Comments spaceshaper has made

Pahrump? Never heard of it. Google -  hmmm. http://tinyurl.com/4websn

This is not an agricultural study but, for what it's worth, a nutritional one, and not to support its conclusions but FYI - the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine is one of the oldest and most highly respected public health research bodies in the world: http://tinyurl.com/kmda6m

So, don't 'get started' until you know what you're talking about. Is there an institutional equivalent of 'ad hominem'?

"Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid will save four times more fuel than the Japanese carmaker’s Prius"

Whether or not GM's fuel-use claims for the Volt are realistic, this is a meaningless statement in the absence of a reference point. If the point of comparison is a 25 mpg vehicle (4gal/100mi), the Prius at a nominal 50 mpg* (2gal/100mi) saves 2 gallons of fuel for every 100 miles driven and the Volt at 230mpg equivalent (0.43gal/100mi) saves 3.57 gallons, less than twice as much. The lower the mpg of the reference vehicle, the lower the "savings ratio" of the Volt compared to the Prius: only with a reference vehicle rating of around 42 mpg or better does the claim become true.

The confusion arises from the much-commented practice of using mpg instead of gal/100mi as a measure of vehicle use. And of course in actuality neither vehicle "saves" fuel. They both spend fuel.

* round number chosen to make the math easy. YMMV.

Here's one by Cooper: http://tinyurl.com/n8e98f

and another by Leviton:http://tinyurl.com/lgzcxa

Both of these are also GFCI. Install as lead outlet in a GFCI string to control all the downstream outlets too.

Indulgent elective choices do not need the endorsement of sustainability advocates whatever the volume of recycled this and PV that they may contain. Comparisons with other over-size homes are specious. This is not in any sense a model for sustainable green construction 'for the masses' and is an insult to the many that are.

Work/live does not need huge: here's an example: 3-bed 2-bath home for merged family of five, 1,874 s.f. includes 320 s.f. studio for artist mom, 5 min walk to business of framer dad, traditional energy-efficient passive solar on 1/4 acre lot in well-resourced walkable urban community. No PV, no elevators, no planned-obsolescent electronic doodads. What it does have is warmth, color, personality, great daylight, and the integrity that only comes with simple ideas well executed. That's a model.

Thing I still don't get after all this increasingly bizarre discussion is if you have reasons not to drink milk (ethics, lactose intolerance, w/e) why not just - not drink milk? What is the atavistic compulsion which will drive someone to consume a somewhat expensive and highly processed whitish liquid which apparently doesn't taste the same OR have the same nutritional value as the original and has its own set of ethical, environmental and dietary problems?

Guess I just don't get it. Last time I drank a glass of milk I was seven years old. I was in hospital having fallen out of a tree and broken my arm. Nurse insisted that the milk would make my arm heal (it did - causation or correlation?) So fifty milkless years later and my bone health is apparently excellent. Milk is for babies, milk substitutes are for the gullible and deranged.

Full disclosure: I do enjoy good quality cheese, butter and yoghurt in modest quantities. I'm a sucker for ice cream too but ration myself because of the sugar content. I've lived around dairy farms much of my life and am aware of the discomfort that dairy cows in even the best-run operations have to put up with as well as the hell they endure in the worst of the worst. I've not entirely made my peace with that but you'll never find me going to the ersatz and the phony as a way out.

Hey Pomp

Ditto on 'harvest'. I grew up among an extended community of farmers, fishers and quarrymen. They would all of them be most bewildered to hear anything described as harvest that was not the product of tillage and planting in the cycle of the seasons.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Unfortunately

increasingly crappy and poorly-maintained roads don't have much effect on reducing automobile use. They just make people feel they need an SUV.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Performance standards for biofuels?

Now there's a crazy idea.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

"Craptastic"

Think I just had a craptasm.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

sadly

'taking pride in being ignorant' is still the preferred way for a Republican politician to connect with the base.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

War. What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing.

is GHG climate emergency as potentially devestating as world domination by the Axis powers was?

The reality is we have effectively been conducting an increasingly vicious war against our mother planet for the last two hundred years, since the beginning of the industrial revolution. This conflict has escalated to the point where Gaia is no longer just irritated but is now positively annoyed and is getting ready to shake us off. Making peace with the earth is now the task that confronts us. War is not the way to that peace. Peace IS the way. We need to back off, calm down, stop our destructive behavior and put salve on the wounds we have inflicted.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Heads up, Rod:

"Just trust us, we're the experts" is not the most compelling response to serious critiques of one's favorite technology, particularly when so much rides on its success or failure, and for so many people. More substance and less camouflage please, or get comfortable with being ignored.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Funny

I was just watching my local mail truck gunning it every hundred feet between mailboxes on my suburban street and thinking a more wasteful application for a gas engine would be hard to imagine. At least the inter-city truck engines get to run at something approaching reasonable efficiency for a substantial part of the trip. For most local delivery an EV fleet would make far more sense, no? Could be a very low-spec inexpensive vehicle. 35 mph, 50 mile range, lead acid batteries, overnight recharge. And keep six-day delivery.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Smart - not so much?

Agree with liberalnun. Smartcars only real benefit is how short they are. Handy parking on the streets of Paris, not so big a deal in the US where most every urban parking space is marked for a full-size, and you're up for a ticket if you double-park 2 Smarts at one meter. Apparently this project went for the Smartcar strategy as a workaround as they couldn't get enough full-size spaces under the building to meet city ordinances (a common enough scenario) - which begs the question, if this building is downtown why does it need parking spaces at all? Doesn't Asheville have a Zipcar franchise? If not why not?

Of course the subtext makes it clear the condos are positioned as second, third or whatever homes for wealthy out-of-towners ("their Asheville car"). So, greenwash anyone?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

'Scuse me

while I go lick a pumpkin.

PETA rocks!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Re: Learning from Criticism

I agree. Sundance has evolved from an experiment into an institution, and like all institutions its basic premises need questioning from time to time. Sundance was created to foster new film-makers and give them industry exposure. Why does it need to do that in Park City? Could it be done better elsewhere? Could it be done better in a totally different way?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Duh!

Because oil is Foreign. Unless it's drilled, baby, drilled from our own environmentally sensitive areas. That's what 'alternative sources' means.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

mojave carbon sink

http://news.dri.edu/nr2008/Mojave_051208.php

You can get plenty of further links with a quick google on 'mojave carbon sink'. Would seem to be a quantifiable effect, so Gar's last point would be testable.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Climate and the steady state

Romm is right to point out the fundamental foolishness of economic modeling based on future climate conditions that are not reliably steady-state. If anything he vastly understates the importance of climate instability to agricultural and economic futures.

Agriculture hates climate instability. It's supremely important to farmers (as to any place-based human investment) that over time the temperature and rainfall at a particular piece of ground are reasonably season-by-season predictable. This is why we have almanacs, agricultural extension, heck even Stonehenge (read the beginning chapters of Steinbeck's 'East of Eden' for an account of the agricultural and social disaster resulting from a decade-long misreading of local climate conditions). If AGW continues unchecked it will be centuries before reference sources can again describe with authority the stable seasonal climate of (fill in the blank geographical location). Building a functional, sustainable agricultural policy is tough enough already - throw into the mix a climate topology which is not predictable from one decade to the next and any attempt at intelligent agricultural resource management goes completely out the window. If you think a little bio-fuel resource diversion has been a problem for world food production just wait to see what's coming.

The need for steady-state predictability of local and regional climate conditions affects almost every other aspect of human development and resource management too, from the design of our homes to where we site our recreation facilities. Agriculture though is forever the broad base of the pyramid, the part which actually keeps us alive from day to day.

But then, Mendelsohn is not here acting as an actual economist (Greek oikos + nomos, household + regulation, the thoughtful and proper disposition of our common resource). He's just saying he sees some short-term profit to be made. Suckas!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Thanks for the link, nancyk

The strategy the economists used was as simple as it was absurd--they substituted economic variables for physical ones. Utility (a measure of economic well-being) took the place of energy; the sum of utility and expenditure replaced potential and kinetic energy. A number of well-known mathematicians and physicists told the economists that there was absolutely no basis for making these substitutions. But the economists ignored such criticisms and proceeded to claim that they had transformed their field of study into a rigorously mathematical scientific discipline.

Strangely enough, the origins of neoclassical economics in mid-19th century physics were forgotten. Subsequent generations of mainstream economists accepted the claim that this theory is scientific. These curious developments explain why the mathematical theories used by mainstream economists are predicated on the following unscientific assumptions:

    *  The market system is a closed circular flow between production and consumption, with no inlets or outlets.
    * Natural resources exist in a domain that is separate and distinct from a closed market system, and the economic value of these resources can be determined only by the dynamics that operate within this system.
    * The costs of damage to the external natural environment by economic activities must be treated as costs that lie outside the closed market system or as costs that cannot be included in the pricing mechanisms that operate within the system.
    * The external resources of nature are largely inexhaustible, and those that are not can be replaced by other resources or by technologies that minimize the use of the exhaustible resources or that rely on other resources.
    * There are no biophysical limits to the growth of market systems.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

The Convergence of the Twain.

Bob, while we share a lot of common ground, maybe more than you think, I've no desire to reiterate our previous discussions on this topic. We are clearly talking about two completely different things: you, what the american people would like their future to be; me, the future the american public may be compelled to accept. Compelled by circumstance that is, not by politics or persuasion.

My great respect for the particular realities of the american political process does not extend to the belief that it is more powerful or more important than the physical realities of the planet we inhabit. I have a strong interest in examining the point at which those two realities intersect - who here does not? But I personally have no time for claims that the former always trumps or has equal value to the latter as the Titanic of human preference rapidly closes in on the iceberg of climate change.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Economics and science

I suspect that much of the blame for the strength of anti-science in our popular and political culture may be to do with economics' claim to scientific authority. While it does use some of the observational tools in the scientific toolbox, the double-blind empirical studies used by the physical sciences to test the hypotheses derived from observation are pretty much unavailable, for fairly obvious reasons.

Then, the reasoning goes, if economics boils down to a matter of (however well-informed) opinion, why not the "other" sciences too? Statistically-based disciplines like climate science and the study of the archaeological and paleological record would be particularly vulnerable to this analogy, hence the credibility given to AGW denial and creationism.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Ain't no nimbys in here!

Note the Guardian article also describes a municipal PV installation near Barcelona mounted on mausoleum roofs in the town cemetery. "The crowded, working-class town (of Santa Coloma de Gramenet) outside Barcelona decided that flat, open, sun-drenched land was so scarce that the graveyard was the only viable spot to site the panels, which provide enough electricity to power 60 homes."

Again, not quite point-of-use. But you can't fault them for resourcefulness!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

substitutions

I think Adam has it the right way round, assuming that he wishes us to choose chicken, pork or fish instead of beef.  Although Angelsnecropolis' inversion is an increasingly common usage I believe it is incorrect, and like "irregardless" or "I could care less" has the opposite of the intended meaning.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

How much jatropha

can be grown in New Zealand?

Will they have any left over for export? And where will they put all the sheep?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Do the math, Bob

Show us where the 'wasteland' is that can grow enough jatropha, or anything else, to put even a small dent in our fossil fuel usage. One jet, one flight, half and half vegetable oil: is that really your 'practical solution, now'? Have you looked into oil product per acre, how many acres are available, how many goats (and the folks that depend on them) will go hungry?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Dream on, Bob

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Aviation & CE

I was under the impression that the lower energy density of ethanol was an additional major problem  in aviation uses. If this is not wrong, and other fuel options do not manifest as amazin' projects, the future of aviation must either be tied to dwindling supplies of petro-kerosene or it must accept lower payloads. Either way this would make commercial aviation an increasingly expensive option over time and thus liable to swiftly lose market to surface modes and, per hapa, virtual travel. The vapor emission problem might just fix itself.

Myself, I'm inclined to think we'll see fast high-tech sailing ships, both cargo and passenger, before we're done. Cutty Sark, wha' hey!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Trash toy spinoff

If Wall-E ends up promoting the consumption of the same kind of useless trash that it purports to condemn it won't be the first time that a well-crafted animated fable has betrayed its own environmental message. I seem to recall that clown fish were in huge demand for home aquaria following the release of "Finding Nemo" and that countless numbers were consequently suctioned from the reefs in commercial emulation of the human villains of the piece, the Sydney dentist and his nasty daughter.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Moving forward while looking backward

Rational discussion of Kunstler seems often to founder on overly simplistic views of the suburb and its relationship with the urbs and the rus, the city and the country. Kunstler's undoubtedly dyspeptic analysis is clearly focussed on that subset of the suburban phenomenon that has been dominant since the middle of the last century. His primary critique is intense and in many respects irrefutable: these suburban developments of the last forty years or so generally have generally an almost complete lack of livability sans automobile: take away the car and this particular version of the suburban way of life simply falls apart. I believe few intelligent observers would deny this. On what follows from this observation however critics diverge dramatically.

On the one hand we see the Kunstlerites extend the analysis more or less as follows: continuing the automobile culture indefinitely is going to be extremely difficult and prohibitively expensive (it could even cost us our use of much of the planet); there are excellent modes of development available to us which make the automobile vastly less important in our daily lives; there are immense additional societal positives associated with these alternative development modes; if we make this change of direction early it can be relatively painless; if we procrastinate it will be forced on us by circumstance, probably with great suffering especially to the most vulnerable among us.

On the other hand the anti-Kunstler camp sees the automobile-based development mode either as a wonderful thing that we must strive to preserve or as a bad thing that we are compelled to accept because 'people won't give up their cars'; either way we must  figure out a way to keep the cars running no matter what. Anti-Kunstlerites include a wide range of political extremes, from the 'drill, baby drill' right to the 'science will save us' technophiles on the environmental left.

What both camps can easily ignore in the heat of the argument is that the suburb predates the automobile by many centuries. It has existed, and flourished, for as long as we have had towns and cities. Ancient Athens and classical Rome had suburbs, medieval walled cities had suburbs, eighteenth-century London and Paris had suburbs. Keats retreated to London's leafy Hampstead, Kahlo to Mexico City's Coyoacan for a measure of quasi-rural peace within easy reach of the city's bustling resources. Towns and cities of the modern age with major development that took place shortly before the hegemony of the automobile had some very attractive and livable suburbs indeed: Philadelphia and Chicago are prominent large-scale examples in the US but finer-grained examples in smaller towns and cities can also be found across north america. A common characteristic of the best of these is that they provided excellent resources mostly within walking distance to supply the daily needs of their inhabitants: grocery and hardware stores, cafes and restaurants, parks, schools and libraries. Then of course to supplement these local resources there were public transportation nodes giving access to the commercial and cultural resources of the urban center.

We need not fear the anti-Kunstlerite caricature of horses and carts and peasant hovels in the country, teeming tenements in the city and nothing in between.  Nor do we need to bother ourselves with the 'environmentalists hate cars' straw-man meme. If we seek a rational way forward we can quite simply look to the best of these traditional suburbs to be our models for new development and for updating the old in a vastly less car-dependent future. The new urbanists seek to do this, as did the Garden City movement of a century ago: there's plenty of excellent literature available on how to achieve the suburb's traditional promise of 'the best of both worlds' with just a modicum of research as well as these excellent built examples. It's not a question of blowing them up but of doing them right.

There remains the huge question of what to do with the large tracts of existing development which if we give any credence to to the Kunstler view may be functionally uninhabitable within a few decades. There is a traditional name for extensive residential developments without convenient access to local resources for daily life: we call them slums. Some of these non-place places may prove redeemable with intelligent retrofit; some will not.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

"Oil is still plentiful"

Bob, you obviously have nothing for contempt for Kunstler, that's very clear. That this extends to anyone who sees a measure of sense in his ideas is also apparent. Reading back through your posts though, quite slowly, I see the closest you come to actual commentary on Kunstler's position is your second post where you skip through the ten points with jeering summary dismissal. Calling an idea "crap" is not my idea of a critique. I also see unsubstantiated and hopelessly optimistic assertions about our future energy costs and options. It's hard to get a clear idea where you're coming from amidst all the scorn, but you seem to understand that, as a climate imperative, coal has got to go. Here's a little reality check: our best-informed and most responsible analysts tell us that our current level of oil use is not sustainable either - not desirable in climate terms nor possible in supply terms (see the latest IFA report, and Monbiot's interview with IFA chief Fatih Birol http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/15/161844/63). And it also seems that THERE ARE NO SUSTAINABLE SUBSTITUTES for our present level of oil use, either currently available or that we can plausibly count on in the future at reasonable levels of cost and volume. Cling to your hopes of plentiful (and miraculously carbon-free) oil and limitless 10c./kWh electricity if you like. The facts simply point elsewhere.

Kunstler grasps the implications of this inconvenient truth for our current land use patterns - there are many others who also get this, such as Rynn, JMG and Lawrence Auerbach who regularly post on this blog. These commentators also regularly point out the many social and personal benefits that would accrue from an early and intentional move towards a less car-dependent culture, I will not reiterate these benefits now, they have been repeated here many many times. Kunstler is more apt to point out the other side of the coin: the pain that's likely to come from waiting until the shift is forced upon us. If you don't like his style, fine, but his conclusions and his remedies are largely rational. You have yet to even attempt to demonstrate otherwise.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

BW

Quick with the faux-country-boy jibes, not so big on content. Tell me, is this one of those tedious town/country things? If so I really don't want to play.

Meanwhile, Kunstler. Wrong on Y2K.  Right on fraudulent and overextended financial instruments. Right on the economic collapse when the shit hit the fan. Right on the failure of recent urban development models. Right, give or take a detail or two, with most of the stuff on this list. Don't like his gloomy prognosis? Neither do I, but that doesn't mean it ain't gonna happen.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Choices, Bob

We can either stay within the confines of what might be politically acceptable to the exurban residents of the Fargo area or we can explore how to intelligently address the critical problems that face the country as a whole. I seem to remember being told very firmly just a short while ago that it was politically impossible to elect a black President in the US. Funny how times change.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Well Bob,

so you don't think much of K's list. What you got?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

just guessing

that first line should read 1930, not 1030?

just guessing.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Hydrogen la-la land

"In the CUTE (Clean Urban Transport for Europe) project, which was intended to demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of fuel- cell buses and hydrogen technology, fuelling the hydrogen buses required between 80% and 200% more energy than the baseline diesel bus. Fuelling the Hydrogen7, the hydrogen-powered car made by BMW, requires 254 kWh per 100 km - 220% more energy than an average European car.... I know of no form of land transport whose energy consumption is worse than this hydrogen car."

David McKay: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. Version 3.5.2, November 2008

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Heat pumps etc.

One of the difficulties of discussing building-related energy strategies on a national/international forum like this is the vast range of climate conditions which individual contributors take for granted. Just looking at the US alone, residents of Miami, Albuquerque, Minneapolis, San Diego and Seattle will encounter very different challenges in achieving desirable comfort conditions in their homes at reasonable energy cost and will tend to have a locally-biassed vision as a result. As an example, WaterConsNYC suggests "only a tiny fraction of North Americans have heat pumps". Without arguing over the specifics of what constitutes a "tiny fraction" I can tell you that air-source heat pumps are the most common systems here in the Carolina Piedmont and I believe they may be the heating/cooling system of choice in as many as 25% of US homes. As such they deserve a little attention. In my experience as a design professional in the home construction and renovation business I have found from observation that programmable thermostats do indeed offer significant year-round energy savings on heat-pump installations, especially as they function in the cooling season too of course. If there are cross-climate generalizations to be made I think it's fair to say that programmable thermostats, appropriately set, can offer significant reductions in home energy use in most ducted air and fast-response radiant heating systems (i.e. wall radiators rather than heated high-mass floors) and probably in all air-conditioning systems.

And swolpow, if it takes as much six or seven hours to reheat your house on cold windy days after overnight setback it sounds very likely your home could benefit from a relatively inexpensive weatherization program. You don't say what kind of heating system you have or where you live, but in a typical low-thermal-mass US home with decent insulation and draft-stripping a recovery time of as little as twenty minutes should be achievable - maybe an hour at the most.On Umbra on turning down the heat posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago 21 Responses

Tell it to the man.

For such a generally well-informed guy the president-elect continues to display some notable environmental blind spots: he still seems to believe that agro-fuels have a future in this country and that unplugging cell-phone chargers is a worthwhile home energy-saver. Tell him we don't need to be building more roads as a way to get the economy moving. We have no shortage of blacktop. Transit and rail investment is the way to go.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Word.

The passage you quote is the pivot and purpose of the whole short speech. The man is gifted.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

A la

Sorry, Canis, I meant alla carbonara as you correctly had it.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Straw Man Festival!

Yay, here we go again. A couple of contributors gently suggest, in a thread about the environmental ethics of Thanksgiving turkey-eating, that eating no turkey at all is an option, and before you know it we have accusations of extremist veg*n proselytizing flying around and the veg*ns responding in kind.

B O R I N G.

How about we give it a break. Seems to me we all have something much more special to be thankful about this November than what brand of roasted bird (or paper towel) may or may not be in the center of the table.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

"Nature"

The hope that "nature" will somehow balance out a hopelessly unbalanced system is the utmost of religious lunacy and dogma.

Not so. Nature will certainly balance out the system in due course, however unbalanced it may currently be. That's what nature does: the only meaningful definition of the term in this context is that which reaches its own balance over time absent deliberate input from intelligent actors such as ourselves. That balance is probably not the one that Backcut seeks, subscribing as he does to the noble savage view on forest management, but balance it will certainly be.

Of course nature takes its own good time to achieve such an end state, often many human generations. Are we prepared to wait that long for the healing of our forests, and would we be satisfied with the result? These are sensible questions, and many of us would prefer a transition within our lifetimes to some particular, reasonably sustainable state for which interventions of the sort Backcut promotes might well be required. However I believe there are many here who would listen more sympathetically to his case if he would not attack his supposed opponents with accusations of "religious lunacy and dogma".

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

I just hope whatever it is

is not as clunky as Google Groups.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Less speed, yes please Jon.

I'd be happy to have a 35 mph 80 mile range electric car for commuting, shopping, going out to dinner etc, as well as for local business use. I'd want a/c and heating - here in NC we have four real seasons - and room for four adults. Ninety five per cent of my driving is on 35 mph or less roads. For out of town trips I'd rent.

Saw a Smart car today, the gas engine seemed such an anomaly, sounded like a lawn mower.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Talk about anthropocentrism!

Wolverine:

my first horse was far more intelligent than the vast majority of people I've met!

And tell me, did this smart critter understand that he/she was YOUR horse? Isn't the idea of ownership (read: enslavement) of another living creature kinda inconsistent with the ideal of biocentrism you claim here so forcefully as your environmental philosophy?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

GPS + cruise control

could actually enforce speed limits in towns (as opposed to ignoring most speeders and only punishing those few who exceed the limit outrageously, by 20 mph or more, as now).

Speed limit enforcement like this could transform the quality of life of our cities and towns. Consider: when crossing the street on foot, your chance of death or disabling injury when hit by a vehicle travelling at 25 mph is 5%; when hit by a vehicle travelling at 35 mph it's 95%.

Simpler yet: transition to low/mid-speed low/mid-range electric vehicles for urban driving: the real "Town Car". Move beyond the urban drag strip. Forget "performance cars". It's time for "performance cities".

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

BCE

It's instructive to look at development patterns BCE (Before Cheap Energy) if we want to see what the future may bring in an energy-constrained future. Cities and towns and their stable periferal communities have flourished for centuries mostly in temperate well-watered climes. In deserts - not so much.

Of course that's even before you look at the aquifer depletion issues. Good luck with the technofixes, DrX. Collect the exhaust drippings of a gazillion hydrogen cars perhaps?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

McSame again

"You may not agree with John McCain on every issue. But you can always count on him to be straight with you about where he stands, and to stand for what he thinks is right regardless of politics."

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Not corn ethanol

Obama's speech plugs "the next generation" of bio-fuels

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

It's not eu, it's epi

"In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle used the term epikhairekakia (alternatively epikairekakia; ἐπιχαιρεκακία in Greek) as part of a triad of terms, in which epikhairekakia stands as the opposite of phthonos, and nemesis occupies the mean. Nemesis is "a painful response to another's undeserved good fortune," while phthonos is "a painful response to any good fortune," deserved or not. The epikhairekakos person actually takes pleasure in another's ill fortune."

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Re: Iraq death comparison

And as I've mentioned before, a single MONTH of driving produces as many American deaths as foreign terrorists have in the last twenty years.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Capital! Or not.

Mac, John FM is just indulging in a little schadenfreude. AKA epikairakakia. So male.

And by the way, Canis:
"In German, Schadenfreude is capitalized, as are all nouns in the German language. When used as a loanword in English, however, it is not, unless the origin of the word is meant to be emphasized." From the Wikipedia article JR referenced.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

TP in history

It's always instructive to look at how our ancestors managed daily activities that seem now unthinkable without our resource-intensive industrial inputs. My personal knowledge of this particular subject is limited, but here's some of the little I think I know.

Roman soldiers famously carried a small sponge for the purpose of anal cleansing, which they afterwards rinsed. I would guess that their urban counterparts, at least the wealthier ones, might have used some form of bidet, though I do not recall seeing anything resembling that among the circle of stone thrones in the communal facility preserved at Ostia Antica. And they of all our predecessors would seem most likely to have had a slave dedicated to that service - asswipearius?

In more recent history the classic disposable cleanser of rural American asses was of course the humble corn husk, later displaced by a page torn from last year's Sears catalog. Neither of these would seem flushable, so I would expect that these options tended to vanish along with the outdoor privy.

In the medieval period in northern Europe underwear was uncommon, clothing for both male and female of the ordinary classes often comprised no more than tunic and leggings. I suspect that the anus largely went unwiped. Unsanitary as this may sound it is nevertheless the standard practice for the household pets of today who are commonly admitted, post-defecation and uncleansed, to our furniture, our carpets, our laps and even to our beds. They of course do not sit on chairs to excrete as we mostly now do, and we must recognize how unnatural this habit is. The low squat, with the upper thighs pressed against the abdomen, is the stance most conducive to proper peristaltic evacuation of the bowel, and which by spreading the ass-cheeks wide and temporarily extruding a small portion of the lower gut naturally limits the cleansing required of that area. It also reduces the tendency to constipation and hemorrhoids with which, judging by the frequent advertisements for patent medicines, we are currently plagued. We are currently being (ill)advised to raise our toilet seats even higher in the interests of "universal design" - but that's another story.

Southern Europe has long favored the bidet over the use of toilet tissue, even before the advent of the plumbed version. A simple bowl of suitable shape on an iron stand was a common feature of guest rooms in the Italian pensione until quite recently.

In Greece, toilets available to the public in rural areas are still liable to be equipped with notices (usually in English and German as well as Greek) not to flush anything but fecal matter as the drains are not designed to accommodate paper products. A small bin, abuzz with flies, is provided for used tissue. This smelly situation is rapidly changing as EC membership has brought funds for upgrading this and other infrastructure. Seated toilets are a relative novelty there in any case: the squatting 'Turkish' toilet was the standard for many years, as it was also in France and Italy.

Arabic cultures I am told traditionally use the left hand, uncovered, for cleansing the anus and the right hand for eating. Makes sense. Perhaps this was once a more universal custom, and could help explain why we greet each other by shaking only right hands, and why we distrust those sinister left-handed people.

With regards to facial tissue, recycled-paper dinner napkins are generally durable enough to last several days of normal use, though germaphobic Americans might find this practice unacceptable.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Meddling

I agree with Wiscidea that we have been meddling with nature for our entire existence as a species, and we are not alone in doing this: other creatures share some measure of our curiosity, our inventiveness and our hunger, though perhaps with rather less impact. The issue right now though is the potential scale of this interference. The real questions we must ask of GMOs, as of all aspects of industrialized food production, are: what are likely to be the long-term consequences (social, environmental, financial) of their massive deployment? And is managing the risks associated with their development safe in the hands of large corporations which happen to be driven primarily by short-term financial gain?

The answers to the first of these questions are hardly being addressed, which suggests that the answer to the second question is simply, no. Wiscidea speaks as a technologist with an acknowledged vested interest in the continuation of GMO research. I have respect for that, but have no confidence that technologists or their employers are presently held properly accountable for the ultimate results of their work.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Re: Duh

Sweeping ethnic generalizations always piss me off, however many subcategories are included. OK, so depending on your definition this may be not so much racist as it is just self-centered, self-deluding and shallow. "Native Americans" are "good" when their behavior corresponds with the world view of a particular (white) observer and "bad" when it does not.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

So there's Good Injuns and Bad Injuns.

Just like in the movies. Sounds like more of the same old racist crap to me, Wolverine.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Passivhaus ancestor?

"On Leasowe Road (in Wallasey, Cheshire, England) is the first building in the world to be heated entirely by solar energy. At 53.4°N, it is also the most northerly. The "Solar Campus" was formerly St George's Secondary School, and was built in 1961 to the designs of Emslie Morgan, the Assistant Borough Architect, who spent a lifetime looking into ways of harnessing the sun's rays. His research resulted in a matchbox like building with, on one side a drab, windowless façade and on the other 10,000 square feet (1,000 m²) of glass, a giant solar wall. The wall is built of glass leaves two feet apart. These draw the ultra violet rays from sunshine and bounce them around the walls of the classrooms. The walls become warm and heat the air. Hardly any warmth escapes through the school's massively thick roof and walls covered with slabs of plastic foam. On the coldest days it is always 60 degrees Fahrenheit inside, and in summer the school is cooler than its more conventional neighbours, for panels inside the glass wall can be turned to deflect heat or absorb it.

Despite dire predictions about the lighting conditions inside the building, all of which proved unfounded, it succeeded. At the time there was no detailed explanation published about why it worked, but work it did, completely eradicating any need for heating. However, Morgan's design died with him, and it was many years before anyone else considered it of more than curiosity value. Similar designs are now being examined across the world.

In practice, the large convector ducts which direct the warmed air to the colder north side of the building are a major safety hazard, and fire breaks have had to be inserted to reduce or cut off the air flow. The result is that on sunny days the south, glazed side of the building reaches unbearable temperatures in excess of 40°C while for most of the time the unglazed north side never reaches a comfortable temperature nor receives much natural light.

A secondary, small single-pipe heating system was installed to give additional heating on cold winter days with very few hours of sunlight. The system is fuelled by oil, which was cheap at the time. Today, the secondary heating has to be used very often, and is very expensive."

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

"deliberate misgovernment"

the conservative agenda calls for deliberate misgovernment to shake the public trust in government so they can further weaken regulations and private interests can cash in.

Is there a more perfect description of the achievements of the current administration? It may have have looked like pure ineptitude but W turned out to be 'smarter' than he looked.

Is there a sad paradox here? Is 'good' government that actually addresses itself to the fundamental necessities of fiscal, social and environmental responsibility inevitably doomed to be undervalued and condemned? Do we only have respect for a government that totally f**ks up, so long as it does so spectacularly and shamelessly? I guess we'll know in November. "You can fool some of the people all of the time..."

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

I think I've figured it out.

The Occam's Razor of the energy debate is really quite simple. If it doesn't work, it's sexy. If it does work ... b-o-r-i-n-g.

Drill, drill, drill. Doesn't work. Sexy.
Conservation. Works well. Boring.

Cellulosic ethanol. Doesn't work. Sexy.
Biomass CHP. Works well. Boring.

LEDs. Don't work. Sexy.
CFLs. Work well. Boring.

Hydrogen cars. Don't work. Sexy.
Public transportation. Works well. Boring.

Clean Coal Technology. Doesn't work. Sexy.
Renewables. Work well. Boring.

Vertical urban farms. Don't work. Sexy.
Traditional rural farms. Work well. Boring.

Of course there's always the exception that proves the rule:

Paris Hilton. Doesn't work. Sexy.
George Bush. Doesn't work either. Boring.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Mac is full of it, as usual

Russ made no claim of universal authority. He expressed an opinion in appropriately modest terms - "I consider that..." - as many of us do, on Gristmill and elsewhere.

Mac on the other hand is very much given to making grand and sweeping pronouncements, with no modifiers and no supporting evidence, as if they were matters of established fact. No wussy IMHO in his repertoire. "If you studied history it should be painfully obvious that people are at their most creative and energetic when the potential for large scale profit exists." Guess he's thinking of the slave trade, CAFO farming, wars for oil and the occupation of Iraq while conveniently ignoring Medecins sans Frontieres, Oxfam and Live Aid, Pasteur and Harvey and Lister and the Curies and a thousand others.

With regard to the content of Russ' post, I too have an implicit distrust of over-large projects. The gargantuan urban renewal projects of the sixties and seventies devastated whole neighborhoods and communities past the point of no return - we are still suffering the consequences. Small-scale renewal, one building at a time, has by contrast a successful track record in revitalizing depressed urban areas while respecting and supporting existing community resources. Size and scale DO matter. Let's not ignore those lessons in our new challenges, as in the quest for truly renewable, sustainable and environmentally-sane energy resources.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Good one!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

brave new farms

"Using less land is inefficient? Using less water is inefficient? Having less need for transport is inefficient?"

Using large amounts of concrete and steel to hoist field crops into the air is an extremely inefficient use of total resources and completely unnecessary for a good deployment of urban agriculture. The water and transportation savings on high value vegetable and fruit crops can take place perfectly well with ground-level and roof-level urban gardens. The space taken by these plantings does double duty as essential amenity space for humans.

Plants need sunlight and lots of it - photosynthesis is what they do. Putting 'em in parking garages with gro-lights and suntubes is just .... (froths at mouth).

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Brittanicus - why stop there?

Throw out out ALL the immigrants, from the sixteenth century on.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Many tongues

JFM: a host of different languages is a wonderful thing, characteristic of isolate but geographically stable social groups. For hunter-gatherers geographical stability means living in the tropics, where game and forage is plentiful year-round. Nice work if you can get it. Outside of the tropical and sub-tropical zone hunter-gatherers generally have to move to follow the food through the seasons. In doing so they encounter other groups doing the same as they and competing for the same resources. This results in territorial conflicts, but also in trade to share surpluses and specialties and the transmission of innovations like agrarianism. It also brings with it the need to learn from each others languages and cultures. Does that blending result in overall loss of culture or enrichment of it? Listen with me to music connecting across continents, to didgeridoo, fiddle and djembe rocking out together, and tell me that's not one of the great things, one of the great powers for good in our world.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

fuddy-duddies and freeways

Amazing:
"The specifics he personally endorses are less important than the concept of sacrifice he keeps bringing up.  I think we green techno advocates ought to accept that."

Not I, either one. Along with many others (DR has posted eloquently on this) I question the notion of sacrifice as a necessary component of getting where we need to be as a sustainable civil society. Unless you think that no longer spending several hours a day sitting in a personal pod on the freeway is a sacrifice. And I would assert that the specifics of this discussion are very important indeed.

Canis, I mean no disrespect to oral traditions. I simply believe they have their limitations, just as our culture of literacy has its limitations, in preventing the repetition of earlier mistakes. If this were not so, how wise we would be by now....
Whatever its faults (and I'm certainly not unaware of them) agrarianism makes possible the settled life and solid record of cultural development that enables us to build on what our ancestors have bequeathed us. I'm not ready to toss out Bach, Beethoven and Big Bill Broonzy right yet. Are you?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

shoes and ships and sealing wax

Robspooner: "if the ships are half as fast, there will need to be twice as many of them."
Actually not, unless you feel that the current volume of unnecessary objects continuously shipped around the globe is a necessity for human wellbeing and prosperity. I do not. Reducing that volume by half or more would be no sacrifice for most of us. I am no fan of banning international trade a la Wolverine, but the only reason for its current massive and unnecessary volume is the availability of cheap fossil-fueled energy, which seems likely to cease.

Wolverine: of course hunter-gatherers had culture. Just not a lot of it, especially as for any of them outside the tropics the lifestyle required picking up and moving camp every few weeks to follow the game and the ripening berries. No place for books and guitars in that always-hungry world. So quite apart from the blindingly obvious fact that no voluntary act will return us to that way of life - nothing short of of a cataclysm will do that trick - if it ever happens it will be short-lived. No books, no cultural continuity. Sooner or later some bright young spark will say, how about we corral those animals instead of chasing them all the time. And let's clear some space where we can get berries and grains to grow all in one place so we can set some aside for the winter. And the rest of the band will say, we are so ready for that. Why did no-one think of this before? Because they won't know someone did, and it led to problems, except maybe through some ancient tales told by the old fuddy-duddies in the band and they're a liability anyway because they can't hunt and gather any more so why listen to them and in fact let's just leave 'em behind next time we move so we don't have to listen them whine on about the good old days any more. So the whole damn cycle recommences and we have to go through the Inquisition and Vlad the Impaler and goddess knows what nasty nonsense before we approach something like a civil society again.

Vakibs: I think Ghandhi was intending no slight to Indian history and civilization but simply stating a fact. He was preoccupied with the well-being of the common people of India, nearly all of whom did live in villages at his time and despite the rapid growth of megacities worldwide in the last few decades to which India is no exception most I believe still do.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Just think: a hybrid running on biodiesel!

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/7/31/95925/2107On Umbra on diesel hybrids posted 1 year, 4 months ago 16 Responses

Question for Wisc..

How do you plow, plant and tend the mine-detector tobacco without entering the minefield?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

"oil is a natural substance"

Jabailo, have you ever seen the misery of a living, dying, oiled creature up close?On Wildlife so far largely safe from Mississippi River oil spill posted 1 year, 4 months ago 4 Responses

As confused as ever.

Wolverine,
Good luck with your poll of suicidal farmers. Especially those who have just lost their export markets because of your ban.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Which is it?

Wolverine, I read your recent post in another thread complaining of insufficiently representative government appointments - yet here you are demanding the banning of international trade. Given that you would find almost no popular support for such a notion, only a dictator could enforce it. Your thinking seems rather confused. Which do you want: dictatorship or democracy?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Charismatic mega-vegetables

Thank you, RDM for bringing this discussion back to a civil exchange. The subject of forests and forestry is a deeply emotional one for many, doubtless because trees are bigger than us and can live very much longer. This anthropometric perception can sometimes cloud our understanding: I imagine if we had the dimension and longevity of a field cricket we'd probably feel that way about cabbages. We want our forests to be durable and sustainable for some very good and selfish reasons. We owe a debt to those such as Richard who work to make them so.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

I loved this:

Using steel panels instead of traditional floor joists is a commercial construction technique that reduces the amount of wood required for framing.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Sustainability (again), Symbiosis

Hey White Dog, glad to hear you're better. Welcome back indeed, I'm always glad for your presence on this site.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on sustainability. I will continue to believe that this is a useful and currently irreplaceable term which is fully definable (and has been so defined) both in general and for the specifics of any given situation, and that we have ample opportunity to challenge those who would bend and distort it for whatever nefarious or ignorant purpose. Only our lack of attention is to blame if it is allowed to descend the 'slippery slope' to which all words, of any kind, are truly vulnerable. As in, what the meaning of 'is' is.

As to symbiosis, I have been giving it some thought. First of course the word has no apparent applicability to our relationship with non-biotic elements of our world - you know, land, water, air etc. - and so misses a key attribute of the range of values that we currently assign to 'sustainability'. Secondly, it occurs to me that its general use is in the mutually advantageous non-harmful relationship of just two species, as in the examples you cite. Perhaps there are three-way or larger group symbioses also, I do not know. The usage seems in any case way too restricted (not to mention way too high a bar) to act as a model for a general ethic of relationship of ALL species. Lion to lamb: so what have you done for me lately?

I will add that some of the arguments that have made in this very forum on behalf of carnivory seem dangerously close to a claim of symbiosis - you know, I feed and take care of the pig, enable its existence in fact - then the pig feeds me....   Slippery slope, oh yes.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

racc is right

plugin hybrids may help reduce carbon emissions from personal transportation but other things being equal there still would remain many of the other environmental ills from the hegemony of the automobile. My best hope is that a strong financial incentive to run mostly on the electrical input will gradually result in a preponderance of smaller slower, lighter, shorter-range vehicles that are more compatible with civilized urban space. To that end a special tax on electricity used for transportation purposes as suggested above would be counterproductive.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

And of course

natural gas is liable to reach its own peak and decline in the not too distant future. Allowing new wind production to retire the coal fleet is clearly the way to go.

Good for T. Boone though that he's moving in the right direction even at this late stage: his considerable fortune and influence will give this particular ball a lot of momentum.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

What's in a name?

Bine is of course related to vine, and is used here by Hardy as a poetic abbreviation for woodbine, an old word for the honeysuckle. It's possible that woodbine would not be an archaism today if the word had not been commercially abused and coopted for many decades as the name for a very popular brand of cheap English cigarettes.  The marketers were presumably trying to borrow the fragrance of the flower and attribute it, falsely of course, to their stinky product. Similarly today's marketers of SUV's try to paste the mighty splendor of Denali and the Yukon onto their clumsy vehicles.

Any word can be misused, any good impulse coopted and misrepresented, and unfortunately we have no control over who uses these particular icons of language. This is no reason to give up on them. On the contrary we must be vigilant, and applaud good use as we condemn the bad, misleading and inappropriate.

And here's a very practical problem. I have a daily need to communicate with clients, contractors and suppliers in very specific language regarding the environmental implications of particular products. What should I use in place of this useful if exploited workhorse of a word to convey the notion that I will not be depleting an irreplaceable and critical resource if I specify a particular material or process? And what word should Tom Philpott use to indicate an agricultural activity that will not deplete the soil, drain the aquifers and pollute the waterways in a mere generation or two? Amazing suggests symbiotic, which has its own and rather different particular import. Other previous offerings have been made, none of which have been any more satisfactory.  And then if we do indeed find a  bright shiny new word to replace our poor downtrodden sustainability, how do we protect it from the same degradation?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

"Sustainability" is a fraud?

That our good friend Caniscandida on whom we depend so frequently for calm counsel has an unusually emotional response to the 's' word suggests we should look at it carefully. So is it a fraud?

Yes, perhaps, if we confuse sustainablitiy with eternity. Yes if we think that 'sostenuto' on a score suggests we should pack a toothbrush and a cot when we attend the symphony.  But do we really imply with this word that we expect our human endeavors will last for ever? Are we 'horrible liars' when we suggest that our systems can be designed to endure at least a generation or two? And is that attitude in conflict with our religious feelings - should we, like the Ottoman architects, build intentional flaws into our plans lest we seem to challenge the deity?

I'd prefer not. We can seek out ways of living on the earth which will leave it in decent shape for our grandkids' grandkids, or we can just let it all go to hell. Sustainability is simply the measure that keeps our ostrich head out of the sand. I'd agree that 150 years is too small a hope for human culture as a whole - but it's a long enough time for many of the system components which would sustain that culture.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Wolverine:

Considering the mercury, why is fluorescent considered a good thing by environmentalists?

Shouldn't we be trying to rid the planet of mercury instead of adding more?

So it's here already. Where do you suppose we do with it: ship it to another planet like, I dunno, Mercury?

GreenFacts.org again:"Its absorption by plants may account for the presence of mercury within fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas, since these fuels are conventionally thought to be formed from geologic transformation of organic residues."

Oh that's right, it's released into the atmosphere by the emissions of power plants used to produce the electricity to power our lighting. Use CFLs, use less juice, less mercury up the smokestack.

Just as a postscript, most mercury used today in commercial products like CFLs is recycled: little mercury is now mined. Seems that world stockpiles of refined mercury will be ample for these new low-level uses as far more hazardous mercury-intensive industrial processes are being phased out over the next couple of decades.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

The scorpion's nature

A traditional version of this tale, which some trace to Aesop, runs something like this:

"A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asks, "How do I know you won't sting me?" The scorpion says, "Because if I do, I will die too."

The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown, but has just enough time to gasp "Why?"

"I am a scorpion. It is my nature""

Seems to have some wider relevance than just the media right now, huh?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Geo-exchange heat/cool

is very advantageous in principle and I know of an installation near my home which has functioned very effectively for a couple of decades. Unfortunately such systems are no magic bullet. Depending on soil conditions and other factors current systems often need an acre or more of land per house. Does not exactly jibe with otherwise resource-efficient denser development. For more universal application, this is a technology which definitely Needs More Work.

Chances are research money could be deployed in this area to far greater effect than on cellulosic ethanol and clean coal. But then that would mean spending money on conservation and demand management. How un-American. Can't have that.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Mercy

The idea of culvert crossings is an interesting one which has I believe been deployed under UK highways to a certain extent. I wonder though if they could be installed frequently enough to make a difference.

Do be so so careful with your kids on missions of mercy on the highway. A ten-year-old died on a two-lane country road near us a while back when going to the aid of a box turtle.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Wiscidea, I guess

we have to agree to disagree. I see a qualitative difference between ELF's action and what we normally understand by terrorism, you don't. I see a danger here in devaluing the language, you don't. I see a model here for the labeling of any act of political direct action or civil disobedience as terrorism, leading to the erosion of civil liberties, to Gitmo and torture and extreme rendition and beyond, and you don't.On Convicted eco-vandal sentenced to six years in prison posted 1 year, 5 months ago 57 Responses

Begging the question

Wiscidea, I quite agree with you that violence has no place in an effective and ethically-consistent environmental movement. Would that it had no place in the world at all. But I post again to protest the debasement of language:

Again, (ELF's) violence and use of terrorism is minor in the grand scheme of things. But it is a slippery slope.

Here we go again.

We've been here before. Here's the schtick according to Wisc and Mad Max:

Arson is violent
Terrorism is violent
Therefore arson is terrorism.

By the same token an exhausted parent slapping a recalcitrant toddler is terrorism, the school bully twisting arms to get his schoolmates lunch money is terrorism. I'm sorry, but none of these has the moral equivalence of  setting off a bomb in a crowded city marketplace packed with innocent persons of all ages. Blurring distinctions between different kinds and degrees of violent act serves no discernible moral, judicial or ethical purpose and degrades our common language and culture.On Convicted eco-vandal sentenced to six years in prison posted 1 year, 5 months ago 57 Responses

By the way,

though I fully endorse the redevelopment of effective long-distance rail systems in the US for both passengers and freight, you've got to remember the freight efficiency numbers cited in Grey's link above are heavily weighted (hah!) by the kinds of stuff that are hauled by today's rail freight systems, e.g. long-distance point-to-point heavy bulk commodities such as coal, lumber, grain, and apparently, SUV's; and that the inevitably far higher fuel costs of end-point distribution from the railhead are not included.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

I've always preferred

the European approach of using liters/100km to the US/UK mpg because it emphasizes reducing the cost of a constant benefit rather than increasing the benefit of a constant cost. The subliminal effect of using mpg as a measure of fuel efficiency is to subtly promote the dumb notion that driving further (on the same gallon) is a good thing for the environment.

Of course this still begs the question of considering miles traveled as the benefit rather than access to resources gained. Far better to live where your kids can walk/bike to school and soccer practice under their own steam than to drive them there, even in a plug-in hybrid.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

More importantly

Feffer's article is a powerful analysis of the integrated nature of the problems we face.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

No anomaly here

GreenEngineer: Feffer makes no claim that "the poor" in the second paragraph are farmers: I would think he has in mind the newly urbanized poor. In the time frame referenced millions of rural poor worldwide moved to the barrios where they would have little opportunity for subsistence food production. Newly installed at the very bottom rung of the money economy, buying food instead of raising it, they have been delivered a one-two punch.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Thanks Brodro

for posting the link to that very comprehensive account from the San Diego Reader. At the end of the day, judging at least by the nature of the objections, it seems likely that the environmental impact of the line will be very much less significant in the decision-making process than the negative scenic impact. Meanwhile the motivation for the line seems to stem more from its profitability to the power company than anything else.

