“Project Budburst” may sound like a hokey name for an action flick, but it’s a serious undertaking to combat climate change – and you can help.

The one-year-old project recently added Baltimore to its network of cities where citizen scientists are helping to document their observations of plant phenophases – their major life cycle changes. Scientists theorize that climate change is speeding up the life cycles of plants globally.

Thoreau got the ball rolling when he began noting his observations of nature in journals in the 1850s.

Heather Dewar over at Baltimore Brew explains:

Last October, the scientists reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science that flowering plants in the area near Walden Pond now bloom a full week earlier, on average, than they did in Thoreau’s time. Many once-common plants that Thoreau wrote about are no longer there.

To enlist as an amateur climatologist, all you are tasked with is keeping track of one plant’s major developments – first budding, first flower, first Holy Communion. You can even keep up with the group on Facebook.

You’d join the Maryland Science Center, which is co-sponsoring the project along with the Baltimore Ecosystem Study.

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Gov. Martin O’Malley and other state officials unveiled a new hybrid bus Friday afternoon at the Motor Trend International Auto Show in Baltimore, saying it was the first step toward the state’s goal of running 600 hybrid MTA buses by 2014.

That would put the Maryland Transportation Authority three-quarters of the way toward its goal of converting its entire bus fleet to hybrids within a decade, he said.

Gone soon will be the days of “instinctively trying to shield your face to avoid inhaling those fumes when a bus goes by,” said O’Malley, who also used the words “dirty” and “dinosaurs” to describe the diesel fleet. “Instead you get a breath of fresh air,” he said.

Dubbed the “Clean, Green Hybrid Machines,” 30 hybrid buses will hit the streets within the next few weeks throughout the state. The hybrids, manufactured by bus maker New Flyer, are 20 percent more fuel efficient, 50 percent quieter and can log twice as many miles (6,000) between service appointments than their diesel counterparts (also made by New Flyer).

But for all that pizzazz, the hybrids cost $875,000 per bus — nearly a third more than the diesels. Reporters questioned the governor about that expense during a time when the state is grappling with a $2 billion budget deficit.

“It’s our belief that while this requires a larger expense on the capital budget now, we make that investment back over the lifetime span for the hybrid bus,” O’Malley said. “[We believe] it does make more sense — what it means in dollars now will come back to us over the next six years.”

The governor also pointed out the hybrids are much better for the environment and will help Maryland reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent. O’Malley is pushing legislation this year that would have Maryland achieve that goal by 2020.

So what do you think? Is this a good expenditure for the state? Or is this just too big of a price to pay right now?

LIZ FARMER, Business Writer

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Maryland’s fight for cleaner air is getting some love from the BBC.

BBC World News America’s Katty Kay — you may know her from regular appearances on Meet the Press and The Chris Matthews Show — traveled from D.C. to Maryland’s James Island with environmental scientist Court Stevenson to get a look at the problems plaguing the Chesapeake Bay, and report back on the work the state is doing to reduce carbon emissions.

“The impact of global warming is hard to ignore — rising sea levels are contributing to massive erosion, threatening Maryland’s 3,000 miles of coastline… The rising water has covered what was once a thriving community — 150 years ago there were two schools, a shop and a shipbuilding yard. Mr. Stevenson said it will all be gone in 30 years,” Kay wrote.

Despite the BBC’s worldwide reach, Kay does little to compare Maryland’s policies to those around the world. I would have liked to find a sister state somewhere out there that’s pushing some buttons with its environmental laws. Regardless, I guess it’s still nice to get some international love.

DANIELLE ULMAN, Business Writer

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Yesterday, I was chatting with my editor about the current appeal in our culture today of all things “green” — and we were trying to put our finger on the correct term for a particular type that exists in most cities across the country.

You’ve noticed them: late 20s to early 30s, working as architects or for nonprofits; they buy designer couches made of organic fabrics; they attend happy hours with prescribed conversation topics that usually have to do with design concepts, or what sort of bike racks the city needs. They read Dwell magazine and numerous blogs about “sustainable design” and “the built environment”; they drive Subaru Outbacks or Toyota Priuses (if they drive at all); they live in Portland, Ore.—or wish they did, and talk about it all the time.

Then coincidentally, at this morning’s “Go Green for Green” symposium hosted by The Daily Record at the Center Club, developer Owen Rouse hit it on the head: these people are Scuppies. That’s right, Socially Conscious Yuppies. The term was used in the context of a panel discussion that touched on what’s driving the green building industry, and Rouse points to them, along with the Dinkpops* of the world, as responsible for tipping the discussion in the green direction.

