In her recent piece in USA Today, Laura Vanderkam takes an environmental stand against the family yard:

“Mowing itself requires fuel, just like our cars, with a similar impact on the environment. And all these woes are before you even get to the issue of water. According to Kress, maintaining non-native plants requires 10,000 gallons of water per year per lawn, over and above rainwater. That water doesn’t just show up by itself; it requires energy to get to your hose. In California, for example, the energy required to treat and move water amounts to 19 percent of total electricity use in the state.”

Vanderkam got me thinking. In her article, she states that maintaining a lawn is one of the most difficult – and therefore potentially environmentally unfriendly – activities one can associate with home ownership.

She interviewed Florida resident Diane Faulkner, who spent some time in Kenya and participated in a daily ritual of waking up at dawn to walk miles along a dried-up river toward a water source, then returning with a few gallons for cooking and washing.

When she returned to America, she asked herself: “How many gallons of water do I waste on that stinking lawn?”

And once the grass has been watered, she wondered, what else goes into keeping it maintained that’s bad for the planet? (Subquestion: How many people own push-mowers anymore, instead of their more convenient relatives, motorized mowers?) While a field of emerald, tailored grass is ubiquitous with owning any sized plot of land, taking care of it is anything but natural.

So, unless you own a sheep, you’re actually doing harm to the environment every time you water and cut the green patches in the front, and backyard. There are 21 million acres of lawn across the country.

In addition to the water waste and exhaust emissions from gas-powered mowers (and don’t even get me started on riding mowers), homeowners use more than 78 million pounds of pesticides each year to keep their front yard “green,” according to Stephen Kress of the National Audubon Society. He also states that weed killers should be banished; simply mowing the lawn removes the tops of weeds and wildflowers, making their stalks virtually undistinguishable from their grassy hosts.

As familiar as the lawn may be when picturing a traditional American neighborhood, think for a moment: What went into putting it there in the first place? Laura Ingalls Wilder aside, the grass was installed on your property, similar to the way your man-made house was. According to Kress, maintaining non-native plants requires 10,000 gallons of water per year per lawn – in addition to rainwater. Then there’s the hose. The water doesn’t flow through it because it wants to – it requires energy to get from pipes to hose. In California, for example, the energy required to treat and move water amounts to 19 percent of total electricity use in the state.

Says the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, the average father of school-aged kids spends 1.6 hours a week on lawn and garden care – more time than he spends on reading, talking, playing or doing educational activities with his kids combined.

Do you think that politicians should start regulating your lawn?

Some facts:

• Inspectors are deployed to count the square footage of grass vs. wild plants; states are cutting teachers and police officers
• By 2020, California will face a shortfall of fresh water as great as the amount that all of its cities and towns together are consuming today
• By 2025, 1.8 billion”¨ people will live in conditions of absolute “¨water scarcity, and 65 percent of the world’s population will be water stressed
• To grow a ton of wheat, it takes 1,000 tons of water; the U.S is the largest exporter of wheat to the world; when we export a ton of our wheat, we are effectively including 100 tons of water in the bargain
• In the U.S, 21 percent of irrigation is achieved by pumping groundwater at rates that exceed the water’s ability to recharge
• There are 66 golf courses in Palm Springs; on average, they each consume over a million gallons of water per day
• Lake Meade (the source of 95 percent of water for Las Vegas) will be dry in the next 4 to 10 years
• Xeriscaping is a form of landscaping that uses zero water
• You can also turn your yard into a vegetable garden; use dense plantings and heavy mulch to keep the weeds down, and put a drip irrigation on a timer for lower maintenance
• And for lawn jockeys, in Southern California verdolagas (a type of purslane) looks like lawn and will grow with zero or infrequent watering over most places

Then there’s Faulkner. She redid her lawn with rocks and hearty plants such as Confederate Jasmine, arranged to look like an English garden. “I don’t have to mow, I don’t have to water, I don’t have to trim,” she says. Her water bill has gone from $80-$90/month to $20. But then again, you could always just spray paint your lawn, too.

Is the grass always greener, eco-friends? Let us know in the comments.

Image: Matt McGee

The post Who Ever Liked Mowing the Lawn Anyway? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Oh, he’s just so smug.

