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Death, disease, and infection, thanks to our friend climate change

Daniel J. Weiss and Robin Pam of the Center for American Progress have a new article on the health impacts of global warming. As they explain, "Some of the most severe health effects linked to global warming include the following":

• More illness and death resulting from heat waves.
• Worsening air pollution causes more respiratory and cardiovascular disease.
• Vector-borne disease infections will rise.
• Changing food production and security may cause hunger.
• More severe and frequent wildfires will threaten more people.
• Flooding linked to rising sea levels will displace millions.

Already, "WHO now says that 150,000 deaths annually are attributable to the effects of climate change." And we've only warmed about 1.5 degrees F in the past century. We might warm 10 degrees F each century!

The time to act is now.

The automotive equivalent of high heels

Was looking for an electric vehicle and this came up. Seriously -- six batteries? And a suicide trunk?

Part of me kind of wants it.

Meat of the future may be grown in a lab

Problem: Large-scale meat production has environmental problems out the wazoo, but Homo sapiens shows much reluctance to giving up meat. Possible solution: Test-tube sausage! The awkwardly named In Vitro Meat Consortium just wrapped up the first-ever international conference focused on the potential for replacing slaughtered animals with grown-in-a-lab chicken nuggets and ground beef. In theory, […]

Fossil fuel moguls inflate reserve estimates to prevent efforts to move beyond their products

When I was young, Yankee Stadium had ~70,000 seats. It seldom sold out, and almost any kid could afford the cheap seats. Capacity was reduced to ~57,000 when the stadium was remodeled in the 1970s. Most games sell out now, and prices have gone up.

The new stadium, opening next year, will reduce seating further, to ~51,800. This intentional contraction is aimed at guaranteeing sellouts, increasing demand, allowing the owners, in pretty short order, to hike prices to double, triple, and more. The owners know that scarcity will fatten their wallets, even though it reduces the number of sales.

This is more than a bit distasteful, as it discriminates against the lower middle class. Nevertheless, it should be a great stadium and as long as the owner is footing the bill without public subsidies for the stadium itself, we may have little grounds for complaint.

The reason that I draw your attention to this practice is that fossil fuel moguls are intent on hoodwinking the entire planet with an analogous scheme.

The basic trick is this: fossil fuel reserves are overstated. Government "energy information" departments parrot industry. Partly because of this disinformation, the major efforts needed to develop energies "beyond fossil fuels" have not been made.

As food prices rise, policymakers ignore potential of home and community gardens

This originally aired on WSHU Public Radio in Fairfield, Conn.

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"Gardens are viewed as 'hobbies' by most politicians/bureaucrats and administrators and are seldom taken seriously as real sources of real food," says a University of Connecticut agricultural extension specialist, speaking of the United States Department of Agriculture. This attitude represents a serious impediment to a healthy, and sustainable food supply and society.

Feeding a growing population with shrinking resources without polluting the planet is one of the greatest challenges facing us, locally and globally. The USDA is the world's largest agricultural research and extension organization. If it doesn't take gardens seriously as "real sources of real food," we are in real trouble.

Although we know that organic food sales are growing at over 20 percent annually, the USDA hasn't collected statistics on organic farms. In Connecticut, there are about 40 certified organic farms, which, like many of the farms in this country, tend to be small and part-time. They probably produce and sell less than a million dollars worth of produce a year.

But there is also an abundance of vegetables and fruits produced in home and community organic gardens. A skilled home gardener can produce amazing quantities of food using only hand tools, compost from kitchen and yard wastes, and human energy.

The more than 20,000 subscribers to Organic Gardening magazine here in Connecticut provide a rough estimate of the scale of organic food being produced in gardens for home consumption. Although some subscribers may not have gardens, that number is probably offset by organic gardeners who don't purchase the magazine.

Do you want a green job?

Talk of "green jobs" and "green-collar jobs" is all the rage these days. What do you make of it? Do you want a green job? Take the poll below.

Security firm spied on green groups, documents show

It wasn’t all in your imagination: Private security company Beckett Brown International spied on Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and other big environmental organizations in the late 1990s through at least 2000, according to documents obtained by Mother Jones. To produce intelligence reports for PR firms and corporations involved in environmental kerfuffles with green groups, […]

Biodegrading is cool … right?

An often-great blog, "The Reality Based Community," raises an important issue: when is it better if things don't biodegrade?

Concentrated solar power is already doing great; no breakthroughs needed

Almost certainly not and absolutely not. I give two answers here because there are two very different types of solar energy:

1. Solar photovoltaics, PV, which is direct conversion of sunlight to electricity. It is well known, high-tech, uneconomically expensive in most parts of this country (but poised to resume dropping sharply in price), and intermittent (power only when the sun shines).
   
2. Solar thermal electric or concentrated solar power (CSP), which uses mirrors to focus sunlight to heat a fluid to run a turbine or engine to make electricity. It is, as I've blogged, "The solar power you don't hear about." It is relatively low-tech, competitive today (and poised to drop sharply in price), and can be made load-following (matching the demand curve during the day and evening) and possibly baseload (round-the-clock).

Absent major subsidies, solar PV is simply not a big-time winner (in terms of kWh delivered cost-effectively) in rich countries with built-out electric grids in the near term. It is, however, a big winner in the medium-term (post-2020). I don't agree with the Scientific American article that calls for a massive $400 billion 40-year plan for solar. I have been meaning to blog that it has many weaknesses, in my mind. No energy efficiency. No wind. Heck, nothing but PV and CSP, and it looks to be mostly PV, which needs expensive storage.

Enviros not fond of new forest management rules

The U.S. Forest Service has released new regulations for forest management that are remarkably similar to regulations that a federal judge struck down last year. Under the new rules, species’ sustainability will not be evaluated individually; instead, the focus will be on overall habitat. A coalition of green groups have sued, saying the rules loosen […]