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10 Ways to Cut Your Home Heating Bill

2011-09-30T00:13:00.000-07:00

Let’s keep our homes warm, happy, clean and green this winter! The green revolution isn’t just about doing right by the planet. It’s also about doing right by our pocketbooks.

Clean energy – A clean furnace is an efficient furnace. Check your filters, check your ducts, dust off radiators (dust insulates them and keeps heat in). Replacing a furnace filter is cheap, and dirty filters cut your efficiency and can cut your furnace’s lifespan. Get your furnace inspected and maintained - a badly tuned furnace wastes $30 a month on average, so this pays for itself very quickly. And make sure your vents aren’t blocked by furniture – that cuts efficiency, too.
Heat Smart – First, drop the temp; each degree you cut clips 3 to 8 percent from your bill. Next, get wet – moist air holds heat better and FEELs warmer. You can add a humidifier to your furnace, buy a freestanding one, or just keep a kettle on the stove pumping out steam. You’ll feel the difference within minutes.
Thermostat Timer – This is actually the only piece of high-tech on our list. Putting it in is an easy do-it-yourselfer; programming can be trickier, but once you get the hang of it you can save 10 percent or more. Many even now come pre-programmed to drop the temperature during down-times, like work hours during the day or when you’re all in bed at night, and then bring up the temp just before you come home or wake up, so you’re always comfy.
Circulation – Heat rises. Use your ceiling fans to circulate air (or install them if you don’t them, and get the cooling benefit in summer as well). Cut back on using kitchen and bathroom ventilation fans for the season – they suck your valuable warm air right out of the house. Also, close off rooms that aren’t being used, and shut the heat vents in there.
Insulate - Got insulation? Better check – bats can sag, leaving gaps, and animals can slip in, making holes. Now’s the time to make sure by taking a quick look. Also, make sure you’re covered all over – attics and crawl spaces might have been overlooked. Need insulation? This can be a big ticket item, but compared to the average $1900 cost of heating a home, it’s a no-brainer. And adding insulation doesn’t just save you money now – it adds to your home’s value. Along with replacing old drafty windows, and replacing an old, inefficient furnace, this is one investment that pays off both in the short term and the long term. Talk to your bank about an equity credit line…
Mind the gaps! – I’m sure by now you know to caulk and weather-strip around doors and windows, and make sure to cover gaps between doors and thresholds. But there are a few places you might not have thought of, like electrical outlets. On outside walls, these can make a gap in your insulation blanket – you can buy small foam inserts that go under the switchplates. You should also check around pipes under sinks, and fill any gaps with foam. Of course, you should make a point of keeping all doors and windows closed – and close garage doors as quickly as possible. And close the chimney damper! That alone can hit you 10 percent. Putting a blanket over your fireplace screen when the fireplace isn’t in use can also help cut drafts.
Use the sun! – You don’t have to have an expensive passive solar setup installed (although that would be great) – you’ve got windows, so let the sun in during the day. It’ll warm the interior, providing free watts of energy.
Windows of opportunity - When the sun goes away at night (or on cloudy days) keep the blinds, shades and curtains closed to prevent heat from radiating out through the glass (you could lose 10 to 20 percent of your heat that way). Installing heavy drapes is good, but you can also install 2-mil plastic sheeting that ups the insulation factor hugely (put it up with blue painter’s tape, which leaves less residue). Replace those ancient windows if you can.
Snug in your bed – A thick down comforter might cost a bit, but if you’re bundled up and cozy you can save a bundle by cutting the heat to 60 degrees while you snooze.
Wood stove – Depending on where you live, installing a wood-burning stove can save you quite a bit. Just make sure you run it efficiently (pointers here). And splitting wood warms you up like you wouldn’t believe.

One other important tip - get everyone in the family involved! Emphasize the planet-saving aspects, and the kids will be happy to join in. And that’s a lot easier than yelling at them 10 times a week to keep the darn door closed….

Image Credits:

(Flickr Creative Commons image by Zeusandhera)
(Flicker Creative Commons image by westy559)
(Ceiling Fan by NorthernFan.com)
Ultratouch Natural Cotton Fiber Insulation
(Flicker Creative Commons image by Phototrope)
(Flickr commons photo by sweet mandy kay)
Woodstove by Quadrafire

Why Hasn't BP Funded the $20-Billion Escrow Account Yet? Do They Think They'll Get a Better Deal from Republicans?

2010-07-26T21:00:00.000-07:00

Remember the $20 billion compensation fund that President Obama got BP to agree to? The money would be held in escrow to assure that the thousands of people hurt - both economically and physically - by the Gulf oil disaster would be compensated.

Well, it turns out BP has been dragging its feet. And hasn't actually put any of the money into the account yet, well over a month later.

Writing over at DailyKos, Jed Lewison speculates on what this means:

You have to wonder if BP would still be dragging its heels if leading Republicans like Barton, Tom Price, and Michele Bachmann hadn't taken the oil giant's side and criticized the escrow account as a slush fund. Although those GOPers did receive public backlash for siding with BP, they also sent a signal to BP that Republicans would go easy on the company if they were to recapture Congress this fall. So, from BP's perspective, it might make sense to try to negotiate a deal with an escape valve in the hope that GOP victory would allow them to shirk their responsibilities altogether.

Check out the full story at our sister-blog, FailDrill.com

(US Coast Guard Photo)

(From Red Green and Blue)

George Lakoff Advises Democrats Against "Disaster Messaging"

2010-07-13T21:04:00.000-07:00

Why have the Democrats been having such a hard time passing environmental legislation? And everything else, for that matter?

Despite control of both houses of Congress and the White House, even the measures they get through (like the Health Care Reform, or the pending energy bill) are watered-down, half-baked compromises that Democrats have to hold their noses to vote for and Republicans still demonize as socialistic budget-busting disasters.[social_buttons]

George Lakoff explains it all. He says the Democrats' messaging is a disaster... or rather, the Democrats have been falling into the pattern he calls "Disaster Messaging".

Here's his bullet points on how the process goes:

• The Republicans outmessage the Democrats. The Democrats, having no effective response, face disaster: They lose politically, either in electoral support or failure on crucial legislation.
• The Democrats then take polls and do focus groups. The pollsters discover that extremist Republicans control the most common (“mainstream”) way of thinking and talking about the given issue.
• The pollsters recommend that Democrats move to the right: adopt conservative Republican language and a less extreme version of conservative policy, along with weakened versions of some Democratic ideas.
• The Democrats believe that, if they follow this advice, they can gain enough independent and Republican support to pass legislation that, at least, will be some improvement on the extreme Republican position.
• Otherwise, the pollsters warn, Democrats will lose popular support — and elections — to the Republicans, because “mainstream” thought and language resides with the Republicans.
• Believing the pollsters, the Democrats change their policy and their messaging, and move to the right. • The Republicans demand even more and refuse to support the Democrats.

Sounds pretty lame, doesn't it? Not much of a recipe for governing.

Lakoff goes into great detail how "framing" works - how the brain works new ideas that come along into a conceptual framework, and how that framework can be manipulated by the media, by talk radio, by politicians, etc.

In politics, the high-level frames are moral frames. There are opposing conservative and progressive moral systems. Important political concepts are “contested,” overlapping in some classic cases, but diverging in content depending on the moral system. Thus, vital political concepts like Life, Freedom, Responsibility, Government, Accountability, Equality, Fairness, Empathy, Property, Security, and so on are contested.
A major goal of political framing is to get your version of contested concepts accepted by the voters. Messaging can then use these concepts and their language freely and effectively. That is how framing works generally — independent of whether the frames are used in politics. In politics, bi-conceptual voters can shift back and forth on an issue, depending on how the issue is framed in terms of higher-level political systems.

And that's where things break down. Lakoff says that conservative have a lean, mean, meme-spreading machine, through institutions like think tanks, talk radio, and booking agencies that get conservative thinkers booked on TV. They spread conservative frames not just as talking points, but as long-term, morally based absolutes.

Democrats don't do that. He says they tend to work issue by issue and short-term.

Democrats tend not to understand how framing works, and often confuse framing (which is deep, long-term, systematic, morality-based, and conceptual) with messaging (which is shallow, short-term, ad hoc, policy-based, and linguistic).
This situation puts Democrats at a messaging disadvantage relative to conservatives, which leads to conservative victories. Hence the regular need for disaster messaging.

So what can Democrats do?

Polling doesn't work.

The general Democratic response to an electoral setback is to poll the public. Many people repeat the messaging they've been getting: conservative messaging and conservative framing.

The pollsters therefore report that the “mainstream” of Americans prefer the conservative language and logic, and the policies that go with them. The pollsters then suggest moving to right to go to where the public is. They then construct and test messages that move enough to right to satisfy the “mainstream.” They also construct “good arguments.” If the “good arguments” activate the conservative worldview, the conservative position will just get stronger in the brains of the voters.
When the Democrats use conservative language, they activate more than the conservative framing on the given issue. They also activate and strengthen the high level, deep conservative moral frames. This tends to make voters more conservative overall — and leads them to choose the real conservative position on the given issue, rather than the sort of conservative version provided by the democrats.

There's lots more, including his suggestions for alternatives - for starters, building up Democratic institutions to take on the conservative ones. He took a stab at that with his Rockridge Institute think tank, but because Democrats didn't get the importance of messaging (and tend not to get scads of money from large corporations), it folded after just five years.

Read Lakoff's whole article here....

George Lakoff is the author of Moral Politics, Don't Think of an Elephant!, Whose Freedom?, and Thinking Points (with the Rockridge Institute staff). He is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and a founding senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute.

(From Red Green and Blue)

Beef is the Worst - Why Put Oil on Your BBQ?

2010-06-12T20:53:00.000-07:00

It's a glorious summer weekend, and folks all over are firing up their grills. But before you shop - today is World Environment Day, so maybe you should think twice about what you're putting on the BBQ, especially after the devastation of the BP Gulf oil disaster.

Beef is, simply, the worst thing you can eat - especially mainstream store-bought beef that comes straight off a factory farm feedlot. Read on to learn why...

In honor of World Environment Day, the UN has issued a new report (PDF Download) that says the best thing we can do to deal with environmental problems, climate change, and fossil fuel dependency is cut back on meat and dairy in our diets. And beef is the worst.
[social_buttons]
We're not suggesting that everyone has to go Vegan tomorrow. But cutting back even a few days a week can have a big impact.

"Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products...
Agriculture, particularly meat and dairy products, accounts for 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use and 19% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions."

Where’s the beef?

It’s not down on the farm these days, alas. The healthy, natural beef of years gone by is almost extinct. It has been driven out by cheap beef, raised on gigantic feedlots, fattened on corn. The problem is: corn isn’t healthy for cows, and raising beef this way ultimately isn’t healthy for us either. Here are some things to watch out for and ways to be more healthy when it comes to your beef-related choices.

If you ask children, “What do cows eat?”, they’ll tell you: “Cows eat grass!” Not corn – grass. Kids are smart; smarter, it seems, than the barons of agribusiness, who haven’t figured that part out yet.

Why do farmers feed cows on corn? First, because it’s cheap, thanks to massive federal subsidies. Second, because starchy corn forces cows to fatten up faster. Cattle evolved a complex digestive system to derive nutrition from rangeland grasses; feed them on corn and their digestion goes haywire, causing flatulence, acid stomach, and massive weight gain.

Sickening

This isn’t healthy for cows: with their immune systems damaged, the cows get sick – an amazing array of illnesses, ranging from liver abscesses and infections to dust-inspired respiratory disease. So agribusiness loads them up with antibiotics to keep them alive long enough to get them to the slaughterhouse – and your plates.

This also isn’t healthy for people: this beef ends up lower in nutrients (everything from vitamin A to vitamin E) and higher in fat – the bad kind, cholesterol-boosting fat. And the rampant use of antibiotics in crowded conditions has led to the rise of a new breed of super-bugs that are sickening thousands and possibly millions.

You heard about the spinach that was infected with E. coli 157? There’s no way to prove anything, but it’s likely the infection came from animal waste from a factory farm. Agribusiness likes to say “It could come from over-flying birds or foxes running through the fields,” but you don't find exotic bugs lie E. coli 157 in the guts of wildlife. The most probable source is the vast lakes of animal waste on nearby cattle farms. Remember the acid indigestion the cows get from corn? E. coli 157 doesn’t do well in the guts of normal, grass-fed cattle, but it thrives in the acid environment of corn-fed cows.

This is a growing problem – 199 people got sick during the spinach outbreak and three died, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 20,000 people a year who are infected with E. coli 157 ,and 200 who die. It’s mostly the very young and the very old who are vulnerable; infection from E. coli 157 is the biggest cause of kidney failure in children.

Making Beef out of Oil

The biggest irony: none of this makes any economic sense at all! Nobody would bother feeding corn to cattle if US taxpayers weren’t paying billions of dollars in subsidies to make corn cheap. And consider this: Cornell’s David Pimentel points out that growing all of that corn takes vast amounts of petroleum-based chemical fertilizer.

Because of this dependence on petroleum, Pimentel says, a typical steer will in effect consume 284 gallons of oil in his lifetime. Comments Michael Pollan,
“We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine.”

Giant agriculture distorts everything. In real agriculture, poop is fertilizer. But we use petroleum products to fertilize the corn, send the corn to giant cattle operations, which churn out massive lagoons of dammed-up poop. It should go back to fertilizer, but it’s such an antibiotic and chemical-laced concoction that it ends up as just another toxic waste-product.

Make a difference

So now you know more of the facts, but what can you do to improve your diet and make a global difference as well? Vegetarians would like you to cut out beef completely, but that’s not totally necessary.

Cut back on beef (and meat). One or two days a week without meat is the equivalent of switching from a gas-powered sedan to a hybrid. (It’ll also save you money, and is good for your heart).
Go solar! When you do eat beef, go for free-range or grass-fed. Organic is best – it’s more expensive, true, but remember, you just cut out a day or two of beef, so you can afford to serve better-quality, more nutritious meals for yourself and your children. Better for you, and better the planet.
Watch your dairy intake, too. Most big dairy producers are as bad as the beef feedlots. Cut back on dairy, or switch to organic for lower impact.
Watch out for corn in your veggie products! Once you start reading ingredient labels, you’ll be shocked and appalled to see how American processed food is loaded up with corn and corn derivatives (loaded with dairy derivatives, too!). It is a good idea to cut back on processed foods anyway, as they are loaded with all kinds of weird chemicals and additives (many of which are manufactured in bulk in China with minimal safety standards).

UPDATE: Some commenters have referred to a report by UC Davis Prof. Frank Mitloehner that says the UN is wrong, that the numbers for the US (based on 2007 EPA estimates) are actually 3 percent emissions for agriculture vs 26 percent for transportation. I'm betting most folks haven't read the full report - it's incredibly technical and dense. I gave up on page 26.

His criticism was a technical one - that the earlier report did a full life-cycle analysis on beef, looking at things like how much oil was used to grow the corn to feed the cattle (as we talked about in this article), and how much oil was used in transportation of all that feed. Whereas that "well-to wheel analysis" was not done for the transportation industry, so in fact agriculture may NOT have more of a climate impact than transportation (at least in the US).

In other words... the heart of his argument is that the report underestimated the number for transportation.

What he DIDN'T say was that beef had no impact, as some commenters and newspapers are asserting, like The Washington Times under the headlines “Meat, dairy not tied to global warming” and "Forget all that indecorous talk of animal flatulence, cow burps, vegetarianism and global warming. Welcome to Cowgate." (Ironically, Mitloehner was the guy who discovered the issue of cow-belches, in a study for the California dairy industry and the EPA.)

Mitloenher himself has stated, “I didn’t say that there is no reduction in greenhouse gases associated with animal protein consumption, but that it is a relatively small contribution and that consumers can do other things that have greater impact on this.” And that last point is simply his value judgement, not based on his research.

He added, “I think it’s time that we work across the globe really on transferring knowledge and help particularly those areas like India and China to produce in a way that is as environmentally benign as possible. I think we have that responsibility. So it would be nice if we would take some of the politics out of the discussion and really focus on getting things done and resolved and addressed.”

(Portions of this article originally appeared at Ecoble.com)

(Photo from D Sharon Pruitt under a Creative Commons License)

Ocean Dead Zones are Spreading

2010-04-18T19:40:00.000-07:00

(Originally appeared at TenthMil.com)

A new type of dead zone is growing off our coasts - low-oxygen regions that kill fish.

“In some spots off Washington state and Oregon , the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions,” McClatchy news reports.

Dead zones aren’t new - one type of dead zone appears every year at the mouth of major rivers like the Mississippi, where nutrients from farm fertilizers that have been washed into the rivers reach the ocean and serve as food for algae blooms. In the feeding frenzy, the algae use up all the oxygen in the water, and any fish in the area literally suffocate and drown. And the isolated waters of the deep ocean has always been low in oxygen, but sea life in the depths has adapted.

The other type of dead zone is more troubling. These have been happening in places like the Pacific Northwest coast off Oregon and Washington, and until now scientists weren’t sure why they were occurring - they just knew they were growing from year to year. It looks like the deep-see dead zones are spreading, rising toward the surface and even coming close enough to the coastline to affect the fishing there. On the Southern California coast, oxygen levels have dropped 20 percent over the past 25 years.

“The real surprise is how this has become the new norm,” said Jack Barth, an oceanography professor at Oregon State University . “We are seeing it year after year.”

We’ve reported at TENTHMIL about the problem of ocean acidification - as CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise, more is absorbed in the upper levels of the ocean, where it turns to carbonic acid. The rise in acidity is bad for fish all up and down the food chain, but is particularly bad for plankton and shellfish, because it interferes with their shell formation. Barth and other scientists say this is all related - climate change, acidification, and dead zones.

“It’s a large disturbance in the ecosystem that could have huge biological changes,” said Steve Bograd , an oceanographer at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Southern California .
Bograd has been studying oxygen levels in the California Current, which runs along the West Coast from the Canadian border to Baja California and, some scientists think, eventually could be affected by climate change.

Want even more fun news? Some ocean life is happy with the change - jellyfish, in particular, love it. This may have something to do with the abundance of jellyfish that have been plaguing beaches in the US, Europe and Japan. There’s a world to look forward to - no fish, no shellfish… just beaches that are ankle-deep in jellyfish and slimy algae.

Restoring Florida's Coral Reefs

2010-04-18T19:24:00.000-07:00

Coral reefs are among the most productive ecosystems in the ocean, harboring thousands of species from plankton all the way up to fish like the grouper and snapper.

Covering less than a quarter of a percent of the ocean’s surface, coral reefs support twenty-five percent of all marine life!

Coral reefs also among the most beautiful ecosystems in the world – painted canyons of branching coral, waving kelp, and dazzling fish in rainbow colors. They remain a huge attraction to divers and other tourists, and are a mainstay of the economies of South Florida’s Keys and countless other destinations around the globe.

Coral reefs are also among the most threatened environments in the world today. Scientists estimate that 25 percent of the world’s reefs have already been destroyed or badly degraded.
What’s killing the reefs?

Diseases: staghorn and elkhorn coral have been hit hard by diseases, possibly imported from the Pacific via the Panama canal; they hit corals whose immune systems are already weakened by the other factors. Both species are now listed as threatened.
Algae: The green growth was kept in check by voracious sea urchins, but disease has wiped out the previously large populations of urchins, and the resulting algae explosion is creating huge problems for coral reefs.
Cold – this winter’s unusual cold snap, which didn’t affect deep-sea coral, was devastating to corals in shallow waters along the coast.
Human Damage – sometimes intentional, like when dredging for a shipping channel or building a jetty; or accidental, when a ship runs aground. In either scenario, the reef gets pulverized and takes years to recover.

Florida Aquarium’s Global Reef Institute, is doing something about it.

Coral may look like a plant, but it’s actually a tiny animal – a polyp – that builds a tree-like framework of calcium carbonate to protect itself. In the wild, corals reproduce by larvae, which swim freely until they find a good place to settle down. Then they anchor themselves, and grow. When a piece of coral is smashed to bits – say, in a ship grounding – it can take months or more for the pieces to get back to equilibrium, and if they don’t land in a suitable place, they may never recover.

That’s where the researchers step in.

“We got the idea that if we could grow them in mass, we could start doing restoration,” says Craig Watson, lab director at the University of Florida’s Tropical Aquaculture Laboratory in Ruskin, who is also on the board of the Florida Aquarium. “The concept is to take coral fragments, grow them up to a size where they would be stable and growing, and take them out to a reef that’s damaged and plant them there.” They gather those coral fragments and place them in a pond or tank, where they can be carefully nurtured for six months. Once they’re healthy, they can be taken back to the wild and glued to a reef. “We can get a huge jump on nature rather than waiting for spawning to occur and a single polyp to establish itself,” says Watson. “It’s like planting a seedling rather than a seed.”

The conventional wisdom was that if you grew coral in a land-based condition, it wouldn’t be able to survive when you transplanted it, but that after three years of experimentation they’ve got it down. “In fact,” says Allan Marshall, the aquarium’s vice president of biological operations, “the program proved that inland grown coral does even better – we’ve had a 70 percent success rate.”

Another concern, with transplanted coral, was the threat of diseases. Whenever you pen up a whole lot of organisms in an un-natural environment, there’s a risk that pathogens will run rampant through the population, and then spread to the wild (it’s a problem on big cattle feedlots and salmon farms). Wanting to make sure they could literally give their coral a clean bill of health, the aquarium has worked out a certification program. Having USDA veterinarians monitor the coral closely, then before any coral is released into the wild it is certified as disease-free.

Marshall says the reef ecosystem is a lot like the tropical rainforests: fragile, and feeling the pressure of changes big and small. The best targets for restoration, at least for now, are reefs with physical damage, usually from a boat grounding. There is also funding there, since the shipping companies responsible are supposed to pay for that restoration work. Money is also coming into the project from the Economic Stimulus, via the Nature Conservancy.

“We’re not looking at restoring reefs where [temperature change] is the problem,” notes Watson, “the reasoning being that those spots aren’t going to be good for coral now.”

Sadly, most of their work takes place in an area that’s already supposed to be a protected zone: the Florida Keys National Reef Sanctuary. “The reality is there are a lot of people in South Florida,” says Watson, “so even though the reefs are already protected there are a lot of impacts associated with all those people.” And he adds that they’re seeing good results with other species. For instance, research found that the grouper and snapper for much of the east coast spawned in one small area. “They’ve created a no-take zone right there,” he says, “so now spawning aggregations are taking place without harassment, so that’s going to help with recovery of those fisheries.”

What can you do?
The Nature Conservancy has an Adopt-a-Reef program that allows you to take part directly – this year, it’s a big part of their Earth Day campaign.
http://adopt.nature.org/coralreef/
http://earthday.nature.org/

(Originally appeared at TenthMil.com)

Is Sea Level Rise Really Such a Big Deal?

2010-03-05T19:48:00.000-08:00

(Image from Erik Kolstad under a Creative Commons license)

When last weekend’s Chilean earthquake sent people across the Pacific rim scrambling to deal with the risk of a tsunami, there was an added danger.

It was a “King Tide” – the location of the sun and the moon meant their gravitational pull was at its maximum. That, combined with the warmth of the ocean water (warm water expands), meant that low-lying areas were in even more danger of being swamped.

The Chile quake tsunami ended up being pretty mild, but this just highlights a question that most people don’t think about: Why is sea level rise such a big deal?

The question

You’ve probably seen estimates like this:

World sea levels rose 3.1 millimetres (about a tenth of an inch) per year from 1993 to 2003, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (you remember them – they shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore). Extrapolating forward, the group estimates global sea levels will rise between 9 and 88 cm (between about 3 inches and three feet) by 2100.

Doesn’t sound like much, does it?

There are some very good reasons you SHOULD be concerned.

The law of averages

Consider: If I told you we could keep your house at an average temperature of 72 degrees, you’d be pretty happy with that, right? That’s a comfortable temperature.

But if I told you that the average temperature would be 72 degrees, but in some parts of the house, the temperature could drop to 32 degrees, and other places would sometimes hit 212 degrees for a few minutes at a time, that wouldn’t be so good, would it? That’s far from comfortable - in fact it’s dangerous.

Averages are funny that way.

... A 2006 study by Australian oceanographers found the rise was much higher, almost one inch every year, in parts of the western Pacific and Indian oceans.
“It turns out the ocean sloshes around,” said the University of Tasmania’s Nathaniel Bindoff, a lead author on oceans in the U.N. reports. “It’s moving, and so on a regional basis the ocean’s movement is causing sea-level variations, ups and downs.

So while the average isn’t enough to cause concern, it’s the extremes we have to worry about – and there, things are getting kind of crazy.

Waves are getting bigger

When you put more energy into a system, you get… more energy in the system.

Just a few years ago, the maximum wave height during winter storms that was expected to hit the Oregon coast was 33 feet. That’s enough to cause serious damage, but people can prepare for it.

But a new study was just completed, and it showed the maximum was up to 46 feet! That’s a 40 percent increase – and it means that all the preparations people have been doing for the past 100 years to protect themselves are useless. There’s a good chance that killer waves will hit sometime in the next few years - eroding coastlines, and smashing docks, houses, and sea-side industries.

And we’re just getting started. The non-partisan Cayman Institute estimates that the cost of rising oceans over the next 40 years will hit an incredible $28 trillion dollars. Most of the mega-cities around the word are seaports, and rising waters of even just a few feet will have a huge impact on port facilities, beachside hotels and resorts, public buildings, and private housing.

For the U.S., the Heinz Center figures that just from homes lost to coastal erosion we’re looking at $530 million per year.

Arctic melting may add to that cost as well.

It’s happening now

Low-lying islands are already seeing damage, like the Pacific nation of Kiribati.

For nations and communities that sit only a few metres above sea level, even small ocean rises engulf their land and send destructive salty water into their food supply, leaving residents with little choice but to flee…
As sea levels have crept higher, the coasts have eroded, corals have been bleached, and islanders’ staple foods such as the giant Babai taro, coconut and banana are unable to grow in salty soil.

Another place the rising waters are already causing damage: Australia’s Torres Straights Islands. Here, too, it’s the extremes. Most days there’s nothing to worry about – but every so often king tides create dangerously high surges that sweep over shoreline houses, docks and buildings.

The ocean is life to these islanders, most of whom make a living by fishing. But now they’re being forced to move to higher ground – if they can find some. A few of the islands are just low-lying stretches of mud that barely project above sea level. Seriously high tides can swamp them.

Places like the Torres Straights Islands are the canaries in our global coal mine. The problem can only get worse. Imagine if every coastal road had to relocated inland, every coastal railroad and pipeline… every city! We’re not that different from the islanders – the vast majority of our population lives near the coast. While the displaced islanders only number in the thousands, in low-lying places like Bangladesh or Florida, the numbers will be in the tens of millions.

We’re still learning just how bad things could get.

Now for the next piece of bad news: When the IPCC made its estimate (the one at the top of the article), it was ONLY based on the expansion of seawater due to warming, plus melting from Himalayan and Andean glaciers. Three years ago, there wasn’t enough data to make any estimates on how much water was flowing into the oceans from melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

Thanks to satellite images and ground-based research, scientists now think they’re beginning to understand what’s happening in those huge ice-fields, and it’s not good. They now think we could be looking at 1.5 meters (4.5 feet) or higher. And again, that’s on average – some places will be much higher. And it’s just an estimate – meaning it could go lower, or much higher. Taken together, that’s a recipe for disastrous flooding for coastal cities like London, Miami, Amsterdam, New Orleans… and the potential for even more trillions of dollars in damage.

And that’s still a preliminary estimate. We know how bad the Greenland melt-off appears to be at the moment, and it’s much worse than we thought it was just three years ago - we have no idea how bad it will get in reality. For instance, the National Center for Atmospheric Research thinks the Northeastern US in particular could be hit by sea level rises a foot or two higher than the global average because of ocean circulation patterns.

Keep that in mind when you see headlines like “Sea Level Could Rise By 1 Meter By 2100, Experts Say”. That does NOT mean that 1 meter is the worst case situation; in science-speak, that figure is the MOST LIKELY situation, based on our current knowledge.

The actual situation could be much, much worse.

(Originally appeared at Tenthmil.com)

The Farley Mowat Receives a Boarding Party

2010-02-26T19:50:00.000-08:00

She’s sailed the seas from the peaceful fjords of Norway to the Whale Wars of the Antarctic’s frigid waters.

She’s faced angry Japanese whalers and mean Canadian Coast Guard cutters. (Mean Canadians? Hard to believe, but there are, indeed, five or six of them.)

(The Farley Mowat in her Sea Shepherd days)

But when we tramped about the Farley Mowat on a chill, steel-grey Halifax morning, the ship was cold and quiet and dark. She’d committed the unforgivable crime of driving near the Canadian seal hunt while green. This created the potential for all manner of danger and loss of life and limb, so the Canadian Fisheries Minister, wishing to avoid an unpleasant scene, had her boarded, her Sea Shepherds’ crew arrested, and the ship impounded and towed to Nova Scotia.

That’s where we found her almost two years later. Her great motors stilled, her generators silent, she’s been sitting dockside, waiting.

Waiting, as it turned out, for TENTHMIL owner Steve Munson. He’d always dreamed of trading in his horse and saddle for a ship and cap’n’s chair, and when he heard the Canadian Government was auctioning off the Farley, he leaped at the chance.

Now he was seeing his 180-foot, 657-ton purchase for the first time – stem to stern, engine room to captain’s quarters. And while things looked a bit chaotic – spare parts strewn in random piles across the galley tables; dust and trash through the crew’s berths – he found the ship in sound shape, if not yet seaworthy.

“She’s looking good,” he said, surveying the deck from the bridge of his vessel. “There’s a little rust, and the wiring is a mess, but the engines are in good shape.”

That’s good, because by summer he wants the Farley Mowat back on the ocean – this time refitted as a research vessel.

The Farley Mowat mobilizes against illegal Japanese whalers:

(Originally appeared at TenthMil.com)

Martin Luther King and the Possibility of Change

2010-02-20T19:58:00.000-08:00

"Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream."

I have friends who don’t believe in change.

They insist that no matter how hard we try, no matter what we do, things won’t get better. They tell me “the man” has too much power, and nothing we do can ever make things right. They don’t believe we can overthrow the fossil fuel dinosaurs of oil and coal in order to move forward with renewable green energy. They don’t believe we can stop the bleeding in habitats across our country and across the globe; stop the bleeding and start the healing.

But I know that’s not true. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

Barely a year ago, I saw a Black man take the oath of office. Who would have believed that would ever be possible?

We cannot walk alone.
And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.
We cannot turn back.

Let me tell you a little family history, by way of illustration.

My grandfather was born in Poland; as a poor immigrant he put himself through medical school. But he went into private practice, because when he graduated in 1929 there wasn’t a hospital in Toronto that would take a Jew on staff.

Don’t tell me things can’t change.

My mother went to one of the best high schools in Toronto, Harbord Collegiate. She probably could have become a doctor, too - hell, she was the top student in her class; she could have been ANYTHING. But when she met with her vocational counselor, he took a look at her outstanding record and told her “You’re very precise. You’ll probably make a wonderful clerical worker.” In those days, women didn’t become doctors or lawyers or corporation presidents.

Don’t tell me things can’t change.

When Barack Obama was born in 1961, his prospects were even worse than my mothers. She was a woman, and a Jew, but at least she was white. Black men didn’t become doctors or lawyers. Black men were called “Boy” even when they had grey beards. Black men couldn’t eat at lunch counters or piss in public restrooms or stay in hotels. Black men who spoke up or talked back or didn’t know their place were regularly lynched across the South and even in the North – hunted down like animals by angry mobs and hanged or shot or worse.

Don’t tell me things can’t change.

You now that’s not true. You’ve seen it with your own eyes.

I have a dream - that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

Twenty years ago I, as a young reporter, saw Jesse Jackson speak at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, and marveled that this was even possible. In what had only a few years before been the heart of segregation country, this man – this Black man - electrified the nation. Everyone knew he could never be elected President, of course, but it was amazing that he had run a serious campaign and earned millions of votes.

Watching that speech, I never dreamed that in just 5 election cycles, I’d be watching a Black man take the oath of office as the 44th President of the United States.

I have a dream - that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Jesse Jackson lost the nomination to Michael Dukakis, of course, who proceeded to get his ass handed to him by the first George Bush. A bully and an oilman, Bush won that election by ridiculing his opponent, just as he ridiculed his next opponents four years later as “Bozo and Ozone Man”. Yes, that’s what he called Bill Clinton and Al Gore; laughing at them for caring about the planet. But this time he got HIS ass handed to him.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” – Mahatma Ghandi.

They ignored us and continued pumping their oil and digging their coal. Then they laughed at us – called us “Ozone Man” and “Treehugger” and “Dirty Hippie”.

Now they are fighting us. But the tide has turned.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now… It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Change happens because we will it. Change happens because we make it happen. Inch by inch, heart by heart and mind by mind.

Don’t just sit there - do something! Go the the Martin Luther King Jr Day of Service website and find volunteer opportunities in your neighborhood that you could be doing right now!

And if you do, post a comment here and tell us what you did.

(Originally appeared at TenthMil.com)

Obama Budget Cuts Oil Money, Adds Renewables

2010-02-02T20:20:00.000-08:00

After criticism for not talking enough about renewables in his SOTU speech, President Obama’s new budget shows us the money - according to a White House statement, more than $6 billion. But is it enough? You’d think that with a total of $3.8 trillion on the table, a few more crumbs could have been tossed toward energy - and planetary - security.

“The President’s budget cuts wasteful spending while making wise investments in innovation and clean energy that will put Americans back to work, save families money and keep our nation competitive in the global marketplace,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “This budget supports new approaches to energy research and invests in the next generation of scientists and engineers, and it will spark new clean energy projects nationwide, including restarting the American nuclear power industry.”

“America must move to a clean-energy economy,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said. “We believe that the taxpayers should receive a fair return on the resources that belong to them.”

The DOE reports the good news on the fossil fuel front, as the new budget cuts the following:
* Eliminating more than $2.7 billion in tax subsidies for oil, coal and gas industries. This step is estimated to generate more than $38.8 billion dollars in revenue for the federal government over the course of the next 10 years.
* Another $8.5 billion would come in by cutting a tax break oil and gas companies currently get for taxes paid oversees.
* Terminating Ultra-Deepwater exploration program, saving $50 million.
* Canceling planned expansion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, saving $71 million.
* There’s also a new fee on “non-producing” leases - a modest $4 an acre that would encourage companies are currently sitting on leases without doing any drilling or exploration (even while they try to get more and more areas opened up for leasing) to start doing something with them. That is estimated to bring in $1.15 billion.

There is also word that $2.3 billion in tax breaks for coal will be cut over 10 years as well.

And for green energy:
* More than $217 million in new funding for science research and discovery, including an additional $40 million for the existing Energy Frontier Research Centers program and $107 million for Energy Innovation Hubs.
* $300 million for the Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy (ARPA-E);
* Lending authority to support approximately $40 billion in loan guarantees for innovative clean energy programs. (But $36 billion of that is an increase in guarantees for new puclear plants)
* More than $108 million in new funding to advance and expand research in the areas of wind, solar and geothermal energies.
* $43 to the EPA for greenhouse gas reduction under the Clean Air Act
* There are also millions more in funds for water cleanup, including $300 million to restore the Great Lakes (we’ll be writing more about this)

Energy Boom breaks out some more numbers:

$4.7 billion in clean energy technology investments at DOE, including:
* Nearly $2.4 billion, an increase of $113 million, for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs including $302 million for solar energy, $220 million for biofuels and biomass R&D, $325 million for advanced vehicle technologies, and $231 million for energy efficient building technologies.
* $545 million for advanced coal climate change technologies to focus resources to develop carbon capture technologies with broad applications to advanced coal power systems, existing power plants, and industrial sources.
* $300 million for the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy to accelerate game-changing energy technologies in need of rapid and flexible experimentation or engineering.
* $793 million for clean energy activities and civilian nuclear energy programs, including research and development and infrastructure programs. The budget includes a new cross-cutting research program to address technology needs for all aspects of nuclear energy production.

And as Josie Garthwaite at Green2Tech notes,

Makers of green energy equipment could also benefit under a proposed $5 billion expansion of a tax credit first created as part the stimulus package, which covers up to 30 percent of the costs for new, expanded or retooled greentech equipment factories. That likely comes as welcome news for the companies behind several hundred projects that didn’t make the cut for $2.3 billion in credits awarded last month under the oversubscribed program.

Garthwaite also points to something missing from this budget: revenue from carbon allowances, “signaling dwindling confidence that the Senate will pass a bill with a cap and trade system this year.”

But President Obama doesn’t appear ready to throw in the towel on that one yet. In a press conference, he said “Because our future depends on our ability to break free from oil that’s controlled by foreign dictators, we need to make clean, renewable energy into a profitable kind of energy. That’s why we’ll be working with Congress on legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy.”

You can get the DOE budget here or the Federal Budget here if you want that level of detail.

Do Something Now!

If you want a quick way to get involved, write to your Senator/Congressperson and tell them you support increased money for green energy.

Drop a note to President Obama thanking him for supporting renewables.

(Originally appeared at TenthMil.com)

Take Your Algae Biofuel News With a Grain of Salt

2010-01-30T20:06:00.000-08:00

A study released this week says Algae fuels may not be worth it. But critics point out that the study’s data were old – some more than ten years old.

It’s a picture-perfect example of how when it comes to arguments over renewable energy, it’s always good to check your sources.

The Study

Bearing the difficult title “Environmental Life Cycle Comparison of Algae to Other Bioenergy Feedstocks”, the study concluded that Algae for biofuel isn’t as good for the environment as other potential fuel-crops such as switchgrass, canola and corn.

(“What’s that?” you say. “Isn’t corn ethanol bad?” Keep reading…)

One of the study’s lead authors was Andres Clarens, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of the University of Virginia. The New York Times had him explain his findings:

The main reason for this is that fertilizers have to be directly delivered to the pool of water that algae is growing in… And fertilizers are very energy intensive to produce.
Corn and switchgrass can draw nitrogen from soil, which reduces the overall amount of fertilizer required, he said. In addition, crop rotation can help replenish soil nutrients.
“Nutrients are going to be the limiting factor,” Dr. Clarens said. “We’re humans. We need to eat dinner, and you can’t expect to have algae that provides a bunch of energy without feeding it nutrients.”

And it’s true that fertilizers – mostly petrochemical-based – have a nasty carbon footprint. That’s why, for instance, corn-based biofuels have turned out to be such a carbon disaster. But… algae?

Critics cry “Foul!”

The Algal Biomass Assocation responded,

“...We expect such research to be based on current information, valid assumptions and proven facts. Unfortunately, this report falls short of those standards with its use of decades old data and errant assumptions of current production and refining technologies.”

Where’s the issue? Older studies did indeed use fertilizers, but these were small-scale pilot projects. Current plans for large-scale operations call for using wastewater, which is full of nutrients, instead of taking clean water and adding nutrients.

Riggs Eckelberry, chief executive of the algae biofuel company Origin Oil, told The New York Times,

“Identifying wastewater is a homerun for algae production, probably the best there is,” he said. “There are lots of nitrates, and algae love dirty water — they can remove toxins, such as medical drugs from that water.”

And it gets even better: energy is currently used treating wastewater, so using it to grow algae saves that CO2 as well.

The Happy Ending

The authors of the study complained that many of today’s algae companies use proprietary processes – they say that with everybody keeping trade secrets, they shouldn’t be blamed for using ancient data (and in the algae field, 10 years back is practically the dark ages).

It appears Mary Rosenthal of the Algal Biomass Association is talking with Clarens about cooperating on a follow-up study. That should make everybody happy - and provide everyone with accurate and up-to-date science.

(Originally appeared at Tenthmil.com)

Is There an Alternative to Storing Nuclear Waste in Your Backyard?

2010-01-29T20:17:00.000-08:00

What’s going on with Nuclear Energy?

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced a new panel this morning to take a microscope to the future of nuclear power in America. The bi-partisan group will be headed by Lee Hamilton (a Democrat with ties to the intelligence community) and Brent Scowcroft (a Republican with ties to the intelligence community).

From the announcement:

In light of the Administration’s decision not to proceed with the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, President Obama has directed Secretary Chu to establish the Commission to conduct a comprehensive review of policies for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle. The Commission will provide advice and make recommendations on issues including alternatives for the storage, processing, and disposal of civilian and defense spent nuclear fuel and nuclear waste.

For those of you not familiar with their backgrounds, Hamilton was a long-time Democratic Congressman from Indiana, chaired the House Intelligence Committee, and then served on both the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group. Scowcroft was the National Security Advisor to both Gerald Ford and Bush I but broke with Bush II over the Iraq war, which he publicly advised against (“Don’t Attack Saddam”, WSJ).