And no, I’m not jealous of his abs, or the fact that Old Spice’s the Man Your Man Could Smell Like (née Isaiah Mustafa) has led something of a charmed life: The Tennessee Titans signed him to their practice squad, then sent him to play football in Barcelona; he owned a restaurant on Melrose; and he accidentally won $47,000 on The Weakest Link from a question where he mixed up Dr. Viktor Frankenstein and the comic book character Dr. Doom to fortuitous results. Then he got the Old Spice gig. And now he’s popping up everywhere, extolling his plants-only diet.

Mustafa is a vegan, you see, which means I feel even worse about myself. A few days ago, he appeared on the Tonight Show and shared his special diet with Jay Leno (which meant that I was annoyed by both the guest and the host for a change, rather than irritated solely by “Big Jaw”).

“I’m lucky to workout with Tony Horton of P90x fame,” said Mustafa. “He’s got me on this diet right now that’s absolutely ridiculous. There are five things you can’t do.” (Insert eye roll.) “There’s no alcohol; no caffeine; no processed sugars; nothing with a face – no animals or animal byproducts.” Life is so hard.

Oh yes, he goes on.

“But here’s the tough one: no gluten.”

The tough one? Who are you trying to impress, Isaiah? I know gluten’s hard to avoid and all, but to dismiss booze, coffee and meat like they’re tertiary characters in a daily diet is pretentious beyond belief. Also, every vegan I’ve ever met looks like the Crypt Keeper; so how does this fella pull off the beefcake bit without consuming, well, beef and cake?

Bring back Bruce Campbell’s avant-garde Old Spice spots. Now that’s a guy we can look up to.

In other news, Zooey Deschanel’s no longer a vegan, citing food allergies. I’ll take her word before Mustafa’s:

“Sometimes you just need a little something, a little meat.”

Yes, ma’am.

The post The Old Spice Guy Eats Green, and Makes Us See Green appeared first on EcoSalon.

Not from the Hill or the Street this time, but I just had to bring this up…

China has overtaken the United States as the world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gases and biggest energy consumer. That’s staggering and all the more terrifying, knowing the rate and capacity at which industry has evolved and grown there. There is one area, however, where China is attempting to curtail its deep carbon footprint.

Meet the straddle bus.

In an effort to go green and relieve traffic congestion without widening roads to accommodate more cars, the Shenzhen Huashi Future ParkingEquipment company is developing a “3D Express Coach” (also known as a “three-dimensional fast bus”). I think of it more as a pretend-you’re-in-a-video-game adventure ride: It’s less dangerous-sounding that way.

Here’s how it works: The monorail on steroids will allow cars less than two meters high to travel underneath the upper level of the vehicle which will be carrying passengers, who were not rendered in the drafter’s graphic seen above, but are most certainly laughing at the screaming drivers and passengers in the cars below them (“My god, the tunnel – it won’t stop following me!”)

According to China Hush, the 6-meter-wide 3D Express Coach will be powered by a combination of electricity and solar energy, and will be able to travel up to 60 kilometers per hour carrying some 1200 to 1400 passengers. You read that right. A large Greyhound bus houses 49 passengers. A typical passenger plane seats roughly 300. This behemoth is green, certainly not lean, and if it goes out of control, God help us all.

And it’s set for construction in Beijing’s Mentougou district by the end of this year. The Chairman of the Huashi Future Parking Equipment company boasts that it will only take a year and $73 million to build and operate the thing. Which is why I get ever more frustrated every time I see the still unfinished San Francisco Bay Bridge lazily huddled in the ocean like a section of braces that an orthodontist forgot to remove from a kid’s mouth.

You hear that, Bay Bridge? China’s built one of you that can drive.

The post China Builds Bus That Drives Over Cars: Be Very Afraid appeared first on EcoSalon.

From the Hill…

Our friends at the Heritage Foundation (who think Jack Bauer is a real person) have deployed multiple teams of energy, environment, homeland security and response experts to the Gulf to study the federal response to the oil spill. They have visited the areas hit hardest by the crisis. They’ve spoken with response workers, affected oil crews, fishermen, elected leaders and BP representatives. Their finding? President Obama has turned the spill an oil and water equivalent to making a mountain out of a molehill. And you know what? They’re not far off.

