by David Burn | Jul 10, 2005 | The Environment
Last January, Grist Magazine ran “The Death of Environmentalism: Global warming politics in a post-environmental world” by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. In the foreword, Peter Teague, Environment Program Director for Nathan Cummings Foundation ties global warming to the increasing number of hurricanes the Gulf Coast is now experiencing. And since the Gulf Coast is experiencing another one right now, this seems an opportune time to take a look at an excerpt from the piece.
We believe that the environmental movement’s foundational concepts, its method for framing legislative proposals, and its very institutions are outmoded. Today environmentalism is just another special interest. Evidence for this can be found in its concepts, its proposals, and its reasoning. What stands out is how arbitrary environmental leaders are about what gets counted and what doesn’t as “environmental.” Most of the movement’s leading thinkers, funders and advocates do not question their most basic assumptions about who we are, what we stand for, and what it is that we should be doing.
Environmentalism is today more about protecting a supposed “thing” — “the environment” — than advancing the worldview articulated by Sierra Club founder John Muir, who nearly a century ago observed, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
Thinking of the environment as a “thing” has had enormous implications for how environmentalists conduct their politics. The three-part strategic framework for environmental policy-making hasn’t changed in 40 years: first, define a problem (e.g. global warming) as “environmental.” Second, craft a technical remedy (e.g., cap-and-trade). Third, sell the technical proposal to legislators through a variety of tactics, such as lobbying, third-party allies, research reports, advertising, and public relations.
When we asked environmental leaders how we could accelerate our efforts against global warming, most pointed to this or that tactic — more analysis, more grassroots organizing, more PR.
Few things epitomize the environmental community’s tactical orientation to politics more than its search for better words and imagery to “reframe” global warming. Lately the advice has included: a) don’t call it “climate change” because Americans like change; b) don’t call it “global warming” because the word “warming” sounds nice; c) refer to global warming as a “heat trapping blanket” so people can understand it; d) focus attention on technological solutions — like fluorescent light bulbs and hybrid cars.
by David Burn | Jun 3, 2005 | The Environment
Wired reports that nearly all of the ethanol in the United States is currently produced by fermenting the sugars in corn grain.
But the economics of ethanol could soon change, according to Robin Graham, the group leader of ecosystem and plant sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Graham said that producing ethanol from the cellulose of plants is less costly than using corn grain. The cost of raw materials for biomass-based ethanol could be much lower, since tree and plant residue from clearing lots can be obtained for free, and switchgrass (a perennial crop that grows everywhere east of the Rocky Mountains) and corn stovers (dried leaves and stalks) are inexpensive to acquire.
There’s no mention of growing hemp for fuel in the Wired piece, but the fact is we need to grow hemp and corn and utilize biomass. In other words, all solutions that wean us off oil are welcome and sorely needed.
by David Burn | May 30, 2005 | Lowcountry, The Environment
We rode a 7.1 mile loop today on Pinckney Island National Wildlife Refuge. It’s Memorial Day weekend, yet there were only a dozen or so cars at the trailhead to this natural treasure. People come to HHI for the beach and golf. But Pinckney offers visitors and locals alike great hiking, biking and kayaking opportunities. And we saw a fox!
Established in 1975, Pinckney Island National Wildlife Refuge consists of Pinckney Island, Corn Island, Big and Little Harry Islands, Buzzard Island and numerous small hammocks. The 4,053-acre refuge includes a variety of land types: saltmarsh, forestland, brushland, fallow fields, and freshwater ponds.
Archeologists have determined that prehistoric inhabitants dwelled on Pinckney Island as early as 10,000 B.C. Tribes of coastal Indians continued to live in the region until the 1700’s. The interior islands west of Hilton Head Island were protected against ocean storms, and provided abundant fishing, shell fishing, hunting, and edible plants to the native islanders.
p.s. We’ve also recently encountered wild turkeys, armadillos, deer, dolphins, turtles, gators, sharks, snakes, frogs, lizards, spiders and countless bird varieties livin’ the Lowcountry life.
by David Burn | Apr 23, 2005 | The Environment
Robert Patterson points to this startling article in Rolling Stone by James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere and The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century, due out next month from Grove/Atlantic (and the book from which the Rolling Stone article is adapted).
This article really needs to be read from top to bottom and then read again, but here are some excerpts to whet your appetite:
Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that “people cannot stand too much reality.” What you’re about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.
It has been very hard for Americans — lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring — to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.
The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don’t have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.
The United States passed its own oil peak — about 11 million barrels a day — in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.
Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.
Kunstler goes on to say we will have to “accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions.” He argues that alternative energies will not save us and predicts a return to local economies by the mid-21st century.
Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not “services” like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work.
The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous.
Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.
I’m not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.
The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.
