A commentary in the Guardian suggests today that we should face the reality that maybe none of the emissions control policies we’re trying to implement will do anything to stop catastrophic irreversible global warming. But facing this reality need not involve suicide, moving to Quebec City, etc.
Geo-thermal engineering, apparently, is a possible answer of last resort. Scientists everywhere agree it’s really risky, but if we had to we could potentially shoot vast quantities of certain chemical agents into the atmosphere to reflect back the sun. No, not immediately comforting. But one of the plans involves a series of yachts crossing the world. Which is at least glamorous.
Image: flickr/radiant guy
A California scientist and cement obsessive has started to churn out cement that doesn’t emit much carbon. Since we’re not going to stop the world’s population from expanding (realistically, any time soon) we should pave paradise the nice way.
The big questions, as always, are: how much, how fast how cheap? Cement Guy claims cheaper than the normal cement. And that making it in bulk is no problem. And that its manufacturing process can actually absorb emissions from polluters like coal power plants.
Cement accounts for about five percent of the carbon emissions in the world — eliminating its contribution to global warming would be the equivalent of eliminating America. Or almost eliminating China.
What a weird twist of fate that would be: if the way to make the world greener were to make it look more like one the post-industrial backdrops in the Halo games.
Image: flickr/billjacobus1
My favorite quote from the Slow Food Nation conference this weekend came from Wendall Berry (poet, essayist, farmer, panelist).
He held up a copy of a San Francisco Chronicle piece that said the best advertisement for the Slow Food movement was the pleasure of carefully preparing and lingering over a meal, and then described what the article got wrong. The following account of what he said is from the Journal:
[Berry] said the reporter described pleasure, as it relates to the Slow Food movement, in a limited view — that the description treated pleasure as a specialty, “a form of idleness,” which leaves out the possibility that good work could also be pleasurable… By limiting the ideas behind Slow Food to just “tasteful consumption,” Mr. Berry argued, the movement is limited in its growth.
If the Slow Food movement is going to catch on outside the upper-middle class, it’s going to be a movement about making people want to farm and distribute food locally. Not making them want to drive to consulting gigs in the city, come home, put on Graceland, and cook said locally farmed and distributed food and sit around talking/blogging/referencing David Sedaris. We need more farmers, working less efficiently, in the sense of using less fossil-fuel burning, soil-eroding methods. (See my lionization of Prince Charles, who is admirably blighted with nostalgia for agrarian England.)
Image: Slowfoodnation.org
There’s not much question that Obama’s address tonight, on the 45th anniversary of I Have a Dream, will be the most important of the election. So the question for enviros is, will Obama be able to talk about the most important issue of the next decade or so, which is to say, climate change?
The danger of bringing it up is that Obama needs more than anything else not to look like an elitist. He’s not going to win as the next Al Gore. High gas prices have been putting a lot of middle-class voters in the pro-drilliing, anti-conservation column lately. A speech that failed to make environmentalism a central issue would be sad but understandable. The Machiavellian in me kind of hopes he runs away from global warming until he gets elected.
Image: flickr/zenobia_joy
PBS has an interesting story online about how evangelical Christians are starting to behave as if they’d be up for an alliance with greens.
Their national assocation has been asking churches to get their energy consumption down, quoting scripture about how you shouldn’t let anything go to waste. Since evangelicals are about a quarter of the electorate this is good news. The only reason not to get too excited is that there is one marginally green party in the US right now, and it’s the Dems. Will climate change override school prayer and gun control and gay marriage and all the other “values” issues that tend to keep evangelicals in the GOP?
The alternative, I guess, would be to hope evangelicals will help to forge a greener Republican party. But as long as said party’s funding comes from the energy industry… Well, may the Lord be with them. But, as my own, more cynical, American subculture would say, like, good luck with that.
Image: flickr/gruntzooki
The White House got caught scheming to dilute the endangered species act today, and the first volleys in a potentially fun Washington rhetoric battle have been fired. 
To summarize:
REPORTERS: Somebody leaked an early draft of this administration proposal to us and it says it will let the various federal agencies decide for themselves whether a road or tunnel, or whatever thing they want to build, will put rare wildlife at risk. They won’t have to consult with Fish and Wildlife anymore.
SEN. BARBARA BOXER (D-CALIF): That’s illegal. If you want to do that, you’re going to have to try to hammer legislation through congress.
LOBBYIST FOR DEVELOPERS: We just want to be able to build things faster, and right now it really sucks for us how long we have to wait before we build things.
WILDLIFE CONSERVATION GROUP: If the government lets you do that, bald eagles may die.
DEPT. OF INTERIOR BUSH UNDERLING: We know that secretly this whole wildlife thing you guys are always talking about is actually about curbing carbon emissions. You just want to find a way to help halt global warming by stopping some developments that create emissions. You are obsessed with that or something.
One potential way for greens to stop this proposal would be to try to find a legal basis on which to stall it until later in the year. If we then got Obama, he’d be able to erase the proposed Bush changes no problem because such edicts take a little while to go into effect. But if we got McCain, we’d probably be screwed on this.
Image: flickr/graybeard763
Detroit’s condition is not the kind of thing you want to rub your hands in bloggy schadenfreude over. Blue-collar layoffs have started turning into white-collar layoffs. And when they sell cars that do horrible things to the planet they’re just trying to give the American public what it wants.
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So you no longer want to be a scourge of everything we hold dear / friend to Saudi Arabia. You want to throw away your SUV. But how is it done? A San Franciscan named Ryan Mickle raised the question for real on a web site this month, and little by little became a web phenom.
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I spend a lot of time in Los Angeles, where the smog, as described by local troubador Beck, is “a giant dildo crushing the sun.” You forget about it for awhile, and then you look at the sky close to sunset, and go, wait a minute, why does God’s palette involve so much yellow and brown? The EPA released a document last week stating that because of climate change, those of you in the Northeast and the Midwest will soon have a clearer sense of what I’m talking about.
The EPA draft study states that simulations showed that in those regions, higher average temperatures will potentially lead to longer smog seasons and worse health threats for kids, the elderly, and people with respiratory issues.
Greater visible ecological damage in Midwestern swing states… Electoral boon for greens? Probably depends on how severe and well-publicized the adverse health effects, sadly.
Image: flickr/steven.buss
The G8 summit of the world’s richest nations plus Russia and some “developing” guests (India, China) just ended, and for the post-game show on what did and didn’t get accomplished, The Economist wins first prize. They agree with just about everybody else in saying the meetings didn’t produce anything faintly resembling a satisfying climate change solution—our leaders kept it vague—but they argue that Bush took a baby step forward.
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