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Like a Top 10 list, without 10

This isn't a top ten list -- I couldn't find that many signs of hope! And yes, I realize that some items on the list are only holding actions. The exercise was a little depressing; I had to wade through a year's worth of stories describing ecological devastation to come up with these.

Given all that, I would still say that 2006 was the best year the cause of environmentalism has seen in decades. I suspect that Grist, along with its readers and commenters, played a bigger part in that than most realize. May that trend continue and accelerate through 2007 and beyond. The list begins below the fold:

A top ten list from the U.K.

Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.

What are the most important environmental books? At Forum for the Future, we polled 100 staff and colleagues from around the U.K. for the green books that had most influenced us, and came up with our top 10. The list spans the last 50 years, and contains the usual suspects -- as well as a few surprises.

Small Is Beautiful and Silent Spring are the runaway winners, and the top 10 also contains one novel, one children's book, and one autobiography. While a couple of titles on the list are peculiarly British, others have had a global impact.

It's interesting to see what didn't get the votes. There are no wildlife or wilderness classics, and no overt spirituality. Would that be different if this were an American list, I wonder?

And there's no place for a number of classic reference texts -- no Limits to Growth, Our Common Future, or State of the World. This might have something to do with the fact that great sources of information are not always the most riveting of reads.

Here's the top 10 in full:

How do they do it?

Al Gore Caught Warming Globe To Increase Box Office Profits

For the geeks

A new, highly energy efficient power supply for your computer.

Summer Arctic ice could nearly disappear by mid-century, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Santa’s Gonna Be Pissed Mileage in Mirror Is Smaller Than It Appears Unusual Weather We’re Having, Ain’t It? We’ll Be In the Fallout Shelter Once More Unto the REACH Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Fill ‘er Up The Barenaked Truth […]

Kunstler on the xmas classics

Veering dangerously close to self-parody, but not quite crossing the line, Scroogian apocaphile James Howard Kunstler deconstructs that Christmas fave of young and old, It's a Wonderful Life:

Believe it

A while back I claimed that an all-dispatchable grid would require 75 hours of storage. I have been definitively proven wrong. Nothing like that is required.

In fact, tiny amounts of storage may do the trick if the grid is large enough -- and making the grid large enough is not that expensive. We may already have in place what we need for a completely renewable grid.

The 75-hour figure came from studies of single, isolated wind farms. But as you add wind farms, the odds of two wind farms being down -- or low producers at the same time -- drops.

I came across confirmation by accident: a Vehicle to Grid study (PDF) that evaluated data from eight sites showed that storing just 36 minutes of nameplate capacity would allow the widely dispersed farms to meet a firm power commitment ~90% of the time.

There are tricky steps involved. I am not necessarily advocating a 95%+ wind grid, as there are many ways to generate renewable electricity. But just as coal dominates power production in our current system, I suspect wind will dominate in any future grid. So consider the following a limiting case for wind.

A holiday meal inspired by New Orleans

A menu for a holiday meal inspired by a New Orleans Réveillon:

Sazerac cocktails
Appetizer of lobster salad with a lemon balm and tomato dressing
Adair Burlingham's chicken and ham gumbo, or a vegetarian gumbo z'erb
Roast turkey or a Turducken
Biscuits
King cake or bread pudding with whiskey sauce
Café Brulot or coffee with chicory

I'll post the first few recipes this week and the others next week.

A few months ago I started thinking about what would make for an environmentally sound holiday dinner. I wanted to create a menu that was festive and satisfying but not excessive or wasteful.

In which I finally come around to this whole video pod idea

I've mostly resisted the siren call of viewer-created video content. (One of the most-watched files on YouTube this month was of a guy sledgehammering a PS3 in front of a Best Buy. Really, America? Really?)

And then Thursday night I went to the Seeds of Tolerance Awards in Los Angeles, co-sponsored by the Third Millennium Foundation and Current TV.

Current TV is Al Gore's just-over-a-year-old cable channel, and a third of its programming is viewer-created content. Now, way back in 2005, everyone seemed to be talking about how crazy Al was for letting the public and its digital video cameras run amok on cable television. Then You-know-who-Tube exploded into pop culture in all its OK Go-breaking, PS3-smashing glory.

Who's crazy now, suckas?

The Great White Hopeless

Chinese white dolphin is likely extinct The baiji, a white dolphin found only in China’s Yangtze River, appears to have gone extinct. Lipotes vexillifer has been swimming China’s longest river for some 20 million years, but in the end it was no match for China’s surging economy. In the last few decades, the Yangtze’s shallows […]