Tag: union

Financing Energy Efficiency

  • More than half the houses in the U.S. were built before 1970. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laborator)

Reducing your carbon footprint
by using less energy can cost
money. Efficient cars, energy
efficient homes, and energy-saving
appliances all take money. That’s
why some states are testing whether
homeowners would be willing
to borrow money to upgrade their
homes and, in turn, save a few
bucks in energy costs. In one
state, the plan is to get private
banks and credit unions to finance
energy efficiency. Peter Payette reports:

Transcript

Reducing your carbon footprint
by using less energy can cost
money. Efficient cars, energy
efficient homes, and energy-saving
appliances all take money. That’s
why some states are testing whether
homeowners would be willing
to borrow money to upgrade their
homes and, in turn, save a few
bucks in energy costs. In one
state, the plan is to get private
banks and credit unions to finance
energy efficiency. Peter Payette reports:

When you hear green building, you might think of a fancy new house with solar panels. But most homes are not new, so reducing the amount of energy communities use means doing something about old houses.

Max Strickland owns a business in Michigan that certifies green homes and buildings. He says more than half the houses in the U.S. were built before 1970.

“We had very little energy code requirements previous to that.”

But upgrades cost money that many homes owners don’t always have. And a lot of people saw whatever equity they had in their house disappear during the past couple of years.

Now, the State of Michigan is trying to help people find the money to make their homes more energy efficient. The program is called Michigan Saves. The state launched the pilot project in a rural area of the state. The pilot is a collaboration of a local credit union, an electric cooperative and a building supply company.
Borrowers will have their new payment tacked onto their monthly utility bill.

Trevor Williams is with Brown Lumber, the building supply company involved in the pilot. Williams says it’s likely most of the improvements will be in heating costs. He says to begin with, home owners will be encouraged to have an energy audit.

“The audit it would say things that need to be done, the top three things that are recommended. Furnace replacement, ceiling ducts and weatherizing the house those going to be the three most common items.”

But homeowners can also borrow money for new energy efficient appliances like refrigerators and hot water heaters. Sometimes loans like this are promoted as immediately paying for themselves. That is, it’s suggested the money you save on your utility bills will fully cover your new payment. That’s not necessarily the case.

Marc McKeller is with Members Credit Union which is financing the project. He says after a few years, people will be able to break even on the costs. Government tax incentives and other rebates will help that happen. But McKellar says people shouldn’t expect to take out a loan, retrofit their house and not have more to pay each month.

“The only way it could be was if a government was to give zero percent loans out and that they received tremendous rebates from the utilities and that they received a tremendous government credit.”


But, McKellar says it’s still a good deal. The interest rate for project’s loans will be a little bit better because the state is backing the loans.

And tight credit means not many banks are loaning people money to make their house energy efficient and not many people are putting money into a home that’s lost value because of the housing market bust. That’s one of the reasons they need to run a pilot project.

“They’re trying to determine through this study, how do you get a consumer to actually do this and what are the benefits?”

The directors of Michigan Saves hope to roll out a statewide program later this year. So far no banks have agreed to participate but there are other credit unions interested in the concept.

For The Environment Report, I’m Peter Payette.

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Biofuels in Europe: Part 2

  • Erhard Thäle and his wife grow organic crops like corn, peas and rye in these fields. They’ve lost money the last three years. Thäle know wants to sell his crops for energy. (Photo by Sadie Babits)

Farmers are finding they can
make more money selling crops
for energy than for food. A third
of all corn grown in the US gets
turned into ethanol. It’s tough
to balance the need for energy
and food when millions around
the world die from starvation each
year. Still, farmers are reconsidering
their roles – including in Germany.
In the second part of our three-part
series on biofuels in Europe, Sadie
Babits meets with one German
farmer who wants to make the switch
and become an energy farmer:

Transcript

Farmers are finding they can
make more money selling crops
for energy than for food. A third
of all corn grown in the US gets
turned into ethanol. It’s tough
to balance the need for energy
and food when millions around
the world die from starvation each
year. Still, farmers are reconsidering
their roles – including in Germany.
In the second part of our three-part
series on biofuels in Europe, Sadie
Babits meets with one German
farmer who wants to make the switch
and become an energy farmer:

Erhard Thale jokes a lot about being an organic farmer. It’s about all he can do.

