From the Earth Hour website:
Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming.
Strains of George Bush saying “you’re either with us, or with the terrorists” eh?
Maybe the clowns at WWF need to think that some people might need to keep their lights on….maybe a symbolic hour of no lights is impossible for some.
Assholes.
I just finished taking a look at the Pickens Plan and it has me scratching my head.
It states:
We currently use natural gas to produce 22% of our electricity. Harnessing the power of wind to generate electricity will give us the flexibility to shift natural gas away from electricity generation and put it to use as a transportation fuel — reducing our dependence on foreign oil by more than one-third.
Why would we want to build the infrastructure to support natural gas-powered vehicles? Keep the natural gas as the power station where it belongs. The infrastructure to support electric vehicles has been in places for ages now and electric vehicles would account for the vast majority of driving that people do.
The answer is staring us in the face. Why do we keep ignoring it?
This is unconscionable. Drill for oil anywhere we want and forget the consequences but damn we really need to make sure those solar installations don’t degrade the environment.
On the one hand I can understand this. I’d rather have good studies done for sighting and placement purposes but 2 years??? And in the meantime they don’t want to apply the same standards to say, ANWR. It’s nuts.
In the July 2007 issue of ‘Diversified Farmer’, which is the news letter published by the Lake County Farm Bureau (of which I am a member due to having insurance through Country) there is a section titled "Addressing Misconceptions about Agriculture" and the misconception they are supposedly addressing is "the only sustainable form of food production is organic".
I quote:
If we were to convert to totally organic food production, yield would decline by 30 to 40 percent.
Now, before even addressing the flat-out falsehood of the claim of a 30 to 40 percent loss in yield I’d rather first ask the question: who exactly is talking about totally organic food production? I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone make the claim that all agriculture should be organic. "Organic" implies a very specific type of farming. I think what more people are saying is that we need to figure out a better system than monoculture farming as practiced today. Whether farming would be conventional in the sense of pesticide use, or organic, or something else is a completely different conversation.
The first paragraph of the article states:
A variety of studies demonstrate this yield
reduction. The Bichel Committee, appointed by
the Danish government as it considered a move to
only organic production, found even greater impacts
than this. They reported to the Danish government
that moving to a mandated, total organic production
system would result in 47 percent less human food.
I have read the Bichel Committee report and so can you. It is located here. The conclusions of the committee are here. As stated in the mandate the point of this committee was to report on what the effect of lowering pesticide use would be on agricultural yields. The study says that they would use experiences of the organic farming industry as extensively as possible.
To state that the report said a total organic production system would result in 47 percent less human food is oversimplifying the report itself and in fact nowhere in the report is the 47 percent figure mentioned. What is mentioned are the figures of production being 30-40% of current (ie: 1999) assuming zero imports of animal feed. More important is the figure of production being 71-93% of current assuming imports of animal feed of 15-25% (at that time the rule).
My reading of this report indicated to me that there were a lot of assumptions made but even so the figure given in the farm bureau article is fiction.
The next two paragraphs go on to talk about the use in organic farming of "green manure" for fixing nitrogen (never mind that in organic farming green manure isn’t a requirement):
One of the main issues that a totally organic
society would need to face would be the nitrogen
requirement of most crops. In order to produce the
necessary nitrogen a third of all crop acreage would
need to be converted into green manure production.Green manure is a crop such as clover, alfalfa,
or trefoil that is grown to be plowed down back
into the soil. As these plants biodegrade they
release nitrogen in a form that other plants can
use. Green manure crops are usually legumes that
fix nitrogen from the air. The loss of acreage to
green manure crops would need to be added on top
of the previously mentioned 30 to 40 percent yield
reduction.
AGain the Bichel report mentions 30-40 percent of current yields but that means a 60-70 percent reduction, not 30-40 as stated above and in the opening paragraph of the article. The statement by the Bichel report is actually worse than what the Farm Bureau is mentioning!
Just to make sure I’m being clear here. I’m not arguing about organic versus conventional farming in this post. I’m just discussing the "article" from the Farm Bureau. If fully organic farming would reduce yields by 60-70 percent that’s a pretty bad thing but this article isn’t even good at getting the numbers right. If they can’t do that I think the full article itself is suspect. As always its easy to cherry pick data to fit any conclusion but they’re not even doing that well!
Now we get to the truly bizarre conclusion with the following two paragraphs:
Another option that could be used instead of
changing a third of all farming acres to green
manure production would be to increase the number
of cattle on the planet. Cattle. and more specifically
the manure they produce is another source of
nitrogen that is an organically approved fertilizer.
However, in order to produce enough manure, we
would need to increase the number of cattle on the
planet by 700 percent.Vaclav Smil, professor of geography from
the University of Manitoba, made the following
calculation. The United States alone would need to
raise roughly one billion additional cattle to replace
nitrogen that we currently use from commercial
sources. Is this possible? We currently have 97
million head of cattle in the United States. (Globally
there are 1.3 billion head of cattle.) If every square
foot of private and public land (including all parks,
forests, wildlife refuges, golf courses, roadsides, and
lawns) was used to graze cattle there still would not
be enough land to graze one billion head of cattle in
the United States.
