Where Do All the Transport Dollars Go?

Can we afford to massively fund public transit? My first response would be, with oil prices and global temperatures both continuing to rise, can we afford not to rapidly build out mass transit?

But this graphic, via Treehugger (with a good article to boot), shows we're already spending the money. It's just been going to highways. More and more money to highways. Enormous public subsidy of an automotive way of life that is paving over our land, bankrupting us to buy oil, shortening our lives with respiratory illnesses, and dangerously transforming our climate.

Hm, can anyone think of a better way to spend that money? Oh, right, mass transit.

Why is it that Amtrak and subway systems (like New York's MTA right now) are always on the verge of bankruptcy? It's time for the highways to go bankrupt. Let them earn their own keep.

Fresh Smells, Toxic Punch?

Are those laundry sheets, air fresheners, and other "fresh smell" products hiding a toxic punch?

Nothing like vinegar, lemon, baking soda, and a little elbow grease to keep a home clean and safe.

Ed Begley also has Cradle to Cradle certified line of house cleaning products.

In other toxic smell news, there's a new report on which car interiors and child car seats have less toxic off-gassing laced in their new car smell.

Credit Where It's Due

At triplepundit, a nice piece on one piece of legislation attempting to do what I mentioned in an earlier post--reduce the impact of fuel prices on families while trying to re-orient us to more sustainable energy usage and policies. Last week, Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore) introduced H.R.6495, the “Transportation and Housing Choices for Gas Price Relief Act.”

The Doin It Themselves Blog

Home Grown Evolution is a very cool blog by a couple of urban homesteaders growing there own food and making their own stuff. Good for the spirit, body and environment. Imagine what we could make our cities look like if we laid less pavement for cars and had more spaces for things to grow--like food and children.

Urban homesteading is also not a bad set of skills to develop, as a post oil world may push us all more in this direction.

Ford, Small Cars, and the Hard Truth Behind Gas Prices

Ford, which led the way in the boom of gas guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks, is now bowing to the inevitable in the face of rising gas prices and shifting production towards small cars. I'd like to draw out a couple of thoughts from what would have only recently been astonishing news.

As congress whips up a flurry of proposals to try to contain gas prices, from offshore drilling, tapping into our strategic oil reserve, and trying to legislate away oil speculation, there are two uncomfortable points we must keep in mind.

First, these efforts are doomed to failure. While there will certainly be fluctuations in the price of oil, as the last week has shown, none of the proposals floating around will have any real effect on long term gas prices. Oil is expensive because: a) we are probably running out of the stuff, and b) even if we're not yet running out, skyrocketing demand from places like India and China mean that demand will continue to outstrip the supplies, and oil prices will stay high.

The second uncomfortable fact is that oil should be expensive and any policy successfully limiting gas prices, as unlikely as such a policy is, would be a disaster. It is true that gas prices are hurting folks. High oil costs are certainly contributing to high food prices, though not as much as the misguided crop based biofuel insanity. Rising oil costs are also contributing to a global economic slowdown, though not as much as the US's ridiculous series of bubbles bursting.

But rising oil costs have also been the only force in history successfully starting to shift our behavior around fossil fuel consumption. We are buying less SUVs. We are riding more mass transit. A serious conversation about alternative energy sources has begun. We've known about global warming for 20 years, and were aware of the threat that dependency on oil imports posed to our economic and physical security for even longer, but we did nothing.

Instead, we allowed oil to be kept artificially cheap. The true costs of an oil based economy, including environmental degradation and global warming, subsidies to industry, military expenditures to protect supplies, subsidizing the highway system and auto industries, have all been hidden. Gas should be $10-15 per gallon, as it has been in much of Europe for some time. We need to let gas get more expensive, not less, and start looking at the deeper changes required to live in a world of expensive oil, rising temperatures, environmental degradation, and rising populations. 

What congress should be doing is looking at reducing long term demand by implementing a crash program for alternative fuels and putting policies in place to cushion the blow of rising prices for those who can't afford it.

