Check out the blog Casaubon’s Book. See it’s About page.
Don’t forget about No Impact Man who’s still going strong:
Here’s a question: if the need for a product has to be created by the manufacturer, if aggressive marketing is required to convince people to buy the product, can the product, no matter how renewable its materials, really be called sustainable?
Posted in agriculture, big business, sustainability | 1 Comment »
Writing in a NYT op-ed, Owen D. Gutfreund, a professor of history and urban studies at Barnard College and author of 20th-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape, says,
It’s imperative that we rethink the way we approach transportation. Our highway policy has remained largely the same since the 1950s even as driving habits have changed. Then, most families had no more than one car, and many had none. Now nearly every household owns at least one; two is more typical, and each car is driven more miles per year. The population, too, has nearly doubled. The result is that bridges and highways are overburdened and falling apart, while local governments lack the money to respond adequately, a problem worsened by dwindling federal contributions.
And he has a solution:
So here’s the answer: charge a premium for expensive and inefficient vehicles. Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, has already taken this step, tripling toll charges for S.U.V.’s. We should take this one step further, requiring that vehicle registrations include designation in tiered classes, taking into account weight, sales price, emission rating and gas-mileage efficiency. Tolls would be levied according to these classes. Smaller, cheaper and more environmentally friendly cars would pay less, while drivers of more expensive, wasteful and higher-polluting cars would pay more. This is everything a tax structure should be: fair and progressive, while rewarding socially beneficial consumer decisions and penalizing selfish, destructive ones. Also, it provides a fairer allocation of the actual highway costs among users, since heavier vehicles produce more wear and tear on road surfaces, requiring thicker pavements and more frequent repairs. We already use this logic to justify higher tolls for trucks and other multi-axle vehicles. Why not also ask S.U.V.’s to pay a heavier toll?
Posted in cars, economic justice, population pressure, sustainability, urban design | 2 Comments »
In the New York Times, As Prices Rise, Farmers Spurn Conservation Program:
Thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate. They are spurning guaranteed annual payments for a chance to cash in on the boom in wheat, soybeans, corn and other crops. Last fall, they took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
Environmental and hunting groups are warning that years of progress could soon be lost, particularly with the native prairie in the Upper Midwest. But a broad coalition of baking, poultry, snack food, ethanol and livestock groups say bigger harvests are a more important priority than habitats for waterfowl and other wildlife. They want the government to ease restrictions on the preserved land, which would encourage many more farmers to think beyond conservation.
Posted in agriculture, biodiversity, food, sustainability | 3 Comments »
The Guardian reports: “The security implications [of the food crisis] should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe,”…
Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said “many more people will suffer and starve” unless the US, Europe, Japan and other rich countries provide funds. He said prices of all staple food had risen 80% in three years, and that 33 countries faced unrest because of the price rises.
In the UK, Professor John Beddington, the new chief scientific adviser to the government, used his first speech last month to warn the effects of the food crisis would bite more quickly than climate change. He said the agriculture industry needed to double its food production, using less water than today.
He said the prospect of food shortages over the next 20 years was so acute it had to be tackled immediately: “Climate change is a real issue and is rightly being dealt with by major global investment. However, I am concerned there is another major issue along a similar time-scale — that of food and energy security.”
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“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead (1901-1978)
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Poll: Make gas guzzlers pay higher fees
A telephone survey of 1,500 Californians, dialed randomly, found support for green transportation taxes and fees – charges that rise and fall with the amount of pollution a vehicle emits.
— 63 percent supported doubling the vehicle registration fee, now an average of $31, and charging higher rates for polluting vehicles and lower rates for clean vehicles.
— 65 percent supported a tax and rebate system for new vehicle purchases that would give a rebate of up to $1,000 for clean cars and impose a tax of as much as $2,000 for higher-polluting cars.
Posted in cars, climate change | 1 Comment »
Warming affects trees, streams in West from AP:
The Rocky Mountain snowpacks that melt earlier in spring leave less water for summer irrigation and heat up trout streams. Glaciers, which provide consistent stream flows during summer, are melting. The glaciers at Montana’s Glacier National Park could melt entirely by 2022…. Montana, Idaho and Wyoming had their hottest Julys on record last summer, while Phoenix had 47 days of 109 degrees or hotter, according to the National Weather Service.
Powell and Mead reservoirs, meanwhile, are half-empty. The reservoirs collect water from the Colorado River, supplying much of the booming Southwest. If they keep drying up, it could shred the Colorado River Compact of 1922, an agreement that allocates fixed amounts of water among seven states. The upper basin states have the water, but lower basin states including California have senior water rights — a crisis in the making….
