Drexel Sierra Student Coalition

Snooki Has A Call to Action on Global Warming

Nicole — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 01:46:46 +0000

New Jersey natives, think fast: Who's your most embarrassing resident, your governor or your reality TV stars? Personally I think the scales are tipping in favor of the Jersey Shore cast. Chris Christie basically hates the environment, but Snooki believes in global warming! She may be constructed mostly of tanner and hair, but she knows what's up. Sort of.

You probably don't want to watch this whole video, since it's characteristically shrilly-pitched and almost aggressively dumb. If Snooki's persona is made up, which it has to be, it's very close to being brilliant-stupid in the manner of Beavis and Butt-head, but if it's for real I'm going to have to become a stylite. So here's the relevant part, which starts around 2:20:

Every time I go down the seaside, I'm sweating in places I've never sweated before. Obviously, the sun's coming closer to Earth, and we're all just sweating our balls off. So if we don't take care of this problem and, you know, make an ozone layer somewhere, the aliens are going to attack Earth and kill us all.
Um, sure. Points for effort?

Listen, if the threat of alien invasion and ball sweat is necessary to get people active on climate change, then as far as I'm concerned, Snooki, you are fresh to death. But you might want to get your climate change theories read out in the style of Oscar Wilde. It would be a little more listenable.

http://www.grist.org/list/2011-08-31-snooki-has-a-call-to-action-on-global-warming

Microsoft, HP, Coke Bumped from Dow Jones Sustainability Index

Nicole — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 01:43:01 +0000

41 companies added, 23 deleted from index

Some of the world's largest and best-known companies accustomed to their annual inclusion in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index received a bit of a jolt this week when they were bumped from the most important sustainability-focused investment ratings in the world.

Based on a corporate sustainability assessment conducted by the Swiss sustainability-focused investment boutique SAM, the updated Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSI World) reflects improved CSR performance in banking, insurance and the healthcare "supersectors," while those that took the biggest hit include oil and gas, utilities, industrial manufacturing and, yes, even technology firms.

Among the largest and best-known companies not included on the 2011 DJSI World (pdf) include beverage powerhouse Coca-Cola Co., California-based technology giant Hewlett-Packard Co. and California utility PG&E.

Other notable deletions among the regional indices include Microsoft, Waste Management, FedEx (North America), Volkswagen AG, Statoil ASA (Europe) and Suncorp Group Ltd. (Asia).

Despite the notable deletions, the World Index grew by a net of 18 companies with Minneapolis-based medical technology company Medtronic Inc.; French energy management and energy efficiency powerhouse Schneider Electric S.A., and French bank and financial services company Societe Generale S.A leading the way as the the largest additions.

New additions to regional indices include Sprint Nextel, U.S., CSX (North America), Mitsubishi Corp. Hang Seng Bank Ltd (Asia Pacific) and Alcatel-Lucent (Europe)

First calculated in 1999, the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index is made up of more than 300 companies in the top 10 percent of their business sector based on a basket of long-term economic, environmental and social criteria including with a special focus on industry-specific risks and opportunities.

Changes to the DJSI World and all 18 other world and regional indices will become effective with the open of the stock markets on September 19, 2011.

http://earthandindustry.com/2011/09/microsoft-hp-coke-bumped-from-dow-jones-sustainability-index/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+earthandIndustry+%28Earth+%26+Industry%29

24 Hours of Reality

Nicole — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:06:50 +0000

What is 24 Hours of Reality?

24 Presenters. 24 Time Zones. 13 Languages. 1 Message. 24 Hours of Reality is a worldwide event to broadcast the reality of the climate crisis. It will consist of a new multimedia presentation created by Al Gore and delivered once per hour for 24 hours, representing every time zone around the globe. Each hour people living with the reality of climate change will connect the dots between recent extreme weather events — including floods, droughts and storms — and the manmade pollution that is changing our climate. We will offer a round-the-clock, round-the-globe snapshot of the climate crisis in real time. The deniers may have millions of dollars to spend, but we have a powerful advantage. We have reality.

When is 24 Hours of Reality?

24 Hours of Reality will be broadcast live online from September 14 to 15, over 24 hours, representing 24 time zones and 13 languages.

Where is 24 Hours of Reality?

From Tonga to Cape Verde, Mexico City to Alaska, Jakarta to London, people living with the impacts of climate change every day will tell their story. You can experience as much as you like without even leaving your home. Click here to find the location — or locations — where you would like to watch a presentation. Due to logistical considerations, three of the presentations will be broadcast remotely from New York — Tonga, the Solomon Islands and French Polynesia — but will include local footage and information. All other presentations will be filmed on location around the world.

