Drilling in New York
Written on January 12, 2010 at 10:45 am, by aafe
E.P.A., Concerned Over Gas Drilling, Questions New York State’s Plans
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/science/earth/31drill.html?_r=1&ref=earth
Teaching Green
Written on January 11, 2010 at 12:03 pm, by aafe
January 11, 2010
Teaching Green, Beyond Recycling
By MIREYA NAVARRO and SINDYA N. BHANOO
Jose Chirino, a 10th grader in Brooklyn with shoulder-length hair and a thin mustache, says flatly that his high school was his last choice.
“They’re experimenting on us,” he said, recalling his first impression of the Green School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which laces an environmental theme into most of its coursework.
Jennifer Auceda, 17, was similarly wary, given that she wanted to be a singer and never saw herself as a “science person.”
“I thought it was going to be about the inside of trees,” she said.
But the two reluctant recruits, who had both failed to get into the high schools they favored, said they were won over after realizing that the school casts a wide net.
Rather than simply covering predictable topics like recycling and tree planting, they say, it has alerted them to problems like sooty air and negative media representations of their neighborhoods.
“Green is not just the environment,” Jennifer said. “It’s politics, government, social justice.”
“We do a lot of things other schools are not doing,” said Jose, 15. “I feel like we’re doing something important.”
While plenty of city schools, from elementary to secondary, teach students about environmental issues like endangered species or global warming, places like the Green School put an overwhelming emphasis on civic involvement.
The students are encouraged to delve into local issues that may affect them and their families, like contamination in waterways like the Gowanus Canal, water quality or the razing of low-scale housing.
“You can’t have a kid in a violent neighborhood and say, ‘Let’s talk about the polar bear,’ ” said Karali Pitzele, one of the school’s two co-directors.
Across the nation, the range of green schools form a fledgling network, with some of them benefiting from state grants and mandates to incorporate environmental education into the curriculum.
They have found eager partners in groups like the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation, which provide lesson plans or money for field trips, and in private and government agencies that are making concerted environmental efforts in communities and cities.
Alison Suffet Diaz, founder of the Environmental Charter High School in Los Angeles, says the focus on environment hits particularly close to home in poor communities that she says are disproportionately affected by problems like contamination from industrial sites.
If grass-roots change is needed to address those issues, she said, “it can’t just be a rich person’s desire to be green.”
Still, Randall E. Solomon, executive director of the New Jersey Sustainable State Institute at Rutgers University, which guides New Jersey towns on environmental efforts, said that green schools were not just a niche phenomenon for the poor or for the wealthy. “It’s also mainstream public schools that are taking this on,” he said.
It is hard to pin down how many private, and charter and traditional public schools nationwide have adopted an environmental theme. Many are new; some have a low profile. They do not share uniform standards that define them as green.
The Green Charter Schools Network, based in Madison, Wis., says it has counted about 200 green charter schools nationwide.
In New York, the green school phenomenon feeds into an effort to break up the city’s enormous high schools into smaller learning settings, a centerpiece of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s overhaul of the school system.
At least 11 traditional and charter green schools at varying grade levels have opened in the last six years, officials at the city’s Department of Education say, while cautioning that they were counting only those that identified themselves by name as “green” or “environmental.”
Many of the schools have yet to graduate their first class, and their progress reports show grades from A to D, school officials said.
The Growing Up Green Charter School, an elementary school in Long Island City, Queens, opened in September with one kindergarten and one first grade class. It plans to expand gradually through grade five.
On a recent afternoon, in a classroom that is also home to an army of compost bin worms and a bearded dragon named Daphne, two dozen first-grade students thrust their hands into bags of potting soil while taking turns planting squash seeds, beans and corn kernels in plastic containers.
The task at hand was to answer the question of the day, posed by a sign in the back of the classroom: “How do we get our food?”
But the real point, said the children’s teacher, Michelle Robles, was to help them understand how the local environment affects food choices, and the need to tend to the soil, air, water and plants.
“If you take care of plants, they can grow and grow so we can cook them,” Alayla Mack, 6, said after the lesson.
Some green schools in New York chiefly emphasize the environmental sciences or teach skills that will prepare students for careers in renewable energy or other pillars of a greener economy.
The Urban Assembly School for Green Careers, a high school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, opened this year with a ninth-grade class and a focus on job skills needed for the design and operation of energy-efficient buildings.
Gregg Betheil, who heads the Office of Postsecondary Pathways and Planning in the city’s Department of Education, said the school sprang out of specific efforts to match secondary education to labor trends and to the city’s own goal of attracting more green industry.
Students learn hands-on skills like installing insulation and solar panels in preparation for entering the work force after graduation or pursuing college degrees in fields like engineering.
“We’ve got some schools investing in the skills kids need to compete,” Mr. Betheil said. “No way is this a fad.”
At the more civic-oriented Green School in Brooklyn, teachers send the students out into their neighborhoods to record public service announcements and videos about smoking and air pollution. They also walk the streets to map trees and trash cans, then incorporate their findings into mural sketches for geometry class.
