Tag: sustainability

Shared Links for Jun 26th – Jul 7th

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A Letter to David Bodansky

Hello Prof. Bodansky,

I’m a PhD student in geophysics, and I just finished reading your book, Nuclear Energy.  I appreciate the trouble you went to in the book to remain effectively neutral as to whether we ought to be pursuing the development of nuclear power.  While I can’t say that the book made me into a nuclear advocate, I am less opposed to it in principle now, and believe that it does represent a potential long term energy solution, albeit one with non-trivial caveats.  Then again, that seems to be the case with all of our options at this point.

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What are we doing?

CaltechPhDEatsGarbage
Caltech PhD Students Collecting Food

Just pulled a week’s worth of food out of a Trader Joe’s dumpster.  Eggs, blueberries, apricots, chocolate cake, frozen ribs, chicken thighs, lettuce, bagels, breads of every description.  We kept a bunch of it.  Sorted the fruit into compost vs. smoothie quality, froze the latter.  Sent what we couldn’t eat to a homeless shelter with another volunteer.  I feel like the more I look at the margin of our society, the more I have to wonder, what the fuck are we doing?  How did we get to this place, to this way of being?  How can we think that this is okay?  One hundred gallons of water for every ounce of beef; ten fossil calories burned for every one we produce as food, and then a third of that food sent to the landfill, while people, only a couple of miles away, are hungry?  While whole neighborhoods in South Central LA have no grocery stores, only liquor stores and fast food junk?

Maybe more importantly at this point, where are we going with this?  It’s a long way down from here.

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Nuclear Energy by David Bodansky

Nuclear Energy by David BodanskyI just finished David Bodansky’s 600+ page tome Nuclear Energy.  It’s almost a textbook, but not quite.  I don’t know who the intended audience is really.  Other than me.  Similar genre, broadly, as The High Cost of Free Parking.  A comprehensive overview of a technical topic, for those with a long attention span and no fear of numbers.  I decided to read the book because of the recent turn toward nuclear power that some environmentalists have taken.  There are many publics that react strongly, and negatively, to the idea, but I don’t trust public sentiment to be rational any more than I can manipulate it.  Bodansky did an admirable job of remaining neutral throughout the book, on a topic that almost universally devolves into something resembling a religious debate.  As a result of this reading, I’m much more positive (or rather, less negative) about nuclear energy than I was before.  I think that my position, which I hope can count as an informed one, now closely resembles that of Ralph Cavanagh, as articulated in this debate with Peter Schwartz hosted by the Long Now Foundation.

The main questions I had coming into the book were:

  1. Can nuclear energy be done responsibly?
  2. What would it take for it to scale up meaningfully?
  3. How would it compare in costs and risks to renewable energy sources, if it were done responsibly at scale?

The answers I came away with were that yes, it probably can be done responsibly, and at the scale necessary for it to be meaninful as a long term source of primary power globally.  However, if it were to scale up responsibly in the long term, it seems that the associated costs would likely end up being greater than for renewable energy sources.  So I guess I’m supportive of having the so-called “nuclear option” on the table, in competition with any other carbon free power source, with the significant caveat that the cost of the nuclear power being considered correspond to a responsible, long term, large scale deployment.  The scenario I foresee needing to be avoided is ending up with an unfair comparison, between short-term and/or irresponsible and/or non-scalable nuclear power, and renewables — especially renewables as priced before the solar power industry has obtained whatever economies of scale there are to be had in their niche.  One might be able to make a persuasive argument that we need to use nuclear power as a bridge between fossil fuels and renewables at scale, but I haven’t heard that argument made yet.

