighting up rooms when you’re not in them.
And you can check for phantom load energy leaks with a Kill-a-Watt meter, which will measure the energy drain of devices and appliances you plug into it.
For a more comprehensive take on plugging energy leaks, call in a Home Performance with ENERGY STAR auditor who will pinpoint areas where your home is wasting energy and give you suggestions to fix them, in addition to flagging indoor-air pollution sources.
For a DIY approach to an audit, the free Homeselfe app (iOS, Android) takes you step-by-step through your home, asking you questions about your energy use, then generates recommendations to help you make your home more energy efficient. It even connects you with local energy rebates for which you may be eligible.
Finally, installing LED bulbs uses 75 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs, and the average US home will save over $1,000 over a ten-year period, according to a 2017 cost analysis by the Consumer Federation of America.
EMF safety tips
Use these tips from Environmental Health Trust to keep yourself and your family safe from cell-phone and wireless radiation:
- Limit children’s exposure. Their smaller bodies absorb more EMF radiation than adults do.
- Distance is your friend. The amount of radiation the human body absorbs decreases by 15 percent with every millimeter away from the wireless device. Keep devices away from the body and your bedroom. And put devices on a table or desk, not your lap.
- Use the speakerphone setting on your cell phone instead of holding it against your head, or use a headset. (Corded airtube headsets are best.)
- Avoid carrying your cell phone in a pocket or bra. Carry it in a bag with the back facing away from you.
- To keep your phone or device from emitting any radiation, turn off the WiFi and Bluetooth settings and put it in airplane mode when you don’t need to be online.
- If you use your phone as an alarm clock, put it in airplane mode.
- Hard-wire devices that connect to the internet whenever possible.
- If you can’t hard-wire your home, turn off wireless routers at night.
- Use corded phones when possible. Cordless phones still emit EMF radiation, but it’s much less than that emitted by cell phones.
- Keep an eye on your signal strength. The weaker the signal, the more radiation your device emits, as it’s working harder.
- Avoid making calls while traveling in a motor vehicle or elevator. The phone works harder to get a signal through metal, so it emits more radiation.
- Never give a cell phone to young children who still put toys in their mouths.
- Reinforce the message with teens, who often sleep with their phones or carry them in a pocket
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Smart Tech for a Greener Life |
Smart Roads
Roads. To an environmentally minded person, they’re something of a menace. Too often, they require bulldozing through natural habitat and laying down black asphalt that absorbs sunlight and further warms the planet. But smart highways of the future might make roads a bit better.
They could harness solar power:
In late December, China launched its first solar road, to test whether its roadway system could do double duty
by generating power from the sun.
The 1-km stretch of expressway near the city of Jinan is lined with photovoltaic tiles, sandwiched between a layer of insulation on the bottom and transparent concrete on top.
While the country’s state-run CCTV boasts that it’s the world’s first solar-panel highway, the French village of Tourouvre-au-Perche opened 1-km solar road in late 2016, with the aim of testing its energy-generating capabilities over two years.
In the US, Solar Roadways has an ongoing IndieGoGo campaign to fund its company’s research and development for domestic solar roads, plus grants from the US Department of Transportation. The company installed its solar road in an Idaho parking lot in 2011 and is currently assessing viability for a larger solar roadway system. Its roads are made of solar panels under textured, fire-and shatterproof glass, with a heating element to melt snow and ice, and LED lights for road markings.
Outlook:
Critics point out that solar roads aren’t very efficient—flat tiles mean they can’t harness the sun as well as the angled panels you see on the roof. And the glass or transparent concrete coating could prove slippery in adverse weather conditions. Plus, while the cost of solar panels keeps nosediving, tempered glass or transparent concrete is pretty much guaranteed to cost a lot more than asphalt in the long-term.
But the people at Solar Roadways say its testing shows that even accounting for flat-tile performance, replacing all US paved roads with solar roads could produce over three times the electricity the entire country uses. Plus, its solar road tiles are textured, solving the slippery road issue.
“A Solar Roadway offsets its cost over time,” the company notes on its website. “No more contributing to the climate crisis. No more dependency on fossil fuels. No more power outages. ... Safer driving conditions. Far less pollution. A new secure highway infrastructure that pays for itself. A decentralized, self-healing, secure power grid.”
They could generate electricity:

Could the mere act of driving on a road help provide energy to our communities? Sure, say scientists around the world working with piezoelectric materials. Roads made with piezoelectrics (piezo is Greek for “squeeze” or “press”) convert the pressure and vibrations from car or foot traffic into usable energy.
While it might sound like a pie-in-the-sky option to the layperson, the technology has already been proven on a smaller scale. UK-based Pavegen has installed over 150 piezoelectric walkways, including one in Washington, DC. When pedestrians walk on it, the DC walkway generates energy that turns on the LED street lamps overhead.
In mid-2017, California invested $2.3 million into two piezoelectric lengths of road. The first project, conducted by the University of California–Merced, will scatter tiny piezoelectric generators onto a 200-foot section of road on campus. The second project, from San Jose-based Pyro-e, will test a half mile of piezoelectric highway with the goal of having it power 5,000 homes.
Says Mike Ward of the California Energy Commission, which is funding the two California programs: “These pilot-scale programs will assess the technical and economic feasibility of piezoelectric systems including power output, life expectancy, durability, cost, and marketing potential.”
Outlook:
Still unknown, as piezo-electrics have never before been tested at this scale. Ward says the results from the two California projects “will help determine the feasibility of conducting future large-scale demonstrations on highways and streets.”
If successful, piezoelectrics could be a real win for the Earth and its climate.
Drive Greener Now
Greener roads won’t solve the massive amount of emissions from driving anytime soon. For that, everyone needs to reconsider their driving habits.
Drive less: The best way to cut your climate and environmental impact from driving is to not drive at all. Walk and bike whenever possible, or carpool or take public transportation. Most public systems have apps available to help you plan your trip. And the increasingly popular Waze app (iOS/Android) makes finding carpool buddies in your area easy.
Go electric: Powering a vehicle with electricity costs roughly the same as fueling one with $1/gallon gasoline, and it’s cleaner, according to Plug In America: Electric vehicles powered by our current coal-riddled grid produce 54 percent less carbon pollution than gasoline cars. If you’re worried about charging on long trips, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) has a gas tank that kicks in when the battery runs out.
Consider biodiesel: Fill a diesel car up with biodiesel, a concoction of vegetable oil and alcohol, to get your driving emissions to zero. Or, you can convert your car to accept straight vegetable oil (SVO), too. Find a biodiesel station near you.
Smart Garages
As cars get greener and roads get smarter, garages are improving, too. Part of the attraction of low-emission electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (EVs and PHEVs) is that they could provide renewable energy storage while they’re parked—and smart garages can help make that happen.
Solar power is, of course, available during the day. And in most places, the wind blows more strongly at night. So a conundrum engineers face over a switch to renewable energy is how to store that power for use when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing as much.
Enter smart garages.
Smart garages with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capacity could pull small amounts of power from the batteries of the cars parked and plugged in inside them, sending that energy into the grid. Most garages are full during the day, as drivers go to work, and that’s also when energy use is at peak demand.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is currently testing a V2G smart garage on its campus. Likewise, the University of California–San Diego, with a grant from the California Energy Commission, is implementing a plan to test 50 V2G charging stations on campus.
Engineers from Tesla have expressed doubts as to whether the wear and tear on a car battery would make parking in a V2G garage economically viable for drivers in the long-term. But BMW and PG&E just completed an 18-month test of a 100-car V2G program in San Francisco, deeming the project a success. 98 percent of participants said they were satisfied with the program, which has moved on to a second phase of testing.
Smart Water Savers

Cape Town, South Africa, announced this winter that it was in crisis as its water supply is expected to dry up in mid-May. As the climate crisis hits the developing world first and worst, it’s critical that we all take steps to conserve water. While the devices below can’t replace smart homeowners who take steps to save water in their lives, they could help add on more water savings.
A Recirculating Shower: The average US shower uses 20 gallons of water. Orbital Systems aims to put the brakes on that water waste with its OAS Closed-Loop Shower (at right).
Instead of using a small pond’s worth of water, the OAS recirculates roughly 1.5 to 3.5 gallons of water, re-purifying it and adjusting pressure and temperature before it washes over you. At $3,599, however, the OAS may be too pricey for many people.
The Smarter Shower: If you’re installing a new shower and have some money to spare, you could consider the Kohler DTV Prompt with Eco-Mode Diverter ($399).
Designed to work with Kohler tub faucets and showerheads, the DTV Prompt is a digital interface that lets you customize your shower’s water pressure and temperature. The “warm-up” mode heats your water to your ideal temperature and then stops the shower until you’re ready to get in, saving water. And it includes a pause function that lets you quickly and easily stop the water flow for up to two minutes, after which your shower will resume just as you
set it.
The device also includes a timer setting, to remind you to get out in a timely, water-saving manner.
The Greywater Heater: The energy used to heat water in your home, including your shower, is the second largest cost driver of utility bills, according to the US Department of Energy. Now you can recover some of that wasted heat with the EcoDrain ($575). This device captures used hot shower water as it goes down the drain uses it to heat clean water before it exits your showerhead. 
The Smart Showerhead: For a lower-priced, lower-tech option, consider the Evolve line of low-flow showerheads, sold by Florida Eco Products and others. All Evolve showerheads and tub faucets exceed EPA WaterSense thresholds for water savings.
For a smarter shower experience, look for Evolve showerhead models featuring “ShowerStart TSV,” or a Thermostatic Shut-Off Valve ($39.99 to $54.99). While they do blast water while your shower is warming up, these showerheads have sensors that detect when the water has reached a comfortable 95 degrees—at which point, they will switch to a trickle, signaling they’re ready for you to climb in. You just pull the cord to resume full flow and begin showering.
Some Evolve models allow you to switch to a trickle whenever you like, so you don’t use as much water while you’re soaping up.
You can also purchase the Evolve ShowerStart TSV, an attachment that retails for $25.95 and screws in between the wall and the showerhead of your choice, giving it the same warm-up function as the Single Function and Roadrunner.
Smart Faucet: While most of the innovations for water savings seems to be around the shower, a few smart faucets may be coming to stores as well.
You might have seen infrared faucet models in public restrooms that automatically turn on when you put your hands underneath them, and turn back off again when you take your hands away. Now, you can have a faucet with that same function at home, with devices like the iTouchless EZ Faucet Adapter (from $46.64). The EZ Faucet isn’t a faucet at all, but an adapter you can screw on nearly any sink faucet to enjoy the water-saving feature.
The company says the EZ Faucet can save an average household 200 gallons of water a month. Kohler offers its DTV Prompt (see previous page) for tub faucets as well as showerheads. 
You might also find smart faucets with wireless capability and smart screens, like the Nomos from Fima Carlo Frattani. The Nomos has a touch screen that allows you to control temperature and pressure, and it also has a pause feature that heats up the water to the ideal temperature before it comes out of your tap.
However, it’s not yet clear whether the water savings of a faucet like the Nomos offsets its energy use when connected to the current power grid. And the fact that it’s wireless means it may be one to skip if you’re worried about EMF radiation.
Save water Now
You can curb your water use without fancy faucets and showerheads. Green America’s recent article, “13 Ways to Save 65+ Gallons of Water a Day” includes several tips to lower your water waste. The top savers we found are taking five-minute showers (a simple timer can help), fixing leaks in your home, and washing full loads of laundry and dishes.
In addition, conventional low-flow showerheads, toilets, and faucets offer water savings without complex gadgetry. Find green businesses offering smart and analog water-saving tools in the “Water Conservation” category at Green America’s GreenPages.org.
Smart Air Monitors
Green America has often recommended getting a Home Performance with ENERGY STAR audit, because this type of audit not only thoroughly points out energy leaks in your home but will also give you ways you can improve indoor-air quality. Now, new smart monitors can provide some of the same indoor-air monitoring 24/7.
The uHoo ($199) tracks airborne chemicals and particulate matter inside your home, letting you know when levels are too high for health. It also tracks carbon monoxide, ozone, CO2, humidity, and temperature.
In addition, it provides charts tracking your indoor air over time, so you can easily identify pollution sources and patterns. And it’ll send you alerts via a cell phone app if your levels are unhealthy.
The Foobot ($179) detects invisible air pollutants inside your home, letting you know which are occurring and in what quantities via an LED display. In particular, it looks at chemical pollutants and particulate matter, as well as temperature and humidity.
Like the uHoo, it provides charts tracking your indoor air over time, so you can easily identify pollution sources and patterns. And it will compare your indoor air to your geo-located outdoor air, letting you know if you’ll get some relief by opening the windows or not.
The Awair ($165) tracks dust, chemicals, CO2, relative humidity, and temperature. It’ll also send you personalized recommendations via an app for cleaning up the air inside your home.
You’ll need WiFi to set all three up and take advantage of all features. After setup, the Foobot will work offline. You’ll just forgo the feature that allows you to send data to the cloud and get back personalized recommendations. The uHoo turns off completely (including WiFi signal) when it’s not actively monitoring—which happens once every minute for ten seconds or less. But if you have hard-wired your internet for safety, neither it nor the Awair will work sans wireless.
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Green Tech for the Future |
It’s called the “Internet of Things,” a term coined by Procter & Gamble exec Kevin Ashton in 1999. It means an interconnected web of appliances, devices, cars, and other technology that are able to “talk” to each other and share data. Considering the vast reach and scope of the internet, adding a bunch of “things” to it may not sound all that sustainable. The last thing the Earth and our busy lives need is more stuff. But, like it or not, the Internet of Things is on its way.
Green America doesn’t suggest you overload your home with wireless devices, due to the health concerns around electromagnetic frequency radiation. But maybe there’s a way to harness some of the new (non-wireless) tech for good.
Up-and-coming roads, for example, could help the world harness enough clean, renewable energy to meet all of our power needs and them some.
New devices aimed at upping energy- and water-efficiency save precious resources and save homeowners money.
Innovative ways of harnessing solar power for your home—from solar windows to solar paint to flexible, stick-on solar panels—can make it easier for every homeowner to go solar.
And don’t forget that in our previous issue of the Green American, bestselling author Paul Hawken and the scientists at his new nonprofit Project Drawdown said that better methods of refrigeration, at home and commercially, is the number one solution for drawing down greenhouse gas emissions and solving the climate crisis. Our associate editor Eleanor Greene takes a deep dive into how that could be done.
Green Americans undoubtedly know that buying new devices, appliances, and cars just to get in on the latest fad can be hugely wasteful. It can also adversely impact workers, as overseas factories may cut corners on worker safety and implement forced overtime hours—without extra pay—to meet high demand. But our editors took a look at some of the new tech that’s either just launching or coming soon, and some of it could help society take the next step toward a cleaner, greener future.
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Events Calendar |
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Clean Energy is Calling |
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New Green Tech: Promise and Pitfalls |
For better or worse, a vast array of new technology is becoming smarter, more interconnected, and able to churn out mind-boggling sets of data. While some of that tech is merely interesting or adds convenience (and waste!), some might help make our lives greener in the years to come.
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Own Stocks? Vote your Values! |
You have the power to vote for company resolutions that affect people and the planet.
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Clean Energy is Calling Report |
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Methods of Regenerative Agriculture: #3 Cover Crops & Crop Rotation |
This is the third blog of a series describing the five methods that make up regenerative agriculture—perennial plants & diverse crops, zero/low tillage & mulching, cover cropping & crop rotation, composting, and managed grazing. Implementation of these methods is site specific and depends on soil characteristics, crops grown, and local climates. Practices are rooted in organic methods and can be integrated into farms and pastures transitioning from conventional to organic. They also have a role in smaller-scale climate gardens, where individuals do their part to sequester carbon and contribute to a local, sustainable food system.
All agriculture sequesters carbon from the air through photosynthesis. But, regenerative agriculture ensures more carbon is stored than released and keeps the drawn down carbon underground. This effectively reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increases the amount of soil carbon available for healthy crops.
