Pop Culture/Green Culture

Last night, in a fit of some procrastination, I decided I would go online to nbc.com and stream one of my favourite TV shows  Heroes. Now, my pick of entertainment isn’t the subject of this post, rather I’m interested in NBC’s “Green Week of Entertainment”. Or rather, I’m interested in finding out how many people KNEW NBC did a week of Green themed programming and subject matter on their website.

I should mention that I don’t watch much TV. Well I do, but I tend to just watch Bravo (my wonderful room mate and I only get 12 channels and Bravo is the only decent one), so I don’t watch regular NBC. I had no idea that they were doing a week of Green until I went online to stream my show. What I found was a case of brilliantly marketed  Greenwashing.

Thats a term I haven’t seen appear on  the media radar in a while, I think because so many major corporations are becoming so active in the field that maybe the environmentalist pundits have been caught off-guard. Its important to give organizations the chance to prove their purpose but what I saw on NBC website seemed so blatantly a case of Greenwashing I was actually disappointed.

Why do I feel this way? Well, it comes down to one simple question. In marketing a Green week did NBC actually do anything beyond filming a few clips on how to reduce your consumption, use biofuels, recycle? Did they reduce the footprint of the shows they filmed? Did they make permanent changes to how their shows are made to become true environmental leaders? I doubt it. I have no proof beyond the fact that if they had the publicity would have been huge. Thats a tact I don’t usually like to take because it leads to confusion and misinformation, but I’m just going to go with it here.

In all of that I did have an interesting experience watching an episode of Las Vegas (oh okay so I really was procrastinating). Beyond the fact that the show is fantastically vapid and therefore very entertaining, last weeks show was themed “Keep It Green”. I actually found very interestingly made — somehow they realised that their audience aren’t the informed consumer of green products who drives a hybrid or makes an effort to take public transport, but the suburban teen/20something with an ugly large American-made SUV. They brought in a whole debate on sustainability and economic principles; the importance of finding the balance between the realities of consumerism and economic growth and the need to stop wasting as much as we do.

I recommend it. Its a fun way to waste an hour and see how the Green debate can go low culture with an impact.

Ethanol Round II: The Glut.

Today the New York times has an article on the collapse in Ethanol prices. The article is a well written overview of the industry and the current impact and reasons for a collapse in the prices. I’m not going to go through all the points the article makes, go read it here — its really worth it. I’m going to talk about what I think is the most important challenge facing the ethanol industry, the federal government and the farmers who are growing the corn and producing the ethanol.

First off most people don’t understand how fragmented the industry is. Most ethanol producing plants, or at least a good majority of them, are owned and operated by farmer cooperatives. This means that the industry has a lot of room to consolidate which will lead to larger margins and less volatility. In the past 2 years, ethanol plants have sprouted (pun) up in hundreds of places throughout the midwest — these plants are relatively inexpensive to build and the technology is well tested. The real issue however is one of transportation. As you can see production is not a problem — there is lots of corn out there for ethanol and there are lots of people turning it into ethanol, but there are not a lot of people getting it from point a to point b. Ethanol, unlike oil and Natural Gas, is difficult to transport — its an organic good and has a sort of sell by date by which it has to be blended into oil if that is the final destination.

Interestingly this transport issue is a common one in the Energy industry. The electrical grid is suffering from the same lack of underinvestment. Why does this dilemna exist? Well most transport networks — for ethanol (pipelines), for electricity (transmission lines), require massive amounts of capital expenditure, with a lot of sunk costs. I’m not sure about this, but as we saw with the bridge collapse this summer in Minnesota, the federal government has stepped back on its responsibility to build and maintain our networks (roads, grids…).

The article makes an interesting point about the likelihood of the federal government having to expand its subsidies to ethanol farmers to protect them during this glut in the market — maybe instead of funding the expansion of an industry already in an overproduction stage, maybe they could pour that money into getting rid of the transport bottleneck. This will allow ethanol to reach end users for its traditional uses of being blended into oil or as a substitute for MBTE, and potentially allow for continued expansion of our inclusion of ethanol into other energy systems.

Ah but what about the effects of increased ethanol production of food prices? on the environment? I’ve already written about my dislike of ethanol as the ’solution’. I don’t think its a solution, i think its a delay mechanisms, but I also see that if we can leverage ethanol through an improved transportation network then people can be allowed to be more creative with the uses and applications of ethanol. Its a complicated situation for sure, but the federal government will continue to be involved and I just hope its in a more constructive way then just giving farmers a check because the market for their product isn’t strong.

Michigan isn’t all that boring.

I’m back!

I’ve finally managed to get my head around all the work that will be due on a weekly and semester basis here back at school. It took me three weeks, due in part to a few weekend trips that took me away from my homework.

This post is going to be about a conference that I attend in early September in Michigan at U of M in Ann Arbor. It was hosted by the William Davidson Institute and the Cornell Center for Sustainable Enterprise.  My dear friend Rich was my fellow Fletcherite to attend and my sounding board for all the thoughts and ideas that attending this conference generated.

The objective of the conference was to get people from academia, professional private sector, public and non-profit sector to come together and talk about strategies to alleviate poverty for the world’s poorest through business. It was interesting to me because it spoke to my thesis interests, and I learned a lot. Probably the most interesting speakers were PK Prahalad, the author of the Fortune-at-the-bottom-of-the-Pyramid, Stuart Hall his co-author on that book and author of Capitalism at a Crossroads, and finally Luis Moreno, the head of the IDB.

The two first, Prahalad and Hart, are the gurus of this concept — they’ve devised and in some cases applied (but always rather limited in scale) strategies that bring business to the poor, creating profit well bringing social and economic good to people who have historically always been excluded. Luis Moreno was the only speaker to really deal with what role governments can take in this sphere, especially as it relates to “basic necessities” –i.e. electricity, water treatment, sewers and interestingly (at least for me) transportation. This is where my interest lies. These services, public goods in a sense, require huge capital expenditures and very high sunk costs, with traditionally very low rate of return.

I’m interested in electricity in this economic strata, electricity distributed and generated by the private sector (which complicates things a bunch).

I’m also taking a course on micro-finance this semester, which is really the perfect class to take at Fletcher.

Okay speaking of class, I need to get back to work, but I wanted my left-over readers to realise that I hadn’t forgotten about the blog.

summer’s almost over

Because this blog is also about “life” I’m going to tell you about some of the things I came across or experienced this summer. They are in no particular order or specific to a theme — some of them are nouns, or actions, or people. Good and bad things are included. I’ll start off with a negative, and hopefully end on a postive:

1. Flying in-and-out of Boston Logan Airport

(i’ve flown a lot in my life, to a lot of places — Heathrow 3 days after the “liquid bomb scare”, bangkok with 10 flights coming in from India, Charles de Gaulle a month after half the airport collapsed, Chicago O’Hare at Christmas — yet nothing compares to the sh*t I had to put up with this summer getting to and leaving Logan.)

2. Flat tires are not fun (but luckily I have a boyfriend who can deal with my anxiety.)

3. May/June in D.C. are truly wonderful months

(Why? because its hot but not muggy, and fireflies are gorgeous)

4. Having Fletcher friends to keep me busy

5. Crossword Puzzles

6. Urban Cycling

(Biking is fun, and biking while dodging cars, possible death traps, and there-goes-my-knee situations is even more fun.)

7. Shenandoah Hiking

8. I love dogs, but I’m not ready to have one yet

9. Harry Potter

10. Excel is… well, sort of fun.

11. I ‘heart’ the Energy Industry

12. I can actually, possibly maybe, hold down a 9-5, office job.

(I told my mother this over the phone and she said how relieved she was, she was worried I was becoming too misanthropic to be able to do this…hmm thanks mum.)

13. Summer Internships are not all bad, but it sure is nice to be able to leave and have 3 weeks of vacation with no Blackberry at my hip.

14. I’m ready to get back to work!

Is an offset card, good or bad credit?

I got a lot of good responses and links from my last post — clearly nuclear is a heavy issue for people, as it should be. I’ll be responding to a couple of comments in a later post because I want to make sure I get my facts/opinion right. So look back for my take on electric cars, hydrogen as a transport fuel and yes, some more nuclear.

In the meantime, this is my subject of the day:

GE, in partnership with AES, has launched a Carbon Offset Credit Card. Both Treehugger.com and the New York Times have articles about it, but I’ve linked here to the New York Times piece.

“We are not sending a message that you can buy your way out of your environmental responsibility,” said Lorraine Bolsinger, vice president of GE Ecomagination. “We’re offering another tool in the kit for reducing carbon footprints.”

Thats their media bite on the whole idea, but what do I really think about the idea?

1. I think it is VERY important that people understand that you can’t buy your way out of climate change/global warming/driving too much etc… And that goes for both sides of the debate. Environmentalists who oppose offsetting accuse it of doing very much that — allowing people a guilt-free ride in their gas guzzlers. I disagree with that idea but only as long as there is a concerted effort by ‘offsetting’ companies tonot mislead their customers as to the meaning of offsetting. Environmentalists who oppose this concept, in my mind, are actually preventing a constructive and useful dialogue to open up between business and themselves. Offsetting is valid — when done well and done in an ecologically considerate way. Which can be done, is being done, and can only be done better if people really work together.

2. Treehugger.com made a good point in one of their posts a few days ago about how Green products are actually counter-productive in many cases. People who don’t need new things, go out and buy Green things because it makes them feel better or they think they are benefiting a cause. However, all they are doing is accumulating more goods, causing more pollution and using up more resources. Sure, this idea is correct but thats only if we assume people are buying green replacements. I think most green consumers who aim to buy something because they need it (or, yes, think they do) will, instead of choosing the main stream “bad” good, go for the green one. Not particularly harmful or helpful but time will tell. So back to this offsets card — I like the idea because it allows people to impact in an environmentally positive way all the purchases they make, whether they are green or not, by choice or by lack of availability.

3. I wonder if the green credit card fashion — which is just really taking off with this idea — will really work. A lot of causes have gone the way of the credit card and didn’t really get much traction or impact. And i also wonder if there is a scale limit to this idea. That is if every CC holder in this country switched to the GE offset card, I doubt they would be able to buy/fund/create enough offset credits for everyone. And it works the other way, if only a few people sign up will their cumulatitive effect be enough to really impact the offset/emission credit business? Guess we will have to wait and see.

Edwards on Energy, thanks to Youtube/CNN

The following is a selection of the transcript from last nights CNN/Youtube debate.

CHARLESTON, South Carolina (CNN) — QUESTION: Hi, my name is Shawn and I’m from Ann Arbor, Michigan. There is a scientific consensus for man-caused climate change, and I’ve heard each of you talk in previous debates about alternative energy sources like solar or wind, but I have not heard any of you speak your opinion on nuclear power. I believe that nuclear power is safer, cleaner, and provides a quicker avenue to energy independence than other alternatives.

QUESTION: I am curious what each of you believe.

COOPER: Senator Edwards?

 

EDWARDS: Wind, solar, cellulose-based biofuels are the way we need to go. I do not favor nuclear power. We haven’t built a nuclear power plant in decades in this country. There is a reason for that. The reason is it is extremely costly. It takes an enormous amount of time to get one planned, developed and built. And we still don’t have a safe way to dispose of the nuclear waste. It is a huge problem for America over the long term.

I also don’t believe we should liquefy coal. The last thing we need is another carbon-based fuel in America. We need to find fuels that are in fact renewable, clean, and will allow us to address directly the question that has been raised, which is the issue of global warming, which I believe is a crisis.

________________

I thought that was a very interesting question, and beyond my dislike of the format (giving candidates litterally only seconds to deal with issues), I thought Edwards answer to be insightful look at his position on energy.

First of all, the questioner is asking about nuclear power — which can only generate energy to be used for electricity, not fuel for transportation which is what Edwards is talking about here.Sure the first part of his answer is about Nuclear, but his solution to not allowing more Nuclear is not actually a resolution of the electricity generation issue vis a vis Climate Change. Clearly, and I find this immensily frustrating, Edwards had this little spiel all prepared, got a question that dealt with Climate Change and Energy and just launched into a little monologue that, really, had very little to do with the actual question.

Now to the meat of Edwards answer:

Yes, I find Nuclear a scary solution to the problems of clean energy generation — no one has yet solved the problem of nuclear waste and the risks associated with running a plant are immense. However, for going on 30 years now France has successfully generated almost 70% of its electricity from Nuclear without any major mishaps. Nuclear is still a live wire issue in France, in fact during the election both candidates got tripped up and into a little trouble over their views and misquotations of nuclear facts. The reality is this in my mind — Nuclear is the cleanest energy we can produce (if waste is properly managed) but it requires incredibly high level of caution, preparation, regulation, information and (any other -tions?) long-term risk management. The next question thats important to me is whether the US is the kind of place where Nuclear energy can be safely generated? Quite frankly I don’t think so. There are so many things wrong with the energy administration in this country that I often think its a very thin line of competency that prevents the kind of melt downs we got in Chernobyl.

Back to Edwards however. The reason Nuclear hasn’t been permitted in the US has little to do with the cost and safety record as to a general beaucratic and political opposition to Nuclear. Energy companies would love to open up the Nuclear market — sure its more expensive than coal, but when up and running and consider the increased likelihood of a carbon constraining regulation sometime soon a Nuclear plant is likely to be more profitable than a coal plant.

Now to Edwards second paragraph, where he gets into solutions not to our electricity generation problem but to the issue of fuels for transport. The truth is, wind, solar and biofuels are unlikely to generate enough electricity for the US and only solve part of the problem. Biofuels, as a starter, is an idiotic idea as an electricity fuel — when burned it still emits a ton of carbon (sure sure, you can claim the life cycle argument that growing corn/soy/other feedstocks negates and more the carbon emitted, but then you have to deal with pretty heavy ecological issues and the food vs. fuel debate). But simply we could never grow enough biofuel feedstock to make a dent in our electrical needs. Wind is a beautiful idea, and one I wholly support, but the reality is that with limitations on where Wind sites can be sited (NIMBY syndrome: Not In My Back Yard) and the nature of Wind as a source of energy (the actual stuff that blows through the windmills) it can never meet our electricity demands. People project Wind being able to provide 10% maybe 12% of our electricity demands, but unless efficiency and conservation efforts are effective, even that percentage is unlikely.

That leaves me with Solar. One thing that people often don’t realise is that Solar is incredibly inefficient, and that unfortunately, without a lot of R&D and time the technologies we have at hand today are unlikely to get any better soon. Thats pretty sad, since apparently we could power the whole world with something like a second of pure sunlight (this little fact is mostly hearsay and i’m too lazy to look it up, but its pretty close to true). I’ve also heard that if we covered 5% of Arizona in solar panels then we would be able to generate enough for the whole of the US. How wonderful you think! but wait there are some big constraints, 1) how do you get the energy from Arizona to New York for example? Transmission lines are already clogged and energy looses power for every inch it travels, 2) What about nighttime? Solar’s foil is that it is only productive during the least energy hours of the day. We, humans, use energy most early in the morning and at night and Solar only produces at high enough levels in the middle of the day. There are some interesting advances in storage of energy, but even that is a long time coming.

Last, but not least, the idea of liquifided coal. I agree with Edwards that coal is pretty dirty, terrible to mine on an ecological level and yes, indeed, another fossil fuel. Liquified coal can be used in cars, theoretically, or gasified to be burned cleanly in power plants. I think to even mention that he doesn’t like liquified coal is silly. First because the realities of politics dictates that the coal industry is a huge and powerful lobby and will definitely get its way especially if a carbon regulating bill is passed. And secondly, coal is plentiful and in the US (Energy Independance). I think it would be much more clever of him, and honest, to say “Lets figure out how to make coal clean, mining safer and better for the environment, and continue to use it while aggressively pursuing and subsidising renewable energy.”

So thats my take on his Energy response. And to be honest, I was disappointed in his answer, somehow I expect more from Edwards but I guess this goes to show that the candidates are not as informed as we would like this early in the campaign.

For a much shorter, funnier and more general take on the debate check out www.eightfor08.com.

The Great American Trails

So I didn’t write this post, I’m transcribing an email a good friend of mine wrote me. He is currently hiking the PCT, that would be the Pacific Crest Trail to the uninitiated. About 2 years ago, he hiked the entire AT, thats the Appalachian Trail.

I thought of him today because of this article in the New York Times about the AT and who takes care of it. Most of the people involved now are baby boomers who are retired or nearing that stage. My friend is, however, a very young and sprightly 27 year old and his writings on his experience always make me wonder if I could do what he’s doing.

Enjoy.

From: Dennis Lucey 

Date: June 15, 2007 5:36:20 PM EDT

Subject: [PCT] And I miss you like the deserts miss the rain

 

After nearly two months of hiking, I’ve made it 702 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail through hot desert terrain and now stand facing the heights of the Sierra Nevada. I’m sitting in an internet cafe (really a trailer with four laptops and a donation box) outside the Kennedy Meadows General Store, less than a mile from Sequoia National Forest and the trail’s gateway out of the desert and into the mountains.

THE DESERT

The hike through the Southern California desert region has had stretches that one would expect: long sandy hikes across washes and dry creek beds, constant exposure to an oppressive sun, hillsides dotted with scrub and chaparral, often pine green and occasionally prickly. The saving grace has been the higher elevations, where stands of scrub oak and a variety of conifers have shaded the trail, fragrant with pine needles and sage. Hot days are followed by cold nights — the first night on the trail dipped down to 17 degrees and water froze in bottles. Two days later I got three inches of snow on Mt. Laguna and watched San Diego news trucks come up to get footage of snowy trees, but not of slightly stinky hikers on the porch of the general store.

This design of the PCT differs greatly from trails back east. On the AT, one could look for the highest hill or mountain in sight and know the trail would be routed up and over that point. Here, one must find the point furthest in the distance and know the trail will contour around every canyon, wash, nook and cranny to get there, rarely ever attaining the ridge and never touching the top of anything. I’ve summited four peaks, all involving side trails off the PCT, ranging in acclaim from not-quite-named Peak 7087 outside Big Bear to the peak of San Jacinto, whose 10,834 foot summit stands nearly two vertical miles above Palm Springs and the wind farms of the Coachella Valley below. The descent of 9600 vertical feet in roughly 25 waterless miles, the bottom stretch of which is completely exposed, was rewarding (the drop ranges through several distinct biomes) and frustrating (imagine hiking a mile in one direction only to switchback and walk back towards where you started, just to drop a few hundred vertical feet).

Overall, the trail’s constant sandy tread and gentle grades rarely exceeding 400 vertical feet up/down per trail mile have taken less of a toll on my feet and legs than the AT. Unlike that hike, I don’t wake up every morning with feet that are numb with pain, if that makes any sense. The only drawback, other than heat and sun that forces afternoon siestas to maintain stamina and sanity, has been the particularly dry environment of this year. Springs and creeks that often have water are nothing more than barren clusters of poison oak. Carrying over a gallon of water at a time is an everyday occurrence, the worst being a 27-mile, 4000+ foot climb out of McDonald’s — try that with 4000 McCalories in your stomach! If it weren’t for the many volunteers that stock and maintain water caches along drier stretches of the PCT my water load would easily exceed that of all of my gear.

One particular stretch of note is the dreaded crossing of the floor of the Mojave desert. For twenty miles the trail cuts perpendicular lines using jeep roads and the sealed Los Angeles Aqueduct to make it from the San Gabriels to the Tehachapi Mountains. This stretch is notoriously hot, with triple-digit temperatures common. The fates smiled upon me when I crossed, however, as a system brought in three days of clouds, high winds, and even a spattering of drizzle down on me. I’m glad to say that I was actually chilly.

FLORA AND FAUNA

As noted, flora has varied from sparse grasslands to creosote scrub to manzanita stands (which invariably gets the Hall & Oates song “Whoa-oh here she comes / she’s a manzanita” stuck in my head) to scrub oak forests to stands of pine, with cones as big as my head. The prickly pear cacti seem to always be in bloom with magenta or yellow flowers. Animals have seem to devoured the nuts from previous years’ cones of the pinon pine, which has been increasingly common over the last few hundred miles.

Most interesting has been observing how topography influences what can grow and in what amounts. I had been familiar with the term “rain shadow” before this hike, but looking down on ridges, one side lush, the other dead, has been a mind-blowing experience. For example, just as moss grows on the north side of trees, the north sides of mountains seem to retain moisture a little bit longer than the south side and tend to have more plant life. The positioning of the mountains and the westward winds from the ocean also seem to play a noticeable role in shaping the landscape.

Other than the eighteen quintillion ants I’ve seen marching across the trail (and my sleeping bag!) and the lizards of all colors and sizes that dart around when humans are near, fauna has been sparse, at least by Virginia standards. I have managed to see a few dozen jackrabbits, many ground squirrels, all sorts of different birds (my favorite is something I call “that blue jay looking thing”; it might actually be a blue jay; I should probably ask somebody), a handful of deer, one scorpion, and snakes, including the first three rattlesnakes of my life. The first rattler was spotted on a sidewalk just outside a McDonald’s off Interstate 15. Wilderness Bob, a Special Forces veteran, moved him out of the way with his trekking poles, eliciting a lot of hissing and rattling.

One evening not too long ago, a Canadian hiker named Potential 178 (referring to the designation given to him by Customs agents using code that he was a possible economic drain on the U.S.A.) asked for a demonstration of my karaoke skills, to which I gave him a couple of verses of Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife”. Soon thereafter the sound of loud heavy breathing filled the air — bear? We couldn’t spot him in the dark, but managed to scare him off, or at least stop its heavy breathing, with the first few lines of George Michael’s “Faith”. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Besides the rare sighting of a mountain lion or Mojave green that hikers dream about, there is the much fabled sighting of the running illegal. Since the trail does start at our border with Mexico, many illegals use it as a means to make it to a road in hopes of getting picked up and folding anonymously into our country. In the first few days of the hike I found many a sleeping bag, empty gallon water jug, and discarded sweatshirt along the trail. At one point I took a break where the trail met a jeep road, only to see a train of eight illegals walking full speed ahead past me. I said “Hola!” and they smiled, not breaking stride. I spotted another illegal later, this time carrying what appeared to be a prescription bottle, again on a pace that would leave even the most seasoned hiker in the dust. Different goals, I guess.

TRAIL SHENANIGANS

What happens when a few hundred people decide to walk hundreds of miles through the desert? They go crazy and do and see crazy things. The trail pass along side Deep Creek Hot Spring, a hangout for various San Bernadino County residents…that also happens to be a nude beach. Besides the very old, very oiled naked guy who laid down on a boulder with his leg propped up, there was also the naked guy that tried to break up a fight between two big and very vicious dogs. That’s not kibble!

The Andersons, a family that feeds hikers full of taco salad and waffles and lets them sleep in the enormous backyard manzanita forest, maintain a water cache before the road to their house that’s also stocked with beer. This hiker and two others took a five-hour siesta and knocked back eight each before hiking the seven miles to the Andersons. Hmmm…desert heat + lots of hiking + mild dehydration + low thru-hiker alcohol tolerance + ninety-six ounces of Budweiser = weaving, yelling, bathroom breaks, and an honest-to-goodness hangover at the end of the day’s hike.

Heavy useless items have started to appear. The group here at Kennedy Meadows have been hiking with a horseshoe, a hammer, and a wrench. A few railroad spikes are being carried further up the trail. Right now I’m hiking with a pinkish floral bag (so floral, in fact, that a few hummingbirds have buzzed around it expecting a nectary treat) that I’m using to hold extra water bottles and Robert the Sheep, a two-ounce fishing weight that trail angel Girl Scout included as part of a “lead weight cache” next to an important water cache, and the nameplate from a Colt Vista (yes, Chris Lindsay, a Colt Vista) that lay abandoned on the trail near Onyx Summit.

In one hiker box I found half of an English muffin in a homemade vacuum-sealed pouch. Not a whole English muffin, just half. I poked a hole in the pouch, ran some cord through the hole, and tied it off to form a Flavor Flav-esque medallion, which I hold up at times to demonstrate my Left Coast credibility. The peanut gallery has speculated if and how badly the muffin will mold, decay, or bring forth insects; three hikers have put up a pool of $205 if I can hike with it around my neck all the way to Canada. (For some reason, if I collect I have to give $50 to Roni from Israel. I think he hoodwinked me sometime between beers.) Given the muffin’s current petrified state, I’m confident about collecting the prize.

Of course, what list of my shenanigans would be complete without karaoke? A group of us took a zero day in Wrightwood specifically to sing at Yodeler’s Pub. A small cast of locals was present when we entered the bar, and within an hour they were all gone, except for three-year-old Scotty and six-year-old Lily and their parents. Scotty got the entire crowd going for a rousing rendition of “Itsy Bitsy Spider”, while Lily surprised everyone by following Garth Brooks’ “I Got Friends in Low Places” with the Marty Robbins’ old standard tearjerker “El Paso”. Once again I got in a dispute over the rights to sing Blake Shelton’s “Austin”; this time no half-Irish guys threatened to fight me outside, and a quick game of a variation on Rochambeau was sufficient to settle the dispute. To those that care, I also performed Travis Tritt’s ” T.R.O.U.B.L.E.”, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer”, George Michael’s “Careless Whisper”, Fuel’s “Hemorrhage (In My Hands)”, a duet with Fester of Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” (yes, Chris Lindsay, “Steal My Sunshine”), and a duet with a Dutch girl named Apple Pie of one of the twenty-five most totally awesome songs ever written, Aaron Neville and Linda Rondstadt’s “Don’t Know Much”. A group rendition of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”, where even all of the remaining staff put down their washrags to join us, rounded out the evening. A good time was had by all.

THE FUTURE

Despite having hiked over 700 miles, there’s 1961 more to go. Indeed, one of the sadder points of the trail was when we reached Mile 488 and realized we had 2175 miles, the length of the entire AT, left to hike. The next 400 miles is the section that most folks have been waiting for: punishing elevations, mountain lakes, and even snow, passing through Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Yosemite National Parks and ending up near Lake Tahoe and its casino buffets just over the Nevada state line. In the next few days I expect to summit Mt. Whitney, which at 14,494 feet is the highest point in the Lower 48.

I hope all is well,
Dennis/Fusion

Is it the environment or the poor we want to help?

I spent most of yesterday ashamedly not doing much work, at work. [As a personal aside, I really don't like the feeling I get when i know i've wasted a day. The positive side effect is I did spend a lot of time reading interesting news sources and generally catching up on the details of current events.

Anyhow, back to my topic of the post. I'm a pretty regular reader of the Economist, but I'd never until yesterday, ventured in to their blog list. I recommend that you take a look. Its even more breif in its factual coverage than a lot of the articles, but the opinions are deeper and the comments cleverer and that's what makes the reading fun. Readers can respond to posts or to articles from the main edition, and the authors will get back to them on this forum, making for some interesting interactions.

What caught my eye today was a short post on the effect biofuels have had on the price of food. Most readers will understand the food vs fuel dilemna, but the article the post references from The Financial Times is about the effect of the hike in prices on the UN World Food Programme. I have to confess that the impact of higher commodity food prices would affect UN food distribution hadn't even crossed my mind until reading about it this morning.

I've already gone over on this blog some of my reticence about Biofuels/Biodiesel/Biomass as sources of energy and food vs. fuel is close to the bottom of my list of impacts I care about. Mostly, because as I understand it its not a problem of actual production, its a problem of subsidies. That is, something that could be resolved with better management of agricultural incentives. We can, and have, always produced too much commodity foodstocks, so there is room for biofuel feedstocks, the problem is that farmers are either paid to not produce (this is switching since the cost of feedstocks has now jumped high enough for it to be more profitable to plant than just get paid) and that prices have been artificially inflated by a lot of press and speculation. I predict, and this isn't original at all, that before the end of the next growing cycle, prices will drop back down to a reasonable level. There is, quite simply, enough corn to go around, and there will be even more soon with all the planting people have done. Not to mention that the most common biofuel is actually sugarcane-based ethanol and not corn-based ethanol -- and though we do eat sugar, there are a lot of other sources of it.

Whats striking to me is that the temporary hike in prices is having a pretty detrimental effect on the world's absolute poorest -- those that litterally cannot feed themselves. I think this plays into the North-South divide on climate change and environmental considerations in general. [For more on what "North-South" means, click here.]

Thats a big topic right there, one I’m not going to go into too much except to say that I’m often frustrated by the patronizing message of Northern environmentalists towards the South. I ascribe to the idea that it is MUCH more important for the South to be able to develop as cheaply as it can — in the long term that is the only way to resolve global environmental problems. For the record, I also don’t think coal is all-evil, and fighting coal plants is detrimental to development and to finding technological solutions to cleaning coal up.

Oh no, I’m slipping into a whole other post. I promise to write more on that topic, but for today, lets stick to Biofuels.

A few notes

A couple of things caught my eye this week so I thought I’d write a weekly-roundup post rather than being specific to one topic:

1. US gas consumption as seen by the rest of the world:

I saw this chart on treehugger.com, it comes from the BP by way of the Economist. I’m a pretty visual person so I find the information depicted to be rather jaring. I think everyone understands that US gas consumption is high, in fact the highest in the world. Its quite another thing to see it contrasted to the amounts consumed in a large selection of other developed countries.

I also think that its only by making people see this kind of easily digestible very visual information, within a context of better understanding of life in other developed countries, will we possibly effect consumption patterns. The silver lining? At least the 2007 Energy Bill passed last month dictates a that American car makers must build cars with higher mpg rates.

2. Climate Change actually not so good for the Northeast United States:

I think the conversation on Climate Change is getting a bit lost in a all the optimisim of Live Earth and pessimism of complex IPCC announcements. This article from the New York Times outlining a recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists brings us back to a look at the real impacts of Climate Change.

It seems to me that acceptance of freak weather patterns has started to enter into our daily dialogue and because of this people might be starting to loose track of what is so dangerous about Climate Change. Ah, so there are a few more storms — will adjust. This report points out that the risks are much higher with the real changes being major coastal flooding in the big cities of the Eastern Seaboard, massive enough changes in weather that cold winters wont happen anymore — having a huge impact on natural habitats, wildlife and the economy of New England, and a lot more. Basically, its good to keep in mind that Climate Change isn’t something we can just adjust too — it is likely to have huge, unrealisable and dramatic effects on some very essential elements of the world as we know it.

3. Now for something cheerier, How cool are these shoes?

I came across this company and I’ve decided I really like these shoes. I also don’t know for sure how really eco they are, but hey, fashion can be good sometimes. Check out www.simpleshoes.com

 

 

4. On a more personal note:

I went for a hike with a friend in Rock Creek Park this weekend. For those not familiar with Washington D.C., it is a surprisingly green city with a very well kept, pretty wild and large park cutting right through the middle of it. I happen to be staying this summer in a house that abutes the park making it easy to go for walks there.

Last weekend, odb showed me the beginning of a few trails and I thought I would give them a try. Now if only more city planners understood the immense value of something like a non-manicured park in an urban area. Buildings can be beautiful, but quick access to nature definitely offers something special as well.

Lazyness can be a virtue whereas I’m not so sure about Live Earth

I want to start of this post with a big thank you to a certain odb for my birthday present of Terrapass offsets. I got the nifty little luggage tag in bright transluscent green plastic in the post yesterday (i hope the plastic is biodegradable, and i’m just going to credit TP by saying it probably is). It lists the amount of miles offset for my cross-continental travel. But best of all, I definitely felt a little less guilty for flying this upcoming August.

But speaking of guilty, I listened to a very interesting “Talk of the Nation” on NPR online this week on environmentalism. They had the Lazy Environmentalist guy speaking, defending his position on being a pro-active modern and yes, lazy environmentalist. I completely related to this guy for several reasons. First he is very frank about wanting to be a full fledged member of modern society — which involves all the luxuries and the nifty technology of our modern lives and he also thinks that for environmentalist to be truly effective and become a mass philosophy then it needs to step out of the “privation” mindset and into one of healthy creative solutions to respecting nature and fixing what we’ve done.

I suggest that if you are interested in being pro-active about the environment without turning all granola compost-loving no-car-ever hemp-only live-off-the-grid environmentalist (which is a valid way of doing things, just not my way) then this is a good source of information and motivation.

His basic premise is that we can all be environmentally conscious without having to “sacrifice” to the greater green. That notion of sacrifice, until very recently, was intimately intertwined with being an environmentalist — you couldn’t possibly be good, or do good, without giving up on a little or a lot of your traditional lifestyle. I would agree that that was definitely the case a few years ago, but with all the new technological resources now available and creative thinking, people can do a lot now without really having to alter some of their basic behaviors. I’m not talking about continuing to act in truly wasteful and destructive ways, those behaviors will never mesh with being ‘green’, but rather being able to continue with simple everyday acts that before would have to be altered or changed.

The Lazy environmentalist has a good illustration in his interview — he loves long languid hot showers, and is loath to give them up. These kind of showers, however, are particularly wasteful in water and energy. His solution: instead of taking shorter showers and depriving himself of something he enjoys, install a water recycler which takes his used shower water and uses it flush his toilet. This could save thousand of gallons a year in water.

And this brings me to my point about this new “lazy” generation of environmentalist: sure the impact might not be as great per person, but what this mindset drives is creativity and greater participation — i.e. its scalable. Looking for techy solutions to problems allows people to live (to a certain extent) a lifestyle they have been used by devising solutions that are both cheap, effective and possible scalable to lifestyles all across the globe.

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Live Earth:

I don’t quite know what to thing of this event. Maybe I should start off with saying I’ve never really understood the rationale behind any of these Live ***, except maybe the first one done for Africa ( I think) back in the 80s.

Live Earth, all the concerts, promotions etc seem like a very hollow attempt at trying to get people engaged in environmental action. I just don’t see how the message gets across in an effective way by getting a bunch of very rich, very wasteful (the wealthier you are, the bigger your carbon footprint) celebrities up on a stage singing songs about money, love, sex, and lots of other topics totally unrelated to the environment.

Either way, the cumulative negative environmental impact of such an event is pretty massive no matter how much they might “offset the concert”. They aren’t offsetting the carbon effect of people getting to and leaving the concert — not to mention all the waste these things usually produce. I think I’m being a little mean now, but you get my thinking.