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Bicycle Inspirations From Copenhagen to Portland
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What Is a Green-Collar Job?
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Designing Homes to Survive the Next Katrina
Should We Make People's Carbon Footprints Public?
Published November 21, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
It's a fact that public condemnation will discourage people from doing certain things. Once all your friends stop smoking and you're seen as a troglodyte for lighting up, it gets that much harder to breezily carry on puffing. It's hard to quit, all right, but somehow a lot of smokers managed it, right?
This is the same principle a new article in the New Scientist called "How reputation could save the Earth" suggests we apply to our environmental problem. Let's shame people into embracing greener habits, write David Rand and Martin Nowak, by publicizing their carbon footprints.
"Cars could be forced to display large stickers indicating average distance traveled, with inefficient cars labeled similarly to cigarettes," they write. The cars' bumper stickers, they suggest, could say something like "Environmentalist's warning: this car is highly inefficient. Its emissions contribute to climate change and cause lung cancer and other diseases." Another of their brilliant ideas? Energy companies could publicize people's energy usage in searchable databases, so we could all condemn each other for being too gluttonous about our heat and lighting.
Videos to Watch: Home Building for an Unstable Climate
Published August 30, 2009 @ 08:34PM PT
The chances are very good that East Biloxi, Missippi will be hit again by a future hurricane at least as severe as 2005's Hurricane Katrina. Rising ocean temperatures due to global warming are already creating more intense coastal storms, many climatologists say, and that's likely to just get worse in coming decades.
But as I wrote yesterday, the seven families participating in Biloxi Model Home Project didn't want to leave the neighborhood. So architects working with the project created designs that factored in future floods and high winds.
Here are a few videos about the project and some of the designs, which are available for free use and adaptation at the Open Architecture Network:
1. Porchdog
Porchdog is one of the designs created for the East Biloxi rebuilding project.
2. Principal Voices: Design for good
Architecture for Humanity founder Cameron Sinclair (a fellow former Worldchanging blogger) explains his "design for good" philosophy, spotlighting the Biloxi Model Home Program.
3. Caesarstone Video
Describes the destruction left behind in Biloxi by Hurricane Katrina, and visits the site of one of the Biloxi Model Homes to describe how their designs meet the challenge of living as safely as possible in the storm zone, while also keeping the homes affordable.
Banishing Cars From Broadway Revives Midtown Manhattan
Published August 26, 2009 @ 05:46PM PT
How do you make cities safer for pedestrians, more pleasant for cyclists, and more conducive to healthy civic life? And cut greenhouse gas emissions in the process?
Just break the grip of "Carmageddon" and let a few streets live free of cars.
This video from Streetfilms takes you on a tour of New York City's newly car-free blocks of Broadway. Far from creating a traffic nightmare as predicted by naysayers, the city's move to close sections of Broadway to traffic has succeeded wildly.
Even businesses, which hated the idea, are benefitting, now that delivery trucks can actually do deliveries, instead of sitting mired in traffic.
Life on Waterpod: Barge-borne home shows off sustainable living
Published August 15, 2009 @ 10:44AM PT
The Waterpod is a floating home-sculpture-adventure in sustainable living.
“It’s about getting people to talk about how we can sustain ourselves in the future,” said artist Mary Mattingly to The Brooklyn Paper earlier this year. Mattingly worked to realize the project for three years, and is living on Waterpod herself May through October.
The recycled, 240-foot long, 3,000 square foot art barge, which has been docking at various points around New York Harbor this summer, features a geodesic "Buckyball" dome as a living space, a flock of four egg-laying hens (Gilly, Rizzo, Marble and Bonzai), a hydroponic garden, a greywater recycling system and human-powered water pumping, energy generated primarily from four rooftop solar panels (along with a bicycle power generating station and a "picohydro" energy system for brief bursts of extra energy when needed), composting toilets, and a space where the public can come on board for performances.