The fact that the once-epithet “yuppie” is built into this new term is important, because it indicates a sort of potential in the whole green movement for it to move from fashionable economic trend to permanent cultural archetype. It’s telling that “yuppie,” a term that dates from the early ‘80s, is recognized by my Microsoft Word spell-checker (even though “blog” is not). And in this month’s excellent 40th-anniversary issue of New York magazine, novelist Jay McInerney argues that yuppie culture has become the hegemon:

There probably are a few Budweiser-drinking union members left out in Brooklyn and Queens who guffaw at the idea of anyone belonging to a gym or buying coffee at any place other than a deli, but generally speaking, yuppie culture has become the culture, if not in reality, then aspirationally. … The ideal of connoisseurship, the worship of brand names and designer labels, the pursuit of physical perfection through exercise and surgery — do these sound like the quaint habits of an extinct clan?

If the Scuppies have their say in it, eventually “green” will become the culture, as yuppiedom has (at least in places like New York), if it hasn’t already (as it may have, apparently, in places like Portland). Have you ordered your organic couch yet?

* Dual Income, No Kids, Plenty of Pets—another term we learned this morning.

ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer

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Goucher College has teamed up with Zipcars to offer students and others on the college’s Baltimore campus round-the-clock access to two Honda Civic Hybrids.

As a recent Goucher grad, I was proud to see the school continue on the road to going green. When I was a student, our environment group installed a solar panel on campus. Soon after another one was installed.

But when I took a closer look at the press release, I noticed that it costs $35 to join Zipcar, and then an additional $7 per hour or $60 per day to use one of the hybrids. Ouch.

Wouldn’t students be more inclined to ask fellow classmates for free rides, rather then spend an additional $14 for a trip to the supermarket?

In light of the controversy over the University of Baltimore’s parking rate hike, do you really think Goucher students—especially those who purposefully don’t bring cars to school in order to save–will be willing to spend that kind of money?

RICHARD SIMON, Multimedia Reporter

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The Baltimore City Department of Public Works issued a news release that took me by surprise, at least through my cursory glance at the headline, which said “COMMUNITY DEER MEETING.”

I’ve heard rumors that deer sometimes wander into the wooded areas of the city (one report of a deer in Guilford, which I frankly don’t believe). But are there enough deer in the city to merit a community deer meeting?

No.

This meeting, though put on by the city DPW, is actually regarding the Loch Raven Reservoir in Baltimore County. The reservoir is part of Baltimore’s water supply, so the city and county are working together on plans to control deer. The deer are eating too much of the new growth in the Loch Raven watershed, according to the release.

So has anybody ever seen a deer in Baltimore City?

ANDY ROSEN, Business Writer

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None of Maryland’s colleges and universities made the Sierra Club’s list of “Cool Schools” – recognizing the higher ed institutions with the best environmental initiatives – but one university system did get a nod in Sierra magazine’s “bright ideas” section:

“Thanks to a coalition of students, all 15 institutions in the University System of Maryland are conducting greenhouse-gas inventories. Some are converting buses to biodiesel and starting green building projects, with the goal of eliminating carbon emissions.”

Some other area schools got a less shining review. Listed in the “five that fail” section are Virginia’s College of William and Mary, and D.C. schools George Washington University and Howard University.

Sierra slams G.W. for being the most expensive school in the country, arguing that it should have policies on climate change and green building standards. WAMU, NPR’s station in the District, reported Tuesday that reps from G.W. dispute Sierra’s ranking, and say the school was the first in Washington to codify green building standards.

Regardless of policies at G.W., environmental guidelines seem to be taking hold at larger schools. Last year, the Sierra Club’s magazine ran its first list of “Cool Schools” and only two of the top 10 were big, state schools.

This year’s list is more well rounded, with five of the top 10 being state schools of the largest kind. Here, Arizona State University at Tempe (51,500 students) and University of Florida at Gainesville (50,000 students) share space with Vermont’s Middlebury College (2,350 students) and North Carolina’s Warren Wilson College (850 students).

DANIELLE ULMAN, Business Reporter

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The lordly New York Times has caught wind of the debate in Roland Park over the sale of 17 acres of open space belonging to the Roland Park Country Club to Keswick Multi-Care Center, a company that wants to build a 300-unit eldercare facility with a 400-space parking garage underneath it.

