Author: Terry Tamminen

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) proposed guidelines to address the practice of inflating eco-friendly claims for a growing list of products, commonly known as green-washing. Experts are debating if manufacturers should consider minimum standards for sustainable content and recycling practices, among many other factors, in an effort to help consumers understand just what shade of green they get for any given purchase. It’s a worthy effort and long overdue, but the FTC should go beyond green-washing and tackle green fraud.

In New York last week for the Clinton Global Initiative and United Nations Week, I attended a small dinner party late one night that featured film start Leonardo DiCaprio, billionaire philanthropist/investor George Soros, the President of the central African nation of Gabon and the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea (PNG), among others.

In parts of the West African nation of Ghana, water has become so scarce that young women ask suitors about the distance to sources of clean water in their communities before accepting marriage proposals.  Where water is hard to find, food is also often scarce, so girls are interrogating potential husbands about their ability to farm and feed a family. Should the rest of the world be taking these kinds of practical inventories of disappearing natural resources too?
 

Last week I visited the Australian state of Victoria, where the Parliament approved a bold plan by Premier John Brumby (of the Labor Party) to cut carbon emissions twenty percent below 2000 levels by 2020.

OK, it’s corny, but I had to smile last week, spreading Philadelphia brand cream cheese on a bagel while visiting Philadelphia (a common occurrence for residents of the City of Brotherly Love, no doubt, but not for a guy from Santa Monica). But what really caught my eye was the label that said the product was made with renewable energy.
 

A science advisor to the UK government predicts the growth of artificial meat in tanks to meet the needs of a burgeoning global middle class and to address the impacts on natural resources from raising livestock in more natural ways.  

In the past few weeks, how many of us have seen (or participated in) that summer staple, the three-legged race?  Two people stand side by side, each placing one leg into a gunny sack, then trying to coordinate movements to stay upright while running to a picnic table at the finish line.
 

About three years ago, I sat next to a man on a plane who was watching “Pirates of the Caribbean” on his iPod.  I couldn’t imagine it being much fun, although the special effects probably looked more realistic on a viewer that defied serious scrutiny than on something like an Imax screen. Ever since then, I have noticed that Apple delivers many familiar products and services in formats that are much lower in carbon content than the ones they replace – – and might even be able to deliver an app that one day saves the entire planet from the dual impacts of climate change and an energy-inefficient economy.

In the same summer that something (or someone?) is punishing the eastern half of the US with record heat and all of its predictable consequences, Congress raised a white flag last week in the battle to regulate one of the primary contributors to the problem—carbon pollution.

Hitachi’s Plant Technologies division and two cities in Japan are selling treated sewage water to an iron ore mining company in West Australia for use in industrial processes that today consume scarce drinking water.