For environmentally conscious students, choosing a school with green principles is getting a little easier.

This week the Princeton Review, the test prep firm and creator of popular college guides, and the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit organization in Washington, released their second annual listing of the 311 greenest colleges in the country. The online-only guide, available as a free download, includes brief summaries of sustainability initiatives at each school, as well a dozen or so data points on things like renewable power use, energy efficiency and waste disposal.

The statistics and summaries have plenty of interesting tidbits. Who knew that 94 percent of the electricity used by Bates College, in Lewiston, Me., came from renewable sources? Or that 35 percent of the food served at Harvard is produced locally?

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New York City Department of Environmental Protection New York City is offering homeowners 55-gallon rain-collection barrels.

It’s raining barrels.

New York City is giving away 55-gallon rain barrels to homeowners to help conserve water and reduce pressure on the city’s sewer system, which is often overwhelmed during heavy storms. The city started promoting the barrels by distributing a few hundred of them in Queens in 2008 and 750 more in 2009 to homeowners who applied for them. This year, 1,000 free barrels are being distributed to owners of single- and two-family homes on a first-come-first-served basis at events in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

On average, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection said, as much as 40 percent of the water homeowners use goes to irrigate gardens and lawns during the summer.
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Kate Galbraith Grass at the City Hall in Midland, Tex., may not fare as well under outdoor watering restrictions issued because of a severe drought.

The severe drought across Texas has hit the oil and gas city of Midland especially hard, as I reported in Friday’s New York Times and Texas Tribune. Since Oct. 1, Midland has received only 0.13 inches of rainfall — making it “most likely the driest six-and-a-half-month period in recorded history,” said David Hennig, a Midland-based meteorologist with the National Weather Service. With three major regional reservoirs ranging 2 percent to 30 percent full, the city has put in place outdoor watering restrictions — albeit not backed up by penalties — for the first time.

Texas weather experts attribute this drought to the Niña effect. Some observers are wondering whether it is also related to global warming, though that’s a delicate question in Texas, the only state refusing to carry out greenhouse gas regulations recently introduced by the Environmental Protection Agency. Gov. Rick Perry, who just issued a proclamation urging prayers for rain this weekend, has said that the climate is always changing but that it is not clear that humans are affecting it.

John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas State climatologist, says that about 80 percent of the models laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in a 2007 report predicted declining precipitation for Texas, but on the other hand Texas has gotten increasing rainfall from 1895 to the present. The reason for this difference is unclear, he said, but it could be attributable to factors like variations of sea-surface temperature patterns, modeling flaws or changes in aerosols or land use.

“Certainly global warming has contributed to the rate at which the ground has dried out because of the warm temperatures,” Dr. Nielsen-Gammon said. But, he added, “the magnitude of the dryness is well beyond what global warming would be able to do so far.”

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With political turmoil spreading across North Africa and the Middle East and oil and gasoline prices rising, all eyes in the energy world are on Saudi Arabia. So when the Saudis announced last weekend that they had cut oil production by 800,000 barrels a day only weeks after they said they would meet any supply gap left by the civil war in Libya, oil analysts offered an array of interpretations.

Some agreed with the Saudis’ publicly expressed view that the world was actually amply supplied with oil and that speculators and traders were to blame for the rising prices. President Obama even weighed in and endorsed that view.

But others wondered whether the Saudis were able to increase their production at all. Still others suggested that the Saudis were beginning to side with more hawkish members of OPEC, including Iran, who want to curtail production to bolster prices.

The reason for the change, some say, is that the Saudis now need more oil revenue to pay for newly promised social programs aimed at forestalling the kind of political upheaval gripping many of its neighbors.

In all probability, it will take several months before we know who is right. Read more…

These days, it seems, the provenance of green products matters.

Manufacturers who have long aligned themselves with environmental causes, like Seventh Generation and Method, have rebounded better from the recession than the “green” lines of larger, more traditional manufacturers.

Analysts say the reason is that the niche manufacturers tend to attract serious green customers who want products that are good for the environment even if they cost more. And if these customers find that a botanical ingredient isn’t quite as effective as bleach, they believe it is better for their house and lungs.