Our cheap fossil fuel based way of life is changing. That's OK. Change is the only constant in the universe. High oil prices are not the problem, they are just a constant reminder of this underlying truth. Now we must tackle that hardest of things for human beings, changing consciously, not simply as a reaction to events. We have to imagine a different kind of world where our presence nurtures the land rather than poisoning and depleting it.

Paradise Unpaved

The lovely illustrated story of a canadian artist who sold her SUV and turned her driveway into a garden.

via Treehugger

The Selfish Environmentalist

I look at the earth as a gorgeous and rich ecosystem that does not need to justify its value. Life in all its diversity, abundance and wonder is its own justification. Until we realize that, we run the risk of destroying billions of years of evolution and are left leading lives detached from the wellspring from which we sprung. Thus we risk continued spiritual impoverishment even as we squander the wealth of geological ages.

But even if you take a very different view, that the earth is here to be exploited by humanity and the biosphere is a resource most properly bought and sold on the market, you may find we end up at a similar place on the questions of the environment.

Two articles today from Science Daily towards that common ground. The value of our wilderness is not best realized by chopping it down for forestry products or razing and filling it for crops and development. It provides services incalculably more valuable when allowed to thrive.

Case in point--the world wetlands hold as much CO2 as exists in the atmosphere as a whole, prevent flooding, clean our water, amongst a host of other valuable services. Global warming threatens their existence while we continue to destroy them through development and pollution. 

Forests similarly provide much greater value in producing clean water, preventing erosion, and sequestering CO2 than could ever be realized by their destruction.

An honest marketplace would reflect the true value of places like our wetlands and forests, which would make their short term profit making plunder economically unviable. When politicians want to open up pristine areas to development and logging, be certain you'll find a money trail leading to the crooks who want to steal these precious services from us for pennies on the dollar.

The Future is Burning

It seems more and more likely that the worsening wildfire situation in the American West, with a fire season that is longer and fires consuming more acreage, is linked to global warming. The West has warmed more in the last 60 years than any other region besides Alaska.

There are other factors, including the practice of suppressing small fires and land use issues, but the changing weather is likely playing a key role. This also points us towards ever increasing fires as the climate continues to warm.

photo by Jeff Turner

Peak Oil on CNBC

Via Treehugger, Matt Simmons, head of oil investment bank Simmons and Company International, talks straight about a future of declining oil CNBC's Fast Money. He says, quite rightly, a disaster is coming if we don't address the hole we've dug with our addiction to oil. The stunned faces of the CNBC talking heads is priceless.

Well worth the watch. He offers some initial ideas on what to do. Massive investments in alternative energy, tele-commuting, living in villages. 

This should, of course, be the conversation happening on every hour of news. Instead, I wonder if Simmons will ever be invited back. We'd rather talk about speculators and dream of a future that looks like our past of artificially cheap gas. In fact, we've near run through a billion years of stored energy in the form of oil and other fossil fuels, and have dangerously heated the planet in the process. These facts won't change by our ignoring them. Doing something, like Al Gore's call for a fully renewable powered electric grid in 10 years, that might make a difference.

More on the "Nuclear Illusion"

A report from the Rocky Mountain Institute on The Nuclear Illusion, looking at why no one wants to invest in new plants--they don't make any sense from an economic stand point.

Imagine

The folks at World Changing ask us to imagine what comes after green.

Talking Cradle to Cradle

Here's the leading light in the new industrial revolution, the architect William McDonough, giving a talk in 2005 at TED on his practice of Cradle to Cradle design. He asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account "all children, all species, for all time." It is a question we must answer if we have hopes of continuing as a species. McDonough is busy answering it with buildings and products that nourish the ecosystems that give us life and leave behind no waste, only function and beauty.

Texas Goes for Big Wind

Texas has approved a plan to be able to accommodate 18,500 MW of wind power by 2012, enough to power 3 million homes. Texas is a big, windy state, but it still shows the potential. If one state can produce enough power from just one alternative energy source to power 3 million homes by 2012, it starts to put Al Gore's call yesterday for a carbon free electrical system within 10 years in context. We can do it.

