– how much land would solar power generation take up?

We’ve voiced our concern here before that solar power generating plants still have an environmental footprint.

But this nifty graphic, by David McCandless of Information is Beautiful, places that worry within an impressively positive context.

Read Full Post »

– more on washing lines!

Other pressing duties have kept us from updating this site anything like as often as we’d have liked, but while we’ve been somewhat dormant it’s been interesting to see what has still brought people here.  Perhaps the number one subject on the site that has drawn in visitors over the past year is the issue of washing lines.

Laundry liberation, it seems, is a big deal for a lot of people.

Well, here’s another article on the same theme.

Read Full Post »

– now in vogue: Green Economics

We’re happy to see the Nation devote an entire week of stories to the issue of green economics.  Important stuff there to check out.

Read Full Post »

– the Sexy Green Car Show

Yes, there is such a thing — running right now at the Eden Project in the UK.

It showcases “the pioneers who are making breakthroughs in aerodynamics, new fuels, engines and ultra-light materials.”

Of course you don’t have to rely on technology to make your drive greener, the Independent reminds us. As writer Sean O’Grady explains in his review of the Sexy Green Car Show, while you might knock 10 per cent off your fuel bill with a greener car, you can cut another 25 per cent simply by driving more sensibly.

Read Full Post »

– obese people worsen global warming!

It stands to reason that larger people eat more than smaller ones, which means that it takes more agricultural production — a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions — to feed them, too.

Basic physics also tells us that it takes more energy to move larger people around in planes, trains or automobiles. And unless that transport is driven by sustainably-sourced power, it makes sense that the bigger people are, the bigger (on average) are their contributions to transportation-derived climate change.

That thesis is codified in this week’s edition of the medical journal, the Lancet, by a team from the London School Hygiene & Tropical Medicine which finds that global obesity is a contributing factor to global warming.

“The researchers pegged 40 percent of the global population as obese,” reports Reuters. That’s a lot of extra food and fossil fuel being consumed that could be saved if people just had healthier body mass indices.

This statement of the somewhat obvious might have the unfortunate effect of contributing to prejudices against the obese, for whom achieving a healthy weight is often far more than a mere matter of will power.

But it might drive something positive, too, in the shape of further pressure upon us all to ask hard questions about why so many people make the kind of nutritional and lifestyle choices that result in their becoming obese. If this research helps further discredit the US subsidization of ‘junk’ calories that reside in products like high-fructose corn syrup, for example, we might be able to both help slow the warming of our planet and give its human citizens a healthier, and longer, life upon it.

Read Full Post »

– where it’s illegal to hang out your washing

It may be hard to believe, but some 35,000 homeowners’ associations in California alone ban clotheslines.

That’s a lot of places where the wonderfully drying California sun could be doing for free what otherwise takes a lot of energy and, these days, adds plenty to homeowners’ gas or electric bills.

As Mindy Spatt of the Utility Reform Network pointed out in an op-ed column last week, a clothes line

requires no government subsidy, no tax rebate and no expensive installation. On a hot day, it can practically match an electric or gas dryer load for load. And it costs next to nothing.

She contrasts the savings in energy we’d achieve simply by air-drying our clothes with the money the State of California is spending on finding high-tech, and too often high-cost, solutions to our energy ills.  Says Spatt:

it isn’t necessary to drive bills for essentials like heat and light through the roof to fight climate change. We can lower our bills and conserve energy at the same time with low-tech, low-cost solutions. Electric and gas dryers account for about 10 percent of residential electricity usage statewide.

So let’s press those homeowners associations to stop banning clotheslines, Spatt argues.  If, like us, you agree with her, you can find  more information at Project Laundry List.

From the news items posted at the site, that snobbery about laundry is a nationwide phenomenon.  Spatt’s op-ed suggests one good trick to get around that: Don’t call it a ‘clothes line,’ call it a ‘solar dryer.’

Read Full Post »

– the answer to climate change: drill for oil in Alaska!

As environmental issues finally seem urgent to broad swathes of the US commentariat, that reality is spawning all sorts of creative arguments for what people wanted all along.

Take the example of drilling for oil in environmentally sensitive habitats in the USA. In a Tribune Media column today, the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson argues — quite creatively — that the proper response to our various environmental crises is for the US to drill for more oil in Alaska and off the Florida and California coasts.