“He has like his corn harvest from two years ago is still lying down on his farm so it’s not sold on the market.”

It’s hard to imagine. We’re outside Ludwigsfelde not too far from Berlin. Thale’s land looks green and healthy – not bad for late fall. But looks can be deceiving. Thale says he’s lost money for the past three years. He blames his land and a volatile world market.

“Then My wife comes and asks, ‘where do we go from here? Piggybank is empty. Money gone.’”

Thale says he can make more money selling his organic corn and rye for energy instead of food. He’s not joking around. There’s a growing movement in Germany to get farmers like Thale to set some of their land aside to grow grains just for energy. There are now areas throughout the country developing so called “bio-energy regions.” The idea is that a community like Ludwigsfelde would produce its energy locally.

Farmers like Thale would sell their grains and manure to a regional bio-energy power plant. Those materials would get turned into green energy. The 20,000 residents who live here wouldn’t have to rely on fossil fuels and they’d cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. Sounds promising. But Thale says he’d build his own plant if he had three million dollars. Then he could keep all the profits from selling energy.

“He needs an uncle in the U.S. with two million euros.” (laughter)

Other farmers, though, are cashing in, finding money in, well, poop.

(sound of milking machine)

A cow chews her cud as an automatic machine does the milking. This milking parlor is part of an agricultural training center here in west central Germany. This is the greenest farm I’ve been on. There’s a bio-energy power plant. Wind turbines and solar arrays.

Klaus Wagner runs the center. He says this cow’s manure is more valuable than the milk.

“That can’t be.”

Wagner sees a growing rivalry between dairy farmers who want to sell milk and those who want to sell manure for biogas.

“I guess that the milk and energy production on the other side belongs together. And those farmers who built 3-4 years ago biogas plant they earn real money now. The biogas plant substitutes the milking production.”

It really comes down to a question of sustainability. How much land here in Germany and, for that matter, the U.S. should be set aside for making energy? It’s not an easy answer. In the long run, if farmers grow grains for energy instead of food, that will impact the food supply and eventually what we pay at the grocery store.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.

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A Tough New Chemical Law

  • Lena Perenius and Franco Bisegna are with CEFIC, the European Chemical Industry Council in Brussels, Belgium. (Photo by Liam Moriarty)

There are tens of thousands of
chemical compounds on the market
these days. And, for the most part,
unless regulators can prove a chemical
is harmful, it stays there. Now, Europe
has turned that way of doing things
on its head, and the US is showing
signs of moving in that direction, too.
Liam Moriarty has this report:

Transcript

There are tens of thousands of
chemical compounds on the market
these days. And, for the most part,
unless regulators can prove a chemical
is harmful, it stays there. Now, Europe
has turned that way of doing things
on its head, and the US is showing
signs of moving in that direction, too.
Liam Moriarty has this report:

(sounds of a street)

Brussels, Belgium is sort of like the Washington, DC of Europe. It’s here – in the seat of the European Union – that the 27 nations that make up the EU hash out their common policies.

I’m sitting in the office of Bjorn Hansen. He keeps an eye on chemicals for the European Commission’s Directorate General for the Environment. To give me an idea of how ubiquitous chemicals are in our everyday lives, Hansen points around his office.

“Just us sitting here, you are probably exposed to chemicals, which come from the office furniture, which have been used to color the textile, which has been used to create the foam, the glue under the carpet that we’re sitting – you name it, you’re exposed.”

The big question is whether all this exposure is harming our health or the environment. The answer?