Crop Rotation & Cover Crops
In agriculture, there is major potential for cover cropping and crop rotation to provide beneficial outcomes for the climate and beyond. In modern-day industrial agriculture, lands are often planted with a single crop year after year and/or tilled and left bare (fallow) for long periods of time (aka monocropping). Regenerative agriculture, on the other hand, incorporates the wisdom of including both diverse cover crops and crop rotations. Cover cropping—the growing of beneficial plants during these times of rest or in combination with the primary crop—significantly reduces soil erosion and agricultural runoff from rainstorms or irrigation. Rotating crops across many fields, rather than planting the same monocrop in one location year after year, is another practice that encourages restoration of healthy soil ecosystems.
Farmers can enhance their carbon storage potential by adding mixed species of cover crops and diversifying cropping rotations—both build soil health, store more carbon, and help keep soils covered and their micro-biome (communities of microbes) nurtured year-round. The practices reduce erosion, improve the water holding capacity of soils, and even provide important wildlife habitats.
Cover crops include wheat, barley, peas, clovers, and many others (often grown in mixes), and can be used in consumer products like beers and cereals. The longer a cover crop is maintained and the diversification of the species used—often called a cover crop cocktail—enhance this practice’s ability to restore soil health and increase farmer profitability. Farmers can choose cover crops that use nature to supply their crops with organic nitrogen and rebuild many other key aspects of soil health at the same time. While many farmers recognize these benefits, current crop insurance policies limit farmers’ use of cover crops because the programs are based on outdated science and don’t take into consideration the new information known about cover crops, risk, and nutrient loss reduction strategies.
Similarly, crop rotation helps farmers reduce loss of soil nutrients and the need for petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides because their whole farming system encourages healthy soil and provides more natural resistance to pests. This twofold benefit is critical for the health of our communities, as chemical drift and contaminated surface and ground water is a major health threat. This practice also has the potential to provide more nutrient-dense crops for our own healthy diets and increased food security.
If you’re a climate gardener, there’s major potential for you and your garden to benefit from cover cropping and rotating your crops. This resource from the USDA that has in-depth information on all the cover crops you might consider for your specific situation and needs—there is an incredible diversity of options. And, while you may find yourself habitually planting tomatoes in the same place year after year, spend some time thinking about alternative plans to help manage soil fertility (for example, some plants consume much more of some soil nutrients than others) and possible diseases and pests (for example, some families of vegetables attract similar pests, so should be alternated to reduce the likelihood of these specific pests becoming a significant issue).
Whether you’re a consumer, farmer, or climate gardener, cover cropping and crop rotations are important. They are just two of the many tools and practices that make up a regenerative agricultural system and bring many benefits to local ecosystems and the people involved from food production to consumption.
If you do not have access to a garden or farmland, and you’re unable to implement these practices directly, use your consumer power and speak with your dollars to show your support for these important practices. Make your opinion heard when crop insurance policies are being debated in the farm bill. Without strong signals from consumers, and demand from food companies large and small, not enough farmers will switch to these practices in the timeframe needed to reverse current climate trends that threaten food security and the future of our planet. If you have a favorite product or retailer, let them know that you support regenerative agriculture and want to see them sell products that support soil and climate health.
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TomatoInk.com |
TomatoInk.com is an eco-friendly, low-cost provider of ink and toner. By packaging ink in remanufactured cartridges, we pass along substantial financial and environmental savings to customers. Our products give the same vibrant, high-quality results that you expect from the name brands but at prices up to 80% less! Combine that with our OneTreePlanted partnership, and you can print with ease knowing TomatoInk is thinking about you and the world you live in.
Save a little green, grow a little green.
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Plant-based Investing: An Emerging Investment Strategy for Vegans |
An increasing number of both institutional and individual investors are aligning their investment dollars with their values. Whether you use the term “SRI (Socially Responsible Investing),” “impact investing,” “green investing,” or “ESG (Environmental, Social, and corporate Governance) investing” -- this approach to investing totaled $8.72 trillion in assets under professional management in the United States alone as of 2016 according to the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investing. Socially responsible investing strategies continue to evolve to reflect new concerns and heightened values that investors seek to integrate with their investment decisions, which is where plant-based investing comes in.
In recent years, fossil fuel free investing has become an important response from investors of all sizes to growing awareness of the need to bring the fossil fuel age to a close. As people take action to address the climate crisis, concerns about the climate impacts of our food system and the benefits of a plant-based diet are also increasingly coming to the fore. As described in Drawdown, The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming: The Western “diet comes with a steep climate price tag: one-fifth of global emissions….business-as-usual emissions could be reduced by as much as 70 percent through adopting a vegan diet and 63 percent for a vegetarian diet, which includes cheese, milk, and eggs.”
Moreover, as cited by FAIRR (Farm Animal Investment Risk & Return – a UK-based investor initiative addressing factory farming), a 2016 report from the University of Oxford suggests that the public and environmental health issues linked to increasing demand for animal products could reach $1.6 trillion globally by 2050.
As people understand that decreasing meat consumption is good for the climate, there is simultaneously growing interest in plant-based diets -- and in vegan or plant-based investing.
Several members of the financial service industry and Green America’s Green Business Network share their perspectives on this emerging investment strategy:
Fran Teplitz, Green America: What is vegan or plant-based investing?
Tom Nowak, Quantum Financial Planning: The evolving strategy of plant-based investing shares some of the nomenclature issues of sustainable investing as noted above. Practitioners in this area use language they believe best resonates with their target audience, such as plant-based investing, vegan investing, cruelty-free investing, or humane investing. It is an approach that encompasses positive and negative investment screens, i.e., the criteria for including or excluding specific investments in a portfolio. Although humane treatment of animals has been a sustainable investment screen for some time, I believe the term plant-based might be helpful in recognizing that some investors focus on the health, environmental or faith-based issues.
Brenda A. Morris, Humane Investing, LLC: Ideally, in the near future, retail investors will be able to invest in vegan companies that are disrupting their respective industries on a massive scale. Until then, humane investing generally means avoiding funds that invest in businesses that support, cause, or contribute to animal exploitation and suffering, to the extent possible, while embracing those funds that are using their position as shareholders to advocate for positive change with businesses that are open to making improvements.
Marissa LaFave, Green Century Capital Management: Plant based investing means supporting the transition from animal-based products to plant-based products, through the companies in which one invests. The transition away from modern animal agriculture reduces negative environmental, animal welfare and public health impacts and focuses investments in innovative companies that understand and work to mitigate the financial risk that stems from the industry. This approach can be done by implementing specific investment screens or through shareholder advocacy campaigns and direct corporate engagements to press companies to better their practices.
FT: Who might be interested in this approach?
TN: As with many areas of sustainable investing, some investors have a strong interest in avoiding certain industries (e.g. alcohol, tobacco, fossil fuels, factory farms, dairy, meat producers). Plant-based investing may appeal to other investors who seek specific, positive outcomes such as the humane treatment of animals, sustainable agriculture, green technology. Some investors may find this area helpful in risk management (i.e. avoid industries with long term negative consequences).
BAM: Just as most animal activists would never consider buying meat products, many have no interest in buying mutual funds that own companies that profit from the exploitation of animals. Fortunately, most sustainable funds steer clear of some of the worst offenders (like factory farms) but a few do own companies that my clients and I do not wish to support, like fast food chains.
ML: Investors who are interested in supporting forward-thinking alternatives to the current food system are likely to be interested in plant-based investment strategies. Other investors may be interested because they may be able to mitigate risk in their investments by supporting companies building more resilient supply chains and actively positioning themselves to grow in the green economy.
FT: How do investors get started?
TN: As with the development of the fossil free divestment movement, client demand will be crucial to the development of plant-based/vegan investment strategies. At present, most investors would benefit from using a financial advisor to screen potential holdings based on vegan values and financial performance. On the equity side, the use of custom stock mixes or a focus on technology exchange traded funds might be appropriate for some. Others might benefit from mutual funds managed by leaders in cruelty-free investing. Some current SRI options focused on community development could help fulfill humane investing goals since those investments support sectors such as affordable housing, small business, and education.
BAM: More investment options are needed – and clients have a central role in creating demand for vegan products. We need investors of all sizes to contact their advisors and fund companies to express their interest in moving their assets into humane investments. In addition, my clients and I give preference to portfolio managers who have signed onto the FAIRR initiative. In 2018 we eagerly anticipate the introduction of a new exchange traded fund (ETF) based on vegan principles.
ML: Another way to support plant-based investing is by investing in fund companies engaged in shareholder advocacy on this topic. Green Century, for example, filed the first and only shareholder resolution on the opportunities associated with plant-based protein, with Tyson Foods in 2016. Following the proposal, Tyson took an ownership stake in Beyond Meat, a leading plant-based protein company, launched a $150M venture capital fund focused on exploring alternative protein innovations, and has become a vocal proponent of the plant-based industry.
FT: Should plant-based investors expect to sacrifice investment performance?
TN: From my perspective, a strategy can be developed that either protects or increases one’s assets depending on the mix of holdings. While no investment has guaranteed returns, there is growing momentum to support the wisdom of building a plant-based investment strategy.
BAM: Organizations that have joined the FAIRR initiative---now representing $4.1 trillion in assets --- acknowledge the risk associated with factory farming. From environmental damage to public health issues, not staying on top of the plant-based protein shift is not just a lapse of moral judgment, but is actually a financial risk as well.
ML: Investors with strong convictions can still perform in alignment with the broader market. In fact, investing using ESG ratings has been shown to reduce risk and offer financial advantages. Plant-based investing could result in a significantly smaller carbon footprint while avoiding the risks associated with animal production, all benefits that we expect more and more companies to seek.
Conclusion
Whatever name best speaks to your values – plant-based investing, vegan investing, cruelty-free investing, or human investing – investors are increasingly recognizing the power and promise of this investment strategy. Tell your financial advisor or mutual fund company today that you are looking for vegan investment opportunities. We need all investors to build demand for investment options that provide long-term, positive value for both people and the planet.
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Mundo Maya Enterprises |
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Methods of Regenerative Agriculture #2: Zero or Low Tillage & Mulching |
This is the second blog of a series describing the five methods that make up regenerative agriculture—perennial plants & diverse crops, zero/low tillage & mulching, cover cropping & crop rotation, composting, and managed grazing. Implementation of these methods is site specific and depends on soil characteristics, crops grown, and local climates. Practices are rooted in organic methods and can be integrated into farms and pastures transitioning from conventional to organic. They also have a role in smaller-scale climate gardens, where individuals do their part to sequester carbon and contribute to a local, sustainable food system.
All agriculture sequesters carbon from the air through photosynthesis. But, regenerative agriculture ensures more carbon is stored than released and keeps the drawn down carbon underground. This effectively reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increases the amount of soil carbon available for healthy crops.
In agriculture, there is major potential for zero or low tillage and mulching to provide beneficial outcomes both for the climate and beyond. There are many types of tillage that range from very invasive to practices causing little to no disruption of the soil. We advocate for the most minimal tillage possible and crop residue management that aims to keep soils covered.
Industrial agriculture relies heavily on tilling with methods that dig into the soil between plantings to incorporate or remove crop residues, kill weeds, and prepare land for irrigation. For this type of tillage, you might hear words like “disking” and “chiseling” which allude to the motions and tools used. This more traditional type of full tillage is what you might envision when you think of large-scale agriculture like corn and soy monocrops. Both conventional and organic farms that use invasive tillage methods to prepare fields damage soil structure and release significant amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere.
By contrast, certain types of zero to low tillage—especially single pass no-till—provide significant carbon storage potential while reducing the amount of carbon released from soils into the atmosphere. Special equipment is often used to reduce the number of “passes” or times a tractor travels over a field; research shows that farmers save an average of 50 percent on fuel costs and over 70 percent time savings with one-pass tillage, a win for climate change and those who grow our food. In this practice, crop residues and cover crops are rolled flat and left to keep soil surfaces covered year-round. These residues effectively become mulch that feeds soil micro-organisms and accelerates the process of storing more carbon in the soil.
New crops are planted into this mulch, which keeps weeds to a minimum and only disturbs the soil where seeds (and possibly fertilizers on conventional farms) are injected. Herbicides may be used to control weeds, although the goal is for mulching and reduced weed seeds to keep this to a minimum, further benefitting local environments and global climate change because of reduced emissions from production of these chemicals.
Minimal tillage practices and mulching also increase rainfall infiltration (allowing for 96 percent penetration in some cases) to help prevent storm flooding. They also limit soil erosion, enhance soil moisture retention, and reduce air and water pollution from dust and chemical runoff.
If you’re a climate gardener, the great news is that you’re likely already doing very little tillage and may even already be mulching on your property. You can expand your positive impact by disrupting soils as little as possible; for example, when removing plants, consider clipping the stem just below the soil line and allowing the roots to remain in the ground. You can then use the removed plant materials as mulching or compost it. More traditional mulching around perennials with woodchips or other natural material will also serve to protect and supply nutrients to your soils. And, if you enjoy wildlife, research shows that crop residues provide important food and habitat for animals!
Whether you’re a consumer, farmer, or climate gardener, tillage and mulching are important concepts to know about. They are just two of the many tools and practices that make up a regenerative agricultural system and bring many benefits to local ecosystems and the people involved from food production to consumption.
If you’re unable to implement these practices directly, use your consumer power and speak with your dollars to show your support for these important practices. Without strong signals from consumers, not enough farmers will switch to these practices in the timeframe needed to reverse current climate trends that threaten food security and the future of our planet.
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Aggie Writing Service |
Coming soon.
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Mango and Topshop Signs Accord to Protect Garment Workers' Safety |
The international clothing companies Mango and Topshop have signed the renewed Accord on Fire and Building Safety, a legally binding agreement to improve workplace safety for garment workers in Bangladesh. The original accord was created after the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh in April 2013. The tragedy left 1,134 garment workers dead and over 2,000 workers injured.
Green America, International Labor Rights Forum, Clean Clothes Campaign, Maquila Solidarity Network and United Students Against Sweatshops have been urging Abercrombie & Fitch, Topshop, and Mango to sign the renewed accord since the original expires in 2018. Thank you to everyone who has taken action with us to push Mango and Topshop to make this step.
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University of Maryland Begins Using Recycled Paper in Magazines |
University of Maryland has begun using 10% recycled content on Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper for its magazines. This progress is thanks to all the Green Americans who took action with Green America’s One Million Trees campaign, which urges colleges and universities across the country to begin using recycled paper for their alumni magazines.
If all higher education institutions used readily available recycled paper options, we could save up to one million trees, 90 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions and 16,000 tons of solid waste every single year.
We hope to see UMD build on its use of 10% recycled content and continue with a purchasing preference for responsible papers (recycled and Forest Stewardship Council Certified content) for years to come.
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SRI Investing |
Gary Matthews is the CEO of SRI Investing - helping progressively-minded people and organizations develop healthy relationships with money and invest in ways that contribute to a more peaceful, just and sustainable world.
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University of Maryland Begins Using Recycled Paper in Magazines |
Higher education has long been a place of innovation and creativity, and increasingly, of environmental sustainability. Many colleges have made climate commitments, implemented composting programs, and worked to boost recycling participation on campuses. But one area where many schools fall short is using recycled paper in alumni magazines. Using recycled paper is essential to building demand for recycled materials to displace more resource-intensive virgin paper.
We are pleased to celebrate a step in using better paper at University of Maryland, as they have begun using 10% recycled content on Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper. It is our hope to see UMD build on its use of 10% recycled content and keep its purchasing preference for responsible papers (recycled and Forest Stewardship Council Certified content) in years to come.
Green America’s One Million Trees campaign urges colleges and universities across the country to begin using recycled content paper for their alumni magazines. If all higher education institutions used readily available recycled paper options, we could save up to one million trees, 90 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions and 16,000 tons of solid waste every single year1.
“It’s wonderful to see that the University of Maryland College Park’s Alumni Magazine, TERP Magazine, is pursuing and capitalizing on sustainable printing options,” says Willem Klajbor, Director of UMD’s Student Government Association Sustainability Committee. “While this is just one of many initiatives UMD is undertaking to carry its weight in the sustainability sector, this specific action is one that is shared with and will be observed by the entire Terrapin family.”
If you are affiliated with another university in our campaign and you’d like to see them make the switch, click here to access our One Million Trees map and add your name to those who want alumni magazines to use recycling paper. Simply click on university of your choice on our map, edit the message however you’d prefer, and hit send!