In a recent class, students watched trailers for the films “2012,” about humans struggling to survive a global apocalypse, and “Precious,” about an abused teenager who finds a form of salvation in learning to read and write. The goal was to analyze the media messages telegraphed by the trailers before starting on their own videos.
At elementary schools, teachers in the lower grades emphasize hands-on projects like building habitats for specific environments, like teepees, or mapping the path of trash from their classroom bin to a landfill.
“It helps them learn early how their choices make an impact,” said Barbara Weber, 43, whose 6-year-old son, Lawless Morse, is in first grade at Growing Up Green in Long Island City.
Ms. Weber, a textile designer from Jackson Heights, Queens, said she had already noticed some changes in Lawless. After a week of studying habitats, she said, he asked why many homes in their neighborhood were made of brick. He also peppers her with questions about how and where various animals live.
Lawless, wearing neatly pressed khakis and a polo shirt with an embroidered “Growing Up Green” logo on a recent morning, said he really liked school.
But as it turns out, a movie — “Wall-E,” about a garbage-collecting robot on an Earth bereft of inhabitants — seems to have made an even bigger impression on him.
“All the people were gone because they littered so much,” he said. “That’s why we reduce, reuse and recycle.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/nyregion/11green.html?ref=nyregion
The Green School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
The Green School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
The Win-Win Campaign for the LES!
Written on December 15, 2009 at 3:54 pm, by aafe
The Win-Win Campaign (Win-Win) is an initiative that empowers young adults to be the drivers of sustainable change in their communities while gaining the real world, new economy skills necessary to obtain green jobs in the future. Through training and mentoring, participating interns become Community Energy Consultants (CECs) who provide access to affordable, measurable environmental and financial benefits for small businesses and other institutions in their neighborhoods.
The Win-Win Overview
The Win-Win Campaign – a program of Envirolution and powered by MakeMeSustainable.com (MMS) – is comprised of two main initiatives:
- A Green Entrepreneurship and Energy Consulting Internship Program
- Small Business Energy Efficiency Assistance Program
The fulcrum between Win-Win’s two programs is a user-friendly online Resource Management System (RMS) developed in conjunction with MakeMeSustainable.com. It tracks energy, carbon and monetary savings gained through incentivized improvement programs while familiarizing students with resource and energy management systems calibrated to Level I and Level II auditing standards. The RMS offers small business owners a one-stop online monitor of efficiency progress that can be shared with their customer-base and associated community (optional).
Council Passes Curbs on Greenhouse Gases
Written on December 10, 2009 at 12:04 pm, by aafe
Council Passes Curbs on Greenhouse Gases
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: December 9, 2009
The City Council on Wednesday approved a weakened version of an initiative to help reduce the city’s emissions of greenhouse gases, scrapping the most far-reaching requirement, which the real estate industry had called too costly.
The legislation requires owners of New York City’s largest buildings to pay for energy audits, undertake lighting upgrades and take other steps to reduce energy consumption. Under the final version, however, the owners are not required to follow through with renovations that the audits indicate would make the buildings more energy efficient.
Still, the measures, which are crucial to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s goal of shrinking New York’s carbon footprint by 30 percent by 2030, put the city at the forefront of efforts nationwide to improve the energy efficiency of buildings.
Jeffrey Harris, vice president for programs at the Alliance to Save Energy, a national group that lobbies on energy issues, called the legislation “a very significant step forward” in testing the combination of mandates and incentives that could work at a national level to encourage lower energy use in commercial and residential buildings.
“We need to find out more what works,” he said. “I hope we get lots of local jurisdictions to copy or adapt what New York City is doing. This is the time for bold experiments in building performance.”
Mr. Bloomberg said the legislative package represented the biggest step the city could take to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas linked to global warming, and called it “a crucial step in slowing climate change.”
The four bills approved by the Council are expected to reduce the city’s total carbon dioxide emissions by slightly less than 5 percent through the next two decades and eventually save $700 million a year in energy costs. They focus mostly on residential and commercial buildings larger than 50,000 square feet — about 22,000 buildings that account for almost half of all buildings-related carbon emissions from boilers, furnaces and the power plants that supply their energy.
The measures require large buildings to pay for energy audits every 10 years. Large buildings will also have to pay for “retro-commissioning,” an inspection of their heating, cooling and other energy systems to correct any waste, similar to a car tuneup.
Large commercial buildings will also be required to switch to more energy-efficient lighting, which usually accounts for about 20 percent of their energy use.
The new laws call for large commercial and residential buildings to participate in a program that will create a profile of their energy and water efficiency and make it public, which energy experts say is tantamount to disclosing the mileage per gallon for cars so consumers can compare performance.
Also, commercial building owners will have to install systems under which each tenant’s energy use is measured separately, to provide an incentive for tenants to conserve.
“We’re literally making our world-famous city skyline greener,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.