We would like to thank our partners for helping to make this project a reality.

RSVP to the event on Facebook here

When

: September 14, 7PM – September 15, 9PM

Water Consumption

Nicole — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:02:36 +0000

The Five Best (and Worst) Places to Bike in Philly

Nicole — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 23:58:04 +0000

Gritty, old Philadelphia is the most bike-riding big city in America. According to the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, biking in Philadelphia has exploded since 2000, when the rate was just .86 percent, nearly doubling between 2005 and 2008 alone.

This city has more bike commuters per capita (2.16 percent) than Chicago (1.15 percent) and New York (.61 percent). While that’s still behind Portland (5.81 percent) and San Francisco (2.98 percent), we’re ninth out of the 70 biggest cities. Some Philly neighborhoods (South, Center City and West) have biking rates that rival anywhere.

Andrew Stober, chief of staff to the Mayor’s Office of Transportation and Utilities, credits Philly’s grid system, narrow streets (“If you think about New York, all of the numbered avenues are wider than Broad Street!”), flat terrain and the fact that many people live within a cozy three-mile bike to work.

The city and its bike advocates have a plan in the works to make Philadelphia into a bicycle utopia, from what the Bicycle Coalition calls an “excellent big city for biking” into a “world class-bicycling city.” We’re talking Portland, Montreal, Amsterdam style biking.

I'm cruising around town on a Friday afternoon with Nicholas Mirra, communications coordinator at the Bicycle Coalition, to discuss how great Philly biking is and how it will get better. First, Mirra guided me down the next jewels set to be added to the city’s be-spoked crown: north-south bike lanes down 10th and 13th streets, between (give or take a few blocks) Spring Garden and South streets. The east-west bike lanes on Pine and Spruce streets installed in 2009 have transformed Center City biking, and the new bike lanes will make your trip from Center City and South Philly to Northern Liberties, Kensington, Fishtown or points beyond a whole lot easier.

The northbound bike lane will head down 13th Street, passing through the Gayborhood and the Marcie Turney-Valerie Safran restaurant empire, across Market and through the northern tip of Chinatown just above Reading Terminal Market, discontinuing up past the Standard Tap on Second Street.

The southbound route begins at Spring Garden right by the Spaghetti Warehouse’s colossal and now empty shell, and then down 10th Street. The path will traverse the neighborhood’s various post-industrial mysteries, into the heart of Chinatown, past the Gallery mall and Jefferson Hospital, ending at Lombard, where you can make your own way through South Philly’s maze-like streets.

According to the Bicycle Coalition, the Pine/Walnut lanes were the “first innovative bikeway design installed in Philadelphia”—which means it was the first time that real-deal anything had been done for bike infrastructure in this city. The lanes are a hit: Bikers have flocked to the buffered lanes and cleared out of car-dominant streets. And it’s only the beginning. Imagine a protected bike track on Washington, or peaceful bicycle boulevards through small South Philly residential streets.

“I think we’re making a lot of progress,” says Stober. “But when it comes to building out a regional trail network, the primary obstacle is funding.”

But the time to bike is now, so PW assembled a list of five of the city’s best, and worst, places to bike. There was heavy competition on both sides: the numerous horrible places to bike like Lindbergh Avenue, Roosevelt Boulevard, along the generally nightmarish Delaware waterfront, and Columbus and Delaware avenues. And then there are great places like Pennypack Park.

Renew Our Economy

Nicole — Wed, 11 May 2011 02:52:26 +0000

Imagine a society that keeps renewing itself and thrives with vibrant energy. Imagine a resilient economy that enhances life without depleting it. Imagine institutions that empower people to reach our full potential. The world we’re creating is shaped by how we see, so lately I’ve been doing some re-imagining.

It’s become clearer to me how important it is to bring together two great challenges of our time:

the shift towards renewable forms of energy and
the full development of human potential.

We can’t have one without the other. They need to go hand in hand. I’ve been playing with ways to communicate this. Here’s my first attempt at weaving some conversations together.

Our economies are based on energy

There’s a story that modern societies have transitioned from agricultural economies (based on farming) to industrial economies (based on production) to consumer economies (based on spending and debt) to knowledge economies (based on ideas). Most economies are based on all these elements to different degrees.But there’s something else that economies are based on that seldom gets discussed: energy.

Energy is the essence of every economic system. Energy is the field of life. It’s also creativepotential.

We live on the sun’s energy

The energy that flows through us and our social/economic system comes from the sun. Its light connects us with one another and every living species.

At a personal level, we get energy through food. Let’s be grateful for plants that make sunlight edible. The energy in our food sustains and renews us. We can use this energy for diverse purposes. We all need to decide how to use this creative potential.

We can lead lives that let this energy shine. We can also live in ways that dampen us down:

River to River Anti-Fracking March

Nicole — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:38:09 +0000

River to River invites you — and Protecting Our Waters supports their call — to join your neighbors, friends, and community members on Saturday April 23 for the River to River march.

Philadelphia’s rivers have vastly improved, thanks to hard work by thousands of people, for decades, in official and unofficial roles — from the Philadelphia Water Department to the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, from Clean Water Action to newer groups like Protecting Our Waters and the newest of all, River to River. All those gains are threatened by unregulated, exempted, toxic radioactive waste from hydrofracking! Let’s reclaim our connection to our city’s rivers. And let’s not let ourselves be fragmented either: just because we’re defending water doesn’t mean we don’t care about air! The beautiful state of Wyoming now has smog worse than Los Angeles due to horizontal hydrofracking. We won’t let that happen here. We won’t let Gov. Corbett and his gasocracy ruin the health of humans and ecosystems by spewing toxic waste into air, water and earth.

Join River to River, Protecting Our Waters, and our allies as we stand up against fracking in the Delaware River Basin and statewide, to protect our own and our neighbors’ health, and to celebrate our relationship to the rivers that flow through Philadelphia.

WHAT? River to River March: From the Schuylkill to the Delaware

WHEN? Saturday, April 23 · 12:00pm – 4:00pm

WHERE? The March will start from the Rotunda in Philadelphia, at 40th and Walnut (just west of the southwest corner), at noon. Converge at Love Park at 2pm for speakers and music, and then at 3:30pm marching up 3rd to Penn Treaty Park on the Delaware River to join Shad Fest.

Bring yourselves, your friends, your banners, your enthusiasm, and let’s take it to the streets.

Please visit the Facebook Event Page for the River to River March for updates, to RSVP, post comments, suggestions, ideas, and to share it with all of your friends.

Obama to Thousands of Young Climate Activists: Push Me

Nicole — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:30:19 +0000

Mark Hertsgaard | April 18, 2011

Bring to Washington, DC, 10,000 political organizers who are willing to play hardball, and you can get serious face time with the president of the United States. Even if you aren’t yet 25 years old.

Shortly after 4 pm last Friday, April 15, Barack Obama dropped in unexpectedly on a White House meeting that his aides were holding with the Environmental Action Coalition, a network of climate change groups on college campuses that had drawn the 10,000 organizers to its PowerShift conference in the nation’s capital. Interviews with multiple sources in the room indicate that Obama spent twenty-five minutes with the young EAC activists, telling them, “You have power, that’s why I’m here.” Ten of the eleven activists were women; none was older than 31. Their discussion with the president was friendly but plain-spoken—one young woman even interrupted Obama, who didn’t seem to mind—as the activists urged the president to be the clean-energy champion they and their peers had done so much to elect in 2008.

The PowerShift activists are reinforcing their tough-love message today, when thousands plan to demonstrate at the White House before marching to Capitol Hill and the Washington offices of the Chamber of Commerce, BP and other business groups the activists accuse of obstructing the fight against climate change.

“The president told us he wants the same things we want, but the politics in the country are really hard right now,” said Maura Cowley, 28, one of two chief co-organizers of PowerShift. “We said that’s fine, but he can’t call coal, oil, nuclear and natural gas clean energy when actually they are quite dangerous. And we said we’re here to help create the political space so he can show bold leadership on truly clean energy choices.” This was precisely the focus of a jam-packed session at PowerShift aptly titled “What To Do When the President’s Just Not That Into You” where many former Obama volunteers seemed ready to apply their social networking skills to demand far more ambitious leadership from the president.

Asked for comment on the accuracy of remarks attributed to Obama, White House spokesman Clark Stevens told The Nation, “The president appreciated the opportunity to discuss the administration’s record on clean energy as well as his ongoing focus to build a twenty-first-century clean energy economy with PowerShift leadership.”

The power Obama apparently perceives in the PowerShift activists reflects the grassroots muscle young people demonstrated in the 2008 presidential campaign. It’s not just that in 2008 people under 30 voted overwhelmingly for Obama. Equally important is that a large number of young volunteers, many of them getting involved in politics for the first time, mobilized millions of other people to vote for Obama as well.

If the president wants similar enthusiasm from youth in 2012, he must do much more about young people’s priority issues such as climate change, said activists attending PowerShift. “Obama really needs to address the urgency of getting [the country] off coal and fossil fuels if he wants us to get out the vote for him in 2012,” Ashley Hall, 21, a junior at Michigan State University, said as she joined 400 other students from Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin in training sessions to sharpen their skills at attracting and working with allies, writing press releases and other basics of political organizing.