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There’s no place like “away”

Most things we buy are trash before we even get to know them well.  Paul Hawken estimates (Natural Capitalism, p. 81) that only about 1% of the mass which we mine, harvest, or otherwise extract is still playing a useful role in the economy 6 months later. The other 99% is made up of either inherently consumable, unsustainable goods like coal, consumable but potentially renewable goods like food (depending on what we do with our sewage), or just plain waste, cast aside in the course of manufacturing, or “saved for later” in some landfill.  Within the waste category, the overwhelming majority of the mass is stuff we never see, like the 20 tons of mine tailings and associated cyanide leachate that are generated in the making of each gold wedding band.  In some cases the right category is unclear.  Was the 800 gallons of 25,000 year old Laurentide ice sheet meltwater that got pumped out of the Ogalalla Aquifer to produce the cheeseburger Michelle and I split at Lucky Baldwin’s on Tuesday really waste?  It was non-renewably extracted, but then mostly evaporated harmlessly into the atmosphere.  Of course there’s also all the stuff we normally think of as garbage, that we wheel out to the curb each week.  If you live in Pasadena or Glendale, or many of the other cities at the feet of the San Gabriels, that garbage is now in the Scholl Canyon landfill, in the hills just to the west of the Rose Bowl:

Scholl Canyon Landfill

If you lost your virginity at Caltech, this is probably where the condom is today.  All the red plastic party cups you ever used at Munth parties are keeping it company, and the styrofoam cup noodle containers and plastic wrappers from your late night Maruchan ramen binges.  And the enormous stack of old class notes you didn’t have time to burn or recycle when you left.  All the leftover crap from you Ditch Day stack is buried here too.  And not just yours, but decades worth of Caltech students.  There really is no such place as “away”.  If you take a closer look it doesn’t look so bad really:

Scholl Canyon Landfill Closeup

Zooming in, you’ll see only a tiny area of actual garbage, where the trucks were working the day the picture was taken.  The rest of the landfill just looks like a construction site, because each night, they’re required to cover the garbage up.  In California, about half the time landfills are covered with dirt.  The rest of the time, we use what’s euphemistically called “alternative daily cover” or ADC.  ADC is anything that you’re allowed to cover a landfill with, that isn’t dirt.  In 1989, California passed a law (the California Integrated Waste Management Act, AB 939) creating the California Integrated Waste Management Board, and mandating that all cities in California had to divert 50% of their landfill waste by the year 2000.  When you use something as ADC it counts as having been “diverted”, even if you never would have sent it to the landfill before.

Among the things which qualify as ADC are sewage sludge, ground up tires, construction and demolition waste, compost, “green material”, and my personal favorite, the residue of shredded automobiles:

Continue reading There’s no place like “away”

Shared Links for Jun 25th – Jun 26th

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Shared Links for Jun 25th

Shared Links for Jun 15th

  • Being “Used To” Our Lifestyle Makes Change Seem Difficult – The range of lifestyles which people have been able to become accustomed to and enjoy throughout history and spread out over the globe, is immense. Some of them are sustainable; ours is not. The willingness to experiment and accept change, to be flexible at a societal level, is of paramount importance today, and has in the past meant the difference between survival and obliteration for countless other civilizations, as detailed in Jarod Diamond's book "Collapse". But change is hard, whether you drive an SUV and have managed to shave your lifestyle requirements down to 8 earths from 10, or whether you're the child of a prostitute in Calcutta. We are creatures of habit, quite literally. (tagged: sustainability film energy green stuff money )
  • The Need for Geoengineering – A WSJ op-ed advocating near term geoengineering, of the stratospheric sulfate aerosol variety. It would be fast acting, relatively easy to reverse, and of the options on the table today, is the least mysterious, since it's not so different from the effects of a large (historically speaking) volcanic eruption like Mt. Pinatubo. The author cautions that even at best, all this would do is give us time: we still need to get the atmosphere back to ~350ppm. What a fascinating modern age it is we live in! (tagged: climate technology geoengineering )
  • Early Reviews of NYC’s New High Line Park – A round up of several reviews of the High Line Park, which has just opened in NYC. (tagged: architecture urban design landscape garden parks nyc )
  • The High Line – An abandoned elevated freight rail line in Manhattan is reborn as a long linear park three stories above the streetscape. I love how the design incorporates the rails and the overgrown feeling that the old line had developed on its own. This and the closure of Broadway at Times Square makes me want to visit New York. Inspiring to see that this kind of change is possible. (tagged: urban design architecture green garden parks nyc )
  • Pedalpalooza 2009 – Wow, a two week long bicycle festival in Portland, spanning the summer solstice? Sounds like a wonderful way to start a bike tour! Hopefully it will still be going on next summer. (tagged: bicycle transportation oregon portland festival activism )