“We, by far, do not know what chemicals are out there, what the effects of those chemicals are, and what the risks associated with those chemicals.”

In the European Union, that uncertainty led to a new law known by its acronym, REACH. That’s R-E-A-C-H. REACH requires that tens of thousands of chemicals used in everyday products in the EU be studied and registered. If a substance cannot be safely used, manufacturers will have to find a substitute, or stop using it. REACH has, at its core, a radical shift: it’s no longer up to the government to prove a chemical is unsafe.

“The burden of proof is on industry to demonstrate safety. And by demonstrating the safety that they think, they also take liability and responsibility for that safety.”

Even for industries accustomed to tougher European regulations, REACH was alarming.

“There were very, quite violent opposition in the beginning.”

Lena Perenius is with CEFIC, the European Chemical Industry Council.

“In the EU, we already had a very comprehensive set of regulations for ensuring safe use of chemicals. And the industry saw that this was putting an unreasonable burden on the companies.”

Corporations may not have liked it, but the measure had strong public support. After several contentious rounds of negotiations, Perenius says the industry feels it got key concessions that’ll make the far-reaching law workable. Now, she says, the industry has come to see the up-side of REACH.

“Now, when we have the responsibility, that gives us a little bit of freedom to demonstrate, in the way we believe is appropriate, how a substance can be used safely.”

Here in the US, there are signs of political momentum building around taking a more REACH-like approach to regulating the chemicals in everyday products. New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg recently said he’d introduce a bill that would shift the burden of proof for safety onto chemical manufacturers.

“Instead of waiting for a chemical to hurt somebody, it will require companies to prove their products are safe before they end up in the store, in our homes, and in our being.”

Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson recently told a Senate committee that – out of an estimated 80,000 chemicals in use – existing law has allowed the EPA to ban only 5, and to study just 200.

“Though many of these chemicals likely pose little or no risk, the story is clear – we’ve only been able to effectively regulate a handful of chemicals, and we know very little about the rest.”

More than a dozen states from Maine to California have already moved to toughen safety standards for chemicals. Even the American Chemistry Council has agreed to support more vigorous regulations to assure consumers that the chemicals in the products they use are safe.

As always, the devil is in the details. But the coming reform is shaping up to look a lot like what Europe is already putting in place.

For The Environment Report, I’m Liam Moriarty.

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European Cap-And-Trade Example

  • Europe was the first to do carbon cap-and-trade, four years ago. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

Congress is haggling over a climate
bill that includes a carbon cap-and-
trade system. In many ways, it’s
similar to the one the European Union
put in place several years ago. Liam
Moriarty looks at what
the European experience has been and
what the lessons for the US might be:

Transcript

Congress is haggling over a climate
bill that includes a carbon cap-and-
trade system. In many ways, it’s
similar to the one the European Union
put in place several years ago. Liam
Moriarty looks at what
the European experience has been and
what the lessons for the US might be:

Slashing greenhouse gas emissions is hard. Our economy is powered mostly by fossil fuels. Switching to clean fuels will be disruptive and expensive, at least to start with.

So how do we get from here to there? The approach that’s proving most popular is what’s called “cap-and-trade.” It works like this – first, there’s the cap.

“We’re going to put an absolute limit on the quantity of carbon-based fuels that we’re going to burn. And we’re going to develop a system to make sure we’re not burning more fossil fuels than that.”

Alan Durning heads the Sightline Institute, a sustainability-oriented think tank in Seattle. He explains that once you put the cap in place…

“Then, we’re going to let the market decide who exactly should burn the fossil fuels based on who has better opportunities to reduce their emissions.”

That’s the “trade” part. Companies get permits to put out a certain amount of greenhouse gases. Outfits that can cut their emissions more than they need to can sell their unused pollution permits to companies that can’t.

The cap gets ratcheted down over time. There are fewer permits out there to buy. Eventually even the most polluting companies have to reduce their emissions, as well.

The goal is to wean ourselves off dirty fuels by making them more expensive. And that makes cleaner fuels more attractive.