What was wrong with Yucca Mountain? Well, it turned out that the proposed storage facility was in someone’s back yard! And that someone was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Yucca Mountain). Which bodes ill for the fate of the Hamilton/Scowcroft commission. The bottom line on nuclear waste: nobody wants it in their back yard.

Obama’s line about more nukes in his State of the Union got the lowest grade of the entire speech in MoveOn.org’s membership focus group (see our SOTU wrapup article). While there are definitely voices promoting nuclear power, they’re few and far between on the progressive side of politics, where it seems nobody really wants to promote nuclear energy.

(Originally appeared at TenthMil.com)

Red State, Blue State, State of the Union

2010-01-28T20:32:00.000-08:00

Okay. President Obama talked about jobs, about energy, about jobs, about climate, and about jobs. Did we mention jobs?

As President, it’s not his job to make everybody happy. But it helps if he wins over more than 51 percent.

Some folks were definitely happy. Steven Cohen, Executive Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, wrote at the Huffington Post:

I continue to root for Barack Obama. Blunt and tough was just the right tone for his first State of the Union. While I expected him to submerge climate policy within the veneer of energy and employment policy, I was impressed that he addressed it so directly

So was “billyparish”, writing at Its Getting Hot In Here:

But from the standpoint of an aspiring green entrepreneur, there was an awful lot to like in the speech. This was the jobs speech it needed to be, and it continued what may be the overarching theme of his presidency, “to lay a new foundation for long-term economic growth.” ...But more than any speech we’ve heard from him before, he put clean energy jobs at the absolute center of his job creation strategy, mentioning clean energy 10 times, solar twice and climate change 3 times. His discussion of U.S. competitiveness in the global economy is entirely framed in the context of the race to develop clean energy technologies.

And Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, was more than pleased:

President Obama issued a clear and unmistakable call to action tonight, charging the Senate to pass the comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation we need to put Americans back to work and lay the foundation for a generation of prosperity, efficiency and security.
The President could not have been more clear: This legislation will jump-start economic growth, reduce our reliance on foreign oil and roll back the pollution that threatens our future. The Senate should pass it without delay.
The President is right on the money. His plan will get Americans back on their feet. Now it’s our job to let our Senators know where we stand. This is our moment. This is our charge, too. It’s time to pass comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation and put America back to work.

It looks like he did well overall. A CBS News poll found 83% of speech watchers approved of Obama’s proposals, although his harshest critics on the right probably weren’t watching to hear some of the olive branches he offered them.

And those olive branches didn’t exactly enamor some of the doves of the left. Progressive organization MovOn.org ran a mega-focus group – more than 10,000 MoveOn members in a real-time “dial test”, providing instant feedback that allowed them to create a moment-by-moment reaction roadmap throughout the speech.

The lowest-rated phrase in Obama’s SOTU? Not too surprising:

That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development.

This phrase got a better reaction (although Republican legislators laughed out loud at “overwhelming”):

I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change,” he said. “But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future.

Some who have been fighting for clean energy were disappointed at the President’s version of “clean energy”. Like David Roberts at Grist:

...what [“clean energy”] means was, in order: nukes, offshore oil and gas drilling, biofuels, “clean coal,” and ... well, that’s it. That’s right, in listing what “clean energy” means the president did not mention renewable energy. That’s just stunning. It’s 2010 and renewable energy isn’t even an afterthought? Seriously?

Or the Get Energy Smart Now blog, which drew a sharp contrast between SOTU 2009 and SOTU 2010:

In 2009, President Obama made a strong and uncompromising call for investments in “clean, renewable energy” and made a direct statement about the type of climate legislation expected from Congress (”market-based cap on carbon pollution”). He provided a meaningful opening target: “we will double this nation’s supply of renewable energy in the next three years”.
In 2010, President Obama did not even mention the word “renewable”, failed to refer back to the strong statements about renewable energy in the 2009 SOTU and how we on track to achieving (and likely exceeding) them, and sounded like he could have been speaking to the Republican National Convention in the Luntz-ian like redefinition of a “clean energy economy”...

What was Obama thinking, calling for more nukes? He’s probably thinking of Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Joe Lieberman (LIE-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who are trying to put together a bi-partisan climate bill. Whether or not he won any hearts and minds on the other side of the aisle, he didn’t endear himself to his supporters.

As commenter “shiplord kirel” offered over at rightwing blog Little Green Footballs:

With the kind words for coal and nuclear, O has grabbed his last few far-left supporters by the scruff of their scruffy necks and tossed them right under the bus of state.

Obama also may have been pitching to those notorious “swing voters” that everyone has been so concerned with. Democracy Corps did a focus group of swing voters, and found that their approval of the President jumped from 44 percent pre-speech to 60 percent after.

They didn’t ask about green initiatives specifically, so we don’t know the group’s reaction on that front (although his “Tax the Banks” plan was wildly popular.)

But we do know one thing: Swing voters liked what they heard, but have doubts as to whether he can deliver.

Unlike most attributes that shifted during the speech, “promises things that sound good but won’t be able get them done” remained very high (78 percent pre-speech to 74 percent post-speech). The “shifters” in these post-speech focus groups are waiting for results, and they pointed specifically to passing health care reform and job creation initiatives as critical reforms that must be delivered. While they see the Republicans as obstructing every Obama initiative, they nonetheless expect Democrats to pass major legislation with their large majorities.

One final poll number: last week Republican Pollster and media guru Frank Luntz reportedon a national survey with some encouraging results:

• 57 percent agreed with the statement: It doesn’t matter if there is or isn’t climate change. It is still in America’s best interest to develop new sources of energy that are clean, reliable, efficient and safe.
• National security is the main reason that people support cap and trade. Across the demographic board, people liked the idea that clean energy will liberate us from this oil addiction.

You want bi-partisan? It sounds like there’s already a bi-partisan consensus in this country. We just have to wait for our politicians to tap into it.

(Originally appeared at TenthMil.com)

Putting a Price on Nature

2010-01-27T20:30:00.000-08:00

There’s a beautiful meadow up by Bend, Oregon, at the heart of the Glaze Meadow restoration project. The TENTHMIL team was up there with a film crew last year, and I was asked, “Looking out over this meadow, what would you say to the people back in the city?”

And I said, “It’s really sad that the only way this land would have any ‘value’ would be if we put a strip mall on it.”

Nature isn’t free, but a lot of people do business as if it is – and this has been going on for thousands of years. It’s called “The Tragedy of the Commons”, and it warps our economic decisions in all kinds of ways.

Economists are finally coming around to that point of view, as reported this month in The Economist.

A number of the thinkers who have made it a hot topic in the past decade gathered at a meeting on biodiversity and ecosystem services held by the Royal Society, in London, on January 13th and 14th. They looked at the progress and prospects of their attempts to argue for the preservation of nature by better capturing the value of the things – such as pollination, air quality and carbon storage – that it seemingly does for free.

They take a look at the example of a mangrove swamp. Worthless land, right? Nobody would want to own a mangrove swamp. Recently, governments in southeast Asia have been subsidizing shrimp farming, in order to take advantage of that useless, wasted land.

Oops.

In 2007 an economic study of such shrimp farms in Thailand showed that the commercial profits per hectare were $9,632. If that were the only factor, conversion would seem an excellent idea.
However, proper accounting shows that for each hectare government subsidies formed $8,412 of this figure and there were costs, too: $1,000 for pollution and $12,392 for losses to ecosystem services. These comprised damage to the supply of foods and medicines that people had taken from the forest, the loss of habitats for fish, and less buffering against storms. And because a given shrimp farm only stays productive for three or four years, there was the additional cost of restoring them afterwards: if you do so with mangroves themselves, add another $9,318 per hectare. The overall lesson is that what looks beneficial only does so because the profits are retained by the private sector, while the problems are spread out across society at large, appearing on no specific balance sheet.

Swamps aren’t the only places this is starting to get noticed. From forests that don’t look like they provide services until they’re cut down and water quality goes to hell downstream, to swamps that prevent expensive flooding when storms hit, there’s a new school of economics that evaluates the true costs of environmental problems and helps governments make more rational, cost-effective decisions.

One such group is the Natural Capital Project, based at California’s Stanford University, whose InVEST computer program is helping governments in Tanzania and Columbia analyze real costs.

The Economist notes that not everyone agrees with this newfound crossing of balance sheets with bio-inventories.

Some think the notion is an affront to those who place cultural, spiritual or aesthetic value on biodiversity for its own sake. It would be a mistake to look at things this way. In valuing a particular service – such as the cost of erosion to Greek hillsides – which can be quantified with a reasonable degree of certainty, you do not exhaust the reasons for preserving the groves where the dryads play.

“...We can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years is also action. It also produces evils.”
- Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”

(Originally appeared at TenthMil.com)

DOE Takes Baby Steps on Geothermal and Earthquakes

2010-01-27T20:14:00.000-08:00

What’s the real scoop on Geothermal and earthquakes? Despite a NY Times report that has been picked up by other outlets, (for instance, here and here), the Department of Energy (DOE) is not initiating any major new regulations for Geothermal projects.

What they have done: building on the experience at The Geysers geothermal field in California, they are issuing a new policy that will apply to “all new Enhanced Geothermal [Systems (EGS)] projects, including those recently funded through the Recovery Act.” The Obama Administration is providing $338 million in funding to a total of 123 projects, although there are no figures on how many of those involve EGS, which generally fractures rock deep in the Earth to allow water to more easily flow through, collecting heat that can then be used to generate power. Mico-quakes cansometimes be produced by slippage along those fractures.

(Image: AltaRock Energy)

According to a DOE letter to the office of Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) obtained by TENTHMIL, the policy will feature:

• The Department will require grantees to collect stress data, background seismicity, and geology data prior to actual field stimulation. Once the data are collected, the grantee will use predictive stimulation models to estimate and forecast potential induced seismicity magnitude and potential radius of seismicity. Information submitted by grantees will be used to develop site specific risk mitigation strategies.
• The Department will task a team of experts to review these results as a part of a go/no-go decision point.
• If judged satisfactory, grantees will be given the go-ahead to conduct field work with adequate permits from local authorities. Otherwise, they will be asked to gather more data and conduct more analysis.

This comes on the heels of two projects – The Geysers, in California, run by Seattle-based AltaRock Energy, and a project in Basel, Switzerland. Both of them were in populated areas near seismic zones – and both were recently shut down after jolting local residents. In both cases, the companies were experimenting with EGS technique.

(Image Source DOE, AltaRock Energy)

Scary Words

The NY Times story opened with, “The United States Energy Department, concerned about earthquake risk, will impose new safeguards on geothermal energy projects that drill deep into the Earth’s crust.” Some picked up the drumbeat and inserted the words “new regulations.” But the DOE isn’t taking things quite that far.

Ernest Majer, a geothermal expert and deputy director of the Earth Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, told TENTHMIL, “We’re in the process of reevaluating what sort of mitigation controls will be put on. They’re not regulations, and we don’t want to put regulations where they’re not necessary.”

On the other hand, he said, the experience that AltaRock had drilling at The Geysers has taught everyone some important lessons, and they wanted to bring that to the table. And they mostly appear to involve the application of common sense when you’re doing seismically sensitive drilling and fracturing in an area with a lot of buildings.

That’s what caused trouble for the Basel project – it was in the middle of town, where even the smallest jolts will shake people up and potentially leave cracks in buildings. There were fewer people living around The Geysers, but they weren’t any happier about the temblors – or about the way their concerns were dismissed.

“It’s ironic,” notes Majer, “because AltaRock’s drilling never even made it below the caprock. They went into an existing well and got jammed up, which was probably their problem – in old wells things can shift.” They never even got as far as fracturing the rock down in the geothermally-interesting heat zone.

But what happened was a public-relations problem. Because they’re experimenting with a new, proprietary process, Majer says the company couldn’t be forthcoming in describing what they were doing, and people got suspicious.

“They’ve got another project at Newberry, Oregon” that they’re moving forward with, he adds. Not only is that site far from people, the ring-fracture system of the Newberry Volcano will limit the dispersal of any potential stresses.

“That seems like a more attractive prospect for experimenting right now,” so they wrapped things up at The Geysers, even as the DOE was finding that the quakes there, while disconcerting, wouldn’t have had an impact on the local population.

(Originally appeared at TenthMil.com)

Geothermal Pitches Wall Street

2010-01-15T20:23:00.000-08:00

Representatives of the Geothermal Energy Association had their largest schmooze-fest ever in New York Thursday (Jan. 14). They met with Wall Street financiers, had lunch with politicians, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Mayor Bloomberg declared “New York City Geothermal Energy Day”, and at the end of the day they even got to ring the closing bell on the stock exchange - well, on the smaller and less prestigious NASDAQ, but it’s still an honor.

Will Geothermal always remain the poor cousin of the better-established solar and wind industries?

The New York Times reports:

Overall, advocates say, geothermal technology is proven and has distinct advantages over wind and solar. Geothermal power is a steady and reliable baseload, which electric utilities appreciate. And geothermal plants use less land than wind farms or solar arrays.
But [the GEA Executive Director Karl] Gawell admits major Wall Street investment banks shy away from geothermal because it takes years to see a return on investments. A Nevada project that came online last year took five years to complete, compared with a lead time of little more than a year for a standard wind farm.
“They’re realizing that geothermal can be a good investment,” Gawell said. “You’ve just got to stay in there a little bit longer.”

Gawall also stopped in at the Wall Street Journal to pitch them on earth power, noting that 200 megawatts have come online in the past year.

“It’s being rediscovered in the U.S.,” Mr. Gawell says. While the U.S. is currently the world leader, the geothermal industry today is where the wind-power industry was 20 or 30 years ago, he says.
And given the role that big corporates—such as General Electric and Siemens—played in the explosion of the wind industry, the logical question is, when will big companies pile into geothermal? GE has been showing up at geothermal meetings lately, Mr. Gawell says, and GE Energy Financial Services finances some geothermal investments.

Analyst Byron King says it’s time the big companies jumped in and took over from the “mom and pop” operations. In his Energy & Scarcity Investor (via BeforeItsNews.com), he says:

The pre-crash business model of the geothermal industry is no longer appropriate to the tight-credit world in which we live… Post-crash, it’s clear that most publicly traded geothermal companies are too small. Back when credit was cheap, money flowed more easily and you could “afford” to be patient over a five-to-eight-year time frame. The same small team of developers was prospecting, leasing, drilling, finding, assessing, fundraising, developing, building, stringing electric line and selling power. Holy smokes, Batman! Where’s the point where we can MONETIZE this?
But in our new economic world, the small, mom and pop business approach just won’t cut it. Geothermal power takes too much upfront capital to make things work. It requires too many different management skill sets. Like many things in life, bigger is better with geothermal. In fact, the world’s largest geothermal producer is Chevron Corp. Is that big enough?

At least some of the investors are excited:

By 2012, “we think the strategic landscape starts to change quickly,” said Paul Leggett, a vice president of investment banking at Morgan Stanley. “We do think the geothermal industry is ready for a takeoff.”

(Originally appeared at Tenthmil.com)

Deforestation: Avatar, Vietnam, and the War on the Trees

2010-01-14T19:21:00.000-08:00

(Originally appeared at Tenthmil.com)

One thing the blockbuster film “Avatar” showed in glorious, graphic 3D: In war, no matter who wins, the forest nearly always loses.

There goes the neighborhood

In the normal course of life, average folks tend to be conservationists. Why shouldn’t they? Just like the Na’vi of “Avatar”, most human societies throughout history developed systems that enabled people to live on the same patch of ground for generations.

The Bible actually commands: “When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war… thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them.” This was also the norm in the intercity warfare of classical Greece; The Spartans only cut down Athenian olive trees when their enmity became really nasty.   Trees are part of that stability, whether it’s olive and fruit trees for food, or other species for lumber, shade, and cover. You plant trees for yourself, and for your children and grandchildren.   Today we call that “sustainability.”

But in times of war, the timeframe changes: people do what it takes to survive this year, this month, this day. If that meant cutting down a forest, then the forest came down, regardless of the effect it would have on future generations.   And indeed, that’s what happened as empires arose in the ancient and classical world. First, warfare devastated Mesopotamia – the deserts of Iraq were once rich farmlands, and the brown hills once were covered in forests.

Then the Greeks and Romans waged their wars, and the tree-cutting spread throughout the Mediterranean. Forests came down to build siege engines, for army cookfires, and sometimes to punish enemies.

The war on the forest

But Caesar cut down Gallic forests to prevent his enemies using them for cover; Augustus did the same on the German frontier. That set the stage for the next thousand years of warfare – Henri II of England set fire to the forests of Ireland for the same reason.

And it wasn’t just the forests of the enemy that were decimated. The Phoenicians wiped out their own resource, the storied cedars of Lebanon, to build their fleets. The forests of Spain were leveled to build King Phillip’s Armada; then France’s forests were cut down for ships, and so were England’s – it’s estimated that when Nelson battle Napoleon’s fleet at Trafalgar, each of his ships had taken about 6,000 mature oaks.

In the modern era, third-world conflicts are often financed by timber sales. The Khmer Rouge Communist insurgency in Cambodia was financed by rainforest destruction; that has since happened in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Indochina, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Central Africa, the Amazon, Colombia, Central America, and New Caledonia.

Wars also create refugees, desperate people struggling to survive far from their native region. Without a stake in the local ecology, and with life and death on the line on a daily basis, they strip the region of food and firewood. During the Rwanda conflict, refugees nearly drove the mountain gorillas to extinction. In the Congo, it was elephants that were nearly destroyed.

And in many cases, ecological destruction leads to war and conflict that in turn leads to more ecological destruction. In Darfur, it was deforestation that led to scarcity, conflict, drought, and a huge refugee crisis… which in turn led to more deforestation and desertification.

We keep pushing the envelope.

The tree-destruction scene in “Avatar” looked like something out of the Vietnam War, for good reason.

In Vietnam, the American Army had Caesar’s problem: the enemy used the forest for cover. But they had a whole new way of dealing with it: Napalm to burn them out, and Agent Orange to defoliate. The jungles of Southeast Asia couldn’t fight back like “Avatar’s” Eywa, and took years to recover. The toxic side effects took their toll on the local ecosystem, as well as the local people, and also the American soldiers who were exposed.

When Saddam Hussein’s army pulled out of Kuwait during the first Gulf War, they set fire to the oilfields, creating a whole new kind of environmental devastation. During the most recent Lebanon conflict, Israel bombed a major coastal oil facility, staining 80 miles of coastline with 110,000 barrels of oil. At the same time, Hezbollah rockets fired into Northern Israel set off forest fires, destroying an estimated 600,000 trees.

But there actually is a bright side…

After Gulf War II, the US restored the marshlands of Southern Iraq, bringing back a habitat of 7,000 square miles (twice the size of Rhode Island) that had been turned to desert by Sadam Hussein in retaliation for an uprising of Shia Arabs.

During the Guatemalan Civil War, the Peten District became such a dangerous place (more than 100,000 people were killed) that tree-cutting effectively ended, leaving it today as one of the largest surviving stands of virgin tropical rainforest north of the Amazon.

There’s an international movement to create peace parks along international borders that have suffered ecological upheavals, such as the eastern Congo.

And there’s the Korean Demilitarized Zone.

Picture a pristine environment.

Forests of Mongolian Oaks full of birds; streams full of fish; coastlands with rare birds like Manchurian Cranes and Siberian Herons. Endangered species like the sak wildcat and the Asiatic black bear.

And no people – no people at all.

The Korean DMZ is a narrow ribbon of land 150 miles long and two and a half miles wide. The DMZ was created in 1953 at the end of the Korean War to keep the two Koreas, North and South, from shooting each other.

For more than 50 years, thousands of nervous, trigger-happy troops patrolled along the DMZ, but never ventured across the barricades and barbed wire. And so, inadvertently, it became a refuge. As Korea industrialized, its population boomed and its industry drove countless species into decline and extinction, the DMZ remained untouched.

Not quite as lush as Pandora, the zone still manages to cover an amazing range of environments, including wetlands, forests, estuaries, mountains, coastal islands, and riparian valleys. Waterfowl love it – it’s the wintering ground for two of the world’s most endangered birds, the white-naped crane and the red-crowned crane.

Still waiting for formal protection, the biggest threat to this accidental preserve would be peace. With the South Korean capital, Seoul, just 20 miles to the south, there will be heavy pressure to develop the region for condos and office parks if there is ever a peace treaty between the North and the South.

