Earth Blog

This week in bag ban news the idyllic hamlet of Ojai is on course to become the first city in Ventura County to ban single use plastic bags.

The Ventura County Star reported that the Ojai City Council passed the ordinance but it will still require council’s approval later this month to be officially deemed a law.

Singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant,  whom you might remember from such 90’s hits as “Wonder” and “Jealousy,” is the latest celebrity to speak out against hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Last year a group of actors including Ethan Hawke, Mark Ruffalo, and Zoe Saldana appeared in a video called “I Love My New York Water” which was made by Clean Water Not Dirty Drilling.

Merchant has chosen to work with The Finger Lakes CleanWaters Initiatives, another non-profit that is also concerned with eradicating fracking.  She will headline with her band in a benefit concert to support a ban in her home state of New York. 

“Hydrofracking poses the greatest threat to clean drinking water in New York and Pennsylvania right now. Our opposition to this threat is imperative. I hope people can come to the concert to show their concern," says Merchant.

Valentine’s Day was a shopping holiday we covered on the blog and we urged shoppers to buy local and ethical, if possible, when hunting for last minute gifts. Ethical consumerism and the effectiveness of “voting with your money” is being debated and discussed over at treehugger.com and at least one other green blog.

The debate started when Sami Grover posted: ““Why Corporate Fat Cats Love Ethical Consumerism.” He set out to explore the concept of: "Every time you spend a dollar, you are casting a vote."  The widely-accepted idea is this: If you don’t agree with the way a company does business simply stop shopping there and they will change or go out of business as they see their revenues drop. But is that wishful thinking? Grover argues that real change occurs at the political and cultural level. He cautions that ethical consumerism could erode the political activism he believes to be more effective at getting at the core problem. Is he right or wrong or somewhere in between?

Akron, Ohio, based FirstEnergy will close six coal-fired power plants across Ohio, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, by September because they are old and it would be costly to bring them up to the EPA’s recently passed Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS). The six might be in the first wave, if not the first, of plants that will close as energy providers weigh the costs of upgrading.

On January 3, 2012 well over a thousand precincts in Iowa will host caucuses to discuss and vote for the candidate they think is the best fit for the Republican presidential nomination. The Iowa Caucuses are important because they allow candidates to do a lot of highly-publicized campaigning to ultimately win their party’s nomination. Winners can go on to focus on primaries and losers may use this as an opportunity to withdraw from the race.

Let’s look at the front-running Republican candidates, according to a most recent Rasmussen poll, and a small number of their environmental platforms.  We are only looking at Republican candidates because there are no serious Democratic challengers to current President Barack Obama.