Following 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.
What We Talk About When We Talk About the Decentralization of Energy – Maggie Koerth-Baker – Technology – The Atlantic
16 AprOpen 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.
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.
Vertical Gardens in Mexico a Symbol of Progress – NYTimes.com
10 Apr“The main priority for vertical gardens is to transform the city,” said Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, 30, the architect who designed the sculptures. “It’s a way to intervene in the environment.”
Many cities have green reputations — Portland, Ore., even has its own vertical gardens. But in the developing world, where middle classes are growing along with consumption, waste and energy use, Mexico City is a brave new world. The laughingstock has become the leader as the air has gone from legendarily bad to much improved. Ozone levels and other pollution measures now place it on roughly the same level as the (also cleaner) air above Los Angeles.
“Both L.A. and Mexico City have improved but in Mexico City, the change has been a lot more,” said Luisa Molina, a research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has done extensive pollution comparisons. Mexico “is very advanced not just in terms of Latin America, but around the world. When I go to China, they all want to hear the story of Mexico.”
via Vertical Gardens in Mexico a Symbol of Progress – NYTimes.com.
Water-Ready Map: Impacts of Climate Change on Water Resources | NRDC
10 AprReady or Not: How Water-Ready is Your State?
As climate change affects communities across the U.S., some states are leading the way in preparing for the impacts on water resources. These states are reducing carbon pollution and planning for climate change impacts. Yet many states are not acting and remain woefully unprepared.
Click on a state to find out what risks communities there may face and what the state is doing to prepare.
via Water-Ready Map: Impacts of Climate Change on Water Resources | NRDC.
The impending urban water crisis – Dream City – Salon.com
2 Apr“When I talk to water utility people, one of the things I say to them is, ‘I bet most of you aren’t planning how to manage your water demands with 20 percent less than what you have now,’” says Charles Fishman, author of “The Big Thirst.” “If you don’t have a plan for that, you’re in trouble.”
You’ll find Fishman’s book in the nature section at Barnes & Noble, but it’s really about urban planning. Because the creeping hydro-crisis has nothing to do with “running out of water.” The earth has the same amount of water as it had 4 billion years ago, and it always will. “It’s all Tyrannosaurus rex pee,” says Fishman with a laugh. The water’s recycled endlessly through the clouds, but it’s the way we’ve built that’s made it seem scarce — with industry, farming and cities in places where there’s not enough water to support them, but still demanding more every year.
Luckily, an urban-planning problem can be mitigated with urban-planning solutions, and cities are blazing the trail — including, believe it or not, Sin City itself. Today, Vegas is soaked in “reclaimed water,” water that’s been used once and then purified for another go-round. It waters the golf courses and washes the thousands of hotel bed sheets. Even the pond at Treasure Island, where the nightly pirate-ship battles take place, is filled with water that the hotel’s guests have brushed their teeth with. (It gets run through a treatment plant under the casino.)
via The impending urban water crisis – Dream City – Salon.com.
Worker Ownership For the 21st Century? | The Nation
28 MarIt may not be the revolution’s dawn, but it’s certainly a glint in the darkness. On Monday, this country’s largest industrial labor union [United Steel Workers] teamed up with the world’s largest worker-cooperative to present a plan that would put people to work in labor-driven enterprises that build worker power and communities, too.
Titled “Sustainable Jobs, Sustainable Communities: The Union Co-op Model,” the organizational proposal released at a press conference on March 26 in Pittsburgh, draws on the fifty-five year experience of the Basque-based Mondragon worker cooperatives. To quote the document:
“In contrast to a Machiavellian economic system in which the ends justify any means, the union co-op model embraces the idea that both the ends and means are equally important, meaning that treating workers well and with dignity and sustaining communities are just as important as business growth and profitability.”
There’s ‘boots on the ground’ history behind the project:
It’s been a few years since the USW first became curious about the Mondragon cooperatives after they had a good experience working with GAMESA, a co-op friendly Spanish wind turbine outfit that opened up three plants in Pennsylvania. In 2009, with their Spanish colleagues’ help, Gerard sent a delegation to the Basque region of Spain to investigate Mondragon, now a $24 billion global operation. Since then, the USW has worked slowly with Mondragon and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC) a university based coop-outreach center founded by one of the organizers of the Youngstown initiative, to fine tune the US version presented Monday.
For the details of the proposal, check out the model for yourself. The full text of the union co-op model is available at www.usw.coop or www.union.coop.
The Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans Gives New Meaning to ‘Urban Growth’ – NYTimes.com
25 MarNew Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward was devastated in Katrina. It’s coming back, slowly. What does this slow recovery teach us about resilience?
The closest analogy to what happened in the Lower Ninth, Blum says, is a volcanic eruption on the order of Mount St. Helens. The next closest is the tsunami that hit Japan’s northeast coast a year ago. This is what distinguishes the Lower Ninth from the most derelict neighborhoods in cities like Detroit and Cleveland. Katrina was not merely destructive; it brought about a “catastrophic reimagining of the landscape.” As in Japan, a surge of water destroyed most human structures. In much of the neighborhood, nothing remained — neither man, plants nor animals. The ecological term for this is simplification. “In 2007, before rebuilding started, when you went down there, it was like going to an agricultural field,” Blum says. “Literally it was wiped clean.”
What happened over the intervening years has made the Lower Ninth one of the richest ecological case studies in the world. Ecologists hypothesize that, after a catastrophic event, human communities and ecological communities return at the same rate. But this theory has not been tested in real time. Blum is among a coalition of scientists — ecologists, ornithologists, botanists, geographers and sociologists — that is studying the Lower Ninth’s recovery to learn how man, and the environment, will cope with future catastrophes.
via The Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans Gives New Meaning to ‘Urban Growth’ – NYTimes.com.
Rising Sea Levels a Growing Risk to Coastal U.S., Study Says – NYTimes.com
14 MarNonprofit Climate Central is releasing research on vulnerabililty to coastal flooding.
About 3.7 million Americans live within a few feet of high tide and risk being hit by more frequent coastal flooding in coming decades because of the sea level rise caused by global warming, according to new research.
If the pace of the rise accelerates as much as expected, researchers found, coastal flooding at levels that were once exceedingly rare could become an every-few-years occurrence by the middle of this century.
To check out your vulnerability, you can search this map by ZIP code.
via Rising Sea Levels a Growing Risk to Coastal U.S., Study Says – NYTimes.com.
The report is available online here. From the executive summary:
Global warming has raised sea level about 8 inches since 1880, and the rate of rise is accelerating. Scientists expect 20 to 80 more inches this century, a lot depending upon how much more heat-trapping pollution humanity puts into the sky. This study makes mid-range projections of 1-8 inches by 2030, and 4-19 inches by 2050, depending upon location across the contiguous 48 states.
Rising seas dramatically increase the odds of damaging floods from storm surges. For over two-thirds of the locations analyzed (and for 85% of sites outside the Gulf of Mexico), past and future global warming more than doubles the estimated odds of “century” or worse floods occurring within the next 18 years — meaning floods so high they would historically be expected just once per century. For over half the locations analyzed, warming at least triples the odds of century-plus floods over the same period. And for two-thirds the locations, sea level rise from warming has already more than doubled the odds of such a flood even this year.
These increases are likely to cause an enormous amount of damage. At three quarters of the 55 sites analyzed in this report, century levels are higher than 4 feet above the high tide line. Yet across the country, nearly 5 million people live in 2.6 million homes at less than 4 feet above high tide. In 285 cities and towns, more than half the population lives on land below this line, potential victims of increasingly likely climate-induced coastal flooding. 3.7 million live less than 1 meter above the tide.
About half of this exposed population, and eight of the top ten cities, are in the state of Florida. A preliminary independent analysis suggests about $30 billion in taxable property is vulnerable below the three-foot line in just three counties in southeast Florida, not including the county with the most homes at risk in the state and the nation, Miami-Dade. Small pockets or wide areas of vulnerability, however, exist in almost every other coastal state.
Nassim Taleb Endorses Ron Paul
13 MarNassim Taleb is an economist and a student of risk. And that’s why he’s endorsing Paul. “Only one candidate, Ron Paul, seems to have grasped issues and is offering the right remedies for the central problems we are facing.” Only Paul understands the economic risks the Republicrat CorpState is creating. Paul’s addressing structural problems in the economy. The others are dulling the pain with Novocain; Ron Paul’s going for the cure with root canal.
According to Taleb, Paul is the only one with the right policies for the “Big Four”:
- Deficits: Rampant bureaucracy is feeding on itself and running up costs
- The Fed: Paul is “the only one with the guts [to go after it].”
- Militarism: Another self-feeding institution.
- “America is about resilience and you don’t achieve that with buy-outs. You need a certain rate of failure.”
Truth and Traditions 