1Environmental impact estimates were made using the Environmental Paper Network Paper Calculator Version 3.2.1. For more information visit www.papercalculator.org.
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Methods of Regenerative Agriculture #1: Perennial Plants & Diverse Crops |
This is the first blog of a series describing the five methods that make up regenerative agriculture—perennial plants & diverse crops, zero/low tillage & mulching, cover cropping & crop rotation, composting, and managed grazing. Implementation of these methods is site specific and depends on soil characteristics, crops grown, and local climates. Practices are rooted in organic methods and can be integrated into farms and pastures transitioning from conventional to organic. They also have a role in smaller-scale climate gardens, where individuals do their part to sequester carbon and contribute to a local, sustainable food system.
All agriculture sequesters carbon from the air through photosynthesis. But, regenerative agriculture ensures more carbon is stored than released and keeps the drawn down carbon underground. This effectively reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increases the amount of soil carbon available for healthy crops.
In agriculture, there is major potential for perennial plants and diverse crops to provide beneficial outcomes both for the climate and beyond.
Perennial Plants
Perennials—plants that provide harvests for multiple growing seasons—range from berries to tree crops and can be integrated into any size farm or garden. Because perennial plants don’t need to be planted each year, soil disturbance is minimized and soil organisms thrive. These healthy soils hold carbon and grow vigorous crops. The plants themselves take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in their trunks, stems, and leaves—as well as in their deep root systems that ultimately feed the soil microbiome. Perennials have extensive root systems, with the added benefit of storing carbon deeper in the soil where it is more stable. When above-ground crops are harvested, the plants shed their deep roots and the carbon they’re made up of but retain enough to grow back the following season.
New studies show that perennial and native plants do a better job at drawing down carbon than many of the annual crops currently grown in our dominant commodity crop system worldwide. There are many commercially viable perennial alternatives—such as Kernza wheat and a new perennial rice—that have great potential to help reverse climate change and improve the state of our agricultural system.
Beyond carbon sequestration and climate change, perennial plants can help increase the water holding capacity and reduce the erosion of soils; reduce time, labor, inputs, and fuel costs on the farm; and improve habitats for invertebrates and small mammals. Perennials function best when planted using regenerative organic approaches that integrate pollinator habitats and intercropping with nitrogen-fixing support species.
Diverse Crops
Diversity above ground encourages diversity in the soil. Growing a variety of crops supports healthy, carbon-sequestering soils because it encourages diverse soil communities and distributes carbon at varying depths underground. Multicultures (opposed to monocultures) are better able to resist weather extremes and are more resilient in the face of droughts, floods, and other impacts of climate change. They have the ability to withstand some pests, which reduces the need for synthetic pesticides. And, having a variety of crops also improves the diversity of diets and food security for consumers and local communities.
If you're a climate gardener, you might already be benefitting from perennials and diverse crops in your yard or on your property. You might have food-producing trees, shrubs or bushes; or, you might be growing perennial vegetables like asparagus, rhubarb or artichokes. Many perennial plants are grown as annuals, even though they may be able to overwinter (depending on where you live!)—one example of this is kale. If you grow vegetables, do some research about this potential labor saving, carbon storing potential!
Whether you’re a consumer, farmer, or climate gardener, perennial plants and diverse crops are your friend. They are just two of the many tools and practices that make up a regenerative agricultural system and bring many benefits to local ecosystems and the people involved from production to consumption.
If you’re unable to implement these practices directly, use your consumer power and speak with your dollars to show your support for these important practices. Without strong signals from consumers, not enough farmers will switch to these practices in the timeframe needed to reverse current climate trends that threaten food security and the future of our planet.
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Bexar Soap Co |
Naturally Made And SUSTAINABLE Products
Our handmade natural products are biodegradable, cruelty free, minimally packaged, many are vegan, and they do not contain synthetic fragrance oils or other harmful chemicals. 100% of our base oils are certified organic. The sustainable organic palm oil we use is purchased from wholesalers who are RSPO certified and/or Rainforest Alliance certified. We try to be mindful of every purchase we make and every action we take as we strive to support fair trade, organic, and sustainable businesses. Bexar Soap Co. was established in 2017 with a goal to create products that were all natural, vegan, and eco friendly.
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T-Mobile to Reach 100% Renewable Energy by 2021 |
T-Mobile announced its second wind farm project as it continues efforts to sustainably sourcing its energy.
In late January, T-Mobile announced its decision to shift to 100 percent renewable energy by 2021. In addition, they became the first U.S. carrier to join forces with over 100 influential businesses committed to the same goal via RE100: the collaborative global initiative.
“We’re doing our part to #CleanUpWireless by committing to 100 [percent] renewable energy usage by 2021,” the company wrote on its Twitter account.
T-Mobile has made it clear that one of their priorities is to do the right thing for their customers, and this move only helps to prove it.
“And it’s not just the right thing to do, it’s smart business,” said John Legere, President and CEO at T-Mobile. “We expect to cut T-Mobile’s energy costs by around $100 million in the next 15 years thanks to this movie.”
Road to 100 Percent Renewable Energy
Along with its goal, T-Mobile also unveiled their second wind farm project. The finalized contract grants the company 160 megawatts from Infinity Renewables’ Solomon Forks Wind Project in Kansas and is slated to begin operating in 2019.
Combined with T-Mobile’s first wind farm project—the Red Dirt Wind Project, which went online this past December—T-Mobile will have 320 megawatts of electricity. This means T-mobile will have enough megawatts to meet roughly 60 percent of their total energy needs. T-Mobile plans on buying enough wind power annually to match every unit of electricity they consume until they reach their goal.
As for their partnership with RE100, Sam Kimmins, head of RE100 at The Climate Group, believes T-Mobile has the potential to greatly benefit the global trend toward renewable energy. “As a large electricity consumer in the U.S., they can truly transform energy systems by bringing significant renewable capacity online,” he said.
T-Mobile has already started working to impact the global renewable energy trend by supporting Green America’s petition urging AT&T and Verizon Wireless to join T-Mobile in fighting for the preservation of fossil fuels.
Companies Fighting For Renewable Energy
Similarly, Nike has also just signed its second major wind energy contract. Avangrid Renewables has agreed to grant the company 86 megawatts of Texas wind power and brings them one stop closer to its goal of sourcing 100 percent renewable energy across the company’s facilities in North America.
In 2015, Facebook surpassed its goal of sourcing 25 percent renewable energy in its data center electricity supply mix, according to the Facebook Sustainability website. Since that achievement, the company’s goal has been to reach 50 percent by this year in hopes of matching its ability to power data centers with 100 percent renewable energy.
Furthermore, Facebook’s efforts have gone beyond ensuring its impact on the planet by also helping local communities. In Altoona, Iowa, the company partnered with local utility and a developer to add 140 megawatts of renewable energy to the grid. That move generated enough energy to power over 40,000 average Iowa homes.
“Our goal is simple: power our data centers with clean and renewable energy and, where possible, help green the grid by adding new renewable sources,” said Peter Freed, Data Center Renewable Energy Manager at Facebook.
As we reported late last year, Google reached its goal to source 100 percent renewable energy in 2017. Avangrid Renewables also collaborated with Google and is currently building two 98 megawatt wind farms in South Dakota as the company will contribute over 40 million in land leases and tax payments, shared John Fitzgerald Weaver of Electrek.
“Renewables from projects like Coyote Ridge and Tatanka Ridge bring value to our business as we scale and accelerate investment in the communities where we operate,” said Gary Demasi, Global Director of Data Center Energy and Location Strategy at Google, regarding the South Dakota wind farms.
As T-Mobile has joined the ranks of such influential companies, it seems clear that the trend towards renewable energy is picking up speed and hoping to take every company possible along for the journey to a more sustainable planet.
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Boss Magazine |
Keep up-to-date with the news around the world. BOSS Magazine has all your industry news from business news, finance, lifestyle and much more.
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AT&T progresses on renewable energy |
AT&T announced that it will purchase 520 MW of power from two wind farms in Oklahoma and Texas. This takes AT&T's use of renewable energy from less than 2% to 20%! It's the equivalent of taking 350,595 passenger vehicles off the road or providing electricity for a quarter-million homes a year.
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Dazey House Cleaning |
Coming soon. House cleaning service
Dazey house cleaning was developed in 1997 by Linda Dazey, the owner. She was born and raised in Ladue, Missouri and is a graduate of Parkway West High school. Linda decided in August of 2016 to expand her business so she could offer more people her environmentally friendly home cleaning services. She has hired long time family friends all of whom have graduated from high schools in the West County area.
Our goal is to offer environmentally friendly products that are free from any animal testing. We are proud to be a Certified Green business. We are a company that is passionate about making your home and environment safe from harmful cleaning chemicals. We pride ourselves on our excellent customer service, our attention to detail, and our open communication with our customers.
Nyck, is Dazey House Cleaning’s Chief Operating Officer. He was born and raised in the west St. Louis county area and is a graduate of Valley Park High School. He has been with the company since its inception, working alongside Linda to help make Dazey House Cleaning one of the top cleaning services in the area.
Green home cleaning
Our house cleaning service is a valued part of the dual-income families of today with work weeks and commutes that stretch beyond 40 hours into nights and weekends. Moms and dads are busy with childcare, kids with homework, gymnastics, band practice, soccer practice, rehearsals, etc.
Working most commonly on a weekly or alternative-weekly schedule, Dazey house cleaning gives busy individuals and families clean, comfortable homes to return to and enjoy—Safe, non-toxic, eco-friendly cleaning according to your individual wishes..
We are very proud to receive each and every review from our loyal clients through Angies List and other sources – complimenting the quality of our house cleaning service.
To discuss your cleaning needs Please do call us today (314) 898-3524 or send us an email message from our website contact page.
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Lynn Mehl, Good Old Days Eco Florist |
The Eco Florist & Green Event Strategist
Why & How It Began
What started in 2001 after 15 years in business as an innocent, internet, quest for the ‘missing’ American Beauty rose, became more than I ever anticipated. The floral industry had evolved; against everything I believed in, advocated, and practiced. I didn’t remember when the wagon shifted and imported flowers took over, or that my entire industry was a toxic, environmental nightmare, inhumane, imported, and just totally unsustainable to country and planet. I found over 70% (now near 90%) of florist flowers & plants and almost 100 % of gift & hard goods were imported, with 99% neither socially just or earth friendly much less biodegradable. I was ashamed at my blindness and contribution- and devastated. I now knew that smell on the (sweatshop crafted) baskets was rat poison from the Asian shipping containers, and the floral arranging foam was a carcinogenic cocktail on formaldehyde laced plastic. My ‘nature’ thought of industry was no better than DuPont and all, slipping by the environmental regulators eye.
What I Did
I decided immediately I must change my business…or career. It took over 5 years but I knew to make it a success and a model for all florists; it had to be both a sustainable and profitable transformation while also not taking away from the consumer expectation. I started with the flowers, searching out US farms & growers across the country who would deal with me. I then moved on to transforming the entire business to one of what I coined an “eco florist”. From energy to water, to recycling & up cycling, to office supplies and packaging, US made and bio gifts, and hard goods. I looked at every single aspect of what a florist does and uses daily; either finding a substitute, a new method, or discontinuing its use or practice. I researched design methods & mechanics of the past, reintroducing them away from the floral/ styro foams, and plastics. These modern innovations cut florists labor, so greening returned that effort. 16 years ago, these changes were nearly overwhelming to tackle much less solve, and some yet are still a waiting game. I picked my battles, I evolved, and soon so did my business and the clients.
I am a small business advocate, I am a passionate artist, but my heart is always with the environment so, I then turned to how to use it for awareness and make a difference. I instituted:
- my ‘green floristry’ techniques –created a Recycle Rewards Program for all florist & event goods -started a Community Fundraising initiative - designed a Flowers For A Cause ecommerce donating all profits of each sale.
Media & Events
After transforming the business operations and products I took on the event side which are basically the same daily operations of a florist but hugely magnified. Event flowers & décor are one of the largest contributors to environmental damage yet the most not seen or just ‘overlooked’. Whether imported flowers, glues and plastics in the Rose Bowl parade or the same at a small birthday party; all use the same unsustainable components, mechanics, and imported products.
Celebrity wedding planners & designers and manufacturers of décor goods are the force propelling the endless landfill of foam shapes, plastic accessories, jewels, fabrics, ribbons, candles, containers, and it goes on. All imported, all cheaply made, one time use, and none earth friendly or socially just. Floral foam works just once, which is used by the 100’s of cases every day around the world. The toxic foam from our parents 1964 event is still in our soil-it never biodegrades. Education is the answer to green events. The cradle to grave equation and domino effect of one simple act or item is unknown and, kept quiet. Most do not know that orangutans (who have 97% the same DNA as us) are near extinct for the palm oil in their event candles, or that our national forests of white pine are being poached & sheared for the roping at their holiday parties which in turn effects the forest bird population. They do not know the floral foam is carcinogenic.
It is actually easy being green in many ways by just effort-however it is this effort that has lost to cheap and easy. With my methods; the client who has no interest for a green gift or event has the appeal of the promotion to their image and marketing, even if only greened by my products and actions behind the scenes for them. Sustainable purchases & events must be easy for the client, not harder or more expensive to catch on, and I feel it falls to the businesses & vendors to act otherwise why will the clients. Events, everyday occasions, and holidays really do not have to cost the planet and it is my mission to help transform my industry, my clients, and every florist I can. |
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Taylar Leigh Apparel |
Taylar Leigh Apparel represents high value, fashion-future, comfortable women's lifestyle wear beholden to Earth-kind and American-made principles . Simplicity, quality, and authenticity is woven into the very fabric of our clothes. Innovative and artful styling meets super comfortable and practical. Look runway ready when running errands. 15 sizes across petites, regular and talls body types. Free custom lengths available. 100% organic fabrics, quality made clothing, forever free shipping in U.S. plus free and easy returns.
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Want to Support Sustainable Business? These 4 Companies Have Work to Do |
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner and it has love and sweets on our minds. But as we think about companies we love, it’s easy to forget that some of the country’s most beloved companies are not as sweet in practice as they seem. What happens when you find out a company that was close to your heart turns out to be a letdown when it comes to representing green, American values and sustainable business?
First, take action and sign letters asking these companies to take more responsibility for their products and workers. Then, remember to vote with your dollars. Every purchase you make (or decide not to make) tells the world what you believe in.
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Disney. It might be the most magical place on earth, but its factories are not. We’ve had campaigns against Disney for years as it continues to work with factories that don’t treat workers well and don’t protect them from toxins. Take action: tell Disney CEO Bob Iger to take responsibility for its factories and end its labor abuses.
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Smucker’s. The company makes cute ads and tasty sandwich spreads, but in most Smuckers jams and peanut butters (yes, Smuckers owns Jif) you’ll find high fructose corn syrup, beet sugar, canola, and soy all derived from GMOs (the brand does have a few non-GMO offerings but the bulk are not). The J.M. Smucker Company has spent over a million dollars fighting GMO labeling, working hard to keep Americans in the dark about what is in our food, as it continues to jam products full of GMOs. Take action: ask Smuckers to make PB&J a non-GMO American sweetheart.
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Ralph Lauren. This company champions a classic "All-American" style of clothing, and even dresses Olympic athletes. Our coalitional #GoTransparent campaign asks industry leaders Ralph Lauren, American Eagle, Carter's, Forever 21, and Wal-Mart to publish their supplier factory information. This information will help workers by allowing unions and other labor advocates to alert brands to labor abuses in these factories. Take action: tell Ralph Lauren to sign the Transparency Pledge and commit to safe workplaces for its factory workers.
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Oreo. This iconic cookie outsells its competitors by a long shot, prompting the brand to claim the title “America’s favorite cookie.” But Oreo has a not-so-sweet secret. The high fructose corn syrup, beet sugar, and soy lecithin in Oreos are all derived from GE crops. Hydrox, Oreos competitor, went non-GMO in 2017, so now it's time for Oreos to follow suit. Tell Oreo’s manufacturer Mondelez that GMOs, and their associated chemicals, have no place in America’s #1 cookie!
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Vote with Your Dollar Toolkit |
Building the green economy is about being informed about corporations AND actually supporting businesses that follow green practices, grow local economies, and pay suppliers fairly. Where you shop and what you buy when you do sends a direct message.