As we report in an article in The Times, sales of green products over all dropped during the recession. But the committed customers have been quicker to come back to environmentally friendly products, compared to the much larger audience of mainstream customers, who may have been willing to buy green products when times were flush but scaled back when price started to matter.

“If you were a hardcore ‘X’ user and the green brand came out and it was on sale, you gave it a shot, but you really weren’t committed to the movement,” said Eric Ryan, co-founder of Method. “Versus the pure plays like ourselves — we brought in the early adopters that were committed to either making a shift for the environment or for the health of the home environment, and we’ve built it over time.”
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Jack Smith/The New York Times When Bill and Suzann Leininger put solar panels on their Escondido, Calif., home a few years ago, they most likely enhanced its resale value, a new study says.

All those homeowners who have been installing residential solar panels over the last decade may find it was a more practical decision than they thought. The electricity generated may have cost more than that coming from the local power company (half of which, nationwide, comes from burning coal), but if they choose to sell their homes, the price premium they will get for the solar system should let them recoup much of their original capital investment.

That is the conclusion of three researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who looked at home sales — both homes with photovoltaic systems and homes without — in California over an eight-and-a-half-year period ending in mid-2009. The abstract of their study states, “the analysis finds strong evidence that California homes with PV systems have sold for a premium over comparable homes without PV systems.”

The premium ranged from $3.90 to $6.40 per watt of capacity, but tended most often to be about $5.50 per watt. This, the study said, “corresponds to a home sales price premium of approximately $17,000 for a relatively new 3,100-watt PV system (the average size of PV systems in the study).” Read more…

Doc Hastings, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, marks the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill with a call to speed drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. “Over the past year significant progress has been made toward making American offshore drilling the safest in the world,” Mr. Hastings, Republican of Washington, said in a statement. “Safety reforms have been implemented, new technology has been deployed and the gulf is ready to get back to work to help create jobs and lower gasoline prices.” [House Natural Resources Committee]

Darrell E. Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, accuses President Obama of an “aggressive quest to end domestic offshore energy development altogether” in the wake of the BP spill, despite the administration’s approval of dozens of drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the spill. “Administration-approved bureaucratic delays contradict our nation’s history in encouraging those who have made major advances in exploring the unknown, whether under the Earth’s surface or beyond its atmosphere,” Mr. Issa writes in an essay. [National Review]

Visiting the Gulf Coast, Lisa P. Jackson, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, says that an environmental “Armageddon” from the BP oil spill was averted, but that rigorous tracking of the effects of the spill needed to continue for years. “There is still oil in the ecosystem. We know that now,” she says. “What I say to people is that we need several years of data to ensure there is no collapse of any part of the ecosystem.” [The Hill]

A new class of transparent photovoltaic cells has been developed that can turn an ordinary windowpane into a solar panel without impeding the passage of visible light, scientists said Tuesday.

The cells could one day transform skyscrapers into giant solar collectors, said Richard Lunt, one of the researchers on the project.

“We think there’s a lot of potential to be able to integrate these into tall buildings,” Dr. Lunt, a postdoctoral researcher at the M.I.T. Research Laboratory of Electronics, said in an interview.

Geoffrey Supran/M.I.T. Richard Lunt, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, demonstrates the transparency of the new solar cell.

Previous attempts at transparent solar cells have either failed to achieve high efficiency or blocked too much light to be used in windows. But the new cells, based on organic molecules similar to dyes and pigments, are tailored to absorb only the near-infrared spectrum and have the potential to transform that light into electricity at relatively high efficiency.

The current efficiency of the prototype cells is only about 2 percent, but some basic modifications, like stacking the cells, could increase efficiency to around 10 percent, Dr. Lunt said.

The largest challenge in developing commercial applications for the new solar cells will be longevity. The cells could be packaged in the middle of double-paned windows, which would provide protection from the elements. But the longevity of the cells would still need to approach the life span of the windows themselves, which would not be replaced for decades.

“To make this thing truly useful, you do need to extend the lifetime, and make sure it reaches at least 20 years, or even longer than that,” said Vladimir Bulovic, a professor of electrical engineering at M.I.T. who collaborated on the development of the cells.

Mr. Bulovic said that previous work to extend the life span of organic light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, which share properties with the organic solar cells, indicated that the problem of longevity was not an extraordinarily difficult one.

“It appears at this point that this is an engineering problem,” he said. “I would expect that within a decade those will be solved issues.”

If the cells can be made long-lasting, they could be integrated into windows relatively cheaply, as much of the cost of conventional photovoltaics is not from the solar cell itself, but the materials it is mounted on, like aluminum and glass. Coating existing structures with solar cells would eliminate some of this material cost.

If the transparent cells ultimately prove commercially viable, the power they generate could significantly offset the energy use of large buildings, said Dr. Lunt, who will begin teaching at Michigan State University this fall.

“We’re not saying we could power the whole building, but we are talking about a significant amount of energy, enough for things like lighting and powering everyday electronics,” he said.

The Center for Excitonics, an Energy Frontier Research Center financed by the Department of Energy, provided funds for the research. A paper describing the technology behind the cells will appear in the next issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters.

In Wednesday’s Times, I wrote about start-up companies developing solar panel arrays that float on water. The companies see a potentially large market to generate electricity from building floating arrays for irrigation and mining ponds, hydroelectric reservoirs and canals.

But the great white whale for some of these solar developers is deploying floating photovoltaic arrays on the California Aqueduct, the 400-mile long canal that irrigates much of the state’s agricultural heartland and delivers water to Southern California.

“It’s a dream for us,” said Phil Alwitt, project development manager for SPG Solar, a Novato, Calif., company that has built floating solar arrays for winery irrigation ponds.

The idea is to reduce evaporation while producing electricity to offset the power consumed by the massive pumps that move water through the aqueduct. Solaris Synergy, an Israeli company, estimates that its floating solar system could generate two megawatts per mile of the aqueduct.

“You could generate gigawatts from all that unused space on the California Aqueduct and there’s a huge electricity demand,” said Danny Kennedy, co-founder of Sungevity, an Oakland, Calif., solar installer. Read more…

One year ago today, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico because of a runaway oil well. The accident killed 11 rig workers and spilled nearly five million barrels of oil into the gulf, the biggest maritime oil spill in United States history.

The effects of that spill continue to linger, as you can see in our recent coverage. Entire communities, including fishermen and rig workers, have been affected.

In a statement Wednesday, President Obama said that his administration had made progress in cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico and improving regulation of offshore oil drilling. But, he acknowledged, “the job isn’t done.”

The president said that 2,000 workers are still cleaning marshes and beaches and performing other tasks to mitigate the damage from the accident. He also noted that federal officials continue to monitor the safety of seafood harvested from the gulf. On Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that all waters of the gulf have now be reopened to fishing. At the height of the spill, millions of acres of gulf waters were off-limits to fishermen, shrimpers and oystermen, costing millions of dollars in lost revenues. (The process of claiming damages from BP has been troublesome for many of those affected.)

Even as the president listed the extensive response efforts and tougher regulations that will now be imposed on deep-water drilling, he also said that he plans to expand domestic oil and gas development as part of an overall energy strategy of reducing oil imports by a third by 2025.

Here is the full statement from the White House: Read more…

The Environmental Protection Agency has become, for some of libertarian or Tea Party convictions, something of an embodiment of government run amok. Environmentalists see the agency, at its best, as the defender of people’s health and the environment’s welfare.

It is instructive to see what happens when these two worldviews are superimposed on the construction of one single-family home that is either in (from the E.P.A’s point of view) or near (from the property owners’ perspective) wetlands in the woods of the Idaho panhandle.

If the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian-leaning property-rights group, has its way, the Supreme Court will have a chance to decide the issue. It has failed to persuade two courts already, but underestimating the Sacramento-based group is dangerous. It was instrumental in bringing  to the Supreme Court a case that achieved a confusing result but nonetheless constrained the E.P.A.’s ability to bring some wetlands under the protection of the Clean Water Act.