Europe was the first to do carbon cap and trade, four years ago. And things got off to a rough start. They set the cap on emissions too high and way overestimated the number of permits – or allowances – that companies would need.

“We have too many allowances. Simple supply means that the prices of those allowances crashes. They don’t have much value, and therefore the price went down to close to zero.”

That’s Vicki Pollard. She follows climate change negotiations for the European Commission. She says the whole system got knocked out of kilter.

For the first two years, European carbon emissions actually went up. After the collapse of Phase One, big changes were made. The next phase of the trading system has a tighter cap, more stringent reporting requirements and enforcement with teeth.


Today, Europe’s on track to meet its current emissions target. But environmentalists, such as Sanjeev Kumar with the World Wildlife Fund in Brussels, say those targets are still driven more by politics than by science.

“We have a cap that’s very weak, i.e. that means that it doesn’t mean that we’re going to achieve the levels of decarbonization that we need within the time scale.”

Leading climate scientists say we have to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by the middle of this century to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Business still has concerns about the EU cap and trade scheme. Folker Franz is with BusinessEurope, sort of the European version of the US Chamber of Commerce. He says companies worry about the additional cost of carbon emissions putting them at a competitive disadvantage.

“If you produce one ton of steel, you emit roughly one ton of CO2. So any ton of steel produced in the EU is right now some 17 dollars more than outside the European Union. And that makes a difference.”

But, Franz says, European businesses accept the need to take prompt action on climate change and are on board with the stricter cap and trade rules coming over the next few years.

Americans have watched Europe struggle with carbon cap-and-trade. The Sightline Institute’s Alan Durning says we can benefit from Europe’s willingness to break new ground.

“It was a big advance when they started it, because nothing like it had ever been done. But, it’s not the be-all-and-end-all. In fact, the United States now has an opportunity to learn from their mistakes and leapfrog ahead to a much better climate policy.”

Durning says an American cap and trade system could avoid the costly stumbles that’ve hampered Europe’s carbon reduction efforts.

For The Environment Report, I’m Liam Moriarty.

Related Links

U.S. Lax on Chemicals

  • Toy makers use phthalates to make hard plastic pliable (Source: Toniht at Wikimedia Commons)

News about dangerous chemicals in toys,
cosmetics and cleaning products has a lot of
Americans spending extra money. People want to
make sure they’re choosing things that are safe
for their families. Julie Grant reports that
other countries are ahead of the US in efforts
to improve the safety of all products:

Transcript

News about dangerous chemicals in toys,
cosmetics and cleaning products has a lot of
Americans spending extra money. People want to
make sure they’re choosing things that are safe
for their families. Julie Grant reports that
other countries are ahead of the US in efforts
to improve the safety of all products:

So you might expect that the government has tested those
chemicals to make sure they’re safe. But you’d be wrong.

Daryl Ditz is senior policy advisor at the Center for
International Environmental Law.

He says the US Environmental Protection Agency has never
assessed the hazards of most chemicals used in every day
products.

“That means the EPA doesn’t know, and you and I don’t know,
which materials on the shelves are more dangerous and
which are less.”

Ditz says only a few hundred chemicals have been
thoroughly tested by the U.S. government, but there are
80,000 chemicals used in products on the market.

In the U.S., the EPA has to prove a chemical is harmful to
keep it off the market.

(sound of toy store)

Dorothy Bryan is shopping at this upscale toy store in Northeast Ohio.

She’s got three grandkids. She’s looking at an
organic cotton bunny, colorful wooden blocks, and of course
Thomas the Tank Engine. She
pays more for toys at this store than she would at the big box
retailer. But Bryan says they’re worth it.

“They’re not toxic. That’s the big part. They’re not the
plastic toxic things.
I purchase usually the wooden toys. The little one puts
everything in his mouth.”

But most kids’ toys are made of plastic. And lots of plastics are made with phthalates. It makes them pliable.