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Support Cocoa Farmers by Choosing Fair Trade Chocolate |
When businesses deny fair trade standards, cocoa farmers lead difficult lives. Even when the market is strong and conditions are good, they face challenging and climate-changing harvest seasons. Cocoa prices are low, and there is an estimated 400,000 tons of excess cocoa sitting in western Africa. The Ivorian government has already slashed the price paid to farmers for cocoa, and the Ghanaian government is considering lowering the price they would pay farmers as well. Low prices mean that farmers are operating at a loss, and it puts pressure on these farmers to use child labor.
How did all this come about?
One reason is that industry officials in cocoa have long proclaimed that the best way to improve farmer income is by increasing productivity (or, how much cocoa a farmer produces). Their thought was that by increasing productivity, farmers can grow and sell more cocoa, and earn more money. Chocolate companies and suppliers have been investing in training programs for farmers to help improve their farming practices. While it is important to ensure that cocoa farmers are improving how they grow chocolate and ensuring that they are more sustainable, the imbalanced focus on growing more chocolate has helped contribute to the overstock of cocoa in the Ivory Coast and Ghana
Another reason is that, due to high cocoa prices several years ago, farmers cleared forests throughout western Africa to plant more cocoa trees in hopes of capturing the high cocoa price. Cocoa trees take about five years to mature and – you guessed it – they all came into maturity last year. Some experts predict that there will continue to be an overproduction of cocoa for the next several years.
This combination of farmers growing more cocoa and the increased number of cocoa farms helped contribute to the oversupply of cocoa and lowered price of this commodity. While this has hurt farmer livelihoods, chocolate companies have not been adversely affected by this.
So what can we as consumers do to help support cocoa farmers?
First of all, consumers should continue to keep an eye out for fair trade certified chocolate. The fair trade minimum price for cocoa is designed to serve as a safety net for farmers when cocoa prices sink. The current fair trade minimum price as set by the Fairtrade International (FLO) is $2,000 USD/ton and includes a $200/ton premium, whereas the Ghanaian market price is $1,914, and the Ivorian market price is $1,230/ ton.
But, fair trade alone cannot solve the cocoa crisis. Although it is a helpful first step, fair trade alone is not enough to solve systemic issues that face cocoa farmers face, and that keep them entrenched in cycles of poverty. While it pays a fairer price to farmers, it is still not enough to ensure that farmers can make a living off of cocoa. Plus, fair trade cocoa still does not make up a large portion of the cocoa industry.
It is also important for consumers to continue demand chocolate companies take more responsibility for their supply chains. Although most companies currently have initiatives addressing the different challenges facing the cocoa industry, clearly there is more to be done.
Moving forward with “business as usual” of pushing for farmer productivity is not enough. And the good news is, it seems like the chocolate industry has recognized that simply increasing cocoa production is not enough to help lift farmers out of poverty, and is open to implementing new programs that better address poverty and child labor. For instance, Nestle and the International Cocoa Initiative completed a pilot Child Labor Remediation Monitoring System (CLRMS) program. This program works with communities to identify root causes for why children are working in cocoa fields, and helps address those issues. Although companies are still in the early stage of testing these programs, the initial data looks promising. Rather than punish farmers for using child labor, the program explores the underlying reasons of why the child is in the fields, and works with the family and community to remediate the problem. It is important to note that the programs so far only affect a few thousand people, while the problems in cocoa affect millions of people - and chocolate companies still have more to do.
Check out our 2018 Chocolate Scorecard to see how your favorite chocolate companies compare.
If you have a favorite chocolate that is not fair trade, use your consumer voice by writing to the company through its website or calling the company’s 800 number and letting them know that you care about the issues of farmer poverty and child labor, and want to know that a company you are supporting is taking active steps to address these longstanding social justice problems. Companies take these direct calls and emails from consumers seriously.
You can also take Green America’s Godiva action, and tell Godiva that you want them to become a leader in sourcing sustainable cocoa and fighting child labor.
Godiva is a leader in the luxury chocolate market, and we think it’s time for them to be a leader in fighting child labor in cocoa too. Compared to other major chocolate companies, Godiva has not taken as active a role in sourcing sustainable cocoa and fighting child labor. Godiva is looking to grow its sales to $2 billion – use your voice to make sure their growth not only benefits the company, but also farmers and children.
As a consumer, you have the power to vie for change and vote with your dollars when supporting companies that treat their workers justly with fair trade chocolate systems. Learn how your chocolatiers might be failing you and the planet, then explore better options at GreenPages.org.
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EP Engineering |
Coming soon.
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Crofters Organic |
``The other side of fear is success.``
—Gerhard Latka, Founder/Owner
Our small, family business may have grown a little since 1989, but our commitments have always remained the same: affordable organic spreads, responsible creation, and jars chock-full of flavor and nutrition. You can read our story on our website at this link.
Here at Crofter’s, our heart is in the conservation of the environment and the wellbeing of all living things, be they bear, bee, or human. That’s why we’ve focused on responsible farming and integrated sustainable processes into all facets of our business. We know that every little bit adds up to one big difference.
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Avocado Green Mattress |
We make green and eco-conscious mattresses and bedding.
Our materials include GOLS organic certified latex, GOTS organic certified wool, GOTS organic certified cotton, and GOTS organic certified kapok fiber. Our mattress and bedding products are GREENGUARD Gold certified by UL Environment for low emissions. Our mattresses are proudly made in California of U.S. and imported materials. As a Carbonfree® Partner, we offset the emissions from our factory and product shipping on an annual basis via carbon offsets purchased from Carbonfund. Our mission is to provide you and your family a healthy sleep environment while promoting sustainability and social responsibility. One percent of all revenues are donated to environmental nonprofits per our membership in the 1% For The Planet organization.
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Mako Labs |
Coming soon.
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Climate Victory Gardens |
To add your garden to the map, click on the orange button on the map and fill out the form. It's ok if you don't know the exact size of your garden--give your best guess! You can also use the search feature to find a community or school garden near you.
Climate Victory Gardens are inspired by the collective action of Americans taken during the WWI and WWII victory gardening movement, when 20 million gardeners produced 40% of the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed in the country at the time. We're bringing victory gardens back. This time, it's for the climate.
Your Climate Victory Gardening Questions Answered
Climate Victory Gardens Webinar Playlist
Community Garden Landscape

Community gardens offer a plethora of benefits, from bringing people together and facilitating community-building to providing fresh produce and education around growing food, as well as mitigating climate change impacts through green space preservation.
However, without proactive policies and planning from municipalities, community gardens are at risk of being shut down or being sold off to developers. Learn more here.
Thank you Megafood for sponsoring our Climate Victory Garden Map!
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Program Manager, Soil & Climate Alliance |
Hours: Full-time (4-days, 32 hours/week)
Salary: $50,000-$58,000/Grant Track Position
Benefits: Medical, dental, sick days, holidays, generous paid leave, retirement plan
Supervisor: Director Network Engagement, Soil & Climate Alliance
Location: Green America is based in Washington, DC, but this position can be fully remote
Organization Summary:
Green America is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a just and sustainable society by harnessing economic power for positive change. Our unique approach involves working with consumers, investors, and businesses to create a world that works for all. We deploy marketplace solutions to solve the most pressing social and environmental problems facing society today.
The Center for Sustainability Solutions builds on Green America’s work over the years, where we have brought together industry groups across supply chains to create major shifts in such areas as solar, banking and investing, sustainable agriculture and fair labor. The Center supports Innovation Networks, focused multi-stakeholder working groups with the objective of making significant, industry-wide system change.
The Center for Sustainability Solutions currently houses three active Innovation Networks:
- Soil & Climate Alliance
- Clean Electronics Production Network
- Climate Safe Lending
The Program Manager will work on the Soil & Climate Alliance team, focusing on the programs of this network, which includes the Soil Carbon Initiative (SCI).
The Soil & Climate Alliance focuses on working with the food and agriculture supply chain in North America to shift 90% of the acres in production to regenerative practices to rebuild soil health, sequester carbon, and ensure farm profitability.
The Soil Carbon Initiative (SCI) is one of the major programs of the Soil & Climate Alliance. This outcomes-based, scientific, agricultural standard is designed to help farmers and supply chains measure improvements in soil health and soil carbon.
Duties and Responsibilities:
Communications & Research
- Develop and execute, in collaboration with the SCA team, the communications plan as it relates to both the overall trajectory of the Network as well as individual plans for meetings and events.
- Create Social Media presence for SCA on the platform to best engage with both existing Network members as well as to engage with potential new members, including monitoring existing social media channels, i.e. Linked In, Twitter, Instagram, Extension University List Serves, for relevant content, events, and contacts within the Regenerative Ag space.
- Customize, draft, and design materials as needed for external events, conferences, and Network announcements.
- Perform website administration for SCA and SCI the various websites (public and unlinked).
Meeting & Event Development
- In collaboration with Director, Network Engagement and SCI Director develop, plan, and execute special events to fill knowledge and expertise gaps necessary to evolve programs within SCA and SCI. This will include special stakeholder meetings and roundtables for SCA and SCI.
- Identify potential speakers for SCA meetings and develop their presentations to address the evolving needs of the Network.
- Lead the development, production, and promotion of Webinars for participants. These are highly valuable benefits of participation and serve as prospecting tools for the networks. Maintain high level of professional production and high participant satisfaction.
- Create all relevant materials for meeting materials and event website.
- Create reports and videos from SCA and SCI roundtables for stakeholders and the general public.
- Provide quick turnaround research as needed to support SCA and SCI.
Participate in Cross-Departmental Teams
- Participate in Green America staff meetings and processes and other duties as required.
- Participate in Green America Cross Departmental Teams: The success of our organizational work includes the voluntary participation of staff members from all levels of the organization in cross-departmental teams addressing a range of issues to strengthen our impact and planning, as time and other work commitments allow.
Qualified Candidates should have the following skills and qualities:
- 5+ years of experience in communications, marketing, website and event/conference management in the NGO and/or corporate communications environment.
- Demonstrated project management skills, with experience managing several projects simultaneously.
- A passion for and strong knowledge of environmental sustainability, and/or sustainable agriculture.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills with internal and external audiences.
- Demonstrates a high degree of adaptability to work on a rapidly growing team.
- Creative approach to problem-solving.
How to Apply:
Please email your resume, cover letter, and writing sample focusing on event collateral/press releases/brief sharing of key information to centerstaffing@greenamerica.org.
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Green America is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without discrimination regarding: actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, related medical conditions, breastfeeding, or reproductive health disorders), age (18 years of age or older), marital status (including domestic partnership and parenthood), personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, family responsibilities, genetic information, disability, matriculation, political affiliation, citizenship status, credit information or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Harassment on the basis of a protected characteristic is included as a form of discrimination and is strictly prohibited.
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Go Green on the Cheap |
Green America staff members share some of their favorite strategies for going green on the cheap.
“I’m a huge fan of Dr. Bronner’s liquid Pure Castile Soap! It’s a multi-purpose product. I use it in the shower, and, combined with water, in foaming hand soap dispensers around the house. Plus, there’s a page on the company’s website that lists dilutions for 18 different uses. I learned you can add about 1/4 tsp. to a bowl of water and use it as a fruit and vegetable wash. Put 1 Tbsp. in a quart of water, and it’s a plant spray that will repel bugs but not harm plants.” —Rob Hanson, Membership Marketing Manager
“I recently learned that you can wash shower curtains and liners (even the plastic ones, though fabric curtains are better for you and the environment) in the washing machine (on cold with a natural soap, and air dry), which really extends their life of looking crystal clean and not soap scummy or other grossness. It saves money and keeps old curtains out of the landfill.” —Jes Walton, Food Campaigns Fellow
“I shop secondhand for most of my clothes. By buying thrift, I save money and mitigate the demand for big brands, which often don’t treat workers right on the manufacturing side. I also host and go to clothing swaps—they’re super fun, and you get free clothes!” —Eleanor Greene, Associate Editor
“I make my own toothpaste! It’s just mixing 3 Tbsp. of coconut oil, 1 Tbsp. of baking soda, and a few drops of cooking peppermint oil in a small mason jar. It works great!” —Beth Porter, Better Paper Project Director
“We have a buying club in the office with Frontier Co-op where we can get organic or eco-friendly food/clothing/etc. at wholesale prices. People can set up their own buying club.” —Bernadette Morales Gaskin, Senior Information Systems Analyst
“I love to receive handmade note cards and wall calendars from friends and family members, using photos they’ve personally taken and designed into the cards and calendars. The cards and calendars can use recycled paper, and the calendars can become keepsake albums—or the photos in them can be used to create new cards the following year.” —Fran Teplitz, Executive Co-Director for Business, Investing, & Policy
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Eco-Travel Checklist |
We don’t know where you’re headed, so we can’t make you a packing list—but we can make you a checklist to make your trip as green as possible.
Before You Start Your Eco-Travels
Pack light and minimize flights. Jets use a lot of fuel, but flying is a necessity to get to faraway destinations. Planes use the most fuel especially while taking off and landing, which is a great reason to plan for fewer layovers. Pack light, because planes use more fuel the more they weigh.
Find a green travel agent or company. If you’d rather leave the planning to someone else, no worries. Green travel agents can check in on green certifications of hotels or tour guides, book you an eco-minded cruise, or plan a group trip to a specific place. They can also help you break away from high-traffic tourist spots so you can talk to people in their communities, visit a farm, or see wildlife in a safe and humane way.
Sleep under a green roof. Whether or not your hotel has an actual green roof (some do!), find a place to stay that has a commitment to sustainability. Green hotels use water- and energy-efficient appliances and may wash sheets every few days instead of every morning.
Your green hotel may also be in a green building, with greywater systems, solar panels, and more. Find an eco-minded independent hotel or B&B from the Green Business Network or through the Green Hotels Association.
Bring reusable containers.You carry around a reusable shopping bag and water bottle in your day-to-day life. Why not when you go on vacation? Getting a squashable bag you can put into your purse or satchel will reduce plastic waste when you shop. Same for a reusable water bottle—just make sure to empty it before you go through airport security.
During the Trip
Get where you need to without a car. Once you arrive at your destination, walk, bike, or use public transportation as much as possible to avoid using up gas with a rental car. It saves energy and usually money, too.
If you do need to use a car, try sharing a ride through a carpool site or app, like BlaBlaCar, erideshare.com, or Hitch-A-Ride, which connect users with drivers and riders nearby or in your social network.
Excess cars belonging to ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft have contributed to traffic congestion in some cities, so do not rely solely on these apps for everyday use.
Shop and eat locally. Buy from local artisans and eat at local restaurants to give back to communities. Be a smart shopper. Just because you find an item for sale does not mean it is legal to bring it home. The World Wildlife Fund has a “Buyer Beware” guide about how to tell if your souvenir is supporting illegal sales of at-risk species. Ask vendors questions so you don’t waste your money and instead can spend on ethical gifts.
Hire a local guide. Hiring a guide who lives in the area gives back to the local economy. You also may get a chance to see a place a way you might not have before, by hiking or biking, going by water, and hearing about local history and culture.
When You Get Home
Offset your impact. To try to make up for the environmental impact of air or car travel, you can buy carbon offsets, which roughly take as much carbon out of the atmosphere as your trip put into it. This is accomplished by using your funds to support individuals and businesses who are purchasing alternative energy sources or cutting their carbon output.
Take action. Going on vacation can be inspiring, whether it leaves you wanting to help preserve a beautiful part of wilderness or help people across the world. Before you get swept back up in the busyness of life, donate to an organization or make a plan to volunteer and harness your inspiration into action.
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Green America and T-Mobile Push AT&T and Verizon to Match T-Mobile’s 100% Renewable Energy Commitment |
T-Mobile Became The First US Telecom Company To Adopt a 100% Renewable Energy Commitment; Green America Will Pressure AT&T and Verizon to Match T-Mobile’s Historic Pledge.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — JANUARY 30, 2018 — Green America congratulated T-Mobile today on being the first telecom company in the U.S. to adopt the RE100 pledge, the company’s commitment to move to 100 percent renewable energy by 2021. T-Mobile is the first of the big four telecom companies in the United States to make such a pledge.
