Year: 2012

Family Success on the Household Carbon Footprint Front

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We Americans may believe that we are obligated to reduce our household Greenhouse Gas Emissions, but then fall short because of the cost and the inconvenience required to do it. Sizeable household reductions in a household Carbon Equivalent footprint usually cost money and sometimes a lot of money. Our household has succeeded to a considerable extent over the past 5 years, by budgeting carefully and picking projects which have multiple benefits to counter the costs.

Can we bear the legacy costs of industrial society’s toxic pollution?

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The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) stunned the nuclear industry last week by putting power plant licensing decisions on hold while it reconsiders rules on nuclear waste storage struck down by a federal appeals court in June.

The issue is part of the much larger and troubling question about the legacy costs–economic, social and environmental–of toxic industrial pollution that are mounting with each day. We’d like to think that we can simply take our industrial wastes and throw them away somewhere. But increasingly, in what economist Herman Daly calls our “full world,” there is no “away.”

Fascination for Death

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We are a peculiar culture. We are extremely reluctant to accept the possibility that our civilization might decline and fall, like all those which have preceded us, yet consider the idea of utterly trashing the biosphere with a fascination which would have made an early twentieth century symbolist uneasy. We have had another example of it with a paper published in the June issue of Nature.

A crisis of legitimacy

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Over the last week or two, the peak oil scene has been going through another round of its ongoing flirtation with fantasies of overnight collapse. This time the trigger was a recent paper by David Korowicz of Feasta. Iit’s a well-written study, limited only by a few frankly unrealistic assumptions about how governments tend to react when faced with an immediate threat to national survival.