Posted in sustainability, water | 1 Comment »
By Arthur Max, Associated Press Writer:
The threat of climate change has drawn attention to carbon footprints…. Now scientists have begun calculating a water footprint, the amount of water needed to produce goods or services.
“What we are doing now can’t keep up with the issues we already have,” says Carol A. Howe, an expert working for a UNESCO-led water development project called Switch. “Something needs to change. It needs to change quickly, and it needs to be fairly dramatic,” she told a symposium of journalists Wednesday.
Gary Amy, a professor of urban water supply and sanitation with UNESCO-IHE, said the United Nations is almost certain to miss its 2015 goal of halving the percentage of the world’s population who lack adequate sanitation. The goal takes 1990 as the base level. Accounting for population growth, some 500,000 new people every day would have to be connected to a sanitation system to meet the U.N. target, he said.
Posted in population pressure, sustainability, water | 2 Comments »
AFP story by Charlie McDonald-Gibson:
Meeting for the first time since marathon talks in December on the Indonesian island of Bali, members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will try to thrash out differences that almost derailed their last gathering.
The five-day meeting, beginning on Monday in Bangkok, aims to set out a detailed work plan that should lead to the most ambitious treaty yet for reining in greenhouse gas emissions and battling global warming.
“The Bangkok talks will be the first test to see if the governments in Bali negotiated in earnest,” WWF’s climate policy coordinator Kathrin Gutmann said in a statement.
Posted in climate change, sustainability, world politics | 1 Comment »
If you have just two minutes, you can read these two very short pieces from Earth & Sky and meet Michael Pollan, Knight Professor of Journalism, UC Berkeley:
Posted in agriculture, big business | Leave a Comment »
by Jason Motlagh, San Francisco Chronicle Foreign Service.
While India’s economy surges forward on the crest of globalization, thousands of farmers are taking their own lives every year to escape mounting debt and an uncertain future. … at least 87,567 farmers committed suicide between 2002 and 2006.
In the 1960s, India underwent a green revolution in favor of high-yield farming to counter acute food shortages. Plant breeding, irrigation development and the use of synthetic fertilizers ramped up production. Today, India is a major exporter of rice, and the world’s second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables after the United States.
The changes caused higher operating costs and production that created a market glut exceeding demand at home and abroad. To remain in business, many farmers were forced to take out loans at high interest rates. Once credit had been exhausted, they turned to private lenders, who charged even more exorbitant interest rates.
And that’s when the suicides started, most activists say.
Such price volatility is a function of globalization, most critics say – and is especially unstable for cotton farmers. As the world’s largest cotton producer, the United States provides massive subsidies that allow American farmers to undercut overseas competition by selling at an artificially low cost.
Moreover, many Indian farmers are now using genetically engineered Bt cotton seeds made by U.S.-based Monsanto Co., which produce higher yields. The seeds and fertilizer, however, must be bought each year, costing farmers thousands of dollars.
Posted in agriculture, big business, economic justice, globalization | Leave a Comment »
See this post at the Pump Handle.
Posted in sustainability, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
“Michael Roddy describes the ecological costs in terms of CO2 emmissions related to choices that builders make when they choose what materials they will build with.” This page has the link to the Roddy’s 10 page PDF.
Excerpts:
…wood framed houses do not last beyond two or three generations without requiring extensive maintenance. In many cases, 60 year old houses are torn down, resulting in sending all of the other homebuilding elements to a landfill as well. Cheap wood, however, has had the effect of perpetuating lumber dominance in the home construction industry, a habit shared by only a handful of other countries. Having built housing on other continents, I can attest to the fact that people from overseas are puzzled about our habit of building houses that are disposable consumer products. A steel stud, by contrast, has been shown by laboratory tests to last for over 600 years in a wall framing application, and after that time it can be fully recycled. Sadly, builders are not much concerned about wood framed houses that begin to deteriorate in a few decades, because their financial responsibility has long since ceased. Only the public can effect a change in the quality of house framing.
Substitution of steel for lumber in a house framing application would result in a major reduction in America’s CO2 emissions. The data show that harvesting wood for housing produces over seven times the greenhouse gas emissions of steel. Even better, switching to steel in all new residential construction would have 2.9 times the positive impact on the US CO2 emissions budget by requiring every new car and light truck sold to be a hybrid or other technology that doubled gas mileage.
