It’s Not Carbon Footprint That Matters Most, but Energy Footprint

The global climate never stops changing. Everything changes, even the global climate. Is it getting warmer? Or colder? That’s for the scientists to answer, and it appears that they will take a very long time to come to anything remotely approaching a consensus, which means that all the polarized rhetoric, Gore-bashing, etc. is just so much hot air (not enough to warm the globe, fortunately, though sometimes I wonder).

Is humanity affecting the climate? We’ve affected many other things as our numbers have increased by a factor of 6 in less than two centuries – a blink of an eye in natural time. If our numbers keep increasing as they have, and our energy use keeps increasing as it is, we will affect the global climate at some point, if we aren’t already. That is another point for scientists to study, and about which there will also probably never be complete agreement. Generally, though, if we are affecting the climate, it is as much tied to our energy use as anything.

Incremental Change Towards Sustainability and How I Maintain My Lawn

Lawns are a relatively recent historical phenomenon.  Lawns didn’t exist except around the palaces of the world (think Versailles) until the 19th century (link), and even then only in the more affluent places like Great Britain.  In North America, though there were some modern lawns in the early 18th century, a good grass seed wasn’t found until around 1930, and due to the more extreme weather lawns had nowhere near the smooth appearance of those in the UK.  While lawnmowers appeared in the 1880’s, the North American lawn didn’t come into its own until homeowners had both hoses and sprinklers for use in the hot summers, and gas-powered rotary lawn mowers, and until the American Garden Club gave lawns a lot of publicity.  With a manual push-type lawnmower people could only keep a relatively small lawn, but powered mowers and irrigation made it possible for many to have huge lawns, especially in the prosperity-driven move to owning huge “McMansions” that occurred at the end of the 20th century.  So how will things change from here on?

How Pundits Support Denial of Climate Change

Some media pundits create a system that promotes and supports denial of climate change. Most media pundits are opportunists by nature. Their pay is based on their ratings, and being controversial gets more attention than being rational. It is to their advantage not only to say startling things and draw attention to themselves, but to nurture constituencies that will bolster their ratings. That is one of the ways human nature interacts with our mass media. Unfortunately, our global challenges just happen to provide excellent opportunities for unscrupulous pundits.

Disposing of the Disposable Society, Part 6 – Repair Versus Replacement

Replacement seems wasteful compared with repair, but is it really?  As we strive to make our stuff last ten times as long in the interest of sustainability and cost savings, will repair shops experience a resurgence?  Over the decades my unscientific eye has detected a significant decrease in the numbers of shoe repair shops, TV and appliance repair shops, and tailors, to name a few.  At first thought it would appear that we will be looking for repairs from time to time to avoid the cost (and ecological impact) of replacement.  Are repairs destined to generally remain too uneconomical to pursue?  How can we be more frugal and decrease our waste stream of discarded products?

A Simple Approach to Climate Change

I was fortunate enough, thanks to Cory Doctorow’s entry on BoingBoing.net (possibly my favorite multi-contributor blog of all time), to catch Cory’s notes on a keynote speechby Dr. Saul Griffith at the O’Reilly ETech Emerging Technology Conference titled “Energy Literacy”, given on March 4, 2008.   In his speech, Dr. Griffith set out some simple steps that need to be done to stabilize the global climate and achieve a sustainable energy infrastructure.

Although this exercise involves some oversimplification, I believe the concept is straight forward and meaningful.  As Dr. Griffith explained, from a global perspective we need to: