Tag: supply

Recession Proof Construction

  • One company created a website that acts as kind of a Craigslist just for reclaimed building materials (Photo courtesy of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction)

In the middle of a recession that’s

crippling the construction field,

there’s at least one sector of

industry that’s doing pretty well.

That’s “material reuse.” Taking pieces

of old buildings and using them in

new ones. Advocates say used materials

could save developers a heap of money.

Samara Freemark has the

story of one re-use company that’s both

green and in the black:

Transcript

In the middle of a recession that’s

crippling the construction field,

there’s at least one sector of

industry that’s doing pretty well.

That’s “material reuse.” Taking pieces

of old buildings and using them in

new ones. Advocates say used materials

could save developers a heap of money.

Samara Freemark has the

story of one re-use company that’s both

green and in the black:

You’ve probably heard what’s going on in the construction industry
these days.

(news montage of housing crisis)

But in middle of all that bad news, there might be one bright spot.

“We’ve actually been expanding quite a bit. I guess it’s one of the
only times I’ve heard
of where that’s the case.”

That’s architect Brad Hardin.

He got interested in reusing building materials pretty early in his career.
He likes the way
the old stuff looked. And he likes the idea of saving resources. And
he’s also kind of
horrified by the tens of millions of tons of construction waste that get
tossed into landfills
every year.

But actually getting his hands on used materials, so that he could reuse
them- that turned
out to be a real pain in the butt.

“You know you’ll be literally going out to someone’s yard and getting
rained on, or
sorting through someone’s basement– it was kind of a hit and miss
process.”

A big part of the problem was simple logistics. Imagine you’re knocking
down an old
house to build a new one. You’d like to sell off whatever pieces of the
old building you
can. But how do you find someone to buy all that stuff? Where do you store
it while you
look for a buyer? And how do you ship the materials?

Harry Giles is a professor of green architecture at the University of
Michigan.

He says most developers don’t want to bother with all that hassle. In the
end, they usually
just end up bulldozing everything. Giles says that’s because there’s no
real secondhand
market for used construction materials- not like there is in a lot of other
industries.

“If you take the car industry, a lot of it is geared around the reuse of
materials. Not just
taking the car and crushing it, but taking it apart and finding useful
components on it.”

You know, like a salvage yard.

And that was the problem Brad Hardin wanted to solve – how to create a
secondhand
market for spare building parts. He figured that if he could do that,
reusing building
materials could actually end up profitable.

So last year he started a company called Planet ReUse. The company’s
website acts as
kind of a Craigslist just for reclaimed building materials. Buyers and
sellers can find each
other on the ‘net.

And Planet ReUse tests all material to make sure it’s up to code. That
way the buyer
doesn’t end up with, say, eight tons of rotten planking. And Planet ReUse
arranges all the
shipping- trying to hook up sellers to nearby buyers. That saves money and
fuel.

By removing those basic barriers, Hardin says his buyers save about 20%
compared to
buying new. And Planet ReUse still makes a profit.

And it’s also a start to reducing those millions of tons of landfill
waste.

So, what kind of stuff does he sell on the site?

“How much time do you have? Steel, flooring…”

It turns out there’s money in just about everything you can salvage from
a building.

Harry Giles says that cash is the key to cutting down waste.

“If people see that it’s a lucrative business to actually salvage
materials, that will drive it
much faster than concern for the environment.”

And it’s not just buildings. Remember President Obama’s inauguration
stage? Well, that
got torn down, and Planet ReUse is trying to get the pieces to New Orleans.
They’ll be
used to rebuild houses damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

It’s just one more way for Planet ReUse to prove that you can do good, be
green, and
make a little money too.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Commercial Fishing Gets Failing Grade

  • Countries are getting bad grades because there’s a lot of over-fishing going on. (Photo by Stephen Ausmus, courtesy of the USDA)

A new study out in the journal Nature grades countries on their ocean
fishing practices. Rebecca Williams reports even the top countries are not
getting a passing grade:

Transcript

A new study out in the journal Nature grades countries on their ocean
fishing practices. Rebecca Williams reports even the top countries are not
getting a passing grade:

The US, Canada, and Norway are some of the countries doing the best job.
That means they’re fishing in a responsible way.

