Why Wildlife is Cheering for the Clean Power Plan

8/3/2015 // By Jim Murphy

 

 

President Obama has taken a historic and ambitious step in the fight against carbon pollution that threatens wildlife. With the announcement of the finalized Clean Power Plan, the President has enacted the first ever rules designed to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Power plants comprise about 40% of the nation’s emissions.

The National Climate Assessment shows that wildlife and communities are already feeling the impacts of climate with rising seas, ocean acidification, heavier precipitation, changes in growing seasons, decreased cold and snow pack, increased incidence of pests, devastating wildfires and droughts, and other significant impacts. Photo by Mary Harvey

The plan is part of the President’s Climate Action Plan, and a key component of America’s commitment to reduce its carbon emissions by up to 28% by 2025. The plan sets achievable reduction targets for states to meet using three building blocks: efficiency improvements at existing coal plants, switching plants from coal to natural gas, and increasing renewable energy. States then have flexibility to tailor their own plans to meet their target.

 

An Improved Plan for Tackling Climate Change

The final rule has some noted improvements over a proposed rule issued last year. For one, the final rule has a more ambitious target for overall emissions reductions, set at 32% by 2030. Also, the EPA listened to the countless voices who called for more emphasis on renewable energy.

Building on the soaring growth of clean sources of energy like wind and solar, the final rule has incentives and goals that are projected to result in an increase in renewable power generation from 22% to 28%. This is extremely welcome news.

The EPA has also included changes to give states even more latitude in terms of achieving compliance by moving back the compliance date and allowing states more time if they have reliability concerns. But compliance should not be a problem as more than half of states are already on track to meet the proposed rule’s 2020 benchmarks for reducing carbon pollution, with 14 of those states on track to exceed those benchmarks.

We Need to Act to Protect Wildlife

These measures come none too soon. The first five months of 2015 were the hottest on record, on pace to surpass 2014’s record year. A recent study published in the journal Nature finds an increasingly visible link between global warming and extreme weather, with warmer temperatures adding fuel to superstorms like Sandy.

Climate change poses a direct threat to wildlife and communities. If carbon pollution continues unabated, scientists predict that higher temperatures will lead to extinction of 50% of species around the globe.

Here are four species that are cheering about the President’s Clean Power Plan:

Ducks

Mallards and other ducks stand to gain from the Clean Power Plan. Photo Credit: USFWS.

Nearly half of America’s ducks come from a region in the northern Great Plains and Canada called the Prairie Pothole region. This vast expanse, which covers the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, Montana and three Canadian provinces, can contain up to six million shallow, often seasonal ponds that provide optimal breeding grounds for ducks.

Climate change will bringer warmer, dryer weather that will significantly reduce the number and quality of these breeding ponds. Without action, like the Clean Power Plan, duck hunters may soon be asking, “Where did all the ducks go?”

Brook Trout

Brook trout could be extinct in states like Virginia if global warming is not addressed. Photo Credit Flickr USFWS.

Brook trout, a favorite catch of anglers, inhabit only the clearest, coolest streams. In many places, these streams are at the upper most part of the watershed. As the climate warms, so do these streams. Increasingly, these streams are becoming too warm for brook trout have nowhere else to go.

For instance, in Virginia, where brook trout are the official state fish, recent climate modeling suggests brook trout could be gone from the state by mid-century. The Clean Power Plan is a big step in the right direction to ensuring brook trout will keep swimming in our streams.

Moose

Moose are already suffering significant declines likely due to climate change in several northern states. Photo by Mitchell Rothman.

Moose are America’s biggest and most recognizable ungulate. But moose are not well adapted for warm weather and are not found in places with extended periods above 82 degrees F.

Heat is already taking a toll on moose. In addition to heat stress, warming temperatures are allowing parasitic ticks to flourish, and tens of thousands of ticks can attach themselves to moose, literally sucking the life out of them. The results are high fatalities particularly in juvenile moose. In the last 25 years, one of Minnesota’s moose populations has plummeted from 4,000 to fewer than 100. Declines are also being seen in Maine and New Hampshire.

Without action like the Clean Power Plan, it is likely that moose populations will largely be driven out of the lower 48 states.

Loons

The Clean Power Plan will also reduce other harmful pollutants, like mercury, that are poisoning loons and other wildlife. Photo by Ronald Norman.

Currently, most states have fish advisories in place concerning thousands of water bodies because mercury from power plants have resulted in serious health risks associated with eating fish. Coal fired power plants are the source of over half of human introduced mercury into the environment.

While we can choose not to eat fish – a choice we shouldn’t have to make – wildlife can’t. Wildlife, like loons, that survive on fish in our lakes have no choice but to eat contaminated fish. A recent report found that 75% of loons in once pristine Adirondack lakes far from coal plants had mercury levels that posed high to moderate risks.

Mercury is so toxic, that 1/70^th of teaspoon to the make the fish in a 25 acre lake unsafe to eat. As the Clean Power Plan powers down mercury spewing coal and powers up renewables, EPA estimates that the Clean Power Plan will remove thousands of pounds of mercury from the environment. That’s good news for both people and loons who like to eat the fish they catch.

What’s Next?

Now it’s up to states to craft implementation plans to ensure the Clean Power Plan’s goals are realized. If states fail to act, the EPA will implement a federal plan on the state’s behalf. However, the plan is designed to make implementation easy for states. As National Wildlife Federation’s President and CEO Collin O’Mara explains:

The President has provided states with the flexibility necessary to achieve meaningful reductions in a way that unleashes American innovation to maximize benefits and strengthen the economy. From the Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to California’s carbon trading system, state-based and regional limits on industrial carbon pollution are proven effective at both cutting pollution and creating jobs.

There’s still a lot of work to do. But the President has taken a huge step towards reducing carbon pollution and has set the stage for further national and international action to keep ducks, trout, moose and loons a thriving part of our children’s future.

Urge Congress to stand strong for wildlife and climate action!

---

from Wildlife Promise

http://blog.nwf.org/2015/08/why-wildlife-is-cheering-for-the-clean-power-plan/

 

 

 

 

6 Surprising All-Natural Air Fresheners

 

Try these DIY deodorizers made from simple household ingredients.

By Emily Main April 1, 2015

 

Before you reach for that artificially scented bottle of "Hawaiian Aloha," which likely contains dozens of air pollutants, consider healthier air-freshening alternatives. Most of them are available in unexpected places, such as your liquor cabinet or your garbage can...or even on you. Here are six interesting ways to clean up.

 

1. Vodka
Ethyl alcohol, found in vodka and other spirits, is a main ingredient in most commercial air fresheners. Cleaning your air with vodka allows you to get rid of musty odors without saturating the air (or your lungs) with added chemicals, like petroleum-derived propellants and harmful synthetic fragrances. Vodka leaves no odor as it dries, so you can spray it straight into your air as is, or add 20 to 30 drops of your favorite essential oils for a pleasant scent.

 

2. Cat Litter
Have a smelly closet or musty basement? Set out a tray of cat litter, specifically, Jonny Cat Litter brand, recommends Joey Green of Joey Green's Cleaning Magic (Rodale, 2010). One primary reason that brand works so well has to do with the fact that the main ingredient is Diatomaceous earth, a naturally occurring mineral that, among its many wonders, absorbs odors (it also absorbs moisture in the air and kills pests that come in contact with it). So if you can't find any Jonny Cat Litter, buy a box of Diatomaceous earth and set a few bowls out in the corners of smelly rooms. You can find it online from garden supply stores, such as Planet Natural.

 

3. Coffee Grounds

Who doesn't love the smell of coffee? According to Green, it's another weird odor remover that helps cut the smell of winter mustiness. You can use fresh or used grounds, but if going with used, let them dry out a bit first. Place them in a bowl wherever you need an odor removed, or wrap them up in a coffee filter or old stocking and hang them in a closet or from a shelf. If you're not a coffee drinker, you can still benefit. Some Starbucks (and many small locally owned cafes) give their used coffee grounds away for free.

 

4. A Palm Tree
We're not talking about palm trees at the beach (though a beach vacation is a good way to get away from dirty indoor air). Palm trees used as houseplants are very effective air purifiers, known to remove formaldehyde, which lurks in paints, furniture finishes, and the glues used to hold pressed wood and particle board together. You'll get similar benefits from a variety of other houseplants, but palm trees are among the easiest to care for. Look for Dwarf date, bamboo, areca, lady, or parlor palm varieties.

 

5. Your Skin
Thanks to all the oils in your skin, dead skin flakes act like natural air purifiers, say researchers from Denmark. According to their study, published in Environmental Science & Technology, one of the most common oils in skin, squalene, reduces levels of the indoor air pollutant ozone, a respiratory irritant that can trigger asthma attacks. After comparing levels of ozone in a day-care center's indoor air with the amount of squalene from skin flakes in its dust, the researchers determined that dead skin flakes can reduce ozone levels anywhere from 2 to 15 percent. We're not quite sure how to make use of this information, but it's nice to know you're producing your very own natural air purifier.

 

6. Elbow Grease
Ultimately, the best way to deal with smelly or chemical-laden indoor air is to go straight to the source. It's easier to eliminate an odor's cause than to try to cover it up with coffee grinds or cat litter. And indoor air pollutants that collect in dust can be trapped by a good vacuum and weekly dusting with a damp cloth. To prevent further polluting your indoor air, make your own green cleaning kit with white vinegar, lemon juice, baking soda, and borax, all of which are also natural odor removers.

 

http://www.rodalesorganiclife.com/home/6-surprising-all-natural-air-fresheners?cid=socHome_20150403_43206646&adbid=10153287192314642&adbpl=fb&adbpr=165599879641

 

 

 

7 Best Air-Cleaning Plants

I know this is an area I need to improve in.  Believe it or not, I don’t have any plants in my office right now and I need to change that.  Hopefully this article will help you, too!  Just remember, many of the plants listed can be invasive if grown outdoors in South Florida.  Leave them in the pot indoors, please!

 

 

Finding plants that clean the air could make your lungs healthier and put you in a better mood.

 

Winter isn't easy on most of us. Piles of ice and snow greet us weekly, and short days make brief periods of sunshine even harder to come by. That, combined with bitterly cold temperatures, means most of us wind up staying inside our well-sealed energy-efficient homes, rather than get outside for fresh air. And that could put your lungs at risk. There are a wide variety of toxic chemicals lurking in your home, and while you can take steps to minimize them, one the most prevalent chemicals in your home isn't easy to get rid of. Formaldehyde, a volatile organic compound that is emitted in low levels by a variety of household building products and furniture, may cause cancer in humans and has been known to trigger asthma attacks and allergic reactions when present in high levels. A common component of glues that hold pressed-wood or particleboard furniture and cabinets together, it's also emitted by natural gas stoves, carpet glues, flooring glues, caulks, sealants, paints, furniture finishes, and the water- and stain-repellent finishes applied to upholstery and clothing.

Government regulations have reduced the amount of formaldehyde that is used in insulation and particleboard furniture, but the sheer number of potential formaldehyde emitters found in the average home makes the chemical difficult to avoid. The good news is, you have a cheap, easy, green tool at your disposal to get rid of it. In 1989, NASA scientists tested a variety of houseplants for their ability to remove formaldehyde from the air, and one of the authors, B.C. Wolverton, later published the findings in a book titled How to Grow Fresh Air (Penguin, 1996).

Following is a list of their top formaldehyde removers, as well as a few other plants that clean the air and may bring a little sunshine into your winter. But before you head to your local greenhouse, ask your friends if they can give you any clippings or root cuttings. Not only are they free, but it's also difficult (if not impossible) to find organically grown houseplants. Greenhouses are breeding grounds for aphids and other plant pests, and as a result, growers commonly use herbicides and fumigants.

 

#1: Boston fern.

Boston ferns remove more formaldehyde than any other plant. They're also highly efficient at removing other indoor air pollutants, such as benzene and xylene (these are components of gasoline exhaust that can migrate indoors if you have an attached garage). The downside is that they can be finicky. You need to feed them weekly in seasons when they're growing, monthly during the winter, and they like to be watered regularly. Depending on the humidity and moisture levels in your home, you may need to water them or mist their leaves daily. Another good fern for formaldehyde removal is the Kimberley Queen, a larger, broader-leafed fern than the Boston fern. It's also a much better choice if you have particularly dry indoor air, thanks to a high transpiration rate (the rate at which water evaporates from leaves). Wolverton writes that they're "one of the best natural humidifiers of all houseplants tested."

