The Barr Foundation in Boston recently announced that it is committing $50 million to the fight against climate change. The Barr Foundation is the largest environmental grantmaker in New England and has a history of making grants in the areas of open space, water resources, environmental stewardship, environmental justice and smart growth. It was a difficult decision to narrow the foundation's focus, but the urgency of the situation demanded it:

The rain was falling sideways when I landed last week at Logan Airport from Colorado, where I live. The January thaw had arrived in the guise of a major tropical storm, with high winds and temperatures near 60. Dressed for winter, I was sweating as soon as I got off the plane. For the two days that followed, I spent most of my time asking people to turn down their thermostats. Though the weather was balmy, the places I visited, from a Boston restaurant to a business in Waltham to the friends’ house in Belmont where I was staying, were still being heated as if it were freezing outside. That it was in fact nearly thirty degrees warmer didn’t seem to matter.

America’s push to become greener revolves around buying new, greener replacement products – with “green” meaning that they use less energy than the old products. This ignores the fact that there are energy and emissions costs in producing both the old and the new products – and sometimes production of the new products can be more environmentally costly than the old ones they replace.

Reps. Donna Edwards D-MD, Russ Carnahan (D-MO) and Steve Driehaus (D-OH) introduced federal legislation (HR 4202 -- the Green Infrastructure for Clean Water Act of 2009) December 3 that authorizes up to $300 million annually in green infrastructure (GI) planning and implementation grants. The bill will also establish GI centers of excellence in planning, implementation and policy, and help states establish Green Infrastructure Portfolio Standards that would incrementally grow states use of green infrastructure stormwater management, akin to renewable energy portfolio standards.