Coyote Crossing

Individual signers can read the text of the Call To Action below, or click on the widget and read it at change.org. If you belong to an organization that might like to endorse this Call To Action — and there are already quite a few prominent organizational endorsers! — send an email to that effect to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) We’re looking for all kinds of organizations: civic groups, chambers of commerce, professional organizations, PTAs, etc, so your group doesn’t have to be a standard green organization to sign on.

We’ll be delivering the signatures to a number of different people in early 2012.  And very importantly: once you’ve signed, tell your friends. We need more signatures.

Solar Done Right Call To Action for Energy Democracy

Whereas,

We must take rapid, effective, innovative action to change the ways we generate and use energy;

Renewable energy is ubiquitous, offering a new model of energy generation that is local, democratic, and free from the abuses of a centralized monopoly;

The US government’s current renewable-energy policy and the policies of most US states push industrial solar and wind development onto public lands;

This industrial development is proposed for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of acres of our public lands—much of that acreage consisting of intact ecosystems which provide habitat for rare and endangered plants and animals, sequester carbon, and offer the chance for ecosystem adaptation to climate change;

The utility-scale solar and wind generating plants now proposed, most with footprints of several thousand acres, would transform these ecologically-rich, multiple-use lands to single use industrial facilities, in effect privatizing vast areas of public lands;

Once developed, those lands cannot be returned to their previous state after the life of a project – conversion is total and permanent, even though most such projects will generate power for only 15 to 30 years;

The thousands of miles of new transmission infrastructure necessary to carry power from remote solar and wind electric generating plants to urban demand centers drastically inflates the cost of renewable energy, while imposing its own serious environmental impacts;

The federal government has provided tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in cash grants, loans and loan guarantees for remote industrial-scale solar and wind development to many of the same corporations that have dominated the Fossil Fuel Era, created the problems renewable energy is designed to rectify, and helped hasten the recession, while states and local governments have incurred substantial costs to expedite these for-profit projects;

Efficiency upgrades and “distributed generation”—point-of-use energy generation on rooftops, in parking lots and highway medians, brownfields, and throughout the built environment—are cost-effective, efficient, clean, and democratic strategies that are quick to implement, and would serve communities, ratepayers, and taxpayers by improving local economies and adding to home values, and creating millions of local jobs;

Efficiency and distributed generation further have far less environmental impact than industrial scale solar or wind power on intact ecosystems, while making our electrical power grid far less prone to catastrophic failure;

Feed-In Tariffs (FITs) and true net metering programs, in which utilities purchase democratically produced, decentralized renewable energy at a fair price, have been proven a cost-effective way of stimulating rapid deployment of local solar and other distributed generation, while providing economic stimulus to communities rather than multinational corporations, even in cloudy countries like Germany;

The Environmental Protection Agency’s “Re-Powering America’s Lands” program has identified 15 million acres of degraded or contaminated land potentially suitable for renewable energy development, and is committed to working with renewable energy developers to remediate these lands for use as utility-scale renewable energy generation sites where large projects may be desirable.

THEREFORE, WE DEMAND:

That the Federal and state governments abandon their current path of industrialization and destruction of our public lands;

That any large-scale solar or wind installations be restricted to degraded, contaminated, or already-developed lands, including those identified by the EPA;

That Federal, state, and local governments facilitate a massive deployment of efficiency
upgrades and point-of-use solar power;

That no new large, long-distance electrical transmission projects be approved to serve remote solar or wind projects until distributed power generation and energy efficiency are maximized;

That the Federal Housing Finance Agency immediately lift its de facto freeze on property assessed clean energy (PACE) loans, which provide critical low-risk financing for efficiency upgrades and home energy retrofits;

That Federal and state funding and other incentives be made available to help states establish and expand generous Feed in Tariffs (FITs) modeled after successful programs like Germany’s, and improve net metering policies, and that Congress work to establish the proven solutions of German-style FITs and less-restrictive net metering at a national scale.
————————

Sincerely,

[Your name]

1 comment on "Please Sign the Solar Done Right Call To Action for Energy Democracy"

I’m starting to work on a new project to do pretty much what it says in the image here: to help people explore, respect and defend our irreplaceable desert biodiversity. Oddly, this is a gaping hole in the range of topics environmental groups work on. There are several groups with desert agendas, and some of them are fine indeed, but none work on all living things throughout the desert.

If you’re interested, you can sign up for the Desert Biodiversity email list using this form — if the form actually works here. If not and you’re seeing this text, I’m scurrying to fix it and edit the text RIGHT NOW.

Desert Biodiversity also has a Facebook page here and a Googleplux page here. Both are slightly sketchy at the moment but growing. They’ll grow faster if you share them and comment on them.

Finally, at some point Desert Biodiversity will ask you for money, but until we get the accounting set up if you’d like to offer a little financial and promotional support we do have T-shirts and other gear available. Check it out.

Join the Desert Biodiversity Email List:

1 comment on "Desert Biodiversity"

If you haven’t seen the amazing time-lapse video generated from footage shot by residents of the International Space Station, you should do so now. I’ve embedded it here. It’s undeniably beautiful. But there’s something about it that’s incredibly disturbing. Watch it first, then let’s talk.

What jumps out at you first? Possibly the amazing auroras, a near-solid layer in the atmosphere that fluoresces like a raver’s plastic jewelry. Or maybe it’s the flashes of lightning dancing across whole regions of the dark side of the Earth.

But I’m guessing the amazing degree to which we’ve made our mark on the night-side of our planet is in the top three. Perhaps you even picked out a place you know at night by the patterns of the lights, as I did with the area around Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto and Buffalo at time 00:20-00:21.

Twinkly lights at night can be pretty, though the objections of astronomers and others concerned about the loss of our dark skies are gaining increasing support. When you spend as much time out in the desert as I do, the tiny vestiges of dark sky become increasingly precious. One of the things I’ll miss about where we live: you can actually see more than a handful of stars in the sky from downtown.

There’s a bigger problem, though.

Light is energy. Every single artificial light you see shining from the night-time side of the earth means we are broadcasting a staggering amount of energy out into space, enough energy that the light can be seen shining brightly from 220 miles up,  which is approximately the distance between the ISS and the Earth’s surface. Imagine how powerful a light would have to be for you to see it from 220 miles away, and then imagine the energy used by continents full of those lights. To a first approximation, all of that light is generated with electrical power — though open flames here and there may add a few lumens to the total, it wouldn’t be much. Assuming figures from a couple of years ago are still accurate, half that electricity in the United States comes from burning coal, another fifth from burning natural gas, with nukes, hydro, diesel and a few other sources making up the remainder.

Those lights you see, in other words, come mainly from burning fossil fuels.

This isn’t news, really. But think about what we use those lights for: safety and security, comfort, productivity, reading at night and deterring crime and reading the street number of the house to which you’re delivering the pizza, and a thousand other things.

None of those arguably worthwhile goals are accomplished by shining light into space, but that’s what we’re doing. We want to fill our local, nighttime environments with enough light to be comfortable and secure, but aside from those lights intended to direct aircraft, we end up wasting every single photon directed skyward. That’s about 30 percent of a typical unshielded outdoor lightsource.

Tracking down the source of that glare of light being seen from the ISS is complex. There’s stationary outdoor lighting such as streetlamps, traffic signals and other such fixtures, which accounts for about eight percent of the energy used in lighting. There are household and industrial exterior lights, generally not tracked as a distinct subsection of each location’s total lighting budget. There’s glare through windows from brightly lit building interiors. There’s vehicular lighting. But just that first category — streetlights, stoplights, etc. — consumes the output of more than 15 gigawatts of electrical generating capacity in the US, which means the energy just that category of outdoor lighting wastes into space is a little more than 5 gigawatts’ worth of generating capacity. Half that mix comes from coal, which works out to 7 million tons of coal burned to illuminate the underside of the ISS as it flies over the US each year.