But they all come in at 60%. That’d be a D, maybe a D-plus.

Tony Pitcher is the main author of the study.

“Wasn’t very encouraging actually that even the top scoring countries were
not really that good. So it wasn’t anything to write home about – we were
at the top but it wasn’t a great field. At the bottom end some countries
were just disastrous. More than half the countries didn’t even pass the
40%.”

Countries are getting bad grades because there’s a lot of over-fishing going
on. There’s illegal fishing. And there’s a big problem with nets and traps
getting lost. They can snare marine mammals, birds and fish.

Tony Pitcher says it’s not always easy to know where your fish came from.
But he says you can look for a blue and white label when you’re shopping.
It’ll say Marine Stewardship Council on it.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Obama: Tar Sands Oil Will Work

President Obama indicates a willingness to continue to import Canada’s dirtiest source of oil. Lester Graham reports environmentalists don’t like it:

Transcript

President Obama indicates a willingness to continue to import Canada’s dirtiest source of oil. Lester Graham reports environmentalists don’t like it:

The United States gets about 20% of its imported oil from Canada. Half of that comes from tar sands in Alberta.

It takes two-tons of the asphalt-like substance to produce one barrel of oil.

Refineries in several states are expanding facilities to process the dirtier oil.

Henry Henderson is with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

He says takes a lot more energy to extract, transport and refine tar sands oil. That means a lot more greenhouse gases.

“At least three times what conventional oil involves. That brings with it a significant threat and impact on our national security in terms of changing global climate in a way that is a threat to us.”

Despite the environmentalists’ concerns, President Obama says the U.S. will work with Canada to use the tar sands oil reserves.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Mountaintop Mining (Part One)

  • In his last days, President Bush changed rules that made it easier to blow off the tops of mountains to mine for coal. (Photo by Sandra Sleight-Brennan)

One of the last things the Bush administration did was change a rule to allow coal mining companies to dump debris into streams. That means one mining company will be able to remove one of the last mountaintops in a West Virginia county. Sandra Sleight-Brennan reports:

Transcript

One of the last things the Bush administration did was change a rule to allow coal mining companies to dump debris into streams. That means one mining company will be able to remove one of the last mountaintops in a West Virginia county. Sandra Sleight-Brennan reports:

Gary Anderson takes me out on his back porch and all you can see is Coal River Mountain. Even on a cold, gray winter day, it’s beautiful.

“All of that mountain range of there, that is Coal River Mountain– that mountain runs for about 3 miles up there.”

When he retired, Gary and his wife Barbara moved from Connecticut back to her family home in Colcord, West Virginia.

“That’s basically what brought us back. Is the mountains and the beauty. We grew up here and we came back to spend the rest of our days here. We thought were coming back to what we remember– the beautiful mountains. And really they just started doing the mountaintop removal over here in the past couple years.”

Other mountains in the area– Cherry Pond Mountinan and Kayford Mountain have been flattened so energy companies could get to the coal inside them.
Over one million acres in West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky have already been leveled to mine the thin vein of coal.

The mining companies dynamite the tops off to get to the coal underneath.

“Once in awhile you’ll see a big puff of dust go up in the air like a bomb has been dropped and in awhile it will settle down and then it will happen again the next day.”

Mountains are shorted and flattened–- often by 100’s of feet to get to a 14-inch seam of coal. What the dynamite loosens is dumped in the valleys. Thousands of miles of streams have been covered over and nature destroyed.

It’s pretty simple. They put dynamite in the mountain and blow it up.

Joe Lovett is the Executive Director of the Appalachian Center on the Economy and the Environment. He’s been fighting mountaintop removal for the past 10 years.

It’s like a layer cake. The mountain is like a layer cake and that coal is the icing. The dirt and rock in between is the cake. There is a lot more dirt and rock and mining waste than there is coal. And when they blow up the mountain the dirt and rock swell. So they have even a bigger problem because they have more material than they know what to do with. So, as they blow the mountain up they need to find something to do with the dirt and rock and they dump it into the streams and the valleys.

Dumping into streams was stopped. The Surface Mining Act’s Stream Buffer rule protected the streams. But the new Bush administration rule changes that.

Joe Lovett says that Coal River Mountain fair game for Massey Energy to blow the top off and fill the valleys.