Green America’s “Hang Up on Fossil Fuels” campaign, which started in 2017, focuses attention on the enormous amount energy used by the telecom sector and the fact that the biggest companies get the vast majority of their energy from fossil fuels. The telecom sector in the U.S. uses as much energy as 3 million households.
T-Mobile CEO John Legere released a video directing people to support Green America’s campaign and challenging AT&T and Verizon to match its commitment to 100 percent renewable energy: https://youtu.be/XJgTB4afPvI.
“This is a game-changer within the telecom industry, which has lagged behind other sectors in making commitments to clean energy,” said Todd Larsen, executive co-director of consumer and corporate engagement at Green America. “T-Mobile is making it clear that it is entirely possible for telecom companies, with their massive energy use, to make a 100 percent clean energy commitment. AT&T, Verizon and Sprint should all make similar commitments.”
"Consumers who care about the climate now have an environmentally conscious option when choosing a cell phone provider. They can support a company that is making an unprecedented 100 percent clean energy commitment," said Beth Porter, program director for Green America. "People should not have to choose between using their phones to text and tweet, and protecting the planet. If T-Mobile’s announcement helps move the entire industry to 100% renewable energy, we won't have to make that choice."
Green America is calling on AT&T and Verizon, the two largest telecom companies in the U.S., to increase their renewable energy use to 100% by 2025, and will be issuing a report on the industry titled “Clean Energy is Calling” in February that will track the progress of the four largest companies in the sector – AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile – in adopting clean energy and energy efficiency measures, and reducing their greenhouse gasses overall.
ABOUT GREEN AMERICA
Green America is the nation’s leading green economy organization. Founded in 1982, Green America provides the economic strategies, organizing power and practical tools for businesses and individuals to solve today's social and environmental problems. http://www.GreenAmerica.org
MEDIA CONTACT: Max Karlin, (703) 276-3255 or mkarlin@hastingsgroup.com.
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Home Land Environmental |
Coming soon.
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Amanda Heerwig |
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FERC Protest: 200+ Groups Demand Changes to Toothless Pipeline Review Process |
Washington, D.C.//January 18, 2018–Responding to the recent announcement by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Chairman Kevin McIntyre that the agency would be reviewing the agency’s pipeline review process, representatives of more than 200 community organizations nationwide concerned with the impacts of FERC-approved fracked natural gas pipeline impacts on health, property, communities, and the environment presented the FERC’s Commissioners with eight key reforms that the agency should enact in order to value people and the environment in the pipeline review process. Representatives sought to hand-deliver the document to Commissioners and post them on the agency’s doors as a way of giving the agency public notice of their demands.
FERC Chairman Kevin McIntyre announced in December 2017 that the Agency will review its 1999 policy statement on how it issues permits to interstate fracked gas pipelines as part of an overall plan “to take a fresh look at all aspects of the agency’s work." The reforms sought by the impacted communities, including hearings for those directly affected, reflect the growing opposition to natural gas pipelines nationwide that has led to increasing protests, lawsuits, and actions by state and local governments and community groups to block fracked gas pipelines. The demanded reforms are also proposed at a time when the fossil fuel industry is pushing to expedite the pipeline review process, which would further trample the rights of people and the environment.
The eight reforms presented to FERC Commissioners in a document titled “Time for a Pipeline Review Process Where People and Our Environment Really Matter” are the following:
- To ensure that FERC identifies a full spectrum of truly meaningful fixes to its pipeline review and approval process, FERC’s Commissioners need to hear directly from the communities impacted by pipeline infrastructure. FERC should begin the 1999 Policy Statement review process with no less than six public hearings held in affected communities across the nation that are dedicated to the impacted public testifying directly to the FERC Commissioners about their experiences with the pipeline review and approval process.
- FERC must mandate a genuine demonstration of an end-use need for a project that is objectively verified by experts and that cannot be fulfilled by renewable energy options.
- FERC must respect state and local authority and expertise by deferring to state and local environmental authorities’ findings regarding the environmental, community, and economic impacts of pipelines.
- FERC must respect the authority of other state and federal agencies by instituting a policy that prevents FERC from approving pipeline infrastructure and/or allowing any element of construction to proceed until all state and federal reviews/permit processes have been finalized and approvals/permits granted.
- FERC must end the use of tolling orders, which place people in legal limbo and prevent communities from accessing justice before a pipeline company exercises the power of eminent domain to take property rights and inflicts irreparable harm through significant stages of construction. If tolling orders are not prohibited, then other mechanisms for addressing the problem include
- Prohibit pipeline projects from advancing in any way, shape, or form, including eminent domain and/or construction, if there is an outstanding rehearing request/tolling order; or
- Mandate FERC response to rehearing requests within 30 days and prohibit projects from advancing in any way, shape, or form during that period.
- FERC must commit to removing bias from the process by no longer hiring consultants with demonstrated conflicts of interest (i.e., those who are representing a pipeline company seeking Commission approval), and by prohibiting Commission staff or Commissioners from working on/deciding upon any pipeline infrastructure project in which they have a direct or indirect financial stake or have worked to represent the company within the previous 5 years.
- FERC must end the practice of using segmentation to skew environmental and community impact reviews.
- FERC must commit to a complete analysis of the costs and benefits of proposed pipelines, with a full and fair implementation of NEPA, including, but not limited to, fully evaluating social justice impacts; climate change impacts of pipeline construction and operation; community, environment, and climate change impacts of increased natural gas exploration, fracking, and methane emissions resulting from pipeline infrastructure operations; economic analyses that include costs, not just asserted benefits; alternatives not limited to alternate routes but that also include alternative energy sources; and robust health-and-safety impact analyses.
These requests have been advanced by over 200 community-supported organizations representing impacted communities in states across the nation.
“History tells us that this announced review by FERC will not result in more protections for communities and our environment,” said Maya van Rossum, leader of the regional Delaware Riverkeeper Network which is currently battling over a dozen FERC fracked gas pipeline projects. “It will in fact result in an easier review and approval process for the pipeline companies and the fracking industry they serve. If Chairman McIntyre truly wants a better process, then he will honor all 8 of our demanded reforms. But, if this is just another dog and pony show designed to serve the industry, we are making clear that we are engaged, informed, active, and will fight to protect our environment and communities, for both present and future generations.”
“FERC is saying that it is willing to take a fresh look at the pipeline review process,” said Todd Larsen, executive co-director of consumer and corporate engagement at Green America. “Communities nationwide that have borne the brunt of FERC’s consistent kowtowing to the fossil fuel sector are presenting the agency with a completely reasonable list of reforms that would ensure that FERC acts in the public interest and creates an energy future that values people and the planet over corporate profits.”
“If you know FERC’s history, there are many reasons to be skeptical about this announced review,” said Ted Glick, organizer for Beyond Extreme Energy. “The Commissioners could weaken this skepticism if they announced that they intend to hold open, public hearings in different parts of the country to hear from those who have experienced FERC’s rubber-stamping ways. If it’s all just for show, it’s time for members of Congress to look seriously at replacing FERC with an agency whose mandate is to shift rapidly from fossil fuel energy to renewables, from 20th century to 21st century energy sources.”
“We in the Hackensack River watershed are worried about a Williams-Transco pipeline expansion proposed last summer,” says Occupy Bergen County member Sally Jane Gellert. “The application focuses on the temporary effects of the construction process, but the real concern should be ongoing operation of compressor stations in residential neighborhoods as well as the long-term effects on wildlife and wetlands. The permitting process is complicated, yet there is no real opportunity for local comments—we need public hearings at times and places when local residents may be heard. FERC must travel to the areas of proposed projects to hear from local residents.”
“Our skepticism about the review proposed by Chairman McIntyre is based on our experience with the Commission and the draconian cuts to environmental protections already made by the same administration that has proposed an expansion of FERC’s authority,” said Karen Feridun, founder of Berks Gas Truth. “We urge the Commissioners to do a proper review of the process that begins with hearings in affected communities and incorporates the recommendations we presented to FERC today.”
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Media Contacts:
Maya van Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper, (215) 801-3043 (cell).
Max Karlin, for Green America, (703) 276-3255 or mkarlin@hastingsgroup.com.
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Power to the People: Fueling the Revolution for Energy Justice |
As we work toward Drawdown, it’s critical to address the impacts of climate change in communities of color, which are often hit “first and worst.” Jacqui Patterson, director of the NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice program, says we all need to work toward energy justice for everyone in our communities.
People often ask why the NAACP, a civil rights organization, is working on energy. All they would have to do is visit the communities with whom I work every day to know why energy is one of the most universally impactful civil rights issues of our time.
We see energy as a civil rights issue when nationwide, 78 percent of African-American children live near a coal plant—with their emissions of mercury, arsenic, lead, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and particulate matter. African-American children are three to five times more likely than white children to visit an emergency room due to an asthma attack and two to three times more likely to die of an asthma attack.
We see energy as a civil rights issue when the oil industry has numerous disasters from oil drilling from Exxon Valdez to the BP oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. A couple of years ago there was an explosion of an oil train, which obliterated a section of a town in Quebec to such an extent that remains of several of the residents were never recovered as they were completely incinerated.
We see energy as civil rights issue when African-American communities and others put so much into their electricity bills but get so little out of it, with the chief output being the disproportionate pollution burden.
According to the American Association of Blacks in Energy, African Americans spend on average $41 billion on energy, yet only hold 1.1 percent of energy jobs and gain less than .01 percent of the revenue from the energy sector. On average, African Americans also pay a higher proportion of their income on energy than the general population.
Meanwhile, the fossil-fuel industry uses its profits gained from the bills we pay to fight against safeguards for public health and well-being, with recent examples being suing the EPA for the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule and Clean Power Plan under the Clean Air Act, and Haliburton lobbying for an exemption for its fracking practices from the Safe Drinking Water Act.
When the fossil-fuel industry is using the very profits from the $41 billion in extraction from our communities to then suppress the advancement of policies that safeguard and protect the very health and well-being of our communities, we see distributed generation of energy as an issue of democracy.
We as the NAACP have determined that it is critical that we shift away from an industry that is responsible for so much harm and transition to an energy-efficient, clean energy economy. We see this not only as a way to have clean air, clean water, and healthier communities, but we also see this as being intersectional with our economic justice and democracy agendas. We can build individual or community wealth through co-ownership of our energy infrastructure, as well as introduce new job/business opportunities for communities whose previous relationship was largely extraction of income and receiving pollution in return.
For the African-American community alone, combined with strong institutions, savvy business entrepreneurs, skilled workers, promising students and more, not to mention untapped Latino, Indigenous, and Asian-American communities, the potential is vast, if we work smartly together! To that end, the NAACP recently launched Power to the People, a new campaign aimed at “fueling the revolution for energy justice.”
“Energy justice is about ensuring our communities benefit fully from green jobs, clean air, and an energy-independent future,” says Jo Ann Hardesty, president of the NAACP’s branch in Portland.
The national campaign uplifts the work of the state and local branches of the NAACP who are fighting as frontline communities who are hit first and worst with energy injustice. Already, communities from Fairbanks, AK, to Alachua County, FL, are launching community solar projects. Communities in Maryland and Ohio are engaging in Community Energy Purchase Agreements. In Mississippi communities are working on democratizing their rural electric co-ops and increasing focus on energy efficiency and clean energy.
In the coming days and weeks, the NAACP will be releasing its Just Energy Policies Toolkit, hosting an Energy Justice Training in conjunction with the EPA Hearings on the Clean Power Plan, as well as hosting a Black Labor Convening on Energy Justice—all with an aim of strengthening and supporting local leadership in advancing a just and sustainable energy landscape rooted in principles of economic justice and true democracy.
To learn more about this work, visit our campaign, Power to the People.
Jacqui Patterson is the director of environmental and climate justice at the NAACP.
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Top 10 Solutions to Reverse Climate Change |
Paul Hawken and the Project Drawdown experts thought they knew what to expect when they modeled and ranked 80 solutions that could reverse climate change. But the data had some surprises in store.
Most prominently was that even when the solutions are modeled in terms of what they call a “Plausible Scenario”—a conservative measure of projected solution implementation that is “reasonable yet optimistic”—society still makes great strides toward achieving drawdown, the point where greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere begin to decline.
Together, all 80 reduce or sequester carbon by 1,051 gigatons by 2050 in the Plausible Scenario. Using the scenario that gets us to drawdown—which requires ramping up the solutions a bit more than the conservative measure, particularly renewable energy—they reduce or sequester carbon by 1,442 gigatons by 2050.
Below are the top ten solutions, ranked in terms of emissions reduction potential over a 30-year period. For the other 90 solutions, we highly recommend you read Drawdown: the Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (Penguin Books, 2017), edited by Paul Hawken. —the Green America editors
Top 10 Solutions to Reverse Climate Change
1. Refrigerant Management
Tell Walmart to eliminate HFCs
The problem: Every refrigerator, supermarket case, and air conditioner contains chemical refrigerants that absorb and release heat, making it possible to chill food and keep buildings and vehicles cool. Refrigerants, specifically chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), were once key culprits in depleting the stratospheric ozone layer, which is essential for absorbing the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Thanks to the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, CFCs and HCFCs have been phased out of use.
It took two short years from the discovery of the gaping hole over the Antarctic for the global community to adopt a legally mandated course of action. Now, three decades later, the ozone layer is beginning to heal.
Refrigerants continue to cause climate change, however. Huge volumes of CFCs and HCFCs remain in circulation, retaining their potential for ozone damage. Their replacement chemicals, primarily hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), have minimal deleterious effect on the ozone layer, but their capacity to warm the atmosphere is 1,000 to 9,000 times greater than that of carbon dioxide, depending on their exact chemical composition.
Solutions in progress: In October 2016, officials from more than 170 countries gathered in Kigali, Rwanda, to negotiate a deal to address the problem of HFCs. Despite challenging global politics, they reached a remarkable agreement. Through an amendment to the Montreal Protocol, the world will begin phasing HFCs out of use, starting with high-income countries in 2019 and then expanding to low-income countries—some in 2024, others in 2028. HFC substitutes are already on the market, including natural refrigerants such as propane and ammonia. Unlike the Paris Climate Agreement, the Kigali deal is mandatory, with specific targets and timetables.
Work to be done: The process of phasing out HFCs will unfold over many years, and they will persist in kitchens and condensing units in the meantime. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 700 million air conditioning units will have come online worldwide by 2030.
Refrigerants currently cause emissions throughout their life cycles, but 90 percent of emissions happen at disposal. After being carefully removed and stored, refrigerants can be purified for reuse or transformed into other chemicals that do not cause warming.
The Kigali Accord ensures a step change is coming, and other practices focused on existing stocks could reduce HFC emissions further.
Green America resources: Green America's Cool It! Campaign urges supermarkets to curb their extremely harmful HFC use, starting with the biggest offender: Walmart. You can also get tips on reducing your need for air conditioning and saving energy at home in our article,“Ten Easiest Ways to Cut Your Energy Use in Half.”
Impact
Project Drawdown analysis includes emissions reductions that can be achieved through the management and destruction of refrigerants already in circulation.
Greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction (Plausible Scenario): 89.74 gigatons (GT) of reduced CO2-equivalent (CO2-e—the common measure for all greenhouse gases) by 2050.
GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires greater refrigerant management): 96.49 gigatons of reduced CO2-e by 2050.
Cost (Plausible Scenario): Data too variable to be determined.
Savings (Plausible Scenario): The costs to establish and operate recovery, destruction, and leak avoidance outweigh the financial benefit: –$902.8 billion net savings.
2. Wind Turbines (Onshore)
The problem: Fossil fuels sidelined zero-emission wind energy during the mid-twentieth century. Wind energy has its challenges. The weather is not the same everywhere. The variable nature of wind means there are times when turbines are not turning. Critics argue that turbines are noisy, aesthetically unpleasant, and at times deadly to bats and migrating birds.
Another impediment to wind power is inequitable government subsidies. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the fossil-fuel industry received more than $5.3 trillion worldwide in direct and indirect subsidies in 2015. In comparison, the US wind-energy industry has received $12.3 billion in direct subsidies since 2000.