According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, there’s a low-tech way around this issue:

If 30 percent or more of the light from a typical outdoor source is wasted into space, as shown on the left side of the above envelope, then simply putting a reflective cover over that bulb (as seen on right) would bounce those ISS_bound photons back down onto the sidewalk where we could use them. This would mean that we could swap out that 100W bulb on left for a 30 percent dimmer one, keep our sidewalks just as well illuminated, and burn less coal and oil while keeping our night skies darker.

For perspective, that 5 gigawatts of generating capacity wasted just by stationary outdoor lights and not counting private homes’ and businesses’ outdoor lighting, fugitive indoor lighting, or lighting from vehicles? That’s about 40 times the generating capacity of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System. Not that Ivanpah will power streetlights: they go on at night when solar doesn’t work. But still. We could retire that much fossil fuel burning by killing 148,000 acres of desert, or we could put hats on streetlights and cut down their wattage a bit. And like I said, that’s not counting the 1000-watt floodlight over your neighbor’s deck that shines into your bedroom window.

So when I look at the video here, my glee at seeing aurorae in the Van Allen Belt is tempered a bit by the reminder of just how profligately we waste electrical power. If it’s such a scarce and dangerous commodity, threatening to bake our planet, so that we have to kill native deserts for industrial solar and wind, why are we flinging terawatts of it into space where we’ll never get it back?

10 comments on "Energy waste as seen by the International Space Station"

7 comments on "Though leaving the Sierra Club was wrenching,"

With enough distance now from the marriage, the dog, and the last of my gardens, I have been able the last few days to summon the fortitude to sort through old garden writing — much of it previously published in a proto-e-book entitled The Irascible Gardener about six years ago — for publication in an actual dead trees book in the next couple of months.

As the book mainly concerns gardening and related activities and subjects in the San Francisco Bay Area — though I suspect many of the themes and topics therein will be universal enough that people in New Jersey might find the book worthwhile — I’ve stolen taken inspiration from a fragment of song from the Ohlone people, native to the Bay Area, for the working title: Gardening on the Edge of The World.

The book consists of essays and articles I wrote between 1990 and 2008 or so, a few of them on this blog, but most in print publications both regional and not.

Here’s an example, first written for the Contra Costa Times.

Helen

My ferns seem to have made it through the winter outside. There are three of them. The two birds’ nest ferns are sending up new flat fronds through a nest of winter-killed foliage. The third, a staghorn, barely hangs on in its favored spot on the fence beneath the juniper. Houseplants all, I exiled them to the elements in October.

This was tough love. A few months of careful cleaning had failed to rid the ferns of their infestation of scale. Small armored relatives of aphids and mealy bugs, scale are one of a fern grower’s worst enemies. Insecticides capable of killing the insects are often dangerous to ferns’ tender foliage. Besides, I don’t particularly want to breathe the stuff in. So out they went, in the hope that one of California’s many scale-eating insects would do the job.

We acquired the ancestors of our current crop of scale five years ago, in an Aglaonema — a so-called “Chinese evergreen.” The plant was a memento of a former neighbor. When we took it, we didn’t know about the stowaways beneath the leaf stems.

We were a little distracted.

Our neighbor Helen was in her thirties, lithe, blonde, and compassionate. She’d moved in after a string of noisy tenants. Her tranquillity was a relief.

We never became best friends, but in the year and a half we knew her, we appreciated the kindness she showed and did our best to return it. Sometimes our dog Zeke would howl in anguish in our absence; Helen would speak comfort to him through the wall. When she felt too ill to go out, we’d bring back groceries for her. She never asked for much, in errands or in the rest of life. The last time I talked to her we talked about unattainable wishes. Hers brought me up short: simply to live with her daughter in a real home.

Helen was not our neighbor’s real name. AIDS is an unpopular disease, and the families of its victims still contend with public fear. Helen’s mother, when we’d meet her dropping off her toddler granddaughter for a short visit, was self-conscious and uncomfortable. When Helen died, she spent no more than a day sorting her daughter’s things, taking a few heirlooms for the toddler, then asked a few neighbors to take what we wanted before the trash people came. Becky took a plain white bowl and the Aglaonema.

I once bought a blue VW beetle from a friend, a law school graduate heading overseas. The car ran perfectly until he handed me the key and left, at which point the engine welded together. Friends said the car died of grief over John leaving for Tibet. So it was with that Aglaonema.  They’re among the easiest houseplants to maintain, as long as you don’t let their feet stay wet. But once Helen was gone, this plant was done for. Over the next three years I tried my hardest to keep that thing alive, but to no avail. Each new green leaf would bring a surge of hope, which withered as the new leaf yellowed from the base. Eventually, I hardened my heart, told myself the memories were what mattered, and tossed the plant on the compost heap.

In the meantime, the scale had jumped from the Aglaonema to various other houseplants.

Scale are tenacious insects. Like their more vulnerable aphid cousins, they live by inserting a tube into a plant’s leaves or stems and drinking sap. They look, to the untrained eye, like drops of wax. Small and mobile when young, they find likely spots on a plant, insert their feeding tubes, and secrete a waxy shell that protects them from most enemies. It also cements them in place.

This is no hindrance to reproduction: scale reproduce parthenogenetically, without males. Every so often, baby scales will crawl out from under their mother’s armor, and begin life on their own.

Plants generally have sap to spare, and a few scale should pose no particular threat to a healthy Aglaonema. It’s the volume that makes a difference. Each adult scale can produce hundreds of offspring. Under such an onslaught, even a healthy plant will suffer and die.

A simile looms, but I’ll resist it. Scale spreads far more easily than AIDS, and to far less effect. No need to trivialize people’s suffering with cheap literary devices. Besides, contagion is what life does. Living things find places to live, and do their best to live there. There’s no real insight in that statement: it’s essentially a tautology.

The problems arise when one side wins permanently.

By the time I tossed Helen’s plant, the scale had killed a previous staghorn fern, several Pelargoniums and a Philodendron. I battled them with rubbing alcohol, which strips the wax and dehydrates the insects, and with brute force, crushing them with my fingernails. I’d win long campaigns, only to be surprised when reinforcements appeared from beneath the leaves of my ferns. Eventually, I sent the ferns out into the yard.

They’ve survived. And they’re not the only things that have survived. Among the bright green fiddleheads are bright tan scale, looking tanned and rested after a long dormant season. We have another year of combat to look forward to.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.

2 comments on "An excerpt from my forthcoming garden book"

In our addiction to irony we denigrate the emphatic impact of beauty on the soul, distance oursevles from the immediacy of the esthetic experience. Beauty is a sudden, surprising opening of the boundaries of the universe, an identification of the perceiver with the object perceived. One is struck by a line of music, a stormy sunset, the shiny elytra of a Japanese beetle, and for a moment the center of the universe is no longer securely contained within one’s skull. The flower becomes the center of the universe.

We counter the compelling by demoting it to “information.” Use that value-neutral term rather than “art” or “craft” or “poetry” or “thought”, and the danger is reduced. And if that evisceration proves insufficient then irony serves as a further defense, the jaded ridiculing of the beautiful and good so as to reduce its ability to knock us from our safe seats in the centers of our worlds.

4 comments on "Why reflexive irony is bad for you"

We’re going to be leaving the desert at some undetermined but not too-distant point in the future. We’re discussing where to go next. The Bay Area heads the list. We have to make it work, of course, so some of our plans will depend on the results of job hunting.

Regardless of where we land, I won’t be giving up desert activism — though I might not be doing it full time if I find a job that isn’t doing desert activism. I’ve done desert commuting from 400 miles away before, and I can do it again. In fact, there’s some important work to be done in the Bay Area educating people about the value of the desert: The Bay Area, after all, is the headquarters of the Sierra Club, as well as Brightsource, First Solar and a few other organizations that urgently need their priorities straightened out vis-a-vis the deserts.

But we just haven’t been able to make it work here for us, professionally or personally. And it’s time to work on cutting our losses.

So now you know. Let me know if you have the perfect job for either of us.

23 comments on "Leaving the desert"