Dallas Trees' E-News of the Day, July 2 - The First Pillar of Green Dallas Is...

privet...no, trees! Trees!!

DALLAS OBSERVER (UNFAIR PARK BLOG)
Is the City of Dallas Really Going Green, Or Just Talking Till It's Blue In The Face?
"If you want to be successful, you have to link economic development with environmental sustainability," (Pamela) Tate told the audience. "The two can coexist and benefit each other."
"Everybody's going to do energy efficiency," Tate said. "You have to do that; it's the first pillar of green. But that is just step one."
Apparently, she never read E. F. Schumacher on secondary (human) and primary (nature) goods.  The first pillar of green? What's too often left out in discussions on Green Dallas is the obvious primary core of green in the environment - it's urban forest. Green Dallas' first pillar is a sustainable forest and its conservation.  If that is not maintained, all profit derived of green 'engineering' is diminished.


Happy Trails? Not Without These Students Spending Their Summers In The Sun.

Going Green While Making Green? WSJ Ponders Bush Turnpike's Toll Collection.

DALLAS MORNING NEWS
City to North Haven Gardens: Don't Sell Chicks.

What makes East Texas tomatoes so good? The soil.

TEXAS ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT BLOG (DMN)
Why the energy bill faces a tough senate fight.

EPA
EPA and business group reach important agreement concerning timing of EPA review of Texas Air Program.
"The process that follows this agreement will help Texas’ businesses obtain clarity in the state of Texas’ clean air permitting requirements by providing a timetable for EPA’s review of the state’s clean-air program. Texas has about 1,500 facilities classified as major sources of air pollution under the federal Clean Air Act. Others, including City of Houston and citizen groups, have echoed concerns over the Texas Air permitting program. The actions taken by EPA under this agreement will help to address their concerns by making Texas' permit process more transparent, and ensuring the Texas' program has all the environmental protections required by federal law."


NPR
Hundreds of California Homeless March for Land Rights.

CLIMATE PROGRESS
ENERGY AND GLOBAL WARMING NEWS FOR JULY 2

Honey, I Shrunk The GOP, Part 1: Conservatives vow to purge all members who support clean energy or science-based policy.

GREENER BUILDINGS
Cement Industry Energy and CO2 Performance: Getting The Numbers Right
"This report from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development's Cement Sustainability Initiative summarizes the work thus far in the nearly 3-year-old effort by the council and the industry's largest companies to make global cement production cleaner and greener.

The manufacturing of cement is responsible for about 5 percent of the world's CO2 emissions. And the three largest producers are China, the top producer, followed by India and the United States. Reducing CO2 emissions in cement production is an important factor in combatting climate change because the industry is expected to double by 2030."


ENERGY BULLETIN
PEAK OIL NOTES - July 2
"So far this week, oil prices have been moved by the fate of the US economy, militant attacks in Nigeria, the dollar, IEA consumption forecasts, and US stockpiles. The week opened with prices around $69 a barrel, made it above $73 and closed Wednesday back at $69.

In Nigeria, the militants continue attacks aimed at completely stopping oil exports and they appear to be making good progress. Shell says its production is down to 140,000 b/d from 999,000 b/d back in 2003 and a local newspaper reports that the company is reducing its operations in the Niger Delta. There is still oil waiting to be loaded at costal terminals, but the outlook is for considerably lower exports later this summer. Given that the worldwide demand for oil is weak and the size of the spare production capacity now available, Nigerian production can probably continue to fall without much influence on prices US demand for oil products, now averaging 18.4 million b/d, is down by 5.8 percent from last year. The weakness is still in distillates, which are closely tied to economic activity, and jet fuel. US distillate stocks have been rising steadily since last October and now stand at 155 million barrels -- 34 million higher than at this time last year."


Energy Companies - July 2
"BP has shut down its alternative energy headquarters in London, accepted the resignation of its clean energy boss and imposed budget cuts in moves likely to be seen by environmental critics as further signs of the oil group moving "back to petroleum".


"The world's largest oil company (ExxonMobil) is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial, a new analysis shows."


Debt, Oil and Healthcare Reform

"Congressman John Conyers recently quipped that most healthcare reform proposals circulating in Washington are a “cacophony of crap” that evade acknowledging medical care as a human right. With Canada across the Detroit River from his impoverished congressional district he knows firsthand how the Canadian health system bests its American counterpart. It’s cheaper by half; covers everyone; citizens don’t worry about bankruptcy –they merely get treatment as needed; and the politician who brought it into existence four decades ago, Tommy Douglas, was named the most important Canadian of all time (Wayne Gretzky finished second).

Ironically, Conyers’ National Health Insurance Act (HR 676) as currently envisioned, shares a premise with those he mocks. All sides of the reform debate presuppose a return to economic growth. It follows that none confronts the possibility that our massive debt and economic woes are not temporary but the beginning of an epochal transition to a reduced level of social complexity and economic activity, which translates into a lower standard of material living that cannot support the present structure of medicine.

Indeed, most of the reformers who claim healthcare is a human right see discussions about fiscal limits as a stealth way to kill reform. And those willing only to tinker with the financing of system assume a return to economic growth will allow healthcare to continue more or less as is. With its cost at about $2 trillion in 2008 and projected to climb to $4 trillion by 2015, attempting to maintain the current system will result in, in my view, one of two unacceptable outcomes: 1) healthcare only for the wealthy or 2) a crash of the system. There is a third way still possible, and it builds on Conyers’ plan with an acknowledgement that our present “Ferrari-Jalopy” (a nod to Congressman Roscoe Bartlett for this metaphor) health system is no longer viable. We should build a Honda Civic health system for all; it’s the best realistic chance we have."

United States - July 2

Where Economics Fails

MONGABAY
A Tasmanian Tragedy? : How the forestry industry has torn an island apart.

869 species extinct, 17,000 threatened with extinction

YALE ENVIRONMENT 360
Environmental Toll of Plastics

WORLD BUSINESS COUNCIL FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
US seen backing 2 degrees Celsius target at G8

THE WORLD BANK
Global Economic Turmoil Having Dramatic Effects On Capital Flows To Developing Countries.

DISCOVERY NEWS
Vegans have lower bone density.

EUREKALERT GOODY BAG
New type of El Nino could mean more hurricanes make landfall.
El Niño years typically result in fewer hurricanes forming in the Atlantic Ocean. But a new study suggests that the form of El Niño may be changing potentially causing not only a greater number of hurricanes than in average years, but also a greater chance of hurricanes making landfall, according to climatologists at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The study appears in the July 3, 2009, edition of the journal Science.


Plants' internal clock can improve climate-change models.
The ability of plants to tell the time, a mechanism common to all living beings, enables them to survive, grow and reproduce. In a study published in the latest issue of the prestigious journal Ecology Letters, an international team has studied this circadian clock from a molecular viewpoint and has found an ecological implication: it makes climate change scenarios and CO2 level figures more accurate.

The team of scientists suggests this regulation should be included in climate models based on the study of plant life in order to obtain better and more accurate results. "A normal climate change model would forecast photosynthesis to be uniform between 6am and 10am in a tropical forest if environmental conditions (light, humidity, temperature, etc) are constant. However, as plants have a circadian clock, photosynthesis is seen to increase during that time of the day", the ecologist states.

According to the scientists, the circadian clock may well be the key for plants to survive a rise in temperatures. Plants without optimised circadian regulation will have "more difficulty to adjust to climate changes and survive the stress". The team now encourages further research from an ecological viewpoint, as "the value of this topic has been underestimated."