WORKPLACE WELLNESS GUIDE. Read how to start doing it in your office

The first step may be to form a wellness committee of employees who care about this topic and are motivated to make some changes within the office setting. What types of changes may these be? Assessing any vending machines in the office is a good place to start. How many healthy choices, such as baked chips, nuts, seeds, dried fruit, etc., do you see? Contact your vendor to determine what other options you have, reduce your supply of unhealthy choices and replace them with some better-for-you snacks. You could even label these snacks as such to produce an even bigger impact. Putting a policy in place stating the need for healthy vending will make this change sustainable and make your staff aware of the changes that were made and more importantly, why they were made. Next, think about your in-office meetings and events. Are healthy choices available when meals are served to your staff or snacks brought in for special occasions? This is another area where a policy can be effective. Only allowing for approved, healthy snack options during special events or occasions and ensuring that at least one healthy option is provided when meals are served is promoting the importance of health to your staff. In no way is this an ask to remove all unhealthy food from your place of work. Simply, this is an ask to allow for employees to easily make a healthy choice — by making sure that these choices are always available. http://www.limaohio.com/news/health-home_top-news/51019879/Making-healthy-choices-at-work

Good News! Wellness now a School Policy for Students, Teachers & Parents of Newton District

Board policy 504.11 details how the battle should be fought on many fronts, from nutrition education of students and parents to meal time guidelines, providing a summer meal program and amounts of physical activity. That’s a sign of progress for schools, including the Newton Community School District, which held the first reading of an updated wellness policy at its Dec. 22 board meeting. Schools were fighting much different battles against poor nutrition 10 or 20 years ago, but at the Dec. 22 meeting, food service supervisor Cristy Croson had many positive items to report about nutrition in the district.Source: http://www.newtondailynews.com/2015/01/05/school-wellness-policy-addresses-junk-food-other-concerns/a3j1kpa/

UPDATE: New Diet Guidelines to Cut Environment Cost for Better Health of Americans

WASHINGTON (AP) — For years, the government has been issuing guidelines about healthy eating choices. Now, a panel that advises the Agriculture Department is ready to recommend that you be told not only what foods are better for your own health, but for the environment as well. That means that when the latest version of the government's dietary guidelines comes out, it may push even harder than it has in recent years for people to choose more fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains and other plant-based foods — at the expense of meat. The beef and agriculture industries are crying foul, saying an environmental agenda has no place in what has always been a practical blueprint for a healthy lifestyle. The advisory panel has been discussing the idea of sustainability in public meetings, indicating that its recommendations, expected early this year, may address the environment. A draft recommendation circulated last month said a sustainable diet helps ensure food access for both the current population and future generations. A dietary pattern higher in plant-based foods and lower in animal-based foods is "more health promoting and is associated with lesser environmental impact than is the current average U.S. diet," the draft said Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/02/diet-guidelines-environment_n_6409228.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

UPDATE: Giant Philippine storms show climate change threat: Greenpeace

Greenpeace global chief Kumi Naidoo said Sunday increasingly violent storms hitting the Philippines showed the world had to act on climate change, as Typhoon Hagupit barrelled across the country. Naidoo was in the Philippines to "bear witness" to the damage done by Hagupit, the strongest storm to hit the Philippines this year, and planned to visit some of the worst-affected areas on Monday. "Nature does not negotiate. We actually have to wake up and smell the coffee. We need to understand that we are running out of time," he said, in a warning to UN negotiators meeting in Lima, Peru, to hammer out the broad outlines of a new world pact on global warming. Naidoo, the international executive director of the environmental group, said that the typhoon passing over the Philippines was an example of the massive damage poorer countries would experience if climate change worsens. He said the storms hitting the Southeast Asian archipelago were getting stronger and stronger, showing the urgency for world governments to act quickly.https://ph.news.yahoo.com/giant-philippine-storms-show-climate-change-threat-greenpeace-202749347.html

BRAZIL: Cleanest and Most Renewable Energy Matrix on the Planet

Green Industrial Revolution can replace carbon-generated and even nuclear power infrastructures with renewable energy, storage system technologies, and smart green on-site distributed grids