Of course generating the power is only half the equation. The cheapest form of alternative energy is increasing fuel efficiency. Reducing the energy used in each home by 50% would mean that same power would supply 6 million homes. This is a very achievable goal. Lester Brown outlines some good ideas on significantly increasing energy efficiency in Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. This is an incredibly important book I will be coming back to. The idea of Factor 10 Engineering goes even further, seeking to increase resource productivity by a factor of 10-100. In other words, using 1/10th to 1/100th the energy and raw materials to make the things we use. Hey, the first industrial revolution did the same thing for labor productivity, so no reason the next industrial revolution can't do that for resource productivity.

EPA: Climate Change a Major Threat, Let's Do Nothing

One week after refusing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act (at least through the end of the Bush administration), the EPA has released a report saying climate change will pose "substantial" threats to human health.

How do they square the two? The answer lies, I think most clearly, with who they consulted with to arrive at the non-regulation decision:

...senior EPA officials met with representatives from Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association, who argued that Bush should not undermine his legacy by regulating greenhouse gases.

Yes, we wouldn't want to undermine a nearly perfect legacy of disastrous mismanagement and the constant trumping of science and reason with narrow ideology and short term profiteering.

On the positive side, even this administration can no longer deny the overriding ecological truths that are emerging, climate change amongst the sharpest. They won't do anything about them, but still, it's a start.

The real economics of nuclear power

The estimate for the nation's first nuclear waste dump just went up $32 billion since the last estimate in 2001, now reaching $90 billion. That assumes that it won't go up another $32 billion every few years, and that it will even open. It also includes 100 years of operating costs, after which the site is to be sealed up "permanently," though what that means when the waste will be highly dangerous for at least 150,000 years, I don't know. What it seems to mean is that this place is designed to last until everyone responsible for it is dead and therefor can't be held accountable, leaving the future to fend for itself.

Add this to the fact that building new nuclear power plants isn't economically viable, and we should realize that nuclear power is not a way out of the climate crisis. We will be hearing more and more about nuclear as a carbon neutral energy source, but that money is much better spent on clean renewable energy sources including solar, wind, geo-thermal, and tidal. The economics are actually much better, and improving, and they don't create the short term risks of leaks and the long term certainty of radioactive waste that lasts 15 times longer than human civilization has even existed.

photo: Stefan Kühn

Happy 90th Birthday Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela, one of our great reminders of perseverance, courage, grace, forgiveness, and a love of freedom and humanity so great it will burn long after his body is gone. Let us contemplate his example as we face so many seemingly insurmountable problems and the power and wealth that always seem to stand in the way of freedom and transformation. These simple words of Mandela's have a weight and a legitimacy few others could grant them:

It always seems impossible until its done.

photo: France, Ministère des Affaires étrangères - Service photographique

Fiji Water by the Numbers

• 5,500 miles per trip from Fiji to Los Angeles (the closest Fiji Water destination point in the US)
• 46 million gallons of fossil fuel
• 1.3 billion gallons of water
• 216,000,000 lbs of greenhouse gases

.. and that's in just one year.

Read the full post over at the Greenwash Brigade.

Oh, and stop buying bottled water.

Gore's Challenge

Excerpt from Gore's speech today, stating the goal of transitioning to 100% renewable and carbon free electricity production within 10 years. Audacious indeed. Possible? It doesn't seem so now, but that's really the point, isn't it? We won't know what's possible unless we commit ourselves. No one thought the incredible industrial transformation the US underwent in its entry to WWII was possible, but it was in fact exceeded. What we do know is that a failure to make a dramatic shift like this will lead to accelerating global warming, increasing energy insecurity, 

Some particular things I like in the speech, beyond the paradigm changing scale of it are: a carbon tax at the source of carbon (fossil fuels) offset by decreased income taxes; a focus on green collar job creation; 

His organization, We Can Solve It, has the full text posted, along with some other comments and a useful Q&A.

