consumers

Paper or Plastic…or Neither?

Paul Koretz is a Los Angeles City Councilmember who represents most of the city’s west side (including UCLA) and large chunks of the San Fernando Valley.  And he’s got a proposal that environmentalists love: Hoping to reduce the billions of grocery bags circulating throughout the city, an L.A. councilman Tuesday called for a sweeping ban …

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Follow-up on refrigeration: the history of the idea of food “freshness”

My colleague Jonathan Zasloff’s recent post on refrigeration reminded me of a fascinating book published last year: Fresh, by Susanne Freidberg.  This book — authored by a college classmate of mine who teaches geography at Dartmouth — chronicles the evolution of the culturally-constructed concept of “freshness” in 19th and 20th-century America, and the development of …

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EPA proposes fuel economy letter grade labels for cars

New labels proposed by the federal government would give new cars letter grades reflecting their fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions.  Electric cars and plug-in hybrids are expected to get the highest grades.  The rule isn’t final yet; the public can comment and make suggestions on the label design. Most of us are familiar with …

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Who will pay for the costs of foreign carbon dioxide in our consumer goods?

I discussed in this post the problem of GHG emissions from imported consumer products.  We import and buy more and more goods from China and other countries that rely heavily on greenhouse gas-intensive coal-fired power.  As a result, our consumer habits are responsible for a large and growing proportion of GHG emissions in other countries.   These …

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EPA report on US greenhouse gas emissions and sinks may not tell the whole story

Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), the international agreement that resulted in the Kyoto Protocol and that will convene a new round of talks in Copenhagen later this year, the U.S. is required to report comprehensively each year on U.S.-based emissions of greenhouse gases and on GHG sinks in the U.S.    The U.S. EPA released …

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