 

 

#2: Palm trees.

Palm trees seem particularly good at removing indoor air pollutants, particularly formaldehyde, and fortunately, they're all relatively easy to care for. The best at formaldehyde removal is the Dwarf date palm, which is closest in appearance to the palm trees that remind you of warmer climates (a good cure for the winter blues). But you'll also get clean air with a bamboo palm, areca palm (pictured left), lady palm, or parlor palm. Another plus: Palms like cooler temperatures, in the 60 to 75 degree range, so they force you to be energy efficient and lower your thermostat.

#3: Rubber Plants and "Janet Craigs."

Got a dim office that's just screaming out for cleaner air and a little touch of nature? Try a rubber plant or the dracaena "Janet Craig." Both will tolerate very little sun (though they may grow a little more slowly) and top the list for formaldehyde removers, which is particularly important in offices where most furniture is made from particleboard held together by formaldehyde-based glues. Janet Craigs will tolerate more abuse and neglect than rubber trees, but rubber trees are a little more aesthetically pleasing.

#4: English ivy.

Grown outdoors, English ivy is an invasive species that can damage your home's exterior and tear off your gutters. But bring it inside, and it's an effective formaldehyde remover. Thanks to its ability to climb structures, it's easy to grow as topiary and use as a decorative element in your living spaces. English ivy likes part sun and part shade, so it's a good plant to try indoors, and it's not as temperamental as Boston ferns are. Occasional waterings and mistings during the winter will keep it healthy.

 

#5: Peace lily.

One of few houseplants that will bloom indoors, the peace lily with its seashell-shaped spathes really will bring a touch of summer into a dreary winter. One of the best plants for removing formaldehyde, it also removes benzene and certain VOCs that are emitted by harsh cleaning products (making it another good office plant, particularly if your maintenance staff doesn't use green cleaners). It also prefers low-light conditions and has a high transpiration rate that will humidify your air. Just be aware that the leaves can be poisonous to pets and children, so peace lily may not be a great choice for new parents or pet owners.

 

#6: Golden pothos.

Though not high on the list of formaldehyde removers, we've included this plant because you can practically hit it with a hammer and not kill it. It tolerates a lot of neglect and is forgiving when over-watered. And it's still relatively effective at removing air pollutants. For those reasons, it's a great "starter houseplant" for people without much indoor-gardening experience. Golden pothos are often mistakenly sold as philodendrons, which are related plants that are equally good at removing formaldehyde, and almost as forgiving to newbie houseplant tenders.

 

#7: Flowering air purifiers.

Nothing is better at beating the trifecta of winter blues—dirty air, and lackluster décor—than a flowering houseplant. Florists' mum and Gerbera daisies (pictured) are the best at removing formaldehyde, with tulips not far behind. Of course, nothing worth having comes easy. Flowering plants require more careful watering and feeding, and most prefer cool temperatures (below 65 degrees). Also, unless you're a really good indoor gardener, you have to toss the plants after the flowers die. If you're really dedicated, you can try rooting a new azalea plant this spring in a movable container that you can bring indoors in the fall. Azaleas can be bred to flower all winter, they are great at removing formaldehyde, and they don't have to be tossed out when their flowers fall off.

http://www.organicgardening.com/learn-and-grow/7-best-air-cleaning-plants?page=0,0

 

Here’s to a cleaner, healthier office in 2015!

 

 

 

 

A fight for urban trees: Seattle’s wealthier neighborhoods leafier

While this article is about Seattle, it could be about any urban area in the US.  Fort Lauderdale is currently developing a strategic plan to target areas in the city that are in most need of tree canopy.  - Gene

 

Trees can increase property value, benefit the environment and even lift people's mood and improve human health. Yet lower-income neighborhoods in Seattle tend to have fewer trees.

By Lynda V. Mapes and Justin Mayor

Seattle Times staff reporters

 

http://wedgwoodcc.org/seattle-tree-map

 

The benefits of trees — from their grace and beauty to their gifts of cool, clean air and stress relief — are well-known and documented in study after study. Yet as the city grows, it is struggling to hold onto its trees, especially in poorer areas.

Seattle's wealthiest neighborhoods are also its leafiest, a Seattle Times analysis shows.

