Roads to Ruin: Towns Rip Up the Pavement

Asphalt Is Replaced By Cheaper Gravel; ‘Back to Stone Age’

WSJ

Photo source: Pawe Kuniar

---

Copyright © 2010 GroovyGreen.com - Start Today :: Save Tomorrow. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact michael@groovygreen.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

ShareThis

I’ve been on the lookout for new environmental blogs.  La Vida Locavore is so good, it got this lazy blogger off his duff to give her a shot out and a link.

Go check the blog out, especially the series on her recent trip to Cuba

Groovy Green readers, any other good blog/website suggestions?

---

Copyright © 2010 GroovyGreen.com - Start Today :: Save Tomorrow. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact michael@groovygreen.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

ShareThis

Oil is spilling at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day into the Gulf of Mexico. The oil slick covers an area of nearly 4,000 sq. miles and growing. It is shaping up to be one of the worst man-made disasters to ever strike the planet. To put the leak in perspective, 5,000 barrels a day is 0.00026% of the U.S.’s daily oil consumption. We “spill” the remaining 99.99974% of that oil into the atmosphere each day.

---

Copyright © 2010 GroovyGreen.com - Start Today :: Save Tomorrow. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact michael@groovygreen.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

ShareThis

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to move almost 200 chimpanzees to the Southwest National Primate Research Facility in San Antonio, Texas, where they will be subjected to painful, invasive experiments.
Submitted by Borg Drone to Offbeat  |   Note-it!  |   Add a Comment

Cooking chicken on the grill this summer? Be careful. Poultry is still the leading culprit in food poisoning outbreaks, health officials said Thursday.
Submitted by Katie Miller to Health & Wellness  |   Note-it!  |   Add a Comment

One man drove 12,238 miles across 30 states to scrawl a message that can only be viewed using Google Earth. His big shoutout: “Read Ayn Rand.”

Submitted by Nancy Bridget to Science & Tech  |   Note-it!  |   Add a Comment

José Saramago, 1998 Nobel Laureate in Literature, died 18 June, at age 87. Read his autobiography here.

This week we pay tribute to World Refugee Day which was highlighted on June 20 by the United Nations and to Nobel Prize Awarded refugees. Read more about these Nobel Laureates who have been forced to flee from their countries.

See the most recent questions people have posed to Nobel Laureate in Physics 2004, David Gross, on YouTube. "How big is space?" "What is string theory?" You still have time to pose your own video or text question via Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/notes/nobelprizeorg/ask-a-nobel-laureate-on-facebook-david-gross-nobel-prize-in-physics-2004/398324121719) or YouTube. Deadline to submit questions is June 25.

Today, Alex Steffen tweeted "Dale Carrico writes one of the smartest things I've ever read on geoengineering" and linked to this article: "Geo-Engineering" As Futurological Greenwashing. Alex is currently on vacation, so this must be good to have brought him back to his laptop!

Please click the link above to read the whole piece, or read on for a few highlights.

Carrico on what's wrong with the term "geo-engineering" and the discourse that surrounds it:

I personally believe that the reason so many people are unaware of "geo-engineering" is probably because there is no such thing as "geo-engineering" for them to be aware of, and that a very good reason that so few people can say "what geo-engineering even is" is because there is no such thing as "geo-engineering" that actually is anything in particular to say something about.

[...]

... the futurological discourse of "geo-engineering" actually functions to create the appearance of a phenomenon where there is none, it functions as futurological frames tend to do as a derangement of sense, a distraction from substance onto non-substance, a substitute of frivolous over-generalities and hyperbolic promises for deliberation about actually complex, actually contingent technodevelopmental problems with a diversity of stakeholders.