Shared Links for Jun 12th

  • Your Backyard Farmer – A couple of women in Portland who will do your organic vegetable gardening for you! They visit dozens of personal gardens all over Portland every day to tend their micro-fields, and can help teach you how to grow too. If we're willing to pay people to come do landscaping (and certainly "we" seem to be willing to do that in Pasadena), why not vegetables too? I've thought about this business model in the past too. Seemed like it would probably be a lot of work, and not a whole lot of pay, but it does have the advantage of starting up with virtually no capital. Just hand tools, seeds, and smiles 🙂 (tagged: gardening food green urban sustainability business )
  • Are we ready for honesty? | Jerusalem Post – A right-wing Israeli talks about what an honest discussion about the Israel-Palestine conflict would look like. Should they annex the West Bank formally, and set up a greater Israel in which the Arabs cannot vote? Should they expel the Arab Israelis in exchange for removing all the settlers? It might sound like crazy talk… but at some level, the questions he brings up are the real questions Israel has to deal with, no matter how ugly they might be. (tagged: israel palestine obama war policy westbank gaza terrorism )
  • China Begins Its Transition to a Clean-Energy Economy – Lots of great plans from the Chinese leadership, but are they actually enforceable, implementable, or verifiable, even by China's own government? And even if they are, the terrifying fact is that they don't end up reducing emissions, they just end up slowing the rate of increase, what what we really need is a virtual cessation of CO2 emissions worldwide. The universe is not required to be accordance with human ambition. (tagged: energy china climate policy politics )
  • Wordnik – A site for anyone who loves words and language. More than a dictionary, different from the Wiktionary, fun and social. Give words a life of their own! (tagged: education language dictionary technology web2.0 )
  • Conservative Cyclists Transcend Cultural Stereotypes – As with sustainability more generally, we're only likely to make progress on cycling when it can stop being a partisan issue. Thankfully I'm not the only one who likes it because it's cheap! (tagged: bicycle transportation politics )

O Brave New World, Where Are You?

After coming across Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s TED talk recently, and already being familiar with his stunning aerial photography, I was excited to see his film Home, about the Earth, and its dwellers.  It is probably the most beautiful film I have ever seen.  The BBCs Planet Earth is gorgeous, but Home is far better.  Every scene is a piece of art, like his photography, but in motion.  I would pay to see it in high definition.  The first half hour or so is a kind of naturalistic creation myth: true, but poetic.  The formation of the Earth.  The rise of the cyanobacteria, and the oxygenation of our atmosphere.  The eventual emergence of our own species and the journey we took from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists, to city dwelling, fossil fueled, rulers of the world.

But there it stumbles.  While what it says is true, it is not enough.  The truth alone is no longer sufficient.  The film is blind, or nearly so, to the future that we need to see.  It’s too easy, given the truth we have inherited, to envision a dark future.  Vague assertions that the solutions are at hand are not enough.  He exclaims, and rightly so, that “We don’t want to believe what we know.”  For some reason, we are afraid to envision a bright future.  Maybe it’s because throughout the 20th century, the bright futures we envisioned often turned dark.  Social progress became World Wars and gulags.  Technological progress became mustard gas, ICBMs and DDT.  Economic progress became the Depression and the disingenuous promise of perpetual growth through the liquidation of our natural capital.  I agree that we don’t have time to be pessimists, but fodder for pessimism seems to be almost the only content out there in the environmental sphere.  And it’s getting old.

Lagos NigeriaCC by babypinkgrl2003

Continue reading O Brave New World, Where Are You?