Uncategorized

Words from a different kind of president

We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.

One choice is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years. Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three-quarters of them would continue to carry only one person -- the driver -- while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our houses, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste.

We will feel mounting pressure to plunder the environment. We will have a crash program to build more nuclear plants, strip-mine and burn more coal, and drill more offshore wells than we will need if we begin to conserve now. Inflation will soar, production will go down, people will lose their jobs. Intense competition will build up among nations and among the different regions within our own country.

If we fail to act soon, we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.

That was Jimmy Carter's fear. Here's what he wanted to do about it:

I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States. Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did [two years ago] -- never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the [next decade], for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade ...

(Via CommonDreams > DailyKos > Oil Drum)

Words of hope from President Bush

"See, there's a lot of things we're doing in America, and I believe that not only can we solve greenhouse gas, I believe we will."

Pulp

Sprol.com has become one of my favorite daily reads. Check out this extraordinary series of posts on "Pulping the World."

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Jerk

An environmentalist takes “enviroliberalism” to task, gets yelled at Jeremy Carl, a longtime environmentalist now working on sustainability issues in India, thinks that environmentalism should look in the mirror to find the source of its troubles. The problem, he says, is the dominance of “enviroliberalism,” a parochial sort of green thinking that ignores international issues […]

Beyond Blunderdome

Secret plan would put U.K. nuke waste in “interim” domes for 1,000 years The U.K.’s government-owned British Nuclear Fuels has developed an innovative solution to the nuclear-waste problem: procrastinate! The company wants to dump waste from nuclear power plants into giant domes designed to last up to 1,000 years — at which point, presumably, future […]

GOP starting to face up to climate challenge

More signs that the tipping point on climate has arrived:

In a Christian Science Monitor article today: "The ground is shifting on the politics of climate change faster than I would have thought," said Alex Flint, GOP staff director of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, at a press breakfast sponsored by The Energy Daily and BP America on Friday.

And as The Boston Globe reports: "The chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, Pete V. Domenici, is considering whether to team up with a fellow New Mexican, Senator Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat, on [a] proposal that would cap [greenhouse-gas] emissions but allow companies to buy their way out if the cost of reducing emissions proves to be prohibitively high." (More on Bingaman's plan here.)

"We're thrilled at the interest being shown by Republicans at doing something that's achievable and doable," said Bill Wicker, a Bingaman spokesman.

One of my concerns about cities.

If it isn't already abundantly clear, I am a big fan of cities. If there's one thing that gets me a little concerned about them, though, it's the fact that they turn over so fast. According to Stewart Brand's recent lecture, cities replace at least 2-3 percent of their fabric every year, so every forty years or so they have been completely remade. Where does all that sheer mass go? And where do we get all that sheer mass? Regardless of where it goes, this doesn't strike me as a particularly sustainable way to go about things. The suburbs probably aren't much better in this department, but this is an issue that a good urban planner should have on her radar.

It's a minor quibble, really. I'll be back to the regularly scheduled praising of all things urban by tomorrow, most likely. And the Stewart Brand talk is just packed with great stuff; more on that surely to come as well.

Greenwashing at GE.

While we are on the MSM watch (which I just learned stands for "mainstream media"), in Sunday's New York Times, Ned Sullivan and Rich Schiafo of Scenic Hudson accuse GE of "dragging its feet" on the cleanup of the PCBs that it has dumped in the Hudson River. This is the same GE that recently started its "Ecomagination" campaign, giving Sullivan and Schiafo this powerful one-liner:

Only after G.E. uses its ecomagination to rid the nation's waterways of its contamination will these words ring true. Until then, its green campaign is nothing more than an eco smoke screen.

USA Today says the globe is warming!

Mark today in your calendars because USA Today's headline just made it official: "The debate's over: Globe is warming." My first reaction was astonishment. I kept scanning their website for other up-to-the-minute revelations. What's next? Are the Beatles really about to break-up? Is the Berlin Wall really going to come down?

But my second reaction was more optimistic -- and less sarcastic. I shouldn't scoff at USA Today's belated recognition as much as I should marvel that a tipping point is happening right before our eyes. The real news here is not that the debate is over -- it's been over, of course, for quite some time -- but that USA Today and other media like it have finally awarded a TKO to climate scientists and greens.

As it turns out, USA Today's conviction is because big corporations, utilities, Republican governors, and even religious groups are now demanding action on climate change. There really is increasingly broad-based recognition of the problem. Still, it's more than a little annoying that media evaluate critical issues based not on the overwhelming scientific evidence, but rather on the proclamations of Arnold and a few CEOs.

But on the other hand, if even USA Today says there's a consensus on climate change, then we're just about to arrive in a brave new world where we can actually begin to do something about it on a large and systemic level. Hold on to your hats: next week we'll find out that burning gasoline warms the atmosphere through something called the "greenhouse effect" ...

Cities vs. those suburbs

Last week certainly was a "week to rejoice" if you love cities, although I think John Tierny missed the boat on exactly why. With the Accords signed, the sustainable (and not so sustainable) ranked, and the cul-de-sac revived and debunked, it was enough to give any aspiring urban planner a headache.

The statistics getting tossed around are staggering too. Just the first clause of the Urban Environmental Accords contains two rather impressive facts:

• The majority of the planet's population now (well, almost now) lives in cities;
• continued urbanization will result in one million people moving to cities each week.

And that got me thinkin': Whaddaya mean, "city?"

In search of the answer to this eloquent question, I headed to the webpages of the UN, since it is their Environment Program after all. Turns out that:

Because of national differences in the characteristics that distinguish urban from rural areas, the distinction between the urban and the rural population is not yet amenable to a single definition that would be applicable to all countries or, for the most part, even to the countries within a region.

Don't worry, our hero will not give up that easily; more below the fold.