Dot Earth also has the full speech, annotated with Andy Revkin's thoughts and questions on some of the science and issues raised. The comments at the bottom seem largely worth ignoring, but the annotations raise some good points. Good for get a sympathetic to the general goal, but skeptical point of view, though I think he doesn't embrace the audacity factor as much as I do.

Let's hope this pushes the issue forward in the coming election and puts pressure on Obama to back an alternative energy policy of equal scope and vision.

The Hanging Gardens of...Midtown?

A NYT article on the very cool idea of vertical farming, which involves building self contained, off the grid, multi-storied (even skyscraper sized), farms in urban areas. Given the end of cheap oil (whatever daily gyrations in price we might see), this concept helps address the 1,500 average miles food travels to our plates and all the fossil fuels and attendant CO2 emissions that brings. As with the best of green design and architecture, it also brings many added benefits such as beauty and air filtration to living spaces.

Dickson Despommier, the Columbia University professor who created the concept with students of his in 1999, is trying to push a conceptual 30 story model through to eventual construction in Manhattan. Given the price per square foot of real estate in Manhattan, I wouldn't necessarily pick it as my proving ground, but I love the audacity of proposing a farming skyscraper blooming in Gotham, whatever the practicalities.

My own sense of the future is that we'll need a lot more small scale garden plots in yards and rooftops. Heck, during WWII, 40% of the US's fruits and vegetables were raised in Victory Gardens, so we've done it before. But vertical farms, distributed throughout an urban environment, could be part of fundamentally changing the relationship between country and city, between food producing and consuming regions, and between fossil fuels and plates full of food.

The article also has some more cool conceptual pix in the associated slide show.

Photo: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Light Posting

Traveling, so light or no posting until next week.

Green Insurance

Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. has rolled out a home-insurance policy that covers the cost of rebuilding a home to green standards. The new coverage -- which can only be added to Fireman's top-tier insurance policy -- covers the cost of reconstruction with sustainably harvested wood, efficient lighting and plumbing, nontoxic paints and carpeting, and more. The coverage runs an additional $70 a year for a home insured at $1 million, and can be purchased regardless of the greenness of the original dwelling, though owners of previously green-certified homes get a 5 percent discount on their premiums. Fireman's, a division of the Allianz Group, two years ago became the first insurer to offer green coverage for commercial buildings. "Certainly with regard to green homes and in the insurance arena, this is an important leadership move," says Michelle Moore of the U.S. Green Building Council. "It's a bellwether to green practices in the home-building markets at large."

via Grist

Why Oil is So Expensive.

From The Oil Drum, a piece looking at the real cause behind rising fuel prices. Nope, not speculators. Not Bush preventing off shore drilling. Pretty simple, really, a finite resource and the leading economies failing to use less of it. Oil demand is outstripping supply. At some point sooner or later, the supply will start to decline, leading to tremendous dislocation

We need to deal with the reality of the end of cheap oil (and the approaching end of oil) and start figuring out how to ration the oil that is left to take us as gracefully as possible to an alternative energy future. The post has some immediate suggestions to take.

The rising global hunger and increasing economic contractions due to higher fuel prices are just the first signs of how ungraceful this transition will be if we don't enter it consciously.

Zero Waste BC Style

Also at World Changing, on overview of British Columbia's efforts to be truly zero waste. Like everyone else, they're running out of land fill space. The efforts include composting, reuse and recycling. They are also, critically, bringing producers into the loop giving them responsibility for dealing with the waste from the products they create. In the long run, we need to redesign our entire manufacturing process so that every component is either reused or can be composted back to dirt, as best put forward in McDonough and Braugart's Cradle to Cradle. This new industrial revolution makes perfect sense. As it stands, we spend enormous energy and effort extracting resources that are inherently finite in nature, then burn them or toss them in the ground where they will be poisoning us and our children for countless generations.