Perhaps the local waterfowl and small animals are secretly praying for us crazy humans to stay at war with each other….

Biomass or Biomess?

2010-01-12T20:12:00.000-08:00

One of the things we should have learned from the corn to bio-ethanol mess of the past five years is: haste makes waste.

The subsidies that were supposed to help create a sustainable industry and help small farmers instead turned into a massive hand-out to big agriculture, and drove up prices on corn and other food when it was diverted to fuel - and the socalled green bioethanol turned out to cost almost as much CO2 as fossil fuels.

Now, the Washington Post reports the same thing is happening with wood biomass. Subsidies that were supposed to create green fuel are instead warping the market:

In a matter of months, the Biomass Crop Assistance Program—a small provision tucked into the 2008 farm bill—has mushroomed into a half-a-billion dollar subsidy that is funneling taxpayer dollars to sawmills and lumber wholesalers, encouraging them to sell their waste to be converted into high-tech biofuels. In doing so, it is shutting off the supply of cheap timber byproducts to the nation’s composite wood manufacturers, who make panels for home entertainment centers and kitchen cabinets.

Of course, subsidies are an important tool for jump-starting the green economy. But not the way the wood biomass subsidies were written.

Biomass energy representatives, such as the Biomass Power Association president, Bob Cleaves, said those subsidies are critical to support a sector that currently supplies half of the nation’s renewable energy (the other half coming from wind, solar and other sources). Seven of Maine’s 10 biomass energy plants would have shut down without the new influx of funds, he said.
“The industry needs help,” Cleaves said. “Is the country not prepared to spend half a billion dollars on half the country’s renewable energy resources?”
The Agriculture Department, for its part, says it has no choice but to implement the subsidy the way Congress envisioned it under the 2008 farm bill. That legislation made no distinction between a waste product with little market value, such as corn husks, and the sawdust that sells for roughly $45 a dry ton.

Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) is looking into the problem, and so is the Office of Management and Budget. So hopefully that means we’ll be seeing this fixed fairly quickly. Everyone agrees that some form of subsidy for biofuels is a very good thing - when it encourages the market in the right way.

But pellet mill owners such as the Rolf Anderson, chief executive of Bear Mountain Forest Products, said the program will eventually create an incentive for people to bring small pieces of wood left by loggers out of the forest, which will give companies like his a cheap and steady stream of raw materials.
“It opens up economic opportunities. It opens up healthier forests, and it helps companies and individuals save on their energy costs,” said Anderson, whose company is based in Oregon.

The problem with subsidies, though, is once companies start getting millions of dollars from the public trough, they lobby hard to keep the flow coming. Why? Because companies can easily afford to donate tens of thousands of dollars to campaign coffers if it means millions of dollars in government funding. The 2008 Farm Bill that contained this biomass provision was widely derided as a bloated mess that ended up pouring billions into Big Ag without really helping out struggling farmers.

What can you do? Write your Senators and Representatives and tell them to get it right.

(Originally appeared at TenthMil.com)

Informed Comment Is More Useful Than Spin and Fingerpointing

2009-12-04T11:24:00.000-08:00

Hey, guess what? Science is hard, but it's easy to take a few sentences out of context to make people look bad.

Canada's Elizabeth May actually read the stolen/hacked East Anglia climate emails - all 3,000 of them. And what she found was, in her words "We've been had."

"Starting from 1996, these good and decent scientists write to each other... Tough stuff using proxy records to figure out what the temperature was... They wrote each other sharing ideas for handling the records from tree rings. They struggled with how to re-calibrate surface sea temperature records. This was a neat thread. Turns out those navies around the world kept records of the temperature of the sea water before using it in the steam room engines. The temperature records shifted when they stopped using wooden buckets and moved to canvas buckets. Tough work evening out the temperatures so they are comparable."

Not very glamorous or exciting, but important work. And very easy for ignorant people to point the finger and say: "You're changing the data!"

US (=Bush) Pressured IEA to Inflate Oil Reserve Numbers

2009-11-10T16:08:00.000-08:00

Did the International Energy Agency inflate oil reserve figures to make it look like we're not facing peak oil?

That's what the Guardian is reporting, based on statements by a whistleblower:

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.

...Now the "peak oil" theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. "The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year," said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. "The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today's number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this....

Read the whole thing...

Fixing the Climate Crisis Isn't Just The Right Thing To Do... It's Sexy!

2009-10-28T00:10:00.000-07:00

Glen Hansard and Damien Rice Busking for Oxfam!

2009-10-12T00:15:00.000-07:00

This is fun... and important. It's so great when folks use their star power to bring more people into the green movement...

Do it for the Planet.

2009-10-06T17:09:00.000-07:00

Coming up on October 15.... sign up and do your part, too!

Coal Is Too Dirty... :)

2009-10-06T14:55:00.000-07:00

I didn't realize that some college campuses have their own coal-fired power plants. Time for a change....

John Stewart Skewers Glenn Beck for Health Care Flip-Flop

2009-08-14T11:57:00.000-07:00

Is it "a nightmare"? Or "The best health care system in the world?"
We report, you decide....

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Glenn Beck's Operation

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Spinal Tap Performance

Good point - health insurance is different

2009-04-19T11:40:00.000-07:00

Great analysis of the fundamental problem with our current health insurance system:

Insurance only works at all because of pooled risk - you pay into a general pool and insurance companies are able to calculate the statistical likelihood that they'll have to pay out in case of accident. "Accident" is the key word - it's an event that has some probability of occurring given someone's history and lifestyle. But it's a finite, time-limited occurrence that incurs a certain amount of cost. Car insurance, therefore, works. Yes, you pay more if you're a poor driver or a 16 year-old, but there's still some statistical probability that these people won't get into accidents. Health care isn't like that. If health care insurance companies were only hedging against the likelihood that someone will slip and fall and break an arm, or fall off the ski lift, then the private solution would work fine. Now imagine the following case. To continue with the car insurance analogy, pretend that everyone has one car that cannot be sold. Some people have lemon cars whose brakes fail every week, or have continuous oil leaks, etc. In other words, the insurance company knows that it will have to pay out on the people with lemon cars, not just occasionally, but continuously. There's absolutely no incentive to insure these people at all. We could, as a society, say well, that's tough. Only, eventually, we all end up with lemon cars - we're all going to die one day, and the large majority of us will be sick for some time before that. The only way to insure people with lemon cars is stick them in a large group of average people and calculate the risk for that pool as a whole.

Wanna print some green money?

2009-02-20T16:07:00.000-08:00

Okay, you and I can't crank out the billions the way the big boys do in Washington.

But if you're a fan of Seventh Generation cleaning products, you'll be pleased to know they now have $1-off coupons on their website.

In these times, every little bit helps....

Important note: Foodies can't be Dummies

2008-11-28T23:13:00.000-08:00

Please try to keep in mind as you shop this holiday season: Fair Trade doesn't just apply to African villagers and Amazon tribes - it also applies to the folks who grow our food here at home.

An interesting note from a farmer who tried switching from big-breasted flightless corporate turkeys to heritage birds:

Our customers who had eagerly signed up to reserve a heritage bird were not only disappointed about the size, but they also complained about the higher price tag and the noticeable lack of breast meat. So the heritage birds cost 2.5 times the price as chicks, took twice as long to grow out, ate nearly twice the food, and dressed out at half the size. We had to charge $8/lb. and we still made no profits on these birds. What was curiously frustrating was that these self-described foodies still wanted the size and body shape of a hybrid bird, along with a small price tag. Even somebody from a local Slow Food chapter still insists that we should be able to raise heritage turkeys for $4/lb.

That's right. Real food costs more, and doesn't look the same was as crap corporate food (or taste the same way, thank god!)

I've also got a post up over at Ecoble.com about how to live a little greener on Thanksgiving this year... check it out.

Whining about Wine

2008-11-27T19:18:00.000-08:00

What is it with some people and wine?

Nobody would argue that Hershey's chocolate is better than Dagoba or Ghirardelli, or that there's no difference in quality between a Mercedes and a Mercury.

And yet, when it comes to wine, it seems every six months someone is trotting out "evidence" that there's really no difference between higher-priced bottles of wine and the cheap stuff. That it's all about elitism and marketing and hype.

When I was first learning about wine, I bought into it, too. I'd tried $6 bottles and $16 bottles, and there didn't seem to be that much difference. So why spend the extra $10?

Then I did a write-up on the Hermitage Inn in Wilmington, Vermont, and got a chance to sample from its 30,0000-bottle cellar. My first $40 bottle of wine, from California's Far Niente vineyard. Wow! Here was a wine that outshone the hype. It was complex, light, dazzling... and totally worth the price.

I still buy cheaper wines (who can afford $40 a week on wine, in this economy?), but I totally lost sympathy for the elitism/marketing whiners.

Like Robin Goldstein. His study, which "proved" that most people couldn't tell the good stuff from the cheap stuff in blind taste tests, made the rounds this past spring (here and here), and is cropping up again. Jonah Lehrer, at The Frontal Cortex, just brought it up, and Andrew Sullivan picked up on it too. Both of them pushed the line that, in Lehrer's words, "expensive wine doesn't necessarily taste better, at least for people who aren't wine experts".

This kind of "study" always bugs me, so I tend to delve into the raw numbers to see where they're pulling their conclusions from. And guess what?

To make sure that our results are not driven by wines at the extreme ends of the price distribution, we also run our regressions on a reduced sample, omitting the top and bottom deciles of the price distribution. Given the broad range of prices in the sample, this is an appropriate precaution. The remaining wines range in price from $6 to $15.

Meaning: 90% of their wines are priced at less than $15. What elitism? The useful comparison is between the $10 bottle and the $40 bottle, not between the $6 bottle and the $15 bottle.

So what's the real scoop? Goldstein was publishing a book: "The Wine Trials: Brown-bag blind tastings reveal the surprising wine values under $15." That certainly explains the fact that 90 percent of the study's wines were under $15.

Their choices of more expensive wines? Mere foils, so they could say things like:

"...when more than 500 blind tasters around the country sampled 6,000 glasses of wine ranging in price from $1.50 to $150, their preferences were inversely correlated with price. For example, Domaine Ste. Michelle, a $12 sparkling wine from Washington State, outscored Dom Pérignon, a $150 Champagne, while a six-dollar Vinho Verde from Portugal beat out a $40 California Chardonnay and a $50 1er Cru white Burgundy."

The book is a nice idea. There are a lot decent wines out there for under $15, and a guide is a great thing (see here for another good source of tips). But it's just not a source of accurate scientific data.

And yet they managed to market their 'findings' into the pages of Newsweek and the New York Times... while pontificating on the notion that much of wine snobbery was nothing but marketing. Ah, the irony..

Think Green This Thanksgiving

2008-11-25T17:56:00.000-08:00

All we have to do this year is look toward Washington, DC, and we've got tons of stuff to be thankful for...

But as we officially enter the season of holiday cheer, holiday shopping and holiday excess, can we all think about the planet, too?

They say that green is the new black, but that doesn't mean you have to get all emo about it. It's possible to be joyful and celebratory - and smart.

10 Great Ways to Green your Thanksgiving

Getting There - Thanksgiving is one of the heaviest travel weekends of the year, and how you choose to get there can make a big difference in your annual carbon footprint. If you’re driving long distances, avoid SUVs and big gas-guzzlers – remember, you can always rent something smaller. Carpooling is also good, although not always an option. And if you’re flying, keep in mind that air miles are about the most damaging mode of travel for the environment. Avoid flying if possible; if you can’t, consider purchasingcarbon offsets from a reliable source.

Set the Scene - Candles are great for creating a warm, homey environment. But paraffin candles are awful for the home environment. They’re made from petrochemicals, they put vaporized parrafin into the air, and they often contain artificial oils and scents that you don’t want your loved ones to be breathing, either. Today, we have better options, made with beeswax and soy wax. Likewise, as you’re buying decorations, think of what’s going to happen to them when the holiday has passed. Try to avoid buying a bunch of paper goods that will go straight into the landfill.

Moderate the Meat - Industrial agricultural poultry farms generate a huge amount of waste; too much to compost (which is how small farms deal with natural by-products in a natural way, returning them to the soil as fertilizer). Instead, all that manure degrades into methane – a greenhouse gas that’s 20 times more potent than CO2. Plus, these birds are pumped full of antibiotics and nasty chemicals to try to keep them healthy in that cramped, hellish environment. This does awful things for the meat – both in terms of nutrients, and in flavor. Go for a free-range organic bird – your taste buds will thank you, as will your arteries. (Or you could try going Vegan…)

Go Local - Transportation is a big part of the CO2 impact of our food. Shipping by water has a modest impact, trucking is pretty bad, and air freight is terrible. Which means that, surprisingly, (ocean-shipped) Peruvian mangoes may have a lower impact than (trucked) Idaho potatoes. Your best bet – buy local. Go down to the farmers market for the most planet-friendly potatoes and yams.

Go Seasonal - Hothouse-grown peppers, tomatoes and lettuce are also not great for the environment – because of the hefty energy used in growing them in cold climates. Think like the Pilgrims, and try to focus on things that grow naturally in your neighborhood this time of year. In the north, that might mean substituting cold-loving crops like spinach, kale and chard instead of a salad.

Go Organic - Industrial agriculature depletes the soil, then uses petrochemical-derived fertilizers to attempt to replenish it. It’s a crazy system that’s accelerating climate change. Organic agriculture, in contrast, actually returns large amounts of carbon to the soil. If all the farms in the US switched to organics, it would be the equivalent of taking millions of cars off the road! Plus, organics are healthier. And your health is always something to be thankful for.

Avoid Packaged Foods - Often, producing and disposing of food packaging takes more energy than it took to grow and process the food in the first place. What can you do about that? Cut back on pre-packaged stuff. Go with fresh local spinach instead of frozen; bake your own pumpkin pie instead of buying one in a plastic clamshell from the market.

Recycle - And of course, make sure the cans, bottles, and packaging you use gets recycled.

Compost - Don’t send your scraps off to a landfill! In that nasty environment, food waste breaks down into methane, which as we’ve noted is a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2. Set up a home composting system; if you can’t, check locally – many cities now have composting programs.

Don’t Say “Yes” to Excess - Don’t go whole hog – or whole turkey. Buy a smaller bird, only make three side dishes instead of six, go for two pies instead of four. You can still eat plenty of food, there will be less waste overall, and when you step on the scale Monday morning, you’ll be able to look at that dial without fear and loathing.

Image credits:

Flickr Creative Commons photo by Groovnick
Flickr Creative Commons photo by Eschipul
Flickr Creative Commons photo by Cyanocorax
Flickr Creative Commons photo by NatalieMaynor
Flickr Creative Commons photo by KingDesmond1337
Flickr Creative Commons photo by Normanack
Flickr Creative Commons photo by Darkroom Demons

How to Cook the Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey

2008-11-24T01:28:00.000-08:00

I've got one of my classic pieces up on Helium.com: How to Cook the Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey. It includes step-by-step instructions, plus expert advice from Eric Trites, the gourmet chef at the Hermitage Inn in Wilmington, Vermont.

A sample:

Your first turkey could be a piece of cake, or it could be a total disaster. So we thought we'd seek out some professional help - Eric Trites, chief cook and pheasant plucker at the Hermitage Inn in Wilmington, Vermont. The Hermitage is a resort that specializes in the fare the pilgrim fathers (and mothers) laid on their tables: pheasants, wild turkeys, ducks, gamecocks, deer. And Trites figures he's cooked around five hundred turkeys over the past ten years....

Thanksgiving food-fests: "Before you start cooking, remove the little plastic bag with the giblets." It is, of course, not a major disaster if you forget this. It just makes the inside of the bird a little messy when the plastic bag starts to melt in the 325-degree oven...

"Actually," Trites notes, "the first thing you have to do depends on whether it's fresh or frozen. If it's frozen, you've gotta defrost it. The best way to do that is to leave it in the fridge, because turkeys are apt to spoil - as with all fowl. They have been known to have salmonella, which is not fun. Spending Thanksgiving day on the john is not a good time."

On the Practical and the Symbolic.

2008-11-19T23:19:00.000-08:00

Bill McKibben has a great column in Orion magazine this month, in which he makes an interesting point:

But in a world where we need massive change at lightning speed, the usual equations are turned upside down. We’re used to thinking that being practical is what really counts—that you can only reduce carbon by, in fact, reducing carbon. Hence the light bulb, or the farmers’ market, or the hybrid car. If we think globally, to use the hoariest of green clichés, we should act locally. In the fight against global warming, though, the practical acts are for the most part symbolic, while the symbolic acts might just save the day. Say you have a certain amount of time and money with which to make change—call it x, since that is what we mathematicians call things. The trick is to increase that x by multiplication, not addition. The trick is to take that 5 percent of people who really care and make them count for far more than 5 percent. And the trick to that is democracy.

We naïvely believe that it takes 51 percent of the people to make change in a democracy, but it clearly doesn’t—5 percent is plenty, if those 5 percent are engaged in symbolic action that can force the kind of legislative change that resets the course for everyone. In the civil rights movement, for instance, the strategy was not to desegregate the country one lunch counter at a time—there were way too many lunch counters. Instead, you use the drama of the fight over one lunch counter to help drive the Civil Rights Act, which puts the full power of the federal government behind the idea that anyone can order a hamburger wherever they want to. And here’s the thing: I bet less than one-quarter of 1 percent of Americans took part in a protest during that great movement, but it was more than enough.

Google has Life magazine's photo archive

2008-11-19T11:27:00.000-08:00

Wow. Just wow. Life magazine's photo archive (published and un-published) at your fingertips...

Futuristic Green Transit: 10 Vehicles for 2010

2008-11-09T10:31:00.000-08:00

Want to green your ride, but can’t afford a Tesla? That’s okay… there are plenty of cool (if not quite so flashy) new transportation options coming down the pike that will cost you less than $100,000. Some of ‘em you can even build yourself.

Seriously Strange Fossil Fuelings:

Who needs hydrogen? Some energy alternatives have been around for years, and are making a comeback.

1. Wood

It’s not talked about as much as the Manhattan Project, but there was a big energy crisis during WWII, when the military sucked up a huge portion of the world’s petroleum output. Individual car-owners across Europe converted their cars and trucks to run on… wood.

Wood?

Wood. Engines don’t run on liquid gasoline - they literally run on fumes. Same goes for the fire in your fireplace – when you see flames rising, that’s the fumes of volatiles coming off the logs and igniting. You can do the same thing in your car.

Some folks are working on making this high-tech, with scrubbers and sealed, carefully controlled burners. Renewable Energy Systems are currently running a demonstration coast-to-coast tour with a couple of modded 1991 Dodge Dakota V8 pickups.

But for now you can go very low-tech – plonk a stove on the back of your pickup and run a vacuum hose to the carburetor; after that your spark plugs ignite the fumes as per usual. You can get information on the web to rig your vehicle with a hundred or so dollars in parts: Jim Mason offers workshops and info, or order a how-to guide from Mother Earth News.

But either way, your fuel can be wood if you want – or any scrap biomass.

2. Steam

The British Steam Car looks like the Batmobile and runs like an iron horse. It is not quite road-ready just yet, though, as it guzzles 1,000 litres (one ton!) of water per 25 minutes of travel time. So for now it is recommended only for shorter commutes (or perhaps not at all).

3. People Power

HumanCar is driven by people - even the steering is human powered, like on a bicycle or motorcycle.

How does it work? They’re being very, very cagey – there’s lot of talk on their website about patents and proprietary trade secrets, not too much on how it will run.

But for sure, this won’t be a Flintstones-style feet-through-the-floor operation.

Already on the Market:

4. ZAP Xebra

Perfect for in-city commuting or shopping, this little car only has a 25-mile range. Still, it brags that even after counting emissions from generating the electricity it uses, it produces 98% less pollution than a gas vehicle. And it’s available now. Next up: A ZAP trucklet with a solar panel to fuel itself.

5. Smart Fortwo

This may look like a toy, but it pumps out 110 horsepower (between a 4-cylinder gas engine and a 50-kilowatt electric motor) And it is kind of cute. This vehicle seats two comfortably (depending on the individual, of course); at a stretch you can cram in thirteen contortionists.

Future Green Transport:

6. Zoop

This little electric flitter can travel at up to 120 mph (although that prospect raises the specter of “Unsafe at Any Speed”). The Zoop is more about being seen – hence the clear canopy and the flashy design by EV-proponents André and Coqueline Courrèges of Paris-based fashion house Maison de Courrèges.

