Green Prophet | Cleantech & Environment News from the Middle East

Rabbi Julian Sinclair on 'Breakthrough' by Nordhaus and Shellenberger

James Murray-White | August 20th, 2008 | 3 Comments | Email this

Book Reviews »

In this week’s green book review, guest reviewer Rabbi Julian Sinclair unpicks the recent ‘Breakthrough’ by US writers Ted Nordhaus & Michael Shellenberger.

Last month Al Gore gave a rousing speech on climate change, throwing down an audacious challenge to the American people. By 2020, Gore declared, let American by powered 100% by renewable sources of energy.

Gore appealed to the Apollo Project as the model for an enterprise of such grandeur. In 1961 President Kennedy announced his goal that America put a man on the moon within a decade. Kennedy’s challenge captured America’s imagination and galvanized the American computer, aeronautics and space industries. As wildly ambitious as the aim at first appeared, the United States reached it with 15 months to spare. In his speech, Gore announced that we need a new Apollo Mission for energy today.

Painting a vision of this magnitude represented something of a departure for Al Gore in his thinking about how to move people on climate change. He has done more than anyone to raise awareness of the issue, but at first he appeared to think that simply laying out the inconvenient truth about global warming would be sufficient to mobilize action. When it didn’t, he started musing about the inconvenient evolution of the human fear gland that was designed to respond to immediate, emotional stimuli rather than cognitive and scientific input.

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Israel's Ministry of Environmental Protection to Clean Up the Kinneret

Ilana Teitelbaum | August 20th, 2008 | 2 Comments | Email this

Business & Politics »

sea of galilee kinneret environmental protection SPNI

It’s a drawback to being popular: Litter has become a big problem on the coast of the freshwater Kinneret lake (the Sea of Galilee).

To take charge of the problem, Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, the Israel Police force and the Kinneret Authority inaugurated a new environmental policing unit to clean up the coast.

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Do Israeli Organic Standards Need Fixing?

Michael Green | August 19th, 2008 | 3 Comments | Email this

Food & Health »

If you’re going to shell out the extra shekels for organic food, you’re want to be confident that you’re getting the real deal.

Personally, I think the price of organic food is worth paying, whether you’re buying it for selfish reasons (taste, avoiding nasty chemicals and GMOs) or altruistic ones (treading lightly our small country) and until recently, as far as I was concerned, anything in Israel labelled with the O-Word must be licensed and inspected by a government-authorised organisation.

So it came as a surprise to find out recently that organic labelling in Israel isn’t such as a clear-cut issue. A new law was passed by the Knesset last week with the intention of ensuring that organic food on sale in Israel really is organic. But the Israel Bio-organic Agriculture Association (IBOAA) claims that the law will not prohibit or limit the use of the term ‘organic’, and that any farmer will still be able to label his produce as they wish, reports Ha’aretz.

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Ten Sustainable Israeli Designers Who Reduce, Reuse & Recycle

Karen Chernick | August 18th, 2008 | 6 Comments | Email this

Lifestyle & Culture »

israeli green designers design with sustainable practices reduce reuse recycle in mind photo Here at Green Prophet we’re big fans of environmentally friendly design. While it is greener, of course, to be a minimalist and avoid purchasing new products altogether – that sort of extreme attitude works for only a limited number of eco folks. For the rest of us, we can alleviate our consciences by supporting sustainable products.

So what is sustainable design?
Sustainable design (which is sometimes also referred to as eco design, green design, or environmentally friendly design) is the design of objects, buildings, you-name-it in compliance with the principles on environmental, social, and economic sustainability.

On Green Prophet, we’ve featured a range of sustainable designers – ranging from those who upcycle existing waste materials into new products (thus avoiding having perfectly good materials end up in landfills and eliminating the need to use additional resources), to those who create products that generate their own energy, to those who use resources harvested organically with sustainable agricultural practices. The possibilities are endless.

To recap some of our favorites, here’s a hitlist of ten sustainable Israeli designers that deserve our support.

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Solar Energy: Easy on the Eyes Too?

Jesse Fox | August 18th, 2008 | 2 Comments | Email this

Cleantech, Science & Technology »

For most people, solar energy conjures up images of rectangular panels on roofs or lined up in rows somewhere in the middle of the desert. And indeed, this is what we can expect to see over the next few years, as Israel begins to develop its most significant natural (and renewable) resource – the sun.

But how will the next generation of solar energy look? Could solar energy production transcend its sterile, technical image and become an element that actually enriches the landscape?

Here is a good example of how it could do just that.

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Do Jaffa Oranges With Carbon Label Make Them Green Oranges from the Garden of Eden?

James Murray-White | August 18th, 2008 | 1 Comment | Email this

Business & Politics »

How many shades of green can a Jaffa orange be? Israeli fruit and vegetable grower and supplier Mehadrin (owned by Hadarim, a property and building group, and a succession of other parent companies) is working with British supermarket chain Tesco in a bid to mark all its Jaffa oranges with the Carbon Trust label, a carbon footprint. This label will show that 125kg of carbon per kilogram of oranges was used or created during the growing, handling and shipping of the product.