“We have always believed that the rule prevented these fills, that and I guess so did the coal industry and the Office of Surface Mining because this has been the main thing that the coal industry has wanted from the Bush administration for a long time is that change in this rule.”

Lovett says its not good for the environment and it’s not good for the local economy.

“We are taking mountains that could support sustainable timber jobs for generations and, in a few short years, destroying them forever and mining them in such a way that those forests will never come back.”

The mining industry argues that we need this inexpensive energy source in order to be energy independent. But, says Lovett and other environmentalists, if valley fills were outlawed tomorrow the cost of coal for our electric rates would only go up by pennies.

I’ll also talk to an official of the mining industry about why this type of mining needs to continue. The fact it provides American energy and jobs and that West Virginia’s economy depends upon it.

Back at Gary Anderson’s home, he wonders how it came to this.

Who gave them the right to blow the tops of mountains off to get the coal? I mean, that’s what gets me. Where, back in time, did they get the permission to come in and just below the mountains up? It’s really unbelievable. You can’t go back and reconstruct a mountain that’s been here for hundreds of millions of years. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

But, the mining companies now have the legal right to level the top of Coal River Mountain and fill up the valleys and streams above Anderson’s home.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sandra Sleight-Brennan.

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Businesses Going Lean and Green

  • Marco's Pizza changed the size of its boxes to fit more on distribution trucks. It's also switching to recyclable plastics for chicken wings. (Photo by Julie Grant)

Times are tough for the economy,
so lots of headlines tell us that the
end is near for the burgeoning green
market. But some analysts say the
economic downturn could encourage more
companies to be environmentally friendly.
Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

Times are tough for the economy,
so lots of headlines tell us that the
end is near for the burgeoning green
market. But some analysts say the
economic downturn could encourage more
companies to be environmentally friendly.
Julie Grant reports:

When stock prices plummeted this year for Whole Foods
Market, a lot of people saw that as a sign that green
companies were wilting during this dark time in the economy.

Whole Foods has one of the best known names for natural
and sustainably made products and caters to people who
are willing to pay more for them.

“You know, it’s really easy to look at stores like Whole
Foods, or companies selling green products, and see that
they’re not doing as well as last year and saying, ‘oh, the
green economy is tanking.’”

Author Joel Makower has chronicled the rise of the green
movement in corporate America through many articles, and
in his recently published book “Strategies for the Green
Economy.”

“The fact is that no retailer, except for Wal-Mart, is doing
better than last year. They’re all doing much, much worse.
So green products sink and swim along with the overall
economy. The economy is really bad right now, so a lot of
these products aren’t doing as well.”

But Makower says the green movement has a leg up on the
rest of the economy – because what consumers are buying
is only part of the story.

(sound of Marco’s Pizza Shop)

The smell of garlic and cheese and dough baking at Marco’s
Pizza is enough to make anyone hungry when they walk in.
While some of the biggest names in the pizza biz are closing
down stores, this relatively small Ohio-based chain is
growing like gang-busters, tripling the number of stores and
franchising in 14 states.

Purchasing manager Don Vlcek says, earlier this year,
prices of everything from the mozzarella to the plastic cups
were on the rise.

“When all of the costs going into restaurants started going
up, like I’ve never seen, and I’ve been in this industry since I
was 17 years old, we wanted to keep our prices the same to
our customers. So we looked at cost cutting – mainly at the
packaging end.”

Vlcek stresses: they’re not skimping on the pizza.
Marco’s has started doing things like using paper cups
instead of plastic. The new ones are cheaper and
biodegradable. Their pizza boxes used to be colorful,
glossy, and not very recyclable.

“Now our boxes, which the industry has said is the most
impressive and highest cost box in the industry, we’ve taken
that and we’ve put new messages on it, with a non-
varnished look.”

Marco’s also slightly reduced the size of its pizza boxes, so
more fit on its distribution trucks. That’s saved transportation
costs – and lots of polluting truck travel. None of this sounds
too sexy. But these efficiencies have saved Marco’s 2.5
million dollars this year.

The cuts they made have been good for the bottom line –
and for the environment.

Industry strategist Joel Makower says there are thousands of
stories like this.