Prompted by the Arab Oil Embargo of the 1970s, the Green Industrial Revolution started to emerge at the end of the 20th century. Initially proclaimed as occurring in northern Europe, it actually began in Japan and South Korea before it emerged in Europe. As a small and densely populated island nation of 130 million people, Japan has a tradition for the need of energy, but with "no waste" that dates back to the Middle Ages. By the 1980s, Japan and South Korea were concerned with the need to become energy independent and secure. As a result, they developed national policies and programs to reduce their growing dependency on foreign fuels. By the beginning of the 21st century, China had leapfrogged the USA into this new era, driven by unprecedented economic growth and development, urbanization and infrastructure needs. In northern Europe, the Green Industrial Revolution received a big push from Germany's Energiewende and its feed-in-tariff (FiT) program. Germany became the number one producer and installer of solar panels for homes, offices, and large open areas from 2006-09. In 2010, Italy then took the FiT concept into its economic and culture so that it held the distinction of world leader in solar panel installation. China took the lead in 2011 and continues as the number one solar panel and photovoltaic manufacturer and installer. Japan is now leading in auto manufacturing, jumping ahead of the competition with its hybrids. The Green Industrial Revolution, with its extraordinary new technologies and promise of thousands of new green jobs, is trying to come to America. It is hampered by the lack of a national energy policy, and a political process that is beholden to the fossil fuel industry. Big Oil and now Natural Gas, which calls itself "clean energy", have been America's "elephant-in-the room" for over a hundred years, exploiting the nation's resources, pushing the country into a dependence on foreign oil producers who are politically destabilizing, and not aligned with our national interests. The natural gas industry sees the rise and commercialization of hydrogen fuel cell cars from all the auto manufacturers around the world as its future. The industry anticipates being "selected" as the primarily source for hydrogen to refuel the thousands of hydrogen-powered cars predicted to be on the roads, starting with California and other areas of the US in 2015. A recent biding process in California awarded 20 out of 25 hydrogen refueling stations to one natural gas company. And Yes. There are ethical and conflict of interest issues in this process and the one company selected. These companies have "influenced" decisions made on the refueling stations as they know that these stations will need to be paid for over decades and make the consumers of all transportation systems dependent upon them: drilling, processing, pumping (pipelines and trains) as well as reforming into hydrogen energy for vehicles. A new era of sustainability and carbonless energy generation is here now. The push , public policy, economics and technologies for renewable energy with a carbonless lifestyle will become history's largest social and economic megatrend. The potential of extraordinary benefits in the form of economic revival, innovation, emerging technologies, and significant job growth for those nations capable of fast entry is here today. Developing nations know this. Developed ones, like the US are still trapped in the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions. Indeed, the world has changed Source:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/woodrow-clark/green-industrial-revolution_b_6045660.html

UPDATE: Any Climate Deal From Upcoming Summit Likely To Be Too Weak To Stop Warming - Reuters

A global deal to combat climate change in 2015 looks more likely after promises for action by China, the United States and the European Union, but any agreement will probably be too weak to halt rising temperatures. Delegates from almost 200 nations will meet in Lima, Peru, from Dec. 1-12 to work on the accord due in Paris in a year's time, also spurred by new scientific warnings about risks of floods, heatwaves, ocean acidification and rising seas. After failure to agree a sweeping U.N. treaty at a summit in Copenhagen in 2009, the easier but less ambitious aim now is a deal made up of "nationally determined" plans to help reverse a 45 percent rise in greenhouse gas emissions since 1990. "We are in much better shape," a year before Paris than in the run-up to Copenhagen, said Yvo de Boer, who was the U.N.'s climate chief in 2009 and now leads the Global Green Growth Institute in South Korea, which helps poor nations. The hope is that in Paris, delegates will also work out ways to ratchet up national plans in coming years to limit average temperatures rises to an agreed ceiling of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above levels before the Industrial Revolution. Temperatures have already climbed 0.85 C (1.5 F). "Not in my wildest dreams do I expect the Paris agreement to close the gap to 2 degrees," de Boer told Reuters. China, the United States and the European Union, which together account for more than half of world greenhouse gas emissions, have indicated they want some sort of global accord in Paris, sharply raising the chances of success for the summit. "The prognosis is vastly better than going into Copenhagen," said Robert Stavins, director of Harvard University's Environmental Economics Program. "The expectations (in 2008-09) were much too high."