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A truly green house

This news bit is a little late, but still worth noting: Last month, an independent team made up of designers from Seattle architecture/design firm Mithun won first place in an international sustainable housing competition in Roanoke, Virginia, with their design for a house powered by--of all things--spinach. The house (the design is pictured at left) will be built this summer in Roanoke, along with other contest winners.

The C2C Home Competition, which drew 625 entries from 41 countries, was inspired by William McDonough and Michael Braungart's work on cradle-to-cradle design principles. They ask designers to go beyond pollution prevention to creating objects and processes that nourish and replenish our communities, using materials that can be recycled indefinitely.

The team's house takes energy from the sun and uses spinach protein sandwiched between glass to generate electricity for the entire neighborhood, turning the house into a supplier rather than a consumer--a house that acts more like a tree than like a machine.

Umbra on having kids, revisited

Dear Umbra, What do you feel is the one issue of personal responsibility regarding the environment that people ignore the most? VaughnJackson, Tenn. Dearest Vaughn, Reproduction. But what can you do? As I said the other time I touched this topic with a 10-foot pole, we don’t make childbearing choices based on politics. If we […]

The real meaning of “roadless”

While shilling for drilling during last week's Senate debate over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) claimed that oil development would have a negligible effect on the area: "When we talk about the roadless areas we have available for exploration, we mean it. We do mean that we are going to put down an ice road that will disappear when the summer comes."

Bizarrely, as Felicity Barringer of The New York Times points out, roadless might not mean what you think it means.  

"[T]he term 'roadless' does not mean an absence of roads," Interior Department officials wrote in a recent environmental impact statement about drilling in another region of Alaska. "Rather, it indicates an attempt to minimize the construction of permanent roads."

The sheer inventiveness of the Bushies' Orwellian contortions is awe-inspiring.

Response to “Death”: Part V

Today is Part V of Ken Ward's response to "The Death of Environmentalism," in which he concludes by laying out concrete steps the movement could take to mount an appropriate response to the danger of global warming. It's a bold strategy -- curious to hear what readers think of it.

Don't forget to read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

More Wolfowitz, more oil, more looney-tunes

Gawd. Speaking of oil: It really is astonishing what some folks in this administration are willing to do to avoid breaking our petrol-addiction.

Wall Street and peak oil

At this point, predictions of peak oil are no biggie. But it seems significant that a Wall Street research and analysis firm -- John S. Herold Inc. -- is getting in the game. The analysts at Herold ...

... have begun estimating when each of the world's biggest energy companies will peak in its ability to produce oil and gas. Herold's work shows that the best minds in the energy industry are accepting the reality that the globe is reaching (or has already reached) the limit of its own ability to produce ever increasing amounts of oil.

...

Since last fall, Herold has done peak estimates on about two dozen oil companies. Herold believes that the French oil company, Total S.A., will reach its peak production in 2007. Herold expects 2008 to be critical, with Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips Co., BP, Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and the Italian producer, Eni S.p.A., all hitting their peaks. In 2009, Herold expects ChevronTexaco Corp. to peak. In Herold's view, each of the world's seven largest publicly traded oil companies will begin seeing production declines within the next 48 months or so.

Of course Herold's specific predictions are controversial, but the firm itself is quite well-respected. Peak oil is slowly but surely sinking into mainstream discourse. If Herold is correct, says Salon:

• Oil prices -- which are already at record levels -- will continue rising as demand outstrips supply. In a few years, gasoline prices of $2 per gallon could seem like a bargain.
• State-owned oil companies like Mexico's Pemex, Venezuela's PDVSA (Petroléos de Venezuela) and Saudi Arabia's Saudi Aramco may be unable to increase their production enough to meet burgeoning global demand.
• The producers who belong to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and Saudi Arabia in particular, may have even more leverage over the global oil market in the coming years.
• The United States will be ever more reliant on oil imported from countries filled with people who don't like George W. Bush or his policies.

Read the whole thing.

Rorschach poll

There are any number of ways one could interpret the results of this poll.

If you're cynical, you might conclude that people are liars. If 66% of people (even 57% of conservatives! even 67% of NASCAR fans!) think driving a fuel-efficient car is patriotic, then why aren't they driving fuel-efficient cars? One might conclude that patriotism is a handy way to attack people you dislike, but somewhat hollow as an actual motivation for sacrifice, or even changing one's own behavior.

