Current Green Blog

David de Rothschild and Jo Royle explain a few details about the unique elements that go into preparing for their trip across the pacific on a boat made from plastic bottles.
In this short segment Jo discusses what it takes to navigate the unique design of the boat, and how their plans to grow their food on board.

If you want to check out a few things that were referenced in the interview: check out Novella Carpenter’s blog on urban  gardening: Ghost Town Farm.

To learn more about vertical gardens, check out this article on DIY vertical gardens made out of shoe organizer, or you can check out this video of vertical garden we stumbled across at Bioneers last year.

And to hear David from Inka Bioshpheric Systems describe their vertical garden system check out this video:

Meanwhile, to see more interviews with David and Jo about their adventures with Plastiki, check this out:

Meet the Plastic Pirates of Plastiki: David de Rothschild and Jo Royle

David de Rothschild and Jo Royle take on the perils of plastic

DIY: How to make a boat from reused bottles sail to Australia

And so now the green movement is being marketed to men.

Or so Audi  pretends in their Superbowl ad for their TDI Diesel (which can be converted to a biodiesel if you have a station in your home town).

Ya know, I like that Audi makes TDI’s. I do.

I hate this ad.

While on the surface it almost looks like a PSA that educates about the basic environmental practices in re: to plastics, battery recycling, composting, Styrofoam and water usage; after viewing it I walked away with the odd association of feeling constricted and constrained by doing all of those small daily practices for the environment. What’s up with police state over monitoring my every move? (At least I would have gotten a laugh if they had broken in on a sex seen for some un-green sex practices…that’s SuperBowl Sunday appropriate, no?)

Frankly, I walked away with an anti-green feeling and irritation towards anyone between me and my ability to do the basic little things I enjoy in life (like eating, and grocery shopping, and hot-tubbing). Look Audi, go ahead and make your cars, but don’t go and F up all the work that so many environmental organizations have been developing to promote and educate that small changes in every day life can be easy to do and can make a difference!

The need for liberation and freedom imprinted in the man’s DNA (this we have all been taught by car commercials) was finally accomplished wby breaking out of the line and driving the open road in Audi’s “green” car. Awesome. So this wasn’t about being green, this was just about a need for speed, and escape from the entrapment of family (perhaps I’m being harsh, perhaps this is really a pro-marriage ad….maybe the real underlying message is If you only  had a woman to deal with all of those domestic chores you wouldn’t get stuck in silly entrapments and have more opportunity to roam the open road…)

Bah. Enough over analyzing. It’s kind of sad that I feel the need to dig deep into this ad to find some underlying messaging. But I offer this act of mindsturbation as a favor to Audi;  otherwise all that would be left to say is, hey look, there goes Audi greenwashing (c’mon guys, driving a car is just plain wasteful and harmful to the environment). So do us a favor, stick to selling your cars via the messaging about  freedom and liberation that comes with having a car. Leave the environmental messaging to people who..well…care.

Believe me, we’ll respect you for it in the morning.

Related content:

Pets and the Environment: The Carbon Paw Print

Why I’m not an activist: and finding the “YES!” in 350.org

The earth is our host and we are one helluva mega coven of vampires

On my first open water dive in Hawaii I swam near a shark. Even though it demonstrated nothing but shy and skiddish behavior I couldn’t get that d#!# Jaws theme music out of my head. And for good reason, when most people hear the word shark, they think about the Great White shark, the king of the oceans, the top predator on the planet.

While attending the Ocean Film Festival this weekend I watched Requiem (while the film was too long and required patience to endure inexperienced filmmaking), it was worth it to see the awesome underwater footage as the filmmaker followed an underwater photographer from Hawaii as she familiarized herself with with the  beauty, power and skills of one of the most infamous classification of sharks – the REQUIEM Family.

The film was filled with plenty of staggering facts such as three sharks are killed every second, 1 million are killed a year, and a myriad of fun comparison stats that compared shark attacks to the regular hazards on living on land such as in 1991 there were 1,300 deaths by bicycles and 4 deaths by sharks. The most staggering information was that many sharks are caught only to have their fins removed and then thrown back in the water and that while there is 350 or so species of sharks, 79 are imperiled.