From a recent article issued by the foundation’s Web site:

BP is (very) slowly taking accountability for its creation of this crisis. Tony Hayward was finally dismissed as CEO, and they have promised full financial restitution for direct and indirect victims. On Day 100 of the spill, it’s time the Obama administration followed suit.

And what exactly does the administration have to be held accountable for? An environmental disaster made worse by federal incompetence. An unnecessary drilling moratorium that has pulled the plug on a Gulf economy already on life support. A claims process that was negotiated in secret, leaving few answers to why claims aren’t being processed and transparency is lost. A slow response that wasted clear weather days as hurricane season fast approaches, and a decision-making structure led by politics rather than duty.

Environmentally, the President and his eco-left echo chamber consciously chose to ignore the damage caused by the oil in favor of focusing on future tax increases that would expand government largess. The President’s initial push for cap-and-trade taxes as a response to an oil spill was so disconnected and oblivious that it was quickly brushed off by the Democrat-controlled Senate. Even so, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday cap-and-trade taxes were still possible this year if any energy legislation passes the Senate and the bill goes to conference.

Here are some details that are difficult to ignore: the administration assured us that we would not be paying for BP’s mistake at the gas pump, but the recent Reid-Boxer bill moving through the Senate indicates that increased taxes are inevitable and there will be a “drastic increase” in the price of oil per barrel.

Says Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, “Carol Browner, President Obama’s White House Energy and Climate Czar, recently said she thinks only Big Oil, which would include BP and a few others, should be drilling in the Gulf. With the Reid-Boxer oil spill bill, that’s exactly what will happen. And with this legislation, President Obama’s Gulf energy moratorium will become a permanent moratorium that will destroy thousands of good-paying jobs, restrict America’s ability to produce energy, and make America more dependent on foreign oil.”

BP is claiming a tax deduction worth roughly $9.9 billion. Congressman James Oberstar (D-Minn.) went on record stating this development was “reprehensible.”

This backlash is taking on the kind of viral reach that seems rivaled only by the widespread push for Hope just two years ago, when we as a nation took a look at the current state of things and paved a new path with a presidential candidate named Barack Obama. That kind of credit can never last. Someone has to pay for it when it comes due. It was unrealistic, juvenile and cockeyed to posit that one man – a good, fair and excellent communicator – would be able to Fix Problems Now.

Has President Obama failed us in the Gulf? Not really, but his and First Lady Michelle’s glamorous, nearly placating photo-ops on the beach haven’t helped.

But that doesn’t mean things are going well there, either. On the Louisiana coastline, barriers were delivered but wouldn’t get installed until permits were drafted, agreed upon and issued – that’s a legislative issue that would have benefited from an executive call to action.

The Heritage Foundation would have us believe there’s a superhero who can help in our definite time of need, much the way that progressives did in 2008. Our Hope has warped and exaggerated the candidate Obama’s cure-all promises for actual change. Inspiring, but potentially empty, rhetoric during election season cannot translate into action on the scale that we assumed it would. This isn’t a TV show; there isn’t a quick fix.

But if you’re out there, Jack, we’d really, really appreciate it.

Editor’s Note: This is the latest installment in Christopher Correa’s weekly column, Hill/Street Greens, examining the environmental deeds (and misdeeds) of Washington, D.C. and Wall Street.

Image: John Griffiths

The post The First 100 Days of Deepwater Horizon: Somebody Call Jack Bauer appeared first on EcoSalon.

From the Street, but trudging up the Hill…

Oh, Oliver Stone. Such a confusing (or is it confused?) Hollywood conspiracy theorist. The Academy Award-winning director of JFK, Nixon and W. has profiled another iconic figure for his latest opus (no, not Wall Street 2).

South of the Border, a documentary about revolutionary Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his left-wing Latin American allies, opened in London this week, and like with many of his historical previous filmic endeavors, Stone’s new movie ties ideas from many opposing sources and forces, and stretches the yarn so that it almost becomes threadbare. A mad scientist at the edit bay, Stone has chopped and cut this doc so that it covers the green movement. He posits that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is an eye-opener for the United States, in that it should follow the example of South American socialists in nationalizing its energy industry.

Further, he decries that America’s country’s natural wealth was too important to be left in private hands, telling interviewers that oil and other natural resources “belong to the people.” What does BP have to do with Hugo Chavez? Not a thing, unless you pitch that question to Stone.