New York Times reporter Melena Ryzik has lived abord Waterpod intermittently. She reports being "surprised at how easy it was to adapt to the Pod’s eco-conscious systems (reuse everything, don’t mind the ever-present flies, and compost, compost, compost)..."
...and how quickly the rhythms and routines of urban life melted away. Even though the Pod was docked only blocks away, a brief visit to the farmer’s market in Dumbo one Sunday felt like a trip into “town” – and into civilization. Ooh, look! A flushing toilet!
It's an experiment in ecologically sensitive living that evokes memories of "Biosphere 2" (the Earth is Biosphere 1, natch), the troubled 1990s project that sought to prove the viability of closed-system, grow-your-own living.
But the artists living on board Waterpod and managing its systems have learned (consciously or no) from that semi-fiasco. Although they grow greens and veggies on the barge, and of course get eggs from the hens, they're accepting food donations as well. They get fresh water from rainfall and the river. And they're regularly welcoming the public aboard: check the docking schedule to find out where to meet the barge.
I imagine that some will see this as a wholly unrealistic way to live. But none of the systems are radical: stationary bikes are already being used to generate energy, for instance; places like Vermont Law School are saving water and chemicals by using composting toilets; city gardening is making a big comeback for both economic and food safety reasons; and of course solar power generation is a proven technology that's getting better all the time.
Even the thing that seems most unusual about Waterpod -- living on the water -- is actually common all around the world.
Perhaps Waterpod is actually the leading edge on restoring ourselves to a way of life that can really endure: one that values clean water and uses it wisely, relies on local food supplies to a much greater extent, takes advantage of clean energy sources to the fullest, and both depends upon and gives back to the local community.
Look at it this way: If they'd called it "Extreme Houseboating," then everyone would want to do it.
It's Stop Global Warming, not "Debate Global Warming"
Published July 25, 2009 @ 09:18AM PT
Above: Sea ice off Baffin Island, July 2009. Source: NASA Earth Observatory. See end of post for more info.
"Why do good, smart people like [Mother Jones'] own Kevin Drum continue to debate those who insist global warming isn't caused primarily by human action?" asks my colleague Osha Gray Davidson (on a Mother Jones blog) "It's not like the facts aren't out there. This is settled science (as far as science can ever be considered settled).
"A list-serv of enviro-journo types to which I belong recently went through a small spasm along these same lines: 'How can we best convince doubters that global warming is real?'"
Some people who have doubts about the reality of human-propelled global warming want to learn more. I'm pleased that we can have these conversations here; this blog network is called Change.org, after all. Skepticism is fine (it's certainly a job requirement in journalism), as long as it's open to being answered by facts.
But unfortunately, they're an extreme minority. And despite inner resolutions not to get into pointless tit for tat with the rest, I fall off the wagon sometimes. Sometimes I'm asked why we don't do more around here about debunking denial memes, also.
Osha's answer is almost manifesto for what I want Stop Global Warming to be:
Once upon a time that was a legitimate question. No more.
...I've lost interest in what motivates climate deniers. Religion? Politics? Money? I don't know and I don't care. The battle between those who accept global warming and those who don't is like a really bad marriage where the two sides bicker endlessly over who's right. This marriage cannot be saved. It's time for a divorce.
Journalists and others need to turn our attention to solutions. Debating solutions to global warming is a sign of a healthy relationship. All sides have a common baseline and can help each other figure out where we need to go from here.
Politically, massive resources should be used to defeat everyone in Congress who still wants to debate the modern equivalent of "Is the earth really round?" We need to divorce pols who are divorced from reality, and the proper venue for that is the ballot box (or in some cases the recall petition).
And then, we need to get on with our lives, with creating solutions to the largest problem facing us: global warming.
A colleague told me recently that global warming denial echo chamber still reverberates strongly in Washington, D.C. This is why (this editor tells me) smart climate activists and bloggers whose professional lives are oriented toward influencing the inside-the-Beltway crowd, like Joe Romm of Climate Progress, and the team at Wonk Room, still spend so much time debunking falsehoods about the reality of global warming.
Little doubt that this is why some of the entities most responsible for spreading global warming misinformation, like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (caked with an inch of greenwash, that!) are located in or near Washington, D.C. as well.
I love me some good policy wonking, and with Congress seriously considering climate legislation, there's plenty of reason to report on the doings on Capitol Hill.
But thank [whatever], there's a wealth of important climate news, views, and action happening beyond the bounds of Route 495, too. Most of it is about finding solutions to global warming, from curbing greenhouse gas pollution, to transforming our energy economy, inventing new materials and new ways to manufacture goods, more ethical ways to do business, and more sustainable ways to grow food and use water.
Taken nationally and globally, only the most minute part of all this activity involves debating the reality of global warming. So that's pretty much the ratio of debunking to informed news and conversation that I aim to have around here.
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About this image, via NASA Earth Observatory:
In the depths of winter, ice hugs the coastline of Canada’s Baffin Island. Summertime sunlight, however, dramatically melts the ice away from the coastline. Seasonal sea ice retreat was well underway when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this natural-color (photo-like) image on July 11, 2009.
Clouds often hover over the Arctic during the Northern Hemisphere summer, making cloud-free images such as this one relatively rare. Although a few wispy clouds appear in the upper right and lower left corners of this image, the delicate swirls of white running along the eastern edge of Baffin Island are sea ice. Eddies along Baffin Island’s coast have fashioned the ice into interlocking swirls, especially near Cumberland Sound. Farther north, a long band of ice holds fast to the shore east of Barnes Icecap. Although less inclined to move with the currents, this ice also shows signs of weakening, as its edges splinter, and pieces float away.
The sea ice retreat captured in this image appears typical of seasonal melt. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, however, Arctic sea ice extent has declined sharply, experiencing a series of low summertime extents and poor wintertime recoveries. Arctic sea ice extent set a record low in September 2007. As of July 22, 2009, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that, in the first half of July 2009, sea ice declined faster than it did in 2008, but not as fast as it did in 2007.
Links
National Snow and Ice Data Center. (2009, July 22). Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis. Accessed July 23, 2009.
Scott, M. (2009, April 20). Sea Ice. Earth Observatory. Accessed July 23, 2009.
Violence Escalating Against Anti-Coal Activists
Published July 23, 2009 @ 08:28AM PT
Above: The devastated landscape of a mountaintop coal removal site. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Coal is the dirtiest fuel around, which is why movements are springing up across the country to end our reliance on this supremely destructive fossil fuel. The epicenter of this movement is Appalachia, which once produced two-thirds of America's coal.
These activists are often being met with hostility and even violence by the coal miners and their families, tens of thousands of whom still rely on King Coal to put bread on the table.
The frontline in the fight is no doubt West Virginia, the heart of Appalachian coal country, where a constellation of small, citizen-led groups have been working to stop environmentally devastating mountaintop removal mining. Among them are some of the environmental movement’s biggest heroes: Maria Gunnoe, of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, received a 2009 Goldman Prize (sometimes called the "green Nobel") for her work to stop mountaintop removal in her native West Virginia. She's pursued this work despite harrassment and threats of violence from coal miners.
Another West Virgininan woman honored with a 2003 Goldman Prize is Judy Bonds, founder of Coal River Mountain Watch.
Violence and intimidation against these and other activists in West Virginia's moutaintop removal country are escalating. In late June, Ms. Bonds was violently attacked by the wife of a coal miner. She was participating in a nonviolent march to support an elementary school that sits downslope from 2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge and a coal prep site operated by Massey Energy, a company with mountaintop removal mining operations in the area The woman hit Bonds around her head, ear and jaw, and also attempted to attack another protestor, Lorelei Scarbro, a coal miner’s widow and local community organizer.
Suggest a story to Stop Global Warming
Published July 10, 2009 @ 08:01AM PT
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