Later in the article Carrico critiques the practice of lumping together various approaches to geo-engineering:

The example Mooney does provide of what "geo-engineering" actually would consist of is "injecting sulfur particles into the stratosphere that would reflect sunlight away from the Earth, thereby causing a global cooling." What I would draw your attention to is that this proposal is actually only one of a ramifying suite of mega-engineering wet-dreams that futurologists start handwaving about when talk turns to "geo-engineering." A New York Times article already four years old (futurologists tend to pretend their pet formulations are startling and new even after they grow whiskers, as witness the dead-enders who still crow breathlessly about the imminence of superintelligent AI) provided a nice summary of the sorts of proposals would-be "geo-engineers" bandy about in its first paragraph: "Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases."

Now, why on earth would it make sense to corral all these interventions together with Mooney's own example and then say of them, as Mooney does, that together they constitute a single "technology," or as the New York Times article does that together they constitute a single "emerging field"? I submit that everything that matters most about each of these proposals in terms of deliberation about their plausible effects, their costs, their risks, their benefits, their stakeholders differ from one another in absolutely indispensable ways. And it is hard to see why, given these differences, anything much about the relative success of one of these efforts would necessarily justify confidence that any of the others would have comparable success.

[...]

Not to put too fine a point on it, the notion of "geo-engineering" seems to me to subsume far too many actually substantially different techniques in the service of far too many actually substantially different outcomes to be of much practical use in any of the deliberations into which it is being injected so enthusiastically by futurologists.

Further, Carrico argues that the vast and confused collection of geo-engineering techniques that gain momentum in the geo-engineering discourse are those that serve industrial and authoritarian interests (and depress the success of proposals for combating climate change that are less technical and more "human-scaled, democratically-accountable, p2p-distributed lifeway formations"):

Even if the actual definitions and analyses of the "geo-engineering" "concept" never manage to provide a coherent and compelling case as to why they include such a disparate constellation of proposals under the same heading while always interestingly excluding mainstream regulatory and educational proposals from consideration under that heading, one can immediately make sense of the grouping if one simply makes expedient recourse to considerations of who profits from what proposals and who loses control over society from what proposals.

The mega-scale engineering proposals that are inevitably championed by futurological prophets-for-hire would without exception be undertaken by vast industrial concerns, helmed by military contractors and multinational corporations under the control of incumbent-elite actors. The legislative and educational approaches of mainstream environmentalism would either directly lower the profitability of such concerns by taxing and regulating them or indirectly do the same by changing the wasteful and destructive hysteria of consumer lifestyle capitalism as such. Furthermore, many mainstream green proposals for the subsidization of edible ecosystem appropriate landscaping and roof-top solar panels yield relocalization and decentralization of production in ways that are less susceptible to authoritarian hierarchical capture and exploitation than are the vast capital-intensive industrial formations like the nuclear plants or orbiting solar sails suave techno-boosters seem to prefer.

The discourse of geo-engineering is dangerous because, as Carrico argues, it inhibits real democratic action and appropriate solutions to climate change in favor of supporting the status quo and providing profits for the few:

From the reactionary denial that human agency could possibly impact the whole vast and resourceful planet on which we all depend for survival and flourishing, we find ourselves confronted by a reactionary denial that the collective democratic agency of everyday people can preserve this vast and resourceful planet on which we all depend for survival and flourishing.

Far from a startlingly new or radical idea, "geo-engineering" seems to me little more than a very familiar, very old-fashioned insistence on the part of corporate-military incumbent-elites that nothing from which they cannot profit and prosper themselves should ever count as real or as possible or as important. All the substance and consistency of "geo-engineering" as an analytic category, as a set of imaginary or actual techniques, or as a program of proposals derives from the preferential benefit it confers to incumbent interests in the midst of a burgeoning planetary awareness and activism that otherwise threatens those interests with the loss of their unearned privileges and status in the world we are making, peer to peer, in the name of sustainability and fairness.

Again, it is worth reading Carrico's full article.

Alex has similarly argued that geo-engineering is a form of greenwashing in this post.

Jamais Cascio has written a response to Carrico's piece over at Open the Future:

But here's the ugly truth: nature doesn't care about democracy, or who's right, or what's fair. And because of the slow-change aspect of climate, we can't wait until the worst effects are upon us to make a decision -- by then, it would be far, far too late. The scenario we may be faced with is one where doing something for the wrong reasons, run by the wrong people, may still save more lives than holding out for a more appealing option.

