…renewable energy generation doubled from 2006 to 2011, the first new nuclear plants in decades are under construction, and prices for solar, wind and other clean energy technologies have fallen while employment in those sectors has risen by 70,000 jobs even during a deep recession.
Those gains could all be lost unless the federal government at least temporarily renews and pays for a variety of subsidies and production credits that have supported those industries as they strive to compete with fossil-fuel based energy sources, the report states.
The study notes that the tens of billions of dollars from President Obama’s stimulus program are drying up, even as tax breaks that have supported wind and solar power generation are expiring. The result is an anticipated 75 percent decline in federal clean technology spending by 2014 from a peak of $44.3 billion in 2009.
Clean Technology on the Brink – NYTimes.com
19 AprEPA Passes New Fracking Rules – National – The Atlantic Wire
18 AprIn what some, like Fuel Fix’s Jennifer A Dlouhy, consider another case of the government caving in to the wishes of the well-funded energy lobby, the rules won’t take effect until 2015.
The new regulations are designed to cut down on the polluting by-products of fracking, which involves drilling through rock and injecting a water-based chemical mixture to force out natural gas. However, after protest from the lobbyists, the EPA will allow the gas industry to hold on to the status quo until 2015, as long as they burn off some of the carcinogenic gases with a process called “flaring.”
Does “EPA” stand for “Enhanced Pollution Agency”?
via EPA Passes New Fracking Rules – National – The Atlantic Wire.
Eyeless Shrimp and the BP Oil Spill – National – The Atlantic Wire
18 AprIt happened almost exactly two years ago, and as much good news as you read about the return of tourism and the spending of BP’s money to help the recovery efforts, some major problems remain.
We’re most concerned about the eyeless shrimp…. In other parts of the Gulf, fisherman are finding fish covered in black lesions and even dead dolphins floating in the water. Eyeless shrimp or killifish covered in oil-colored spots serve as cringeworthy reminders of how even a small amount of leftover contaminant can do huge amounts of damage to local lifeforms.
But you don’t even have to eat mutant fish to be affected by the spill. A new report by the non-BP-funded Surfrider Foundation shows that humans swimming in the Gulf are soaking up the chemical that BP used to disperse the oil right after the spill.
via Eyeless Shrimp and the BP Oil Spill – National – The Atlantic Wire.
Americans Link Global Warming to Extreme Weather, Poll Says – NYTimes.com
18 AprA poll due for release on Wednesday shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.
The survey, the most detailed to date on the public response to weather extremes, comes atop other polling showing a recent uptick in concern about climate change. Read together, the polls suggest that direct experience of erratic weather may be convincing some people that the problem is no longer just a vague and distant threat.
via Americans Link Global Warming to Extreme Weather, Poll Says – NYTimes.com.
Greening an Entire Block Instead of Just One Building – Jobs & Economy – The Atlantic Cities
17 AprLiving City Block’s basic concept is simple. Small buildings rarely have the resources to do a serious retrofit. For most of them, the idea is cost-prohibitive. But what if you combined a small building with 10 more like it? If all of those building owners got together to order high-efficiency water heaters in bulk, or to collectively replace one-thousand windows, could they achieve the kind of economies of scale that the Empire State Building gets?
This sounds feasible, and Riley is sure the idea will work. But he’s talking about creating a kind of building owners’ association that has never been modeled before, one in which neighbors who otherwise have very little in common might make common decisions about pooling their trash pick-up, paying their utility bills, and renovating their properties.
If you’ve ever thrown in your lot with a condo association, you can begin to imagine the logistical and legal challenges of scaling up something like this to the neighborhood level and then convincing banks to finance the joint projects of all of these random people.
“The legal framework, the governance structures and the financing are the biggest three [challenges],” Riley says. “Everything else is just stuff.”
via Greening an Entire Block Instead of Just One Building – Jobs & Economy – The Atlantic Cities.
What We Talk About When We Talk About the Decentralization of Energy – Maggie Koerth-Baker – Technology – The Atlantic
16 AprFollowing electric utility deregulation in the 1970s, the jobs of generating electricity, transmitting it over long distances, and distributing it around localized regions have increasingly been done by different entities.
This is happening now, outside of the shift toward alternative energy, but as we generate electricity using more renewable resources–as generation becomes increasingly distributed, to match the locations of inherently local sources of energy–that trend will only accelerate. The day may come when no electric utility generates anything. Instead, it might simply coordinate the movement of electricity between generators and customers. Rather than making and selling electricity, utilities like the municipal utility in Gainesville, Florida, could someday find itself selling the service of making sure that all of the solar panels in town work together in a reliable way, alongside storage systems and mid-size power plants.