If you're a more optimistic type, you might conclude that this level of support for fuel efficiency -- 89% think it's important for government to act to reach 40mpg -- is a vast, largely untapped political force. One might think that an aggressive program of education and advocacy would open people's eyes up to the fact that their government is in fact doing very little, and get them fired up.

Or one could just conclude that polls don't mean much at all.

(The full results of the poll are in a press release here as a PDF.)

Also, check out 40mpg.org, launched today in the wake of the poll. Very cool site.

10th birthday for Yellowstone’s wolves

Next Monday will mark precisely 10 years since wolves re-appeared in Yellowstone National Park, from where they had been absent since the 1920s. The re-introduction program was a smashing success, far exceeding even optimistic predictions.

 

On March 21, 1995, federal biologists finally opened the acclimation pens holding 14 gray wolves, sometimes called timber wolves, brought from Alberta. Earlier that year an additional 14 wolves had been set free in central Idaho's mammoth wilderness. And the following year, 17 more wolves were released into Yellowstone and 20 more into Idaho.

A decade later, Yellowstone's wolf population has grown more than five-fold and expanded into adjacent areas of Wyoming and Montana. Idaho's wolf population expanded even more spectacularly--by thirteen-fold--with an estimated 452 animals in the Gem State at last count in 2004. All told, over 850 wolves now roam the US Rocky Mountains. It's only a matter of time until they begin returning in numbers to Washington and Oregon, where they are now only rare visitors. [Click on the chart at left for state-by-state trends.]

Wolfowitz and the World Bank

Nobody is entirely sure what to make of the appointment of neocon radical Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank. However, this Bloomberg story contains an ominous tidbit:

Under Wolfowitz, the Bush administration may now try to narrow the focus of the World Bank, returning the international lending institution to its roots of primarily financing large infrastructure projects and limiting the practice of handing out zero-interest loans, analysts such as Alan Meltzer, who led a 2000 congressional inquiry into the World Bank, said.

For the past decade or two, the World Bank had been making an effort -- or at least talking more -- about making low-to-zero interest loans to social development projects in developing countries, stuff like pensions and education. This is contrast to the old school, wherein the WB would make enormous loans to huge infrastructure projects -- highways, hydropower, etc. -- that would enrich the huge American companies (see: Halliburton) that built them, leave the poor poor, and put the countries themselves in crippling debt to the U.S., which they could never possibly hope to escape from, leaving them, effectively, permanently indentured American colonies.

Here's a bit of an interview with John Perkins, ex-international development consultant and author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man:

The electricity, the highways, the ports were seldom even used by the people who needed them the most. But the country would be left holding a huge debt and it would be such a large debt that they couldn't possibly repay it. And so at some point in time, we economic hit men, we go back into the country and say, "Look, you owe us a lot of money, you can't pay your debts. Therefore sell us your oil at a real cheap price or vote with us at a UN vote or give us land for a military base or send some of your troops to some country where we want you to support us."

Looks like Wolfowitz -- and unreconstructed advocate of American Empire -- may be sent to return the WB to its "good" old days.

(All this comes via Digby, whom you should be reading more often.)

(See also this dystopian scenario from Billmon.)

Update [2005-3-18 8:28:46 by Dave Roberts]: More support for this theory in an American Prospect column.

Update [2005-3-18 10:8:57 by Dave Roberts]: And see this Salon piece on Wolfowitz's 30-year record of incompetence.

Fuels rush in

This Eugene Register-Guard editorial -- cautioning Oregon's politicians to take a sober, hype-free look at biofuels before launching a program to subsidize them -- is definitely worth reading.  But it makes one point that, while not clearly out-and-out wrong, at least deserves a closer look.

According to the editorial, legislative action to promote biofuels in Oregon would be unnecessary ...

... if biofuels could compete with other forms of energy in the marketplace. The fact that ethanol and biodiesel need the Legislature's encouragement is evidence that these fuels suffer an economic disadvantage, have environmental costs or both.

Hold on, there, buckeroo.  Petroleum gets huge subsidies of its own, ranging from special tax benefits for oil companies, to the mammoth military costs for defending access to overseas oil supplies, to the environmental and social costs of air & water pollution, greenhouse gases, etc.  So just because ethanol needs subsidies to compete with petroleum, doesn't necessarily mean that ethanol is inherently uncompetitive; it could just be that petroleum's massive subsidies outweigh those to ethanol.