That matter, known as the Rapanos case, involved a Michigan developer and a large tract of land, and turned on the question of when wetlands are connected to the waters covered by the clean-water law. The issue in the Idaho case is slightly different: when the E.P.A. says something is a wetland, under what circumstances can that declaration be reviewed? Read more…

Nevada is home to the largest nuclear bomb test site, and the proposed host for a nuclear waste repository. The scientists and engineers, the corporate executives, the lawyers and the elected officials have all had years to chew over how and why Nevada was selected, but now comes a new analysis, from an English major.

Courtesy of the Black Rock Institute The cover of the book “Bombast: Spinning Atoms in the Desert.”

“Bombast: Spinning Atoms in the Desert,” published late last year by a nonprofit group in Reno, the Black Rock Institute, is a trip through what the author, Michon Mackedon, calls “nuclear colonialism.” Ms. Mackedon, of Fallon, in northern Nevada, is a former co-chairman of the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects, a state agency appointed to fight off the waste dump. She is also a professor emeritus of English at Western Nevada College.

Courtesy of the Black Rock Institute Michon Mackedon.

Outsiders with a global or national agenda – like preparing for nuclear war with the Soviet Union or finding a disposal site for the civilian and military wastes piling up around the country – began by devaluing their chosen site, whether atolls in the South Pacific or the deserts of New Mexico or southern Nevada, she asserts in the book.

And Nevada, she said, is barren and quirky; in the popular mind, why not throw the mushroom clouds and the million-year waste repository in with the state’s “casino culture,” she asked.

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PARIS — Mediterranean fish, including bluefin tuna, sea bass and hake, are in danger of extinction from overfishing, marine habitat degradation and pollution, according to a report on Tuesday from the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

In all, more than 40 species of Mediterranean fish are endangered, the organization said in its list of threatened species.

Almost half the species of Mediterranean sharks and rays — so-called cartilaginous fish — are facing extinction, the conservationist organization said, adding that they make up 14 of the 15 species it considers critically endangered. The 15th is a bony fish, the common goby or Pomatoschistus microps; the group says its population has declined about 80 percent in the past 10 years, mainly from damage to its habitat and incidental capture.

The organization called on governments to “reinforce fishing regulations, create new marine reserves, reduce pollution and review fishing quotas, in particular the number of captures allowed for threatened species.”

A species that the group lists as endangered, the Mediterranean population of Atlantic bluefin tuna, is one of the world’s most valuable fish, with adult specimens regularly selling for thousands of dollars on the Japanese market. Read more…

The businessman and adventure tycoon Richard Branson is taking heat for his plan to bring 30 Madagascar ring-tailed lemurs to his own private island in the British Virgin Islands.

Chuck Liddy/The News & Observer, via Associated Press Ring-tailed lemurs on Lemur Island, a new exhibit at the North Carolina Zoological Park in Asheboro.

Mr. Branson said the effort is part of a broader plan to save species around the world from extinction, and that the lemurs will come from zoos in South Africa, Sweden and Canada, not Madagascar. He said the government of the British Virgin Islands granted him a permit to bring the animals to the island over the objections and concerns of residents and local environmental groups.

“We’re trying to look at all the species that are most in peril and trying to come up with imaginative ways to protect them,” Mr. Branson said in a phone interview Tuesday from Necker Island, another island he owns in the British Virgin Islands.

Some scientists and environmentalists said his plan for the lemurs is reckless and that any effort to introduce a foreign species into a new environment is risky.

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Provinces in central and southwestern China may face their worst electricity shortages in years this summer due to intensifying coal shortages and drought, state officials warn. Fuel supplies are dwindling due to steadily rising prices and transportation problems, while meager rainfall during March has left hydroelectric facilities generating significantly below peak capacity. A major copper producing region is already suffering regular power shortages, hampering production. [Reuters]

Beijing will ban coal use from many of the city’s largest urban districts by 2015, as part of a larger effort to reduce air pollution in the city, officials say. Hundreds of thousands of old vehicles that cannot meet new emissions standards will also be barred from city streets as part of the program. [People's Daily]

Nuclear reactors under construction along China’s southeastern coast are situated near a fault system similar to the one responsible for the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in March, setting off a nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. “We have to assume they’ll be hit,” a seismology expert says. “Maybe not in the next 10 years, but in 50 or 100 years.” [Associated Press]