The Super Bowl is going to generate 310,000 pounds of carbon today. The same weight as, oh, a thousand NFL lineman. Or so says the eco-site, Treehugger.com

In a recent post, it listed just about every number imaginable associated with the big game, down to the number of blades of grass on the field (194 million) and how mnay bicycles could fit into the 22,000 car-parking spaces (264,000).

None of it is annotated, so who can really say whether the fun factor outstrips the fact factor.  But it’s a reminder of how excessive our national excesses can be.

Me, I’m looking forward to The Who performance at halftime. Except that’s one thing Treehugger doesn’t tell us: How many times has Roger Daltrey done that great scream in “Won’t Get Fooled Again”?
 

There’s just so much climate gloom and doom that it’s wonderful to come across a delightful little person like Energy Girl.

In real life, she’s 16-month-old Mya Evans of Silver Spring Township, Cumberland. But on her prize-winning YouTube debut, she shows her parents how to avoid wasting electricity in the home. Cute is just the beginning of how to describe this sweet little video.

Michael and Jennifer Evans produced it and entered it in a PPL Electric Utilities contest.

It won. Watch it and you’ll see why the Evans family will receive a $5,000 Sears gift card to use toward the purchase of Energy Star products and appliances.

In all, five videos won prizes. You can see them all here.
 

A still from "The End of the Line"

Bluefin tuna are in dire straits, and apparently U.S. sushi-eaters aren’t helping.

According to a press release from several environmental groups, export figures from the European Union show that up to 3,341 tons of bluefin were exported from the European Union to the U.S. between 1998 and June last year. The figures were compiled by an investigator for the film, The End of the Line, a documentary about overfishing that had a screening at the United Nations General Assembly in New York earlier this week.

In 2008 the US was a net importer of bluefin, bringing in 360 metric tons from around the world, notably the Mediterranean, compared with the 266 metric tons that were caught domestically, according to the groups’ statement. They  include the nonprofits Oceana and Greenpeace and staff from the film. Bluefin is worth nearly $9 a pound on average,so the total trade in the United States is worth nearly $100 million a year, they said.

Their statement says the EU is likely to support a proposal to ban all international trade in bluefin tuna by listing it under Appendix 1 of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). And the group wants the U.S. to add its support.

Charles Clover, author of the book, The End of the Line, on which the film is based, said: “I think people in the United States tend to think of the collapse of the bluefin as a tragedy going on a long way off. In fact, they could be helping save a whole species by calling on the US Government to listing the bluefin on Cites Appendix 1 and insisting that the restaurants they eat at do not serve tuna from the collapsing and rampantly overfished Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean population.”

Fish2fork, a website that reviews fish restaurants for their sustainability, was launched in the U.S. on Jan. 15. From what I can tell, it’s not exactly a complete listing just yet. Nor could I find any way to search for a restaurant to check it out. But it has a “top ten” list for the U.S. and a “bottom ten.” It mentions one restaurant in this area — Starfish Brasserie in Bethlehem, which is on the top ten list.
 

Smithsonian forest ecologist Geoffrey Parker measures a tree on the grounds of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. (Photo by Kirsten Bauer)

Eastern forests are growing at faster rates than any time in the previous 225 years, and the reason appears to be climate change — or rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and a longer growing season. Every other likely reason has been ruled out.

This comes from Smithsonian forest ecologist Geoffrey Parker. His and his colleagues’ research was published this week the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Trees, as we know, take up carbon dioxide. Parker began a census of trees in 55 hardwood plots in Maryland his first day on the job -- Sept. 8, 1987 -- at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md.

Plotting their locations, measuring the trees and factoring in other things foresters know about trees, Parker and post-doc Sean McMahon of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute concluded that more than 90 percent of the stands they were studying grew two to four times faster than a predicted baseline rate.

They also were able to determine that the faster growth is a recent trend, not longstanding.

This is more than merely interesting. Policymakers will no doubt be looking at forests and how much carbon they hold as they seek to address climate change.

Meanwhile, the researchers don’t necessarily expect the higher growth rate to continue indefinitely. At some point, the trees could be limited by their supply of soil nutrients and water.
 

A detail from Chris Jordan's "Plastic Bottles, 2007."

