July 2008 Archives

Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment. The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more -- if more should be required -- the future of human civilization is at stake. (((At least we can't say we weren't warned.)))

...Of course the greatest obstacle to meeting the challenge of 100 percent renewable electricity in 10 years may be the deep dysfunction of our politics (((yes))) and our self-governing system as it exists today. In recent years, our politics has tended toward incremental proposals made up of small policies designed to avoid offending special interests, alternating with occasional baby steps in the right direction. Our democracy has become sclerotic at a time when these crises require boldness. (((Yes.)))

It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil ten years from now. (((Yes.)))

Am I the only one who finds it strange that our government so often adopts a so-called solution that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem it is supposed to address? (((No.))) When people rightly complain about higher gasoline prices, we propose to give more money to the oil companies and pretend that they're going to bring gasoline prices down. It will do nothing of the sort, and everyone knows it. (((Yes they do. The tower of lies here... how high do they tower? They tower about 147 dollars high, at the moment.)))

-- Bruce Sterling's annotated Al Gore Energy Speech (Beyond the Beyond)

• Under Pressure from VP's Office, Oil Industry, Many In White House Reversed On Greenhouse Gases (Dow Jones via CNNMoney.com)
• House Repubs Block Dem Bill to Bar Oil Companies From Obtaining New Leases If They Are Not Actively Exploring Current Holdings (The New York Times)
• Green Ink: The End of of the Oil Haven? (Environmental Capital - wsj.com)
• Energy Tsunami Coming, Warn Bipartisan Group of Policy Emeriti -- and US Risks Being Crushed (Associated Press)
• Nuclear Power A Thorny Issue For Obama, McCain (National Public Radio)
• France: Thanks to Nuclear, 80 Percent of Electricity Already Carbon-Free (BBC News)

We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change.

Al Gore

• A Generational Challenge to Repower America: Text and Video of Gore Speech (algore.com)
• The (Annotated) Gore Energy Speech (Dot Earth - nytimes.com) [[worth linking to for a second day in a row]]
• Gore Calls for Carbon-Free Electric Power (The New York Times)
• Gristmill Breaks Down the Coverage of Al Gore's Energy Speech (Gristmill)
• Gore's Goal: Former V.P. Lays Down a Green Gauntlet (Environmental Capital - wsj.com)
• Gore's Goal: What You and I Can Do (Huffington Post)
• T. Boone Pickens Responds to Al Gore's Climate Speech (Market Watch)

• The (Annotated) Gore Energy Speech -- Carbon Free Electricity by 2018 Challenge (Dot Earth -- nytimes.com)
• NYC: Taxi Fleet Will Be 100% Hybrid by 2012 (City Room - nytimes.com)
• Eating Local: A Fruit Tree That May Grow in Brooklyn (Scienceline)
• Home Solar -- Minus the Cost, Effort, Worry (Triple Pundit)
• Proliferate! Are Many Small Nuclear Plants the Energy Answer? (Environmental Capital -- wsj.com)
• Solar Prospecting Drives Southwest Land Race, and Goldman Sachs Is There (How the World Works - salon.com)

• Superstruct: Play the Game, Invent the Future (Open the Future)
• Imagine You Were Actually Doing Something Rather Than Sleepwalking Toward Your Doom (Beyond the Beyond)
• On the Heels of the G8 Meeting, Looking at Clean Tech in the Group of 5 (NEXT - Innovation Tools & Trends - BusinessWeek.com)
• Investing in Cities, Cultivating Town Centers...Learning From the Brits (The City Fix)
• Bottom-up Urban Practice: Tune Your City (Pasta & Vinegar via Eyebeam Reblog)
• Alternative Energy: Easy-to-Build Pressure Wheel (Wild Water Power via Make)

Image: Ocean winds tracking -- future power sources? Source: NASA JPL/QuikScat Satellite

• A New Fashion Catches On in Paris: Cheap Bicycle Rentals (The New York Times)
• New York May Follow Paris Bike Sharing Example (New York Magazine)
• We've Seen the Future ... and We May Not Be Doomed (The Independent)
• Coal Industry Hands Out Pink Slips While Green Collar Jobs Take Off (Worldwatch Institute)
• Patchwork of Efforts Try to Ease E-waste Load (Triple Pundit)

Image: Green roof installation. Courtesy of Sustainable South Bronx. Credit: James Burling Chase.

Here's my cat George, fast asleep in the reflective-insulated-heat-blocking-panel protected bathroom.  Doesn't he look happy?



Cats are pretty reliable four-footed comfort gauges -- they are not creatures much inclined to suffer. George prefers the shady bathroom to any other place in the apartment, now -- even though I gave in to the past week's will-sapping heat and humidity and installed the air conditioner.

Isn't my cat cute?  Am I too late for Friday Cat Blogging?

Next: Thank you, Lifehacker! It included my diy heat-blocking panels in its list of top 10 summer projects -- at the number 4 position no less.  

I'd love to hear from those of you who make and use them. How well do they work for you? Did your energy bill go down? How have you improved on my design?

Now, the air conditioning. Until I bought it a few years ago, well into my adult years, I was pretty pleased with myself for never owning an air conditioner, all right. But I was humbled by the typical New York summer ("it's like taking a walk in someone's mouth," said my sweetie), and out went the green halo.

Here's how I make peace with it: I only cool my (small) bedroom. I keep the machine set in the high 70s, low 80s even if the humidity is really low (the goal here is to be comfortable enough, not to create a habitat for Antarctic penguins). I keep the heat-trapping honeycomb shade drawn when it's on, and I use the machine's "energy saver" setting -- which automatically switches it off when the room's cooled down to the set temperature.

But what's really busted my air-conditioned guilt has been signing up for Con Edison's clean energy option.  Paying the extra charge for delivery, on top of the electricity use itself, is supposedly expressing my consumer demand for wind turbines and solar arrays, thus providing the market with an incentive to build more of these and other non-petro power generation options.

Essentially, I'm taxing myself voluntarily to support the expansion of clean energy. It's something I'm willing to do -- or to be more accurate, something I wouldn't be able to forgive myself for not doing -- for as long as I can afford to do it. But not everyone can afford this, and even fewer are going to affirmatively choose to pay more for their electricity.

Why is clean energy so much more expensive, when it's basically so much less harmful?

One reason is that we're not directly accounting in our energy rates for the collateral damage of using dirty energy. The extra costs to our society are distributed out over, say, the taxes that go for public health services, when they care for children suffering from asthma, or adults with worsened heart disease, from breathing in tiny particles of pollution from coal plan emissions. Or the government funding (such as there is) for environmental cleanup and restoration. Or the extra money we pay for food when there are supply scares and price swings brought on by extreme weather events like the recent Midwest floods. These weather swings are arguably due to human-caused warming of the globe -- brought on in part by the carbon dioxide emissions from coal and gas power plants.

What if all of these costs (along with the hundred other ways we're invisibly subsidizing oil, gas, and coal) were directly accounted for in each month's electric bill -- with an extra charge like the delivery charge I'm paying for Cod Ed Solutions? Would clean energy suddenly look a lot more affordable, and practical, and necessary?

• Video Guides to DIY Bicycle Repair (The Bicycle Tutor via Make)
• How to Increase Produce in Your Local Corner Store (Neighbors Project via Instructables)
• Putting Meat Back in Its Place: Cook With Less Without Giving It Up (The New York Times)
• Gorgeous Brooklyn Garden of Ornamental Edibles
(Brownstoner)
• Robotic Arm Rotates Plants Towards the Sun (Make)
• Top Ten Survivial Skills for Modern Life (Lifehacker)

Image: Art meets craft meets intense bicyclist personality type: mosaic-covered touring bike by Nathan. "Fully functional! I'll be using it for a bike tour from Vermont to Baltimore this August...[Y]es, this thing is heavy but it can still climb hills and I've hit 40 MPH down hill. I'll get there when I get there." nathan2480/flickr.

• World Ports Tackle Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Terra Daily)
• New Federal Rules Proposed for Offshore Fish Farms, Energy (Associated Press)
• In A Changing Climate, Cities Worsen Water Quality (ES & T)
• The Old Man Who Farms With The Sea (Los Angeles Times)
• Water-Powered Cars: Too Good To Be True? (Treehugger)

Image: Working container port in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. Taken by me for East River Day on 21 June 2007; at the time I was editor of Waterwire News for the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance.