Mehadrin is so far the only Israeli food company to be working on displaying the carbon measurement of its products (see Bagir, which is carbon labeling its eco suits), and in doing so is cleverly tapping into environmental issues that are close to many British consumers’ hearts (and I speak as a sensitive British consuming expat).

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Environmental Conference for Imams Challenges Israeli Muslims to Go Green

Karen Chernick | August 17th, 2008 | 5 Comments | Email this

Business & Politics »

(Image credit marantzer)

Last Thursday fifty Muslim clerics gathered in Umm el-Fahm for a conference to raise awareness regarding environmental issues among imams. The first of its kind, the conference was an important stepping stone in improving the quality of the environment in Israeli-Arab towns.

Organized partially by the director of Environmental Quality Unit Northern Triangle and long term environmental and social activist, Mohammad Rabah Aghbarieh, the event was held at the Umm el-Fahm Science and Art Center.

In addition to helping organize the conference, Rabah Aghbarieh prepared materials together with the Environmental Protection Ministry that every imam took home. These materials included a poster with an outline of basic environmental guidelines to be hung in his mosque, stickers stating that environmental protection is a religious commandment, and a CD containing sources from the Koran and hadith supporting environmental issues, general environmental information sources, a movie about the ministry, and other informational resources.

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Soot’s Role in Climate Change Can Be Predicted, New Research Shows

Green Prophet | August 14th, 2008 | 1 Comment | Email this

Cleantech, Science & Technology »

Image credit Keetsa

Tons of soot is being released into the air annually as forest fires rage from California to the Amazon to Siberia and Indonesia. Climate scientists have generally assumed that the main effect of smoke on climate is cooling, as the floating particles can reflect some solar energy back to space as well as increasing cloud size and lifespan. But new joint research at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and NASA may cause them to rethink soot’s role in shaping the Earth’s climate.

Air-borne particles such as soot – known collectively as aerosols – rise into the atmosphere where they interact with clouds. Understanding what happens when the two meet is extremely complicated, in part because clouds are highly dynamic systems that both reflect the sun’s energy back into space, cooling the upper atmosphere, and trap heat underneath, warming the lower atmosphere and the Earth’s surface. Aerosols, in turn, can have both heating and cooling effects on clouds.

On the one hand, water droplets form around the aerosol particles and these may extend the cloud cover. On the other hand, particles, especially soot, absorb the sun’s radiation, stabilizing the atmosphere and thus reducing cloud formation.

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Green Books Roundup Review on Grist, TreeHugger, Ed Begley's New Reads

James Murray-White | August 14th, 2008 | 2 Comments | Email this

Book Reviews »

“Nature is a language – can’t you read? Nature is a language – can’t anybody read?”

Morrissey & Marr: The Smiths, ‘Ask’ (1986) as played live in Tel Aviv last week.

We here at Green Prophet don’t often blow our own green shofar, but it’s always good to get praise from others, particularly when it’s in the national media. We were delighted last week to be described in a Ha’aretz books supplement book review as: “the useful (and, yes, hip) Israeli environmental blog in English.”

Thanks to the writer Daniel Orenstein, a postdoctoral fellow at the Technion and a faculty member of the Arava Institute, for that. Orenstein’s kind words came in the middle of a powerful review that blossomed into an overview of the burgeoning green revolution here in Israel: what the situation is, and what we as Individuals can do, as well as the politicians (see MK Dr. Dov Khenin’s plans for greening Tel Aviv sustainably here).

He ends his review, titled ‘What do we do now?’ with a punchy call for action from all of us, and emphasises the need for us to apply pressure to those with political clout:

“Greening should be a project we can all engage in. For this to be the case, we need legislation that will place the proper incentives on environmentally sound decisions, help people pay for the high up-front costs of energy efficiency, and make polluters pay for environmentally damaging activities. And for that, we need an abundance of genuine environmental advocates sitting in [the] Knesset whose concerns are for the long-term well-being of the land and people of Israel.”
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A Green Survey of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates

Karen Chernick | August 14th, 2008 | 1 Comment | Email this

Business & Politics »

dubai rotating building

Stay tuned for our future eco-tour of Dubai, but in the meantime let’s take a look at some green goings-on in Dubai. Because we’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that very interesting things are happening over there.

For starters, the Dubai government recently issued a requirement that all buildings in the emirate be constructed with environmentally friendly “green building” standards beginning in January 2008. What does “green building” mean?

It means the design, construction, operation, and maintenance of a building are altered in order to increase energy efficiency and reduce consumption of resources. These goals are obviously beneficial towards both the environment and the people using the buildings, and it is very impressive that the Dubai government has taken on this challenge. And this initiative makes Dubai the first city in the Middle East to implement green construction standards, so kudos are in order.

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