If there’s one lesson you should pick up from this story, it’s that alternative energy isn’t only about changing what we put in our fuel tanks or how our electricity is made. Alternative energy is going to alter entire business plans and change who we are, what our responsibilities are, and how we think about ourselves.
George P. Mitchell, fracking, and scientific innovation. – Slate Magazine
15 AprThe shale gas R&D projects assumed a kind of vacuum. The only criteria were technical feasibility and economic profitability, and the innovators failed to consider questions about how the technologies would play out in the real world. What is the long-term fate of the chemicals that remain underground? What do we do with the toxic mixture of fracking fluids and naturally occurring radioactive materials that flows back up the wellbore during drilling and production? How will roads handle the increase in traffic volume that results from the roughly 1,000 truck trips (hauling fracking fluids and waste water) it takes to get each well producing? What are the air quality and climate implications? Can we safely frack in places where people live? What happens when the wells run dry? Is it wise to further commit ourselves to a finite fossil resource that requires such extreme measures to extract?
Why weren’t these questions asked with the same rigor as the technical questions? It is because we have an innovation system that only asks “how to,” not “what if?” As a result, we have enormous powers to change the world and the way we live, but essentially zero capacity to guide those powers wisely or responsibly. We promote transformative research with one hand and clean up its messes with the other. And throughout we lack any clear sense about what needs transforming and why.
via George P. Mitchell, fracking, and scientific innovation. – Slate Magazine.
Open Source Permaculture — Indiegogo
15 AprTo suppor the development of a FREE permaculture resource, click the link at the bottom of this post, read all about the project, and make a contrabution.
Open Source Permaculture
What will this comprehensive resource contain? This project will fund the creation of an Urban Permaculture Guide eBook and the Open Source Permaculture Q&A Website + Wiki:
Urban Permaculture Guide – FREE eBook (circa 400 pages)
This will be the first freely available, comprehensive ebook teaching the use of permaculture in urban spaces! You will find easy to understand DIY tips that can be applied in your flat, tiny backyard, rooftop or community garden, including topics like:
* Indoor and Balcony Gardening – Permaculture Style
* Vertical Gardens
* Tree Crops and Edible Forests
* Guerilla Gardening
* School gardens
* Community Supported Agriculture
* Mushroom log cultivation
* Spiral Herb Gardens & Medicinal Herbs
* Composting and Vermi-composting
* Rainwater collection
* Micro-livestock
* Wind and Solar Energy
* Transportation
* …and much More!
This FREE eBook will also include interviews with founders of successful Urban Permaculture projects and a comprehensive list of FREE online educational resources.
The eBook will be released under a CC BY-SA license.
Open Source Permaculture Q&A Website + Wiki
With the website and wiki, you will have access to an expansive database of trusted resources and permaculture experts at your fingertips, to help resolve all of your gardening and landscaping problems. The Open Source Permaculture Website and Wiki will be cultivated by a community of experienced permaculture practitioners, allowing for a deeper understanding of permaculture and sustainability to everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re just growing a tiny container garden or if you’re running a full-fledge urban farm business. Whatever your project is, Open Source Permaculture aims to provide a real, working solution.
Our apocalyptic odds – Environment – Salon.com
15 AprFor example, sustaining our growing numbers and demands depends on a regular and unlimited supply of energy—a supply that, nevertheless, is limited. Approaching its limits means that we need to develop ever more efficient technology to squeeze out the last remains of the fossil fuels from Earth, which, in turn, depends on ever larger investments. However, investors want to see their money back, which proves increasingly more difficult the closer we get to the point of depletion. They have to invest more and more, but as less fuel can be mined, the returns become less and less. Approaching the point of depletion, investors will gradually draw their money back in order to reinvest it into something more profitable: at this point, a positive feedback loop starts up; more and more investors withdraw their money, this loop destabilizing the societal system as a whole. Energy shortage will destabilize this system because energy is the main constituent of our body, our numbers, requirements, and infrastructural organization.
In fact, the decreasing trend in the energy returns on investment was already apparent in the early 1990s, a trend which continues to the present day and which may develop into the feared financial and economic positive feedback loop. Food will be more expensive to produce, leaving the poor in jeopardy. And so on.
Why Trees Matter – NYTimes.com
12 AprTrees are dying, in large numbers; we’re killing them. But we know relatively little about the roles trees and forests play in sustaining the world. What we are learning suggests that, in killing trees, we are further endangering ourselves.
… what trees do is essential though often not obvious. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.
Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma.
In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment.
Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral.
Truth and Traditions 