“Once companies squeeze out the waste and inefficiency
and the water, carbon, and energy intensity and the toxicity
of their products, that’s not going to come back as soon as
oil prices drop, as we’ve seen them do, or when the
economy goes bad, as it has. This is a fundamental change
in how business is being done, and this is just the
beginning.”

Makower predicts that companies will continue to innovate
new ways to save money, and that is going to benefit the
environment.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Growing Upward, Not Outward

  • Valcent's vertical farm has hundreds of clear plastic sheets holding pockets of plants. These hang from moving racks. (Photo courtesy of Valcent)

It takes a lot of land to grow
crops. There are concerns there won’t
be enough land to grow all the needed
food for the rapidly growing population.
That’s why some researchers and business
people are creating what they call
vertical farms. Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

It takes a lot of land to grow
crops. There are concerns there won’t
be enough land to grow all the needed
food for the rapidly growing population.
That’s why some researchers and business
people are creating what they call
vertical farms. Julie Grant reports:

On the outside, it looks like a big green house. Inside,
there’s an overhead conveyer system.

It looks kind of like a dry cleaner. Hanging from the moving
racks are hundreds of clear plastic sheets. Each has rows of
pockets. In each pocket, there’s a vegetable plant.

The conveyor moves them around to make sure the plants
get enough light, nutrients and water.

Glen Kertz is president of Valcent Products, which is building
its first commercial-scale vertical farm in Alberta, Canada –
where it can be expensive to truck in fresh produce.

“A couple of hundred years ago, they couldn’t get fresh
lettuce in the dead of winter. But do they want it today?
Yes.”

Kertz and others think we could vertical farm in cities in
skyscrapers.

But Kurtz says the farm’s heat, lighting and conveyor system
all run on fossil fuels and he wants to switch to renewable
energy.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Saving Nation’s Seed Supply

  • Multinational corporations started taking control of seeds around thirty years ago. Now, ten corporations own over half the world’s commodity seed supply. (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA Agricultural Research Service)

Some small gardening businesses
are noticing more customers want organic
and heirloom seeds. Experts think that
trend might be important for the world.
Kinna Ohman reports they believe
those seeds might be the hope of future
food supplies:

Transcript

Some small gardening businesses
are noticing more customers want organic
and heirloom seeds. Experts think that
trend might be important for the world.
Kinna Ohman reports they believe
those seeds might be the hope of future
food supplies:

John Meshna points to a half empty rack of vegetable and flower seed packets in his
store.

“We’ve emptied this thing at least a half a dozen times this year. I thought maybe
we’d have a rush in the spring and that’d be the end of it. And it looks like it’s
going to be going through the winter.”

Meshna owns and runs DirtWorks – a green garden supply business in New Haven,
Vermont. He’s been selling organic and heirloom garden seeds for more than twenty
years. Heirloom seeds come from vegetables that have almost disappeared. And Meshna
thinks people want those types of seeds more and more because they’re worried about our
food supply.

“People call us just to make sure sometimes before they order, now, ‘these are really
organic seeds, right?’ Yeah, it says it right on the label. It’s gonna make you very
happy when you get that package.”

And it’s making certain experts happy too.

Hope Shand is the research director of Etcetera Group. It’s an organization that’s
concerned about corporate control of the food supply. Shand says when more home
gardeners and small farmers grow plants from organic and heirloom seeds, that helps
keep variety in the world’s food supply.

“This is an incredibly important service. People, gardeners, small farmers, urban
gardeners, are conserving, and saving seed diversity. No one else is really doing that
job.”

Hope Shand says multinational corporations started taking control of seeds around thirty
years ago. Now, Shand says, ten corporations own over half the world’s commodity seed
supply. And she thinks that’s risky.

“The seed is the first link in the food chain. Whoever controls the seed literally
controls the world’s food supply. We can’t afford to have the level of vulnerability
and dependence that that entails when we have a handful of multinational seed
companies controlling the world seed supply.”

(sound of watering)

“I’m growing greens without heat.”

At a small organic nursery in Hinesberg, Vermont, Julie Rubaud is one of those who
wants to get these seeds and plants to more people. For her, it’s not just preserving a
strain of a vegetable, it’s trying to match up those plants with the right gardener.

