WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

Although county lines parcel out the southern shore of Lake Michigan like garden plots, the environmental issues that unify people from Michigan City, Ind. to Chicago do not respect political boundaries.

Nor do most economic issues. Industrial decay and depopulation have left communities throughout the greater Calumet region with some common problems, as well as shared opportunities.

That was the message from the inaugural Calumet Summit, a conference convened this week in Gary, Indiana’s lakefront Marquette Park by the Calumet Stewardship Initiative.

The summit follows some major moves in the Calumet area, not least of which is the Millennium Reserve initiative, dubbed the nation's largest "open space" project.

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In the debate surrounding the United States' natural gas resources, it is often noted that methane, the primary component of natural gas, is 21 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. There are two main issues with that statement, although that is the figure used by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Carbon dioxide, whose concentration recently reached a long-feared milestone, remains the most important greenhouse gas trapping heat in the atmosphere.

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The glitzy towers of downtown Chicago are filled with offices that boast impressive financial returns, but their biggest cash flow may be one they all share: the Chicago River.

A new report commissioned by Friends of the Chicago River and Openlands says each dollar invested in the river provides a 70 percent return.

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As conventioneers pack up their model turbines and fly home from the 2013 Windpower exhibition at McCormick Place, they have the wind at their backs.

That’s because the nation’s largest convention center announced this week it would purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs) to offset 100 percent of its energy use with wind power. The three-year arrangement with Atlanta-based Sterling Planet will procure credits worth some 331,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, according to McCormick Place, or about as much as 69,000 passenger vehicles each year.

The cavernous conference center uses about 130 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, but its plan to buy RECs doesn’t mean wind turbines will now be wired to McCormick Place.

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The White House Council on Environmental Quality honored 12 teachers with a Presidential Award for environmental education Tuesday, but in Chicago a band of green-minded volunteers added more than 700 new students and teachers to an environmental organization present in every one of the city's 50 wards.

The Chicago Conservation Corps' student program has graduated roughly 6,500 students and teachers who have devoted some 150,000 hours of service since the program begin in 2006.

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America has become the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas,” according to President Obama, and one former director of the Central Intelligence Agency would like to use that fossil fuel war chest to break our ties with imported oil, an addiction that costs the nation $1 billion per day.

R. James Woolsey, former CIA director and self-proclaimed energy hawk, would like another option at the gas pump: methanol.

He said last week at the Chicago Club that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has so tight a grip on global gasoline prices that the U.S. will never drill or conserve its way out of funding Middle East petro-states.

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