·:[ Environmental News Bits ]:·
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Via Docuticker.

Illegally Green: Environmental Costs of Hemp Prohibition (PDF; 627 KB)
Source: Reason Foundation
From press release:

With oil hitting $110 a barrel and gas prices creeping towards $4 a gallon, the federal government continues to prohibit U.S. farmers from growing hemp, which could be used to efficiently produce biofuels, including cellulosic ethanol.

Hemp is also a cost-effective, environmentally-friendly substitute for polyester, cotton, fiberglass and concrete, according to a new Reason Foundation study that examines hemp’s potential uses and the ways other countries are benefitting from it. Industrial hemp production is banned in the U.S. as an archaic consequence of the war on drugs.

Read the full post at EcoGeek.

Swansea University has been working with steel companies for years. These companies produce those marvelously beautiful sheets of steel that cover buildings all over the world. But, while working on ways to make the steel not degrade in sunlight, a Swansea student figured out how to make the paint actually harness that energy and covert it to electricity.

The University has announced that with the 100 million square feet of steel that they produce could add 4,500 gigawatts to the grid annually. To that, I say “whoops…you seem to have made a typo,” because I’m pretty sure they mean 4,500 gigawatt-hours.

Read the full story in the New York Times.

More chain and boutique hotels — with views of skyscrapers not trees — are incorporating sustainable green practices into their policies.

Read the full post at Environmental Capital.

Lee Scott Jr. has earned a reputation as something of an environmental guru for actions he has taken over the past few years in getting Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to green up its act.

But this morning at the ECO:nomics conference in California, the president and CEO of the retail giant took some attendees aback by flatly declaring: “We are not green.”

Mr. Scott was actually being candid when a questioner asked how he could reconcile why Wal-Mart’s carbon emissions were continuing to grow despite its much-publicized efforts to reduce its carbon footprint. He said Wal-Mart is trying, but it also needs to grow at the same time. In fact, Mr. Scott said, “I haven’t a clue,” when asked when he expected the company to meet his stated goal of having zero waste and 100% renewable energy over time.

Read the full post in the Wall Street Journal’s Environmental Capital.

Vinod Khosla, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist turned ethanol evangelist, likes to suggest that Big Oil is ripe for the treatment that Silicon Valley’s digital upstarts meted out to the Old Phone Monopoly during the last decade. But Big Oil looks to be a tougher customer than Ma Bell.

Mr. Khosla’s firm, Khosla Ventures, is backing a number of biofuel startups, most aimed at transforming various forms of waste into alcohol fuels. Read more about the studies and reports Khosla has produced about ethanol…

But so far, very few of the more 160,000 service stations in the U.S. offer the 85% ethanol blend – “E85” – favored by biofuel proponents. “Today what we need is for oil companies to come along. They have been happy to do blending, but they have opposed E85,” Mr. Khosla said. The government needs rules mandating that service stations dispensing more than $5 million worth of fuel a year should have E85 pumps…

Not so fast, replied American Petroleum Institute President Red Cavaney. “We have enough mandates,” he said. “We’d like to have the free market work.” Read API’s briefing on alternative fuels.

Via Docuticker.

Climate change will have a significant impact on transportation infrastructure and operations
Source: National Research Council/National Academies Press

While every mode of transportation in the U.S. will be affected as the climate changes, potentially the greatest impact on transportation systems will be flooding of roads, railways, transit systems, and airport runways in coastal areas because of rising sea levels and surges brought on by more intense storms, says a new report from the National Research Council. Though the impacts of climate change will vary by region, it is certain they will be widespread and costly in human and economic terms, and will require significant changes in the planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of transportation systems.

The U.S. transportation system was designed and built for local weather and climate conditions, predicated on historical temperature and precipitation data. The report finds that climate predictions used by transportation planners and engineers may no longer be reliable, however, in the face of new weather and climate extremes. Infrastructure pushed beyond the range for which it was designed can become stressed and fail, as seen with loss of the U.S. 90 Bridge in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

+ Potential Impacts of Climate Change on U.S. Transportation: Special Report 290

Read for free online.

Science News highlights the winners of the Intel Science Talent Search.

Read the full story in the Wall Street Journal’s Environmental Capital.

Are big-company CEOs that change their businesses to deal with climate change trailblazers, or are are they rubes hijacked by green activists?

It’s not an academic question. Steve Milloy, head of the $11 million Free Enterprise Action Fund, spends his time as a self-described “headache” to corporate chieftains like Jeff Immelt of GE. His fund regularly sues companies for shirking what he calls their duty to shareholders by getting greener, even if it costs money. His nemesis, Mindy Lubber, runs a $5 trillion coalition of investors pushing companies to come clean on what climate change means for them– and how they plan to deal with it in the future.

Read the press release.

Seattle-based Nordstrom, Inc. (NYSE: JWN) announced that it will introduce new environmentally friendly packaging options for customers throughout 2008. Fully recyclable shopping bags and gift boxes and a reusable shopping tote will be available to customers as the year progresses.

Read the full story at Environmental Leader.

Promoting the green design, construction, renovation and operation of buildings could cut North American greenhouse gas emissions that are fuelling climate change more deeply, quickly and cheaply than any other available measure, according to a new report, Green Building In North America, issued by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, a panel set up by the U.S., Canada and Mexico to address environmental concerns.