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Bumps on the road to a greener city
David Giambusso, New York Times
If no good deed is allowed to go unpunished, Kathryn Martinez should have seen two punishments coming.
Anthony Risicato wants to retrofit his Harlem brownstone to make it more energy-efficient, but to do so without gutting it, to limit the use of new materials. He has struggled to find a contractor.
To reduce their reliance on commercial food sources, she and her fiancé planted a vegetable garden in the backyard of their home in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. Hesitant to pick their lettuce too soon, they left it in the ground. When they finally pulled it up, the lettuce had gone bad.
They also built a compost heap to recycle their scraps, keeping their waste in a large plastic bin in the kitchen and emptying it every few days. But they let it go too long in a heat wave, and when Ms. Martinez opened the bin it was rife with maggots. Someone had to take it outside. “I drew the short straw,” she said…
(14 August 2008)
San Francisco peak oil town hall meeting: What’s happening with oil? (audio)
SF Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force via Global Public Media
The San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force is conducting a series of town hall meetings from August 4 through August 20 to help educate the people of San Francisco on Peak Oil and how we need to prepare ourselves and our city for it.
Their full report will come out this fall. Find out more about the task force, including learning how to attend their public meetings, by visiting their web page.
In partnership with students from the Presidio School of Management and other committed citizens, the meetings cover:
* What’s Happening with Oil
* Growing Food in an Urban Environment
* Creating Communities and Local Economies
* Transportation
* Personal Preparation
* Keeping Healthy in a Post Peak World
Interested in attending a future meeting? They are free and you can register here.
In this meeting we covered:
* the geologic reasons behind peak oil
* the alternatives we have to oil
* the expected impact on climate change from peak oil
* the likely impacts of peak oil on the economy and our societies
* and the kind of response that will be required of us
You can download the slide deck here (PDF 5.7MB).
(4 August 2008)
Fred’s footprint: the best solution to climate change
Fred Pearce, New Scientist
What’s the best way to fix climate change, to stamp out the emissions that are warming our planet? I don’t mean what technology. That’s actually coming along quite nicely. I mean what are the international legal and financial levers that can pulled to get the technology, on the scale needed, from the test rigs to the national grids?
Later this month, in Accra, Ghana, the UN’s lumbering Kyoto negotiations will have another stab at what to do after 2012. They will come up against the familiar stand-off. On the one hand, is the rich world’s reluctance to accept emissions limits that will add to the cost of doing business unless developing countries subscribe to emissions controls. On the other, developing countries utter their familiar (and not unreasonable) cry: “You caused the problem; you fix it.”
The answer has been staring us in the face for a while now. And more and more people – from business to politics to the greens – are catching on. It has an inelegant name: contraction and convergence (C&C).
It works like this. The world needs to contract emissions by more than half by the middle of the century. It’s do-able and it won’t wreck the world economy. (Bankers on a spree are far better at doing that.)
But there will be some pain. The only way of sharing out that pain fairly is for everyone to take on emissions targets, but targets that are fair because they are based on a basic parameter of need. That is: population size.
(13 August 2008)
Reader DLC writes:
It is good to see an MSM journalist of Pearce’s unique standing and experience coming out unequivocally in favour of Contraction & Convergence. But where in Gods name are the American equivalents, in these crucial months of presidential campaigning ? Can America really claim to have a free press ?
