Articles by Glenn Hurowitz

Unilever supports rainforest destruction moratorium

Greenpeace just announced a big win in its anti-palm oil campaign: just five days after launching a campaign to pressure food and cosmetics giant Unilever to stop purchasing palm oil from rainforest destroyers, Unilever met Greenpeace halfway. Apparently nervous about the prospect of orangutan-suited activists continuing to scale their corporate headquarters (see picture), the company agreed to support a legal moratorium on rainforest destruction. Given that Unilever uses five percent of the world's palm oil and chairs the so-called Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, that's big news!

Greenpeace discovers new sponge species

Greenpeace recently announced the discovery of a new species of sponge, Aaptos kanuux, as a result of its deep explorations of the Bering Sea last summer. Here's a video of the sponge from Greenpeace, and more info from my fellow Green Corps alum, Greenpeace Oceans Campaigner John Hocevar:

Biofuels loophole in 2007 energy bill grandfathers in pollution

A recent report ($ub. req'd) by Greenwire's Ben Geman revealed a massive loophole in the 2007 energy bill that renders meaningless most of the climate safeguards for corn ethanol that Democrats have touted.

The loophole exempts any ethanol refineries that have already been built or were under construction at the time the bill passed from meeting the global warming requirements. Those facilities have a combined production capacity of 13.7 billion gallons, just shy of the 15 billion gallons of production mandated in the bill -- meaning that the Democrat-vaunted greenhouse-gas safeguards will apply to only 11 percent of corn ethanol production.

With recent studies in the journal Science and elsewhere revealing that corn ethanol takes 167 years to produce enough greenhouse-gas savings to make it as green as regular old oil, and with billions of people struggling with skyrocketing food prices, and millions more acres of forest and savanna being destroyed, that means disaster for the climate and the world's poor.

No difference between McCain and Dems on climate

I got home yesterday from canvassing for Barack Obama in the outskirts of Harrisburg, Penn. and found last week's edition of The Patriot-News (whose politics reporter, Brett Lieberman, describes the state as "Pennsyltucky" for its unique mix of urban, industrial, and backwoods), including a "Find Your Match" voter guide with a chart that's supposed to help people figure out which candidate is closer to them on key policies. Here's what the chart said about Obama, Clinton, and McCain on global warming:

Clinton: $150 billion, 10-year energy package for new fuel sources; backed stringent caps on greenhouse-gas emissions.
Obama: $150 billion, 10-year program for "climate friendly" energy supplies, favors stringent caps on greenhouse-gas emissions.
McCain: Led Senate effort to cap greenhouse-gas emissions; favors tougher fuel efficiency.