‘Green News Report’ – August 6, 2009

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IN TODAY’S AUDIO REPORT: ‘Cash for Clunkers’ — now with more cash!; ‘Astroturfing’ — now with ‘Clean Coal’!; ‘Roadless areas’ — now without roads! PLUS: Obama talks batteries … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail, really really roadless wilderness for realz this time? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (links below): What’s Your Water Footprint?; Eco-tourism and organic farming in Costa Rica; Solar in the Sahara inches forward; Program successfully reduces shipping pollution at the Port of Seattle… PLUS: How Good Is Algae Fuel At Fighting Climate Change? Totally Depends…

Info/links on those stories and all the ones we talked about on today’s episode follow below…

• Obama: ‘Unleash prosperity for everybody’ (MSNBC)

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

• TRANSCRIPT: President Obama Delivers Remarks on the Economy, Wakarusa, Ind. (Washington Post)
• $2 Billion in Grants to Bolster U.S. Manufacturing of Parts for Electric Cars (NY Times) [emphasis added]:
  Some of the money is for education, but it is not for research. Nearly all the money is being spent to reduce battery production costs, by getting manufacturing started on a mass basis.
• ‘Red’ Kentucky loses out as energy grants go to battlegrounds (McClatchy)
• Battery Sweepstakes: And the Winner Is…General Motors (Wall St. Journal)
• Senate reaches deal on $2B ‘clunkers’ refill (AP)
• The Ups And Downs Of Cash-For-Clunkers (New Republic)
• Court ends Bush-era road-building in forests (Reuters)
• Court restores ‘roadless rule’ in national forests: Environmentalists cheer the decision, which reverses moves by the Bush administration to reopen wilderness lands to development. More legal wrangling remains, however. (LA Times)
• Greenpeace and Kimberly-Clark Settle Feud (Green Inc.)
• Kimberly-Clark, Greenpeace hug it out (Grist.org) [emphasis added]:
  Greenpeace and Kimberly-Clark announced today that the paper-products giant has finally agreed to clean up its act. It will source the fiber for its tissue products, under brand names that include Kleenex, Scott, and Cottonelle, from “environmentally responsible sources,” including those that are [Forest Stewardship Council]-certified and recycled. The company has also committed to end the purchase of non-FSC fibers from Canada’s Boreal forest by 2011. For its part, Greenpeace will drop the five-year-old Kleercut campaign that has long urged Kimberly-Clark to quit destroying the Boreal just so cold-sufferers can experience a softer blow.
• Climate Letter Forgeries Stir Outrage
• Lobby Firm Behind Climate Forgeries Helped Kill Higher CAFE Standards (DC Streetsblog)
• NAACP-Forgery Group, Bonner & Associates, Has A Decades-Long History Of Astroturf Tactics (Think Progress)
• Big Coal: Back on the Offensive (Wall St. Journal)
• READ how a fake “grassroots campaign works! From The Hawthorne Group [emphasis added]:
  We thought the most fixated of the political and communications “junkies” might find interesting some highlights of a recent grassroots campaign Hawthorn created and managed for the American Coalition of Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE).
• FLASHBACK: Hello. I’m calling this evening to mislead you — A look inside one of Washington’s top phony grassroots lobbying firms. (Mother Jones, Nov. 1997)

‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’: More green news not covered in today’s audio report… See below!

• Special Report: What’s Your Water Footprint? (Mother Jones) [emphasis added]:
  Nice jeans. Too bad they cost the planet 2,866 gallons of precious H2O.

  …[He] turned toward me and demanded if I knew how much water it took to grow one almond, a cantaloupe, or a pound of tomato paste. (I didn’t. Turns out it’s 1 gallon, 25 gallons, and 55 gallons, respectively.) “The people in the city, they don’t know what their footprint on nature is,” he scoffed. “They sit there in an ivory tower and don’t realize what it takes to keep them alive.”
  …
  [H]ousehold water use accounts for only 6 percent of the water that we consume. The other 94 percent comes from the products we buy, everything from almonds and tomatoes to blue jeans and microchips.

• Running a Green Business in Costa Rica–Organic Farming and Ecotourism Meet (Triple Pundit)
• Industry lines up behind bold solar project in hopes politicians will follow (Greenwire)
• Deal has made ships more eco-friendly (Tacoma News Tribune)
• How Good Is Algae Fuel At Fighting Climate Change? Totally Depends (Earth2Tech) [emphasis added]:
  [D]oes that mean that algae-powered cars are going to significantly help fight global warming? Not necessarily, but maybe — it seems that, as with most types of biofuels, the overall carbon emissions reductions we could get by swapping out gasoline for algae fuels totally depends on the production process.