On a recent hot summer day, brothers Stanley and Kenneth Mason were eating cherry pie under the cover of enormous bigleaf maples at their house in the Rainier Valley.

"We have the best spot on the lot," Kenneth Mason said. "We love our trees. When we are up here, it is quiet and peaceful. I love the shade and I know they are providing clean oxygen for me to breathe. They keep my air fresh."

They are among the lucky ones in their neighborhood, where big trees are scarce — and continue to fall to the saw.

A look at median household income in the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data, together with a map of the city's tree canopy by the city of Seattle, shows lower-income neighborhoods generally have the fewest trees.

Dividing the city's 53 neighborhoods, including park and greenbelt areas into three income tiers of low ($21,095 to $54,712), middle ($56,963 to $74,302) and high ($74,398 to $110,992) shows the higher-income neighborhoods have 29 percent tree cover, dropping down to 18 percent in the lower-income tier.

The city's most current estimate of tree-canopy coverage is seven years out of date and showed the city then was barely holding steady at 23 percent canopy overall. And that was before its current growth spurt, making it the fastest-growing big city in the U.S. in 2014, according to a census report.

Seattle isn't doing even as well as some of its neighbors. Bellevue's canopy coverage in 2007 — its most recent data — was 36 percent, even though the city has lost 20 percent of its tree cover since 1986, according to a report for the city by American Forests, a nonprofit forest-advocacy organization.

Portland gained tree cover in every zoning category between 2000-2010, when its coverage hit 30 percent citywide, according to a 2012 city report.

Redevelopment is the primary reason trees are cut down in Seattle. Also in the mix are a confusing matrix of city regulations, and underpowered enforcement to protect trees.

Regulation of tree cutting is scattered across three city departments — the Department of Transportation, the Department of Planning and Development and Seattle Parks and Recreation — depending on the type of tree and where it is growing.

 

http://www.seattle.gov/trees/canopycover.htm

 

Complaints against illegal cutting can only be called in during regular city business hours, though often tree cutting happens earlier in the morning or on weekends.

The city has been working to reverse the trend of losses. It has created the Seattle reLeaf program, which dispatches volunteer tree ambassadors to neighborhoods and encourages planting trees, provided free by the city.

Since 2009, the city has helped Seattle residents plant 4,000 trees in yards and along streets through the Trees for Neighborhoods Program.

The city's Department of Transportation also planted more than 1,000 street trees in 2013, according to a progress report on the city's Urban Forest Stewardship Plan, adopted in 2013.

To combat blackberries, English ivy, holly and other invasive plants inundating trees in city green belts and parks, the city has partnered with Forterra, the land conservation nonprofit, other groups and countless volunteers to reclaim and replant aging forests before they become ecological dead zones.

The city's Heritage Tree program also allows residents to voluntarily nominate big, exceptional trees for special recognition, and protection. Except in an emergency, those trees aren't to be cut down without a prior permit indicating they are a hazard.

The city will have to plant a lot more trees to reach its goal of a 30 percent canopy cover by 2037.

That goal was set in Seattle's Urban Forest Management Plan in 2007, and reiterated in a 2013 update adopted by the city of Seattle's Urban Forest Coalition, an interdepartmental working group. Its goal is to protect the health and maintain the benefits of the urban forest.

Meeting the 30 percent goal, itself a downgrade from the 40 percent canopy cover the city enjoyed in the 1970s, will be hard in part because trees — especially big trees that provide the most benefit — need space. Not just for a little while, but for the long haul, to enable trees to reach the girth and height and spreading crown that makes an exceptional tree, or grove.

 

Disappearing canopies

It's been a struggle to keep pace with the encroachment of pavement in Seattle.

The city's redeveloping neighborhoods lost more than 35 percent of their tree cover between 2003 and 2007, city records show, "and we have lost a lot more trees since then," said Mark Mead, arborist for the city's Parks Department.

"What we saw was a denuding of the southern part of the city due to development," Mead said. "The land in the core and northern areas was too costly to develop, and the south wasn't, so the expansion of development went south, and the canopy disappeared down there."

Trees on private land in Seattle have little protection, and in the contest between people's desires for views, or sun, or space, the tree rarely wins, Mead noted.

