Latest Articles
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A very cool 'only in California' development … bike valets
Slate V posted a short video about the bicycle valet service provided at the farmers market in Santa Monica, Calif.
Brilliant! But do the valets help repair flat tires?
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A new sustainable sushi book, restaurant, and debate
Sustainable Sushi: A Guide to Saving the Oceans One Bite at a Time, the definitive guide to sustainable sushi, was written by Casson Trenor, alum of the International Environmental Policy Program at the Monterey Institute.
What I particularly like about this volume is that Casson outlines vegetarian alternatives to fish at the end of the book, since as he freely admits, not eating fish is one of the best ways to protect the oceans.
Casson is not only spreading the printed word, but also walking the walk by putting all of his knowledge into practice at his new sushi and sake bar Tataki Sushi in San Francisco -- the world's first sustainable sushi restaurant. It has garnered rave reviews and has been nominated for the city's No. 1 sushi restaurant. He is constantly updating the menu to keep pace with developments in science, policy, and business practices.
And for anyone who can make it to Monterey, Calif. on Feb. 19, Casson along with Kim McCoy of Seashepherd (and the star of the show Whale Wars), Stanford PhD student Dane Klinger, and myself will be participating in a debate entitled, "Seafood sustainability: Is it real and is it enough?" Info here.
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New travel and cooking shows valorize the very practices destroying frogs and other living things
Remember when food shows were about cooking stuff? Now we have shows featuring guys who travel the world stuffing food in their pie holes just so they can tell us how it tastes (usually while the food is still in their mouths). You just can't get a fresher description than that. Because we can only eat so much, we can now entertain ourselves between meals by watching other people eat.The latest incarnation is the Man V. Food show where Adam Richman runs around the country trying to eat the ubiquitous gargantuan promotional meals offered by so many restaurants, which include everything from a seven-pound monster breakfast burrito to an eleven-pound pizza (which was barfed back up).
One show I find particularly irritating is the Travel Channel's Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, who for some reason reminds me of a turtle. He eats a lot of wildlife, which can't help but fan the flames of the growing wild food trade that's consuming biodiversity. From a recent NYT opinion piece:
As global wealth rises, so does global consumption of meat, which includes wild meat. Turtle meat used to be a rare delicacy in the Asian diet, but no longer. China, along with Hong Kong and Taiwan, has vacuumed the wild turtles out of most of Southeast Asia. Now, according to a recent report in The Los Angeles Times, they are consuming common soft-shell turtles from the American Southeast, especially Florida, at an alarming rate.
Here he is eating a still beating frog heart:
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All your whatever we want are belong to us
Without apparent self-consciousness, The New York Times reports on the galling trend of Bolivians "closely controlling" their country's lithium and "keeping foreigners at bay," since they are "not willing to surrender it."
That's the problem with resources -- there's always a bunch of foreigners between us and what's rightfully ours!
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Kent Conrad is trying to kill reform at the USDA
As I surmised might happen in a comment to Tom Philpott's recent post on ag reform, "Sustainable Dozen" member Chuck Hassebrook, Tom Vilsack's choice for deputy secretary, is having trouble getting through the Senate Ag committee. North Dakota's Kent Conrad (D) is trying to kill Hassebrook's nomination before it's even officially announced. Nick Kristof has the details here (h/t Jill Richardson).
In the Senate, a single senator wields enormous power and can put a stop to any bill or nomination if he or she so chooses. With everyone's attention on the stimulus package, this is the perfect time for a little backroom backstabbing. Should you wish to, say, register your feelings about this, the current members (and states) of the Senate Ag committee appear after the jump.
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Denny's serves up a plate of petroleum
The millions of Americans (Grist included!) glued to their TVs Sunday for Super Bowl XLIII got a personal invite from fast food chain Denny's to swing by any of its 2,500 U.S. locations this morning for a free "Grand Slam" breakfast -- two eggs, two sausages, two slices of bacon, two pancakes (a whopping 800 calories).
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Against the so-called 'need' for new long-distance, high-voltage transmission lines
The following is a guest post from Carol A. Overland, a utility regulatory attorney and electrical consultant based in Minnesota and Delaware, representing clients in energy dockets including transmission projects, wind, gas and coal gasification generation, and nuclear waste.