In order to understand the full scale of US timber industry CO2 emissions, it is useful to first look at the global picture. In spite of our having only 2% of the world’s remaining frontier forests, and 6.6% of the planet’s woody biomass, the US produces 18% of the world’s industrial roundwood, or raw timber harvest. Even more startling, we consume 27% of the planet’s wood products, more than the total for the four billion people who live in Asia.
Posted in agriculture, big business, carbon regulation, forests, sustainability | 3 Comments »
Written Testimony of William H. Gates, Chairman, Microsoft Corporation, Co-Chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, before the Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives.
Excerpt:
In particular, I believe that there are two urgent reasons why we should all be deeply concerned that our advantages in science and technology innovation are in danger of slipping away.
First, we face a critical shortfall of skilled scientists and engineers who can develop new breakthrough technologies. Second, the public and private sectors are no longer investing in basic research and development (R&D) at the levels needed to drive long-term innovation.
If the United States truly wants to secure its global leadership in technology innovation, we must, as a nation, commit to a strategy for innovation excellence – a set of initiatives and policies that will provide the foundation for American competitive strength in the years ahead. Such a strategy cannot succeed without a serious commitment from – and partnership between – both the public and private sectors. It will also need to be flexible and dynamic enough to respond to rapid changes in the global economy.
You may not agree with his proposed solutions, but it’s certainly worth reading his diagnosis.
Posted in economy, education | Leave a Comment »
The 2005 Austrian documentary film We Feed the World has been showing on the Sundance channel in the US recently. (IMDB entry.) It’s incredibly well done.
WE FEED THE WORLD is a film about food and globalisation, fishermen and farmers, long-distance lorry drivers and high-powered corporate executives, the flow of goods and cash flow — a film about scarcity amid plenty. With its unforgettable images, the film provides insight into the production of our food and answers the question what world hunger has to do with us.
Interviewed are not only fishermen, farmers, agronomists, biologists and the UN’s Jean Ziegler [the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food], but also the director of production at Pioneer, the world’s largest seed company, as well as Peter Brabeck, Chairman and CEO of Nestlé International, the largest food company in the world.
See the short reviews on this page.
Posted in agriculture, big business, biodiversity, economic justice, globalization, oceans, population pressure, sustainability | 2 Comments »
Carbon Output Must Near Zero To Avert Danger, New Studies Say in the Washington Post:
The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.
“People aren’t reducing emissions at all, let alone debating whether 88 percent or 99 percent is sufficient,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “It’s like you’re starting off on a road trip from New York to California, and before you even start, you’re arguing about where you’re going to park at the end.”
Steve Gardiner, a philosophy professor at the University of Washington who studies climate change, said the studies highlight that the argument over global warming “is a classic inter-generational debate, where the short-term benefits of emitting carbon accrue mainly to us and where the dangers of them are largely put off until future generations.”
Posted in carbon regulation, climate change, sustainability, world politics | 6 Comments »
A Few Things Ill Considered, a blog by a Gristmill contributor Coby Beck who wrote the outstanding How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic guide, has an extensive weekly roundup of global warming news.
See also H.E.Taylor’s page of links (a main source for Beck’s roundup) on a variety of topics many of which are about aspects of sustainability.
Posted in climate change, sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Since 2000, the WWF has issued the Living Planet Report every other year. Read about it in this Mongabay news article.
From the forward:
The Living Planet Report 2006 confirms that we are using the planet’s resources faster than they can be renewed – the latest data available (for 2003) indicate that humanity’s Ecological Footprint, our impact upon the planet, has more than tripled since 1961. Our footprint now exceeds the world’s ability to regenerate by about 25 per cent.
The consequences of our accelerating pressure on Earth’s natural systems are both predictable and dire. The other index in this report, the Living Planet Index, shows a rapid and continuing loss of biodiversity – populations of vertebrate species have declined by about one third since 1970. This confirms previous trends.
Posted in biodiversity, fossil fuels, oceans, reports, sustainability | Leave a Comment »
Joseph Romm of Climate Progress engages with Andy Revkin of Dot Earth in this recent essay about the media’s ability (or lack thereof) to report accurately on climage change. Look for Revkin in the comments of that post.
Charles Siegel of the Preservation Institute Blog summarizes the dire climate projections.
Posted in climate change, media | 1 Comment »
See this article in the business section of UK’s Times:
World demand for oil and gas will outstrip supply within seven years, according to Royal Dutch Shell.
The oil multinational is predicting that conventional supplies will not keep pace with soaring population growth and the rapid pace of economic development.
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