Rubaud grows close to eight hundred varieties of organic and heirloom plants for her
customers. She says that helps her connect people with the right plants for their gardens
and tastebuds.

“I always start out asking, ‘how much room do you have?’ And then I ask them
how they like to eat tomatoes. It’s nice to be able to cater everyone’s garden plan to
their individual needs because we have so many varieties.”

And if next year’s anything like last year, Rubaud will have at least forty varieties of
organic tomato plants ready for new gardens by next spring.

She wonders – with the economy the way it’s been – if one plant might do exceptionally
well.

“There’s Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter Tomatoes. Have you heard of that
one?” (laughs)

Radiator Charlie’s tomato has been around since the 1940s. You probably won’t find it
at the big-box discount-store gardening department. It’s one of those colorful, hardy,
productive plants that many people think will help bring back variety to our food supply.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kinna Ohman.

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How Much Help From Offshore Drilling?

  • Oil is a global commodity, so oil drilled in the US would not have to stay here (Photo courtesy of the Minerals Management Service)

There’s been a lot of talk lately
about drilling for more oil off the American
coasts. Rebecca Williams reports that oil
is not required to go to the US markets:

Transcript

There’s been a lot of talk lately
about drilling for more oil off the American
coasts. Rebecca Williams reports that oil
is not required to go to the US markets:

Oil is a global commodity. Oil drilled in the US would not have to stay
here.

But most of it probably would.

Alan Good is with Morningstar. He analyzes the oil and gas industries.

“It would generally go straight to America because it would incur the lowest
transportation costs to get to the United States refineries.”

But Good says it would be at least a decade before that oil would come
online. And even then it’s not clear how much offshore drilling here would
reduce imports from the Middle East.

“It will help somewhat with imports but it’s not likely to make a huge dent.”

And he says it’ll probably have little effect on the price you pay at the pump
because world demand drives oil prices.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Better Packaging, Bigger Benefits

  • Employees wrap office furniture in blankets as one element of a green shipping method used by Perkins Specialized Transportation to cut carbon emissions. (Photo courtesy of Perkins)

Companies are looking at new ways to
use less packaging and save fuel. It’s all
considered “carbon reduction,” but it comes
down to saving money. Lester Graham reports
on a couple of companies finding some success:

Transcript

Companies are looking at new ways to
use less packaging and save fuel. It’s all
considered “carbon reduction,” but it comes
down to saving money. Lester Graham reports
on a couple of companies finding some success:

Many environmentalists love to hate Wal-Mart. But, in recent years, Wal-Mart has been
encouraging its suppliers to find ways to reduce environmental impacts.

Now, that’s important because Wal-Mart is huge. As its suppliers go green, it’s having a
ripple effect on the suppliers’ suppliers and all their competitors.

So here’s what happens. Companies that come up with ways to reduce environmental
impacts are rewarded. Wal-Mart gives them more store shelf space and promotions.

Rand Waddoups is with Wal-Mart. He says electronics company Hewlitt-Packard took
the challenge to a whole new level.

“They came back with this idea to completely remove the packaging from the laptops that they’re selling us, and instead have a messenger bag that we give the customers to take home with them. In addition to that, it’s Energy Star product, it’s Ross compliant – which is reduction of hazardous substances. It just ended up being a really great laptop.”

It’s not just Wal-Mart and its suppliers that are trying to reduce packaging.

Other manufacturers and shippers are finding ways to get rid of all the cardboard and
styrofoam and plastic wrapping.

The office furniture company Haworth worked with the shipper Perkins Specialized
Transportation. Instead of boxing up chairs and desks with cardboard and styrofoam,
the companies decided to test other ways of shipping. Greg Maiers is the the shipper,
Perkins.

“About a third of their shipments we converted to a blanket-wrapping or using pads to secure the product in decking inside the trailers, as opposed to the way they had been doing it, with cardboard boxes.”

So instead of stacking bulky boxes, they just put the furniture in, put in a wood deck,
and put in another layer on top of that – all cushioned with pads.

The tests came up with three results. One: they didn’t have to buy cardboard boxing.
That made their retail customers happy because they didn’t have to deal with throwing
all that stuff away or trying to recycle it. Two: they could actually fit more office
furniture on the truck, so they didn’t need as many trucks on the road. Three: it does
take more labor to pack in the furniture and wrap it in blankets, stack the decks and so
on, so that cost a little more, but remember, there were fewer trucks, and that savings
more than offset that additional labor cost. So overall, shipping was cheaper.