7. Ecooter

It is hard to say whether this Chinese offering is even a car, and even the name implies it is some sort of scooter…

Still, it has four wheels (in a diamond layout, rather than the standard “four corners” formation) and there is a roof over your head to keep out the wind and rain, so perhaps it qualifies.

The way it parks is particularly interesting - thanks to the diamond wheelbase, you can do some remarkably tight turning with this little thing:

7. Loremo

The name stands for “Low Resistance Mobile” This just goes to show that you don’t need to wait for next decade’s technology to accomplish amazing things with milage: The Loremo combines a highly-efficient German-engineered diesel engine with extremely low-drag design to achieve 150 miles per gallon. Coming next year to Europe, with US launch to follow.

8. Helios

Want to really get off the grid? Helios has the answer: a solar-powered buggy with a saurian solar sail that spreads out to soak up the sun and recharge, photovoltaicly. This concept car won the Best Use of Technology at the Interior Motives Design Awards 2008. Note to racers: do NOT attempt to deploy the sail as a drag chute…

9. The Air Car

Coming as early as spring 2009 from MDI and Zero Pollution Motors, it runs on compressed air. Developed by Formula One engineer Guy Nègre, the Air Car is expected to make big inroads in India, where it will be sold as the Tata Nano for $2500.

10. VW 1-Liter

A few of the mainline automakers are trying to break out of the gas-guzzler mode (although not GM, who have announced they won’t be bringing their min-cars to the US market, further demonstrating their brilliant business acumen and why the government should give them a big bailout.) VW wanted a car that would go 100 miles on one liter of gas, but it’s taken them more than six years to perfect the high-tech low-weight materials like carbon fiber and titanium. Along with a super-sleek aerodynamic shell, this diesel-powered commuter car is scheduled to get a spectacular 235 mpg when it hits the roads (in a limited edition test release) in 2010.

Can’t wait - or really want to do something now? Don’t despair - you can upgrade your current rustbucket to at least make it a little more fuel-efficient.

Yes, We Did

2008-11-05T14:55:00.000-08:00

Print magazines are so last century...

2008-11-04T15:55:00.000-08:00

At this stage, who really wants dead-tree magazines shipped to your doorstep?

It seems there is finally an alternative - and the first dose is free, thanks to The Read Green Initiative.

There's a wide range, from Parenting to Playboy, plus PC, Popular Science, even Reader's Digest. Nice!

Over the past few years, I've cut out just about all of my magazine subscriptions (Lyra and I still get Mother Earth News and the sister publication, Herb Companion).

I'm trying to decide with zine to take as my freebie... probably going to go with Outside. I'm guessing Lyra will go with Saveur.

Snag yourself some documentary

2008-10-13T14:20:00.000-07:00

Snag is offering a pre-election Film Festival, screening dozens of documentaries on everything from climate to education to straight-forward politics.

Check out this one, on the movement in the Hudson Valley (where I grew up) to clean up the river.

Earthdance!

2008-09-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

No matter where you're reading this from, you can go to Earthdance this weekend.

Earthdance is one of those times when unification trumps narcissism. This is a trans-global dance party, with events from Argentina to Zambia, but we're fortunate in having the Hub Event, the center of it all, just up the coast at the Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville. It unites world music, jamband, electronica, folk and reggae on five stages over three days.

Find your local Earthdance event - from Argentina to Zambia - on the main website.

Paul Stamets: Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World

2008-09-09T13:05:00.000-07:00

Wow.

Mushroom expert (what an inadequate word!) Paul Stamets preaching the gospel of Mycelium.

Islands are crumbling

2008-09-03T00:02:00.001-07:00

"World sea levels rose 3.1 millimetres (0.12 inch) per year from 1993 to 2003, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said."

Doesn't sound like a big deal, does it? It's just millimeters, right?

The thing that is rarely reported when they mention that figure is... "average" means that some places it's lower, and some places it's higher... much higher.

"...a 2006 study by Australian oceanographers found the rise was much higher, almost one inch every year, in parts of the western Pacific and Indian oceans.

"It turns out the ocean sloshes around," said the University of Tasmania's Nathaniel Bindoff, a lead author on oceans in the U.N. reports. "It's moving, and so on a regional basis the ocean's movement is causing sea-level variations ups and downs."

Just as warming is much higher than average in the Arctic - and causing a host of problems, from melting sea-ice to melting permafrost - the sea level change is higher in some places, like the island nation of Kiribati.

"For nations and communities that sit only a few metres above sea level, even small ocean rises engulf their land and send destructive salty water into their food supply, leaving residents with little choice but to flee...

As sea levels have crept higher, the coasts have eroded, corals have been bleached, and islanders' staple foods such as the giant Babai taro, coconut and banana are unable to grow in salty soil.

On the Carterets, where one island has been split in two by the encroaching sea, Rakova said hunger and desperation were sending the young men to mainland Papua New Guinea, or spiralling into depression."

Another place the rising waters threaten: Australia's Torres Straights Islands. Here, too, it's the extremes:

"Ron and Maria Passi, who operate Murray Island's only taxi, were out driving the night the king tide struck... The couple's son, Sonny, was outside his fibro shack with his five children, watching the monster surf, lashed by north-west winds, rise ever higher. In the commotion, everyone had forgotten that Sedoi, the baby, was still inside. They heard her crying and found her in her cot, covered in sand. Water had surged in after a wave picked up a big wooden pallet and flung it through the front wall...

No one on Murray had ever seen such a high tide before. Other islands in the Torres Strait, which lies between the far north-eastern tip of the Australian mainland and Papua New Guinea, have witnessed similar scenes in recent years. Houses, roads and graveyards have been flooded, and the locals believe they know the reason: climate change."

Something for the rest of us to look forward to...

UPDATE: The Guardian reports that the Maldives are looking to buy themselves a new homeland.

Not thinking about polar bears

2008-09-02T22:07:00.000-07:00

Watchmen Trailer

2008-09-01T16:44:00.000-07:00

Coming in 2009... at last.

Termites and hydrogen

2008-09-01T13:27:00.001-07:00

Searching for a miracle... a fuel source that is actually efficient.

Ethanol has been a disaster, barely breaking even in energy output, not doing well at all in carbon footprint, and driving up the price of corn and other grain. Time to try something else.

Hydrogen hasn't been much better, so far - it's still not cost effective. We simply don't have an industrial process to make it cheaply and in bulk. Wouldn't it be nice if we did? Termites, and the microbes in their guts that allow them to digest wood, could change that.

Termites? Termites!

A worker termite tears off a piece of wood with its mandibles and lets its guts work on it like a molecular wrecking yard, stripping away sugars, CO2, hydrogen, and methane with 90 percent efficiency... Offer a termite this page, and its microbial helpers will break it down into two liters of hydrogen, enough to drive more than six miles in a fuel-cell car. If we could turn wood waste into fuel with even a fraction of the termite’s efficiency, we could run our economy on sawdust, lawn clippings, and old magazines.

Check out the article... it's fascinating.

Sea ice closing in on record

2008-08-28T16:59:00.001-07:00

Bad news for those who still think it'll be 20 or 30 years before we have to face an ice-free arctic ocean. Climate change is accelerating far faster than anything in the models.

More ominous signs Wednesday have scientists saying that a global warming "tipping point" in the Arctic seems to be happening before their eyes: The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that sea ice in the Arctic now covers about 2.03 million square miles. The lowest point since satellite measurements began in 1979 was 1.65 million square miles set last September...

Within "five to less than 10 years," the Arctic could be free of sea ice in the summer, said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally.

"It also means that climate warming is also coming larger and faster than the models are predicting and nobody's really taken into account that change yet," he said

Celebrating Lenny Bernstein

2008-08-26T13:16:00.001-07:00

Where was I twenty years ago? Covering Leonard Bernstein's 70th Birthday bash at Tanglewood...

Leonard Bernstein at 70
Tanglewood, August 25-28
By Jeremy Bloom

There is an irony to the career of Leonard Bernstein, celebrated this past weekend with a whole series of concerts and parties at the Tanglewood Music Center, where that career began.

By the end of Thursday night's gala multi-starred celebration, it was obvious what an impact “Lenny” (as everyone calls him) has had in every area of music, from conducting the works of Copeland, Stravinski and Mahler to his own writing for the classical halls, the Hollywood screen, the Broadway stage.

There is so much wonderful material to draw on - songs from his early broadway shows, On the Town and Wonderful Town; his ballet collaboration with Jerome Robbins, Fancy Free; his film score for On the Waterfront: and of course, the unforgettable melodies of West Side Story and Candide.

"Poor Lenny, ten gifts too many,'' was the sad refrain of the lyrics specially penned for the evening by collaborator and friend Stephen Sondheim.

And yet, this is the man who once criticized Gershwin as being merely a pop composer whose music would not dwell among the immortals. Bernstein wants very much to be remembered as a serious classical composer. But of the 36 works performed over the course of the weekend, only four were from among his classical writings - and all four were choral works or songs, including the jazzy Mass. His heavier pieces, such as his Age of Anxiety Symphony, were passed over completely.

So what? Let's let Lenny and his psychiatrist and the historians sort it out. Thursday night, there was no doubt about how his contemporaries feel about him.

One after another, the people he has touched took the stage to thank their friend and mentor with a memory, a joke, and a gift of song - a Who's Who of 20th century music, from cellist Mstislav Rostropovitch, older than Lenny himself, to the 16-year-old Japanese wunderkind violinist, Midori; more than 50 singers, conductors, composers and musicians.

"I was at the Nureyev birthday celebration in New York last year,'' said one tuxedoed gentleman who had laid out $5,000 for top tickets for the week, ""and it was nothing like this. No one else has this depth of talent to draw on. These aren't just performers he's worked with - these are all his friends.''

Or, as Greek minister of culture Melina Mercouri put it, one of dozens of world figures sending greetings to the birthday boy: "To say, bless you? You were born blessed.''

Remembering Lena

2008-08-25T13:39:00.000-07:00

Another of my "Greatest Hits"

Cafe Society
(Appeared in The New York Times, 1991)
By Jeremy Bloom

“There is a cloud of weirdness that hangs over Saratoga Springs,” says the singer-songwriter Bruce (Utah) Phillips. He should know, having spent most of the mid-'60s period he calls “the great folk music scare” in the small upstate New York city, along with Arlo Guthrie, Don McLean, Rosalie Sorrels, Bob Dylan, Spalding Gray and others.

They gathered spontaneously around Lena Spencer and Caffe Lena, the small Bohemian coffeehouse she ran in Saratoga Springs from 1960 until her death in 1989. The oldest continuously-running coffeehouse in the country, Caffe Lena endures as almost a time capsule - and a natural documentary subject.

In 1989, a BBC-TV crew filmed performances and interviews with some of the many musicians who considered Spencer a friend and her “caffe” a surrogate home. The result, titled “Caffe Lena”, will be broadcast at midnight Thursday on WNET (NY).

Arlo Guthrie is on hand for the film, as he always was for Spencer - he jokes about his role as financial angel for the often-broke cafe, saying he knew things were O.K. with Lena when he didn't hear from her.

Rosalie Sorrels lived with Spencer, and her children stayed with Spencer when she was on the road (Spencer never had any children of her own, but after her husband left her, the cafe provided an ever-shifting family). Ms. Sorrels' contribution to the documentary is a soulful performance of Mr. Phillips' “I Could Be the Rain” with blues-rocker David Bromberg playing lead guitar; it's the kind of collaboration that happened all the time in the early days.

Spalding Gray got his first acting job in a short-lived theater company which Spencer founded and then folded at the cafe during what he describes as the surreal summer of 1966. He has vivid memories of late nights with Spencer piloting the Ouija board.

“The theater productions were done with such inspired madness,” he told an interviewer. “The backyard looseness of it really set the tone for the Wooster Group's work,” he added, referring to the avant-garde theater he founded in New York in 1975 with Elizabeth LeCompte, who was waitressing at Caffe Lena when they met.

And then there was Spencer herself. She presided at the top of the stairs with the myopic regality of a Persian cat. “Do you have a reservation?” she would ask each visitor in the refined tones of an Italian immigrant's daughter who has trained for the stage.

Like her friend Bob Dylan (he played the cafe in 1962, but is not seen in the film), Spencer was at heart a private person. “She was a strange, warm, mothering character,” Mr. Gray recalls fondly. “One of the few I've met in America.”

Four easy ways to cut your CO2

2008-08-04T14:58:00.000-07:00

Want to cut your carbon footprint at home? Four ways you can make a difference:

Disposable Coffee Cups
It might not seem like a big deal, but paper coffee cups add up – fast. One national chain estimated that in just one year, their customers who chose to bring their own mugs together prevented 30 tons of paper from going into landfills. That’s a lot of trees, and a lot of CO2.

Disposable chopsticks
Next time you’re in an Asian restaurant, think about the more than 100 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks used every year, the millions of trees cut down to make them, and the CO2 released when they are burned or land-filled. You can join the movement to bring your own chopsticks.

Wrap it up
More than 4 million tons of wrapping paper goes into US landfills every year. Use old newspapers, color comics, magazines or pieces of cloth instead.

Nix the bottle
Americans use - and dump - 30 million plastic water bottles every day. All of those bottles were manufactured (using power and 63 million gallons of petroleum per year), packed into cardboard boxes (millions of trees cut down), then trucked around the country (more oil). Use an inline filter on your tap, and a reusable bottle when you're on the road.

The Al Gore Challenge

2008-07-18T12:41:00.000-07:00

Check out the website here.

See highlights of the challenge on YouTube:

Annotated version on the New York Times' Dot Earth blog...

Beef is the worst.

2008-06-06T21:21:00.001-07:00

We've been pushing local food for some time now. Local food tends to be better, more nutritious, and tastier. And and if you don't ship stuff thousands of miles, you don't pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

A recent study by a pair of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University came up with a surprising result, though. While transporting food long distances definitely contributes to greenhouse gases, that amount is tiny compared to the impact of red meat and dairy.

...engineers Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have found that although most foods in the U.S. are transported over long distances, the process of making the food dominates greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, they traced 83 percent of the average household's food-related footprint of greenhouse gases to the origins of the food itself. Transportation only contributes 11 percent of greenhouse gas emissions on average—with the transportation leg from producer to retailer accounting for just 4 percent.

The big culprit is, of course, cattle. Not only do they crank out vast amounts of methane (and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2), but other aspects of the production process are also GHG intensive.

The start-to-finish process of raising and distributing red meat causes more greenhouse gas emission than any other food group, with dairy products coming in second. Animal products create the greatest amounts of nitrous oxide, emitted as a result of soil fertilization and management, because animals are inefficient at using plant energy. Producing red meat and dairy also causes the bulk of all methane emissions, which are put out by ruminant animals and manure fertilizer.

The scale is such that, for the average household, just cutting a little over a day's worth of red meat and dairy would totally balance out the buy-local effect.

Which isn't to say that buying local isn't a worthy goal - it is. But encouraging people to cut out meat and dairy is even better. Even one meatless day can have a big impact; cutting our red meat entirely would be as good, from a GHG perspective, as driving a more fuel efficient car or cutting out a couple of airplane flights.

For perspective, food accounts for 13% of every U.S. household's 60 t share of total U.S. emissions; this includes industrial and other emissions outside the home. By comparison, driving a car that gets 25 miles per gallon of gasoline for 12,000 miles per year (the U.S. average) produces about 4.4 t of CO2. Switching to a totally local diet is equivalent to driving about 1000 miles less per year, Weber says.

Another good point - ocean shipping is much more efficient than trucking. So food brought in by boat from Chile to San Francisco has a fairly low impact - better than potatoes trucked in from Idaho.

Which is good news for us, since we eat no red meat, but are addicted to mangoes and coconuts...

Yes We Can

2008-06-03T18:14:00.000-07:00

A leader we can believe in.

Gov Schwarzenegger at the Yale Climate Change Conference

2008-05-26T19:16:00.000-07:00

The Governator says Environmentalism is sexy:

Successful movements are built on passion. They're built on confidence. They're built on Teddy Roosevelt's bully pulpit. They're built on critical mass and often they're built on an element of alarm that galvanizes action.

I believe the environmental movement is switching over from being powered by guilt to being powered by something much more positive, something much more dynamic, something much more capable of bringing about revolutionary change. Its image is also changing from one of hand‑wringing and whining to one that is hip, an image that is cutting edge, forceful and self‑confident and even sexy.

He whines a bit about environmentalists blocking power lines, but for the most part, it's amazing how... well, how the climate has changed. :)

Utah Phillips, 1935-2008

2008-05-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

Utah Phillips has passed away.

He was a hell of a guy, a storyteller, singer, raconteur, and union man.

"Don't mourn, organize"

Here's a piece I did on Utah some twenty years ago...

Labour of Love
Utah Phillips spreads the word – and the ashes – of Joe Hill

By Jeremy Bloom

“If you want to do something good for yourself, go to Utah and get thrown out.”

U. Utah Phillips knows from whence he speaks. In 1968, he got 6,000 votes as the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from Utah (Eldridge Cleaver headed the national ticket as Presidential nominee). For some reason, in 1969 Phillips found himself persona non grata in Mormon Utah.

He left - and ended up becoming a nationally-know (or at least notorious) raconteur, folksinger, and Union activist with the Industrial Workers of the World – aka, “The Wobblies”.

Which was how it happened that he found himself in Washington, DC (“Or Mordor, as we like to call it”) recently, on a special mission to pick up a very unusual parcel: the ashes of Joe Hill.

For those unfamiliar with “The Ballad of Joe Hill,” or the Wobblies, Phillips is glad to explain. After all, stories and songs are his living.

“Joe Hill was executed by the state of Utah, essentially for writing songs,” he says. “He was the Wobbly Bard.”

The IWW was doing organizing up in the silver mines, and the governor of Utah had vowed to break the union. Joe, an organizer as well as a songwriter, was framed on a murder charge and executed.

His final wish: that he be cremated and his ashes scattered in every state but Utah. He is also reputed to have asked his friends to get his body over the state line into Wyoming, so he wouldn’t “be caught dead in Utah.”

(This is trademark Utah Philips: Tell ‘em a story, make ‘em laugh, and then slip in the message.)
Joe’s last request to his friends has become famous: “Don’t mourn, organize”.

It was that business about scattering his ashes, though.

“An extraordinary experience, you know, to have Joe’s ashes in my hand,” he said, simply. “They were so kind to me. The woman down at the National Archive was a mole back in the inner recesses, by name Aloha South. She’d been there 27 years. The ashes were in a little ceramic jar. And there was the torn envelope.”

But what were the ashes of Joe Hill doing in the National Archive? With Aloha South’s help, Phillips was able to piece together the story of the lost, lonely packet.

“We were in the first world war in 1917, and there was a big red scare,” he said. “They passed the Espionage Act June 15, 1917, and the FBI, through the Postmaster General, sent out the word to postmasters all over the country. They got in the habit of taking anything they thought looked suspicious and sending it to the FBI.”

Joe's ashes were parceled out into 47 packets for mailing to to the various states. But one of the packets became torn during the mailing, and the suspicious Chicago postmaster alerted the Feds. Perhaps it was illegal to mail an anarchist over a state line…

The ashes found their way into the National Archive in 1944. Their existence was common knowledge in the archive, but the world outside didn’t find out until last year, when the catalogue was published, and someone noticed and notified the IWW. The last of Joe was rescued from a bureaucratic burial, which left the question: What do with him?

“I really think the ashes ought to go to the farm workers in California”, was Phillips’ opinion. “That’s a living struggle with a superb record, consistent with what Joe and the IWW is about.”

Actually, he had another idea… inspired when an old-timer came up at a concert and asked, "Could you do a couple of lines of ‘Joe Hill’?"

“Well,” said Utah, laughing through his grey Santa Claus beard, "we could get a mirror and a razor blade… don’t tell anyone in my union I said that. They’re a humorless bunch.”

Utah Phillips sings Joe Hill's "There is Power in The Union."

30-story urban farms?

2008-05-19T11:29:00.001-07:00

When I first heard about this idea, I thought it was dumb. With the amount of vacant land available, why bother growing food in skyscrapers? But there may be something to it.

Why build vertical farms in cities? Growing crops in a controlled environment has benefits: no animals to transfer disease through untreated waste; no massive crop failures as a result of weather-related disasters; less likelihood of genetically modified “rogue” strains entering the “natural” plant world. All food could be grown organically, without herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers, eliminating agricultural runoff. And 80 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas by 2050. Cities already have the density and infrastructure needed to support vertical farms, and super-green skyscrapers could supply not just food but energy, creating a truly self-sustaining environment.

