Sport Sandals for the Rich & Famous

It looks like someone forgot to tell the folks at PêcheBlu about the rising prices of fuel and food and the economic pressures many consumers say they are facing. Today the athletic sandal company unveiled its new line of luxury crocodile flip flops, “which will be the most expensive production flip flops in world,” boasts PêcheBlu.

Hold onto your Teva’s, because the new “world’s most expensive flip flops” will retail for a whopping $400 a pair.

Now, I understand that crocodile skin is a very exotic and expensive material to work with, but considering the size of a flip flop strap, things break down to about $50 per square inch of crocodile skin.

I also understand that there are plenty of people who are willing to pay $400 for flip flops and who can easily afford them. I guess I just wish I was one of them.

Green Land Grab

Marketers have “bombarded the Patent and Trademark Office” during the last year for green-themed marks, according to a report released by the law firm Dechert, leading the way to a 10 percent spike over 2006 in overall trademark filings.

Buoyed by the interest in environmentalism, filings for new trademarks last year topped 300,000. The previous record was 289,000 filings, set in 2000 during the Internet boom.

The enviro-mania has lead to a "green gridlock, with multiple companies filing for almost-identical marks at nearly the same time," says Glenn Gundersen, chair of Dechert's trademark practice, in the report. “Many of these me-too filings will either not merit legal protection or will be very weak trademarks."

"Green," of course, was the most popular word among marketers, with applications more than doubling from 1,100 in 2006 to 2,400 in 2007. That follows a 23 percent increase in applications in 2005 and a 37 percent increase in 2006.

Trademarks requests with the prefix "eco" also more than doubled in 2007, with nearly 900 new applications, says the report. Quips Gundersen: "if all the new eco-branded products filed in 2007 actually came to market, an EcoCitizen could buy an EcoHouse in EcoTown from an EcoRealtor."

Word Most Used in Trademarks
within Green Branding Space in 2007
(Numbers are approximate)
Term.....................Occurrences
Green..........................2,400
Energy........................1,200
Clean ..........................900
Earth..........................900
Eco..............................900
Organic ......................700
Environment...............450
Planet..........................400
Friendly......................180

More on BPA

Irked by recent coverage of bisphenol-A on one of the morning network news shows, the American Chemistry Society sent a letter to FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach requesting the FDA to update its review of the safety of bisphenol-A in food contact applications.

The ACS believes reports and allegations that BPA is unsafe are unfounded and lack scientific credibility. And while the ACS obviously has an agenda (its members are the folks that don't make the stuff we use but make the stuff that makes the stuff we use better), it's always good to hear all sides of a situation before pulling products and passing judgement onto trusting consumers.

So here's a link to the recent ACS statement with a dial-in number to a recorded press conference on the matter. All in the interest of science ...

Where your taxes go

This seemed appropriate data for the day ... defense spending many oppose, Social Security many supposedly won't get and health programs most can't even use.

More fast facts:

50 million students in public elementary and secondary schools = education gets 2% of budget
42 million people enrolled in Medicaid = public healthcare gets 21% of budget

Hilldog Said What?

It's hard not to scoff at Hillary Clinton's recent call for President Bush to boycott this summer's Olympic Games, in the wake of all the protests over China's actions in Tibet. Now, the way our history books read, it was President Bill Clinton in 2000 who opened Chinese businesses to the U.S. when he signed a bill extending permanent, normal trade status to China. And those same history books show signs of oppression and human rights violation taking place in Tibet and China since well before Bill helped Arkansas-based Wal-Mart captilize mightily on cheap Chinese labor. Nothing's new really.

Surely China's history is not unknown to Hillary. So why didn't she have the same type of advice for her partner Bill all those years ago?

By Hillary's logic, it would seem, it's okay to openly engage in all sorts of economic activities with Chinese companies and its government, we just shouldn't play sports with them at the country's coming out party to the world.

A campaign to raise awareness, change the numbers

As I write, satellite images from the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center show that a 5,282 square mile piece of ocean ice about the size of Connecticut is disintegrating.
Apparently, the disintegration of Antarctica’s Wilkins Ice Shelf was initiated by the breaking off of a 25.5 mile long by 1.5 mile wide shard of its edge at the end of last February. This was followed by today’s images of a 160 square mile collapse of the shelf.

For the remaining global warming skeptics that believe the earth’s warming is part of a cyclical trend, the unprecedented speed at which these changes are occurring is becoming harder to contradict. Climate models, conservative by design, are showing that predicted changes in our environment are happening at an unforeseen rate.

This theme that climate changes are taking place at rates never before seen ran throughout the 13th annual symposium entitled Alternative Energy: Seeking Climate Change Solutions, sponsored by the Wallace Stegner Center for Land Resources and the Environment, in Salt Lake City (7-8 March, 2008). After almost two days of non-stop presentations, the final and keynote address was given by environmentalist Bill McKibben. McKibben is a writer who has been championing the cause to stop global warming since his first book, The End of Nature (1989). He was one of the founders of the nationwide Step it Up 2007, a climate change demonstration, simultaneously held in all 50 states. Now, he is focusing his attention on slowing down what appears to be the irreversible consequences of the rise of carbon dioxide, ergo www.350.org.

At the end of the pre-industrial revolution, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been estimated to be about 275 parts per million (ppm). So McKibben states, “scientists and policymakers focused on what would happen if that number doubled – 550 ppm was a crude and mythical red line, but politicians and economists set about trying to see if we could stop short of that point.”

What has happened since 2000 is clear: the earth is reacting to the changes in carbon dioxide much faster than anticipated. Consequently, various groups throughout the world are moving to lower the target level of 550 ppm to 450 ppm. As discussions across the globe focus attention on lowering the CO2 ppm threshold, new data shows that even 450 ppm has little chance of stopping the devastating effects of climate change. Quoting NASA’s climatologist and arguably, the world’s preeminent climate expert, James Hansen (et al), “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm … If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.”

Today’s disintegration of 160 square miles of ice shelf reminds us that we do not have time to languish in our decisions to act on behalf of our planet.

As McKibben said in his 28 December 2007 op ed piece in the Washington Post, “It's the number (350ppm) that may define our future.”

For more information, go to http://www.350.org/. And check out the video directly below.

-Ernest Shiwanov

Antarctic Ice Shelf