More ideas offered for G-20 summit

At a community brainstorming meeting Wednesday, June 24, 2009 offered suggestions for the upcoming G-20 summit scheduled for Pittsburgh this Fall.

The G-20 summit, a meeting of the world's top financial officials and heads of state, will take place in Pittsburgh's David L. Lawrence Convention Center on Sept. 24 and 25.

The summit will provide Pittsburghers with the "unparalleled opportunity to get our story out," said Bill Flanagan, executive vice president for corporate relations at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development.

Jeff Shaw - President of PrintNet, Inc. strongly recommended that that all printed material for the event be printed on 100% Post Consumer Recycled Paper with vegetable based inks, and that we commit to the G-20 Summit being a "Zero Waste Event".

Read the whole Story: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09175/979451-53.stm

Watch the Video: http://kdka.com/video/?id=59114@kdka.dayport.com

Pittsburgh Hosts G-20 Summit in September

White House announced Friday May 29th that Pittsburgh will host the next G-20 Summit in September, saying it was chosen because of its "commitment to employing new and green technology to further economic recovery and development."

The G-20 finance ministers held their first summit in Washington in November 2008, and met again in April in London, at which time they decided to meet again in September to assess the status of the global economy.

Pittsburgh, marked its 250th birthday last year, saw its Pittsburgh Steelers football team make history this year, winning its sixth Super Bowl, more than any other team in the National Football League. Its Penguins hockey team is on the way to the Stanley Cup finals.

In picking Pittsburgh, the Obama administration capitalizes on one of its favorite themes -- the environment. The David L. Lawrence Convention Center, completed in 2003, received an endorsement from the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit group that promoted environmentally friendly design. The center relies on skylights for much of its lighting, uses recycled hand towels and reclaims water from fountains for use in toilets.

"The city has remade itself over the past 25 years," said James Rohr, chairman and chief executive of PNC Financial Services, based in downtown Pittsburgh. "I think there's an opportunity for the city to showcase itself as a great place to work and live." He noted the region lost 250,000 steel-related jobs in the 1980s, but a number of other industries, including health care, technology and robotics, have sprung up since then.

That broader economic base has helped the region weather the recession, which some local leaders said played a role in its being chosen to host the summit. Pittsburgh's unemployment rate of 7.6% in March was more than a percentage point below the national average of 8.9%.

The city's 29-year-old mayor, Luke Ravenstahl, was understandably pleased. "We're especially proud that Pittsburgh was chosen because of our status as a symbol of economic transformation, as well as our leadership in the green movement."

http://www.g20.org/about_what_is_g20.aspx

New evidence of Kimberly-Clark's shocking mismanagement of forest resources

Shocking new photos released September 16, 2008 reveal the existence of a massive stockpile of old-growth logs that are destined to become disposable products like Kleenex tissue and Cottonelle toilet paper for tissue giant Kimberly-Clark Corporation (K-C). The logs originate from the Ogoki Forest, the single most ecologically valuable area left in Ontario's southern Boreal Forest and the site of growing controversy.

As these new photos and recent government correspondence reveal, Kimberly-Clark is currently purchasing huge quantities of pulp made primarily from whole, old-growth trees from intact areas of Canada's Boreal Forest. According to the Ontario Ministry of Environment, the stockpile contained 85,000 cubic metres of wood as of the end of March 2008. That's equivalent to over 7,000 logging trucks full of wood.

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/new-evidence-of-kimberly-clark  

The Story of Stuff!

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Mountaintop Removal

The name says it all -- is the most ruthless method yet found to extract coal as quickly and as cheaply as possible. That it happens at all is an outrage. That it happens in one of North America's most biologically diverse ecosystems is heartbreaking. The mixed mesophytic forests of central Appalachia are home to more than 60 species of tree, which are in turn home to more than 250 different songbirds. Unfortunately, two-thirds of those warblers are in decline, largely because their habitat is being cleared by bulldozers and buried with explosives. http://www.onearth.org/article/appalachian-apocalypse

Highway to Hell  

Most locals call it Hell's Highway or the Highway of Death. On any given day thousands of logging trucks, SUVs, semitrailers, buses, and tanker trucks form a frantic parade to and from North America's largest engineering project. Convoys of extrawide loads often block an entire lane of the highway with turbines, tires, or house-size coker ovens used in oil processing. In fact, Highway 63 ferries one of the highest tonnages per mile of any road in Canada. http://www.onearth.org/article/canadas-highway-to-hell