“This BP oil spill is typical” of what happens when private industry is allowed to draw revenue on what should be a public good, he says. “We shouldn’t make this kind of profit on oil or on health or on war or on prisons. All these industries should be public industries.”

South of the Border sheds light on the social improvements ushered in by Chavez, who has nationalized parts of Venezuela’s economy, including segments of the oil sector, as well as parts of the banking, electric and steel industries.

“Generally speaking the economy has surged in Venezuela from 2003 to 2008. This is a story that people don’t know,” Stone said.

He also referred to President Barack Obama as “Bush not-so-lite.” Given that he seemed to fawn over the previous commander in chief in 2008’s critical and box office misfire W., I’m not sure President Obama needs to worry about being assessed in such a fashion by the Oliver Stone of today. In the 90s, the director was crafting sensationalist (some might call propaganda) pieces that derided Nixon sympathizers and Reaganites and deified (while embalming) John F. Kennedy. Even scatterbrained and schizophrenic works like U-Turn seemed like they were biting the hand that reared, let alone fed them. But by the 00s, his movies got softer, more contextual and shapely. World Trade Center tried to satisfy both political parties, and W. was practically a eulogy to the 43rd President of the United States.

A couple of things:

Chernobyl was nuclear power as run by a government that owned everything for the people. When the government is put in charge, without private influence whatsoever, the power over industry is all concentrated in one body, the government. Doesn’t Oliver Stone make movies about how corrupt government is?

I wonder how he’d feel if the news media and entertainment industry were nationalized too. Might not have the leverage he’s got now, and you just know he’s got a movie in him about government-controlled media. Oh, wait, Natural Born Killers.

When Stone made the first Wall Street, the film’s tag line and mantra (intentionally or otherwise) was, “Greed is good.” The movie still feels like a corporate orientation video for new hedge fund employees. And its sequel, back by popular demand, focuses on another movement – the green movement. He might as well muddle that hot topic, too.

Let the mixed messages begin.

Editor’s Note: This is the latest installment in Christopher Correa’s weekly column, Hill/Street Greens, examining the environmental deeds (and misdeeds) of Washington, D.C. and Wall Street.

Image: nicogenin

The post Oliver Stone Wants to Put You in Charge of the Energy Industry appeared first on EcoSalon.

From the Street…

The question will no longer be, “Who shot J.R.” but “Where’d J.R. get those photovoltaic panels for his roof?” Which is almost as catchy.

Larry Hagman is reprising his role as J.R. Ewing from the soap opera Dallas on behalf of the solar industry. The dastardly Texas oilman who famously spent a summer nursing a bullet wound (while audiences spent it thinking about his fate with bated breath) has become disillusioned with Texas tea. Here he is in an advertising campaign to promote solar energy and SolarWorld, a German photovoltaic module maker.

“In the past it was always about the oil,” Hagman says in a TV commercial that debuted yesterday at the Intersolar conference in San Francisco.

“The oil was flowing and so was the money. Too dirty, I quit it years ago,” he says in a voice so gravelly you could walk across it. A portrait of a beaming, much younger J.R. from his wilder days in the 80s fades out of focus, with the subtlety of the Picture of Dorian Gray. Images of an offshore oil rig and blackened waters flash against the backdrop of his sullied memories.

“Shine, baby shine,” he guffaws. The line is a direct jab at Sarah Palin’s “Drill, baby, drill” campaign slogan.

Before the rolling of eyes ensues, it’s worth noting that Hagman lives on an estate in the Southern California town of Ojai which he outfitted with an elaborate 94-kilowatt solar system, thought to be the largest residential solar panel installation in the world, several years ago. He also serves on the board of the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF), a non-profit that builds solar systems in poverty-stricken areas of the world and was awarded additional funding by the ExxonMobil and Ashoka’s Changemakers Women | Tools | Technology Challenge campaign on June 29.

SolarWorld donated solar panels for the group’s work in Haiti after the earthquake there in January. Yesterday the company said it would give an additional 100 kilowatts worth of panels to provide electricity for at least five health clinics.

The commercial will air nationally in August and can be found on SolarWorld’s site here.

SolarWorld, which is based in Germany but operates factories in California and Oregon, is just the latest of a number of solar companies to introduce a high-profile advertising campaign.