But phthalates are endocrine disruptors. They’re gender-bender chemicals that make girls develop earlier and reduce testosterone levels in boys.

That’s why
California has banned the use some phthalates in toys. So
have Japan and the European Union.

But Daryl Ditz, chemical expert at Center for International
Environmental Law, says regulators in the U.S. don’t have
much power to ban phthalates or other chemicals.
Chemicals here are innocent until proven guilty.

“That is, companies can sell virtually anything in a product or in a barrel unless it’s been proven
to be dangerous.”

But other countries are starting to take the opposite
approach. Ditz says the European Union is rolling out a new
set of laws that make chemicals guilty until proven
innocent.

“They’re putting the responsibility squarely on the shoulders
of the chemical makers. As opposed to having the
environmental authorities look for a needle in the haystack,
they’re saying, ‘this should be the responsibility of the
companies who make these materials.’”

Under the EU law, manufacturers will have to study and
report the risks posed by each chemical: whether they
cause cancer, birth defects, or environmental problems.

The Bush administration and chemical manufacturers tried to
block the European law. But they couldn’t.

Ditz says leaders in the
chemical makers’ trade group are now running around like
their hair is on fire. They’re worried – the costs to comply
could be in the tens of millions of dollars for some
companies that export chemicals to Europe.

But many individual companies have already started to
comply with the law.

Walter van het Hoff is spokesperson for Dow Chemical in
Europe. He says cataloging Dow’s 7000 chemicals is a
huge effort, but they don’t have a choice.

“You need to comply; otherwise you cannot sell them
anymore in the European Union.”

There are a half billion consumers in the EU and Dow wants to keep them. Dow and other
manufacturers might have to reformulate – or even abandon
some chemicals if the EU decides they’re unsafe.

While the U.S. is not considering a comprehensive chemical
review like Europe’s new laws, about 30 states are
considering new regulations on chemicals in toys. The Toy
Industry Association doesn’t want a patchwork of laws, so
it’s called for national toy safety standards.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Invasive Screening Program Could Save Bucks

The U.S. economy could save billions of dollars a year if the government
would screen for invasive species. Lester Graham reports that prediction is
based on a recent study on screening out problem plants:

Transcript

The U.S. economy could save billions of dollars a year if the government would
screen for
invasive species. Lester Graham reports, that prediction is based on a recent study
on
screening out problem plants:


The study shows when a country screens for potentially harmful species of plants that
could spread like weeds, the cost of the screening is miniscule compared to the cost
of
the damage the plants cause. The study is published in the Proceedings of the
National
Academy of Sciences. It looked at the costs and benefits of Australia’s invasive
species
screening program.


Phyllis Windle specializes in invasive species. She’s with the environmental group
Union
of Concerned Scientists. Windle says it’s long been assumed that screening out pesky
plants would be worth the cost.


“But what this study does is that it really shows that prevention pays off and it
has good
data to illustrate that.”


Factoring in the scale of the U.S. economy to Australia’s, the Union of Concerned
Scientists estimates for an annual cost of a few million dollars, the U.S. economy
could
be spared a few billion dollars in damage by invasive plants.


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

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Plutonium Protest

Later this month (October, 1998), the U.S. Department of Energy
will begin shipping weapons grade plutonium to Canada for testing as a
possible fuel for nuclear reactors. As Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
commentator Suzanne Elston cautions, this could open up a whole new global
economy for the most deadly substance on earth:

Shipping Strike Averted

The Great Lakes Sailors Union has decided not to strike against two steel-hauling fleets this year. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mike Simonson reports, a strike could have been disastrous for an otherwise strong shipping season:

Striking Crews May Halt Great Lakes Shipping

Great Lakes Shippers are facing a strike, in a classic transportation dispute over cutting crews. Union sailors authorized a strike against two of the six fleets on the Great Lakes, after the companies proposed cutting back crews on supercarriers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mike Simonson reports: