ApocaDocuments (8) for the "Recovery" scenario from this week
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Sun, Mar 8, 2009
from Mother Jones:
Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008
Many of the familiar models don't work well on the scale required to feed billions of people. Or they focus too narrowly on one issue (salad greens that are organic but picked by exploited workers). Or they work only in limited circumstances. (A $4 heirloom tomato is hardly going to save the world.)...
Organizations such as the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (which despite its namesake is a real leader in food reform) have long insisted that truly sustainable food must be not just ecologically benign, but also nutritious, produced without injustice, and affordable.... Using the definition of sustainability above, about 2 percent of the food purchased in the United States qualifies. Put another way, we're going to need not only new methods for producing food, but a whole new set of assumptions about what sustainability really means....
And for all our focus on the cost of moving food, transportation accounts for barely one-tenth of a food product's greenhouse gas emissions. Far more significant is how the food was produced—its so-called resource intensity. Certain foods, like meat and cheese, suck up so many resources regardless of where they're produced (a pound of conventional grain-fed beef requires nearly a gallon of fuel and 5,169 gallons of water) that you can shrink your footprint far more by changing what you eat, rather than where the food came from. According to a 2008 report from Carnegie Mellon University, going meat- and dairyless one day a week is more environmentally beneficial than eating locally every single day. ...
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Wait... it's not just simply "organic or not"? I mean -- isn't "paper or plastic" simple?
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Sun, Mar 8, 2009
from BusinessGreen:
Energy secretary promises "transformational" green research
US energy secretary, Steven Chu, yesterday called on a Senate committee to authorise far greater levels of government support for energy research, arguing that the onus is on the federal government to help incubate cutting edge low carbon technologies before they become commercially viable.
Chu was testifying at a hearing held by the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources to review the future direction of energy research and development. He argued there was an urgent need for greater funding, and a renewed focus on how to spend that money more wisely.... Chu also called for greater government support for cutting edge " transformational" energy research, arguing there was a need for "game changing, rather than incremental" science.... These include the creation of fuel from non-food crops and bio-waste, automotive batteries with greater longevity, reducing the cost of photovoltaic by 80 per cent, and computer design tools to increase energy efficiency in buildings. Finally, the Government could help to develop energy storage technology that could turn renewable power sources into base load generators, he said. ...
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If we change the game, how will we know who wins?
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Sun, Mar 8, 2009
from Living on Earth:
Toward Healthier Waters
President Barack Obama has set aside half a billion dollars to clean up the Great Lakes. Many environmentalists - and some politicians - say the project is long overdue. The lakes are polluted with toxic waste that poison fish and endanger human health, and invasive species which disrupt the food web and the marine ecosystem... ...
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Maybe we can bribe the quagga mussels into leaving.
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Fri, Mar 6, 2009
from USA Today:
Obama veers from Bush's environmental course
Even before George W. Bush can settle into his new house in Dallas, his legacy on the environment is being dismantled by his replacement in the White House. In less than two months, President Obama has put on hold Bush's plans for power-plant pollution, offshore oil drilling, nuclear waste storage and endangered species. ...
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After how much harm Bush did in 8 years, his legacy isn't the only thing that should be dismantled!
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Thu, Mar 5, 2009
from New York Times:
Grass-Roots Uprising Against River Dam Challenges Tokyo
First, the farmers objected to an ambitious dam project proposed by the government, saying they did not need irrigation water from the reservoir. Then the commercial fishermen complained that fish would disappear if the Kawabe River's twisting torrents were blocked. Environmentalists worried about losing the river's scenic gorges. Soon, half of this city's 34,000 residents had signed a petition opposing the $3.6 billion project. In September, this rare grassroots uprising scored an even rarer victory when the governor of Kumamoto prefecture, a mountainous area of southern Japan, formally asked Tokyo to suspend construction. The Construction Ministry agreed, temporarily halting an undertaking that had already relocated a half-dozen small villages, though work on the dam itself had not started.
The suspension grabbed national headlines as one of the first times a local governor had succeeded in blocking a megaproject being built by the central government. ...
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Ecuador... now Japan... People are fighting back!
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Wed, Mar 4, 2009
from Wall Street Journal:
U.S. Climate Official Urges Congress To Curb Greenhouse-Gas Emissions
The top U.S. negotiator of international climate-change agreements urged Congress to pass legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions in advance of an international summit this December, saying it would give other countries "a powerful signal" to cut their own emissions.
"It's been a long time now that countries have been looking to the U.S. to lead," Todd Stern, President Barack Obama's special envoy for climate change, said in response to questions from audience members after a speech at a conference on global warming. Mr. Stern acknowledged that passage of climate-change legislation before December would be "an extremely tall order," but added that "nothing would give a more powerful signal to other countries than to see a significant, major, mandatory plan" from the U.S. before the start of international talks that are intended to forge a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which committed many industrialized nations to cutting their emissions. ...
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Thank goodness his name is Todd Stern and not Todd Wussy.
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Tue, Mar 3, 2009
from Chicago Tribune:
Going green: Entire Swedish city switches to biofuels to become environmentally friendly
KALMAR, Sweden -- Though a fraction of Chicago's size, this industrial city in southeast Sweden has plenty of similarities with it, including a long, snowy winter and a football team the town's crazy about.
One thing is dramatically different about Kalmar, however: It is on the verge of eliminating the use of fossil fuels, for good, and with minimal effect on its standard of living.
The city of 60,000 -- and its surrounding 12-town region, with a quarter-million people -- has traded in most of its oil, gas and electric furnaces for community "district heat," produced at plants that burn sawdust and wood waste left by timber companies. Hydropower, nuclear power and windmills now provide more than 90 percent of the region's electricity.... Just as important, the switch from oil and gas is helping slash fuel bills and preserve jobs in a worldwide economic downturn. And despite dramatic drops in fossil fuel consumption, residents say nobody has been forced to give up the car or huddle around the dining table wearing three sweaters to stay warm. ...
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I'll bet they have great sex, too.
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Mon, Mar 2, 2009
from CNN:
Can a 'smart grid' turn us on to energy efficiency?
... According to research sponsored by the U.S. Government, improving the efficiency of the national electricity grid by 5 percent would be the equivalent of eliminating the fuel use and carbon emissions of 53 million cars.
For years environmentalists have been talking up the idea of a "smart grid" -- an electricity distribution system that uses digital technology to eliminate waste and improve reliability -- as a way of achieving this.
Advocates of a "smart grid" also say that it would open up new markets for large and small scale alternative energy producers by decentralizing generation.
"It would give consumers the potential to have a much more complex relationship with their energy supplier," says John Loughhead, Executive Director of the United Kingdom Energy Research Center.
"Essentially, with a smart grid, traffic goes both ways. If you wanted to install some kind of micro-generation facility in your home, you could use it to sell to the grid and get money back." ...
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But what if .... my grid is dumb?
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