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NotesPanel: Confronting the Climate Disinformation Campaign
from Sustainability Now Radio:
Here is the video for the free presentation given on April 30, 2012 on Penn State’s University Park Campus. Penn State professors Michael Mann, Donald Brown, Janet Swim and Rick Schuhmann, and graduate student Peter Buckland spoke Monday evening at “Changing the Moral Climate on Climate Change,” a talk that focused on climate change denial. Mann is director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center and part of the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Susannah Barsom, with the university’s Center for Sustainability, moderated the event, which included a question and answer session.
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NotesSome recent water themed shots from around Vancouver
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Video
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NotesThinking Globally: ‘Living Planet Report 2012’ - Ecological Footprint Index
From WWF:
”The Living Planet Report is the world’s leading, science-based analysis on the health of our only planet and the impact of human activity. Its key finding? Humanity’s demands exceed our planet’s capacity to sustain us.”
You can find your country and see how it compares to others using the interactive Eco Footprint calculator above.
Related:
~ ‘How to be a conscious consumer’ (WWF)
~ ‘Earth’s environment getting worse, not better, says WWF ahead of Rio+20’ (The Guardian)
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NotesThinking Globally: ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’
From Planet Under Pressure via Vimeo:
A 3-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the Rio+20 Summit. The film charts the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes.
More here.
(Image credit: IGBP)
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Notes"The most important of these trends is a multi-decade shift from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy. The shift will accelerate as oil becomes harder to produce and climate change worsens. Once climate change really starts affecting people’s lives – when it cuts world grain production, for instance – people will demand action. The action will come in the form of regulations and taxes that raise the price of carbon fuels.
The shift to carbon-free energy will be akin to what economists call a “general purpose technology” transition. The modern world has seen half a dozen or so transitions in the past 200 years, including those following the introduction of railways, electricity, the internal combustion engine and the computer microchip. Each produced staggering economic upheaval: companies, jobs and whole industries vanished, while new ones exploded onto the scene. These were periods of startling innovation, rapid economic growth and enormous opportunity for entrepreneurial individuals and communities.
The coming energy shift will dwarf all these earlier transitions combined. It won’t arise from just one disruptive technology but from an integrated suite of many, such as advanced batteries, building reskinning, smart grids, cheap super-thin photovoltaic materials, ultra-deep geothermal power, and perhaps thorium nuclear power. It will spur the invention and delivery of a torrent of new technologies, goods and services in every sector of the global economy.
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Three paragraphs from Thomas Homer-Dixon’s recent article in the Globe & Mail, ‘All’s not lost, Ontario. The future is green, not black’. Homer-Dixon is the director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and the author of a number of books including, ‘Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future’, ‘The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization’, and ‘The Ingenuity Gap’. You can watch, listen and read about his work here.
(Photo credit: Eco-News)
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Video
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NotesWendell Berry: ‘IT ALL TURNS on affection’
From The National Endowment for the Humanities:
Wendell E. Berry, noted poet, essayist, novelist, farmer, and conservationist, delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on Monday, April 23, 2012 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
The annual lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.
In his lecture, entitled “It All Turns on Affection,” Berry lamented the increasing divergence of modern man from the environment and local communities. Invoking the words of his mentor, the writer Wallace Stegner, Berry observed that throughout history Americans have been divided into two kinds: the “boomers” who “pillage and run,” and the “stickers” who “settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”
Inspired by a passage from E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Berry called for for a land use ethic that is shaped by a sense of “affection” for land and place. “And so,” he said, “I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods.” The full text of Wendell Berry’s lecture is available here.
Check out the rest of the article here. Berry’s talk starts approximately 10:00 minutes into the video and you can check out media coverage of it here, here, and here.
(Photo credit: NEH)
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Notes"There are two ways to level the energy playing field. The first is to internalize the almost unmeasurably dire cost of fossil fuels, which as a byproduct of their use are radically altering the planet’s climate in ways increasingly inimicable to life as we know it, through carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes and such. In Germany, doing this to a sufficient level to make coal more expensive than renewable power would’ve made the domestic coal industry furious. It would’ve been a ferocious political battle. So the Germans under the left-wing Red-Green Coalition in 2000 went another way.
The other way – which gave rise to the feed-in tariff – is to incentivize renewable energy sufficiently to offset the avoided cost of the greenhouse gas it doesn’t create. In a sense, you’re internalizing the practice that has emerged in carbon-priced markets worldwide, in which polluters buy offsets from green energy facilities. Instead of doing such elaborate market gymnastics, you simply build the desired offset into the green energy price through a pricing obligation. Grid operators in countries like Germany buy wind and solar and other renewably generated power at costs high above the cost of coal-fired power, and the added cost is passed on to consumers. In the case of the German energy market, the average household saw energy bills rise by about 40 euros per year (fifty bucks or so) in the first decade of the feed-in tariff."Writer Chris Turner explains the “two way to level the energy playing field” in his MNN article, ‘What have we learned about cheap energy?’
(‘Renewable Electricity Generation in Germany’ graph: Volker Quaschning via Clean Technica)
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Notes2012 TED Prize Wish: The City 2.0
From TED Prize:
For the first time in the history of the prize, it is being awarded not to an individual, but to an idea. It is an idea upon which our planet’s future depends.
The 2012 TED Prize is awarded to….the City 2.0.
The City 2.0 is the city of the future… a future in which more than ten billion people on planet Earth must somehow live sustainably.
The City 2.0 is not a sterile utopian dream, but a real-world upgrade tapping into humanity’s collective wisdom.
The City 2.0 promotes innovation, education, culture, and economic opportunity.
The City 2.0 reduces the carbon footprint of its occupants, facilitates smaller families, and eases the environmental pressure on the world’s rural areas.
The City 2.0 is a place of beauty, wonder, excitement, inclusion, diversity, life.
The City 2.0 is the city that works.
(Photo credit: TheCityFix)
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Notes
Changing Paradigms: New vs. Old Thinking
Last week I went to a talk on “leadership and creating a sustainable future” out at UBC’s brand new and ultra green Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability. (I’ll post some shots of the building in another post).
Above is a slide from Göran Carstedt’s presentation highlighting the “new logic” central to creating large-scale, transformational change. If it’s the type of thing that floats your boat check out his 2010 TEDxAthens talk, which covers much of the same territory.
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Notes
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Under the right circumstances, solar cells from Semprius could produce power more cheaply than fossil fuels
via nextbigfuture
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Nature inspires more creative minds
The more you get away from the stresses of daily life and the more time you spend... -
The Spring of 2012 Is the Hottest in U.S. History
In case, you know, you haven’t been outside in the past three month, it’s...
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Walkable neighborhoods now more valuable than car-centric ones
If you can walk to the post office, library and eateries, your real estate could... -
Ride. a short film on bike commuting.
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Urbanized, a feature-length documentary by Gary Hustwit about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban...
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“Income Inequality As Seen from Space,” Per Square Mile, May 24, 2012
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Cycles of Life by Grant Snider