Solutions in progress: Today, 314,000 wind turbines supply 3.7 percent of global electricity. It will soon be much more. In 2015, a record 63 gigawatts of wind power were installed around the world, despite a dramatic drop in fossil-fuel prices. In many locales, wind is either competitive with or less expensive than coal-generated electricity.
In the US, the wind-energy potential of just three states—Kansas, North Dakota, and Texas—would be sufficient to meet electricity demand from coast to coast.
Current technologies make it easier to overcome fluctuations in supply and demand. Interconnected grids can shuttle power to where it is needed. Newer turbine designs address concerns over bird and bat deaths with slower-turning blades and siting practices to avoid migration paths.
Ongoing cost reductions will soon make wind energy the least expensive source of installed electricity capacity, perhaps within a decade.
Work to be done: The ways and means for the United States to be fossil-fuel- and energy-independent are here. What is often missing is political will and leadership to reverse climate change.
On the policy side, energy portfolio standards can mandate a share of renewable generation. Grants, loans, and tax incentives can encourage construction of more wind capacity and ongoing innovation.
Wind energy is part of a system. Investment in energy storage, transmission infrastructure, and distributed generation is essential to its growth. For the world, the decision is simple: Invest in the future or in the past.
Green America resources: Green America’s Divest/Invest campaign encourages people to divest from the top 200 fossil-fuel companies and reinvest in sustainability.
Impact
An increase in onshore wind from 3 to 4 percent of world electricity use to 21.6 percent could result in:
GHG gas reduction (Plausible Scenario): 84.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.
GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires greater wind-energy increase): 146.5 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.
Cost (Plausible Scenario): $1.2 trillion, though costs are falling annually and could deliver more savings.
Savings (Plausible Scenario): Onshore wind turbines can deliver a net savings of $7.4 trillion over three decades of operation.
3. Reduced Food Waste
The problem: A third of the food raised or prepared does not make it from farm or factory to fork. That number is startling, especially when paired with this one: Hunger is a condition of life for nearly 800 million people worldwide. And this one: The food we waste contributes 4.4 gigatons of CO2-equivalent into the atmosphere each year—roughly eight percent of total anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions.
In places where income is low and infrastructure is weak, food loss is typically unintended and structural in nature—bad roads, lack of refrigeration or storage facilities, poor equipment or packaging, a challenging combination of heat and humidity. Wastage occurs earlier in the supply chain, rotting on farms or spoiling during storage or distribution.
In regions of higher income, unintentional losses tend to be minimal; willful food waste dominates farther along the supply chain. Retailers reject food based on bumps, bruises, coloring—aesthetic objections of all sorts. Other times, they simply order or serve too much, lest they risk shortages or unhappy customers.
Similarly, consumers spurn imperfect spuds in the produce section, overestimate how many meals they will cook in a week, toss out milk that has not gone bad, or forget about leftover lasagna in the back of the fridge.
Basic laws of supply and demand also play a role. If a crop is unprofitable to harvest, it will be left in the field. And if a product is too expensive for consumers to purchase, it will idle in the storeroom.
Regardless of the reason, the outcome is the same. Producing uneaten food squanders a whole host of resources—seeds, water, energy, land, fertilizer, hours of labor, financial capital—and generates greenhouse gases at every stage—including methane when organic matter lands in the global rubbish bin.
Solutions in progress: The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals call for halving per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels by 2030, as well as reducing food losses along production and supply chains.
Work to be done: The interventions that can address key waste points in the food chain are numerous and varied. In lower-income countries, improving infrastructure for storage, processing, and transportation is essential. Strengthening communication and coordination between producers and buyers is also paramount for keeping food from falling through the cracks. Given the world’s many smallholder farmers, producer organizations can help with planning, logistics, and closing capacity gaps. In higher-income regions, major interventions are needed at the retail and consumer levels. Most important is to preempt food waste before it happens, for greatest reduction of upstream emissions, followed by reallocation of unwanted food.
Standardizing date labeling on food packages is an essential step. Currently, “sell by” or “best before” dates and the like are largely unregulated designations, indicating when food should taste best. Though not focused on safety, these markers often confuse consumers about expiration.
Education is another powerful tool, including campaigns celebrating “ugly” produce and public feasts made from nearly wasted food. National goals and policies can encourage widespread change, as well.
Green America resources: Get ideas from our “Tackling Food Waste” issue of the Green American.
Impact
If the world reduces its food waste by 2050, it would see the following:
GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 70.53 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050.
GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires greater food waste reduction): 83.03 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050..
Cost (Plausible Scenario): Too variable to be determined.
Savings (Plausible Scenario): Too variable to be determined.
4. Adoption of a Plant-Rich Diet

A vegan dessert from Candle Cafe, a vegan, local, and organic restaurant in New York City that also offers frozen vegan meals and vegan cookbooks. Photo courtesy of Candle Cafe.
The problem: The Western diet comes with a steep price tag for climate change. The most conservative estimates suggest that raising livestock accounts for nearly 15 percent of global greenhouse gases emitted each year; the most comprehensive assessments of direct and indirect emissions say more than 50 percent.
Outside of innovative, carbon-sequestering managed-grazing practices described in another section of Drawdown, the production of meat and dairy contributes many more emissions than growing their sprouted counterparts—vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes.
Ruminants such as cows are the most prolific offenders, generating the potent greenhouse gas methane as they digest their food. In addition, agricultural land use and associated energy consumption to grow livestock feed produce carbon dioxide emissions, while manure and fertilizers emit nitrous oxide. If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
Overconsumption of animal protein also comes at a steep cost to human health. Eating too much of it can lead to certain cancers, strokes, and heart disease. Increased morbidity and health care costs go hand in hand.
Solutions in progress: With billions of people dining multiple times a day, imagine how many opportunities exist to turn the tables. It is possible to eat well, in terms of both nutrition and pleasure, while eating lower on the food chain and thereby lowering emissions.
Work to be done: A groundbreaking 2016 study from the University of Oxford modeled the climate, health, and economic benefits of a worldwide transition to plant-based diets between now and 2050. Business-as-usual emissions could be reduced by as much as 70 percent through adopting a vegan diet and 63 percent for a vegetarian diet (which includes cheese, milk, and eggs). The model also calculates a reduction in global mortality of six to ten percent.
The case for a plant-rich diet is robust. That said, bringing about dietary change is not simple because eating is profoundly personal and cultural. For individuals to give up meat in favor of options lower on the food chain, those options should be available, visible, and tempting.
Meat substitutes made from plants are a key way to minimize disruption of established ways of cooking and eating. Between rapidly improving products, research at top universities, venture-capital investment, and mounting consumer interest, experts expect markets for non-meats to grow rapidly.
Beyond promoting “reducitarianism,” if not vegetarianism, it is also necessary to reframe meat as a delicacy, rather than a staple. First and foremost, that means ending price-distorting government subsidies, such as those benefiting the US livestock industry. Debunking protein myths and amplifying the health benefits of plant-rich diets can also encourage individuals to change their eating patterns.
Green America resources: Read about how the world could eat less meat and the impacts it could have in our “Don’t Have a Cow” issue of the Green American.
Impact:
If the world reduces its meat consumption by 2050, it would see the following:
GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 66.11 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050.
GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires further reduction of meat consumption): 78.65 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050.
Cost (Plausible Scenario): Too variable to be determined.
Savings (Plausible Scenario): Too variable to be determined.
5. Tropical Forest Restoration
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Sustainable forest management in Indonesia. At least 751 million acres of land in the tropics could be restored to intact forests, reducing 62.1 gigatons of CO2. Photo by Biosphoto via Alamy.
The problem: In recent decades, tropical forests—those located within 23.5 degrees north or south of the equator—have suffered extensive clearing, fragmentation, degradation, and depletion of flora and fauna. Once blanketing 12 percent of the world’s land masses, they now cover just five percent.
When we lose forests, primarily to agricultural expansion or human settlement, carbon dioxide discharges into the atmosphere. Tropical forest loss alone is responsible for 16 to 19 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions caused by human activity.
Solutions in progress: Restoration of tropical forests, both passive and intentional, is now a growing trend. As forest ecosystems come back to life, trees, soil, leaf litter, and other vegetation absorb and hold carbon, taking it out of global-warming rotation.
In 2011, the Bonn Challenge set an ambitious target of restoring 370 million acres of forest worldwide by 2020. The 2014 New York Declaration on Forests affirmed that aim and added a cumulative target of 865 million acres restored globally by 2030. Should the world accomplish that goal, a total of 12 to 33 gigatons of CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere and become terrestrial once again.
Work to be done: “More than 4.9 billion acres [of forests] worldwide offer opportunities for restoration—an area larger than South America,” a team of researchers from the World Resources Institute reports. Three-quarters of that land would be best suited to a “mosaic” forest-restoration approach, blending forests, trees, and agricultural land uses. Up to 1.2 billion acres are ripe for full restoration of large forests with dense canopy cover. The opportunities are enormous, and the majority of it lies in tropical regions. In a median time of 66 years, tropical forests can recover 90 percent of the biomass that old-growth landscapes contain.
Given the interconnectedness of people and forests, a particular framework for restoration has emerged: forest landscape restoration. The approach, proposed by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, means “regarding the landscape as an integrated whole ... looking at different land uses together, their connections, interactions, and a mosaic of [restoration] interventions.”
It means there is no single formula for forest restoration. Making restoration a collaborative process can ensure it is done with and for local communities, and that root causes of forest damage are addressed.
The bulk of restoration opportunities lies primarily within low-income countries in tropical regions. Those countries cannot manage the level of investment required, nor should they, since the benefits of restoration provide value and a service to all. The relevant stakeholders are the entire human race, and some bear greater responsibility for the problem of climate change than others.
Because forest restoration is such a potent solution to climate change, commitments and funding need to be a global priority. And because restoration efforts have ranged from success to failure, we need to analyze why, scale best practices, and eliminate those that do not work. Initiatives need to respect land rights and tenure, especially those of Indigenous people.
Green America resources: Green America’s Skip the Slip campaign helps forests around the world by urging companies to shift away from using millions of pounds to unrecyclable paper receipts and use online receipts instead. In other sectors, Green America's campaigns work to protect our forests by moving towards recycled paper or online.
Impact
In theory, 751 million acres of degraded land in the tropics could be restored to continuous, intact forest. Project Drawdown’s Plausible Scenario assumes restoration could occur on 435 million acres, resulting in:
GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 61.2 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.
GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires more restoration): 89 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050..
Cost (Plausible Scenario): Data too variable to be determined.
Savings (Plausible Scenario): Data too variable to be determined.
6. Educating Girls

Sunita was once forced to weave carpets and perform domestic work from 4 a.m. late into the night. Now, she attends school through GoodWeave’s education program. GoodWeave rescues child weavers from carpet looms in South Asia and invests in their education and rehabilitation. It also certifies carpets and looms as being free from child labor. Photo by U. Roberto Romano for Goodweave.
The problem: Today, more than 130 million girls are denied the fundamental right to attend school and lay a foundation for their lives. The situation is most dire in secondary classrooms.
Economic barriers include lack of family funds for school fees and uniforms, as well as prioritizing the more immediate benefits of having girls fetch water or firewood, or work a market stall or a plot of land.
Cultural barriers encompass traditional beliefs that girls should tend the home rather than learn to read and write, should be married off at a young age, and, when resources are slim, should be skipped over so boys can be sent to school instead.
Schools that are farther afield put girls at risk of gender-based violence on their way to and from, while other dangers and discomforts are present at school itself. Disability, pregnancy, childbirth, and female genital mutilation also can be obstacles.
The education gap also matters for global warming. According to the Brookings Institution, “The difference between a woman with no years of schooling and with 12 years of schooling is almost four to five children per woman.” Women with more years of education have fewer, healthier children and actively manage their own reproductive health.
In the poorest countries, per capita greenhouse-gas emissions are low. From one-tenth of a ton of carbon dioxide per person in Madagascar to 1.8 tons in India, per-capita emissions in lower-income countries are a fraction of the US rate of 18 tons per person per year. Nevertheless, changes in fertility rates in those countries would have multiple benefits for girls and women, families, communities, and society.
Solution in progress: Nobel laureate and girls’ education activist Malala Yousafzai has famously said, “One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world.” An enormous body of evidence supports her conviction. For starters, educated girls realize higher wages and greater upward mobility, contributing to economic growth. Their rates of maternal mortality drop, as do mortality rates of their babies. They are less likely to marry as children or against their will. They have lower incidence of HIV/AIDS and malaria. Their agricultural plots are more productive and their families better nourished. They are more empowered at home, at work, and in society.
Education is the most powerful lever available for breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty, while mitigating emissions by curbing population growth.
Education also shores up resilience to climate change impacts. For example, a 2013 study found that educating girls “is the single most important social and economic factor associated with a reduction in vulnerability to natural disasters.” This decreased vulnerability also extends to their children, families, and the elderly.
[Editor’s note: Increasing women’s involvement in the energy sector also leads to “more effective clean-energy initiatives, greater returns on investment in clean energy, and expanded emissions-reduction opportunities, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.]
Work to be done: In 2011, the journal Science published a demographic analysis of the impact of girls’ education on population growth. It details a “fast track” scenario, based on South Korea’s actual climb from one of the least to one of the most educated countries in the world. If all nations adopted a similar rate and achieved 100 percent enrollment of girls in primary and secondary school by 2050, there would be 843 million fewer people worldwide than if current enrollment rates sustain.
The encyclopedic book What Works in Girls’ Education (Brookings Institution Press, 2015) maps out seven areas of interconnected interventions: 1) Make school affordable. 2) Help girls overcome health barriers. 3) Reduce the time and distance to get to school. 4) Make schools more girl-friendly. For example, offer child-care programs for mothers. 5) Improve school quality. 6) Increase community engagement. 7) Sustain girls’ education during emergencies. For example, establish schools in refugee camps.
Green America resources: Green America’s Labor programs and End Smartphone Sweatshops campaign promote solutions that raise family income, get children out of factories and fields, and allow more children to go to school.
Impact
Because educating girls has an important impact on family planning (#7), Project Drawdown allocated 50 percent of total potential emissions reduction to each solution.
GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 59.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.
GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires helping more girls attend school): 59.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.
Cost (Plausible Scenario): By closing an annual financing gap of $39 billion, universal education in low- and lower-middle-income
countries could be achieved.
Savings (Plausible Scenario): The return on investing in girls is incalculable.
7. Family Planning
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Kenya has made significant gains in education, with more than 80 percent of all boys and girls currently enrolled in primary schools, and 50 percent of boys and girls in secondary schools, Poverty is the main reason for low enrollment, and boys receive priority for higher education when there are financial constraints.Courtesy of Project Drawdown.
The problem: Securing the fundamental right to voluntary, high-quality family-planning services, so women can have children by choice rather than chance and can plan their family size and spacing, is a matter of autonomy, dignity, and, yes, climate change.
225 million women in lower-income countries say they want the ability to choose whether and when to become pregnant but lack the necessary access to contraception—resulting in some 74 million unwanted pregnancies each year. The need persists in some high-income countries as well, including the US, where 45 percent of pregnancies are unintended.
Challenges to expanding access to family planning range from basic supply of affordable and culturally appropriate contraception to education about sex and reproduction; from faraway health centers to hostile attitudes of medical providers; from social and religious norms to sexual partners’ opposition to using birth control.
Currently, the world faces a $5.3 billion funding shortfall for providing the access to reproductive health care that women say they want to have. After being silent on the topic of family planning for more than 25 years, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change included access to reproductive health services in its 2014 synthesis report and pointed to population growth as an important factor in greenhouse-gas concentrations. (See #6 for statistics on per capita emissions.) Growing evidence suggests that family planning has the additional benefit of building resilience—helping communities and countries better cope with and adapt to inevitable changes brought by climate change.
Solutions in progress: The success stories in family planning are striking. Iran put a program into place in the early 1990s that has been touted as among the most successful such efforts in history. Completely voluntary, it involved religious leaders, educated the public, and provided free access to contraception. As a result, fertility rates halved in just one decade.
In Bangladesh, average birth rates fell from six children in the 1980s to two now, as the door-to-door approach pioneered in the Matlab hospital spread across the country: female health workers providing basic care for women and children where they live. Family planning requires social reinforcement—for example, the radio and television soap operas now used in many places to shift perceptions of what is “normal” or “right.”
