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Too much ‘love’ not good for planet
Kathleen Braden, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The Sierra Club representative who called me to solicit money for the anti-global warming campaign sounded perplexed. I told him I would not contribute because I was troubled by the international travel I saw each month in my Sierra magazine, activities undoubtedly contributing to global warming. “OK, I’ll have to think about that one,” he said, and hung up.
Was I just being annoying? I decided to create a small database from my May-June issue, listing all the international nature tours sponsored by the Sierra Club. John Muir had advocated travel in the outdoors to develop an ethic for saving Earth’s environment, but I don’t think he had airplane trips to Peru in mind back when he founded the organization in 1892.
Estimating travel between Seattle (just as an arbitrary starting point) and a major airport in each destination, calculating 10 people per trip, and using the World Resources Institute norm of .11 kilograms of CO2 emissions per person-kilometer for a long distance flight, the 37 Sierra Club international outings would generate 689 metric tons of CO2. Just by air flights alone, a person traveling to Nepal to love nature in the Himalayas would generate 22 times the average Nepalese person’s yearly output of CO2.
The same day I was being an irritant to the Sierra Club caller, a mailing arrived from the Ocean Conservancy, soliciting my membership in a campaign to save the world’s oceans. If I joined and sent them $15, I would get a turtle plush toy with a “huggable beanbag stomach.” Alarmed because most beanbags these days are filled with polyvinyl chloride, a material Greenpeace has suggested banning, I sent an inquiry. The Ocean Conservancy people assured me their toy was filled with a natural material, but, yes, it was made and shipped from China, a country that has just declared the river dolphin extinct.
…pseudo-conservation has become mere big business. In today’s world, we can delude ourselves that we are supporting nature by buying experiences or symbols. Perhaps one of the problems with the idea of “sustainability” is the mind-set it creates that what gets sustained is not so much Earth’s capacity to tolerate us, but our own consumption of just about everything. I wonder if the dolphins and sea turtles would prefer a “frugality” campaign.
I wrote to the Sierra Club and asked how it views those CO2 emissions in light of their global warming stance. They passed my letter to the Outings Department, which had already been working on a new policy. Maybe next time they call, I can be more pleasant.
Kathleen Braden is a professor of geography at Seattle Pacific University.
(4 June 2007)
Airlines told to eliminate emissions
Bruce Constantineau, Vancouver Sun
The global airline sector must become a completely non-polluting industry — meaning “zero emissions” — within 50 years, International Air Transport Association chief executive officer Giovanni Bisignani said Monday.
He told IATA’s annual general meeting in Vancouver the industry needs a wake-up call because its carbon footprint is growing and that is not politically acceptable.
The UN estimates the airline industry’s contribution to global carbon emissions will grow from two per cent today to three per cent by 2050.
“Climate change will limit our future until we change our approach from technical to strategic,” Bisignani said. “Strategy starts with vision.”
He said the industry has done a good job in improving fuel efficiency by 70 per cent in the past 40 years, with another 25-per-cent improvement expected by 2020 as newer aircraft take to the skies.
“I don’t have all the answers [to eliminating emissions entirely] but our industry started with a vision that we could fly,” Bisignani said. “The Wright brothers turned that dream into reality and look at where we are now.”
He said building blocks for a carbon-free future include fuel cell technology, solar-powered aircraft and fuel made from biomass plant material, vegetation or agricultural waste used as a fuel or energy source.
The four major challenges to a green airline industry include…
(5 June 2007)
What’s the point of making hydrogen-powered cars if there’s no fuel for them
Bibi van der Zee, Guardian
It’s not often ethical living journalists find themselves in the BMW hospitality pavilion at Wentworth golf club, sipping champagne and watching Veejay Singh tee off just a few metres away. (Not often enough, actually.) But readers! There was a reason for all this bacchanalian living, honestly: BMW is introducing the public to its hydrogen-powered 7-Series car, and had offered me a chance to drive it. I’m sure you understand that it was irresistible, as, indeed, is the whole idea of hydrogen power, the near alchemical dream of getting cars to run on a fuel that can be made out of water.
In the hydrogen dream, we could create our own power and fuel our cars, with zero carbon emissions and complete fuel security. The homepage for a website called Hydrogen Highway asks you, in that American way, to “imagine … a world where the only thing coming out of your car’s exhaust pipe is water vapour”, and it’s exactly the sort of world I like to imagine. But is the dream too good to be true?
(31 May 2007)