It looks like a lively debate has begun!

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Amanda Reed in Climate Change at 4:15 PM)

The publishers of "The Little Book of Shocking Global Facts" is releasing a successor this fall: "The Little Book of Shocking Eco Facts." The book is by Mark Crundwell and Cameron Dunn, with illustrations by Barnbrook Design. Much like its predecessor the book will be filled with striking illustrations and 'shocking' facts about our rainforests, wetlands, seas, and more. The intention of the book is to build awareness about threats to the natural world, in an effort to inspire people to "help avert the needless destruction of our shared and beautiful world."

As a very visually oriented person with a great curiosity for 'eco' facts and figures (but alas, not much of a memory for them), I'm a sucker for infographics and cool illustrations paired with data and compiled into a portable volume...and I thought other Worldchanging readers out there might be too.

Here's a preview of some of the contents from the book courtesy of Fast Company:

In the mountain forests of the Colombian Andes, 1/3 of bird species have gone extinct in the last 80 years. (via Fast Company)

Raw rain forest, if it's simply stripped and converted to pasture, is worth about $150 per hectare per year. But if it's used instead for sustainable uses, that figure rises to $1175. (via Fast Company)

Singapore is a microcosm of ecological collapse: Since it was first colonized, it has lost 99.8 percent of its forest cover, and 26 percent of its natural species. (via Fast Company)

Light bulbs account for 25 percent of all the electricity we use; 75 percent of that could be saved by switching from incandescent bulbs to CFLs. (via Fast Company)

Methane concentration in the atmosphere has gone up by 148 percent since 1750, and methane, as a greenhouse gas, has been shown to be 21 times more harmful carbon dioxide. (via Fast Company)

11 of the 18 species of penguin are suffering population declines; seven are classified as vulnerable; and four are endangered. (via Fast Company)

The ocean absorbs massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the air. As a result, since 1800, the ocean's pH has dropped to from 8.2 to 8.1 and the ocean's life is extraordinarily fine tuned to water acidity. If current trends continue, the ocean's pH will be 7.8 by 2070. (via Fast Company)

(via Tonic)

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Amanda Reed in Resource - Planet at 2:30 PM)

Is Your Home Less Affordable Than You Think, or More?

by Ben Fried

This spring, the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology made a big policy splash when they released the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index. CNT's work -- including a nifty mapping tool -- made it easy to see that "affordable" housing wasn't so affordable when it's located in car-dependent areas that come saddled with high but under appreciated transportation costs.

Over at Grist, Jonathan Hiskes reports that CNT has turned their data into a consumer-friendly web app called Abogo (a portmanteau of "abode" plus "go"). With Abogo, currently in beta form, you enter an address and it spits out the average monthly transportation costs you can expect to pay, and how that compares to the regional average. You can also look at a neighborhood, city or region and look at how it stacks up:

In the Abogo mapping tool, the Bronx shows up as a green area with low transportation costs.

Hiskes writes:

CNT's hope is that the information nudges homebuyers and renters toward more compact, walkable places -- or at least gives them a more realistic picture of what it costs to live in auto-dependent neighborhoods.

"When you choose a home, you're choosing a location and everything that has to do with that location," said Stefanie Shull, a CNT policy analyst. "That location determines how much you're going to have to drive to take care of your daily needs."

Earlier this week, Hiskes highlighted another piece of location visualization news: The folks at WalkScore are about to update their own consumer-friendly web app for prospective movers. WalkScore's rating system will soon reflect actual walking routes, instead of as-the-crow-flies distances, which will spell the end of walkability algorithms based on the notion that one can walk across buildings, highways, and bodies of water.

Next up: The Abogo/WalkScore mash-up?

This post originally appeared on Streetsblog.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Resource - Cities at 1:45 PM)