It's merely adequate in terms of composition (at the time, I was on a moving water taxi with a digital point-and-shoot), but the view surprises people who didn't realize that Brooklyn still has a working port, or that in fact, New York City is still a working port city.

Living in a city on the Atlantic seaboard (and right on a "coastal evacuation route," to boot), I take an interest in hurricane trends above and beyond my journalistic curiosity. So I note that to the record-breaking weather events of 2008 -- the extreme heat in California and the huge Midwestern floods, we can add Hurricane Bertha, the first storm of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season. According to NASA Earth Observatory, no hurricane has ever formed so far east before August 1 since reliable recordkeeping began in the 1940s.

What does it mean? Very hard to say in the short term. Note that in April, M.I.T. climate scientist Kerry Emanuel published research calling into question a recent role for global warming in rising hurricane intensity or frequency. Essentially, Dr. Emanuel seems to feel that the discrepancies between what some climate models predict about rising hurricane intensity as humans heat up the globe, and what's actually happening in nature, need acknowledgement and further study.

It's a significant shift for Dr. Emanuel, who is the scientist who "foresaw a rise in hurricane intensity in a human-warmed world and in 2005, just a few weeks before Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, asserted in a Nature paper that he had found statistical evidence linking rising hurricane energy and warming," wrote Andrew Revkin of The New York Times on April 12. "The new study, in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is hardly definitive in its own right, essentially raising more questions than it resolves. But it definitely rolls back Dr. Emanuel's sense of confidence about a recent role for global warming."

According to Nasa Earth Observatory, Bertha started near the Cape Verde Islands during the first week of July. "By the early morning hours of July 7, it had become a Category 1 hurricane, and less than 12 hours later had intensified to Category 3 status, with winds near 115 mph. Two days later, when this image was captured, the storm had weakened to Category 1, but was forecast to re-intensify."

Image: NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of the MODIS Rapid Response team. Caption by Rebecca Lindsey.

Select links on the pros and cons of oil gajillionaire Pickens' new enthusiasm for transitioning to wind power, including a video featuring T. Boone himself!

• The Pickens Plan (pickensplan.com)
• Texas Oilman T. Boone Pickens Wants To Supplant Oil With Wind (USA Today)
• T. Boone Pickens Could Gain From His Energy Plan, But So Might We (Los Angeles Times)
• Memo to T. Boone Pickens -- Plan Is Half Brilliant, Half Dumb (Gristmill)
• Big Pickens: T. Boone, the Oilman, Ups the Ante in His Wind Bet (Environmental Capital - wsj.com)
• Pickens Wants More Emphasis On Alternative Energy (BusinessWeek)
• T. Boone Pickens' Plan to Catch the Wind (Indecision 2008 - Comedy Central)
• Pickens' Audacious Wind-for-Gas Plan Flawed? (CNBC)

Just For Us Gals Dept: I have approximately two dresses I wear with any regularity.  The other four or five I keep for special occasions -- because you know, schmancy restaurant dress and casual night at the movies dress are not the same sort of animal.

I'm just concerned enough about this sort of thing to keep those seldom-worn dresses around, but they do take up precious room in my limited city apartment closets

Enter this fashionable "from one thing, many uses" renewable dress that I spied on the Russian design blog, "Things" ("Shtuki").  Here's what it says:

This is super!! 

The idea is simple in its brilliance: take a white dress with pockets, into the pockets we push the open felt-tip pens -- voila! We get bright summer clothes. 

Then we wash the dress, and do it anew with different colors.

Note the classic A line shape -- good for easily 90 percent of one's warrants-a-dress needs.  And the different patterns you can make just by limiting the colors and the pockets used. I imagine that some refinements of the fabric used for the pockets could net different shapes or designs for the dyes to flow into.

This is another take on the same design idea -- versatility that doesn't sacrifice style -- that birthed Nau's versatile Chrysalis dress-vest-jacket, with its removable arms and adjustable length. 

Video demonstration of the customization in action:


[[[Upon a second viewing, there is something kind of freaky-medical about this video. The white on white, the gesture of inserting the markers into the pockets is vaguely akin to inserting a hypodermic. Maybe I read too much cyberpunk in the 1990s.]]]

Designer's web site: FernandoBrizio.com

* With apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien.