His reasoning, essentially, is that right now we don’t have any decent alternatives to oil and that other oil exporters are nasty mean guys who don’t care about polluting. So if the US can become more oil-independent, it will make the polluters poorer and more likely to be deposed (at whatever human cost) and therefore make for less pollution! He says:

the choices facing us, at least for the next few decades, are not between bad and good, but between bad and far worse – and involve wider questions of global security, fairness and growing scarcity.

It’s a little like George Bush’s firm belief that the solution to everything is to cut taxes on the rich. We can expect to see a lot more of this: people finding in climate change a rationale for doing what they wanted to do, even before climate change was something they felt was an issue.

Read Full Post »

– a distopian Earth Day

Gloom — appropriately perhaps — seems to be the theme this Earth Day.

Joseph Romm in Salon thinks it’s already too late to save much of the flora and fauna on our planet. It’s time to worry out ourselves, he says.

Over at Alternet, Michael Klare worries at length about a ‘new world order in energy.’ The comments are as interesting as the article: some alarmed, some thoughtful, others desperate, crazy, excited even.

In the New York Times, Paul Greenberg reviews two novels that conjure ‘ecological end-times.’ Ecotopia, first published in the 1970’s, imagines a better life (for a part of America, at least) emerging from eco-crisis. The more recent novel, The World Made by Hand, is based in an East Coast town of the future in which most people return to laboring and can now only dream of driving. Says Greenberg:

I would prefer to live in Ecotopia, but the verisimilitude of Kunstler’s world leads me to think the future is Union Grove. Thirty years from now, it will be interesting to see if that little town seems excessively sad, richly luxurious or spot on. But for now, I’m hedging my bets. Where I live, one block east of ground zero, I’ve started keeping a compost bin and am thinking about adding a micro wind generator.

Meanwhile columnist Paul Krugman fears that we’re running out of commodities. That won’t mean the immediate collapse of civilization, he reassures us. But

rich countries will face steady pressure on their economies from rising resource prices, making it harder to raise their standard of living. And some poor countries will find themselves living dangerously close to the edge — or over it.

No critique from Krugman, though, about whether the way we’ve come to define a good life is part of the problem. And no ideas for how we might resolve the crises that will come when countries do tumble over the various precipices upon which they teeter.

Over in the UK, the Independent is doing its usual best to add to the bad news. Yesterday they mourned the decline of birds that usually migrate to the UK.

So what are we to do? For an exhortation not to give up — but to act both personally and politically we can turn, thankfully, to Michael Pollan — writing in the Time’s magazine this Sunday.

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous, cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live.

Read Full Post »

– US President announces . . . nothing much

We almost decided not to mention this story, since it really amounts to nothing. But in case you missed it, yesterday US President George Bush called for a halt in the growth of US greenhouse gases by 2025. And he said US power plant emissions should peak in the next 10 to 15 years.

And he pretty much left it at that. To quote the SF Chronicle’s Zachary Coile:

But the president proposed no new regulations or legislation to ensure that his new targets are met, and his proposal falls far short of the cuts in greenhouse gases that scientists say are needed to avoid the worst effects of rising temperatures and sea levels.

Call it cynical; call it trying to add to a little burnish to the President’s many reputational tarnishes, or call it, as many Democrats have done, an attempt to undermine an upcoming Senate bill with real regulatory teeth (which calls for emissions to be reduced by 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and by 66 percent by 2050) — but it’s certainly not going to be any kind of a force for change. Which is almost certainly the President’s intention.

Read Full Post »

– the biofuel backlash goes mainstream

That seems to be the message from two stories published today, one on each side of the Atlantic.

In a news analysis, the New York Times notes that:

a reaction is building against policies in the United States and Europe to promote ethanol and similar fuels, with political leaders from poor countries contending that these fuels are driving up food prices and starving poor people.  Biofuels are fast becoming a new flash point in global diplomacy, putting pressure on Western politicians to reconsider their policies, even as they argue that biofuels are only one factor in the seemingly inexorable rise in food prices.

Officials from both the UN and the World Bank have recently voiced concerns about the impact of biofuels on the price of food.

Meanwhile, the UK’s Independent reports that, “the production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world’s environment” and asks why the UK government wants its citizens to use more of it.

The Independent’s Cahal Milmo also mentions the impact that biofuel production is having on world food prices.  But of equal concern is the environmental damage that careless encouragement of biofuels can cause.  British campaigners, reports Milmo, this week

condemned as “disastrous” the absence of any standards requiring producers to prove their biofuel is not the product of highly damaging agricultural practices responsible for destroying rainforests, peatlands and wildlife-rich savannahs or grasslands from Indonesia to sub-Saharan Africa to Europe.

Read Full Post »