Articles by Andy Brett

Greenwashing at GE.

While we are on the MSM watch (which I just learned stands for "mainstream media"), in Sunday's New York Times, Ned Sullivan and Rich Schiafo of Scenic Hudson accuse GE of "dragging its feet" on the cleanup of the PCBs that it has dumped in the Hudson River. This is the same GE that recently started its "Ecomagination" campaign, giving Sullivan and Schiafo this powerful one-liner:

Only after G.E. uses its ecomagination to rid the nation's waterways of its contamination will these words ring true. Until then, its green campaign is nothing more than an eco smoke screen.

Cities vs. those suburbs

Last week certainly was a "week to rejoice" if you love cities, although I think John Tierny missed the boat on exactly why. With the Accords signed, the sustainable (and not so sustainable) ranked, and the cul-de-sac revived and debunked, it was enough to give any aspiring urban planner a headache.

The statistics getting tossed around are staggering too. Just the first clause of the Urban Environmental Accords contains two rather impressive facts:

• The majority of the planet's population now (well, almost now) lives in cities;
• continued urbanization will result in one million people moving to cities each week.

And that got me thinkin': Whaddaya mean, "city?"

In search of the answer to this eloquent question, I headed to the webpages of the UN, since it is their Environment Program after all. Turns out that:

Because of national differences in the characteristics that distinguish urban from rural areas, the distinction between the urban and the rural population is not yet amenable to a single definition that would be applicable to all countries or, for the most part, even to the countries within a region.

Don't worry, our hero will not give up that easily; more below the fold.

Porous pavements potentially prevent problems

NPR's Living on Earth ran an interesting story this Saturday about porous pavements such as Ecocreto. In places where a good deal of the land surface area is made of impervious materials like regular concrete or pavement, rainwater can sometimes go unused, be discharged to the sea (think Los Angeles or Mexico City), and contribute to flash floods along the way. By absorbing the water and slowly releasing it, permeable concrete is designed to alleviate these issues.

Also available on their website is an interview [mp3] with Bruce K. Ferguson, director of the School of Enivironmental Design at the University of Georgia, on the same subject.

Businesses join the chorus on climate change

Dozens of mega-corporations, including Ford, BP, British Airways, and Toyota, are calling on the G8 to set up a system of emissions trading, which they view as "inevitable," at the Gleneagles summit. Representatives from the companies met with British PM Tony Blair yesterday. This is the second group that's called out the G8 regarding climate change; the national science academies of eleven countries threw in their two cents [PDF] earlier this week.

While Tony Blair is indeed the host for the summit, I think the corporations may have picked the wrong world leader with whichto discuss the issue. Hopefully a meeting with Bush will follow.