Pro sports are going greener, and that means the rest of us are too | Grist

Pro sports may not seem like a natural ally for environmentalists. Players fly from Boston to Los Angeles and back for a single game. Leagues and teams convince cities to build expensive and often unneeded new facilities with taxpayer money. Fans clog up roads as they drive to games and clog up trash cans with hot-dog wrappers and beer cups once they arrive.

But six teams representing six major North American sports leagues have kicked off a new effort to make themselves more sustainable: the Green Sports Alliance. No, they won't stop flying to games or pushing for plush stadiums, but they will use less energy, recycle and compost more, and green their procurement practices by buying more eco-friendly goods. All of the founding teams are from the Pacific Northwest -- MLB's Seattle Mariners, NFL's Seattle Seahawks, NBA's Portland Trail Blazers, NHL's Vancouver Canucks, WNBA's Seattle Storm, and MLS' Seattle Sounders FC -- but the alliance aims to get teams from all around the U.S. and Canada to join in.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which laid the groundwork for the GSA, has been working with pro sports teams and leagues for years to help them get greener.

Australia: Snow arrives two months early

With the official start to the ski season still two months away, the snow continues to fall across Mt Buller today after temperatures fell below zero last night. At 9.30am the temperature had climbed back to minus 0.2 degrees after plunging to minus 1.6 degrees. About 10cm had fallen at Mt Buller by 9am.

Grist List

An independent study by a Berkeley energy analyst found that growing pot indoors uses the same amount of electricity as running 30 refrigerators. Processed cannabis, the study says, gives off 3000 times its weight in CO2 emissions. Can that possibly be right? Crap, back to mushrooms, I guess.

[David Roberts: Another alarmist who does a lot of unnecessary fossil-fueled travel]: Me, heading to Germany to learn about distributed renewable energy | Grist

This week, I'm going to be traveling to Berlin under the gracious auspices of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, a German progressive nonprofit that does work on clean energy. Exciting! It'll be my first time in Germany.