"If someone has a view issue, the first words out of their mouth are usually, 'I love trees, just not those trees.' "

The result is a pull of people to the attraction of the Emerald City that is struggling to continue to live up to its name.

"People come here for the jobs and the great climate and because it's green," said Cass Turnbull, founder of the nonprofit Plant Amnesty, and TreePAC, a political nonprofit formed to advocate for urban trees.

"Pretty soon it will just be for the jobs," she said. "That would be sad."

The past 150 years of clearing, regrading and development have left only remnants of the once vast forest that cloaked the Puget Sound region. Today about 3,700 acres of natural areas in forested parks and greenways, in addition to street trees and trees on private land, comprise the city's total tree canopy.

Unlike on the East Coast, where non-American Indian settlement came earlier, leaving trees more time to regrow — and some truly mammoth older trees were never cut — the biggest, most venerable trees in the Seattle are just more than a century old, and most are far younger and smaller than that.

Even in city parks, more than half the trees are smaller than six inches in diameter, according to a city report.

 

http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/cities/2007/06/where_have_all_.html

 

The value of trees

Urban trees are a lifeline to nature not only in Seattle, but for the majority of residents in the United States, where 80 percent of the population lives in urban areas.

Trees are not a luxury, or small matter: Study after study has shown that neighborhoods with more trees usually have higher property values, better neighborhood interaction and lower crime rates. People with trees in their environment generally experience less stress. They are happier and better able to focus and solve problems.

In public debate, the focus usually is on the ecosystem services of trees: their ability to clean the air, filter the water, soak up stormwater and lower energy bills by shading summer heat and blocking winter winds.

The city's urban forest was estimated to supply billions of dollars' worth of free stormwater retention and filtration and millions of dollars in energy savings per year, according to a 2012 report by a collaboration of Forest Service and University of Washington researchers.

But the more subtle, human benefits of trees can be beyond quantification.

Especially big trees have a special effect on people. Some cultures have long known and even deliberately embraced the healthful effects of trees. In Japan, the practice of so-called "forest bathing" is well understood, with walking paths designed for the pleasure of a walk in deep woods, notes Kathleen Wolf, a research social scientist at the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington.

On research trips to Japan she noticed a "reverence, appreciation and tolerance for old, misshapen, crotchety trees," often supported with props, aflutter with prayers on notes attached.

 

City or forest?

But in Seattle big, old trees are often in the cross hairs.

Consider the case of Seattle's Heritage Tree No. 121, a grand, old American elm just down the street from where the Mason brothers were eating that pie.

The elm that filled a front corner of Deborah O'Neal's lot, gracing the house she grew up in, stood more than six stories high, and its crown spread 95 feet across. Its trunk was more than 4 feet around at chest height.

But O'Neal said she got tired of the tree's roots in the sewer line and worried about branches dropping on her fence, her car, even her neighbors' kids.

"Everyone wants to say the tree is pretty, but I have had (sewer) backup issues because of the roots, and it is a hazardous tree. It belongs in a forest, not a city," said O'Neal, who paid a tree service to cut it down last month.

She had petitioned the city to enroll the tree in its Heritage Tree listing for extraordinary specimens in 2007, but said she was disappointed the designation came with no financial assistance to care for the tree, not even a plaque.

"I am melancholy about it, but I knew for the greater good it had to be cut," O'Neal said. "It dropped big branches and if anyone gets hurt, I will be the Big Bad Wolf. I don't want to have that happen."

An alarmed neighbor called in a complaint to the city as the chain saws revved, but by the time the Department of Development and Planning responded within an hour, most of the cutting was already done.

The city is investigating whether the cutting was against its regulations protecting exceptional and heritage trees.

Neighbor Juli Cummings, who called in the complaint, lives down the street under a canopy of big copper beeches. But the elm was the biggest tree in the neighborhood, and something Cummings said she looked forward to seeing every day.

"It was like a family member," she said, looking at the stump.

 

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024305935_treecanopyxml.html

 

Gene Dempsey, City Forester

Public Works Sustainability Division

Office - (954) 828-5785  Fax - (954) 828-4745

GDempsey@fortlauderdale.gov

 

 

 

To fight unemployment, India to plant 2 billion trees

Maybe we could/should do something like this in the U.S.!