I'm particularly sympathetic to the idea of being able to isolate your crops to keep out GMOs and insect pests, having spent enough time in my life picking bugs off spinach, zucchinis and apple trees. Of course, if you ever got an infestation in the kinds of monocultures they would have in these buildings, it would be game over...

Update: Kate Petersen at Politicook sends me to City Farms, a blog about Urban Agriculture (not the skyscraper kind)

Mark Bittman: What's wrong with what we eat

2008-05-18T19:31:00.000-07:00

Mark Bittman, who blogs and writes for that paper in New York, talks about the food situation.

Rant of the week

2008-05-17T17:09:00.001-07:00

"It is not enough to simply question authority. You've gotta speak with it, too."

Bad news for Nuclear Proponents

2008-05-15T23:33:00.000-07:00

It seems that nukes won't be our energy salvation, either.

A new study out of Australia points out a couple of salient facts: There's not that much Uranium available anymore, and gearing up for more power plants would just make the shortage worse. Building more plants and mining the uranium and processing it would generate - of course! - more greenhouse gases.

The researchers' basic assumption of declining uranium jibes with data from the Nuclear Energy Agency and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The agencies have put the total amount of known recoverable uranium reserves at around 3.5 million tons. That accounts for reasonably assured reserves and estimated additional reserves that can be mined at moderate costs.

At the current rate of usage -- around 67,000 tons per year -- those reserves will last for just over 50 years. And that's before any additional nuclear plants are built, reports Friends of the Earth, Australia in this analysis.

McCain is one of those proposing a whole new round of nukes - according to one estimate, even reaching a fraction of his goal, meeting 20% of US needs, would take $250 billion dollars. (And that's just to build the plants, without even addressing the issue of waste)

In contrast, SolveClimate quotes a new Department of Energy Report (PDF) that says we could get to 20% of US needs with wind power by 2030... and all for just $43 billion, the cost of four months of the Iraq war. That seems like a better deal...

Organic Farming Sequesters Carbon

2008-05-14T21:35:00.000-07:00

Could organic farming be one of the major engines in scaling back atmospheric carbon? Rodale Institute CEO Tim LaSalle thinks so:

Simple everyday tasks, such as what food you buy, can either contribute to—or reduce—global warming. Rodale Institute research shows that organically managed soils can store (sequester) more than 1,000 pounds of carbon per acre, while non-organic systems can cause carbon loss. For consumers, this means that the simple act of buying organic products can help to reduce global climate change.

Watch the whole interview...

The Cambist and Lord Iron

2008-05-06T00:49:00.000-07:00

I've been fairly distant from the science fiction world the past few years, but the Hugo nominations are up and one of the short story nominees, The Cambrist and Lord Iron, is a pretty marvelous piece of work. The author, Daniel Abraham, is a fellow alum of the Clarion West Writing Workshop, as well...

The Definition of Insanity: Identified!

2008-04-21T22:01:00.001-07:00

A year or so ago, I was involved in a conversation, and the subject came around to the classic definition of insanity: "Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results."

I've seen it widely quoted, generally attributed to Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein. Back then I did a Google search, and found both those attributions, along with others that stated definitively that it was NOT either Franklin or Einstein. So where did it come from? I shrugged and moved on.

Until today. There was a post on Balloon Juice that once again quoted "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results," attributing it to Franklin.

I guess Wikiquotes has gotten on the case in the time since I last explored this, because someone in the comments was able to direct us to the answer... In fact, the line comes from Rita Mae Brown, in her mystery novel Sudden Death (Bantam Books, New York, 1983, p. 68).

Franklin is one of those classic American "wise men" (ie: Jefferson, Lincoln, Twain) to whom many "pithy" statements often get attributed; attributions without a verifiable source should be treated with some skepticism (Wikiquotes)

So, now we know! Of course, I can't resist noting that once again, lazy intellectuals forget the name of a smart woman and transfer her wisdom to dead white males....

Un-intelligent design

2008-04-11T18:02:00.000-07:00

Ben Stein has a new movie. It's a documentary, sort of, about intelligent design (ID) theory. Cleverly, they're calling it "Expelled" (see, it's a riff on the expulsion from paradise, while whining that the poor ID scientists are being unfairly expelled from intellectual circles - and jobs at academic journals - just because they're propounding "science" that violates every tenet of what science stands for.

Oh, wait. That's not quite the way they put it... according to a review in Scientific American, the main issue was how a pro-ID paper get published in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington without peer review. According to Managing Editor Richard Sternberg, "it was my prerogative to choose the editor who would work directly on the paper, and as I was best qualified among the editors, I chose myself.")

According to Sternberg, "after the publication of the Meyer article the climate changed from being chilly to being outright hostile. Shunned, yes, and discredited." As a result, Sternberg filed a claim against the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) for being "targeted for retaliation and harassment" for his religious beliefs. "I was viewed as an intellectual terrorist," he tells Stein. In August 2005 his claim was rejected. According to Jonathan Coddington, his supervisor at the NMNH, Sternberg was not discriminated against, was never dismissed, and in fact was not even a paid employee, but just an unpaid research associate who had completed his three-year term!

Oh.

And it gets worse from there. Read the whole thing....

Disastrous Farm Bill

2008-04-11T02:19:00.001-07:00

One thing we can do right away about climate change: DO NOT adopt the current version of the farm bill.

How bad is it?

What can we citizens expect if the proposed $300-billion farm bill is signed into law? Federally subsidized feed -- corn, soybeans and cottonseed -- for animal factory farms that spread disease, greenhouse gases and dangerous working conditions wherever they set up shop... The continuation of America's obesity campaign, which ensures the cheapest and most widely available foods are made up of such high-calorie ingredients as high-fructose corn syrup, refined flours, saturated fats and unhealthy meat and dairy products. And more federally backed exports of California's water -- in the form of cotton and rice, mostly sold overseas.

Ironically, when Gingrich's radical free-market Republicans took office in 1994, the bloated farm bill of the day was one of their prime targets. They put together a package that was supposed to increase subsidies temporarily to wean farmers off Uncle Sam's bloated teat.

You can guess how well that worked. Once the subsidy increases were in place, no-one had the political courage to actually do the weaning. The next time the farm bill came up was right after 9/11, and agribusiness used National Security as a catch-all excuse for even BIGGER subsidies (we must secure our food supply!).

Now, with food prices soaring to the highest levels in decades, nobody really thinks farmers need subsidies. But that's not stopping agribusiness from demanding them. And unless we do something, it looks like once again, they're going to get them. It's a great deal. They spread $80 million around in campaign contributions and lobbying costs, and in exchange they get billions and billions of taxpayer dollars.

Al Gore on Climate Change at TED

2008-04-09T15:17:00.000-07:00

Al Gore gives yet another great talk on climate change...

Disproving Climate Deniers: It's not the sun

2008-04-04T00:04:00.000-07:00

One of the favorite arguments of the Climate Change Deniers is that we don't have any effect on Earth's climate - it's mostly the sun.

So it's big news when Lancaster University scientists report "there has been no significant link... in the last 20 years."
Scientists have produced further compelling evidence showing that modern-day climate change is not caused by changes in the Sun's activity...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its vast assessment of climate science last year, concluded that since temperatures began rising rapidly in the 1970s, the contribution of humankind's greenhouse gas emissions has outweighed that of solar variability by a factor of about 13 to one.

According to Terry Sloan, the message coming from his research is simple.

"We tried to corroborate Svensmark's hypothesis, but we could not; as far as we can see, he has no reason to challenge the IPCC - the IPCC has got it right.

As climate warms, species shift

2008-03-20T12:19:00.002-07:00

Yellowstone is changing, as warmer weather encourages Canada Thistle to move in. Pocket gophers feed on the roots, and grizzlies feed on both the roots and the pocket gophers.

As climate change alters ecosystems, Dr. Crabtree said, “the winners are going to be the adaptive foragers, like grizzlies that eat everything from ants to moose, and the losers are going to be specialized species that can’t adapt.”

He said one specialized declining species was the long-tailed weasel. It feeds primarily on voles, which are also declining. The changes in the Lamar Valley might point to a new approach for invasive species, which are overwhelming many natural systems. “Invasives are the single biggest threat to biodiversity,” Dr. Crabtree said.

In another example of species shift, ecosystems are moving higher and higher up the mountains of Vermont as the climate warms:

We resurveyed forest plots established in 1964 along elevation transects in the Green Mountains (Vermont) to examine whether a shift had occurred in the location of the northern hardwood–boreal forest ecotone (NBE) from 1964 to 2004. We found a 19% increase in dominance of northern hardwoods from 70% in 1964 to 89% in 2004 in the lower half of the NBE... Our results indicate that high-elevation forests may be jeopardized by climate change sooner than anticipated.

Arctic Sea Ice - More Bad News

2008-03-20T12:19:00.001-07:00

Although it's been a particularly cold winter (thanks to a strong La Nina system in the Pacific), arctic ice is thinner and younger than ever before (no surprise, since we had a record melt last summer).

According to Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as ice ages it continues to grow and thicken, so that older ice is generally also thicker ice. This winter the ice cover is much thinner overall and thus in a more vulnerable state heading into the summer melt season.

"It's becoming thinner and thinner and much more susceptible to melting during the summer - much more likely to melt away. It may look OK on the surface, but it's like looking at a Hollywood movie set - you see the facade of a building and it looks OK, but if you look behind it, there's no building there," said Meier.

Tilting Windmills

2008-03-18T23:27:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from 3rings)

Wind power has been part of the energy landscape for thousands of years. But in the nuclear era, it was viewed as quaint - “Tilting at windmills” became a metaphor for fighting hopeless battles against the forces of change. Mind you, Helix Wind of San Diego does come off a bit quixotic in their corporate philosophy: “Freedom is at the heart of our values – energy independence and autonomy – a freedom fueled by a resource that never runs out. The wind.”

But this ain’t Cervantes’ windmill. Not only is their Savonius more efficient, simpler to set up and less expensive to buy than your average model - it’s also flipping gorgeous. When I saw this sleek, nautilus spiral at the Wired NextFest, it took my breath away.

The key to the design: vertical orientation, which eliminates a lot of traditional windmill issues. When folks apply for zoning variances to install wind power, they’re nearly always battled by neighbors who say (quite rightly) that windmills are ugly, noisy, obtrusive, and dangerous to birds and other wildlife.

All of those problems are eliminated in the Savonius. Instead of horizontal propeller-like blades with tips that spin at very high speed (noisy!), and must therefore be set very high above the ground (dangerous!), the Savonius spins vertically, with no more noise than wind blowing through the trees, on a pole (no tower) that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Oh, bird-lovers should note that at the low speeds the Savonius spins, you never have to worry about it taking on that translucent look that encourages birds to try to fly through it…

The Savonius currently comes in two configurations: 1 kw for residential applications, which stands 9’ feet tall by 4’ feet in diameter (2.74m x 1.21m). The commercial turbine, the Helix 2 kw measures 12’ feet in height by 4’ feet in diameter, (3.6m x 1.21m).

And there are rebates - if you live in California, the state will cover up to 77 percent of the cost; other states are coming on board, as well. Helix Wind even has a calculator function on the website to help you work out the financials.

But we shouldn’t worry about such Philistine considerations… what, after all, is the true price of beauty?

Paperless Gypsum Board?

2008-03-13T01:14:00.000-07:00

(Crossposted at 3rings)

Who wants to breathe mold?

There’s been a growing awareness of indoor air quality, with the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) estimating that 10 percent of Americans are directly allergic to mold.That’s about 30 million people who can potentially be sickened just by walking into a building. Mold is an even bigger concern for at-risk populations, like children (it’s estimated that mold exposure doubles a child’s chance of developing asthma), the elderly, or those already sick.

It turns out mold’s major foothold comes in wallboard, and in particular the organic paper cladding, which in damp environments can provide the perfect home for mold to thrive in. This is why the Oakland children’s hospital went with DensArmor Plus paperless drywall from Georgia Pacific.

Instead of paper, the panels feature a glass-mat surface on both the front and back, plus additional moisture-resistance features. DensArmor Plus® scored a 10, the highest level of performance for mold resistance, under ASTM D 3273 testing.

The panels are recommended for all interior uses, but are especially useful in environments that might be exposed to moisture, including bathrooms, kitchens, and basements, in both residential and commercial settings. And moisture can be a problem anywhere: Georgia Pacific points out that “In today’s tightly sealed structures, inner wall cavities present ideal growth opportunities for mold, simply because of the moisture concentration, the lack of air circulation and the temperature differential from one side of the wall to the other. Thus, mold’s greatest potential for growth is out of sight.”

There are a couple of additional benefits. Because of its low emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), DensArmor Plus® is the first, and so far the only, gypsum drywall to be GREENGUARD Indoor Air Quality Certified®. It also received GREENGUARD Children & Schools Certification, for a product that can help reduce exposure of schoolchildren to indoor air pollutants, which means use of DensArmor Plus® gives LEED certification points two separate ways in school construction.

Another benefit: it’s so moisture-resistant that Georgia Pacific offers a 90-day in-place warranty against exposure damage, meaning wallboard can start going up even before the building is completely closed in. Imagine how much help that can be on a tight construction schedule!

Biofuels: "Worse than we thought"

2008-02-14T12:36:00.000-08:00

The word has been trickling out that the latest attempt by big energy to jump on the green bandwagon is, in fact, an environmental disaster.

Via Kevin Drum, biofuels guru Mike O'Hare says recent studies have shown that, once you take all the factors into account, corn-based ethanol and similar fuels actually dump much more CO2 into the environment.

There is now more than good reason to expect that no biofuel from seeds, possibly none (even cellulosic) grown on land that could grow food, will reduce global warming if substituted for petroleum products...

(There's more...)

The first piece of the puzzle is the recognition that if a piece of forest is cut down, or natural grassland plowed up, to grow biofuel, decay and/or burning of what was there before releases an enormous puff of carbon into the atmosphere that needs to be counted along with the carbon releases of the biofuel crop. Even spreading the initial release over decades of biofuel growing, it is large enough to push almost any biofuel's global warming intensity way above that of gasoline, especially because it all occurs right at the beginning of the future rather than a few years or decades down the line...

Small amounts of diesel and ethanol will probably be available from trash and agricultural waste like the tree branches and bark scraps the logging industry leaves around to decay, or cornstalks, or McDonald's used frying oil, and these are environmentally OK because they don't induce land use conversion....And many smart folks in this business expect that algae growing in tanks in the desert (for example) can eventually be taught to make a lot of diesel cheap, with no land use implications. But for now, and for a while, biofuels generally are going over a very rough patch of road, a patch that may go on for years before new technologies smooths it out again.

Sounds Strange Department

2008-02-14T00:18:00.000-08:00

"If music be the food of love... veg on!"
Why not a vegetable orchestra?

Onigiri

2008-02-12T17:05:00.000-08:00

More good eats from Lyra's blog. We served these up at our Oscar-nominated film marathon and potluck over the weekend.

Writers Strike: The End

2008-02-11T20:48:00.000-08:00

It looks like the writers strike is over. Niki Fink reports (extensively!) at DeadlineHollywood:

At the WGA's news conference today, union leaders declared the new contract is "a huge victory for us". Trumpeted WGAW President Patric Verrone, "This is the first time we actually got a better deal in a new media than previously." Verrone credited News Corp. No. 2 Peter Chernin and Disney chief Bob Iger, and also CBS boss Les Moonves, with "being instrumental in making this deal happen" after the WGA spent 3 months "getting nowhere" with the AMPTP negotiators and lawyers. WGA negotiating committee chief John Bowman added that, "What happened to the Golden Globes was instrumental in getting the CEOs to this table. It was a huge symbol." Bowman said it was "imperative" that the WGA "get in on the ground floor of New Media. Henceforth, we're in from the start. It's 2% of distributor's gross. They can't have a business model without taking that into account."

(There's more...)

Verrone said, "Since we began negotiations in July, we've been saying, 'If they get paid, we get paid.' This contract makes that a reality. It's the best deal this Guild has bargained for in 30 years after the most successful strike this Guild has waged in 35 years. It was arguably the most successful strike in the American labor movement in a decade, clearly the most important of this young century. It is not all that we hoped for, and not all that we deserved. But as I told our members, this strike was about the future, and this deal assures for us and for future generations of writers a share in the future..."

Verrone said it was "heartbreaking for me personally" to drop the WGA's demands relating to reality and animation (Verrone is an animation writer) "But it was more important that we make a deal that benefitted the membership and the town as a whole and got people back to work." Verrone stated that "The legacy of the '88 strike was the ability of the companies to develop content without writers and creators. The legacy of this strike will be the ability of writers and creators to develop content without the companies. We are making deals, and we will continue to make deals, with Google, Yahoo, and others beyond just the 7 conglomerates."

People Power

2008-02-11T18:25:00.000-08:00

More cool toys...

First, it was the flashlight you charged up by shaking it a few times. Never again to frantically search for batteries by candlelight when the power goes out...

Now, scientists at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University are developing a knee-brace that charges up electronics as you walk.

Max Donelan's team's work has spawned a startup called Bionic Power, which has received seed investment but no rounds of venture capital. Donelan told Wired.com that their initial markets were "people whose lives depend on portable power." These off-grid power users include backwoods hikers and the military, which is always looking for ways to reduce energy usage. Donelan called soldier battery use "astonishing," noting that soldiers can pack 30 pounds of batteries for a 24-hour mission. All those batteries add up to an equally astonishing $57,000 per soldier per year in battery costs.

They've got a video up explaining the core technology... worth checking out.

(Image courtesy Simon Fraser University)

No, He Can't

2008-02-09T12:59:00.000-08:00

Parody is the sincerest form of mockery...

No more Polaroids

2008-02-08T18:20:00.000-08:00

Technology marches on.

Polaroid instant photography was the coolest thing, back in the day... No waiting!

But now we live in an even more instant age, and I can take better pictures with my phone.

So... Polaroid has announced that it will no longer be manufacturing film. They dropped their instant camera manufacturing last year. Sensibly, they'll be focusing on digital photography.

Cupcakes Can Be Healthy, Too

2008-02-05T13:06:00.000-08:00

More gluten-free goodness from Lyra.

Not only did she make these chocolate chip cupcakes gluten-free, but she used coconut milk instead of butter or oil. My god, they are rich and tasty....

Experience vs Inspiration

2008-02-04T15:20:00.000-08:00

For years, the Democratic Party has nominated good, experienced candidates - who failed to inspire.

Mondale: Strong on substance, wooden in inspiration
Dukakis: Strong on substance, wooden
Clinton: Yes! Inspiration!
Gore: Incredibly strong on substance, inspirational in real life, put in a lock-box by his consultants and mocked mercilessly by the media
Kerry: You get the picture.

Reagan got people to cross over and vote for him despite their disagreeing with him on policy. He inspired.

We know that on issue after issue, from abortion to economics to Iraq to torture, the majority of Americans actually agree with us.

Wouldn't it be nice for a change to nominate someone who inspires people to vote for the candidate they actually agree with?

(There's more...)

I've been pretty much an Edwards supporter since 2004. I still think the wrong guy was at the head of the ticket that year.

With Edwards out, I've had to take a good look at the remaining choices. And it seems to come down to a choice: Experience vs Inspiration. "Ready on Day 1" vs "Yes We Can".

Now we have a choice between Clinton II, who we already know will not inspire the opposition to cross the line and vote for her.

And we have Obama.

Substance? The man is a sitting US Senator who, before being elected to public office was involved in grassroots community organizing. He's not the cypher some would like to make him out to be.

Governors have an executive advantage, of course. Bill Clinton was a governor who had put through policy initiatives in a small state. But it was not his policies and initiatives that made him Presidential timber, but his inspirational ability

Bill Richardson is out of the race, despite having a great resume, because he is not a great communicator.

You select a plumber based on "substance" because you know he's the guy with his hands on the pipes. You can choose a guy for CEO based as much on inspiration as on resume, because the CEO sets direction. For everything else, you have managers and bookkeepers.

It's the same with a President. We've seen time and again Democrats put forward proposals that are just and fair and far-reaching, only to have them shot down because we couldn't build a coalition of support behind it.

After years of nominating guys with good resumes who went down in flames in the general election, I'd like to see someone inspirational get the nomination.

