This morning CA Senator Barbara Boxer headed up a "Boxer Rebellion" (ha) on global warming issues, voting to move a landmark climate change bill to the Senate floor despite a complete Republican boycott.

Why is it so hard to get Republicans to even discuss climate change legislation? Maybe we need to work on our sales pitch. One idea environmentalists are tossing around right now is that instead of fighting global warming with the rhetoric of science, fear or appeals to human decency, politicians should start selling climate change legislation with patriotism.

Robert Dujarric pitches the idea in the Christian Science Monitor.

• Victory Gardens of tomorrow

So far, only a global recession has been shown to work when it comes to cutting emissions...

The way to get Americans to take action? Appeal to their patriotism. Historically in times of war, the US government has successfully gotten citizens to join the armed forces, to buy war bonds, and to accept rationing by appealing to their patriotism...

Even if the oil sold in the US comes from Alaska, Texas, or allies like Norway, American demand drives up the price of the commodity, thereby pumping huge flows of dollars into the treasuries of its enemies.

On the other hand, when the US invests in alternative energy sources and energy conservation, it helps spur technological innovation in America and other advanced liberal democracies.

I long for the day when local tea baggers proudly roll up to Michael's Italian Beef on anti-Obama bicycles.

h/t to Sightline. Check out Portland artist Joe Wirtheim's site for more progressive propaganda posters like the one above.

I've been complaining about the wastefulness of phone books for a few months now, but this weekend's arrival of the Yellowbook was a slap in the face:

Neighbors in the Creston-Kenilworth Yahoo group echoed my irate opinions about the greenwashed Yellowbook. But miracle of miracles, one of them managed to track down the phone number of someone who will actually come to your house, pick up your unwanted phone book and offer to take you off their delivery list altogether. Hallelujah!¹

Dialing 1-800-373-3280 will get you to the national Yellowbook distribution HQ. The line seems to be primarily used for people applying for a job dropping off phone books, but after a robot informs you that job information will be available at "a meeting with casual dress code," you're connected to a person who will arrange to have the Yellowbook delivery drivers come by and un-deliver your phone book. This exclusive limited time offer only lasts while they're still distributing phone books in Portland, so act now!

1. I just realized that maybe having someone drive a van back to my house to pick up and reuse one phone book is worse for the environment than if I just recycled it on my own. Uh... so maybe you should band together as neighbors if you're going have your phone books undelivered.

The city's Bureau of Environmental Services is offering a grant of $5 per square foot to property and homeowners who choose to build ecoroofs. Check out the their website for more.

I know this, because I too was at the Mercury's branch office outside City Hall Friday morning, enjoying the sunshine. I also learned more about the city's Grey to Green initiative, thanks to the staff's wise choice to offer free coffee and cookies on the sidewalk. Ecoroofs are part of the program, but Grey to Green is also doing a bunch of other stuff. In the year and a half that it has been underway, the city has seen some significant improvements:

• GREEN STREET: MEANS LESS POOP ENDS UP IN THE RIVER

That's just the beginning. The five-year goals for Grey to Green include adding 43 acres of ecoroofs, constructing 920 green streets, and purchasing 419 acres of high priority natural areas. And with a city grant of $50 million over the next five years, those goals seem reachable.

The city has never taken on street tree planting on this scale—the budget for that has been only about $20-40,000 over the last twenty years, and now they're looking at over $1 million in just a year or two. Despite the rosy outlook for Portland watersheds, the work isn't done.

A new treebate program (get it? like rebate!) will compensate property owners for planting trees. The initiative is a collaborative effort with Friends of Trees and will launch in a few weeks. It hopes to encourage land owners to plant trees, especially local varieties, by covering 50% of tree-planting expenses up to $40, and up to $50 for native species. Money for you, trees for the world!

I just got my new IKEA catalogue! The one I didn't want or request, the one that was removed from the front porch and directly dumped into the bottom of my recycle bin. It's annual arrival got me thinking about all the junk mail I receive in a year and I contemplated saving it all in a big pile and weighing it and... oh! Hey! Seattleite Alan Durning over a Sightline just did that!

His write-up of a year's worth of junk mail is pretty funny—15 pounds of phone books? 17 credit card offers from United Airlines? Seven pounds of annoying sales pitches from Qwest, Verizon and Comcast? This shit is ridiculous, but Durning includes action ideas after each item to help channel that frustration into activism.

It would be cool to chronicle Portland's biggest junk mail offenders. I think it must be phone books by far but I can also commiserate with the Comcast deluge.

• Alan Durning
• Two feet tall, 50 pounds deep: one year's worth of junk mail.