Greg Maiers says corporate America is learning, and changing.

“Many, many industries are clearly getting the indication that there is an environmental impact that’s going on, there’s a change, and we have to address it. And many, many companies are doing it.”

And a lot of those companies are finding it’s also good for the bottom line.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Dirt on the Coal Supply

  • This coal fired power plant sits at the corner of the SIU campus in Carbondale, Illinois. It has sulfur scrubbers and other technology that allow it to burn Illinois coal. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

Presidential candidates John McCain
and Barack Obama are trying to sell us on a
clean energy future. And they’ve got a laundry
list of ideas, including conservation, solar
and wind power, and safer nuclear energy.
But they both want to tweak an old reliable
fuel, too. That would be American coal.
Shawn Allee looks at why McCain
and Obama are gung-ho on coal:

Transcript

Presidential candidates John McCain
and Barack Obama are trying to sell us on a
clean energy future. And they’ve got a laundry
list of ideas, including conservation, solar
and wind power, and safer nuclear energy.
But they both want to tweak an old reliable
fuel, too. That would be American coal.
Shawn Allee looks at why McCain
and Obama are gung-ho on coal:

One reason McCain and Obama tout coal is they’re convinced we have plenty of it.

And they even agree on how to make that point.

McCain first.

McCain: “Our coal reserves are larger than Saudi Arabia’s supply of oil.”

Obama: “We’re the Saudi Arabia of coal, we got more coal than just about
everybody else.”

The Saudi Arabia of Coal.

That’s a sexy political metaphor – it sounds like coal’s just waiting to be scooped up.

Where do politicians get this idea?

“It is really based on data published by the Energy Information Administration.”

That’s Mike Mellish. He crunches coal projection numbers for that agency.

Politicians cite a government figure that we have 250 years worth of coal.

Mellish calls that a very rough estimate. Mellish says we get that number by estimating
how much coal we can get out of the ground economically.

Then, analysts compare that to how much we burn in factories and power plants right
now.

“So that’s really the basis of that statement of 250 years.”

Mellish says, if we use more coal, we’d literally burn through the supply faster.

There are critics who pounce on the idea we have plenty of coal. One of them’s Richard
Heinberg.

Heinberg studies energy for the Post-Carbon Institute, a green think tank. He says
politicians should not expect cheap coal for centuries.

“It assumes we can continue extracting this stuff out of the ground at constant rates
until, one day, it all just runs out.”

Heinberg says America does have lots of coal, but the amount under the ground isn’t the
only thing that counts.

“We tend to get the cheap, easy stuff first, then the production peaks and tails off
afterward.”

Heinberg predicts companies will have to invest money to keep finding new coal, and
that will raise coal prices – not in centuries – but in a few decades.

And Heinbergs says there’s another reason Obama and McCain shouldn’t have so much
faith in coal.

Coal plants put loads of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and that makes the global
warming problem worse.

Both candidates want new technologies to put coal’s carbon emissions in the ground.

“But there are a lot of questions as to whether this is really going to work. The cost
of capturing all that carbon dioxide and moving it around and burying it will be
enormous and they will add to the cost of electricity we can make with coal.”

For Heinberg all this talk about the Saudi Arabia of coal, and that 250 year figure, it’s all
a big bet – and it could have a high cost if we’re wrong.

“If we’re going on the assumption that there’s plenty of coal out there for many
decades to come at current prices and we build infrastructure accordingly and then
a couple of decades from now, suddenly coal becomes much more expensive and
scarce we will have gotten ourselves in a very difficult place, sort of like we’d done
with oil.”

A lot of energy experts are more upbeat on coal than Heinberg.

They admit it’s not clear how much coal we have, but it’s a heck of a lot, and we know
how to get it.

They say they don’t blame Obama and McCain for giving clean coal a chance. It’s just
that we should have started testing it a decade ago.

Hmm, a decade ago?

Politicians don’t like to say we’ve missed the mark by a decade.

It’s no wonder we haven’t heard that on the campaign trail.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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