But there was considerably less enthusiasm among labor leaders and others.
Jeffrey Grabelsky, director of Cornell University’s construction industry program, called the dropping of mandatory retrofits “a disappointing retreat” and said cities must be more ambitious in using mandates and financial incentives to make a dent in energy use and generate jobs.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/nyregion/10green.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion
Bloomberg and Aides Going to Copenhagen
Written on December 9, 2009 at 10:41 am, by aafe
Bloomberg and Aides Going to Copenhagen
By DAVID W. CHEN
Published: December 8, 2009
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg needs his passport again — but this time, it’s for official business.
The mayor’s office said on Tuesday that Mr. Bloomberg and some of his top aides would attend the United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen next Monday and Tuesday.
His schedule, for now, includes delivering a speech at a reception for mayors and other delegates, and attending another reception for 100 mayors from around the world who are taking steps locally to address climate change.
New York is one of 10 cities (Los Angeles is the only other American one) to have been selected for an interactive exhibition called “Future City,” highlighting local initiatives. The city will outline its attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and energy use in buildings under a plan that the City Council was expected to approve on Wednesday, said Jason Post, a spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg.
Mr. Bloomberg was expected to be accompanied on the Copenhagen trip — which he will pay for, as he has for previous trips — by Rohit T. Aggarwala, director of the mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability; Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey; and Stu Loeser, the mayor’s press secretary. Others may go as well, but “we haven’t finalized the itinerary or the roster yet,” Mr. Post said.
It was not clear, for instance, whether the city’s new environmental commissioner — Caswell F. Holloway IV, a top City Hall aide with a thin environmental résumé — would go. Nor was it known whether the first deputy mayor, Patricia E. Harris, would join them.
The trip gives the mayor a chance to spotlight his environmental record, which has been praised by former Vice President Al Gore and the U2 frontman Bono, among others.
Several environmental groups staged a City Hall rally on Monday to support the legislative package, even though the mayor did back down on one emissions initiative, which would have required owners of buildings of 50,000 square feet or more to pay for renovations to make the buildings more energy-efficient, as determined by audits.
The visit will be Mr. Bloomberg’s first official overseas trip since January, when he went to Israel. But it will not be his first time out of the country since he won a third term last month; he and his companion, Diana L. Taylor, flew to Paris on the weekend of Nov. 14 and dined along the Seine on Île St.-Louis. The mayor is also fond of retreating to his beachfront home in Bermuda.
Mr. Post said he did not know where the mayor and the city’s delegation would stay because logistics were still being ironed out. In the past, Mr. Bloomberg, who flies his staff on his private jet, has not skimped. City officials have stayed in luxury hotels like the King David in Jerusalem, the Four Seasons in London and the InterContinental in Paris.
A great article about carbon emissions from the NYT!
Written on December 8, 2009 at 3:25 pm, by aafe
E.P.A. Sets Carbon Crackdown
By JOHN M. BRODER The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday will complete its determination that greenhouse gases pose a danger to human health and the environment, paving the way for regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles, power plants, factories refineries and other major sources.The agency finding also will allow Mr. Obama to tell delegates at the United Nations climate change conference that began today in Copenhagen that the United States is moving aggressively to address the problem.
The E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, is expected to announce the step at a news conference this afternoon in Washington.
The move gives President Obama a significant tool to combat the gases blamed for the heating of the planet even while Congress remains stalled on economy-wide global warming legislation.
The Obama administration has signaled its intent to issue a so-called endangerment finding for carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases since taking office in January. Ms. Jackson announced a proposed finding in April and has taken steps to implement the rules that would be needed to back it up.
The administration has wielded the finding as a prod to Congress to act on legislation, saying in effect that if lawmakers do not act to control greenhouse gas pollution they will use their rule-making power to do so. At the same time, the president and his top environmental aides have frequently said that they prefer such a major step be taken through the give-and-take of the legislative process.
The administration struck a deal with automakers in the spring to set stricter tailpipe emissions and higher fuel economy standards as part of the greenhouse gas regulation efforts. The E.P.A. has also announced rules requiring all major emitters to report an annual inventory of emissions.
In late September, the agency announced a proposed “tailoring rule,” that limits regulation of climate-altering gases to large stationary sources such as coal-burning power plants and cements kilns that produce 25,000 or more tons a year of carbon emissions.
Industry groups and the United States Chamber of Commerce have objected to the proposed regulations, saying they would damage the economy and drive jobs overseas. Some groups are likely to file lawsuits challenging the new regulations, which could delay their effective date for years.
Thomas J. Donohue, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, said that the endangerment finding “could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project.” He said that his group supports “rational” federal legislation and an international agreement to control global carbon emissions.
“The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don’t stifle our economic recovery,” Mr. Donohue said.
Source: http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/epa-sets-carbon-crackdown/?hp
A Video on the Spring 2009 It’s My Park Day!
Written on November 3, 2009 at 10:17 am, by aafe
Check out the following video on It’s My Park Day!