This particular instance would seem to be a useful preview for any general discussion of the role of long-distance transmission in a renewable-energy based grid, and the complexity of the issue reinforces the case for local generation as the primary choice wherever possible.On Huge Calif. solar plant would run transmission lines through state park posted 1 year, 5 months ago 39 Responses

to Nucbuddy:

I endorse your earlier point that anyone who drives as little as Biod's post suggests should consider not buying a car at all. However Biod's purpose with his particular purchase goes beyond that of its use as a personal vehicle and though his is a small-scale project it could possibly have benefits for us all. The investment - of time, expertise and money - is his own. He has been most generous with sharing his electric bike development experience and I believe we can expect more of the same from the current project. I suggest it is your mean-spirited commentary, not Biod's project, that deserves no place on Gristmill.

to Bill H:

Huh?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

"Plunder"

Yes, that's the word I was looking for a few threads ago.

Rather than the more usual and quite spurious "harvest".On E.U. ending bluefin tuna season early amid overfishing concerns posted 1 year, 5 months ago 3 Responses

Tabloid headline sucks

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Trees, profit, militias

To Russ:
I really don't have much to say about your quaint and rather touching conviction that non-hominids seek no more than they need for their day-to-day survival other than this is not born out by my own observation of the deer in my yard. They eat continuously any available food limited only by the capacity of their stomach and stored body fat. If they had opposable thumbs I have no doubt they would build larders and fill and defend them. On your later point, the presence here in the US of organized gun-for-hire groups like Blackwater does nothing to diminish my preference for a publicly accountable civil police force.

To Caniscandida:
I don't think I actually drew the connection between profit and sustainability in my posts above, perhaps because I consider it pretty much self-evident. A business plan which only aspires to break even can not be self-sustaining - how do you get through a bad year? Repay startup costs?

As for the trees and other natural organisms, I don't want to push the metaphor too hard but they generally take and metabolize whatever resources are available, use what they need for immediate purposes (operating expenses) and of the rest store what they can (retained earnings) and distribute the balance in the form of seed or other offspring to  ensure that at the end of their individual life the species itself will continue - this is their visible profit.

Forest ecologies make an interesting study as a general market metaphor, either wild (unregulated) or managed (regulated) as Backcut prefers. Despite their calm outward presence they encapsulate a slow-motion fight to the death among ruthless competitors elbowing each other aside for access to light, water and soil nutrients. At the same time they contain life-sustaining symbioses without which all would perish. How cool is that!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Discounting, growth, profit

JMG, you make a convincing argument against the level of discounting applied in CBA arguments, but I don't see how this translates into an inherent flaw in CBA itself. The problem would only seem unfixable if the environmentalist voice abstains from the discussion.

Russ, I'll make lawyer jokes with the best of 'em but I'd rather have lawyers, courts and a civil police than warlords, private militias and thuggery. Similarly I'll take money as the medium of civil exchange over any of the alternatives history has so far presented. It is indeed a characteristic of money that it facilitates growth, and we are all very aware I think that the pursuit of economic growth as an end in itself is a foolish and unsustainable endeavor. But money also also facilitates art, music, public health, social stability, social compassion....

I've written before on profit, which many including Russ seem to mistakenly regard as a curse peculiar to the snarling wolf of corporate capitalism. Trees, which have been my principal life coaches over the last ten years or so, have shown me that even they must turn a profit in order to survive. Every year a little taller, every year a little more stored against drought and famine. They are good mentors, they take the long view.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Just to be clear

I do not mean to suggest that to have purchase in public debate all environmental values will need to be monetised - far from it. Just as well as it's extremely hard to attach a dollar value to, say, the extinction of a species unless that species already has commercial value to humans. So it's as well to have plenty of other financial data on the consequences of arctic ice melt to speak to that sadly large population that could not care less about the continued existence of the polar bear at all and to those for whom a few in a zoo would do. Yes, when the numbers could go either way the emotional appeals and the charismatic megafauna could help swing the balance, but don't count on 'em to save the day if you don't make the financial case well.

The biofuels debacle is a good example of issues argued on gut values that many environmentalists swallowed - some still do, that surely it's better to grow our fuel in Kansas than pump it out of the ground in Saudi Arabia. NOW the costs of that immense self-deception have burgeoned to include accelerated aquifer depletion, maritime pollution, ripping up of carbon sinks and global food shortages, while the environmental benefits measured in EROEI (a child of CBA) have proved to be around zero or less. Yes, hard to count the cost of starvation elsewhere in dollars here at home - smarter numbers earlier on could have saved us from that challenge.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Stewardship

Russ, you claim many assumptions about my views, beyond those I have expressed, which I do not have the time or inclination to address. I'll just say this:

I do not accept that that cost benefit analysis is the 'enemy's weapon', one which we are temporarily compelled to brandish ourselves but which we can abandon once we have 'trounced' them on the 'battlefield'. On the contrary, as I have tried to express above, I believe that it is based in a powerful and positive process central to our essence as humans, as it is central to the essence of other living things in this world. I also believe it is central to wise resource use, which I always understood to be a primary environmentalist value. A developed sense of cost/benefit informs probably three quarters of the posts in this blog, invoked whenever environmentalists point to the carbon-absorbing capacity of the rainforest or the relative merits of rail vs road transportation. Whenever we exclaim at the resource-squandering wastefulness of our culture and invoke better ways to achieve our ends, we are using cost/benefit thinking.

Perhaps in heaven all costs will be eliminated, and all benefits will be limitless. Perhaps we'll get pie in the sky when we die. Meantime here on earth we will continue to be making demanding decisions, some affecting our very survival and the survival of other living things with which we share the planet. You envisage a human culture directed by values of stewardship, as do I. It's a poor steward who operates without a thorough and mindful assessment of costs and benefits.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Quibble:

Epenick's closing phrase is a disclosure, not a disclaimer. A disclaimer abjures responsibility for something: "Keep back 200 feet - not responsible for broken windshields" is a disclaimer.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Drenched in blood? What nonsense.

This way of thinking astounds me:

Revesz is right that CBA nevertheless often does favor the environment side, and we should be alert to opportunities to use the enemy's weapon against him.
But this should be seen as a purely tactical matter, for CBA is the enemy's weapon, forged by his way of thinking, drenched in the blood he has shed. As I tried to say earlier, and as the Climate Ethics post displays, it is not part of the fundamental ethic of environmentalism or of the broader humanist stewardship project.

I'd say that I have never in my adult life made a significant decision without making some kind of cost/benefit analysis, whether instantaneous and intuitive or measured and calculated, and I doubt if Russ has either. To claim its is "not part of the fundamental ethic of environmentalism" is preposterous. Should I buy a Prius? Gas is still not high enough (even in Europe at $9/gallon) to make that a slam dunk without attaching specific value to intangibles. I'd pay a few thousand bucks over the going rate because of my environmental values but not a few hundred thousand. The value I attach to the Prius' better environmental performance falls somewhere between those points. Why should national environmental policy cleave to a different standard?

Attaching financial value to the environmental values we hold dear should not scare or disgust environmentalists: remember it's not money itself but the consuming love of it that is the root of all evil. Hell, I have no idea exactly how but even a tree does CBA when it puts sturdier roots on this side to resist prevailing winds, and just the minimum on that side where the allocation of extra precious resource is not justified. Or a panther, deciding when to quit pursuit of a fast-moving lunch - when does the metabolic cost exceed the value of the meal?

If environmentalists reject CBA as a central element not only of human discourse but of the whole of the unfolding of the natural world then is it any wonder that the environmentally unaware (whom I will refuse to call "the enemy") are left to frame the entire calculus of this irreplaceable process?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Proscribed or Prescribed?

Sean, this post makes a lot of sense - I think - but I don't quite understand your last sentence:

Don't write policies that are so heavily proscribed that they are unable to adapt as The Truth is more fully revealed.

I'm guessing it may be a typo, but if proscribed is truly what you meant I don't understand the usage in this context. Could you clarify, e.g. with an example of such a policy?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

There's a reason

that indoor house plants are mostly limited to non-flowering, non-fruiting, non-edible decorative greenery. Many reasons in fact.

It's hard to imagine a city building designed to accommodate a substantial quantity of food production that does not severely compromise its other functions. Even farmers don't generally wish to live in their greenhouses. Marginal production of a few herbs and salad items yes. Meaningful quantities of staple foodstuffs for the city dweller, sufficient to justify the resources of energy, space and capital required for its production: I don't think so. When I was in architecture school in the 1980's student urban design projects were full of flying cars and hoverbikes. This looks familiar.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Sean,

I guess one of us is missing something. I suggest it's the business of government to regulate only proscriptively - "thou shalt not". You claim to agree, then complain of the absence of "rewards" for good behavior in current climate legislation such as L-W.  "L-W puts fees on various carbon producers, but without any real reward (other than a promise not to kick them in the ass as hard) for positive behavior."

Exactly why should the government reward market players for their actions, good or bad? Isn't the market itself supposed to provide the rewards? Should you get a check each year from the highway patrol for not speeding? I'd hope we simply continue to permit the insurance market to reward your ticket-free record. And how do you distinguish "rewards" from market-distorting subsidies and winner-picking? Seems to me that government completes its regulatory job when it sets uniform limits to ensure the good guys are not penalized for their efforts. Naturally, for such regulation to be effective in delivering the required performance, the bar must be set as high as it needs to be and the penalty for noncompliance must be set higher than the value of the market advantage such non-compliance provides.

"Rewards" are for kids. This is not elementary school.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Great discussion

I hesitate to join this conversation of giants but I have to register my surprise at Winston Churchill quoted as if he were a political philosopher of repute rather than the skilled partisan politician which he undoubtedly was. This was a man born to wealth and privilege (in a palace, no less) who knew which side his bread was buttered.

I also have to exclaim at the hoary old chestnut of the "efficiency of markets". One has to ask, what are they efficient about? One has only to look at the free-market health-care and pharmaceutical industries in the US which are very efficient at generating revenue and profit (neither of which are in themselves at all bad things) but are decidedly less than effective in delivering a healthy population at a price which is globally competitive. "Free" markets compete at least in part by externalizing as many costs as the participants can get away with, a phenomenon conspicuously present in the present state of the energy industry. The industry is already gorged with an excess of carrots, including many directly from the guv'mint itself. Right now it's hard to argue that it needs anything less than the tough love of regulation.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

I will assume

that the English voice-over is an over-dub to make it available for a wider audience, and the French accent is a tip of the hat to the character's mime origins, in Marceau of course, not Chaplin. I am curious whether the (original?) German version also uses a French accent.

I also find the ad not anti-nature in the least - it suggests how we can live with the capricious wind, to our great benefit. It is quite beautifully done.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

All seems very abstract.

Here's an actuality. Military systems in the U.S. are organized around obedience of the individual to an authority that is pyramidal and which originates in a very deeply anti-environmental commander-in-chief whose destructive influence has been so pervasive that environmentalists can hardly expect support even from the EPA these days, let alone the army. Shrub's successor is yet unknown, and the hangover effects on military policy, senior personnel and attitudes are in any event not going to disappear on 1/20/09. In that context the presence of some individuals in the military with environmentalist sympathies seems an unpromising source of meaningful institutional support for environmental causes any time soon.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Part of the solution? Which part would this be?

"Life - life is high school with money" (Cadillac Escalade ad directly tapping peer group status anxieties).

Pretty typical of the irresponsible boy racer sh*t auto marketing of the last couple of decades. So much for just selling what people want to buy.

Vroom vroom. See you in hell.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Humane foie gras

Whether it's my eyes or my brain getting old I don't know (probably both) but for a moment I read this as Human foie gras. An anthropophage online discussion briefly flashed through my head, balancing the relative culinary merits of the fattened livers of plump toddlers, athletic adolescents, and sedentary middle-aged bloggers. Mmmm tasty. Myself, I prefer buttered parsnips.

The article to which Kurt Michael Friese refers (which seems to emanate not from The Times but from that still more notoriously right-wing rag The Telegraph) suggests that activist attention to foie gras is more about class resentment than compassion for animals (we should of course stipulate that to the Brits pretty much everything is about class). I'd suggest it's more to dispute the extreme-foodie notion that if it tastes great we should have no qualms about eating it.

Aside from that, I've never cottoned to this notion that because evil 'X' is worse we should not concern ourselves with evil 'Y'. Should we neglect to prosecute burglary and fraud because they are less heinous crimes than torture, rape and murder?

Meanwhile. Work to be done.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Shambles - a bloody mess

Though shambles has long since been used to refer to any situation of chaotic disarray it was once the specific name of that part of the medieval marketplace where animals were killed and dismembered for sale. Not just any mess but a very bloody one. Let's hope our children may be saved from it.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Atreyger - both and.

I was not familiar with that aspect of the bison's history. Thanks for the links. But we also have this from the website of the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge:

President William McKinley set aside these mountains as a Forest Reserve in 1901. Then Theodore Roosevelt renamed it a Game Preserve in 1905. It is the oldest managed wildlife preserve in the United States.

In October 1907, fifteen bison were donated from the New York Zoological Society and arrived at the Preserve via the Cache railhead. This was the beginning of the re-stocking effort at the refuge.

Of course both these initiatives would seem to have been motivated at least as much by the urge to maintain hunting stocks as for any altruistic desire to preserve the species. But we should be grateful nonetheless.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

In praise of unreasonable men

Art, with respect I believe your suggested interpretation is about 100% wrong. GBS was no enthusiast of subtlety: his writings tend to the exceedingly direct. In Shaw's vocabulary progress was a positive thing containing no "innate stubborn selfishness" but rather representing humanity's striving toward the greatest fulfillment of its potential for good here on the earth. "Reasonableness" means accepting the status quo and failing to seek that fulfillment. Shaw here is praising the unreasonableness that seeks to better the human condition. Shaw's list of unreasonable men would have included such luminaries as Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.

And Shaw himself of course would certainly have wished to be found in that "unreasonable" company. A lifelong vegetarian in an age at least as carnivorous as our own, a committed socialist long before socialism became a major political force in Britain, Shaw's life and work was devoted to challenging the status quo, not to "taming" the impulse to improve it.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

An undeserved slight

Shame that while he rightly praises our most excellent Carrboro Farmer's Market Tom Philpott exhibits such disdain for its symbiotic twin Weaver Street Market, the equally beloved local food coop he dismissively bunches with corporate giant Whole Foods in this article. Setting aside the fact that WSM's local food offerings are an order of magnitude or so greater than Whole Foods, the reality is that Carrboro/Chapel Hill's "incredibly vibrant local-food scene" owes an enormous debt to Weaver Street Market's relentless work over the last two decades, much of it in close coordination with Farmer's Market organizers. Example: together with the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association WSM has for many years co-sponsored what has become one of the largest local farm tours in the nation, for which it received an award this year from the National Cooperative Grocers Association, recognizing the event as a model for co-ops across the country. It's no exaggeration to say that without the consistent and long-term support that WSM has provided,  many of the farms that supply the "few visionary, and necessarily relatively expensive, restaurants" would probably not exist.

Weaver Street Market spends over two million dollars a year with local growers and food producers: as a percentage of twenty million dollars in total sales, I challenge Tom to show more than a handful of grocery stores in the country that can match, let alone exceed this record. Saturday mornings and Wednesday evenings finds crowds of local folks walking the four blocks from farmer's market to coop market, buying from each the best they have to offer. If Tom finds an insufficiency of local farm produce on the shelves at WSM he probably got there too late. On To make local food more accessible, time to revive mid-sized farms posted 1 year, 7 months ago 10 Responses

Thanks, Lessismore

for the link to the very excellent DoE website. I recommend it to anyone who wants to find it more about LED's than just the manufacturer's hype. It explains how LED's work, why heat management is such an issue for them, why standards for like-for-like comparisons with other light sources have been so difficult, and how such standards are being developed.