So what’s your opinion? Do you respond well to the idea of a fictional oil baron going rogue in favor of the green movement? Does it draw the right kind of attention to the cause? Is it a clever move or completely out of touch? Let us know in the comments.

Editor’s Note: This is the latest installment in Christopher Correa’s weekly column, Hill/Street Greens, examining the environmental deeds (and misdeeds) of Washington, D.C. and Wall Street.

Image: AP

The post Recovered Shooting Victim and Reformed Oil Tycoon Goes Green appeared first on EcoSalon.

From the Hill…

I just couldn’t let this one go by. And it pains me to bring it up. But let’s talk about a few inconvenient truths.

Who’d have thought that President Bill Clinton was the eco-friendly “bad boy” of the Clinton-Gore administration? He made intimate phone calls to his special friend from inside the White House during his scandal; Vice President Al Gore took a private jet during his. How could our anointed Captain Planet turn his back on (in addition to one other key figure) Mother Earth?

Masseuse Molly Hagerty has been dishing about the Nobel Peace prize-winning climate change guru’s ‘crazed sex poodle’ behavior. I won’t go into the gossipy details of the alleged massage because it has no relevance here.

But, some facts have arisen about the other, more globally pressing issues about the Harvard-educated family man becoming entangled in this controversy. He was staying in Portland, Oregon, and asked staff at the luxury Hotel Lucia to find him a masseuse. Two things. One, the Hotel Lucia is lovely, lively, hip and chic. But just because it’s located in the Emerald City, doesn’t make it a green hotel. Maybe Gore forgot to do a simple search for one of these environmentally friendly lodgings. Also worth noting: Staying at the Doubletree is not any greener simply because the word tree is part of its name.

Plain and simple, Gore hasn’t been practicing what he’s been preaching all these years. Witness the purchase of his bachelor pad in San Francisco in 2006.

Gore paid $3.9 million for the apartment atop the grand St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco in 2006. There is a swimming pool, a health spa, a roof deck and even a butler available to bring refreshments along with his order of double standards. He enjoys an opulent personal lifestyle while lecturing the public on green morality.

It’s a complicated situation being a public personality. The spotlight can illuminate, yes, but it can also seduce and reveal the bad in someone as well as the good.

Tabloid fodder aside, it’s the double talk with regard to core message that’s difficult to stomach, let alone abide. San Francisco is one of the greenest cities in the country. So what kept Gore from finding, or erecting, a sustainable living space? Building a green house doesn’t take much more than money. Heck, even Glenn Beck built and lives in one.

University of Manchester Professor Geoff Beattie published a study about environmentalism and attitudes versus actions. In it he differentiated between how people felt about being “green” and what they actually believed and did about it. Sean Coughlan at the BBC reports:

Researchers, at the university’s Sustainable Consumption Institute, made video recordings of people talking about issues such as global warming – looking at how their words matched their body language, such as hand gestures and expressions.

The study found that while people could control their speech to express green opinions, their unconscious gestures suggested their “true thoughts and feelings” lay elsewhere.

Explicitly, people may want to save the planet and appear green, but implicitly they may care a good deal less.

Given it is these implicit attitudes that direct and control much of our behaviour in supermarkets and elsewhere, these are the attitudes that we have to pursue and understand and change.

It’s common knowledge that people (politicians, especially) will say one thing and do another, often the opposite. It’s just difficult to observe, in hindsight, when some of those people take a very public stance, muscle their way to icon status – and make less good on their word. The lesson here: If you’re going to fall from grace, make sure you have a cushy seat on a private jet to make your descent a comfortable one.

Editor’s Note: This is the latest installment in Christopher Correa’s weekly column, Hill/Street Greens, examining the environmental deeds (and misdeeds) of Washington, D.C. and Wall Street.

Image: socketsite

The post An Inconvenient Roof: Al Gore’s Controversial Lodgings appeared first on EcoSalon.

From the Hill…

Those of you who thought that Kevin Costner’s career was all wet, you were absolutely right. Taking a rather odd move, BP has thrown their cleanup business at Hollywood. In a plot that could have been lifted out of a movie, Kevin Costner stepped forward to promote a device that he says will aid the oil spill disaster – the exact same thing his character did to Dennis Hopper’s oil rig-fortressed villain in Waterworld.