Plenty of people estimate the extent of our castoffs -- the numbers of plastic bottles, the tons of catalogs, on and on -- but it's tough to grasp what all that means. What do those kinds of numbers look like?

Artist Chris Jordan has a vivid answer. With help from computer manipulation, he's produced large-scale photos of specific quantities of stuff: 15 million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use in the U.S.); 106,000 aluminum cans (30 seconds of can consumption), 100 million toothpicks (the number of trees cut in the U.S. yearly to make the paper for junk mail), or 38,000 shipping containers (the number of containers processed through American ports every 12 hours).

Jordan says he's trying to “raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.”

His traveling exhibition, titled "Chris Jordan: Running the Numbers," is on display at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery through March 5. The college is at 370 Lancaster Avenue in Haverford.  Gallery hours are Monday-Friday 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 12-5 p.m., and Wednesdays until 8 p.m.

There's also a book version, with 60 color photographs.

More information is available here.

(Inquirer photo by Charles Fox)

In this morning's paper, I wrote about how Blue Mountain, the city's recycling facility works.  The place is a maze of moving parts -- conveyor belts, spinning discs, you name it. The place would be perfect for the final movie scene where James Bond gets in his daredevil hand-to-hand fight with the bad guy. 

The story included a list of what to recycle and what not to recycle. But what if you still don't know? Nina Shen Rastogi, who writes "The Green Lantern," an environmental Q&A column for the online magazine, Slate, recently took up the question. 

Obviously, if you don't know, the first thing is to try to find out by going to the city's recycling website, www.PhillyRecyclingPays.com.  But if you're still in doubt: Throw it out. 

"In the moderately bad scenario, the offending item gets weeded out by the recycling facility's sorters, in which case it will be landfilled or incinerated—exactly what would have happened if you'd thrown it in the trash in the first place, except for the extra money and fuel spent on its roundabout journey," Rastogi writes.
 

"In the worst-case scenario, the interloper either damages equipment or ruins a batch of otherwise valuable material."

You can read the full article here.

In many different nations tomorrow, activists are planning "actions" to mark "World Day for the Abolition of Meat." As in eating meat. They are demanding the end of slaughterhouses.

Clearly, the groups are focused on the practices of meat production, but they've recently gotten a significant number of allies among people who are giving up meat, or lessening their intake, as a way of combating climate change. Beef, in particular, has been targeted as a meat that has a large climate impact, both because beef are often fattened with large amounts of corn and because their digestive processes produce methane.

Events were held last year in Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Germany, South Africa and New Zealand. This year, a Philadelphia group will join in, distributing vegan literature and vegan snacks at Rittenhouse Park, 18th and Walnut Streets, from 2 to 5 p.m.

According to the group, "Worldwide six million sentient beings are killed for their meat every hour. That figure doesn't include fish and other sea animals. Participants will inform the public of how much suffering meat eating causes non-human animals and how unnecessary it is to human beings. Goals are twofold: encouraging vegetarianism and veganism as forms of boycotting the products of the animal farming industry and secondly to explicitly request the abolition of meat production."

For more information: www.nomoremeat.org

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For this morning’s story about white-nose syndrome in bats, as usual, I had far more information than would fit into the limited space.

In case anyone wonders how journalists work, I wrote the story just as I thought it should be, then checked the length and found out it was about twice as long as this kind of newspaper story “should” be. So I spent hours going over the story line by line, deleting paragraphs, nipping and tucking a word here, a line there, rewriting ten lines so the same thought would fit into five lines. Ugh.

But Internet space isn’t as constrained as the physical newspaper. So here are some of the things for people who are interested beyond the story that appeared this morning, plus links for even more information:

A pesticide connection?

As far as the pesticide and declining ecosystem argument, science journalist Sonia Shah wrote compellingly about it in the online journal, Yale 360.

“Today, drips and puffs of pesticides surround us everywhere, contaminating 90 percent of the nation’s major rivers and streams, more than 80 percent of sampled fish, and one-third of the nation’s aquifers. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, fish and birds that unsuspectingly expose themselves to this chemical soup die by the millions every year,” Shah writes.

“In the past dozen years, no fewer than three never-before-seen diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, bees, and — most recently — bats. A growing body of evidence indicates that pesticide exposure may be playing an important role in the decline of the first two species, and scientists are investigating whether such exposures may be involved in the deaths of more than 1 million bats in the northeastern United States over the past several years.”