It also LED me (hah!) to Cree's LR6, designed specifically for those ubiquitous recessed can lights. I don't particularly like cans, partly because CFL's do not perform well in them, but if you have to have 'em, this seems definitely the way to go. Spendier yet than JMG's offering, it nevertheless represents the first commercially-available LED I've seen that if the supplied data is to be believed actually outperforms a standard CFL in both color rendering and energy efficiency.

http://l2i.stores.yahoo.net/creellflr61.html

Or go to the Cree website for full photometric data.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Hear hear!

Let those claiming cultural tradition as excuse for brutal practices use only traditional methods.On Hunting season ends with Japan catching fewer whales than planned posted 1 year, 7 months ago 13 Responses

Fortuna not so buona

Using Karate as an example, some people may prefer to use a Green Belt to exercise their level of commitment to the environment. Those with a BLUE belt are just practicing the next level of environmentalism.

Sorry not to be able to join the mazel tov chorus but if the message is going to be that the blue campaign is taking green "to the next level" then it will undoubtedly harm other efforts, including Gore's, toward climate action which is actually effective. Getting more people involved with environmentally ineffective actions like recycling disposable water bottles does not make those actions any more effective - just more numerous. A billion ineffective actions has no more benefit than a thousand or a million of them.

This is going backwards, not forwards.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Bring on the smart grid (and more)

There ARE useful technology developments that we can reliably anticipate and foresee, but they are not going to be on the fuels side. They will be on the side of how we deploy the fuels and energy resources we already have. Energy control technologies, energy conservation technologies, energy system design technologies. The Breakthrough actually occurred a couple of three decades ago with the microprocessor revolution: it has yet to be systematically and comprehensively deployed in the service of energy management and use. Vast amounts of computing power are being deployed in the service of screwing the last ounce of extra horsepower out of deeply inefficient locomotion systems. Time to make better use of all those zeros and ones.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

BioD

It's really quite straightforward to write ordinance to protect solar access from both skyscrapers and trees, and many communities below state level have already done so. Performance standards are to be preferred to simplistic zoning and  height limits. If Seattle has no such protections it really should be a matter for action, the sooner the better.

Protection from shading by new buildings is relatively easy to enforce through the development approval process. Trees are a little tougher, as this case shows.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Yeay!

Pangolin, you're on a roll today! You're an excellent writer when you're not being grumpy about vegans!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

BC,

This thread is speculating about potential modes of environmentalist response  to fencebuilding in the desert which is being carried out with no pretense of environmental benefit, much indication of severe environmental harm, and which is unlawful to boot, i.e. not very comparable to the analogs you describe.

However: yes, I would be annoyed at my vehicle being vandalized. But I would still consider this to be a very different kind of activist behavior than dropping a rock from an overpass as I was driving below. I'd reserve the 'violence' monicker for the latter.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

To CC

""To violate" is a very strong verb, and we should restrict it, and the nominal forms "violation" and "violence," to occasions of real physical harm inflicted on sentient beings."

I agree.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Do something about it.

Quit whining and get busy. Railing at Pollan etc. is just straw man b-s: you know who the real villains are. Push back. Start investing in one of the reliable ways to create self-sustaining access to quality food for poor as well as well as rich folks in your community.

Start with your local food coop - if you don't have one start one - http://www.foodcoop500.coop/. Build on that as a base: network with local farms, CSA's, farmer coops to eliminate the costs of transportation, packaging, advertising and shareholder profits from the price of the foods you eat. You'll be amazed at the difference it makes to be part-owner of your food supply system.On Why Michael Pollan and Alice Waters should quit celebrating food-price hikes posted 1 year, 7 months ago 27 Responses

I don't generally carry a torch for archaisms

but I have a sentimental fondness for "whom" when it a) is technically correct and b) falls at the end of a (written) sentence. I seldom if ever use it in speech however. Is that a double standard?On New Mattel line lets you wear Barbie's discards posted 1 year, 7 months ago 6 Responses

More:

Yes, a very good post. Couple of thoughts I'd like to add to this discussion:

First, I suspect that one of the reasons that public transportation is such a hard sell in this culture is the frequent use of the phrase "mass transit" by its proponents (thankfully, none so far in this thread). This is a culture of individualism, and few people want to think of themselves as part of a herd, delivered Metropolis-style to their place of mass employment by a relentless piece of unthinking, unfeeling machinery. The days of such concentrated delivery of ant-workers to the factory gate are gone - the watchwords of our culture are diversity and pluralism, and this applies to our transportation needs as much as anything else. "Mass transit" inevitably skews perception toward large monolithic centralized systems rather than the flexible systems we actually need and are fully capable of creating. Furthermore, the phrase is simply not accurate: it doesn't fit taxis for example, which in some form or another are an essential part of any comprehensive public transportation network.

So I'd like to make a plug for "public transit" or "public transportation" as the standard term of art.

My second point follows closely from the first. We cannot afford to abandon the suburbs. There's just too much invested there, culturally and emotionally as well as financially. Neither can we afford to leave them as they are: the personal automobile infrastructure around which they have been built will not be sustainable in the long term whatever the automotive fuel. We need adaptive re-use programs for the suburbs which will make them resource-efficient. This means building schools in the midst of where the homes are (yes, this means they will likely be smaller and perhaps have less focus on athletics, neither of which would probably be a bad thing) and developing all the other resources of daily life in close physical proximity to the people who need them.

So to me, Joe's analysis for dealing with peak oil needs two additional legs, not one:

1. Excellent, comprehensive multimodal public transportation systems designed with overall system efficiency in mind.

2. Thoughtful re-purposing of our existing building and development infrastructure as well as intelligent regulation of new development in order to reduce the overall volume and intensity of the transportation needs which those systems will serve.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Ed -

Do tell us more about the "working class ... fliers" whose "livelihoods will be destroyed or endangered by the project".

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Re: predators

CC, I present no argument. As I wrote, it is merely a post hoc justification and like all such is easy to riddle with holes. I just feel worse eating creatures less gentle than myself.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Complexity

Adam, you rightly point out that complexity is implicit in climate legislation. This is not a good reason to add more.

You point out many of the problems yourself. "Increasingly intricate" sounds like a bureaucrat's wet dream, a nightmare for those actually trying to achieve positive climate effects.

And how about this from your OP:

Needless to say, such measurements are difficult and expensive in real life, so most retailers don't bother. They use some rules of thumb to limit their risk and assume that coupons are on balance a boost to business.

Looks like the old wet finger to me.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Adam,

Of course carbon reductions are subject to measurable scientific parameters.

It's  just the additionality that's nothing but a wet finger in the breeze.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

2 cents

Additionality as a prerequisite for carbon reduction incentives and regulations in public policy appears to be merely noise coming out of the offset industry, where it represents a failed attempt to give legitimacy to a flawed enterprise concept.

It should go without saying that public policy formulations designed to achieve actual reductions in greenhouse gas emissions need to be subject to measurable and definitive scientific parameters. Additionality has already failed the tests of scientific definitiveness and measurability in the offset business, where the rule seems to be that it's additional if I say it is. IMHO.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Interesting.

Chipotle's market positioning raises some interesting issues. Consider:

1. We now have at least one national chain restaurant that includes organic and other environmental health claims in its core branding. I find it hard to see the downside in this: the competition is Taco Bell, fer chrissakes!

2. Including a measure of local sourcing in at least one of their locations is an indicator that at least someone in the organization has ambitions to raise the bar beyond the organic easy button. Again, not something to be sneered at.

3. The visibility of a large chain brings with it some measure of public accountability and is raising the profile of locavore thinking. It also raises public awareness of how crippled most chain restaurants are in terms of their location-based food prep facilities: think, they had to install an actual KITCHEN in Charlottesville to accommodate this arcane idea.

What to do? Like Pangolin, I've always been a fan of cheap local food joints but I also value known quality in the food supply chain.  In our area the locally-owned restaurants (such as Chapel Hill's very excellent Lantern) that make a point of serving only or primarily sustainably-grown local farm produce have tended to be upscale and relatively expensive, and I suspect this is generally the case elsewhere. There are encouraging signs though that the locavore attitude is trickling down to more ordinary eating establishments, and that local food communities of farmers, markets and consumers are springing up which will certainly help the small single store or eating spot develop in this way.

Developing these food networks will be indispensable if we are to see locally-owned sustainable food production linked to locally-owned community food outlets, which has to be a better goal than dependence on any chain. We can help. Solid support for our local coops and farmer's markets and CSA's will ultimately help our local restaurants too.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Noir et amer

La mère, la mer, l'amer. The mother, the ocean, the embittered one. Oh my america! My new found land!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Low pressure sodium

If you want a big yellow street lamp in your living room go right ahead. Otherwise, enough with the .....ing incandescents already, go CFL.

Couple things to watch:

1. Don't use screw-in CFLs in standard recessed can lights (these are very inefficient fixtures in any case). If you must absolutely must have cans trade out the fixtures for CFL-happy versions. Not a huge investment.
   
2. You have to get special dimmable CFLs to use with dimmer switches. Standard CFLs will blow the switch.

Many people find the equivalence rating printed on the box a tad optimistic, depending on the color rendering, so you may want to uprate by maybe 10% - they still represent a huge energy saving, one of the few energy upgrades you can make for less than a hundred bucks that will start saving you money right away.

Now if only there were a good energy-efficient replacement for those small halogen floods and spots...  Yes, I've tried the LEDs, haven't found any with half-way decent color rendering yet. If you know of any, please share.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Rangelands, food choices, heightism...

Pangolin, it's good to see you writing with a little less anger than your usual anti-vegangelical rants, and you indeed make several decent points. One of course is (if I may radically paraphrase) that we should consider ourselves very lucky to be able to make choices about what food we eat. Most of the world's people can't. As an extension of that thought, it seems clear enough that as a society we are wealthy enough to make better choices about our national diet and that one of those choices should be severe restrictions on the abuse wrought by CAFO operations on our public health and on our common environment. I hope you would agree.

On the use of range lands: indeed they are unsuitable for agriculture. From another perspective of course this does not necessarily mean we should therefore use them for other kinds of human food production. The world is not just about us. Furthermore, your point is well made that there is already enough food in the world and that the problems lie with the politics of distribution, not production, and that we could perhaps afford to leave the dry, steep, untillable land alone - just a little bit? Thoughtful agronomists like Philpott have made the excellent point that sustainable agricultures have typically rotated gazing with tillage on the same land in order to build soil fertility.

On the nomadic herders: I am not aware of studies that show a causal relationship between their diet and their height. Indeed it may well be the reverse. Short-legged folks like me would be crazy to get into the chasing-after-animals-all-day business. And if I were born into such a culture I'd have a hard time keeping up, which would put me at a distinct evolutionary  disadvantage.

And what's with the heightist assumption that tall and skinny = better health anyway?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Sustainability, Pollan

Pollan fears the debasement of the word, as should we all. He appears to recognize however that sustainability is a test we must apply to agricultural practice and public policy alike: if it fails we will need to look elsewhere for a reliable future. Even though sustainability may only be defined by the absence of its opposite, it is still the one essential criterion for sound environmental practice.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Steel wheels

While I could not disagree more strongly with JD's assertion that sprawl is a beneficial development model I think he makes a good point that light rail has become a fetish among mass transit enthusiasts, with significant negative consequences in opportunity cost and resource diversion.

I also agree with him that for many if not most communities wishing to reduce their dependence on automobile transit, buses are the way to go. Here are some thoughts on that:

1. Steel wheels on track may be more efficient but there is a difference between efficiency and efficacy. Buses offer vastly greater flexibility both in geography and in timing of service. It's extraordinarily easy to lay on specially intensive bus service for, say, a major sporting event. Light rail - not so much.

2. Buses can be routed to serve existing needs. The huge capital investment of light rail tends to generate relatively expensive new development - condos and offices - rather than servicing existing (poorer, older) neighborhoods. Where it does connect with older communities it can produce the social ills of gentrification. Poorer residents with the greatest public transportation needs get displaced away from the transit stops.

3.  Bus systems can operate a wide range of vehicle scales over the same infrastructure and with the same personnel, from large articulated units down to nimble 16-passenger jitneys.

4. Buses have the potential for huge gains in energy and operational efficiency from new technology. Hybrid diesel/electric engines with regenerative braking are obviously the future of stop/start city bus services (that's not even counting fixed-route all-electric trolley buses). On-the-fly radio dispatching has been used in European cities for years to optimize service and reroute buses around congestion. GPS tracking systems are providing up-to-the-minute service updates for users, even via cell-phone alerts, which offers huge benefits in convenience and personal safety.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Hey DR,

is there some way of preventing a thread from wasting valuable space on the recent comments sidebar when the discussion drops below zero on the environmental relevance index, as in this sad little mutual masturbation fantasy going on between BW & MM?

Just a thought.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

No helmets indeed

and so graceful and beautiful to watch. What an inspiration. Thanks, BioD.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Hear it for the small towns too

Excellent post, Jon. Attempting total replacement of current vehicle miles with alternatives to petroleum fuels is a worse than fool's errand that will ultimately lead to panic and disaster. Radical physical restructuring of our towns and cities to accommodate denser and more sociable living patterns is sooner or later inevitable.

Only thing I'd add is that the dense historic cores of large metro areas (Evanston, Manhattan) are not at all the only models for close-together life. ALL small towns used to be this way, and can be again. Not to mention that many of the denser suburbs will repurpose well in this format. Overlaying the convenience of modest personal electric vehicles (including electric bikes a la BioD) onto traditional walkable-scale settlements can be a win-win-win for quality of life as well as for environmental sanity.

But God help the exurbs.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

BioD - I'm not an expert but..

my understanding is that Windows OS upgrades generally have very limited backwards-compatibility with older machines. If you want to stay current on your Windows OS you'd need to buy a new machine every couple of years. New versions of Linux/Unix (and Mac OS) are apparently much more forgiving of older hardware.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Shell game?

Looks like GE has investor-owned HP Hood mixed up with farmer-owned Organic Valley, which is indeed a coop. Easy to get condused, seems Stoneyfield buys milk from OV and licenses yogurt production to Hood.

One more reason to buy local. What, you thought Stoneyfield was actually a farm?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

The cull

With a transferred sense, the euphemism "to cull," meaning "to kill a number of animals within a population, short of extermination," is "wicked," because its intention is to remove an act of killing sentient beings from any suspicion of moral questionability, and instead, deceitfully to present it as morally neutral and acceptable.

"To cull" in fact is a word pertinent to agriculture and horticulture, referring to the thinning of plants, and the plucking of flowers.  The action does not necessarily result in the death of plants.  When it was first applied, metaphorically and euphemistically, to "managing" (another unhappy euphemism) the numbers of wild animals, I do not know, but no doubt that could be discovered easily enough.

I have often considered that our own species seems to be imminently targeted for a great cull, by mother nature herself, through what might be called the 'market correction' of global climate change. To follow your chain of thought, Canis, would that make her 'wicked', or merely guilty of management errors (in allowing us to so screw up our world)? On Australia military will kill hundreds of kangaroos posted 1 year, 8 months ago 16 Responses

Rip Van Winkle redux?

Mark's father was one of the first dairy farmers to sell organic milk in Maine

This would make either Mark or his father, what, three or four hundred years old?

OK, I know this is a serious article about the difficulties of conducting sustainable dairy practices in the age of corporate monopsonies and the great bio-fuel hoax, and it's fairly clear that Guest Author meant to indicate that Mark's father was a local pioneer in certified organic milk in the modern era. However I'm not just making a quibble here. Disregarding the rich history of sustainable agricultural practice in the ages before cheap fuels and chemical fertilizers is a big part of what got us into this mess. Environmentalist thinking by very definition takes the long view forward, but I don't believe it can offer anything valuable to human cultural development unless it also entertains a very clear and current understanding of what came before.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Not strictly on-topic,

this latest blog posting from a North Carolina biofuels coop nevertheless provides good, honestly-framed background on the ethical and financial quandaries currently being faced by those attempting local, sustainable-scale biofuel production:

http://energy.biofuels.coop/general/2008/03/05/going-glob ...

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Coppicing - good! Cellulosic ethanol - still bad.

Coppicing has been practiced sustainably for centuries to produce fences, furniture, building materials and yes, fuel for home heating and cooking uses, at the same time as it has provided a stable and dependable habitat for wildlife. Most parts of a traditional Windsor chair come from coppice growth, as does the wattle in wattle-and-daub. Traditionally done skillfully by hand with the billhook (the Englishman's machete) the growing coppice often does double duty as hedgerow - the coppice area of any agricultural land resource has been carefully balanced against other needs and the coppice's strictly limited yields are carefully managed over time to optimize the value and utility of its product.

Does this rich history and knowledge-base give us any grounds, whatsoever, for believing that coppicing could be managed sustainably on the massive scale necessary for ethanol production as a substitute liquid fuel? It is undeniable that our liquid fuel demands are somewhere between voracious and totally out of control. Seems to me that monopsonistic reduction of the coppice to mere feedstock for this insatiable appetite is self-evidently yet one more environmental disaster in the making and an absolute travesty of the integrated, wholistic, and sustainable coppicing tradition.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

To Willa:

There's plenty of 19th and 20th century concrete in first class condition and of course there's plenty of rubbish too. Every age has its share of crap; older stuff (including Roman) that didn't make the grade vanished long ago. We only see the survivors. So far I've seen Hardiplank go fifteen years on one coat of paint and still look great and perform well, and that's as long as it's been in use in my area. I'm professionally involved in a lot of renovation work and I've yet to see any failures. I don't expect it to last less well than the asbestos shingles you despise. Time of course will tell.

Fiber cement siding is not a vapor barrier. No lap siding is. Agreed that you need to pay careful attention to vapor barrier placement, especially in regions that experience prolonged cold weather.

Agreed that split shake siding can be very durable if that's what you mean. Sawn shingles and sawn lap siding are generally much more vulnerable to decay as the face grain fibers are ripped open by the saw and absorb moisture like a sponge if not protected. Good roof overhangs and proper flashings are essential in any case.

Agreed that poorly installed or poorly maintained windows are major energy sieves. Fix 'em. There are crappy modern windows and also excellent ones that will last several lifetimes if properly fitted to your house. You generally get what you pay for.On Umbra on house siding posted 1 year, 9 months ago 9 Responses

Never mind the smell, the math's pretty simple

Ten square miles would give us a little over 4 s.f. per person (10 x 27,878,400/6.5 billion). We'd actually have room to sit down.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Good but no cigar

My guess is they can't do a district geothermal loop because they're selling lots one at a time and can't afford the upfront costs with no guarantee the development will actually get built out any time soon. And they can't do a one-shot build-out to make a district system possible because the costs are so high they can only sell in the high-end custom market. They're trapped by the mind-forg'd manacles (love that phrase) of the development model.

I agree, Pangolin, that cost is definitely an issue: with this kind of promotional material batting for it the green building movement hardly needs enemies. But also did you notice that the lot layout doesn't seem to facilitate simple passive solar design - the predominantly E-W narrow lots (presumably row house lots, it's hard to get a sense of the scale, actually would seem to make anything approaching optimal solar orientation impossible? To facilitate good solar access the row house lots would need to be rotated 90°. The 'cottage #1' model home is clearly passive solar, but how many of the lots shown here could it actually be built on? Perhaps I'm missing something here, perhaps someone familiar with the development could help us understand what's going on.

On the plus side it does seem to be a somewhat brownfield site with some adaptive re-use in its development plan. However it appears to suffer from the classic and all-too-common 'green island syndrome' - putting a ring around a small group of houses and calling it a community does not actually a sustainable community make. It fails to show any meaningful integration with the larger community of Salem and its hinterland on which it will always be umbilically dependent. As such it illustrates the crucial difference between being 'green' and being sustainable.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Big Sugar? No thanks.

The big plus for me is to get all the land that was used for growing tobacco planted in Sugar Cane.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Songs of Experience indeed.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Another zero?

LONDON

I wander through these chartered streets
near where the chartered Thames does flow
and mark in every face I meet
marks of weakness, marks of woe

in every cry of every man
in every infant's cry of fear
in every voice, in every ban
the mind-forged manacles I hear

how the chimney-sweeper's cry
every blackening church appals
and the hapless soldier's sigh
runs in blood down palace walls

but most, through midnight streets I hear
how the youthful harlot's curse
blasts the new-born infant's tear
and blights with plagues the marriage hearse.

I wander through each chartered street
near where the chartered Thames does flow
and mark in every face I meet
marks of weakness, marks of woe

William Blake [1757 - 1827]

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

The slum potential

is sadly evident and it's extremely likely to be a widespread phenomenon. As is the ghost town.

The problem with reclaiming the land for agricultural purposes is going to be the high cost in financial, material and energy resources. Finding finance for reclaiming brownfield sites for high-return uses is difficult enough: pulling out all that asphalt, concrete and other pollutants to plant cabbages is going to be a real stretch - unless cabbages get very, very expensive, which I suppose is a possibility. This is why in most cases we should be trying every other option first.

But we probably won't.

I was trying to be upbeat, dammit!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

A house of (credit) cards

that perhaps has started to fall. Personally, I think it's amazing the exurban trope has lasted this long. I first encountered these new-style suburbs on a visit to the US in 1990 when I was getting ready to move here. A brief taste, visiting cousins in a NJ-side far-out suburb of Philadelphia was shocking: a twenty minute drive to school, grocery, restaurant, movie theatre, anything, a two-hour commute to work - what the hell was that about? Are these people insane? How long can they keep this sh*t up?

Longer than I'd have guessed, apparently. Even now the death announcement of the exurban fantasy may be premature. A sidebar in the Atlantic Monthly article referenced above linked to a somewhat similar piece about the suburb's decline - dated 1988. Since then as we all know, the rate of growth of these collective inanities has skyrocketed.

It's of course important to distinguish between the different suburban styles that have emerged over the years. The older, tighter suburbs (right up through the 1960's or so) that took for granted no more than one car in the family, so that essential resources had to be close enough at hand that kids could bike to school or to their grocery-bagging jobs, may well prove redeemable. The newer stuff, based not on a car in every garage but on four or five cars in every driveway, while the garage itself is bursting with barely used imported consumer crap, will probably not.

As the Atlantic article put it, "Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild." Sadly, as with carbon emissions, there still seems to be barely a slowdown in our folly.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

In our dreams

I will hazard a guess that Caniscandida's tongue, if not Pathos', is firmly in cheek but in case anyone would take this concept seriously:

The notion that off-world colonization, if it were to become at all even possible, would somehow lead to the redemption of our home planet's biodiversity and environmental balance may indeed be a cheery concept but one that does not bear an iota of scrutiny. Note that the worst industrial devastations of Europe took place AFTER the "New World" colonization of the Americas, Africa, East Asia and Australasia were well under way.

But a little light relief is fun, no?On Researchers develop energy-generating clothing posted 1 year, 9 months ago 7 Responses

Dear Jonas

thanks for the clear exposition. I'm guessing the stubbornness of Greyfalcon, which I rather share, revolves around a critical item in your point 3. - "now if you use the trees as a carbon source for energy, then sequester it" (my emphasis).

I'm sure you can guess the question that's coming. How, and at what environmental, financial and social cost, does the sequestration occur?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

the 20mph threshold

Jon posted an excellent link to the advantages of reducing traffic speed. A couple of issues not mentioned in that compendium: when motor vehicle speeds can be effectively reduced to 20 mph or less the need for separated lanes for bikes is generally nonexistent, offering many advantages in the design of compact multimodal transportation infrastructure (I am aware the cycling community is hugely divided on the issue of separate bike lanes but it's obvious to all I should think that they serve most effectively when alongside expressways rather than in pedestrian-inclusive environments), and secondly that lowering vehicle speeds often does not significantly reduce vehicle travel times. On the other hand, those multilane high speed urban roads with many intersections with which we are all so familiar have inevitably generated demand for frequent stop lights to facilitate cross traffic turns. The net result is the ubiquitous hurry-up-and-stop process than can turn a two mile trip (six minutes at a steady 20 mph) into a ten-minute drag alternating between 50 mph and dead zero. Question: do they call it a drag strip because of the amount of time you spend just waiting around?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Good for you, Billy Salt

I wish there were more intelligent progressives studying business administration and preparing to take a leadership role in that field. Goodness knows we need you.

Great name by the way.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Justlou nails it.

The more we break elemental cycles, the more we undermine ecological services, the more we have to substitute energy hungry technological services.  Ironically, the economy selects for and rewards these substitute technological services while doing little to bolster the ecological services they are intended to replace.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

"Vegangelical"

When I first came across this coinage a few months back, I'll admit I was annoyed. It was in a context where it was clearly intended to be insulting, demeaning and dismissive - the president of a biodiesel company defending his turf and his market, seeking to deflect yech-factor criticism of his CAFO chicken-fat feedstock sourcing.

The irritation resurfaced when I read the post above: "I'm not a vegangelical" says Balcavage, clearly wishing to dissociate herself from the strident, shrill etc. image which the word is intended to convey. And in the many emotional anti-veg diatribes we see whenever Gristmill examines the environmental ethics of meat-eating, such an image is constantly invoked. "I'd eat less meat myself if PETA just weren't so strident" runs the complaint.

Then my thoughts went to the fact that despite living in a community where veg*ns are not at all rare, I've never actually encountered this trope myself. Just where are all these strident veggies?

And then I suddenly began to wonder if this absence was actually such a good thing. I've always been one of those "polite" veg*ns myself, always responding with a quiet deflection when someone asks at a party "why aren't you eating the ham/beef/turkey - it's delicious!" I hold back from mentioning the short unhappy life and nasty brutal death of the animal they're eating. It seems so unfestive and awkward, so I say something nonconfrontational, like Oh I just don't like to eat meat. The carnivore at my elbow usually backs off at this point and changes the subject.

But perhaps I'll have the courage to take a more aggressive line, now I have a label to cling to. Instead of cringing defensively when this trendy coinage reappears, as surely it will, I'll emulate the Impressionists who turned sneering insult to badge of honor. "Meat is disgusting", I'll say, " you should be ashamed of yourself. I'm a vegangelical and you're infringing my rights to a meat-free environment. Why are you insisting on eating that crap in front of me? Take it somewhere where I don't have to see it."

The non-smokers did it. God, wouldn't it be great if the hard-core carnivores at a dinner party were banished to the back deck in the rain to chew their slim jims away from polite company. Are we being just too nice? Fellow vegangelicals: rally to the banner. Our hour has come!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

What condescending nonsense.

Your outrage/aggravation over meat consumption will kill you faster than eating a porterhouse five days a week, guaranteed!

Re: "undisentanglable global networks"

Dear Caniscandida,

You suggest "... the "unacceptable consequences" of just about any large-scale activity are too hard to predict, too hard to measure, and too hard to compensate for."  

Hard, yes. Too hard - I certainly hope not.

"Is it really possible anymore to separate out one discreet system from within this undisentanglable global network of systems, and declare it "sustainable"?"

Well of course we know that everything in this world is connected to everything else, in ways that we often only barely understand, and that nothing can ultimately be considered in isolation.  However, we often find it possible to consider systems as if they were isolated from each other and obtain some very useful and practical results. A business plan. A lunar trajectory. The path of a motor vehicle along a highway. A bridge. A basketball play. Not always, but startlingly often, these projections actually work. Taken separately, they enable a particular course of action to be taken. Taken together, they become an increasingly complete picture of the world and our place in it.

I believe we can do the same with our aspirations to sustainability: by considering each part in turn, and by making continuous corrections in the course of each part, we can achieve some adequate measure of a sustainable whole. The sustainability paradigm insists that we consider, as far as we are able, the environmental consequences, the social consequences and the economic consequences of any particular proposal or practice. This is a demanding task and it is not a do-it-once kind of thing. It will take - dare I say it? - a sustained effort, for the rest of the life of our species. That "eternal vigilance" thing.

Are we ready for it? Maybe not. But don't we have to do it anyway?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

40,000+ deaths a year.

Some molehill.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Go whole hog....?

Actually, if Easterbunny's data are correct and other things being equal, the best path to carbon footprint reduction in his/her particular situation would be to switch to CFL's for optimal summer efficiency AND to replace the gas furnace with electric radiant heating.

Of course for those of us stuck with fossil-fueled electricity, the simpler point is that hanging on for dear life to incandescents is just plain wack.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Just a reminder

A bank that puts the environment first today will likely not be there to look after it tomorrow. The good news is that a bank which totally ignores its environmental responsibilities will probably not last either.

Sustainability theory tells us that if it wishes to continue long-term, an organization cannot put any one element of its triple bottom line 'first'. It has to take care of its financial responsibilities, its social responsibilities and its environmental responsibilities or it will, eventually, fail.On Three Wall Street banks announce funding restrictions for new coal power plants posted 1 year, 9 months ago 20 Responses

with gay abandon...

It is specific in stating that there is not a problem using switchgrass on abandoned farmland. How could there be. Those lands have already largely lost their carbon sinking ability.

Genuine question: why would abandoned farmland lose its carbon-sinking ability? There's plenty of it around my way (the N. Carolina Piedmont), old cotton and tobacco fields mostly that generally have covered themselves in fast-growing pine and sweetgum within twenty years, getting ready if left to themselves to succession into mixed deciduous climax forest in fifty or so. There's no albedo effect to speak of - we get a a few days of snow cover every few years. There are vast amounts of self-supporting second-growth forest like this throughout the southeast. Isn't this a major chunk of the abandoned farmland we are talking of, and isn't it sinking carbon as we speak?

I don't pretend to be an expert in the bioprocesses involved, but here's my concern: seen as resources of low-value cellulosic fiber these huge acreages of abandoned land are clearly prime candidates for feedstock supply for a cellulosic ethanol boom (assuming the technology becomes actually viable). Quite apart from the habitat destruction and visual devastation that would come from the wholesale removal of this material for biofuel, and the loss of soil stabilization and regeneration from the natural forest cycle, wouldn't it also result in a major spike in carbon release that would take decades for the regenerating forest to reabsorb?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Komanoff's title is apt

and the comparison long overdue. Automobile deaths are the elephant in the room which none wish to speak about. This entirely anthropogenic rolling disaster inflicts grave and quite avoidable suffering on upwards of a thousand American families every week: there are those who die, and those whose physical being is forever altered, and those who mourn or look after them. The sudden, violent, forever life-changing nature of these events is, as far as the victims are concerned, impossible to distinguish from those of 9/11, except there are so many more of them and the financial payouts are seldom as generous.

Ah, but you say, 9/11 was an intentional evil. Bad, foolish, manipulated, misguided people caused it on purpose. There are sins of commission and sins of omission, and the first are surely the worst? Well, sorry to say I have found the lack of strict intentionality on the part of the perpetrators to have little palliative effect on the sufferings of those I know who who have lost a loved one beneath the wheels of the juggernaut we call a transportation system. I have no personal acquaintance with any family which has lost a loved one to terrorism, either through the 9/11 events or through the military actions which they purportedly engendered. Statistically-speaking, my experience would seem to be true of most Americans. My closest personal connection to the Iraq fiasco is to a young English soldier, the son of friends, who quite fortuitously was sent on an errand at the moment that a suicide bomber detonated her device and blew herself and his checkpoint comrade to bits. My list of dead friends and children of friends sacrificed on the altar of personal mobility is much longer. A few: the young man who blinks his eyelids to communicate with his mother, and will never be capable of more. The young gardener, poet, musician, lover of life, buried in a quiet spot in Virginia. The woman who raises her grandchildren alone after her son died bleeding beside the highway, and his wife followed him a few days later when a quarter-million dollars worth of life support was turned off.

Then there are those we read or hear about in the local news - though only the more extravagant of these deaths seem to attract much attention. Now this in breaking news! Carload of teenagers rolls from a highway off-ramp at ninety miles an hour! Bring on the death-counselors at the local high school! But don't fix the actual problem. Don't question the relentlessly sexy zoom-zoom ads on the teevee. Don't halt the development of car-fixating strip malls and exurbs. Don't stop building our schools miles from the communities which they serve, and don't whatever you do improve the pedestrian safety and comfort of our downtowns or our school walk-zones.