(Waterworld, by the way, was produced and distributed by Universal Pictures in 1995, the year that Seagram Company Ltd. [booze people] and Conoco [oil people] were granted a controlling stake in MCA/Universal to the tune of $5.7 billion. It was a shaky relationship, and conspiracy theorists have gone to great pains revealing that several of the movie’s poor critical reviews appeared in publications whose owners had close ties to oil companies, including BP. Did the oil industry want Costner’s efforts to go dead in the water in 1995? It adds a whole new layer to the story, that’s for sure.)

Costner has invested some $20 million and spent the last 15 years developing oil-separating centrifuge machines. (Hey, he’s had a lot of off-time between cinematic bombs.) His manufacturing company, Ocean Therapy Solutions, which advances his brother’s research in spill cleanup technology, was endorsed by not only BP, but by the New York Times. In his testimony before Congress this month, Costner discussed the device’s operation, explaining how it spins oil-contaminated water at a rapid speed, which separates the oil and captures it in a containment tank.

BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles ordered 32 of them. He said the additional machines will be used to build four new deep-water systems: on two barges and two 280-foot supply boats.

“We tested it in some of the toughest environments we could find, and actually what it’s done,” Suttles has said. “This is real technology with real science behind it, and it’s passed all of those tests.” He reports that Costner’s device has proved effective at processing 128,000 barrels of water a day.

In his congressional testimony, perhaps citing experience having difficulty marketing his latest movies for general audiences, Costner recounted his struggle to effectively market the centrifuge. He explained that although the machines are quite effective, they can still leave trace amounts of oil in the treated water that exceeds current environmental regulations. Because of that regulatory hurdle, he said, he had great difficulty getting oil industry giants interested without first having the approval of the federal government. This is a very real concern – innovation on spill technology has been slowed in part due to federal regulation intervention.

The last time Costner invested millions into a national disaster, he came up with The Postman. So what do you think? Is this another big budget flop? Or might we be chanting a different – if familiar – message:

If he builds it…

Editor’s Note: This is the latest installment in Christopher Correa’s weekly column, Hill/Street Greens, examining the environmental deeds (and misdeeds) of Washington, D.C. and Wall Street.

Image: John Griffiths

The post BP’s Hollywood Ending: Kevin Costner Turns Gulf into Personal Waterworld appeared first on EcoSalon.

From the Hill…

Remember when you were a kid, and mom and dad would give you a few bucks each week for mowing the lawn, cleaning your room, doing the dishes and taking out the trash? And if you took on more responsibility, you’d ask the parentals for a raise, because baseball cards and toys are expensive. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has taken that concept a little too far.

She recently moved into a new district office located in the San Francisco Federal Building. It’s in a trendy neighborhood, has a great view and costs a little more than the old office space. How much more, you ask? Pelosi’s paying $18,736 each month to type, make calls and talk around the water cooler in the new digs. That’s right. I’m going to type that again because it bears repeating, and because – if you’re like me – upon hearing the price Speaker Pelosi is paying to go to work, you picked up a calculator and a pencil, and just shoved them in your eyes. $18,736. For renting an office.

All sorts of reasons were cited for the move: she’d been in the old place for twenty years; the new office’s location is more accessible for her constituents (public transportation and walking being so unruly and all); she needed more space (why? Because the monthly office pool is an actual pool?). Also the new office is in a “green” building. This is one of those moments when the word green means just so many things, isn’t it?

But rent is getting higher all the time, and San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the country. So maybe this is just a harsh realty reality. The thing is, Pelosi’s new office rent is four times what she was paying for the old one – which is also located in San Francisco. Also, her rent is almost double what anyone else in Congress is paying. Rep. Diane Watson, D-Calif., whose office is in Los Angeles, is getting it for a steal: only $9,055 a month! And Rep. Suzanne Kosmas, D-FLA., pays only $1,353 a month for an office owned by the University of Central Florida in Orlando and another $100 for a small office provided by the City of Port Orange.

So how’s Pelosi paying for her pad? Each member has a Representational Allowance at his or her disposal, to cover the cost of rent, transportation and supplies and materials associated with the position. Another good use for this allowance is the cost of communication with constituents, like town hall meetings. She’s paying for this space with an allowance. That’s a lot of dishes she must have washed! What’d she do, offer to mow the lawn at the National Mall?