Work to be done: Honoring the dignity of women and children through family planning is not about centralized governments forcing the birth rate down—or up through natalist policies. Nor is it about agencies or activists in rich countries, where emissions are highest, telling people elsewhere to stop having children. It is most essentially about freedom and opportunity for women and the recognition of basic human rights.
Currently, family-planning programs receive just one percent of all overseas development assistance. That number could double—a moral move that happens to have meaning for the planet.
Green America resources: Green America’s Labor and Clean Electronics programs support solutions that help women earn their own incomes and determine their own futures.
Impact
Because educating girls (#6) has an important impact on family planning, Project Drawdown allocated 50 percent of total potential
emissions reduction to each solution.
GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 59.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.
GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires providing more women with family-planning access): 59.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.
Cost & savings (Plausible Scenario): Inappropriate to monetize a human right.
8. Solar Farms

OCI Solar Power’s 60-acre Alamo 3 solar farm in Converse, TX, generates 5.5 megawatts (AC) of power for nearly 1,240 homes. Courtesy of OCI Solar Power (OCISolarPower.com)
The problem: The era of fossil fuels is over, and the only question is when the new era of clean energy will be upon us. Solar photovoltaics are only two percent of the global electricity mix at present.
Solutions in progress: Solar farms are large-scale arrays of hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or, in some cases, millions of panels that achieve generating capacity in the tens or hundreds of megawatts. These solar farms operate at utility scale, more like conventional power plants in the amount of electricity they produce.
The first solar photovoltaic (PV) farms went up in the early 1980s. Now, these utility-scale installations account for 65 percent of additions to solar PV capacity around the world.
If Ukrainian officials have their way, Chernobyl, the site of a mass nuclear meltdown in 1986, will house a 1-gigawatt solar farm, which would be one of the world’s largest.
Public investment, tax incentives, technology evolution, and brute manufacturing force have chipped away at the cost of creating PV, bringing it down to 65 cents per watt today. The decline in price has always outpaced predictions, and drops will continue. Informed predictions about the cost and growth of solar PV indicate that it will soon become the least expensive energy in the world. It is already the fastest growing.
Compared to rooftop solar, solar farms enjoy lower installation costs per watt, and their efficacy in translating sunlight into electricity is higher. When their panels rotate to make the most of the sun’s rays, generation can improve by 40 percent or more.
Work to be done: No matter where solar panels are placed, they are subject to the diurnal and variable nature of solar radiation and its misalignment with electricity use, peaking midday while demand peaks a few hours later. That is why, as solar generation continues to grow, so should complementary renewables that are constant, such as geothermal, and that have rhythms different from the sun, such as wind, which tends to pick up at night.
Energy storage and more flexible grids that can manage the variability of production from PV farms will also be integral to solar’s success.
The International Renewable Energy Agency already credits 220 million to 330 million tons of annual CO2 savings to solar PV. Could solar rise from two percent of the global electricity mix to meet 20 percent of global energy needs by 2027, as some University of Oxford researchers calculate? Thanks to complementary government interventions and market progress, there are many promising signs.
Green America resources: Green America’s Solar Catalyst and Solar Circle programs have played a major role in accelerating solar in the US and abroad. Our new campaigns put pressure on AT&T, Verizon, and Amazon to power their massive servers with clean energy.
Impact
Utility-scale solar is currently 0.4 percent of global electricity generation. Project Drawdown assumes it will grow to ten percent.
GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 36.9 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.
GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—assumes higher growth): 64.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.
Cost (Plausible Scenario): –$80.6 billion. (Solar farms are cheaper to install than fossil-fuel alternatives, so there’s actually a
savings on implementation.)
Savings (Plausible Scenario): $5.02 trillion in net savings.
9. Silvopasture
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A silvopasture field in Sweden, combining pastureland with climate-cooling trees. Photo by Bo Jansson (Alamy).
The problem: In Brazil and elsewhere, headlines condemn ranching as a driver of mass deforestation and attendant climate change. Cattle and other ruminants require 30 to 45 percent of the world’s arable land, and livestock produce roughly one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions.
Solutions in progress: Conventional wisdom says cows and trees do not belong together. The practice of silvopasture challenges this assumption of mutual exclusivity and could help shape a new era for the acreage dedicated to livestock and their food.
From the Latin for “forest” and “grazing,” silvopasture is just that: the integration of trees and pasture or forage into a single system for raising livestock, from cattle and sheep to deer and ducks. Rather than seeing trees as a weed to be removed, silvopasture integrates them into a sustainable and symbiotic system. Silvopasture is currently practiced on 351 million acres of land globally.
The dehesa system of silvopasture, famous for the jamón ibérico (Iberian ham) it yields, has been cultivated on the Iberian Peninsula for more than 4,500 years. More recently, silvopasture has taken root in Central America, thanks to the work of champions such as the Center for Research in Sustainable Systems of Agriculture, based in Cali, Colombia. In many places in the US and Canada, livestock and trees can be found intermingling.
That intermingling takes a variety of forms. Trees may be clustered, evenly spaced, or used as living fencing. Animals may graze in grassy alleys between rows of arboreal growth. Most silvopastoral systems are similar in spacing to a savanna ecosystem. They can be created by planting trees in open pasture, letting those that sprout mature, or by thinning a woodland or plantation canopy to allow for forage growth.
Soil is the other essential component—and key to the potential silvopasture has for mitigating climate change. Silvopastoral systems sequester carbon in both the biomass above ground and the soil below. Pastures that are strewn or crisscrossed with trees sequester five to ten times as much carbon as those of the same size that are treeless.
Moreover, because the livestock yield on a silvopasture plot is higher, it may curtail the need for additional pasture space and thus help avoid deforestation and subsequent carbon emissions.
Some studies show that ruminants can better digest silvopastoral forage, emitting lower amounts of methane in the process.
From a financial and risk perspective, silvopasture is useful for its diversification. Livestock, trees, and any additional forestry products, such as nuts, fruit, mushrooms, and maple syrup, all come of age and generate income on different time horizons. Because the land is diversely productive, farmers are better insulated from financial risk due to weather events.
Silvopasture can also cut farmers’ costs by reducing the need for feed, fertilizer, and herbicides. Because the integration of trees into grazing lands enhances soil fertility and moisture, farmers find themselves with healthier, more productive land over time.
Work to be done: Though the advantages of silvopasture are clear, its growth has been limited by both practical and cultural factors. These systems are more expensive to establish, requiring higher up-front costs in addition to the necessary technical expertise. There is less incentive to plant trees and protect them where pastures are plentiful, fire poses a risk, or land ownership is unclear.
Layered on these challenges is the stubborn belief that trees and pasture are not compatible—that trees inhibit the growth of pasture fodder rather than enrich it. Farmers may ridicule one another for shifting to an alternate approach.
These social impediments make peer-to-peer engagement and direct experience of silvopasture’s benefits key accelerants. To address economic obstacles, international organizations such as the World Bank and NGOs such as the Nature Conservancy are making loans to enable silvopasture installation—loans a typical bank would not provide.
As the impacts of global warming progress, silvopasture can help farmers and their livestock adapt to erratic weather. Trees create cooler microclimates and more protective environments, and can moderate water availability. Therein lies the climatic win-win of silvopasture.
Green America resources: Green America’s Re(Store) It! and Carbon Farming programs are accelerating the shift to regenerative agriculture, including silvopasture practices.
Impact
Project Drawdown estimates adoption of silvopasture expanding to 554 million acres by 2050 out of 2.7 billion theoretically suitable:
GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 31.19 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050.
GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires higher rate of adoption): 47.5 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050..
Cost (Plausible Scenario): $41.6 billion net cost.
Savings (Plausible Scenario): $699.4 billion net savings.
10. Rooftop Solar
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An Uros mother and her two daughters live on one of the 42 floating islands that the Uru constructed from totora reeds on Lake Titicaca. This solar panel replaced kerosene and provided electricity to the family for the first time. Photo courtesy of Drawdown.
The problem: The era of fossil fuels is over, and the only question is when the new era of clean energy will be upon us. Solar photovoltaics are only two percent of the global electricity mix at present.
Solutions in progress: Solar photovoltaics (PV) have seen exponential growth over the past decade. In 2015, distributed systems of less than 100 kilowatts accounted for roughly 30 percent of solar PV capacity installed worldwide.
While the production of PV panels, like any manufacturing process, involves emissions, they generate electricity without emitting greenhouse gases or air pollution. When placed on a grid-connected roof, they produce energy at the site of consumption, avoiding the inevitable losses of grid transmission. They can help utilities meet broader demand by feeding unused electricity into the grid, especially in summer. This “net metering” arrangement can make solar panels financially feasible for homeowners, offsetting the electricity consumers buy at night, when the sun is not shining.
Rooftop PV is accelerating access to affordable, clean electricity and thereby becoming a powerful tool for eliminating poverty. It is also creating jobs and energizing local economies. In Bangladesh alone, 3.6 million home solar systems have generated 115,000 direct jobs and 50,000 more downstream.
Roof modules are spreading around the world because of their affordability. Solar PV has benefited from a virtuous cycle of falling costs, driven by incentives to accelerate its development and implementation, economies of scale in manufacturing, advances in panel technology, and innovative approaches for end-user financing.
Small-scale PV already generates electricity more cheaply than it can be brought from the grid in some parts of the US, in many small island states, and in countries including Australia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
Work to be done: See #8 “Solar Farms.”
Green America resources: Join with your neighbors to drive down the costs of rooftop solar. Read our “Community Solar for All” issue of the Green American.
Impact
Project Drawdown estimates that rooftop solar PV can grow from .4 percent of electricity generation globally to 7 percent by 2050.
Carbon reduction (Plausible Scenario): 24.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.
Carbon reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires more solar rooftops): 43.10 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.
Cost (Plausible Scenario): $453.1 billion net cost.
Savings (Plausible Scenario): $3.46 trillion net savings.
How Green America Campaigns Stack Up
We thought it would be fun to see where Green America’s climate-related campaigns stack up on the Project Drawdown
top 100 climate-change solutions. The solutions are ranked by the amount of greenhouse gases they reduce by 2050. Here’s how our efforts came out:
Climate Action: Growing Renewables: A big part of our Climate Action program aims to grow renewable energy generation in the US. In 2002, our Solar Catalyst project mapped out the future of solar power in the US. Today, Climate Action supports tax incentives for solar and wind, and helps investors move their money into companies coming up with climate solutions. We also developed the idea for Clean Energy Victory Bonds, which would allow individuals to invest in green energy for as little as $25, through a government Treasury bond. Ranking: Rooftop solar: #10, with 24.6 gigatons (GT) CO2-equivalent (CO2-e) reduced. Solar Farms: #8, with 36.9 GT reduced. Wind Turbines: #2, with 84.6 GT reduced.
Re(Store) It! and Carbon Farming: These campaigns aim to promote regenerative agriculture—through encouraging farmers to practice it, retailers to sell products farmed in this manner, and consumers to look for products grown through regenerative methods. Ranking: Regenerative Agriculture is #11, with 23.14 GT of CO2-e reduced.
Better Paper Project: Our Better Paper Project aims to conserve the world’s forests by advocating for recycled paper
use. Currently, we’re working with magazine publishers to switch them from virgin-pulp paper to paper with at least
some recycled content—particularly Smithsonian Magazine and college and university alumni magazines. The Project’s new “Skip the Slip” campaign asks retailers to offer digital receipts and consumers to skip paper receipts. Ranking: Recycling is #70, with 0.90 gigatons of CO2-equivalent reduced. Saving tropical forests ranks #5 (see p. 23), and saving temperate forests ranks #12, with 22.61 GT of CO2-e.
Fair Trade: Our Fair Trade program empowers women and girls by increasing family income, allowing girls to go to
school (see #6).
Green Living: Our website and publications are filled with practical articles on many of the Project Drawdown solutions, including the ones corresponding to our program areas mentioned above, as well as ride-sharing (#75), investing in
women (#62), composting (#60), saving water (#46), buying an electric car (#26), eating less meat (#4), reducing food waste (#3), and more.
In addition, our “Climate Justice for All” issue of the Green American highlights leaders around the world who are working to reduce climate-change impacts to communities of color, who are often hardest hit by them.
The solutions to climate change are within our abilities, and they improve life for every being on this planet.
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A Plan to Reverse the Climate Crisis |
If you’re part of the movement for a just and sustainable future, or you're interested in solutions to reverse the climate crisis, chances are you’ve heard of Paul Hawken. To say that Hawken has an interesting background is a bit of an understatement.
You might know him as a green entrepreneur. Starting in the 1960s, he founded several pioneering green businesses, starting with the Erewhon Trading Company, one of the first natural-food companies in the US to rely solely on sustainable agricultural methods.
You might know him as a bestselling author. He’s published several books on the green economy, five of which have become national bestsellers—including The Ecology of Commerce (HarperCollins, 1993), which professors from 67 business schools voted as the number-one college text on business and the environment. His 1987 book, Growing a Business (Simon & Schuster), was the subject of an acclaimed 17-part PBS miniseries, which he hosted and produced.
You might know him as a compelling public speaker. In addition to being a regular on our Green Festival circuit, Hawken has given hundreds of talks around the world, at colleges and universities, to government agencies, and before world leaders.
But what he’d like you to know him for now is as a champion of 100 scientific solutions that can solve the climate crisis.
Hawken’s latest New York Times bestseller, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (Penguin Books, 2017), is the compilation of research from more than 200 scientists, policymakers, and experts, detailing 100 bold solutions that could get the world to “drawdown”—or the point where greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and then begin to decline—and beyond. He’s also launched a new organization, Project Drawdown (drawdown.org), to help get us there.
Green America editor-in-chief Tracy Fernandez Rysavy talked with Hawken about Project Drawdown and what everyone can do to help it succeed.
100 Reasons for Hope on Climate: Project Drawdown created climate and financial models for 80 solutions to climate change, and examined 20 more solutions that are forthcoming in the future. The researchers found that if the world implements the initial 80 solutions over a 30-year period using a “reasonable yet optimistic forecast,” the total amount of CO2 avoided and sequestered amounts to 1,051 gigatons by 2050. To achieve “drawdown,” or the point where greenhouse gases in the atmosphere begin to decline, we’d need to ramp them up a bit more, particularly renewable energy, to get to 1,442 gigatons by 2050.
Green American/Tracy Fernandez Rysavy: What is Project Drawdown, and how did it come about?
Paul Hawken: Drawdown started at two different times: In 2001, the Third Assessment of the IPCC [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] came out. [Editor’s note: The IPCC Third Assessment Report is widely known for establishing a scientific near-consensus that unnatural levels of global warming are occurring and are caused by human activity.] I began to ask people, “Where do we stand? Do we have the solutions at hand? Can we reverse this? Why are we not talking about reversal?”
Then, as now, the discussion was about slowing, stabilization, and mitigation. I said we should do the research and find out what technologies we have at hand that can reduce emissions or sequester them. Everybody I talked to at big NGOs [non-governmental organizations] thought it was a great idea but didn’t have the expertise. And I said, “I don’t either.”
For a couple of years, I was trying to induce somebody to do the work, and nobody wanted to. Eventually, I stopped asking. Then Bill McKibben’s piece in Rolling Stone came out in July of 2012. The title was “Global Warming’s Terrifying Math,” based on Mark Campanale’s research at the Carbon Tracker Initiative. Mark had been a financial analyst, so he analyzed the balance sheets of all the gas and oil companies, and basically pointed out that they had assets that are called unburnable carbon. In other words, if those assets were combusted, the Earth would be more like Venus—we wouldn’t even be here to combust them. According to Mark, Bill turned that data into poetry.
I had many friends come to me in despair after reading Bill’s piece. Many of them independently said, “It’s game over. We’ve lost.”
I remembered what I’d been proposing in 2001. I also thought that when people give up, it’s an opening, not a closing. Surrender is usually an opening.
So with a few friends,we created Project Drawdown to map, measure, and model the most substantive solutions to global warming in terms of impact. These are solutions that are currently in place, at hand, and that are all scaling. We wanted to know what we can do with what we have now.