Many Roland Park residents are upset because the sale signals the loss of publicly-used green space to development, and because they say there already sufficient facilities for retirees in the neighborhood.

But the Times couches the dispute largely in terms of what Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., the urban planner who designed Roland Park in the late 1800s “to interrupt this city’s concrete sprawl with an oasis of big sky and lush fields,” would have wanted for the neighborhood.

Lifelong-resident Kathy Hudson is quoted as saying, “This is not what the residents or Olmsted had in mind in designing this community,” while 85-year old retirement home denizen Jack Bremermann countered, “It is hard to say what Olmsted would have wanted…but I feel pretty confident that he probably would have some way for elderly people to be a part of the full community.”

Some further research into Olmsted’s life revealed that most of his career was spent working for the preservation of national parks, not planned communities. One account claimed that he valued “the concept of neighborhood-centered development, the differentiation of streets by function, the importance of common open recreational spaces, and the need for continuing maintenance and aesthetic oversight to preserve the quality of the community,” but also, vaguely, that he embraced the idea of “the interrelationship of people and their environment.”

It’s safe to say the jury’s still out on WWFLOD (What Would Frederick Law Olmsted Do?), but isn’t it sort of silly to be quibbling over the speculative desires of a man who died in 1957? Wouldn’t the upset residents of Roland Park, who are likely to lose this battle—it’s a private land deal, essentially, and the community’s Civic League can’t afford to buy the land, so the city is likely to approve the sale—be better served talking about the needs of the community in the here and now, rather than century-old history of their affluent, idyllic neighborhood?

ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer

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After reading the Baltimore Sun article this morning about the City Council’s failure to pass a ban on plastic bags in grocery stores and retail chains, I had one question: Are those who want to replace plastic bags with paper barking up the wrong tree?  (Yes, that was an attempt at a pun.)

But seriously — those in support of the measure, voted down by the council 11-3, say they are concerned about the amount of garbage created by plastic bags and this is certainly a legitimate concern. But on the other hand, those against the bill said they did not think that tapping natural resources to make more paper bags would help the environment any more.

As it was so aptly put by City Councilwoman Rochelle “Rikki” Spector, “It takes trees to make paper bags.”

Is it, after all, not the material itself but our use of the material that needs to be put in check? I prefer plastic bags for their sturdiness — especially when holding products that tend to perspire in bags like milk or ice cream — and for their convenient handles. I also save them to reuse as garbage bags.

But I also throw away my share of plastic bags and could do more for the environment like save them for the bag recycling bins I see outside many grocery stores, or bring my own cloth shopping bag to the store to cut down on plastic bag use.

But, quite honestly, that requires a little more effort on everyone’s part and I don’t know that any amount of activism and raising awareness will be able to get every shopper to consistently change their habits.

What do you think? Should we keep pushing the paper because at least it’s a step in the right direction or should we “bag” that approach (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) and start addressing people’s shopping behavior?

LIZ FARMER, Business Writer

(picture taken by Assistant Legal Editor Christina Doran in downtown Baltimore)

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I’ve discovered a new way to judge your patriotism.

It used to be I’d just glance at your lapel — no flag pin, no love for your country. Now I can spot you on the road, too.

A recent Q&A on Slate discusses whether it is more fuel efficient to drive with your windows down, or with your windows up and the AC cranked. You might think it’s better to save gas by giving the AC a rest, but opening windows lets wind into the car, which can increase drag and force you to use more sweet, sweet gasoline.

“At low speeds, at least, the fuel-economy losses associated with rolling down your windows are minuscule. But as your foot gets heavier on the accelerator, the situation rapidly begins to worsen. That’s because drag increases with the square of speed. So when you hit the highway, all that wind whipping through your open windows begins to take a major toll. Even with the windows sealed tight, the majority of your car’s power goes toward fighting wind resistance when you’re cruising at 55 miles per hour.”

What’s the easy solution? There isn’t one. Different autos give you different ratios.

And from whence does my assessment of patriotism come? From my twisted noggin, that’s whence! The more gas you waste through non-aerodynamic driving, the more you need and the higher prices go. That means more reliance on foreign oil.

I’m in favor of a Manhattan Project-sized research endeavor into alternative fuel sources. But, barring that, I’d appreciate it if you search for the middle ground between your AC and your windows when you’re barreling down the road.

JOE BACCHUS, Web Specialist

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