• Sacramento's Energy-Smart 'Blueprint' for Growth Draws National Attention (The Wall Street Journal)
• A Danish Community's Victory Over Carbon Emissions -- Island of Samsø Converted to Clean Energy in a Decade (The New Yorker)
• Colleges, Universities Take The Lead In Building Green (Los Angeles Times)
• Can Green Designs Solve a Housing Crisis? (Worldwatch Institute)
• Are Bikes the Answer to Pain at the Pump? (Environmental Capital -- wsj.com)
• Retooling a Developed Economy's Energy Base: Germany at the Head of the Class (Triple Pundit)

Image: Offshore wind turbines, Samsø, Denmark. Courtesy Samsø Energy Academy.

• Secret Report: Biofuel Caused Food Crisis (The Guardian) [[[This report may cause panic and recriminations, but let's put this in context: Switchgrass and many other potential, and potentially much more energy-laden, biofuel feedstocks do not factor into the human food chain. The problem here is not biofuels; the problem is corn. Skewed agricultural policy and practices privilege corn commodity subsidies over policies and economic practices that would create a more sensible farm economy, stable food supply, and also materials for biofuels that don't draw on the same crops that factor into the human food chain.]]]
• Japan Sees a Chance to Promote Its Energy-Frugal Ways (The New York Times)
• Hawaii Is First State to Require Solar Water Heaters (Ecogeek)
• Massachusetts Unveils Ambitious Renewables and Energy Efficiency Bill
• (Treehugger)
• Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Preserves Viewscape (Ecofriend)

• We're Number Eight! U.S. (and Canada) Worst in G8 on Forestalling Climate Disruption (The Globe and Mail)
• Oil, Food Costs May Bump Climate Off G8 Agenda (news@nature) [[[When will they figure out it's all part of a piece?]]]
• Caffiene Usage Arcs Track Coffee Intake (information aesthetics)
• Hyper X 3 Local News at EveryBlock.com (NewAssigment.net)
• One Week Month Later, U.S. Lifts Moratorium on New Solar Projects (The New York Times)
• Rare Iguanas Struggle for Survival as Island Population Grows (Worldwatch Institute)
• S. Asia Leaders Gather to Plan Climate Crisis Action (BBC News)

Image: Melt Season along the Greenland West Coast. Image Acquired:  June 26, 2008. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

"In late June 2008, melt season had begun along the west coast of Greenland. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite captured these images on June 26, 2008.

"The top image is a natural-color image, similar to what a digital camera would record. In this image, snow, ice and clouds all appear white. Upstream from Jakobshavn Glacier, crevasses, or cracks, have colored the ice pale gray. Ponds of melt water dot the edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

"The bottom image is a false-color image that uses a combination of light visible to human eyes and light our eyes cannot see. This image highlights several features of the west coast of Greenland that can be difficult to discern in a true-color image. In this image, snow and ice appear bright turquoise, clouds appear translucent pale blue, water appears navy blue or black, vegetation appears bright green, and bare rock appears pinkish-brown. Immediately west of the ice, vegetation covers much of the Greenland coast, although the vegetation is not necessarily as robust as this bright green implies. North of Jakobshavn Glacier, the land tends more toward bare ground. More conspicuous in this image than in the natural-color shot, melt ponds make numerous black marks on the ice surface.

"Reaching all the way to the sea is Jakobshavn Glacier. At the time MODIS acquired this image, Jakobshavn was moving at a rate of roughly 14 kilometers per year, making it the world's fastest glacier.

"NASA image courtesy of Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Michon Scott, based on image interpretation by Ted Scambos, National Snow and Ice Data Center."

• Hurricane Watch: Insurers Raising Rates, Dropping Coast Communities on Forecasts of Future Storms (The Wall Street Journal)
• China Watch: Plastic Bag Ban Trumps Market and Consumer Efforts (Worldwatch Institute)
• When It Comes to Urban Transportation, Ingenuity Is the Key to Cleaner, Greener, and Smarter Cities (World Resources Institute)
• Architecture 2030 Cracks the Building Code (Solve Climate)
• Copenhagen to Join Congestion Tax Cities (Treehugger)
• India Unveils Solar-intensive Climate Change Plan (BBC News)