FAQ: Green Civil War: Projects vs. Preservation

Byoliveridley

Environmentalists are more openly at odds over two goals: the preservation of wide open spaces vs. the use of public lands for renewable energy projects.

via Green Civil War: Projects vs. Preservation – Room for Debate Blog – NYTimes.com.

This is a question that gets asked a lot, so it is refreshing to see different perspectives on how to manage needs for more clean energy with the desire to preserve pristine land. Of course, given the diversity of opinions offered, some are better than others. I, for one, don’t see this as a dichotomy, so I prefer ideas that avoid the binary choice frame of the question and suggest real solutions that will try to optimize both “choices”.

I liked David Roberts’ and Ileene Anderson’s opinions quite a bit, plugging for getting away from the large scale, utility centric model to a distributed paradigm. Daniel Kammen pitches for aggressive efficiency measures. Vaclav Smil says “Use less”, amen! Randy Udall deals mostly in cliches and says nothing very meaningful other than “we should optimize” and “some people will always complain”. Winona LaDuke makes a very important point that this is a good opportunity for Native Americans shut out of the conventional energy process to be involved in the wise stewardship of wind and solar energy. She does not provide any policy suggestions to make it happen.

Anyway, it looks like most of the panelists chosen avoided the binarification of the problem, good job! Will preserve this for a link every time someone asks me about this.

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  • Drivers: Cyclists, pedestrians and Glare

    Byoliveridley

    Two cyclists were taken to hospital Wednesday after each went hurtling into a windshield in what police said were “almost identical” accidents just 23 minutes apart. Both drivers were somehow blinded by the sun, neither of them seeing the cyclist.

    Two cyclists hurt in separate collisions.

    This is sad, because it is avoidable. Most drivers know that visibility during  morning and evening driving when the sun is low is problematic. They can see massive objects like other cars, trees, or buildings, but pedestrians, animals and bicyclists are frequent victims to what is called “sun glare”. But do drivers get adequate training on how to avoid sun glare?

    Insurance BC (ICBC) driver’s licence guide has a chapter that they call See-Think-Do, about being a smart driver. It doesn’t mention the sun or glare. I have not taken driving lessons here, so I don’t know if this is something that comes up during instruction.  Just in case, here’s a shortlist of things drivers can do to avoid injuring other people, courtesy the smart motorist, and moi.

    1. Take the bus! Why is this first? Because it is foolproof, you can’t personally injure people when you’re not driving, and you can be assured that your professional driver likely knows more about driving than you ever will.
    2. Know when the problem is worst:  Early spring and early fall when the sun rises due east and sets due west, and roads are laid out perfectly east-west, and north-south.
    3. Driving in glare causing conditions is as dangerous as driving in fog or rain, so drive anticipating danger. It’s a beautiful sunny day without consequence when you’re sitting in a bus watching the sun rise over the ocean, or playing hooky from work, not while piloting a dangerous vehicle.
    4. Aerodynamic tilted windshields make you more vulnerable as they increase scattering. No, don’t go out and buy a boxy SUV, you’ll injure more people that way.
    5. Light coloured dashes are out, get darker interiors. Yes, it may get a little warmer on a few days in the summer, but the solution to that is a sunshade, and cracking your windows.
    6. Avoid, as in avoid ghastly cleaning products that shine up your car’s insides. Yes, shiny is often associated with clean, but might I add, that an understated clean shows more polish 🙂
    7. Clean windshields. That buggy, dusty windshield will scatter more light, keep it clean. Also, older windshields eventually get micro-scratches from all that dust, and all the cleaning in the world will not improve things. I wonder if one’s insurance company will pay for a replacement if the windshield becomes a safety hazard. I mean, it is more honest that a strategic stone throw, or other devices.
    8. Polarised sunglasses. Surprising that sunglasses are not mandatory while driving, they really really help. I should know, having never worn one for many years. I got a prescription pair five years back, and I can’t imagine driving, biking, or walking in the sun without one.
    9. Attention. Of course, texting, talking, eating, changing channels, berating your children, vacuuming your car, polishing your dashboard, etc.

    If you are a visual learner, here’s a helpful, very short video from consumer reports.

    Image courtesy bootbearwdc’s flickr photostream used under a creative commons licence.

     

  • BC's Election

    Byoliveridley

    Is over and the centre-right Liberals won. Many in the traditional environmental movement are trumpeting it as a referendum on the BC Carbon Tax. I am not so sure. The so called people who were supposed to vote for the opposition left leaning NDP, but did not because of their (admittedly stupid) opposition to the “gas tax” also gave the Green Party their lowest share of the vote in the last few years. I am finding it hard to imagine a left leaning voter voting for the Liberals instead of the NDP, rather than throwing her vote on the Green Party.

    The truth is probably a lot simpler. Carole James of the NDP did not resonate with voters as an alternative for many reasons, poor campaign positioning, lack of vision, poor media coverage, etc. and in tough economic times, BC just made what it considered a safe choice.

    Of course, BC also made a “safe” choice and rejected a proportional representation system for the province. More will be known once any exit poll data is released, but a proposal which came within a couple of percentage points of passing in the last election failed roundly this time. There is early speculation that it was how the question was asked. I would have preferred a multi-party proportional system to reduce the stranglehold of the two major parties and get some Green Party representation in the legislature.

    Anyway, full speed ahead for BC’s puny Carbon Tax, which will go all the way to $30 a ton in a couple of years, let’s see what that does to compensate for The Liberal’s penchant for massive road building, offshore drilling ideas and “business friendly” privatization of the commons approach to governance.

  • Gulf States spending more on Clean Energy than Canada

    Byoliveridley

    Gasoline sells for 45 cents a gallon. There is little public transportation and no recycling. Residents drive between air-conditioned apartments and air-conditioned malls, which are lighted 24/7

    Still, the region’s leaders know energy and money, having built their wealth on oil. They understand that oil is a finite resource, vulnerable to competition from new energy sources.

    So even as President-elect Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America’s route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy.

    They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home.

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  • Canada's Environmental Corpus Callosum malfunction

    Byoliveridley

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    Canada is among the three worst countries on nine indicators (per capita greenhouse gas emissions, sulphur dioxide emissions, carbon monoxide emissions, volatile organic compound emissions, water consumption, energy consumption, energy efficiency, volume of timber logged and generation of nuclear waste);

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    Canada’s performance on most environmental indicators continues to worsen

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    BTW, this is what happens to people when their corpus callosum is removed.

    [youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo’]

    Once this theme crystallized in my head, I went searching for earlier work that would reinforce my conclusion and came upon this book Unnatural Law – Rethinking Canadian Environmental Law and Policy. From the First chapter:

    Is Canada an environmental leader or an environmental laggard? Is Canada contributing to solving environmental challenges or are we exacerbating these problems?

    Great, a book that reinforces my frame in the very first paragraph! I’ll let you know after I finish reading the book (helpfully available from my local library and written by a former ED for the SIerra Legal Defence Fund (now known as Ecojustice) and who lives on Pender Island, a few islands away from where I live! Promises to be an interesting and illuminating read.

    1Corpus Callosum = Part of brain that connects the two hemispheres.

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    India's Environmental Portal

    Byoliveridley

    Home | India Environment Portal

    This is a very useful undertaking by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) to gather up a lot of technical information about India’s environmental research and activism.

    They have a small multimedia section as well and I found this movie, appropriately titled Faecal Attraction to be an informative watch…

    [youtube=’http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=bUlkOLLa31s’]