The full story is here.

I talked to several researchers about the idea of pesticides potentially playing a role. Some said the evidence is pretty slim, as far as being able to draw a direct correlation, even harder to establish cause and effect.

But Doug Inkley, senior scientist with the National Wildlife Federation, says its possible these species — the frogs, bees and bats — have simply passed a tipping point. He compared it to “someone in poor health who gets the flu. The death report will say he died of flu. But what was really the cause?”

“The solution is to keep the ecosystems as healthy as possible so species are able to withstand stresses,” he said.

Amazing bats

As DeeAnn Reeder was processing the bats in the cave, she paused to tell me how wonderful bats are, as creatures of the ecosystem. I mourned the loss of this section of the story, so here it is:

She talked about how body fat is central to a bat’s survival. But their food supply of insects exists for only part of the year. They are unique in how they parse their energy-depleting activities.

In the fall, they arrive at their hibernating sites fattened from a summer of bug-eating. They swarm and mate, but the females don’t get pregnant right away. Instead, they store the sperm in their reproductive tracts. Come spring, they emerge from the cave and within 24 to 48 hours, ovulate and become pregnant. They then migrate to what’s called their maternity site — researchers think each bat has fidelity to both its winter cave and its summer maternity site — and give birth in June.

What’s problematic for little brown bats is that each female only has one pup a year. Even though the bats can live 20-30 years, that’s not a high replenishment rate for the population. “This mortality rate is going to take hundreds of years for the bats to recover from, if at all,” Turner said. “To get even with where we are now.”
 

More on the possible human spread

Finally, I should make a note about human spread of white-nose fungus. Often, after I write a story about research being done on wildlife in decline, I get comments from readers wondering about the ill effects of the research itself. It’s always a trade-off.

In this case, the researchers knew their movements and voice might rouse the bats. More than that, humans have been implicated in the spread of the disease by — knowingly or unknowingly — going into one cave where the fungus exists, and then using the same equipment in another cave where it may not exist.

The researchers at the Mifflin County cave disinfect all their gear and clothing after each visit to a cave.

The clothing is the link to the ray of hope researchers feel after discovering the fungus in a cave in France. They think it’s possible that the fungus was inadvertently brought to this country — possibly on the gear of traveling cavers. And here, the bats have no immunity to it. The fungus is an invasive species just like the kudzu weed and emerald ash borers and Asian carp. But if it’s the case that bats in Europe developed an immunity, perhaps bats here can, too.
 

Links for more information:

The Pennsylvania Game Commission's white-nose syndrome site

New Jersey DEP's WNS site

US Fish and Wildlife WNS site

The US Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center page on WNS

A Nature Conservancy article

Bat Conservation International

The National Speleological Society (Don't miss the topper with the guy wading through water underground. Yikes.)
 

KrisCan

There's nothing funny about peak oil, right? It marks the beginning of the end of cheap, easy petroleum.

It's not funny if you haven't met KrisCan, a female of indeterminate name and locale who has an Internet video "show" called "Peak Oil Action and Adventure." Check it out here.

"Peak Oil is real. Fossil fuel depletion is real. It's not getting better, and it's not going away," said Kris, or Can, or KrisCan. "Selling bad news is tricky. But people are more likely to watch and learn about these issues when you present them in an upbeat, cool, humorous way."

So among 60 episodes since 2008, she has slightly goofy segments on growing food in your back yard, transportation and biofuels. "If you can make a margarita, you can make biodiesel," her expert assures, as she adopts a "really?!" face.

Then, in a segment that could be described as Bruno becomes female and takes on global energy, she dons a low-cut top, blonde pigtails and an Eastern European accent to explain peak oil. It's hilarious, and I bet many who watch it will finally understand what the word means, if not the intricacies of what it's all about.  (Go to the site to see it. I'm embedding the tamer peak oil song below.)

KC contends there's a shortage of "interesting and informative" coverage about the global petroleum shortage.

"Even now, it's only a handful of older white men who are really talking about Peak Oil and the serious energy crisis we're facing," she says. "I felt an urgent need to make this message more appealing and fun for a wider audience. I want to motivate younger generations to get involved now in some of the efforts to prepare for a world that no longer runs on cheap oil."