Here’s a map of all the LEED-certified buildings in San Francisco. Something tells me Speaker Pelosi could have found an office that was just as green, for a little less green.

Image: Speaker Pelosi

Editor’s Note: This is the latest installment in Christopher Correa’s weekly column, Hill/Street Greens, examining the environmental deeds (and misdeeds) of Washington, D.C. and Wall Street.

The post Nancy Pelosi’s Allowance Is Better Than Yours appeared first on EcoSalon.

He’s baaack!

You’ve all heard of Richard Pombo, right? For 14 years, he represented a real-life version of the smoke monster from Lost to environmentalists everywhere. The Tracy, CA cattle rancher was even given a cute nickname by President George W. Bush: “The Marlboro Man.” From 1993 to 2007 Pombo represented the 11th Congressional District, which runs from Morgan Hill to Danville along the east side of I-680, including farm towns like Manteca and Lodi.

So why is he so toxic?

Pombo introduced bills to expand offshore oil drilling (“Drill, baby drill!”), rewrite the Endangered Species Act (“Die, Bambi, die!”) and increase logging on public lands (“Fell, baby, fell!”). He even advocated more commercial whale hunting (I guess dolphins and baby seals weren’t big enough game), and infamously that environmental regulation “owes more to communism than to any other philosophy.” Seems reasonable. I could swear the last time I went hiking that the wind in the willows seemed to be whispering Marxist propaganda at me.

Then came 2006. Environmentalists spent more than $1 million to help Democrat Jerry McNerney, a former wind energy executive, upset the rootin’ tootin’ pollutin’ Marlboro Man. But this week it appears that Pombo will be coming out on top and reinvigorating his political career – and worse, his political agenda. He’s running in the Republican primary in what may be California’s hottest congressional race of the June 8 election.

His district will include, wait for it, Yosemite National Park. That sound you’re hearing is a thousand woodland creatures screaming collectively.

Pombo and the other three candidates, state Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Merced; former Fresno Mayor Jim Patterson; and Fresno City Councilman Larry Westerlund, have similar positions on the issues. They all have angled for lower taxes, an overturn of President Barack Obama’s health care law, and new rules to waive the Endangered Species Act to allow more water to be pumped to farmers from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Can’t evolution of flora and fauna be stifled by the law? What good is lawmaking anyway if it can’t put limitations on everything, even nature?

The Stetson-donning Pombo, has stated that if elected, he’d not only start with 14 years seniority, but with insight into how Congress works, particularly when it comes to water and wildlife laws.

Here’s something to chew on: If the GOP wins back the House in November, Pombo has said that by January he could be chairman again of the powerful House Natural Resources Committee. Perfect!

“This is a tight race,” he said. “The state, the Central Valley, doesn’t have a lot of time. We’re in trouble. We need somebody who is going to be effective immediately. That’s what I bring to the table.”

What are greenies doing about this? Not much, I’m afraid. (Really, with this kind of threat to the environment, how can anyone not be afraid?) The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund has spent around $65,000 on radio ads calling Pombo “another corrupt politician.” (Been there, done that, guys.) The Humane Society Legislative Fund has distributed thousands of mailers – which is kind of counter-intuitive if the mailers are not printed on recycled paper, which you just know Pombo and his ilk will call out. And the League of Conservation Voters put Pombo on its “Dirty Dozen List,” normally reserved for sitting members of Congress – do they not realize that The Dirty Dozen is the title of a movie starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland – precisely the kind of “man’s men” that deems the classification a compliment?

“Having Pombo represent a district that includes Yosemite National Park is like electing Godzilla as mayor of Tokyo,” said Warner Chabor, CEO of the California League of Conservation Voters. No, Warner, it’s not. Godzilla was a stranger in a strange land. Richard Pombo is a danger in endangered land.

During the campaign, he has caught controversy for once taking money from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and also for billing taxpayers $5,000 after taking his family in 2003 on an RV trip of national parks. I mean, come on. Californians, when you vote in this election next week, take a look outside your window and hum the “This Land is Your Land” tune. When you do that, remember that those lyrics are little more than Communist what’s-mine-is-yours propaganda. Do you like the view from your den? Enjoy it now, because it’s about to become Marlboro country.

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