Are these environmental issues? Environmentalism demands that we hold ourselves accountable for the full costs and consequences of our activities.

These are grave costs and serious consequences, and undoubtedly they result from our activities and ours alone. So how are they NOT environmental issues?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Go WeCar!

Folks who'd use this service:
Realtors. Attorneys. College professors on dispersed campuses. Physicians working at multiple locations. Reporters. Social workers. Architects. Business executives. Any office worker needing to make a visit to a child's school function or meet a dental appointment without taking the whole day off.

In a few American cities with truly effective public transportation cabs, buses and subways are faster and more convenient (no hunting for parking spots at your destination). Everywhere else, a busy professional can't spend two hours on cross-town bus commute to a mid-day meeting if a car takes you there in ten minutes. So though there may be commuter transit available at the beginning/end of the work day s/he drives to work to cope with those interim trips. And as the car's  sitting there why not drive to lunch as well...

Certainly, good public transportation is better than car-share. But until the general infrastructure gets up to Manhattan's standards, these services can undoubtedly help reduce congestion and emissions, especially if high-performance autos like the Prius are the vehicles of choice.On Enterprise and other rental companies move into car-share market posted 1 year, 9 months ago 6 Responses

sustainable, prolongable

I believe the distinction lies in the question of costs and consequences. Ask the fossil fuel industries how long their activities can be prolonged and you will get an answer based on the amount of calculated reserve in the ground, feasible extraction rates (if you're lucky) and our rate of usage of that product. This is how the question has been traditionally asked and answered. Now as in recent years we have come to frame that question in terms of sustainability, we have thereby enlarged the terms of reference to additionally demand from producers a full accounting of the financial, social and environmental costs of that production.

That the initial answers may be self-interestedly mendacious or diversionary is hardly surprising, and it is our job as an alert population to probe, query and discover the truth. Sustainability advocates have been working assiduously for some years now to promote a clear understanding of the disciplined framework for that analysis which includes, I repeat, a full accounting of the financial, social and environmental costs of any particular activity. And that sounds most worthwhile to me.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Sustainability, aspirationality, and the rest

While I find much of Legumesam's comment to be helpful I still continue to be bewildered by the putative association of sustainability with permanence. I find no such obligatory connection in uses of the word outside of the environmental discussion and see no reason for that link to be assumed within it. Some examples from common usage: when we talk of a sustained note in music or a sustained lift in weightlifting we do not expect either to last for ever, but rather that it has duration past the instant. My long-sustained relationship with my first wife is now largely over, and I had many sustained friendships with people I now live far away from and no longer see. Some yoga asanas which I can hold only for a breath or two at the beginning of yoga practice I find much more sustainable after my muscles and sinews have warmed up. I make plans for my business to be financially sustainable through an average recession but accept that it might not survive a major one. The four walls of my house sustain the roof very well but I do not expect them to do so forever.

The alternatives offered by Caniscandida, aspirationality, durability and prolongability, I find deeply unsatisfactory as substitutes. The first describes what we might hope for without addressing the cost: the second, durability, is another quality altogether (a Humvee is extremely durable, especially if it sits unused in the garage as rising oil prices and growing awareness of pollution problems makes its use unsustainable as a quotidien means of personal transportation), prolongability simply describes how long something may be made to continue, again without addressing the cost. Coal-fired electricity may prove to be extremely prolongable if industry lobbyists manage to make it so, at the same time as it destroys our climate.

Sustainability is without question temporal, not eternal, and I agree that very often in these discussions the timeframe is elided or assumed. An old farmer's saying in the sturdily nonconformist region where I grew up ran "Live as if you would die tomorrow, farm as if you would farm forever". None actually expected to farm forever, or die tomorrow, the "as if" speaks to the attitude of mind, and "forever" stands service for "beyond the next harvest or two". So also the native american "seven generations" to which I referred earlier is not any literal period of time but speaks to a horizon beyond the present and our preoccupation with our immediate needs. In present environmental discussions that sustainability timeframe might be fifty years for a PV cell or a thousand or more for nuclear, depending on context. It certainly needs to run well beyond a corporation's annual report to shareholders, and beyond the CEO's golden handshake and stock option expiration date. These are things we need to fix, and sustainability is the analytical construct we can use to consider the cost and duration of cost, the benefit and the duration of benefit, to bring those needed perspectives into focus.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Fair enough.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Impermanence, we embrace it

"All human things are subject to decay,
And when fate summons, Monarchs must obey."

I believe I was sixteen or so when I came across these memorable words (John Dryden, opening lines of "Mac Flecknoe"). I have no illusions of permanence in our human systems, simple or complex, and I have to disagree that any use of the word sustainability implies such. If I may quote from my earlier post, here's a reiteration of the working definition as I see it in its relevance to environmentalist thought:

That is, we want [the systems] to be continuable for some reasonable period of time without prematurely depleting the resources on which they depend.

A definition like this of course begs the questions of what is a reasonable period of time and what constitutes premature depletion. Seven human generations has been offered by some as a reasonable timeframe for such decisions, and I would not argue with that.

Thank you for pointing out my failure to close my parenthesis above. If I were as omnipotent on GristMill as our esteemed DR I would go back and fix it. Systems can be correctable, if they are so designed!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Not coal, Corey

Though the BBC story does indeed refer to making hydrogen from fossil fuel with carbon sequestration it also states that the fuel in question is natural gas, not coal.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Depends what your goals are

Colin, if sustainability of the species is your only goal then pre-agricultural homo sapiens was indeed a  durable model. We hope though it is not the only one, as it had its obvious disadvantages in individual quality of life, which I believe was the substance of Patrick's comment.

Our current challenge is to combine our proven durability as a species with a much higher quality of life as individuals. It remains to be seen whether we will be successful: as you point out, we're still in the first few minutes of evaluation.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Fairness and happiness

Sean Casten:

There's also some interesting work in Behavioral Economics on this same subject, where people were asked to estimate whether they were fairly paid first by telling them their job and their salary and separately by telling them their job, their salary and the average salary of the other people on their street.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the latter group was much more likely to report that they weren't fairly compensated, even though the additional information didn't actually convey anything meaningful about whether they were fairly compensated.

This brings up a very interesting point that doesn't get mentioned enough in the ongoing debate about personal vs. political action on carbon emissions. I've also read of studies where subjects acted against their own self-interest when they perceived others would do even better from their action. If we feel that we are sharing a burden equitably, we are happier individually. If we're carrying more than our share of the load, we're angry, recalcitrant and tend to act against our own best interest.

This is where government comes in. Pace the growing-the-green-economy folks, no change comes without cost, and equitable sharing of that cost will not happen without good government. And of course good government will not happen unless we insist on it.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Sounds tasty!

If it helps people actually NOTICE what they consume I'm all for it.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Once again, Dave nails it right off the block

As I've said before, meat has the distinction of being one of the few big contributors to ecological destruction that is almost entirely voluntary. Very few people have to eat meat, and nobody has to eat as much as the average American.

Truths by this time pretty much in the self-evident department.

And yet:

Yet the suggestion that people go without produces more resistance and vitriol than almost any other "green tip." It's mysterious.

Mysterious indeed.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

In other news:

Duke Energy's proposed Cliffside coal plant in N. Carolina just got its air quality permit, which means construction will start soon.

On the bright side, Duke CEO stated this will likely be the last coal-fired plant they'll ever build. Maybe something's percolating through.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

No, Max

a cooler year or two wouldn't prove a thing. No one ever claimed that every year is going to be hotter than the one before. You know this.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

And verily I say unto ye...

Max, I have to hand it to you. Taking comfort and reassurance from what you yourself acknowledge to be phony science takes a true believer.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Hate to be smug

but instant paperless printing to PDF from any application has been a standard part of the Macintosh OS for years.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Gotta admire the stamina!

Haven't visited this thread for a while though I have been amazed to notice it's still running. I wonder if there's a vaccine that makes a person immune to rational analysis of actual data? Max, you seem to comment on everything about the Nexus article except the apparently damning dismissal of Archibald's methodology and data points. Any reason for that?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Nancy may just be losing it

from having to knock heads with the Idiot Parade on a daily basis. I think this is what I heard her say on the radio a couple days ago, apropos the tax giveaway economic incentive bill:

"I know this will work. And if it doesn't we'll do something else."

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Is it time

to call Jabailo once more on his nonsense about carbon mitigation hurting the "emerging poor" and global warming helping them?

You do understand, do you not Jabailo, that several hundreds of millions of the "emerging poor" are likely to find their homes and workplaces under water well before the fortunate residents of Kent begin to feel the pinch?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

When did that happen?

Caroline Kennedy is now Robert F.'s son?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

wackatalpidae:

I'm not quite sure what your point is but despite the efforts of Mr. Nader and others, deaths by vehicle in the U.S. have hovered around the 50,000 a year mark, every year since the 1960's. To put that in perspective, we sacrifice more Americans on the altar of the automobile every month than were killed in the terrorist events of 9/11/2001.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Female-only

train compartments were common in England at least up through the 1950's as I recall. They disappeared as women gained more rights of self-determination and self-defense in the law.On Mexico City encourages transit ridership with women-only buses posted 1 year, 10 months ago 8 Responses

One the one hand,

it's about the positive (we'd hope) environmental impact of the area of work, not the specific nature of the job or the kind of person doing it.

On the other hand, it's a spin-doctor's dream, a term as clearly ripe for abuse, posturing and argumentation as any other green-prefix phrase.

And clearly, if building a Prius is to be designated a green-collar job, then the phrase is already devoid of any significant meaning.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Say again?

GreenOx suggests continuing to pay farmers to take marginal land OUT OF production via the CRP program - while allowing them to keep those lands IN production for fuel farming.

Win-win? No. Just another subsidy for agri-fuels.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Shalom, and lotsa luck.

Great initiative it is. Israel will be a great test-bed for this technology, for many reasons. But don't oversell it: "the road to peace in the Middle East" it almost certainly isn't.

There's so much more going on there than oil.  Israelis tooling around in the latest hi-tech emissions-free vehicles is hardly going to make their much-poorer neighbors drop their resentment, and it could even make matters worse. I'm as fond of shiny consumer toys as the next person, but I don't expect 'em to Save The World.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Yup

What Jon said.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Try loans, not gifts

Consider Kiva.org. No-interest microloans you make to aid third-world development are repaid so that the money can be used again and again. And again.On Umbra on green donations posted 1 year, 10 months ago 21 Responses

A pity about the racism.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

More on Crawford

The biggest obstacle in implementing Crawford's proposal may be gaining acceptance for the residual highway being reduced to a single lane in each direction, even in the envisioned future of expensive and scarce gasoline. However, many parts of the interstate system (particularly the newer sections) have been constructed with a wide center median to allow for future lane additions without the need for extremely expensive and disruptive intersection reconstruction. Adding rail track rather than highway lanes in this median reserve makes much better sense.

Crawford points out that the interstates occasionally include difficult local conditions such as steeper grades than trains are easily capable of dealing with. He mentions several strategies to deal with this problem, to which I would add the option of selective deviations of the rail route from the interstate right-of-way where appropriate. Natural terrain elevations at the beginning and end of such sections would tend to facilitate grade separations of highway and rail track.

Another alternative at the steep grades? This is not a new problem. Borrow a strategy from the old stagecoach days. "First class passengers, stay in your seats. Second class, get out and walk. Third class, get out and push!" (smiley face here)

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Tubes?

More trains - yes! Wonderful way to travel. Don't know about the tubes though for high speed city links - sounds very costly, and at 300 mph you'd be pushing an awful lot of air the length of the tube. Unless you're thinking of pulling the train through the tube using a stationary vacuum pump, like the cash systems in the old department stores.

Two hours or more in a closed tube also sounds pretty claustrophobic. Twenty minutes in the Channel Tunnel is more than enough for most people. Isn't one of the pleasures of rail travel just seeing the world go by, without any driving responsibilities? And while I enjoyed reading J.H. Crawford's thoughtful proposal for adapting the interstates, I'd hope that existing RR routes could also be a complementary part of such a system so that not all of the journey would be flanked by highway. Train vistas in general have always been for me so much more expansive and interesting than those from the interstate.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Music miles,

food miles, love miles, work miles, play miles, booty miles, save-the-earth miles, god miles.

Lotta miles.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

The Prius phenomenon, yada yada

You haven't provided any evidence to falsify or undermine my hypothesis, however, nor have you made any substantive argument against it. All you've done is dismissed it out of hand. Why are you so sure it won't have the effect I've posited?

JFK, your ambitious and so-far unsupported assertion that the social paradigm-changing effect of a new Prius is sufficient to justify its environmental and economic cost is for you to demonstrate, not for me to disprove. In the absence of that supporting evidence I'll consider it as no more than wishful thinking and continue to look at the balance of actual environmental benefit and disbenefit of purchasing a new car.

I do claim that driving a Prius will almost certainly reduce one's own energy use plus CO2 and other air pollutant emissions over the lifetime of the vehicle

Here's the nub. One more time. While purchasing a Prius will indeed decrease the PERSONAL energy use of many buyers (though for those who drive less than the average mileage each year this effect is less certain) it will not reduce GLOBAL energy use and emissions unless it is guaranteed to be a replacement vehicle in the global fleet, not merely an additional one.

Let's be clear. I do not challenge the actual merits of the Prius such as they are. It's a resoundingly successful proof of concept and a definite improvement in energy and emissions performance in use over comparable vehicles of our age. But it's still a car, with an ICE that generates pollution, and it demands roads and parking spaces and all the other resource-hungry doodads that contribute to the mess we're making of our environment, and buying one is not going to save the world.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

I do indeed believe we should try.

I also believe we should employ methods that can be reasonably expected to work. Perhaps Odo you have access to information on the process by which the Japanese/ German experience was effected.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

assumptions

So JFK, you're going to bet the farm on the hope, the prayer, the so-touching expectation that Greg Gasguzzler down the street is going to be so blown away by the aura of environmental cool emanating from your Prius that he'll turn his Suburban into yard art and maybe even invite the deserving poor to share his McMansion.

Lots of luck with that one. Me, I'll just continue to be pathetically dependent on actual information.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Escape II

And didn't we see this one coming a mile off?

So much for the "tipping point". Everyone drives a hybrid SUV and feels they've done their bit! Yahay!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Sending messages

JFK, I think I'd better just drop out of this discussion before my toes begin to curl. You're probably a really great guy and if we met in real life we'd probably enjoy each others' company talking environmental issues over a beer or something. However. Online, you have a talent for pressing my hot buttons. "Buying hybrid cars is good for the environment" (or something to that effect) is one that always gets me going, and now you've followed through with the old "sends a message" argument.

Not good. Used by hanging judges to justify harsh punishment, politicians to justify stupid legislation, anyone in authority to justify riding their personal hobby-horse beyond reason, as soon as I see or hear that phrase I know that someone somewhere has run out of rational arguments.

In this case, how about the message that it's OK to drive your ass off so long as you do it in an "easily-identifiable" Prius? Kind of like in the Old South, not beating your slaves on Sunday "sent a message" that you envisioned incremental social changes toward a society that only beat their slaves on the third Thursday of the month...

See? I should stop.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

The weakest link.

Around our way most of the apparent congestion is caused not by fluid dynamics but by horrendously inefficient intersection design. Frequent stoplights bunch traffic into dense little pods that leave most of the road empty much of the time, until the next pulse of closely-spaced vehicles comes through. What a waste of land, of blacktop, of people's time, of clean air with all those idling engines.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

JFK, Odo

It's all well to speculate about cousin Lance's improving prospects, my immaturity, ways out of the production economy and other diversionary topics but the reality is this: there are about fifteen million new cars added to the US inventory every year while only about twelve million are dropped. And of that twelve million a considerable number are not lost to the global inventory but simply exported wholesale from the US to less wealthy countries such as Mexico for continued use.

