Category: Green Hell

Girl Scouts: Badges Out, Green In

The Washington Post reported this morning that the Girls Scouts are trying to revive flagging interest in the group by de-emphasizing merit badges and emphasizing green activities:

… What’s in: books and blogs written in girls’ voices on topics such as environmental awareness and engineering; troops led by college students; videoconferencing with scouts in other countries…

The biggest change is last year’s debut of Journeys, a pilot curriculum that will mostly replace the system of earning badges on specific topics. Girls still will be able to earn badges if they want, but Journeys rarely mentions them, focusing instead on broader themes, including teamwork and healthy living. Rather than scouts earning a badge for cooking a single nutritious meal, for example, the books emphasize fruits and vegetables whenever food is mentioned…

Many lessons focus on changing the world in measurable, modern ways. Recycling is still an important part of lessons on helping the environment, but some troops also install solar panels and test water quality in rivers.

This is not surprising given its source: the Girl Scouts hired the global PR firm Ogilvy & Mather, which went green last year according to this April 28, 2008 report in The Australian:

Last week, public relations firm Ogilvy launched its new brand OgilvyEarth to better position itself in the growing green communications and brand management markets. It released results of a survey of more than 50 companies about their attitudes to green branding and the risk of green wash. More than three-quarters think having a positive environmental brand will be essential to their business case within 10 years.

While 90 per cent said they had never been accused of green washing themselves, 98 per cent said it existed in corporate Australia, and 74 per cent said it was intentional.

It’s a shame that the Girl Scouts want to throw out their heritage and reputation in the greenwash.

Also, should we buy Girl Scout Cookies to support Ogilvy & Mather and its program to green our daughters?

Take Action:

Send your thoughts to Connie Lindsey (cl5@ntrs.com), the Chair of the Girls Scouts National Board of Directors. You may want to cc Davia Temin (dtemin@teminandco.com), the Board’s First Vice President.

Tax green propaganda?

The Washington Post again editorialized today in favor of taxing us by the mile driven instead of by the gallon of gas purchased.

Appearing near the Post editorial is a letter from Gerry Rosenthal of Great Falls, Virgina:

Perhaps there should be a tax on every editorial you write. Then you would feel the pain of being charged just for doing your job. I drive to visit my clients regularly, to generate income. The last thing I need is to be penalized for getting out there to support my family.

Your focus is misguided. The auto manufacturers’ lack of ingenuity should be the target, not me.

A further thought. Many people get their copies of the Washington Post by home delivery, which inevitably involves somene driving a car. Leave it to the liberal media to advocate a tax that would hurt its own employees and business. No wonder newspapers are dying.

Congress chokes on greening itself

The Washington Post reported today that

The U.S. House of Representatives has abandoned a plan to make its offices “carbon neutral,” a sign that Congress is wrestling with a pledge to become more green even as it crafts sweeping legislation on climate change.

The promise that the House would effectively reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to zero was a centerpiece of the Green the Capitol program in which the new Democratic leadership sought to use Capitol Hill as a kind of a national demonstration project.

But last week, a spokesman for the House’s chief administrative officer said the chamber’s leadership had dropped an essential part of the plan, the purchase of “carbon offsets” to cancel out emissions from its buildings. Offsets are a controversial commodity that promises that a certain amount of pollution was captured or avoided elsewhere.

“Right now, there is no plan to purchase more offsets,” spokesman Jeff Ventura said. The House paid $89,000 for offsets to cover the last session, in 2007 and 2008.

The decision comes as legislators also struggle with the future of the Capitol Power Plant: Hundreds of demonstrators with Greenpeace, the Rainforest Action Network and other groups will protest tomorrow against the plant’s continued use of coal.

Nancy Pelosi’s message seems to be, “green for thee but not for me.”

Charmin ‘worse’ than Hummers?

As part of the ongoing green attack on our potty habits, The Guardian (UK) has this quote from Allen Hershkowitz, a “senior scientist” with the Natural Resources Defense Council:

“Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution… People just don’t understand that softness equals ecological destruction.”

Reusable toilet wipes?

Wallypop, purveyor of goods “supporting a natural lifestyle” is selling cloth toilet wipes. Wallypop says:

Using cloth toilet wipes actually has many advantages. For one, it’s a lot more comfortable and soft on your most delicate body parts. It’s also more economical, uses less paper, and saves you those late-night trips to the store.

Here’s how you use them, according to Wallypop:

Using cloth wipes for urine-only visits to the bathroom is so simple it’s hardly worth mentioning. Go, wipe, and then toss the wipe into whatever container you prefer.

Using cloth wipes for other toilet visits is not any more difficult, but there is a certain ick factor involved. Consider how much waste you’re willing to leave on your children’s diapers or wipes when you toss them in the pail. Use the same standards for yourself. Shake, scrape, swish, or squirt off anything you don’t want in your laundry, and then toss the wipe into the pail or container. (Personally speaking, we just wipe and toss in the pail. Our wipes have minimal staining.)

As Andrew Bolt commented,

Surely it’s time global warming believers marked their houses with some sign, a green pentangle or something, as a warning to visitors to enter at their own risk.

Recycle urine?

Rose George opined in today’s New York Times that we should recycle urine.

IN the far reaches of Shaanxi Province in northern China, in an apple-producing village named Ganquanfang, I recently visited a house belonging to two cheery primary-school teachers, Zhang Min Shu and his wife, Wu Zhaoxian. Their house wasn’t exceptional — a spacious yard, several rooms — except for the bathroom. There, up a few steps on a tiled platform, sat a toilet unlike any I’d seen. Its pan was divided in two: solid waste went in the back, and the front compartment collected urine. The liquids and solids can, after a decent period of storage and composting, be applied to the fields as pathogen-free, expense-free fertilizer.

From being unsure of wanting a toilet near the house in the first place — which is why the bathroom is at the far end of their courtyard — the couple had become so delighted with it that they regretted not putting it next to the kitchen after all.

What does this have to do with you? Mr. Zhang and Ms. Wu’s weird toilet — known as a “urine diversion,” or NoMix (after a Swedish brand), toilet — may have things to teach us all.

Though George advocates urine diversion toilets, she acknowledges there could be a problem with them:

Then there’s the sitting problem: in most urine-diversion toilets, a man must empty his bladder sitting down. This wouldn’t be a problem in some countries — Germany recently introduced a toilet-seat alarm that admonishes standers to sit — but it has been in others. Professor Jenssen was flummoxed by one participant at a training workshop in Cuba who said firmly, “If a man sits, he is homosexual.”

First, the greens came for our 3.5 gallon flush toilets. Now they want our flush toilets. What’s next? Just hold it?

Greens come after your Charmin

The New York Times reports this morning that,

… The country’s soft-tissue habit — call it the Charmin effect — has not escaped the notice of environmentalists, who are increasingly making toilet tissue manufacturers the targets of campaigns. Greenpeace on Monday for the first time issued a national guide for American consumers that rates toilet tissue brands on their environmental soundness. With the recession pushing the price for recycled paper down and Americans showing more willingness to repurpose everything from clothing to tires, environmental groups want more people to switch to recycled toilet tissue.

“No forest of any kind should be used to make toilet paper,” said Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and waste expert with the Natural Resource Defense Council…

Environmental groups… are hoping that Americans will become as conscious of the environmental effects of their toilet tissue use as they are about light bulbs or other products.

Dr. Hershkowitz is pushing the high-profile groups he consults with, including Major League Baseball, to use only recycled toilet tissue. At the Academy Awards ceremony last Sunday, the gowns were designer originals but the toilet tissue at the Kodak Theater’s restrooms was 100 percent recycled…

Marcal, the oldest recycled-paper maker in the country, emerged from bankruptcy under new management last year with a plan to spend $30 million on what is says will be the first national campaign to advertise a toilet tissue’s environmental friendliness. Marcal’s new chief executive, Tim Spring, said the company had seen intense interest in the new product from chains like Walgreens. The company will introduce the new toilet tissue in April, around Earth Day…

“Our idea is that you don’t have to spend extra money to save the Earth,” [Mr. Spring] said. “And people want to know what happens to the paper they recycle. This will give them closure.”

“Closure” about toilet paper?

Government commission urges taxing drivers by-the-mile

A week after Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood floated the idea of taxing drivers by-the-mile-driven rather than by-the-gallon-of-gas-purchased and the White House’s near-immediate denial that such a tax was under consideration, a federal commission has recommended just such as tax.

In a report released today, the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission recommended that,

A federal funding system based on more direct forms of “user pay” charges, in the form of a charge for each mile driven (commonly referred to as a vehicle miles traveled or VMT fee system),
has emerged as the consensus choice for the future…

Commence the transition to a new, more direct user charge system as soon as possible and commit to deploying a comprehensive system by 2020…

Ensure that, once implemented, mileage-based fees and any other charges are set to meet the
designated federal share of national surface transportation investment needs, and index these rates to inflation.

Initiate an extensive public outreach effort to create a broad understanding of the current funding
problem, the proposed solution, the intended method of implementation, and the anticipated
impact on individual system users.

So the government plans on monitoring how much you drive and taxing you on that basis. Note that fuel efficient vehicles won’t save you from the tax.

The Commission’s report is available here.

Lefties recommend insulating poor from climate costs

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think-tank, has issued a new report concluding that global warming policies

…will significantly raise the price of fossil-fuel energy products — from home energy and gasoline to food and other goods and services with significant energy inputs… They will… cut into consumers’ budgets…

For the 60 million Americans in the bottom quintile of income (about $15,000 annually for a family of three), the CBPP says that

even a modest 15 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would cost them an average of $750 a year in higher energy-related prices that result from the emissions cap.

The CBPP recommends that these families receive tax rebates to compensate them for the effects of higher energy prices.

Read the full CBPP report…

Pickens says no one opposes his ‘Plan’

T. Boone Pickens said in an interview this morning on CNBC that,

… but know this… we’ve never had a person that stands up and says your plan is not good. Nobody has said that… I don’t know… there’s not many op-ed pieces or any thing…

But Steve Milloy has written six FoxNews.com columns critical of the Pickens Plan — one of which Pickens’ team responded to on FoxNews.com.

The Cato Institute’s Jerry Taylor has been critical of the Pickens Plan here and here.

Reece Epstein and David Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research have a lengthy critique here.

Here’s a Wall Street Journal article about Pickens’ critics, who include FedEX CEO Fred Smith and former Kansas governor Bill Graves, who now heads the American Trucking Association.

There are plenty more who have stood up against the Pickens Plan. Yet Pickens denies their existence in his effort to “swiftboat” America into his make-Boone-richer-scheme.

Why doesn’t Al Gore get this question?

In its Feb. 22 interview of Dambisa Moyo, an African activist (the Anti-Bono) who condemns Western aid to Africa as perpetuating poverty, New York Times Magazine reporter Deborah Solomon asked Moyo whether she had a financial interest in a microfinance company mentioned in the interview.

Why is Al Gore never asked about his financial interests? He is, after all, a partner in UK-based Generation Investment Management and in the U.S.-based venture capital outfit, Kleiner Perkins. When Al Gore testified in the Senate in January, he never mentioned, and no Senator asked about the billions of dollars his firms stand to make off global warming regulations.

Are only politically incorrect activists suspected of profiteering?