Riding the Wind

Kathryn Cooper at World Changing takes a look at the 7th World Wind Energy Conference in Ontario. They see a global tipping point toward renewable energy emerging based on successes like Germany which now generates 14% of its electricity from renewable sources, and in the process created 249,000 jobs and generated $38.8 billion in economic activity in 2007. This is what folks like Van Jones at Green for All and Majora Carter at Sustainable South Bronx are talking about in tackling poverty and our environmental crisis by creating a new clean economy based on green collar jobs. What they are talking about works.

Given the current clamor to suck the last of the oil out of delicate and bio-diverse ecosystems off our shorelines and in Alaska in order to extend our auto addiction just a bit further, hearing about momentum on alternative energy is very welcome news. Even more welcome will be the day we see similar goals and policies in place in the US.

282 Miles per Gallon

From Treehugger, a nice report on this 282 mile per gallon car due from VW in 2010. They're only making a few thousand of them, and they won't be cheap, but it certainly shows the kind of qualitative shifts in conservation we are capable of in the short run.

G8 Leaders Agree to Maybe Later on Agree to Do Something Down the Road to Start Stopping Global Warming

The G8, responsible for 62% of the atmospheric C02 causing global warming, has agreed to "seriously consider" a cut of 50% on emissions by 2050. Last year, the conversation was a cut of 50% from 1990 levels, so this vague, gaseous promise is actually a step backwards. They are refusing to even set any interim goals for 2020, when the cuts might, you know, actually help. As many leading climate scientists see us heading rapidly towards a tipping point on global warming, there's a good chance that 2050 is an irrelevant target. Feedback loops like melted ice caps and thawed permafrost releasing methane may have taken over and made our own emissions irrelevant. There's not way to be certain what the tipping point for a system as complex as the earth's weather system will be. But with the consequences crossing such a tipping point is likely to bring—including mass extinctions, extreme weather, lost coastlines, and upwards of a billion climate refugees—we can't afford to play chicken climate change.

If you haven't yet, go read the recent congressional testimony of James Hansen, the climatologist who first brought global warming to national attention in front of congress 20 years ago. Sobering stuff, but also clear ways to address the problem.

The Guardian has a decent round up on the G8 pledges. There's a video with some environmentalist responses.

Live Dense, Live Well

Nice WSJ article on how Sacramento's "Blueprint" urban planning initiative to encourage denser, mixed use development where people can walk and bike between work, home, play and shopping. Suburbs are an illness. It's good to see cities begin to find work towards cures.

photo by David Shankbone

Small steps to nowhere?

This very interesting post over at World Changing looks at the question of whether small green steps leads to change. Is the focus on changing people into green consumers actually hurting our ability to bring real change to our relationship to our ecosystem?

The numbers aren't promising, even as green becomes big business, everything from carbon emissions to the acceleration of species extinction and ecosystem destruction continues to increase.

The post is in response to this WWF report that argues for a shift away from getting folks to focus on small personal changes, and towards shifting our collective social values in a way that will drive true and impactfull government and business transformation. Both are well worth a read.

Bio-Fueled Food Crisis

From the Guardian:

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

Crop based bio fuels are criminal. Their is no other side to it. They cause more greenhouse gas emissions, all told, than using plain old gasoline. We're destroying natural ecosystems to plant them. Even if we turned all our cropland towards biofuels, we still would only replace a fraction of our oil usage. And, their production is pushing millions into starvation.  

The only beneficiaries are the agri-business concerns reaping huge profits on their corn, and the politicians they buy off. Think about it, if crops are competing with oil in the market, they will eventually be pushed to the same price. Our policies can no longer be determined by narrow corporate interest. It is not a moral question, it is a question of survival. Short term, short sighted profits generally stand in opposition to long term sustainability.

There are exciting possibilities for biofuels, including using plants that can grow on non-arable land and algae in tanks. In the meantime, we know what we need to do. Drive less. Walk more. Increase car efficiency. Improve mass transit. Move towards electric cars fueled by clean energy. 

And stop feeding cars by taking food out of people's mouths.

Of Bees and Flowers and Feeding Ourselves

photo by Nicolas Guérin

Bees play a critical roll in pollinating crops, not to mention every other flowering plant in the world. They are vanishing. But a new study shows even if the number of bees recover, if the diversity of bees declines, crops are in trouble.