So we have gone from using green manure making sure there are enough cattle to provide nitrogen for plant use. Why does it have to be one or the other? Never mind that any system would use a variety of methods to achieve the required inputs of nitrogen. Why let small things like facts get in the way of a good smearing?
The final concluding sentence states:
Insisting on strictly organic production would
denude the earth.
Again I don’t think anyone is calling for strictly organic production but we can’t possibly do that because it would, <ominous music here>, denude the Earth.
Shoddy journalism pure and simple. I think it’s pretty clear that monoculture form of agriculture in major practice today isn’t sustainable. We simply can’t afford to keep creating fertilizers from petrochemicals. All other issues aside it’s a simple supply issue. I also think it’s pretty clear that agriculture needs to be a many-headed animal to be effective. There isn’t just one answer but to attempt to make people think that the current way is the only way is deception pure and simple and the Farm Bureau should be ashamed of themselves for printing this piece.
Exhausted. Between work and getting over being sick I’m just plain tired. Too exhausted to write much but wanted to mark Earth Day with at least a shout out. I hope everyone had some time to reflect a bit on where we stand on this 2008 edition of Earth Day. I know I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my place on the planet (saying this while looking at the veggies growing in my basement) and hoping I can do a lot more to live a lot more sustainably. We’re getting there even if not as fast as I’d like 
Just an FYI for those who live in the Chicago area and don’t have a rain barrel program in their town/county. Lake County has extended their rain barrel ordering deadline until April 23rd (for a early May pick-up). More details here:
We did. Well, maybe it was more like Earth 45-minutes as my wife and I both forgot about it and then I was reminded on the radio. Unfortunately I was so tired from the happenings of the day that I didn’t really reflect too much on anything having to do with the environment. I guess I do quite a bit of that normally anyhow every single day so I’m not going to feel too bad about it. At the very least we turned the lights out and just chilled out a bit.
Wow. Where have I been? Whole Foods is ditching plastic shopping bags! My last post on this subject received quite a bit of attention (I got a nod in the New York Times…near the bottom). At that time I never would have expected this given their response to me. I’m really glad to hear they’ve come to their senses.
From the National Post an opinion piece that wants us to think that because some places are experiencing colder-than-normal weather (or getting more snow than usual) that global warming doesn’t exist. How many times do these people need to hear that global warming means wackier weather? If we have warmer than usual weather in summer what does that mean?
But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter’s weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.
Actually environmentalists and environment reporters aren’t shrieking about single events like the one mentioned. They’re shrieking about trends. And based on the fact that most climate scientists agree that there is global warming the shrieking is warranted.
I just can’t figure out why these people don’t understand the premise that global warming trends mean more extreme weather..including *cold* weather.
Oh and the best part? We can’t listen to the scientists and their talk of ice core samples and all that other scientific stuff. But we can rely on records from 1350-1850 about the Little Ice Age.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
Certainly those records are more accurate.
Back on November 12th I wrote about the desire to chronicle the journey my family is on while we move to a more sustainable life. I said I’d write the next day about where we were starting and what we were already doing to ease the burden we are placing on the planet. Well, I never made that post. Several months later I’m starting.
I think my wife and I are doing well so far. The choices we’ve made for upgrades to our house have been the best we could possibly afford, not unlike many other people, but I think for different reasons.
As an example when we had to choose a new furnace the first Fall that we lived in our current home we chose a 90%+ efficient furnace. I’ve talked to quite a few people since then and most, given the same choice, would have chosen the cheaper 80%+ efficient model because it was cheaper and there wouldn’t be enough of a return on the investment on the more expensive, but more efficient model. Simply put the dollars saved in energy bills wouldn’t be worth the difference in price.
In our case I chose the higher efficiency model because I think that, regardless of the money saved, it is my obligation to use less energy. I could afford the higher price and the natural resources saved was enough of a reason to make the purchase decision I did.
This is not to say that I think I am better than anyone else for having done so. I also believe that is is very important that people need to live within their means and not overstretch themselves. The lower-cost models are still far more efficient than what they would be replacing (in my case the furnace in this house was from the 1960s!) so in most cases any choice would be a win. Someone living within their means and watching what they consume is just as big of a win, if not a bigger one, for the planet.
Another upgrade to the house we made was replacing all (well…mostly anyhow. The basement windows weren’t replaced.) of the windows on the first and second floor of the house. The old windows were the original windows from when the house was constructed in 1943. The glazing on most of them was in bad shape and they were single pane glass. They leaked air so badly that we always put the shrink-plastic over them in the winter and during really bad winds you’d see the plastic bowing out into the room every time a gust of wind came through (and the windows all had storm windows over them too.). The upstairs windows were simply just too dangerous.
They were all replace with the highest end vinyl window we could find. We got the low-e glass, argon gas filling, etc. Was vinyl the best choice from an environmental standpoint? Probably not but it was the trade-off we had to make. We couldn’t afford anything more expensive and the heat loss in winter that was cut down, plus the lower heat gain in the summer, were wins no matter how you look at it. There are no perfect choices in this type of situation but I think we made the right choice.