At this point soda really shouldn't even be appetizing. As we all know, it's full of empty calories from high-fructose corn syrup, rots your teeth, causes childhood obesity, blah blah blah. So why do I still find myself circling back to the nutritional wasteland that is Safeway's soda aisle? I'll tell you why: cherry coke. It's been a favorite treat since I was a teenager, and despite my best intentions, I don't think I'm going to give it up any time soon. I figure since I can't do anything about how bad soda is for me, I'll at least try to make it a little better for the planet. Our friends at AltUse have a bunch of good ideas for reusing empty plastic soda bottles:

1. Keep your yarn tangle-free: With a box cutter, carefully cut a large door in the side of the bottle. Insert your yarn into the bottle through the door. (You can tape it shut if you wish.) Reach into the spout, grab the end of the yarn, and pull it through. You can put the top back on the bottle when you want to store your yarn.

2. Make a funnel: Create a make-shift funnel by cutting the top off of a plastic bottle.

3. Water your plants automatically while you're away: Make a small pin hole on the bottom side of the bottle. Fill it up with water. Leave the water bottle inside a plant pot, hole side down. Water will slowly leak out. Lasts for about three days.

4. Keep your picnic cold: Make ice cubes that don't drip: Fill empty plastic water bottles and then put 'em in the freezer. Be sure to leave some room for the water to expand as it freezes.

5. Trap wasps. Cut the top off a bottle. Put something sweet into the bottom, then insert the cut-off portion back into the bottle, but upside down. Tape it in place. Wasps come in, but they can't get out.


Tsunami Animations

NOAA's Center for Tsunami Research has generated some impressive animations of the February 27th Chilean tsunami. There are actually several animations, though you'll need to go to the NOAA website to play them. One is a wave amplitude animation. Another's a wave amplitude over time animation, but with a more wavelike look to it. There are also energy propagation plots displayed on Google maps or on Google Earth.

From the NOAA Chile event page:




A new ad campaign ties American oil dependence to Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and IEDs, making the security case for Congress to pass a climate and energy bill this year. The ads, from progressive veteran group VoteVets, show Iraq war veteran Christopher Miller over images of explosions and armed insurgents. The argument: this isn’t just about polar bears and melting ice caps. Passing energy legislation is an issue of national defense.

"That's the type of IED that earned me a purple heart in Iraq six years ago," says Miller, as images of military vehicles exploding run behind him. And every time oil goes up a dollar, he says, hostile countries like Iran get "another $1.5 billion to use against us."

"Connection between oil and the enemy couldn't be clearer," Miller continues. "We need to break that connection by breaking our addiction. And we can by passing a clean energy climate plan. It would cut our dependence on foreign oil in half.”

The ads are running in eight states and the District of Columbia. VoteVets released similarly provocative ads last month tying the Detroit bomber to energy concerns. Here's the ad:






"The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans. Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap."

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area encompassing more than three-quarter million square miles of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean—three times larger than the nearby Siberian wetlands formerly considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane.

Shakhova’s research shows the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already emitting 7 teragrams (1 teragram = 1.1 million tons) of methane yearly, about as much as the all the oceans of the world.

"Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already," says Shakhova. "If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger."

From 2003 through 2008 the researchers took annual research cruises on the shelf, sampling seawater at various depths, and sampling the air above the ocean. Their findings:

  • In the air directly above the ocean surface, methane levels were elevated overall and the seascape was dotted with more than 100 hotspots. (This, combined with results from a winter expedition, showed the methane is not only being dissolved in the water but also bubbling out into the atmosphere as well.)
  • Methane levels throughout the Arctic are usually 8 to 10 percent higher than the global baseline, yet those registered over the East Siberian Arctic Shelf rose another 5 to 10 percent higher than that.

In the shallow waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, methane doesn’t have enough time to oxidize, and more of it rises to the surface and escapes into the atmosphere. That fact, combined with the sheer amount of methane in the region, adds an extreme volatility to this uncalculated variable in the climate models.