Why should we care about these giants in the ocean that most of us will never come in contact with? Well…because they are what is considered a “keystone species“, in other words, they have a major influence on their entire environment. At the sustainable seafood pannel the following example was provided to illustrate the role and influence of sharks in the ecosystem:  when the sharks disappear, there is an abundance of weak and diseased fish, which then influences the rate of the algae, which in turn influences the amount of oxygen in the water, which then influences the ability for all species in the area to survive. So in other words, if you want to keep eating your salmon and halibut,  you might want to consider making sure that we don’t kill off all of the sharks.

How can you engage?

1. Learn more at wildaid, Monterey Bay Aquarium,  Adopt A Shark, or the Shark Foundation.

2. Help get the information out to countries who are affected by the actions of their government but might not have access to the information (hello Twitter. We got a small thrill when one of our tweets about sea horse annihilation was translated and retweeted in Japanese, given that at the sustainable seafood panel one of the speakers stated that they did not have an education system in place to inform the Japanese population about the effects of the Japanese government policies).

3. Contact your local seafood restaurants and educate them about the dangers of shark fin soup. I felt a little nieve and shocked to find out that they serve shark fin soup right here in San Francisco (and if you want to get really crazy, start a campaign that educates the consumers at the restaurant about the dangers of shark fin soup).

Number of sharks that died while you read this post: approx 120

Related Content:

Paradise Lost: 2 films about the oceans that are flying under the radar: To Save a Whale and a profile of Sylvia Earle

Raw interview with Bryant Austin about photographing and swimming with whales

Welcoming the Environmental Journalist to the Endangered Species List

Sea Lions, sharks, and swimming with whales! Oh my! The Ocean Film Festival has arrived.

In the closing hours of 2009, people from around the world gathered to witness and attempt to influence the activities of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 5th Meeting of the Parties (COP/MOP 5) to the Kyoto Protocol.

Current Green called into Copenhagen each day to get the perspective of activists, policy experts, and environmental enthusiasts.

We circled ’round and asked the people we interviewed to check back in with us and give us their 20/20 perspective on their experience. Our first entry comes from Kevin Buckland, the art ambassador for 350.org, Kevin was featured in a crowd pleasing segment that featured…dancing penguins.

Kevin’s update:

In the cold memory of Copenhagen there is a story the delegates never saw. They missed the story that is writing itself in the arms and eyes of those who shall inherit this earth. And they are not meek. The future is not being written for them, but by them – and they are not waiting for permission because they are not asking permission. You do not need permission to survive.
As the lines of the illiterate UN documents sprawls across the pages of years, as the UN debates, as the oceans warm, as nothing changes the changing – there is no need to wait for permission, because there is no question to be asked. For no question can be asked aloud without the same carbon and oxygen breathe that answers itself. You do not ask about survival, you survive. We survive.
In Copenhagen the past attempted to create the future, but this is not the way things work. The past does not create the future; the future becomes the past –stories get written backwards, and retrospectively. For all their planning and pouring over the careful words that led to a long declaration of nothing, the delegations missed the future slowly claiming the present.

As the delegates rang for room service – the future was sweeping the years from abandoned factory floors. The dust lay deep, but many hands cleaned the many windows and let in the light air of change. They cleaned the floors where thousands of unknown but caring bodies would come to sleep; bodies that had hitched through winter days, slept on trains, piled into cars and across illegal borders. They came because they knew they had to, because the future is in motion, like a flock of birds it steers the wind.
As the delegates’ carbon planes landed and oil limousines idled outside airports, the future walked their backpacks and bodies the last few kilometers to a place where they had been told they could sleep: for the promise of a roof to house their dreams of change.
If the delegates had to clean the floors they slept on – if they had to sweep up the broken glass and cover the broken windows with broken cabinets – would they have come to repair this world?
The past sat at long tables, claiming each day another day of the present to past. Consuming time until it became their own; while their eyes in Peru watched the dry corn leaves brown, their hands in Bangladesh pulled again at the mud, and their feet in Kenya had to walk away; they all breathed in, and that silence resonated loudly throughout the conference center. They breathed out and formed a song that they sang in the streets of Copenhagen, that tells of a story writing itself in brooms and wood-ovens and paint. This is not the story of the UN document – that is a story that doesn’t say anything. It is the story being told in the empty spaces between the lines of their text.
As the delegates were served their foreign fruits and cheeses – fresh from Peru with pesticides from America and picked by barely paid hands, as they cut another slice—all over the city the future was searching – jumping into dumpsters and finding so much fruit it took three trips on the bicycle just to bring it all back.
As the delegates handed their bank card to the waitress, vast and free communal kitchens served long lines waiting in the cold. Who would hold a full plate and sit on the floor of the large hall, and eat with a metal fork the stew and kernels of sharing, where all eat the same and there are more people than plates.
As the delegates signed-off and put their computers to sleep, the future sang and painted shields long into the night – warmed well by so many hearts and a woodstove they had made from the old oil drums of an unimaginably wasteful world.
As the future stood, arms linked and singing within sight of the Convention Center, their songs drifted in to fill the spaces between the lines of the UN document. As the future was beaten by police, as the future was put into cages…
The future is free, because they are the ones who decided to create change. They were not paid like the police to stand in their lines and protect something, they were not chauffeured from dinner to the hotel. They were moving themselves, and moving history. The past cannot hold back the future with their brackets and clauses, because the future is not a question. The future is writing itself already. We are not waiting for a document, we are the document.

Related content:

Kids vs Global Warming: Alex Loors gives the low down from Copenhagen

Youth stage sit in inside the Bella Center: Kimia Ghomeshi calls in from Copenhagen

Photojounalist Kris Krug on documenting the Copenhagen protests

The following guest post was written by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger (you can also follow them on Twitter).

Nuclear power, biofuels, clean coal: These are the Obama administration’s answers to climate change. The 2011 budget, released this week, promised new loans for the construction of nuclear power plants, and on Wednesday the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), White House, and other departments detailed steps to encourage ethanol and clean coal production.

These initiatives may garner support from conservatives, but their ascendancy comes at a price. Support for renewable fuel sources, like wind and solar, has dwindled. President Barack Obama did encourage Senate Democrats to pass a climate change bill, but some moderates are bucking the cap-and-trade provisions that could tamp down carbon emissions. Those moderates are pushing for legislation that leaves carbon caps out entirely.

It hasn’t been a good week for climate advocates. On top of the Obama administration’s overtures to crusty, old energy industries, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has had to fend off pressure to resign. The IPCC published a report with a badly sourced fact about the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting, and when scientists pointed out the error, Pachauri would not cop to the mistake. (If you missed the beginning of this to-do, Mother Jones‘ Kate Sheppard covered the controversy back in January.)

Given this country’s weak efforts to tamp down carbon emissions, though, perhaps the IPCC’s prediction that those glaciers likely will disappeared by 2035 will turn out to be accurate.

New nuclear plants—but at what cost?

Obama’s budget, as Sheppard reports at Mother Jones, is upping funding for nuclear plant development, even though previous nuclear projects have run wildly over budget. The president has always supported increased nuclear production. As an Illinois Senator, Obama had Exelon Corporation, the country’s largest nuclear operator, in his constituency. The company continued to support him as a presidential candidate. The proposed funding runs in the neighborhood of $54.5 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear projects. That’s good news for an industry that’s in need of cash. As Sheppard explains, without governmental backing, these plants would have little chance of being built.

“Even as public opinion toward nuclear power has warmed, projected construction costs for new plants have soared, with a single reactor now estimated to cost as much as $12 billion,” she writes. “In fact, the outlook for nuclear plants looks so dire that even Wall Street banks have balked at financing them unless the government underwrites the deal.”

The Obama administration is also backing research into nuclear waste disposal, a prerequisite for nuclear expansion. No matter how “green” nuclear energy production might be, so far there’s no safe, sustainable way to deal with its by-products. Finding a long-term solution for nuclear waste disposal will not come cheaply.

Biofuels move us backwards

The administration’s support for biofuels was bigger slap in the face to environmentalists, though. Just a few years ago, ethanol made from corn or switchgrass ranked high on the list of renewable fuels that could spring America from its Middle East oil addiction. In practice, however, biofuels have proven more environmentally destructive and less efficient than advocates had hoped. With farmers in the Midwest knee-deep in corn marked for ethanol production, though, backing away from biofuels is politically dicey.

The consequences are more than political, however. At Grist, Tom Philpott argues that support for biofuels will ultimately drive global carbon emission up, rather than down.

“As ethanol factories continue sucking in more and more corn, plantation owners in places like Brazil and Argentina will put more grassland and even rainforest under the plow to make up for the shortfall, resulting in huge carbon emissions,” Philpott writes. “That dire effect of our ethanol program, known as indirect land-use change, likely nullifies any scant climate benefits from ethanol.”

It’s not just corn and switchgrass that pose a problem, either. As Gina Marie Cheeseman reports at Care2, algae farms, another potential source of biofuel, face their own challenges. Algae demands high energy input and could release more carbon dioxide emissions that it would save, according to a new report from the University of Virginia.

There’s more research to be done before writing algae energy production off, however. In January, the Department of Energy said it would sink $44 million into work on algae pools. Industry players like ExxonMobile are also underwriting research on the subject, Cheeseman writes.

No room for innovation

Moving towards energy sources like nuclear power and ethanol does take the country a step closer to responsible energy production. But right now, the Obama administration is not leaving room for new or ambitious ideas that could do more. Wind and solar, which would form the best foundation for a sustainable energy future, have few advocates in Congress. They also seem to have no role in the near-term energy plan.

Ethanol was the Midwest’s first green industry, for instance, but there are other possibilities for juicing up the region’s clean energy production. In The Nation, Lisa Margonelli lays out the case for “gray power,” which is recycled energy produced by the old, dirty smokestacks that ring cities like Cleveland.

In this vision, twentieth century industry can produce twenty-first century energy. Waste energy, Margonelli argues, “can be profitably “recycled” onto the grid to create power as clean as that from solar and wind but far cheaper.”

“In fact, energy now lost as steam and gases by the region’s manufacturing plants, as well as municipal and agricultural waste, could create as much energy as sixty-nine nuclear power plants, according to figures commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency,” she says. “This power could strengthen the region’s electrical grid and preserve jobs by making local manufacturing plants more economically stable, while making the region a leader in greener technology.”

A project like Margonelli imagines, however, would require significant commitment and vision from the federal government, both of which are lacking right now.

The opening night of the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival left me with two favorite finds: The first was KQED’s profile (produced by Amy Miller and Joan Johnson) of Sylvia Earle.

Sylvia’s enthusiasm and adoration for ocean exploration is contagious. The stories about Earle’s experience of being the first female explorer as well as one of the first deep water explorers were inspiring, informative and entertaining. (Earle and 5 other female scientists lived at the bottom of the ocean for two weeks; when they set out, the main questions asked by reporters were about how they were planning to do their nails.)  Earle has a unique perspective, and leaves us was with the stark awareness that the next ten years are possibly some of the most crucial years on the planet in regards to determining the future health of the oceans.

Another film not to be missed is To Save The Whales, by award winning filmmaker Gavin Newman. Ok, so you can get from the title that this is not  a fun film to watch. But it was utterly informative and fascinating as it delved into the complexity of understanding cultural political play involved with stopping Japan’s whaling practice.  Equally interesting was the story of how Greenpeace became involved with whale protection and what motivates the activists involved with the direct actions. Truth be told, I wouldn’t have complained if the film was twenty minutes shorter, but footage was incredible, and if nothing else you should go see it for the aerial shots of the arctic. But as I write this, I am haunted by the hunting scenes of the whales being shot, drown, and dragged onto the Japanese ships.

As with any good documentary I left the theater with the illusion that I had somehow participated with the issue and am now part of the mission to spread awareness and information about the process of whaling. (A clever if not obvious and purposeful section of the film was dedicated to hitting the audience over the head with the distinct power of media to bring stories to the world that might not otherwise get exposed).

So since you can’t readily get your hands on the film, a few facts: Japan’s whale hunt is allowed under international rules as a scientific program, despite a 1986 ban on commercial whaling. The Japanese started Whale hunting when other meats were scarce after World War II. It is no longer a common food in the country, although meat is sold in Japanese supermarkets and upscale restaurants. I wish I could send you a link to this informative and fascinating film, but atlas, I believe the only way to get access to it is to contact the Gavin Newman directly.

As an aside, two days ago I caught up with under water photographer Bryant Austin, who photographs whales, it is interesting to note the consistent theme in which media is being used with purpose, and is being taken directly to the countries who are involved with killing these creatures so they can…put a face to the meat they are eating. In Bryant’s case he is taking the photos to Norway, and as you can see in Newman’s film, he takes the facts and information to Japan to talk to tell the people the influence of their government (The film states that billions of tax dollars spent of whaling a meat that is a surplus).

Ok, and now to leave you with another taste of Sylvia Earle via her talk at the TED conference in 2009:

Related content:

Raw interview with Bryant Austin about photographing and swimming with whales

Welcoming the Environmental Journalist to the Endangered Species List

Sea Lions, sharks, and swimming with whales! Oh my! The Ocean Film Festival has arrived.

San Francisco is in for a treat as the Aquarium of the bay launches the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival today. Kick your desires to consume doom and gloom to the side, because the festival promises inspiration and fun with special programs on sharks, surfing, swimming with whales, and of course, lots of information for the ocean loving geek.

The SFOFF films are produced around the world and are largely unavailable to the general public.  The films are intended not only to entertain the audience but, more importantly, to educate and encourage active participation in ocean conservation.

This event was the first film festival of its kind in North America and the second in the world, following a well-established ocean festival in Toulon, France. The 2010 festival will present over 40 films, feature an expanded education program and continue its tradition of Festival Awards for works featuring the magnificence of our oceans, threats to marine life, and the human connection with the marine environment.

You can find the full schedule of the Ocean Film Festival ( Feb3-7th) here.

True confession, I’m past the point of excited. This will be my first time attending the Ocean Film Festival, and if it is anything like the Banf Film Festival, I’m prepared to be inspired and invigorated.

Meanwhile: if you aren’t able to make the festival, not to worry, we’ll be interviewing filmmakers throughout the weekend and twittering about our favorite films. If you want to follow along and ask question as we go, feel free to follow the current green twitter feed.

Meanwhile, we’ll leave you with you this tasty treat: Yesterday we caught up with Bryant Austin, the photographer featured in the short documentary, “In the Eye of Whale” (see below). We spoke with Bryant about the documentary, In the Eye of Whale, that features his efforts of taking life sized photographs of whales. In this raw and uncut clip Bryant discusses close encounters with whales, and how he hopes his photos will influence future generations to stop whaling.

After swimming with a Minke whale for a week, Bryant explained to a friend,”I feel like I’m coming home less human, but more as a being among beings.” And with out further adieu, enjoy In the Eye of the Whale:

Related Content:

David de Rothschild and Jo Royle take on the perils of plastic

I took the 1 Green Thing Challenge: I’ll be removing 559 POUNDS of garbage out of the ocean

Best green Podcasts on eco-tips, green living, and…edible algae

So Bin Laden came out over the weekend to speak out as an activist for climate change.

Sort of.

Well, not really. It would seem al-Qaeda leader bin Laden got the memo that there is a new trend that people are paying attention to called “climate change”.

Oh Osama! Climate change is so 2009! According to the Pew Research Center’s recent poll, climate change is on the bottom of our political priority list for 2010,

Better luck next time.

I’ve already ranted about why we should kill the term climate change, so I won’t get into that one again. But just in case you were about re-route a donation to Haiti Relief over to bin Laden on account of his recent appearance as climate activist, you might want to think twice.

Osama bin Laden is using the climate conversation to serve his own agenda with regards to the US and other industrial economies-this times around it’s the reprehensible crime of climate change. Here’s how it went down.

In an audio tape obtained by Al Jazeera, bin Laden criticized George W. Bush, the former US president, for rejecting the Kyoto pact and condemned global corporations.

“This is a message to the whole world about those responsible for climate change and its repercussions – whether intentionally or unintentionally - and about the action we must take,” bin Laden said.

Sorry to say, we are going to have to add Bin Laden to “crimes against climate activists” list since his new claim has only given fuel to climate deniers, as discussed by Juliana Williams on the youth climate movement blog It’s getting Hot in Here:

His strategy is not to stop global warming, but rather to draw broader global support for his anti-American efforts.  What better way to wreak havoc and chaos in the nation of his enemies than to associate himself with one of the fastest growing sectors of the US economy: clean energy.

By highlighting the climate challenge, bin Laden opens the floodgates for climate deniers to claim that taking action on climate issues is now un-American, anti-American and that seeks to destroy the economy.

So thanks for nothing Bin Laden. We’ll be adding you to our crimes-against-climate-activist hit list.

Related content:

Hipsters in Space: Jihad is Rad (video)

Welcoming the Environmental Journalist to the Endangered Species List (video)

Climate Change On Obama’s Back Burner

The following guest post is by  Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger

In his first State of the Union address, President Barack Obama touched on climate issues only briefly. He called on the Senate to pass a climate bill, but did not give Congress a deadline or promise to veto weak legislation. Nor did he mention the Copenhagen climate conference, where international negotiators struggled to produce an agreement on limiting global carbon emissions.

The Obama administration’s attitude towards climate change still represents a remarkable shift from the Bush years, when global warming was treated as little more than a fairy tale. But in the past year, Congressional squabbling has stalled climate legislation, and international negotiators nearly gridlocked in talks over carbon admissions at the multinational Copenhagen conference. Without strong leadership from the president, work to prevent this looming environmental crisis will stall.

Obama did address global warming skeptics, saying that they should support investment in clean energy, “because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy.”

“And America must be that nation,” Obama said.

No push for climate bill

Despite his combative language, the president did not challenge Congress to push for real solutions to ballooning carbon emissions and energy consumption. As Forrest Wilder of The Texas Observer notes, Obama “uttered the phrase ‘climate change’ precisely once.”

The Senate has already wait-listed the climate bill: Health care came first. With health care reform now in line behind work on jobs and bank regulation, climate legislation has little chance of passing the Senate in the coming months, let alone making it to the president’s desk.

If Congress lets this work wait until after the midterm elections, the United States will show up at international negotiations in December 2010 as a leader in carbon emissions yet again, but with little in hand to show a way forward.

Clean energy, not renewable energy

When the president did bring up climate issues, he focused on their connection between climate reform and potential job creation. Obama highlighted areas for growth, not in renewable energy fields like wind or solar power, but in nuclear power, natural gas, and clean coal.

Yes, these fuel sources could decrease the country’s carbon emissions. But they are not solutions that will revolutionize energy production. Grist’s David Roberts was floored that the speech omitted renewable energy entirely and kowtowed to a more conservative litany of energy projects. “I suppose it was done to flatter conservative Senators that will have to vote for the bill Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham are working on,” he writes. (The three Senators are working on a version of the climate bill designed to appeal to Republicans.)

“But the SOTU is not a policy negotiation,” Roberts says. “It’s a bully pulpit, a chance to shape rather than respond to existing narratives.”

Roberts argues that progressive supporters would benefit from a stronger message. If activists knew that the White House stands behind a real shift in America’s energy policy, they could use that prompt to drive action on climate change.

What was missing

While touting the virtues of off-shore drilling, Obama overlooked other policies that could broker real change. Although he admonished Congress to pass a climate bill, he did not pressure the legislature on what he’d like that bill to include. He did not mention cap-and-trade, the mechanism the House bill relies on to tamp down emissions and dirty energy use.

President Obama did touch on transportation reforms that could decrease the country’s use of fossil fuels.

“There’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains,” Obama said. He cited a high-speed rail project that broke ground on Tuesday in Tampa, FL, as evidence that America could best the rest of the world in creating new energy-efficient technology.

But one or two high-profile projects won’t be enough to challenge Europe’s network of high-speed trains or China’s investments in solar power. The White House could put the country at the forefront of sustainable technologies, but it’ll take more money than the president has committed. In AlterNet’s ideal state of the union, projects like the railway would merit sustained attention and funding. Funding for the high-speed train came from this year’s stimulus bill, and there’s no guarantee that similar projects will find federal funding in the future.

“Continued support is still needed” for green jobs and clean energy, Alternet’s editorial staff argues. “It’s unclear yet how Obama’s new proposal for a three-year spending freeze will apply to this sector, but a boost is what is needed, not cuts.”

Green jobs

Michelle Chen argues for In These Times that the president is right to subordinate climate issues to economic policy. “The jobs angle is more than sugar-coating,” she says. A recent Pew Research Center poll put climate change at the end of Americans’ long list of cares, and a Brookings Institution study found that they’re no longer willing to pay as much for greener products.

Jobless workers need green in their pockets most of all, and so far politicians’ promises haven’t made up for the slack economy.

“No matter how slick the marketing, confidence in green jobs may wilt even further absent real investments in the beleaguered blue-collar workforce,” Chen writes.

Copenhagen accord losing momentum

The small role that climate change played in the state of the union address only emphasized the downward momentum of the issue since the United Nations conference on global warming in Copenhagen. Grist’s Jonathan Hiskes talked to six leaders in climate change activism, and none of them offered a different strategy than they had last year.

That same stasis is showing up in Europe, as well. Spain, which currently leads the European Union, proposed that the European Union’s negotiating position should remain the same as its position before the Copenhagen conference, according to Inter Press Service.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), who’s working on climate change legislation in the Senate, offered advice to climate activists at a clean energy forum in Washington, DC on Wednesday. Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard reports that Sen. Kerry encouraged his audience to get angrier, louder, and more active, in the mode of the conservative Tea Partiers, who have earned plenty of attention. After his speech, he also recalled the tactics that pushed landmark legislation like the Clean Air Act through Congress.

If climate change is going to play a larger role in the next state of the union, the citizens and groups concerned about this issue need to do something to put it on the agenda. Otherwise, next year, the president may find it just as easy to skim over it again.

Related content:

Morality over Monsanto

Wade Davis: on Magic, Mystism, and putting ancient culture in the context of the modern world

Calling in from Copenhagen: Eco-Adventurer Roz Savage on courage (video)

At first I thought someone was making a reference to Battlestar Galatica.

However I didn’t need to leave the planet to discover that fracking refers to a process of extracting natural gas out of the ground. What seems to be flying under the radar is that it has a minor side effect, which reportedly include accounts of aquifers catching on fire, houses blowing up, and residents who live close to locations of the extraction process getting cancer. Propublica made this handy-dandy visualization:

As they say, curiosity kills the cat, so I clicked right on over to Wikipedia to get the low down on Hydraulic Fracturing. The cliffs notes: Hydraulic fracturing is a process used by gas an oil companies to create fractures in rocks. The fracture is maintained by introducing a proppant into the injected fluid. Proppant is a material, such as grains of sand, ceramic, or other particulates, that prevent the fractures from closing when the injection is stopped.

The technique is used as a way to extract natural gas. While most companies state that 99.5 percent or so of their proppant is made from sand and water, the remaining ingredients are what is known as the “special sauce” and is considered what makes different companies competitive against each other, hence the contents of the ingredients are protected by patents, and are not available to the public.

While the technique is apparently safe for underground use, it may not be safe when it leaks above ground, (hence the stories of houses exploding and people being able to light their water on fire).

Alright, so our interest is piqued. We are asking you for your first hand accounts. Have you experienced fracking? Do you know someone who has? Share your story, your photos or your video here.

If you are seeking more information, Wikipedia has an extensive description of the process and the EPA’s involvement. And Solve Climate is covering the two bills that are currently addressing fracking.