We ended up with 100 solutions that, if we continue to scale them at a reasonable level, achieve “drawdown,” that point in time when greenhouse gases peak and go down on a year-to-year basis.
Green American/Tracy: What was so exciting for me in reading your book is that for the first time, experts are talking about reversing climate change, not just mitigating it.
Paul Hawken: Exactly. “Mitigation” means to reduce pain, severity, and seriousness. Can we make global warming less severe? What an underwhelming goal that is. Mitigation is for triage in an ER, but it’s not for civilization and the Earth.
The science on climate change is an extraordinary problem statement. The headlines that come out about extreme weather, fire, ocean acidification, and so on, all validate the problem statement. But what’s happening is that we keep immersing ourselves in the problem statement rather than accepting it and saying, “Got it. The problem statement is correct. Now let’s work on the solutions.”
Today, we have knowledgeable people constantly repeating the idea that what we need is solar, wind, Elon Musk, and cutting back on how many burgers we eat. The implication is that if we move to clean energy and electric vehicles, we get a hall pass to the 22nd century. That’s a scientific howler. It’s not true. Of course, those are crucial solutions, no question—we can’t achieve drawdown without them, but it requires more than that. The system caused the problem, so it’s the system that heals it. That means we need all of the solutions, large and small.
Project Drawdown did the math on the most impactful solutions, pure, straight, and simple. Without bias. Without a foregone conclusion. Without the idea that we knew what the most substantive solutions are.
Over 230 people are involved—we are a coalition. We are a “we.” We didn’t try to be right. We just tried to do the math.
When you look at the back of book (or website) and see the bios of who is involved, you meet some wonderful, knowledgeable people.
Green American/Tracy: Tell me more about the math.
Paul Hawken: There are only two things we can do about global warming: Stop putting greenhouse gases up there, and bring them back home to Earth.
With a group of Research Fellows from 22 countries—all with extensive academic and professional experience from some of the world’s most respected institutions—we gathered comprehensive lists of climate solutions and winnowed them down to those that had the greatest potential to reduce emissions or sequester carbon from the atmosphere. We then compiled literature reviews and devised detailed financial and climate models for each.
The analyses were put through a three-stage process including review by outside experts, who evaluated the inputs, sources, and calculations. We also engaged a 120-person advisory board made up of diverse and prominent engineers, agronomists, politicians, writers, economists, climatologists, biologists, botanists, financial analysts, architects, and activists who reviewed and validated the final text.
With respect to greenhouse gases, we relied completely on peer-reviewed science, using the more conservative data where there is a spread. On the financial side, the measurement of cost and return, we only used data from the most respected international organizations: the IEA, FAO, World Bank, IPCC, etc. And again, we were conservative on costs and the rate at which costs would go down. The data employed in the models is not our data. We are transparent about where it comes from. We reflect back to the world what the world actually knows. It’s just that no one had ever put it together so that we could see it.
NASA has long been the leading experimenter in future aircraft design (Drawdown solution #43). They believe new designs could reduce fuel and pollution by 70 percent. Adopting the latest and most fuel-efficient aircraft, retrofitting existing aircraft, and retiring old aircraft early could prevent the release of 5.1 gigatons of CO2-equivalent by 2050. (Photo courtesy of NASA)
Green American/Tracy: I’m still stunned by how optimistic the results are—which I think could go a long way toward moving people in a productive direction.
Paul Hawken: People do say it’s optimistic. We think of it as a reality project. What we know and what we are actually doing has been obscured. Ninety-eight percent of the news about climate is bad news; it is about doom, fear, and threat. What do individuals feel like when they’re inundated with bad news? They disengage; they become numb. We’re all the same in that way.
What we know about how the brain works, from neuroscience and the study of ourselves, is that how global warming is being communicated by the climate establishment defies what we know about how the mind works. We hear over and over again that we must not exceed 2° C of warming, and if we go past that temperature, we enter some kind of wormhole, where something terrible is going to happen. That kind of rhetoric is guaranteed to turn people off. And the fact is, terrible things are already happening, i.e. Puerto Rico.
The truth is, that’s not a science-based number. That number was made up by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber in 1994. He was trying to communicate to German government officials the dangers of climate change, and they were having trouble understanding the science. So he said, “Think of it this way. We can’t go past 2° C.” It was pulled out of the air, and we’ve been using it ever since as if it’s enshrined like the Virgin Mary.
Even if it was a science-based target, it’s a future existential threat, which human beings don’t relate to. The human brain isn’t wired to respond to future existential threats. The people who did that are not in the gene pool. The people who live here today have ancestors who thought about current existential threats. That’s evolution.
Basically, the communication that is currently practiced is guaranteed not to work.
People come together around opportunity and possibility, not the probability of disaster. The way to reverse global warming is to address current human needs.
Going back to Drawdown, 98 of the 100 solutions are regenerative development. If you do them, we’re better off with respect to life in a measurable way, whether it’s water, food, grassland, soil health, marine life, pollinators, etc. In other words, the development, when completed, leaves the world better off than when we started.
We currently practice degenerative development. We’re stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.
What global warming is inviting us to do is heal the future and sell that in the present. We can monetize the healing just as we can the stealing of the Earth.
If you break down the solutions in Drawdown, they create jobs and almost all are profitable. If we tax carbon and stop subsidizing everything that’s harmful, they are virtually all profitable. They create social stability, crop productivity, and better food. They increase soil health, biodiversity, water retention, and clean air. They reverse marine desertification and coral bleaching. The list goes on and on.
Every one of these solutions—other than two of them—are no-regrets solutions. If we were clueless about extreme weather (“Well, that was a hell of a hurricane!”), we would want to do 98 percent of these solutions regardless, because they have so many benefits and no downside.
Drawdown is not about trying to fight climate change. That’s an unfortunate phrase. It makes the need to address climate change into a war metaphor. We have enough war metaphors, and wars for that matter.
In any case, we’re not going to “fight” the atmosphere because it is impossible. It would be like fighting wind, sunshine, and ocean currents. The climate is supposed to change—that’s what climates do.
Bepkaeti of the Kayapo Tribe in Brazil sits on a mountain overlooking Kayapo territory—and also one of world’s largest protected rainforests. Indigenous communities are creating some of the most effective climate solutions through land management (Drawdown solution #39). If the world stops encroaching and allows Indigenous peoples to manage the 909 million acres of land they live on but do not have secure rights to globally, it could reduce greenhouse emissions by 6.1 gigatons (GT) by 2050. Photo by Neil Ever Osborne.
Green American/Tracy: What were some of the most surprising solutions to the climate crisis you've found?
Paul Hawken: We were just surprised, period. Like anybody, if we had made a list of what we thought were the top solutions, renewable energy would have been at the top. Transportation would have been way up there, too. In the office, we all had our own pets and guesses, and we were pretty much all wrong.
The very top one, refrigerant management, surprised us. We wished something sexier was number one, but that was how it turned out.
Number two is onshore wind—not a surprise. But number three was reduced food waste and number four, adopt a plant-rich diet. Those surprised us not as solutions, but as rankings that were so high. Also, food waste doesn’t include the methane impact of landfilled food. Put that in, and food waste could be number one.
When it comes to a plant-rich diet, it’s really about getting the world to adopt a diet where a significant part is plant-based, and a diet where we are eating proper amounts of protein. We overconsume protein in the west, much to the detriment of our health and the health of the planet.
Number five is protecting tropical forests. Tropical forests are sitting on more CO2 than is in the atmosphere. Destruction, deforestation and degradation pose a huge threat to us. Number five is about protection, preventing it from being a growing problem.
Number six was a surprise: educating girls. As was seven, clinics to support family planning and women’s reproductive health—not just in the developing world but here in places like Alabama.
Both issues are intertwined: If you leave girls in school and support their education, they tend to plan their families very differently. When they’re married off early, which happens all over the world for cultural and religious reasons, their choices are made for them. Educated girls become women who make different family choices: they’ll have an average of two children rather than five or six. It’s the difference between high and median world-population predictions. Put six and seven together, and it becomes the number-one solution. We think it’s a solar panel that’s going to save the world. It’s not a panel—it’s a woman!
I just want to make clear that by measuring impact in terms of carbon, we’re not trying to be reductionist. We should educate girls based on a list as long as your arm. Education has cascading benefits for them, for society, for communities, for the future. Having said that, no one had looked at the impact of doing so in terms of climate. We did.
Green American/Tracy: The two “regrets solutions” you mentioned are nuclear and waste-to-energy, correct? Why include those?
Paul Hawken: Yes, that’s right. They’re there because we set out to measure most substantive solutions. If, in the process of doing that, we started weeding things out because we didn’t support them, our objectivity would have been called into question. The fact is, for many people, nuclear and waste-to-energy [WTE] are solutions.
Personally, I think nuclear is the most absurd way humanity has ever invented to boil water. Generating and guarding radioactive waste is dangerous and complex. That’s my opinion, right? But as a research institution, we wanted to make sure everybody thought we had done our homework, which was to be objective. This is science. The fact is that nuclear energy is less carbon intensive than coal and natural gas. So we mapped, measured, and modeled it.
The problem with WTE is that it doesn’t go upstream, to who made the waste. It stops a better solution, which is zero waste. WTE is done in a very clean way in Europe, but even if it’s just spotless, we shouldn’t be making crap and burning it. We should be making everything in such a way that it can be returned through biological processes.
[Editor’s note: Green America is against expanding WTE and nuclear power for the reasons Paul Hawken describes above. In addition, when it comes to nuclear, mining and enriching uranium, constructing power plants, and dealing with processing and storing nuclear waste all generate carbon pollution. For more on our position, see our article, “10 Reasons to Oppose Nuclear Energy”]
As cities around the world become denser and city planners invest in making those cities walkable (Drawdown solution #54), five percent of trips currently made by car could be made by foot, resulting in the avoidance of 2.9 GT of CO2-equivalent. Photo by Martin Bond for Alamy.
Green American/Tracy: I want to go back to the idea that some of the Project’s solutions have other benefits. Can you talk a bit more about those?
Paul Hawken: Take number 11, regenerative agriculture, for example. When you restore soil health, you’re increasing water retention. You’re taking carbon out of the air, creating humus and more life in the soil, which gives resiliency to crops in drought years. You reduce runoff/floods. You’re eliminating nitrous oxide. You’re increasing pollinators, because you’re planting cover crops. You’re not tilling soil, so you’re not releasing CO2.
You’re increasing productivity, so you’re making money. That’s good for farmers. They’re not making much money now; thus, they’re getting more dependent on chemicals to try to squeeze out one last little bit of productivity on their exhausted soil, which is becoming dirt. Big Ag is basically like a drug dealer.
You’re introducing animals as a way to fertilize. You’re not using mineral fertilizers. You’re not making things out of natural gas to put on soil. The amount of inputs is reduced, if not eliminated.
These farms exist, and these farmers are not progressive, liberal Democrats. They’re farmers. But they’re focused on one thing: soil health. Which leads to healthy animals, people, air, water. It’s a virtuous circle, and everyone benefits. That’s just one example.
[Editor’s note: Green America has a new programs on regenerative agriculture, called Re(Store) It!]
While the 100 Project Drawdown climate solutions are all technologies available now and scalable, the researchers also included “coming attractions,” or technologies that are currently in development. One of those technologies is smart highways. The Wattway solar road, pictured above and developed in France, is made of solar tiles that adhere to existing roadways to produce electricity. A 10-by-20-foot section can supply the electricity requirements for an average French home. Photo by Vincent Capman/Getty Images.
Green American/Tracy: Can you tell our readers about some of the newer technologies that are part of the solutions list?
Paul Hawken: 80 of them are well in hand, and we have lots of data. The 20 that we called “coming attractions” are valid scientifically, but there’s not sufficient data to model them.
With the solutions that are in place, well understood and practiced, we can achieve climate reversal. However, what we’re trying to show is that things aren’t static. There are companies, engineers, designers, bioneers, people all over the world who are innovating, creating, and imagining new solutions and technologies. It’s not all that’s going to happen in the next 20 to 30 years.
But reinforcements are on the way—extraordinary breakthroughs in design and technology and practice that are going to enhance the ones we modeled. We wanted to give people a sense of
what’s coming.
Green American/Tracy: America is so politically divided right now. Are the Project’s solutions more things that Democrats embrace, or are they like regenerative agriculture, able to cross current political party lines?
Paul Hawken: Well, let’s be honest. Washington never did much about climate, whether Democrat or Republican. These solutions aren’t coming from Washington. Could they be greatly accelerated by Washington? Yes. You see it in countries like Germany and even in non-democratic countries like China, who have taken the lead. But just because government doesn’t take the lead doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. The poster boy for wind energy is Georgetown, TX—which has a Republican mayor and is a conservative town. It’s a Trump town. But the whole town is 100 percent renewable!
This is not a liberal or conservative agenda. This is the human agenda. When people stop for a minute and look at the solutions for what they are themselves, they’re not political. They’re actually about energy, food, water, housing, costs, etc. About
safety, human health. People vote with their dollars for what protects them, their family, their children, for what serves them.
In this book, we don’t make people wrong. We don’t demonize. It’s about the future. Nobody is right about the future. It’s about having some humility and the capacity to learn and listen. The problem isn’t Congress. It’s our conversations—how we talk to each other.
Because most of the news we get is about the corruption, ignorance, and perfidy of human beings in power, it obscures how extraordinary we are. We wanted to bring a different message—we’re actually really good people.
Green American/Tracy: Going back a bit, I loved what you said about global warming being an invitation. It’s a whole new mindset that’s very empowering.
Paul Hawken: Generally, we think of global warming as happening to us. We screwed up in the past, and we’re still screwing up. There’s an implied guilt of individuals and shaming of companies.
But we need to ask ourselves this question: Is global warming happening to us or for us? If it’s happening to you, you’re the victim and disempowered. You probably will fight or think that way. Or be angry. Or be resigned.
Or you can think about it happening for us, for you. This Earth is a system—beautiful, miraculous, intricate, extraordinarily sacred. When the weather changes, there’s feedback. Anytime you ignore feedback from a system, the system perishes. Global warming is feedback. It’s actually a gift. It’s an offering. It’s a gentle nudge.
Okay, it doesn’t feel very gentle. But if you step back, it’s a slight variation in global temperatures. Addressing it is a pathway to transformation, creating a far better civilization than the one we live in now. Far kinder, more compassionate, more inventive, cleaner, restorative. Once you think of it as for you, you can take 100 percent responsibility. It’s totally liberating to be the person who is going to address and solve something. The point is that it invites creativity, imagination, celebration. It invites you to be an extraordinary human being. It’s also about knowing that you can’t do it alone.
I’ve had the same editor for 25 years. I adore my editor, and he adores me. And my publisher, Penguin Random House, was hesitant to publish the book because climate books do not sell. The concern was that it’s another book about what global warming is and how fast it’s getting worse, that is was too expensive, a full-color book with 100 percent post-consumer waste paper. The concern was that they were going to get stuck with these books. The reason it’s out now is because the publisher at Penguin, Katherine Court, said to her people, “If we don’t publish this book, why are we here?”
It became a bestseller its first week. It went into its seventh printing in six months. The last printing was 31,000 copies—we’re printing more copies than when we started.
What it tells us is that people want to do something. We want to know what to do, and we want to do it together.
Green American/Tracy: So, if I’m wondering what to do to support Drawdown, where do I start?
Paul Hawken: Do whatever is important to you on an individual level. What we’re seeing is people getting together in different ways: They’re coming together to help us research data—we have experts and organizations from universities around the world.
People want to game-ify it for kids, so they learn how to reverse global warming. There’s been tremendous curriculum development by educators, K-12 and college.
Cities and local communities are organizing Project Drawdown action plans. There’s Drawdown Marin, Drawdown Nova Scotia. Faith communities are putting together groups. People are doing TV shows, and there’s a documentary film in the works.
We’re working with people who are making solution accelerators, developing platforms and products that are leading us to drawdown and beyond.
Then there are impact investors and family funds who are working together to seek out investments—where should we and shouldn’t we put our money to achieve drawdown.
What lights you up? Where do you go wow? Maybe it’s educating girls or literacy overall. Wherever it is, that’s where you’re understood, respected, where you have friends, and you can start there.
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