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Transition ... transmission ... transition ... transmission ...That old Bowie hook is on my mind as I represent individuals, community organizations, and local governments opposing high-voltage transmission lines. Today we're at a crossroads in energy, a transition point where the decisions we make, like electricity itself, are binary. What we choose will determine how we use electricity in the future. The first step is to carefully define "need."
Transmission doesn't produce electricity. It is passive infrastructure that just sits there, conducting energy from one place to another. At its worst, though, it's an enabler of dysfunctional energy planning and profit-driven projects that are against the public interest. Claims that we "need" transmission are end-stage conclusions of a many-step planning process that we as a society have not yet consciously begun.
"Need" is a term of art, and the crucial task for energy planners is to define the need. We need energy when we flick the switch, and when we do, that's a utility's need for service of local electrical load. We also need renewable generation, and we have an equally compelling need to reduce the CO2 emissions, pollutants, and toxic waste of electrical generation (a need not readily recognized in energy planning). Energy planners plan for peak "flick of the switch" need, those few very hot summer days or very cold winter nights. How much "flick of the switch" energy do we need? It depends.
Prior to assessing local load-serving need and making demand projections -- before "need" is considered -- the first and unarguably least-cost step is conservation. We can easily make up for an annual projected increase in demand of 1.5 percent through conservation, and can probably cut today's "need" by 10 percent or more, though compound conservation gets more difficult as we cherry pick the easy stuff. The next step before analyzing need is to enact energy efficiency, demand-side management, and load-shifting to cut the peaks and level out the dips. This is also a comparatively least-cost means of meeting demand.
When that's done, and not before, it's time to assess our need for electricity -- the supply side. Utilities, which are in the business of selling electricity and building their infrastructure -- for which we pay, routinely promote sales and exaggerate growth in demand. Because of their overstatements of need in similarly recessionary times, we overbuilt in the 1970s, to the extent that many proposed plants were ultimately canceled. Still so much was built that we haven't needed much utility infrastructure since. We've been through this before, and should be mindful in making investments.
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Children are externalities
"So many people are wondering why, when our lives are supposed to be getting better, there are more and more babies born with birth defects and couples who are infertile."
-- Chinese environmental activist Huo Daishan, on the alarming rise in birth defects in his country
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Civil disobedience campaign launched at Massey Energy mountaintop-removal site
"Give me but a banner to plant upon the mountains of West Augusta, and I will rally about it the brave men who will lift our bleeding country from the dust, and set her free."
-- George Washington, 1779
In Pettus, West Virginia this morning, five Coal River Mountain activists were arrested and charged with trespassing after locking themselves to a bulldozer and a backhoe at a Massey Energy mountaintop-removal mine site.
In the face of an impending 6,600 acre mountaintop removal strip mine, they planted a banner for the Coal River Wind Project, a nationally acclaimed proposal that would create 200 local construction jobs and 50 permanent jobs, enough energy for 150,000 homes, and allow for sustainable forestry and mountain tourism projects, as well as a limited amount of underground mining.
After the TVA coal ash disaster in December, when a billion gallons of coal ash poured out of a pond and deluged 400 acres of land in six feet of sludge, the Coal River Mountain activists fear blasting for the proposed mountaintop removal site on Coal River Mountain, which rests beside a 6 billion-gallon toxic coal waste sludge dam above underground mines, could be catastrophic for the communities downstream.
"Massey could flood the towns of Pettus, Whitesville and Sylvester with toxic coal sludge," said Julia Bonds, of Rock Creek, W.Va. "Blasting at a multi-billion-gallon sludge lake over underground mines could cause the sludge to burst through and kill thousands of people."
"The governor and county legislators have failed to act, so we're acting for them," Coal River Wind advocate Rory McIlmoil said. "They shouldn't allow the wind potential on Coal River Mountain to be destroyed, and the nearby communities endangered, for only 17 years of coal. There is a better way to develop the mountain and strengthen the local economy that will create lasting jobs and tax revenues for this county, and that's with wind power."