I just flew back and forth across the country and every time I asked for water, the flight attendants handed me one of these bright two-gulp bottles:

The peppy branding made me cringe a little, so I turned over the bottle and read this little statement on the back:

Uh, what? This bottled water company wants me to stand dripping and cold in the shower so that there's still enough water in the world to be drained into millions of totally unsustainable 8.5 ounce plastic bottles? Who would be so cheeky?

Oh geez. What a bizarro green-hungry market we live in these days. Coca Cola is preaching to me about how my showers are wasteful while it's meanwhile trying to get itself out of hot water with environmentalists who criticize their overuse of the world's finite water supply. While Coke is ambitiously aiming to be "water neutral" by 2012, they still extract 1.73 liters of fresh water for every liter of soda they produce. Thanks for putting your eco-friendly tips on the side of a bottle of water distributed on jet planes, Coke!

Former Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradley Twitters:

The challenge he's referring to is a get rich quick scheme from a blogger who's willing to bet global warming skeptics $25 dollars a day that the world is getting hotter.

Victoria Taft is the charming local radio host who coins phrases like "crap and trade". But is she chicken? Victoria and all other global warming deniers can take Nate up on his offer right here.

Pat yourself of the back, Portlanders—according to Northwest enviro think tank Sightline you're each using an average of 40 gallons less gasoline per year than the average American. And, importantly, our gasoline consumption has declined over 15 percent over the last ten years. Check out this graph from their new report (pdf):

What do the researchers credit for the change? An environmental ethos is never mentioned. Instead, Sightline points to practical changes like smarter urban growth policies, investments in transit and high gas prices. And don't get too excited because even though we're below the national gas consumption average, America consumes a miserably high amount. Twenty million barrels of oil per day! Woo! We're #1!

Phone books. I have seven. I hate them. I probably have at least a tree's worth of paper sitting on my front porch right now, piling up as a monument to the futility of personally trying to save the world by saving paper. I don't want them. And yet they appear incessantly. Remember this photo? Nothing stops the phone book delivery people.

When I blogged about phone book waste a couple months ago, commenters pointed out that Oregon should mandate some sort of opt-in policy for phone book distribution. And that is exactly what SE Portland Representative Jules Kopel Bailey has done. He and Portland Rep Ben Cannon are the sponsors of HB 3477, which would make Oregon the first state in the country where it would be illegal to distribute phone books to people without their specific request. Phone book companies could still drop off a bunch of the obsolete tomes at public libraries and post offices, where people who need them could pick one up. In the meantime, look what we wouldn't be doing:

According to a DEQ study, in 2003 there were 6.45 million sets of
white/yellow pages published and distributed in Oregon, and there were
only 1.33 million households in the state at that time. Only about 20%
of phone books are recycled, the rest end up in landfills or are burned.

Glory glory Hallelujah. However, the bill hasn't gotten a hearing yet, so it doesn't seem likely it'll pass this session. Which means by the next possible time it could become law, we'll have cut down the trees to print at least 13 million more phone books in Oregon. I say we engage in a vigilante campaign, impaling more phone books on fences around town as a warning to Qwest.

Giant TV vans full of reporters showed up at City Hall for the release of the mayor's budget (which we'll blog about asap) but were surprised to find a crew of young ruffians tearing up historic building's front lawn. Bringing a little bit of Obama right here to Portland, Loaves and Fishes and the Parks Department are replacing City Hall's withering grass with an organic garden.

The produce from the garden is going to Loaves and Fishes, Portland's Meals on Wheels people. A victory garden for the new recession!

If you’ve never heard of the Great Pacific or Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, it’s an area nearly the size of Texas, that is completely filled with floating and disintegrating plastic marine debris, trapped by the North Pacific Gyre. If you want to know the details, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation is very informative.

But the truly exciting part about this garbage patch is that a it has inspired a British banking billionaire, David de Rothschild, to build a boat completely from plastic waste and to sail it through this patch, across the Pacific Ocean. He says it’s to raise awareness about the importance of being eco-friendly and keeping oceans clean. However, my favorite parts of this project (called Plastiki) are that 1) it has proven far more difficult to build a boat out of plastic waste than the billionaire originally imagined and that 2) de Rothschild is ENTIRELY convinced that this is a super EXTREME adventure that will bring TONS of awareness about the environment, despite the fact that this is not the first voyage of its kind. Maybe it’s cruel to laugh at an adventuring adrenaline junky who wants to use his fortunes to save the world and is finding it’s not easy. But I enjoy it. And you can too! Check out the Plastiki site or read about his vision here and here. He was scheduled to launch today, but has been delayed to the vague date of "Summer 2009." Don't you just hate when your big plans to get sponsors to build a boat so you can go sailing all summer go awry? ...I guess it’s also a rather a decent idea that might change the way we build boats from now on, but who cares about that.