Crops are often pollinated by many different bees. If some of those bees are absent the process, the resultant fruit can have far fewer seeds. Lowered bee diversity means lowered crops. Hardly something the world can afford right now.

This is just one warning chime of the impact of decreasing bio-diversity. Life is indeed an intricate web. When the strands are broken, the consequences will continue on and be far greater than might be initially evident. With species extinction happening at somewhere betwen 100 to 1,000 times the natural rate, that's a lot of strands snapping.

More Death Tolls for Guzzlers

Apparently, you can hardly give away and SUV these days. While the demise of gas guzzler culture is certainly welcome news, it's important to realize that when it comes to oil consumption and automobiles, mileage is only one part of the picture. Driving less and more efficiently is actually the easiest way to decrease consumption. Carpooling with three people is effectively the same as tripling the mileage of your vehicle. Cutting your car travel in half by combining trips, skipping some, using mass transit some, well that's like doubling your gas mileage.

Even better, move close enough to your job to walk, bike, or take mass transit and let the old relic (for what else can we consider oil powered vehicles) gather some dust till it's time for them to be scrapped and turned into something useful.

More on Less Burbs

Reading Natural Capitalism, and running across many interesting thoughts. But one struck me, in relation to the earlier post about the possible pressures moving folks away from suburbs, that goes to the root of how we organize our living and working. Worldwide, in most places that evolved organically, people are five minutes walk from where they live, work, shop and play. They quote Alan Durning from the Northwest Environment Watch:

Most people believe the alternative to cars is better transit--in truth, it's better neighborhoods."

Better mass transit, more efficient/non-polluting cars--these are great. But they don't get to the root of the issue which is we've organized our entire society around cars. We should be clustering people and work together. Less miles driven, more community, less sprawl wiping out natural spaces. Anyone who's had the pleasure of living walking distance to work, which I have a couple of times, can attest what a joy it is. Commuting is death for everyone--the commuter, the community and the environment.

One of the things we have to deal with in the US is that most of our zoning laws forbid that kind of clustering. They are left over from a time when the need was seen to separate dirty factories from homes. Now we need to separate dirty commuting from all of us.

More Evidence, More Extreme Weather

photo by Marc Averette
A new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) adds to the growing evidence and chorus of scientists linking global warming with increases in extreme weather events, i.e. droughts, floods, extreme heat and cold, and more intense hurricanes. The economic and human costs of this are literally incalculable. Climate change action was dropped in Washington this year. We can't afford to wait any longer.

via Al Gore's group, WE.

Suburbs Losing Their Sex Appeal?

picture by David Shankbone

Were the suburbs ever sexy? From our mad dash towards sprawl, launched and subsidized since WWII by every level of government, it must have been. Now we're paying the price--from wet and wildlands paved over; social atomization of suburban living; oh, and global warming.

This Boston Globe article looks the impetus higher gas prices might offer towards pushing folks back towards the cities. One hopes so. More efficient cars aren't going to help much if we keep driving farther and farther, converting all our green spaces into parking spaces.

Smart Jugs

In an example of simple design changes bringing significant environmental and costs savings, Sams Club and other retailers are starting to use a new milk jug. Rather than needing to be packed in plastic crates, like old style gallon jugs, these can be stacked on top of each other and shrink wrapped. More gallons fit on a truck and no crates are used. The dairies cut labor by half, reduces trucking trips to the store from five times a week to two times a week, and reduce water use by 60 to 70 percent. The gallons get to the store quicker and fresher, and cost 10¢-20¢ less.

Lower carbon, pollution, and water foot print. Lots of savings. Nothing radical, just a simple design change.

Cutting our energy and resource use down is not so hard. It mainly takes a little thought and a willingness to do things differently. Generally, that also means a willingness to save a lot of money. We need to go farther than this--alternative energy for transport, zero waste production and packaging, organically raised cattle, and so on--but these kinds of efficiencies buy us the time to keep working it out.