"Nothing's Gonna Change My World"

2008-02-03T16:11:00.000-08:00

What a great song. And what a wonderful idea...

NASA beams Beatles' song into space

The Beatles' song Across the Universe will be the first ever to be beamed directly into space next week, NASA said.

Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney said it was an "amazing" achievement and John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono called it the "beginning of a new age".

The transmission of the song over the space agency's Deep Space Network on Monday will mark the 40th anniversary of the day the band recorded the song.

The song will be aimed at the North Star, Polaris, 431 light years away from Earth, and it will travel across the universe at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, NASA said.

In a message to the space agency, Sir Paul said: "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul."

Car Culture and Cul de Sacs

2008-02-02T00:17:00.000-08:00

James Howard Kunstler has been one of America's leading curmudgeons for the past 20 years. He was in Vancouver last week, spreading his iconoclastic (or perhaps "autonoclastic") notions that we are at the end of the era he calls "Happy Motoring" and entering the twighlight struggle of "The Long Emergency".

His weekly posts at Clusterfuck Nation are must-reads for anyone who is worried about the current state of America and the world - that is, anyone who has been paying attention.

What's scary about this interview is: It's from 13 years ago. And nothing has changed - the situation has only gotten more critical.

James Howard Kunstler and
The Geography of Nowhere.
Interview with Jeremy Bloom

"Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading...."

Thus, James Howard ("Jimmy") Kunstler begins his new volume, "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-made Landscape." A pithy, gutsy volume that pulls no punches, "Nowhere" develops the idea that the lack of community we feel in America today is, in large measure, because we have failed to build communities.

By looking at how our towns and cities grew - from Long Island to Detroit to Disneyland - Kunstler is doing more than the proverbial "talking about the weather" of our urban environment; he is attempting to do something about it. He points out what he thinks are the mistakes that were made, and also looks to the future with some hopeful changes, some of which are already in motion. It's an important issue: important enough that "The New York Times" has run reviews of "The Geography of Nowhere" in both the Book Review and the regular daily Times, as well as running an Op-ed Page piece by Kunstler.

We chatted with him on a warm summer day, sitting on the wide, carnival-painted porch of his Victorian Saratoga Springs house. Holding a glass of frosty iced tea in one hand, he contemplates the cover of "The Geography of Nowhere," with its pictured vista of Long Island's suburban sprawl.

J.H.K.: I wanted to call the book "Why America is So Fucking Ugly," but my publisher and I settled on "The Geography of Nowhere"

(There's more...)

JB: So we're nowhere, and it's ugly. How did we get here?

J.H.K.: We had an incredible imperial boom from to '50s to the '70s. The Interstate Highway System was going up, everyone was getting a new house with an FHA mortgage. People were making money off this stuff and the horizon seemed limitless. Very few people were thinking of the consequences - and particularly the unforseen repercussions, the hidden costs.

We have done incredible damage to our culture, to our spiritual life in this country, and our civic life. To any notion of the common good.

It boils down to this: we build too many places that are not worth caring about, and we've destroyed our civic life in the process. If we're going to continue to be a viable civilization, we're going to have to build places we can care about - and if we do that, we will enjoy civic life once again.

All these things may seem to be abstractions, but they are no more abstract than, for instance, the concept of justice - which is very important to Americans.

There are some ideals that we are going to have to pay attention to that are different from the ones we've been looking at over the last 20 years.

JB: But this is very abstract and complex: we're talking here of a juxtaposition of questions of natural law, aesthetics, as well as questions of efficiency and economics questions....

J.H.K.: Most people think of this problem only in terms of aesthetics. They drive down some gruesome commercial strip like Central Avenue in Albany, and they go "ewwww, yuck..."

JB: If they notice it at all.

J.H.K.: I think they notice it. And I think they are quite justified in feeling that way. But the outward appearance of our landscape is just a manifestation of deeper problems. And I wanted to find out what they are.

We once had a sense of a community as a functioning, living organism, made up of many other functioning, living things. It's places where people live, where people do business, where people enjoy public gatherings - all these places that used to comprise our civic life.

When we look at these gruesome highway strips and go "yuck" and "bleah,' and our stomachs turn, what it finally comes down to is an apprehension that we have thrown our civic life away, and that's what people feel.

JB: And do you blame the automobile for that loss?

J.H.K.: The automobile has played a very large part in that destructive process, but it's not the only thing. There have been some reviews of the book that have suggested that it is only about the effects of the automobile on the landscape, and that's not true.

(He pauses for a moment, takes a sip of ice tea, gathers his thoughts.)

The troubled townscapes and landscapes that we have created are manifestations of our economic predicament. We have come to the end of a 50-year-long, abnormal war-time boom economy. First it was the hot war economy, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and in between it was the Cold War economy.

From 1945 until the early 70's we could sell any product that we made to any country in the world, because after WWII all the advanced nations were either bankrupt or bombed into ruins.

Japan and Germany weren't going to try selling us cars in the 1950s. But then other countries started to catch up, and in the mid-'70s the Japanese started to successfully compete against our biggest industry: the car industry. Now, the industrial jobs that gave our workers the highest standard of living in the
world are simply gone, and they're not coming back.

So the economy we face in the next 50 years is not going to be the same as it was for the past 50. It is not going to be based on people driving around to the malls buying Guns and Roses posters and plastic trolls.

JB: But how was the "destruction of our civic life," as you put it, the consequence of that boom?

J.H.K.: Unintended consequences. One of the great tragedies of our times is that the great bustling middle class - that used to be out in the public realm fomenting ideas and meeting each other and being involved in cultural life - are the ones who abandoned the cities and are locked in their suburban houses.

The analogue to that is the way we have eliminated the merchant classes from our towns. This has been a great tragedy, because the merchants in small towns and in cities were the people who supported all the civic institutions. They were the people who sat on the library boards and on the school boards, and sponsored the little league teams. We threw them into the garbage cans so we could have K-Marts, where we could buy a microwave oven for $9 less than we would have been charged in a locally-owned store.

People are paying $9 less for their microwave oven, but they're losing a lot more than $9 in public amenity in the process.

JB: How did that happen?

J.H.K.: Mass merchandising in America came about because we have cheap transportation. Truckers pay less for gas in America than they do anywhere else in the world, period. As long as that's the case, you can have huge mass-merchandising corporations that can rationalize their operation. You can't do that in Italy, where gas is $4.50 a gallon and it costs $30 in tolls to drive
100 miles. You couldn't be trucking around 5 tons of trolls every day if the government didn't subsidize the highway system.

I'm not saying this was even avoidable. But what I think is really pathetic is the way people in the towns behaved contrary to their best interests. All the little Rotary Club boosters would do everything they could to get the K-Mart to come to town, and then they would stand there scratching their heads when all their fellow small-businessmen went out of business.

We see this in Saratoga. In 1974 they had a special supplement in the Sunday newspaper that was put together by the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, promoting the hell out of the new Pyramid Mall that was about to open here, and what a wonderful thing it was going to be, and what a wonderful adjunct to downtown Saratoga it was going to be. Well, 98 percent of the stores that existed in downtown Saratoga when the mall opened are gone now.

JB: In "The Geography of Nowhere," you take an in-depth look at the destruction of mass transit in this country, and the corollary that Detroit was given a chance to build smaller and more efficient cars when the oil embargo hit in 1973 with the oil embargo, and basically...

J.H.K.: They blew it.

JB: Or didn't see the possibility that things would change. We tend to look at the life we have, the economic environment we have as being inevitable, a "natural order"....

J.H.K.: Or maybe people are like fish, they don't question the water that they swim in. Our everyday environment is the water that we swim in.

JB: But in fact there were several economic choices that were made that could have gone a different way, with different results. For example, greater reliance on alternate fuels, or electric cars....

J.H.K.: Changing the fueling of the cars isn't going to help the trouble we have with the way places and people relate; it's only going to make the problems worse.

The question really isn't whether we're going to have solar cars, electric cars, propane cars - look, we're going to continue to have cars, I've been misquoted in some newspaper reviews as having said that the automobile is going to disappear; I never said anything of the kind. I do think we're going to have less automobiles in the future, and fewer people are going to be able to own them.

But to try to solve the problem by inventing a different kind of automobile is not going to happen, and it's not going to work, so we might as well forget it. We can get a lot more value out of redesigning the human habitat to get places that are worth living in, without having to redesign the automobile. No amount of redesigning the automobile will give us our civic life back.

JB: You comment in the book about Greenfield Villlage, Henry Ford's "old time Main Street U.S.A." park, and the fact that people visiting there like it very much, but can't quite put their fingers on why it feels good. Americans seem to instinctively like the old Main Street with its shops - and no parking lots full of cars - but somehow, it's not what we ended up with.

J.H.K.: People know what they like, know how to make a good town. The problem right now is that their instincts and their longings are in direct opposition to their building practices, laws and regulations.

JB: In the book, you talk about zoning as a prime villain....

J.H.K.: We invented zoning at the turn of the century, and it was a good idea - that all these factories and their noxious pollutants should go to their own part of the city and be dirty and smelly and noisy over there where they won't harm property values.

JB: Maybe this points a finger at one of the roots of our trouble: rather than deal with a problem, we've tended to just put it somewhere else and pretend it's not there. "Out of sight, out of mind;" put all the obnoxious activities where they'll bother someone else.

J.H.K.: And after WWII we decided that shopping was also an obnoxious activity and we weren't going to let people live around shopping either.

Zoning created the strip mall - which was an obnoxious place to shop. For 5,000 years people built their towns in a different way: You had stores on the first floor, and you had other activities up above; people living, offices, other activities all mixed together. That is the basic pattern for the basic American small town, and it's not a bad pattern. The ironic thing is, people wonder why small towns don't feel like small towns anymore - it's because their laws tell them they can't build them like small towns.

If you look around America, you will notice a curious thing: Every strip mall is one story high. We have an affordable housing crisis in this country, and one of the reasons for that is that we haven't been building any cheap housing for 50 years. We haven't been building any houses over stores.

The only kind of housing we've allowed people to build, for the most part are single family dwellings.

JB: But where did that idea come from, that it's "inhumane" to let people live over stores?

J.H.K.: I don't know. I do think it's funny that we think it's inhumane to allow people to live over a plant store. We also think its inhumane to have grocery stores in housing developments. I don't think I've ever seen a housing development in America that actually has a corner store right in the
development. And most of the people would probably greet the idea with loathing at first glance.

JB: But that makes sense - as you point out, the set-back requirements and lighting requirements would drop that corner store into the middle of a sea of asphalt and all-night mercury-vapor lighting; not exactly a pleasant neighbor.

J.H.K.: But you shouldn't have to have the mercury-vapor lights; you could even live without the parking lot. We have corner stores in the old neighborhoods in Saratoga, and they don't have parking lots, and they function very well, the people who operate them seem to be able to make a decent living. So it can be done. It's a matter of changing the zoning.

JB: In the book, you mentioned one strip mall in the Massachusetts town of Mashpee that had been converted into more of a "town center" sort of place....

J.H.K.: Yes. they took this one-story strip-mall with its sea of asphalt and built apartments on the second floor, took the parking lot and turned it into a street by putting stuff on the other side of it, and infilling it.

By observing a few good rules of urbanism, they took a place that looks like nowhere and turned it into a place that looks like somewhere.

JB: What rules are those?

J.H.K.: Well, for example, in order for a place to have any civic vitality, any life, it really helps if you have people living there. You go to a strip mall at night and it's a dead place; you go to a live downtown at night, like Saratoga, and there are people around. There are shops on the ground floor, they come out to the sidewalk - the rules are really simple. The trouble is they've been zoned out of existence, except in places that are essentially antiques.

JB: Like Woodstock, Vermont.

J.H.K.: Yeah, or any of the places I've mentioned in the book. You go to Georgetown (D.C.) and Beacon Hill (Boston), and people like to be in those places. They recognize the good relationships between things, instinctively. They know that they feel a sense of community there because they can see how nice it would be to be able to walk down that flight of stairs and out onto the street and buy a newspaper, and then go back for breakfast, or go down the street to a corner tavern and have a beer, or actually know the person that you are buying your meat from.

The other way of living is artificial, created by accident, by zoning and government policies, and as long as it's economically feasible for people to maintain this status quo, they are going to. My point is that it isn't going to be economically feasible much longer, because of the hidden costs.

Something that no one seems to think about: Every little town and hamlet in America has to bear the expense of operating a mass transit line that runs only twice a day, and only for people under 18. It's called "a school bus fleet." The costs of these things are immense - we're talking about millions of dollars for every small town in the country. And they sit around most of the day.

The tragic thing is, there's no reason on earth that they couldn't use some of those vehicles the rest of the day for public transport, but they don't. We need to rethink some of these "settled" issues. We're going to have to unsettle them, or we're never going to have decent towns in America.

When Robert Moses built his highway out to Jones Beach in the 1920s, he made the overpasses too short for busses to get under, because he didn't want that class of people coming out to Jones Beach. He wanted only the people who could afford cars - in short, he was a snob.

We do an interesting thing in this country. We pretend that we're the most egalitarian country on Earth. And yet, no other country segregates its people and its activities by category as rigidly as we do. People who make less than $12,000 must live in this concrete can we call public housing; We can't have any shopping or any places where people work around places where they live. So everything is disconnected.

That's not the way it used to be, when poor people lived right around the corner, or right upstairs, from middle-class people, when all the children walked to school together and played together.

We pay a lot of lip service to being a democracy, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it, we really don't allow democracy to exist.

We don't want to live around people who are different. Forget racism - even white people don't want to live around white people who make less money than they do.

JB: One of the standard arguments against the kind of planning that you advocate is that "Americans won't stand for that kind of government interference in business and private property". But you seem to be saying that, in fact, most of the current situation is precisely because of government interference in business decisions, from zoning restrictions to FHA- subsidizing suburban tract-housing and government-subsidizing highways.

J.H.K.: Absolutely. And a few people have benefitted from, for instance, the government giving them insurance on their beach houses.

I had an interview with a very interesting man named John DeGrove, who is a professor at Florida Atlantic University and a major player in the revolutionary new land-planning stuff that's going on down there - They now have what is called a concurrency law, which requires the developers to do all the infrastructure work before they put in the development, so they can't just plop the houses down and then say to the county, "Okay, here's 7,000 new people, build schools for them." Now the developers have to do that, put in sewer lines, and do all the other things that were bankrupting municipalities. And as a consequence you don't have the same kind of development you had before.

The government has not only subsidized a lot of bad building, it has subsidized bad ideas about building.

JB: So, as long as there is still money to be made, what's going to change that?

J.H.K.: It's changing already. The Federal government is bankrupt. The chickens are coming home to roost now. We've out $500 billion from the savings and loan debacle; we're out several billion dollars from Hurricane Andrew, and that's probably just the first of many high-price disasters we're going to suffer in the decade ahead.

In an economy with less money sloshing around, it's not going to be possible to say "Go ahead, build your development on the beach, if anything goes wrong the government will pay for it again." So far we've postponed the reckoning by rolling over the debt. But we can't keep doing it forever.

JB: And yet you are not - despite what some critics have said - a "zero-growth" advocate either.

J.H.K.: The question is not whether we're going to have development or not - we're going to have it. But the development issues of the next decade are going to be different.

What we have been doing in America has been to take the functions of town life and smearing them all over the countryside. This has two consequences: It ruins the countryside, and it impairs and damages the life of our towns.

I think of development in a different way. A town is like an organism: it grows or it dies. The question is, HOW does it grow. Where does the development belong? And we're going to have to rethink that question.

The towns that people like best are the towns that are pedestrian-oriented, but we have built an infrastructure that will only serve motorists. When we discover that our life, based on motoring, is bankrupting us, we are going to build a different kind of environment.

Yes We Can

2008-02-01T14:50:00.000-08:00

I've come around to Obama.

In part, this video is why. The man is an inspiration. And we need that in these times.

The War Grinds On

2008-01-31T12:53:00.000-08:00

(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)

When he graduated from Brooks Secondary School in 2003 and joined the Canadian Armed Forces, Gord Hoffman knew there was a good chance he would be deployed on a mission somewhere in the world. It's one of the things for which the Canadian military is known.

Sometime next month, Hoffman and elements of his unit, the 1 Service Battalion in Edmonton, Alberta, will be shipping out to Afghanistan as part of the national support element. Exact dates and details can't be revealed for security reasons.

(More...)
"I'll be supporting our mission," said Hoffman. "I'm a mobile support equipment operator by trade, which basically means I'm a driver for any number of vehicles that we have over there, including the 16-tonne pallet-loading system, the new armoured heavy-support vehicle system, and the tracked light-armoured vehicle."

Hoffman is one of two Powell Riverites in current deployment. Darryl Hansen, who graduated from Max Cameron Secondary School in 2000, is also going as a driver with the national support element.

"This is my first time overseas," said Hansen. "We'll be patrolling, peacekeeping. We've done a large amount of training and I think we're mentally prepared and ready to go."

Hoffman likewise emphasized the intensity of the training he's been receiving. "We've had a lot of cultural awareness briefings, lessons learned from previous tours," he said. "They've figured out what works best and we're learning from their experience. We've got corporals from the 5 Service Battalion training us based on what they saw there. We're getting a variety of different scenarios, from practice patrols, to improvised explosive devices (IEDs), anything we might encounter in the theatre of war."

When he was in school, Hoffman worked his way up through Junior Forest Wardens and army cadets, and he said that joining Canadian forces seemed like the next logical step. He also worked for several years as a carrier for the Peak.

"I don't get back to Powell River enough," he said. "Being based in Edmonton, I miss the mountains and the ocean. There will be mountains where I'm going in Afghanistan, but not as much rain as in Powell River."

Both Hoffman and Hansen will be leaving wives behind for the six or seven months of their deployments. "It'll be tough," said Hansen. "But I think my wife and I are both mentally prepared for it. We can keep in touch by email."

Hoffman will also be separated from his one-year-old son, Alex. "It'll be hard," he said.

Jim Hoffman, Gord's father, said it took him a little while to get used to the idea of his son going to Afghanistan, both as a parent and as a patriot. Their deployment comes at a difficult time for the mission. There has been increased activity by the Taliban, and last week involved both the death of the 78th Canadian service person, and the release of a report by former federal Liberal cabinet member John Manley, calling for a re-evaluation of Canada's involvement.

"He loves the job, loves the work," Jim Hoffman said. "But I'm not really comfortable with the mission. I don't think they're really there for peacekeeping. There've been too many boys killed."

Hansen said it's all part of the job. "I'm excited to go, proud to serve my country, and I'm looking forward to it."

Totally Stokes

2008-01-30T13:17:00.000-08:00

(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)

Composer Tobin Stokes is used to working across multiple genres.

The former Powell River resident has composed classical music, choral and scores for film and television. But the score he wrote last year for the miniseries Captain Cook, Obsession and Discovery, really pushed the envelope.

"It took everything," said Stokes. "Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii and Canada each has its own aboriginal music that had to be incorporated. And of course Cook started in England, so the producers wanted to have music by Johann Christian Bach worked in, much more formal."

(There's more...)

He said it's tricky balancing that many different styles and influences, but it makes for a wonderful challenge.

"The show needs to be congealing through the music," said Stokes. "So I take each of those influences and try to build it into the overall plan. What's interesting about Cook is that in the third voyage he starts to fall apart. So I took all the themes I'd developed in the first episodes and deconstructed them in strange ways. It was a lot of fun."

The miniseries has already aired on Australian Television, earning rave reviews, an audience of more than one million viewers, and several awards. In Canada, episodes one and two will air back-to-back on History Television at 8 pm and 9 pm on Tuesday, February 19, and episodes three and four will air at 8 and 9 pm on Tuesday, February 26.

Those familiar with Stokes' work will not be surprised to learn that the score involved choral music. Growing up in Powell River, Stokes was an active participant in the International Choral Kathaumixw festivals, which have been a major influence on his life and work.

And he, in turn, has been a major influence on the festival. His composition, The Spacious Firmament, is sung by a thousand-voice choir at each Kathaumixw's opening and closing ceremonies.

"Choral is my favorite form of music," he said. "I think when a person is singing, they're using their own instrument. The music goes right from brain, to voice, out into the air, and then to the ears of the audience. So, it's the purest form and it gives me so much satisfaction."

His original plan for the Captain Cook score had been to record the choral sections with the Powell River Academy Chamber Singers. "They have the facilities and a great choir that can learn stuff on the spot," he said. "They're very adaptable and eager, and wonderful to work with. Unfortunately, the scheduling didn't work out."