You personally contribute to this total global growth in absolute vehicle numbers and hence to the absolute total volume of greenhouse gas emissions every time you buy a new car - even a Prius -unless you are able to personally ensure that a usable vehicle is removed from service at the same time. It would also be appropriate to demonstrate that the environmental benefit of taking the junked vehicle off the road was sufficient to justify the environmental cost of production and ultimate disposal of the new, replacement vehicle. This is not a complicated point.

I have previously posted several times about the need for a more nuanced look at the energy balance of hybrid vehicles when making a personal purchasing decision, such as the importance of not ignoring production/disposal energy costs of the hybrid if your personal annual mileage is low. Prius taxi = no-brainer. Prius for a 5K/year or less driver? Probably far better for the planet to hang on to that '04 Accord. I have yet to see a reasonable refutation of this analysis.

With regards to the "drive less" mantra: only about a third of average personal vehicle-miles in the US are related to home/work travel and thus, arguably, critical for a household's economic well-being. I'm suggesting that for most drivers there are likely be substantial and painless reductions to be found in the remaining two-thirds, thereby reducing our carbon emissions without the necessity for bringing yet another new vehicle into the world.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Buy stuff! It's Green!

Less-efficient, more-polluting, and beat-up older vehicles are junked all the time as new cars are purchased--a sort of trickle-down effect as the cars the new hybrid-buyers trade in are bought by other folks who can't afford new vehicles, who then sell their cars to people who can only afford lower-priced used vehicles, and so on, eventually reaching the folks who trade one lousy jalopy for a bit better one.Yes, that's simplified, but it's basically the way the market works.

Actually the way the market works is that a good percentage of those bottom-rung lousy jalopies are just going on to someone's brother-in-law's nephew who couldn't afford to buy one before. Cars are lasting much longer than they used to, and more cars are coming in at the top than are coming out at the bottom. Result: runaway population growth of automobiles. More and more people are driving every year. I say, resist the siren call of shiny new car smell! Adopt, don't procreate!

PS
the Californian program to get beaters off the road had it right. Buy back the smog mills and junk'em!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Garbage in, garbage out

At the risk of flogging a dead horse:

A variety of reputable investigators have concluded that 85-90 percent of energy use and global warming emissions attributable to an average vehicle over its entire lifecycle come from operation. Only 10-15 percent is production and disposal. This is true for both hybrids and conventional vehicles.

I have a great deal of respect for the Union of Concerned Scientists, not to mention a Variety of Reputable Investigators.

However.

Unless a hybrid uses proportionately less energy in manufacture and disposal than an equivalent lower-mpg conventional vehicle, the last sentence of this statement is obviously nonsense. For example, if the conventional vehicle gets 25mpg and the hybrid 50 mpg, the hybrid would need to use half the energy in manufacture and disposal to conform with this generalization. I don't understand how that might be true, especially when the hybrid has appreciably MORE components in its manufacture.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

OK, so I lied.

But really - can't we find a higher target for environmental aspirations than a just slightly more efficient friggin' automobile?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Daniel Burnham

Chicago architect, 1846 - 1912

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Speed limits

My recollection is that for  non-hydroplane craft there is a hard limit to ship speed determined by hull geometry and overall length. Beyond this no amount of extra power will move you appreciably faster, so skysail assist should indeed result in fuel saving rather than faster passage. Skysails are unlikely to be fitted to hydroplane craft as they are already moving too fast for wind power to be helpful.On Cargo ship to use massive kite-like sail on trans-Atlantic voyage posted 1 year, 11 months ago 16 Responses

Perfection - and otherwise.

Canis, I had guessed and hoped my little Latin might trigger your erudite input, for which I thank you. Caesar's Gallic Wars and a few books of the Aeneid can only take you so far. I'm not sure I have a "heavenward gaze" but I do anticipate the perfection of my earthly life at some stage not too far off, at which point I have no particular expectations other than that my constituent molecules will (perhaps joyfully) re-enter the cycle of death, life, and rebirth.

Jon, thanks for the link. Quite the reality check. Confirms my suspicions that in the big picture our feeble attempts at a functional energy strategy will eventually have to focus on using less rather than deploying more. Perhaps "clutching at switchgrass" will eventually replace "clutching at straws" as our metaphor to indicate the whole range of our desperate attempts to consume our way out of catastrophe.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Ethanol and rural sustainability

Happy New Year everyone.

To RDMIller:

"As you stated.... and as I stated...commodity silviculture HAS been the problem. What I said we need is the opposite of this... a change to sustainable forestry practices which focuses first and foremost on biodiversity and the health of rural communities."

I would love to be better informed. I am certainly not an expert on sustainable forestry practices, though I do know something about the economic viability of small rural communities. Please explain for me therefore how the production of biomass (switchgrass, forestry thinnings, whatever) on a scale appropriate to the production of cellulosic ethanol as a substitute transportation fuel would not be the kind of commodity practice which we seem to agree would be in conflict with both biodiversity and the health of rural communities.

On the other hand, if cellulosic ethanol is not to be a commodity product as a mass market fuel but a local cottage industry serving only those few fortunate communities with enough of the right kind of land lying around available and otherwise unused (whatever that might mean), what's the justification for the huge R & D costs?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

PS

I understand that you are not an advocate of coal-fired electricity generation.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

LED nightlights

are pretty cool too - and at 1/4w rating or less they are said to use less energy running continuously than with a sensor to turn them off in the daytime. The sensor apparently uses more juice than the light. I have one which casts a quite beautiful blue glow over our entire central hallway. For comparison, standard plugin incandescent nightlights are rated about 4W.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Consensus

Jabailo has effectively drawn our attention to two overlapping usages of this word, so let's not be confused by them.

In a small or contained group such as a committee or an intentional community it is usually taken to indicate unanimity toward a proposed course of action. In that situation just one dissenting voice is sufficient to deny consensus.

In a larger context it has a less exclusive sense - e.g. "there is a general consensus among the inhabitants of the US that democracy is a good thing." We would have no difficulty finding Americans who disagree with this judgment, but there is overall agreement on this position amongst the population sufficient that the principle of democratic governance has an effective working mandate - i.e. the consent of the governed.

Similarly we say there is general scientific consensus on the theory of gravity or the conservation of mass and energy, without any expectation that there will not be some wacko with a PhD who will disagree. At this level critiquing scientific consensus on the grounds of absence of unanimity is purely a red herring.

This is the sense in which the term is applied to the IPCC findings: if Jabailo disagrees with this usage he can feel free to suggest another term, and see if he can find support for that alternate description. However, whatever word we use to describe the generally held scientific opinion represented by the IPCC report doesn't change what it is.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Not quite.

LED's are not even close as general replacements for curly fluorescents, either in cost or, far more critically, lumen/watt efficiency. In other words, it actually uses more energy to provide general lighting for a room with LED's than with CFL's.

LED's are most effectively used in highly directional applications, which CFL's are not so good at - in domestic situations this means accent and spot lighting. The MR16's listed in the above link are the first that I've seen, and they begin to look  promising. Give'em another few years and we may be able to use them cost-effectively for directional lighting in home and commercial lighting as replacements not for fluorescents but for incandescent halogens. Much better deal!

There should be no battle between CFL's and LED's. In ten years time I believe we'll be using the two technologies side by side as complementary lighting sources with nary an incandescent in view. I think too that among many other applications we'll also be using LED's very successfully for street lighting, pointing straight down to illuminate the sidewalk, not polluting the night sky.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Oh, and

"In order to achieve a net reduction in per-mile global warming emissions, (i.e. to offset the additional emissions from manufacturing and disposing of another vehicle) the new vehicle will have to get 10-20 percent better fuel economy than the old vehicle, assuming the vehicle will be driven in a typical way (i.e. that it will be used for its full useful life - usually around 170,000 miles).

In case it's not clear from what I wrote earlier, I feel that this a big assumption that may not be true for many buyers. A green-thinking owner driving 5,000 miles a year would take 34 years to take the Prius through its "full useful life", and few cars last that long for reasons outside of drive-train durability. Therefore, IF you're that kind of driver, you'd need to be looking at far better than 10-20% mpg improvement to justify the environmental cost of the new vehicle.

And of course, if you're an average 15K a year driver, far better to find a way to substantially CUT your annual mileage by two thirds than to buy any kind of new vehicle.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

JFK,

I agree with you entirely. I was not suggesting that the Prius and other hybrids will not have a useful afterlife when their technology begins to seem wasteful and dated. My point is rather that that point may come sooner than later, and therefore a massive capital investment in this technology which  has been largely promoted as a transitional one may be inappropriate, for both society at large and the individual, as you yourself have sensibly decided. And that there is more to consider in automotive energy policy than in-use fuel-efficiency.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Hard sell...?

"Maybe a policy idea for those Durango drivers today?"

If it was a tough sell to pay to junk a '71 Dart with a 10K bribe (several times what the car would have been worth), what'd you have to pay to junk a 2006 Durango to make it worth the owner's while?

While we're on the subject of diverse analytical perspectives, the Hummer/Prius lifetime energy study was debunked partly because it took the Prius' effective life to be 100K miles and the Hummer's to be 300K. The sensible point was made that the Prius was also mechanically capable of 300K miles.

But consider the not entirely unlikely scenario in which a Prius is driven only 5K miles a year by an environmentally responsible owner and is surpassed in efficiency by far more technically advanced vehicles within ten years, to the extent that like the Dart (and like the Hummer too of course) it needs to be consigned to the scrapheap - with only 50K on the dial. The widely-quoted average lifetime energy costs ratio of 20% manufacture/80% use might easily be reversed in such a context, largely demolishing any environmental-impact advantage that vehicle might seem to offer. And guess what: this effect will only increase for the more fuel-efficient replacement technology unless there's also some truly miraculous improvement in the energy costs of manufacture. Something to bear in mind.

I'm not making this point to denigrate the Prius or any other relatively fuel-efficient vehicle. I'm just pointing out there are a number of questionable steady-state assumptions in these analyses, and that "better fuel efficiency" is something of a chimerical goal.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Bait and switch or red herring?

Mark, I think you've just demonstrated that the definitions of freedom (or (free)dom) you have at your disposal are multiple and relative, not singular and absolute as your post suggests, and those which are relevant to your argument are, yes, largely ideologically based. For example, I think you'd find it hard to find consensus that "an absolute right of property ownership" (primary methodology of your first link) is an objective measure of human freedom. Your second link with its emphasis on political and civil liberties is more mainstream but appears to display no plausible connection with your original contentious hypothesis.

Not that this matters very much as that hypothesis is in itself entirely circular and self-referential. As a reminder:

"Economic growth is caused by (free) human minds.  Therefore, the more (free) human minds--or their computer equivalents--that exist, the greater will be the rate of economic growth."

In other words, "economic growth is generated by those individuals and machines which generate economic growth. The more of them there are, the more of it there will be." Falsifiable? Maybe. Worth the trouble? Not for the purposes of an intelligent discussion of how much economic growth is good for us (as opposed to how much of it can possibly be made to happen). Sorry - looks like just one more example of an ideologically-inspired economistical non-contribution to addressing the most critical environmental issue in human history.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Trajectories of faith

Mark - Really an interesting leap from apple > ground to economic growth > (free) human mind. I know what an apple is, and the ground; I think I have a reasonable concept of what people mean by economic growth; what the hell would be the working definition of a (free) human mind that's not based entirely on ideology?.

A construct without functional, non-ideological definitions is not in any sense of the term falsifiable. This is exactly where some economists seem all too ready to fall off the edge of a scientific methodology.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Go Coop!

Coops are indeed a capable alternative to the investor-owned corporations which dominate our business infrastructure, and we would do well to invest much more substantially in them. They have many characteristics that make them conducive to a long-term sustainable economy, not least of which is that being owned exclusively by the people who actually use their services (employees, customers, producers) they are less likely to be abandoned when for whatever reason the profit line takes a dive.

But while I endorse amazing's support of the coop model I can't let his post go by without comment. First, it's not a good idea to describe coops as non-profits and thereby associating them with the charitable sector. Coops are businesses, and like any other business they have to project a long-term net operating surplus to survive the lean years and invest in their own future. The only difference is that in a coop the profit belongs to the those who directly participate in generating that value and not to external investors. That community of ownership ultimately gets to decide where that profit goes, typically to some combination of business re-investment, owner distribution and community support.

Second, coops differ from average "family farms and small businesses" in some very significant ways. Being community-owned means they are directly accountable to the community which depends on them. The profit goes to that community of ownership, not to some individual purse. And coops are not needlessly beset with inheritance and succession issues. Unless grossly mismanaged, coops outlast their founders.

This is not to say that coops are incapable of behaving badly. But I do believe that as community-owned businesses they are more capable of behaving well (sustainably, accountably, responsibly) than their family-owned or investor-owned counterparts. Grist readers, support your coops!

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Hmm

Not sure if I can see a benchmark to the French standard on the EPA site. A score of 10 (the very best score) per EPA allows up to 295 g CO2 equivalent emissions per mile, which translates to about 180 g/km. This is above the threshold for penalties in the French plan.

Am I missing something?  Is there a difference between "CO2" and "CO2 equivalent"? Or is what passes for top of the line in the US that far below the minimum French standard?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Kudos to you, Justlou

" I don't fly.  I have not built a vacation cabin in the woods.  My travel is limited to within my state and a couple of adjacent states -- mainly canoeing and camping."

Travel of course necessitates consumption (as, for that matter, does eating), but we can take steps to keep our consumption within mindful bounds. As you have.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Whichever..

it's a lot more than it need be. It's common now for new homes to have close to a kW of lighting just in the kitchen - and not just used at night.... Clearly neither necessary or sustainable.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Inversion?

Craig,
I join the chorus of thanks for your post, which adds much depth to the headlines. But I am puzzled. On my browser at least, and on on this blog, older comments reside above newer ones. So for me at least your reference to "above" in your third comment was correct, and your correction of it, not. Surely this is not some odd southern-hemisphere thing, like seeing the midday sun in the north?

Caniscandida,
wholly admirable polyglot as you are, perhaps you should learn a little Strine.

DR,
tell it.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Please tell me you're kidding.

I'm a good environmentalist - I recycle my cans, I drive a hybrid (and key non-hybrid drivers cars)

If that's a joke it's not even funny. That's not environmentalism. It's the act of a self-satisfied prig and a vandal.On Are you brave enough to say no to a high-stress holiday? posted 2 years ago 51 Responses

Greentiger:

Though there are those much better qualified than I to answer your points, as no-one else is jumping in I'll take a shot:

i definitely believe economical cellulosic ethanol is on the cusp...

Not my understanding. As a lab process, maybe. As an economically viable production process - not even close.

there's no insurmountable barrier to it's mass-production;

- apart from, say, the low energy density of the feedstock giving it a potentially negative EROEI just in haulage to the production plant, depending on the geography. And that the cellulosic material already has significant economic, biological and ecological value which is likely to always exceed the value of its maximum theoretical potential as fuel.

the current inefficiencies are all conquerable biological problems

Isn't viewing biology as a problem to be conquered what got us into this mess?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Cheap shot, Patrick

Just how do Farm Girl's food purchase choices hurt the poor - anywhere? Or what am I missing here?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Sorry, Wisc...

this is not the time to repudiate the values that inform environmental leadership.

Such an abandonment would not be helpful.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Lagoons

I somehow doubt the poop is coming from cleaning out shelter barns in winter. The farm referenced in the article, the fourth to join the program, was a 700-cow operation, and I strongly suspect they're all that large. I've lived in dairy country all my life - though not in Vermont - and I've never seen a pastured dairy operation even close to that size.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Not only energy savings-

Looking at the luminaires on the supplier's website and noting the highly directional characteristics of LED's it seems possible that with careful choice of fixtures and by putting light only where it's needed LED streetlights could lessen light pollution too. Twofer. Yay!On Ann Arbor, Mich., declares itself first U.S. city to use LEDs in all its streetlights posted 2 years, 1 month ago 3 Responses