By implicitly threatening to withhold their enthusiasm from the president’s re-election effort, the young climate activists are pursuing a sharply different strategy than most big environmental and other progressive groups centered in Washington. Aside from the Sierra Club—the lead sponsor of PowerShift—and one or two others, most so-called Big Green groups have instead focused on maintaining friendly access to the Obama White House, even when this has meant supporting policies that fall well short of desirable.

The most notorious example is the cap-and-trade bill that was the centerpiece of Obama’s early climate policy. Although many environmentalists outside the Beltway complained that the bill promised at best incremental emissions reductions, both the White House and its Big Green allies insisted it was the only realistic way forward. The cap-and-trade bill’s weaknesses ended up leaving the environmental base unexcited about pushing their elected officials to approve it even as corporate and Republican hostility to climate action remained undeterred. Cap-and-trade was duly crushed on Capitol Hill, leaving environmentalists in disarray and polluters in ascendance.

“[Obama] told us it was our job to push the envelope and it’s his job to govern,” said Shadia Fayne Wood, a member of the steering committee of the Environmental Action Coalition. “That was really reassuring to hear from the president, because we’ve gotten lots of pressure from Big Green groups saying we shouldn’t be criticizing him. I think our meeting [with Obama] shows their strategy isn’t working, and it’s time for young people to be leaders of this movement.”

The young activists heard much the same message from Al Gore, Van Jones and other notables who addressed PowerShift 2011. Speaking to a crowd of thousands as lights flashed and music boomed through the Walter Washington Convention Center, Gore told the young activists in a near-shout that 26 was the average age of the NASA engineers who put a man on the moon in 1969. The crowd went nuts. Jones, a former Obama environmental adviser, later pointed out that these young activists had more computing power on their laptops and iPhones than the entire US government had at the time of the moon landing. “If you use your laptops and iPhones not as toys but as tools, you can change the world,” Jones said as another roar erupted and the crowd leaped to its feet.

The new direction these young climate activists are charting is based not on leveraging inside access in Washington or bending over backwards to find common ground with polluters. Instead, they’re finding that the route to wielding decisive power in Washington is through grassroots organizing outside of the Beltway that can keep elected officials honest. Thus most of PowerShift was spent on training sessions to help the activists build trust, develop unity, and improve their organizing skills.

“We think this is the largest grassroots organizing training in US history,” said Courtney Hight, 31, the other co-organizer of PowerShift. Hight was a key youth organizer for Obama in 2008 and worked briefly in his White House before concluding that real change required exerting greater pressure from outside government to counter-balance the constant pressure from big corporations. “These 10,000 activists will leave here, go back to their campuses and communities, and work to stop coal, build the green economy and enable the Millennium Generation to play a non-partisan role in the 2012 election campaign.”

“We want to pull back the curtain on the role corporations play in our democracy and draw a line in the sand for politicians,” added Cowley. The young activists have already issued a clear demand to all candidates in the 2012 elections: if you want our support, you must pledge not to accept campaign contributions from big polluters. Asked at PowerShift whether Obama would make such a pledge, Kalpen Modi of the White House Office of Public Engagement said, “I don’t know.” The White House will have the opportunity to provide a more considered answer today, when thousands of young climate activists rally outside the front gates. In a sign these young people are refreshingly serious about politics and have only just begun to fight, the banners they will be carrying say, “Grow Power.”

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/160001/obama-thousands-young-climate-activists-push-me

Focus the Nation Clean Energy Forum

admin — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 05:45:10 +0000

Drexel Sierra Club would like to thank the following speakers as well as all who came out to forum. Many thanks and we hope to see you all next time!

Speakers:
Adam Agalloco – Mayors Office of Sustainability
Kristen Suzda – Delaware Valley Green Building Council
Cory Suter- Bioneighbors Sustainable Homes
Neil Young and Scott Kelley- Re:vision Architecture

Micah Gold and John Steele – Solar States
Jack Strong- The Energy Coordinating Agency

Alex Fuller Young- Penn Future
Paul Kohl- Philadelphia Water Department
Joe Campbell- Drexel Green

Nau.inc alternative thinking and sustainable fashion

Stephen — Sat, 23 May 2009 02:41:56 +0000

Beauty. Performance. Sustainability

Sustainable Clothting startup Nau.inc has long been a supplier of high quality eco friendly activewear. They are also a supplier of many very interesting and forward thinking ideas about corporations and the environment and what we as consumers can do to lead towards a more sustainable economy.

Main web site->www.nau.com