Activists wearing face masks and haz-mat suits dumped a pile of sewage sludge on the steps of San Francisco's city hall today to protest the city's practice of marketing the material to home gardeners as "organic compost." The US Department of Agriculture's organic standards explicity prohibit organic produce from being grown on sludge-treated land.  "The City of San Francisco owes an apology to all of the food consumers in California who have been eating non-organic food grown on sewage sludge," said Ronnie Cummins, president of the Organic Consumers Association. He was wearing a haz-mat suit on which he'd written a message to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom: "Organic gardens aren't toxic waste dumps."

Using sludge as fertilizer is a common practice; more than half of the sewage produced in America ends up being treated and applied to gardens and farmland. The EPA considers sludge to be safe, but many food activists and some of the EPA's own scientists disagree, pointing out that it can contain trace amounts of almost anything that gets poured down the drain, from heavy metals to endocrine disruptors--and that only a portion of these contaminants are screened for in sludge. (For more on the safety of sludge, check out "Sludge Happens" in our May/June 2009 issue).

The confusion over San Francisco's "organic" sludge isn't unique. The USDA doesn't regulate which fertilizers can be labeled as organic, allowing anyone to use the term. But Cummins says it's particularly misleading to apply the "organic" term to treated sewage sludge, which has been known to contain high levels of pollutants such PFOAs and flame retardants. Mother Jones' report that President Obama's "organic" White House vegetable garden was planted on sludge-treated land led to considerable outcry last year. In response to complaints from organic gardeners who say they were duped and to this CBS news segment, San Francisco has at least temporary suspended its public "compost giveaway events" and announced that it will no longer call the material "organic."

Still, Cummins wants San Francisco to stop using sludge as fertilizer and to help gardeners who accepted the material clean up their land. To press his case, he poured some sludge into a jars and marched into Newsom's office, still wearing his haz-mat suit and a pair of safety goggles. After a moment, mayoral representative David Miree appeared and Cummins gifted him with the sludge sample. "Be careful with this stuff," Cummins said. Another activist offered Miree her safety gloves.  He politely declined them, but rather than holding the jars, walked out with them loaded into a garbage can.


His reason? To "protect clean coal state economies." Of course, "clean coal" doesn’t actually exist yet. The entire press release on his bill is a study in wishful thinking. "Today, we took important action to safeguard jobs, the coal industry, and the entire economy as we move toward clean coal technology," said Rockefeller. The release continues: "Senator Rockefeller has been working to protect West Virginia clean coal and secure the economies in clean coal states." If you repeat the phrase enough times, will it actually become real?

Rockefeller's bill is just another delay on rules that his colleague, Robert Byrd, has said the coal industry should accept as inevitable and necessary. The EPA is moving forward on regulations under the Clean Air Act because the Senate has so far not passed a new law. Rockefeller has not so far been supportive of congressional actions. He said he had "serious concerns" about the House-passed cap-and-trade bill that would, incidentally, direct a whopping $60 billion to carbon-capture-and-sequestration, aka "clean coal," technologies.



This is just the latest in a growing bipartisan attempt to block the EPA. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is leading efforts to nullify the agency’s finding that gases threaten human health, the precursor to legislation. She has support from Democrats Mary Landrieu (La.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.). And on the House side, Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) and Jo Anne Emerson (R-Mo.) have introduced identical legislation, as has the GOP caucus. Murkowski called Rockefeller's legislation "further evidence of the growing, bipartisan, and bicameral resistance to EPA's back-door climate regulations" in a statement. She said she would support his bill, while keeping her disapproval resolution on reserve in case his failes.

Environmental groups argue that Rockefeller might as well have joined Murkowski's efforts. "In our view, there is little difference between no action for two years and no action ever on solving the climate crisis,” said Joe Mendelson, director of global warming policy at the National Wildlife Federation.

