 

A new initiative in India will employ up to 300,000 youths in an effort to improve air quality and provide opportunities to the unemployed.

By: Sami Grover

Mon, Jul 21, 2014

 

What better way to clean the air along India's roadways than with trees? (Photo: seeveeaar/flickr)

 

Jadav "Molai" Payeng, the Indian man who single-handedly planted up 1,360 acres of forest, may soon have some competition on his hands. Or allies, depending on which way you want to look at it. Huffington Post reports that a new afforestation initiative from India's Rural Development Ministry aims to plant 2 billion trees along the nation's 62,137 miles of highways. The idea, says the article, is to both combat rural poverty and youth unemployment while also improving the environment and helping to clean up India's chronic air pollution:

 

“The country's Rural Development Ministry on Friday announced a new afforestation plan to plant 2 billion trees along the nation’s highways in an effort to tackle youth unemployment. The country’s Road Transport, Highways, Shipping and Rural Development Minister Nitin Jairam Gadkari said in a meeting in New Delhi that the new initiative would also help preserve the environment.

This plan cannot come soon enough. Not only does India have a youth unemployment rate of 10.2 percent, according to the World Health Organization, it is also home to six of the world's 10 cities with the worst air pollution. Given the deadly impact of air pollution worldwide, and the incredible power of trees to absorb emissions, this plan may have a significant impact not just on the economy and biodiversity, but on health as well.” 

 

The plan could potentially employ 300,000 youths, Indian outlet NDTV reports.  This isn't the only recent sign of environmental progress in India either. The country's new prime minister, Narendra Modi, has also announced a target of getting electricity to every home in India by 2019, relying largely on solar power to do so. According to The Hindu, the government is also working on plans to clean up the Ganga and Yamuna rivers. 

Read more: http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/to-fight-unemployment-india-to-plant-2-billion-trees#ixzz38OJoc4WA

 

 

 

Keeping Your Car In Shape

Keep Your Engine Properly Tuned

Fixing a car that is noticeably out of tune or has failed an emissions test can improve its gas mileage by an average of 4%, though results vary based on the kind of repair and how well it is done.

Fixing a serious maintenance problem, such as a faulty oxygen sensor, can improve your mileage by as much as 40%.

Fixing a car that is noticeably out of tune or has failed an emissions test can improve its gas mileage by an average of 4%, though results vary based on the kind of repair and how well it is done.

Fixing a serious maintenance problem, such as a faulty oxygen sensor, can improve your mileage by as much as 40%.

Fuel Economy Benefit:	4%
Equivalent Gasoline Savings:	$0.14/gallon

Keep Tires Properly Inflated

You can improve your gas mileage by up to 3.3% by keeping your tires inflated to the proper pressure. Under-inflated tires can lower gas mileage by 0.3% for every 1 psi drop in pressure of all four tires. Properly inflated tires are safer and last longer.

The proper tire pressure for your vehicle is usually found on a sticker in the driver's side door jamb or the glove box and in your owner's manual. Do not use the maximum pressure printed on the tire's sidewall.

Fuel Economy Benefit:	Up to 3%
Equivalent Gasoline Savings:	Up to $0.11/gallon

Use the Recommended Grade of Motor Oil

You can improve your gas mileage by 1%–2% by using the manufacturer's recommended grade of motor oil. For example, using 10W-30 motor oil in an engine designed to use 5W-30 can lower your gas mileage by 1%–2%. Using 5W-30 in an engine designed for 5W-20 can lower your gas mileage by 1%–1.5%. Also, look for motor oil that says "Energy Conserving" on the API performance symbol to be sure it contains friction-reducing additives.

Fuel Economy Benefit:	1%–2%
Equivalent Gasoline Savings:	$0.04–$0.07/gallon

Replacing a Clogged Air Filter on Modern Cars Improves Performance but Not MPG

Replacing a clogged air filter on vehicles with fuel-injected, computer-controlled gasoline engines—such as those manufactured from the early 1980s to the present—or diesel engines does not improve fuel economy, but it can improve acceleration.

Replacing a clogged air filter on an older vehicle with a carbureted engine can improve both fuel economy and acceleration by a few percent under normal replacement conditions.

Note: Cost savings are based on an assumed fuel price of $3.60/gallon.

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/maintain.jsp