It's been a very busy year for Stokes. Apart from the Captain Cook project, he also scored the film http://www.mountainsidefilms.com/savingluna/, about an orphaned orca that lived in the Gold River area. The film will be shown at the Powell River Film Festival at 12:30 pm on Friday, February 8.

"My score features some of the same singers and some of the same aboriginal people as the Captain Cook series did," said Stokes.

He also had a piano concerto to compose for a world premiere with the Victoria Symphony on November 26, 2007. "With delays in the Captain Cook series, I barely managed to finish it in time," he said.

The production company liked his score for Captain Cook so much that they've brought him on board for its next project, a miniseries about another sailing scientist, Charles Darwin. Stokes is also scoring a documentary about famous Canadian photographer Ted Grant.

His next big project is an opera.

"It's about the first Europeans coming to Nootka, to Vancouver Island," he said. "I'm not sure yet, but somehow we're going to present some of it at Kathaumixw."

Battered Eagles

2008-01-28T13:11:00.000-08:00

(Originally printed in the Powell River Peak)

After two weeks in rehabilitation at the Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society in Courtenay, a wayward bald eagle was returned to Texada Island and released.

John Whitehead found the eagle on his property in the Oasis area north of Gillies Bay. "There were a few eagles hanging around in the area before Christmas," he said. "When I got home after Christmas I found this one in the backyard, hopping around, unable to fly."

(There's more...)

He said he called the Powell River conservation officer service, but was told there were no officers available in the area, and he should try the Powell River SPCA. He contacted volunteer branch manager Audrey Hill, who quickly arranged for local volunteers to get there with a transport cage.

"I was right on the scene," said volunteer Micheline Macauley. "I live right next door."

Joined by volunteers Cheryl Nyl and Elaine Purgavie, Macauley and Whitehead set about the daunting task of capturing a bald eagle.

"It wasn't easy," said Whitehead. "We got a blanket over him, and got a hold of his talons. But even though he was wrapped in the blanket his head was still out, and I didn't know if I was going to get an eye pecked out. I got my coat off and over his head, and we got him into the kennel. He wasn't happy, but he didn't get overly excited."

After a preliminary examination by local veterinarian Dr. Brian Barnes, of Westview Veterinary Hospital, BC Ferries gave the eagle a free ride to the Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society.

Mary Jane Birch, wildlife rehabilitator and manager of the society, said fortunately, there were only minor injuries. "There were no broken bones or major lacerations," she said. "But he was thin and wet and cold, and was found down on the ground, so that's never a good sign."

She said it was possible that the eagle may have fought with another eagle, as winter is hard on all wildlife, with strong winds, harsh weather and disrupted food supply. "There's competition over food, over territory and mates," she said. "We gave him lots of food, vitamins, and some rest and relaxation. That seems to have done it."

After two more free ferry rides on Tuesday, January 22, the bird was returned to Whitehead's property and released.

"He hopped right out," Macauley said. "He looked around, flew up into a low tree and rested for a bit. Then he just took off. It was beautiful to see."

Hill said this is the fourth eagle the SPCA has assisted this winter, which is unusual. "We've had about nine eagles in the 14 years I've been here." she said. "We captured one on Savary Island two weeks ago, but he was too badly injured, probably by the storm, and didn't make it."

Fries With That

2008-01-27T13:05:00.000-08:00

(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)

When inventor Rudolf Diesel demonstrated his distinctive engine in the early years of the 20th century, it ran on peanut oil, not petroleum.

It took nearly 100 years, but local resident Kevin Egan said he is part of a worldwide movement to return to the original plan for the diesel engine, and switch over from fossil fuels to sustainable fuels.

He pointed out that local restaurants treat used vegetable oil as a messy waste product. "The restaurants are paying people to get rid of it, and the resources to haul it away are wasted," he said. "Instead, we could be using it as fuel."

(There's more...)

Egan, whose background is in organic chemistry and petroleum technology, worked for years for Shaw Cable. But a year ago he had neck surgery to fuse three vertebrae and he's been out on disability leave.

He has taken his free time to help others by assisting them in converting their vehicles. "It's not that difficult to switch a standard diesel vehicle over to run on pure veggie oil," he said. "You can hire somebody to do it for you, and that will cost around $3,000. Or you can do it yourself for less than $1,000, with all the little extras and bits. And if you're prepared, you can do the whole thing in one day."

Egan cautioned against confusing vegetable oil and biodiesel, which are two different things. "Biodiesel is oil that has been transesterified," he said. "That requires a lot of work and some messy chemicals, and it's too much for an individual to handle in most cases. With veggie oil, you can run it straight out of the fryer. You just have to filter out food particles and remove any water that got in from cooking."

He noted that it takes about 15 minutes to filter a 55-gallon drum. "That's about 250 litres," he said. "I've been getting it for free from local restaurants, since they'd have to pay to have it disposed of. What would that much diesel fuel cost at current prices?"

He sets up the vehicles with two tanks, one for diesel and one for vegetable oil. He said that cars cold-start better on standard diesel, and it's also good to have an auxiliary system if people using the system are on the road and vegetable oil is not available. "We have two full-size, four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi Delicas that we imported from Japan, and our family goes through more milk in a week than diesel," he said. "I'd say that's pretty good."

Egan said that diesel cars have not been offered for sale in the United States and Canada because of emissions concerns, although diesel pickups are available. Mercedes and Volkswagen produce diesel models, and various Japanese companies make diesel cars for their own domestic market, like the Delicas he imported. Egan estimates that about one in 20 vehicles in Powell River run on diesel. "And we have enough veggie oils being wasted here, now, to power those vehicles," he said.

Another advantage, he added, is that vegetable oils are much more stable than petroleum fuels. "You can take a big drum and carry it in the back of your van," he said. "It doesn't smell bad, and it can't blow up."

Via word of mouth and computer bulletin boards, Egan has helped people with conversions in other parts of BC, from Campbell River to Kelowna. "I'd like to do some in Powell River," he said. "I'm talking with a couple of people, and I may be helping the automotive class at Brooks Secondary School convert a Mercedes diesel over to veggie. This is the best form of community-oriented recycling, reusing things locally, saving resources and money."

Anyone interested in having Egan convert a vehicle can email him at veggievan (at) shaw (dot)ca.

Jared Diamond on Sustainability

2008-01-26T16:53:00.000-08:00

Jared Daimond, author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" and the recent "Collapse", has a great article on consumption vs sustainability.

The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that's a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya's more than 30 million people, but it's not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

His conclusion? Because we waste so much, we can actually maintain a fair amount of our current lifestyle while bringing our consumption factor down by at least half.
Worth reading the whole thing...

Powell River: Student Action

2008-01-24T12:36:00.000-08:00

(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)

Some people look at the trash from a construction project and shrug. Others sigh about the waste.

Ryan Barfoot, sustainability and eco-education coordinator for School District 47, looked at the scrap wood being generated by the reconstruction project at Brooks Secondary School and saw an opportunity.

Edgehill Elementary School staff approached him for help with their Dream Streams project, an environmental display of large wooden salmon to decorate the school. They needed help and materials, and thought that Students for Environmental Awareness (SEA), a student group he runs at Brooks, might want to become involved.

"Instead of seeking new material, we're using the scrap wood," he said. "They get their artwork, and there's less waste going into the landfill. It's a full-circle and holistic approach, and everybody benefits."

More than that, the group is moving beyond Edgehill's original plan, said grade 10 student Katherine Boucher. "We're going to do a dramatic presentation about salmon streams, the importance of salmon and habitat."

Barfoot said that this is only one little project, but it's involving hundreds of students overall. "For Edgehill, it started as an art project," he said. "We're helping them do it in a full way, with a deeper dimension of education and mentorship, with my students mentoring their young students."

Added grade 12 student Erika Davies, "we're learning by teaching, which is cool."

(More...)

Barfoot said the teens of SEA are young, but they are both enthusiastic and knowledgeable when talking about cutting-edge subjects such as sustainability and smart development.

Erika said the group is working on an ecological footprint presentation. "We're going to present this around the school," she said. "It's important for students to know how much of the world's resources they're using, and how they can reduce that."

That's a general goal, but they also work on concrete projects, such as getting the school to use more recycled paper. "The problem there is that recycled paper costs more," said grade 12 student Kayle Wilson. "We're looking at doing a fundraiser to help cover the difference."

And grade 10 student Mackenzie Adamson is looking to the end of the year for a paper-related, tie-in project. "There's tons of paper thrown out when school is over," he said. "Maybe we'll have a huge recycling bin and do it as a fundraiser."

The SEA students worked with Canada World Youth to clean up the beach at Tla'Amin (Sliammon) First Nation, and circulated petitions opposing the liquefied natural gas plant on Texada Island.

While the group only has 21 members so far, Katherine said she thinks they're making an impact. "We're spreading the word," she said. "We talk to our friends, and they inform their friends, and it gets out there."

The school district is looking to be carbon-neutral by 2010. This means balancing carbon emissions and power usage with sustainable alternative energy. The group is looking at ways of helping that along, including replacing all light bulbs in the school with more efficient models.

Katherine said she'd like to start a greenhouse in the back of the school. "We could do more composting, too," she said.

Beyond that, Erika said she believes youth need to have more of a say in what goes on in the world. "We should have more of a voice in the community sustainability charter," she said. "People make plans, but they only ask what the current generation thinks."

"We're the ones who are going to have to live with the consequences," Kayle added.

"We want action," Katherine said. "They use a lot of words like hope and desire, but there's not much on action and taking charge."

The group meets a couple of times a month, generally at lunchtime on Thursdays, and more frequently when they're working on a big project. Sometimes, Barfoot said, they just take a break and get out into the outdoors.

"I think that's what fuels people," he said. "Without having direct experience of the environment, it's hard to embrace."

Why it's important to be an organ donor

2008-01-17T13:34:00.000-08:00

(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)

Joey Whitford has a new pair of lungs and a new lease on life.

The Powell River native, whose lungs were scarred by cystic fibrosis (CF), is in his sixth month of post-operative rehabilitation in Toronto after a cutting-edge operation.

With his lungs damaged by the disease, most physical activities were an impossible strain, said Joey's mother, Renee Whitford. "Now he's been skating for the first time in 10 years, he's shooting hoops and soon he'll be resuming golf, which is one of his passions," she said.

(There's more...)

Joey said he is looking forward to returning to Powell River next month. He would have preferred to have his surgery in Vancouver, but he had a complication that could only be handled in Toronto.

"There is a shortage of donor organs in BC," he said. "Toronto has the donor base to allow Toronto General Hospital to become one of the top transplant hospitals in the world. The doctors in Vancouver had done five transplants; my doctors in Toronto had done more than 100. I'd like to see that change in BC, but we need more organ donors."

Renee said that when Joey was diagnosed, double lung transplants weren't an option. "There was nothing," she said. "Nothing but slowly fade and die. The doctors said he only had a 50 per cent chance of living until he was five. There weren't adults with CF in those days - kids got it, and kids died."

Renee added, "I think if people could understand the fear a parent goes through, wondering if there will be a donor in time to save my child, I think more people would donate."

Joey left for Toronto on December 18, 2006, and finally went in for surgery on August 19, 2007. Recovery was complicated by bowel obstruction, kidney shutdown and dialysis.

Most people don't realize that the law pertaining to donations has changed, Joey said. "People think that if they signed up to be organ donors with their driver's licence, they're still donors," he said. "But that's no longer valid. You have to start over and fill out a form, which you can get at doctors' offices and clinics, or sign up online at Transplant BC's website, or at my own website, CFsucks." On the website, he added, that's short for "CF sucks the breath out of you."

Once a person becomes an organ donor, said Joey, they can save many lives and have a positive impact on even more. "Between heart, lungs, liver, valves, corneas and so many other things, each donor can affect 36 lives. If you have an untimely death, it's a way that good can come out of tragedy."

One of the things that kept him going through the hard times was his love of golf. He has started the process to become a golf pro, but he didn't have the stamina for the physical side of the test. Soon, he said, that will be possible.

Disease strikes early
Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is the most common fatal genetic disease affecting young Canadians. A person afflicted with CF produces excess mucus that affects mainly the lungs and the digestive system.

In the digestive tract, CF makes it difficult to digest and absorb nutrients from food. In the lungs, CF causes severe breathing problems.

A build-up of thick mucus makes it difficult to clear bacteria and leads to infection and damage to lung tissues. People with CF must follow a daily routine of physical therapy to keep the lungs free of congestion, and routine intravenous antibiotics to fight infection. Most persons with CF eventually die of lung disease.

For more information, readers can visit the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation's website.

The Challenge of Wellness

2008-01-16T13:59:00.000-08:00

(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)

One of the challenges of the human condition is that we all seek our personal paradise - a good job, a good relationship and a good home in a good community. And then we want to stay there.

But time has its way, and we don't get to stop when we get where we want to be. Like Alice's Red Queen, we have to run as fast as we can just to stay in one place.

(There's more...)

How do we stay well? As presented at last weekend's Live Well: A Night Celebrating Wellness event at Brooks Secondary School, wellness is a lot more than not being sick. Author Brian Luke Seaward spoke about being a whole person - whole in mind, whole in body and whole in spirit.

That takes good food. Folks who would never think of pumping trash gas into the tank of their vehicle often forget that their body needs prime fuel as well.

Malaspina University-College professor Les Malbon talked about the 50-mile diet, and how much better it is to eat whole foods that are fresh and local. It's not good when food is trucked in from a factory farm 1,000 kilometres away, or from Chile or China. It may be cheaper, but the food is less nutritious, less flavourful, and may be tainted with toxins. And it devalues local farms.

Malbon pointed out that since 2001, more than 30 per cent of the agricultural land around Nanaimo has been lost to development. As Powell River looks to sustainably manage growth at the Saturday, January 19 community sustainability charter meeting, it's worth considering that the original meaning of the word paradise was orchard. Do we want more orchards, or more parking lots?

When wellness program organizer Jim Palm called Dr. Jeanne Paul to invite her to speak at Brooks, she told him she had been to Brooks before--for one day. It was 1951, when there was a deep well of prejudice against first nations peoples, and Paul was taken from Tla'Amin (Sliammon) First Nation and sent to boarding school.

Now, half a century later, Paul was a featured speaker, and other first nations participants were integral to the program. It was a testament to the way the non-aboriginal communities and first nations communities are building together to achieve a true regional wellness.

For the community, wellness is about integrating all the individuals into a coherent whole. That doesn't mean groupthink or hive mind, but healthy interactions, free of prejudice, coercion and fear.

Seaward emphasized how humour and humility are central to that, and author-educator Chris Bratseth put the spotlight on kindness. Small acts of daily kindness are the food that grows healthy communities.

Eagle Walz, who was also honoured on the weekend, has done an immeasurable amount of work on the Sunshine Coast Trail. He didn't do it for money, or even for the thanks of strangers who hike those trails, never knowing the man who helped make the trails possible. He did it because he lives here. He gets to enjoy them and so does everyone else.

Wellness multiplies wellness.

90 mpg from a Hummer? Dang...

2008-01-15T01:20:00.000-08:00

We could cut our fuel use by more than 50 percent just by revamping our cars. This guy is a miracle worker...

Check it out. It's actually a jet engine," says Johnathan Goodwin, with a low whistle. "This thing is gonna be even cooler than I thought." We're hunched on the floor of Goodwin's gleaming workshop in Wichita, Kansas, surrounded by the shards of a wooden packing crate. Inside the wreckage sits his latest toy--a 1985-issue turbine engine originally designed for the military. It can spin at a blistering 60,000 rpm and burn almost any fuel. And Goodwin has some startling plans for this esoteric piece of hardware: He's going to use it to create the most fuel-efficient Hummer in history.

Read the whole article... or watch an interview:

Fighting a Cold? Take D!

2008-01-10T13:27:00.000-08:00

(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)

How do you get your vitamins?

Vitamin C comes from oranges, vitamin A from carrots, but the main source of vitamin D is the sun. Vitamin D is the only major nutrient humans can produce themselves.

The good news most people make all they need in 15 to 20 minutes of overhead summer sunlight (longer for those with dark skin).

But that's in summer. According to Dania Matiation, the community nutritionist at Vancouver Community Health, "the bad news is that this far north, in winter, you're probably not getting enough sunlight even if you spend an hour or more outdoors. Which means you need to be looking at your diet, or at supplements."

In northern latitudes, the low level of the sun in the sky means that the ultraviolet B rays that form vitamin D are blocked by the thickness of the atmosphere, even at midday. That's why Scandinavians have used cod liver oil for years, and why the Inuit eat a diet heavy with D-rich animal fats. It's also why Health Canada estimates that the majority of Canadians have a vitamin D deficiency.

It's been known since the 1930s that lack of vitamin D caused a condition called rickets, but it's only in the past few years that a raft of new research has built a strong case that vitamin D, which is technically a steroid hormone precursor, rather than a true vitamin, is critical to everything from immune system function, including fighting cancer, to nervous system development in infants. One study even showed that people with higher levels of the vitamin lived two to three years longer than those with low levels.

Studies are also improving knowledge of how much is needed. The current Health Canada standard of 400 IU (international units) was based on the amount needed to prevent rickets. The new studies indicate that much more may be needed for optimum health, as much as 1,000 to 2,000 IU.

"I think there will be new recommendations from Health Canada in the next few months," said Matiation.

Getting that much isn't practical through diet. Milk is fortified, but only 100 IU per cup. That leaves two options--supplements and tanning booths.

"The booths provide both kinds of ultraviolet, A and B," said Rhonda Boyles, owner of Pacific Breeze Tanning Studios. "It's possible to have a sensible regime of tanning that meets your vitamin needs and doesn't damage your skin." Boyles also works as a receptionist at the Powell River Recreation Complex, another location for tanning. "When you start acquiring the tan," she added, "that's the signal that you're getting enough vitamin D."

One contributing factor to the deficiency problem is that dermatologists, justifiably worried about increasing skin cancer rates, have been discouraging any sun exposure at all, and encouraging use of sunscreen when people do go out. But sunscreen blocks ultraviolet B.

Dr. James Spencer, clinical professor of dermatology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City, says people can get enough vitamin D from diet and supplements. He recommends fortified milk or orange juice, and eating salmon and other fatty fish, plus taking a 600 IU supplement. "It's so easy," he said. "And it's a lot safer than lying in the sun or climbing undressed into a tanning booth and frying your whole body."

Heather Chappell, senior manager of cancer control policy at the Canadian Cancer Society, agreed that the most reliable source is probably supplements. "The Society recommends that adults start talking 1,000 IU of vitamin D daily in winter, and people with dark skin should take them year round."

Matiation added that, while it's important to consume D, it should be done sensibly. "Don't panic and overdo it," she said, "because too much vitamin D also has toxicity problems." This is especially true for pregnant women, who should consult a physician before adding supplements of any kind.

"A reasonable balance of sun, diet and supplements should work for most people," she said.

Vitamin D Effects
* Promotes immune system function. Why do people get colds and influenza in winter? New studies show it may be low levels of vitamin D.
* Promotes immune system cancer fighting, particularly against colon, breast and prostate cancers.
* Regulates bone density and calcium absorption.
* Low levels may be linked to diseases ranging from high blood pressure to periodontal disease, multiple sclerosis and depression.
* Low levels are strongly linked to muscle aches and bone pain.
* Taking supplements may add as many as one to two years to the average lifespan

Vitamin D Sources
* Fish liver oils, such as cod liver oil, 15 millilitres provides 1,360 IU.
* Catfish, 85 milligrams provides 425 IU.
* Salmon, wild-caught, cooked, 100 milligrams provides 360 IU.
* Mackerel, cooked, 100 milligrams provides 345 IU.
* Sardines, canned in oil, drained, 50 milligrams provides 250 IU.
* Tuna, canned in oil, 85 milligrams provides 200 IU.
* Sun-dried shiitake mushrooms, 13 caps provide 400 IU.
* Fortified cow's milk, 250 millilitres provides 100 IU.

Bending the Shire

2008-01-06T16:46:00.000-08:00

This is very cool... If you have a spare $700,000, and don't mind living in Bend, Oregon, there's a community-based, green-construction development going up with houses based on Tolkien's Shire.

Okay, very loosely based. As any self-respecting Hobbit knows, proper houses are built by digging into the sides of hills, are constructed in tunnels rather than with walls and roofs, and have round doors, not standard-issue rectangular ones.

But if you can get past that, the houses do look fantastical.