The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope — that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on.
by David Burn | Apr 14, 2005 | Politics, The Environment
According to an Associated Press report, lawmakers plowed through an energy bill yesterday that would provide billions of dollars in tax breaks to industry, open an Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling and aid farmers by expanding the use of ethanol in gasoline.
Hey, I’m all for ethanol. So there is some good news. But now back to the bad news.
Democrats were expected to try to remove a provision that would, for the first time, allow oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Republicans said they’re confident the attempt will be rebuffed.
The refuge drilling issue is all but certain to be rejected in the Senate where opponents have vowed to block it by filibuster. Refuge drilling proponents in the Senate, instead, are hoping to get the measure passed as part of the budget process where the filibuster cannot be used.
Democrats complained that the tax package, which advanced out of the Ways and Means Committee, provides little to promote renewable energy sources and reduce energy use while funneling tax benefits to energy companies that already are making huge profits from high energy prices.
“There is no provision … that will lower the price of gasoline, only protect the profits of the oil industry,” said Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) “What do the American people get — nothing but a raw deal.”
by David Burn | Jan 18, 2005 | The Environment
Reykjavik: Iceland’s geothermal riches have made it a leader in alternative energy for years, but now, by tapping deeper into that free energy source, Iceland aims to be completely oil free by 2050. Actually that’s a pretty long way off, but major changes have already taken place – 70% of the countries energy needs are already met by geothermal and hyrdoelectic power. And many busses are already running on hydrogen power.
Source: Beyond Brilliance
by David Burn | Jan 1, 2005 | The Environment
NEW YORK (Reuters) — Turkey leftovers will take on a whole new use after a Minnesota company finishes construction of a power plant fired by the birds’ droppings.
It may not be the total answer to relieving the United States’ addiction to foreign oil, but the plant will burn 90 percent turkey dung and create clean power for 55,000 homes.
Three poultry litter plants have already been built in England, but the Benson, Minnesota-based facility will be the first large-scale plant of its type in the U.S. and the largest in the world, according to operator Fibrominn, a subsidiary of power plant builder Homeland Renewable Energy, LLC of Boston.
Turkey dung is prized over pig excrement and cow chips.
“Poultry litter is drier material, so it burns better, and there’s a lot of it,” said Charles Grecco, of HH Media, LLC, an investment bank that helped arrange $202 million in financing for the plant.
The 55-megawatt plant will burn 700,000 tons of dung a year and produce fertilizer as a by-product, a process that will keep phosphorus and nitrates found in the raw litter from seeping into water supplies, said Grecco.
by David Burn | Nov 17, 2004 | The Environment
from The Independent: Polar bears, the biggest land carnivores on Earth, face extinction this century if the Arctic continues to melt at its present rate, a study into global warming has found. The sea ice around the North Pole on which the bears depend for hunting is shrinking so swiftly it could disappear during the summer months by the end of the century, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ICIA) says.
The ACIA said a warmer polar region will not only result in the possible extinction of the polar bear and other species. It will present serious challenges to the health and survival of some native peoples and their cultures.
Countries bordering the Arctic, notably Russia, Greenland and Canada, are already planning for the time when the north-west and north-east shipping routes are open all year round. Russia especially is expected to benefit hugely from the control of a year-round shipping route between Japan and Europe which will cut thousands of miles off present-day trade routes.
by David Burn | Oct 26, 2004 | The Environment
Breaking news from Ukiah, CA…
Ukiah entrepreneur Kumar Plocher is fueling a revolution one gallon of biodiesel at a time. Plocher and his wife, Sunny Beaver, manage Yokayo Biofuels, and they preach the biofuels gospel throughout Mendocino County. Since the company started, Yokayo Biofuels has merely distributed biodiesel. However, Plocher is close to finding a site in Ukiah for a biofuels production plant.
“It’s a common misconception that we are producing biofuels right now. I can’t wait to be able to stop having to correct that misconception,” Plocher said. “Being a biodiesel dealer is not profitable, but if you control the process, you increase your ability to make money. In many ways, we are pioneers in what we do. I think a lot of people have their eye on us to see how well we do with our plans.”
Yokayo Biofuels collects restaurant grease and converts it into fuel for diesel-powered vehicles. More than 100 restaurants in Mendocino and Sonoma counties take part in the grease recycling program. Their participation yields about 5,000 gallons per month for Plocher’s business.
by David Burn | Sep 28, 2004 | Food & Beverage, The Environment
Founded in 1986, in direct response to the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in Rome’s famous Piazza di Spagna, the Slow Food movement–dedicated to supporting traditional ways of growing, producing and preparing food–is today gaining traction with people around the world. According to this excellent article in The Nation, Slow Food offers a kind of pleasure-loving environmentalism that does not reject consumption per se but the homogenization and high-speed frenzy of chain-store, fast-food life.
