Keerist–they’re kicking our ass, and lamenting how poorly they’ve done. The mother country, showing what responsible leadership is all about:

Government admits pollution target unrealistic

Hilary Osborne
Wednesday January 31, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Mist and pollution over the City of London. Photograph: Matthew Fearn/PA

The UK will struggle to hit its 2010 target for reducing carbon emissions, the environment secretary said today.While the country is on track to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by almost double its Kyoto target, David Miliband said the domestic goal of cutting CO2 emissions by 20% on 1990 levels “looked increasingly difficult to achieve”.

More after the jump 

Entry Keywords:

Aww, shucks. On message and everthang:

Entry Keywords:Blue, burning man, camera girl, Coolingman, gasifier, jim mason, larry harvey solar

Just a few days left to submit proposals for the ScrapEdenSF project!
Artist’s proposals are due January 31, 2007. The Black Rock Arts Foundation
has launched a public art project for the environment: ScrapEdenSF.
Neighborhood groups will each collaborate with an artist in the creation of
temporary public sculptures made from reclaimed and recycled materials. BRAF
is now accepting applications for artist’s proposals. Learn how you can
participate!  We plan to award grants to artists ranging from $5,000-$12,000
per project. Grant info and application:
http://www.blackrockarts.org/grants/scrapeden-sf-artist-application

Working with the Neighborhood Parks Council, BRAF has identified three
community groups associated with SF neighborhood parks to participate in the pilot phase of ScrapEden SF. Congratulations to the community groups
associated with the following parks: Juri Commons (Mission neighborhood),
Parque Ninos Unidos (Mission neighborhood), and Panhandle Park (NOPA/
Panhandle/ Upper Haight). For more information about the groups and their
parks: http://www.blackrockarts.org/projects/scrapeden-sf-park-sites

Do you live in the Mission, NOPA, Panhandle, or Upper Haight?  Interested in
knowing what BRAF has going on in your SF ‘hood?  Send an email with your
neighborhood in the subject line to ScrapEdenSF Project Director Rachel
Weidinger at  rachelann@blackrockarts.org .  She’ll keep you in the loop
about nifty goings on in 2007 in your very own neighborhood (and maybe even
on your block!)

Rachel Weidinger
Project Director
Black Rock Arts Foundation
www.blackrockarts.org
415-793-2939 Mobile
415-626-1248 General office
1900 3rd Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA, 94158
rachelann@blackrockarts.org
AIM & Yahoo!IM: rachelweidinger

Entry Keywords:

Stories like this make me believe, for a moment, that we just might turn the corner on this sucker.

In other news: our guy in Reno turns out to be the solar industry’s guy in Reno. Could help broker a deal, and could help at the legislature in Carson City this year in getting the caps moved from 30KW per meter eligible for rebates up to 1MW.

Entry Keywords:

Snipped from comments from SFist this morning.

From reusablebags.com/facts.php?id=7 we see that:

Energy to produce: Plastic 594 BTUs, 2511 BTUs. Besides the obvious global warming issues, this means that making paper bags spews more crap into our air an rivers killing animals and humans alike (just not in a way you can take a picture of like with an animal choking on a bag.

Paper sacks generate 70% more air and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags. Not even close, paper sucks here. Think of all the animals that die in rivers from waterborne pollutants from people choosing paper.

Energy to recycle 1 bag: Plastic, 17 BTUs, Paper 1444 BTUs. There’s many secondary effects here — all the energy to heat up a paper bag vat of chemical goo for recycling causes power plants to spew more crap into the air, release carbon, etc.

Current research demonstrates that paper in today’s landfills does not degrade or break down at a substantially faster rate than plastic does.

It’s not even close. If you have to use a nonreusable bag, choose plastic and then try to recycle it at Safeway when you’re done. Even if you don’t recycle plastic is the clear winner.

Entry Keywords:plastic recycling

One last post for this morning, then to my coffee. At last night’s BRC GWG ( that’s Black Rock City Green Working Group ) Energy subcommittee meeting, I heard from Blue about the incredible challenges he’s had to overcome getting to use even a couple biodiesel generators out there. How our primary vendor United Rental won’t allow us to use the juice in their machines, and how he’s had to look high and low for another company, Kohler, that will.

Fast forward. Guy comes last night who know’s the VP of another company that’s now open to biofuels. Long conversation short, we’re now going to try to rent an entire fleet of biodiesel generators. How to fuel them, you ask?

Bentley Biofuels is a company in Minden, NV that collects used vegetable oil from restaurants in northern Nevada and processes it into biofuel.

So, if we put this deal together, we could go from using 20,000 gallons of diesel from Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Texas, and other human rights war zones, or instead 20K gallons from, say, Sparks, Reno, and Truckee. I’ll take door number two for the planet, Alex. Stay tuned.

Entry Keywords:Bentley Biofuels, biofuel, Blue, BRC GWG

Leave it to les bleus to take French Fry juice and make it sexy.

Here’s a story about a new Peugeot diesel that gets 69mph. Of course, as you know from our previous lecture series, diesel=biodiesel after some mods. ( Reminds me, we need a glossary explaining biodiesel et al ).

Entry Keywords:biodiesel hybrid

In this morning’s Washington Post is a very good story outlining the challenges facing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and really any national politician, who wants to explore climate change in a legitimate way. One big one: her own party’s honchos, like Detroit’s own John Dingell. A snippet:

Act Fast vs. Go Slow

---

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) is worried about the future on a hotter planet, and the posters in his office show why. There’s Glacier National Park, where Inslee believes “there will be no glaciers in 50 years.” There’s Mount Rainier, where alpine meadows are retreating as higher temperatures push the tree line higher. There’s a photo of his 28-year-old son, Connor, skiing down Washington’s Stevens Pass; two years ago, there was so little snow on the mountain that Connor could only work on the ski patrol for a few days.

For the first decade of Inslee’s congressional career, Republicans controlled Congress, and emissions-reduction rules were about as likely as new gun restrictions or same-sex marriage rights. But now Inslee and many of his colleagues speak with a fervor reminiscent of the GOP revolutionaries who seized the House in 1995 and immediately wanted to shake things up.

“The flat-Earth society has been removed from power,” Inslee said. “This opens the door to meaningful change.”

Inslee is just a back-bencher on Energy and Commerce, but he is already trying to hash out details of climate change legislation. Last week, he spent an hour on the phone with Duke Energy chief executive Jim Rogers, who has endorsed a limit on carbon emissions. They delved into the details of how a limit could work, how to promote cleaner technologies, how it is easier to sequester carbon in the soil in Indiana than in North Carolina.

Inslee has no patience for the go-slow crowd that thinks Democrats would be smarter to grandstand the climate issue in 2008, then work with an eco-friendlier president in 2009. He wants to get to work.

“This should not be a planning year,” he said. “This should not be a debating year. This should be an action year.”

Dingell represents the other side of the debate, the side that is quick to point out that overzealous restrictions on emissions could decimate the U.S. economy. He wants to hold extensive hearings on climate change, to investigate the problem, if in fact it is a problem, and what it might cost to try to address it. That is the way he has dealt with issues since he came to Congress during the first Eisenhower administration. He says global warming will be a priority for his committee, but clearly not the only priority.

“We’ve got Medicaid, Medicare, health insurance, prescription drugs,” Dingell said. “We’ve got leaky underground storage tanks.”

Leaky underground storage tanks? When Glacier National Park is melting?

****

You can see her problem.

Entry Keywords:

Today, prepping the board members individually on the solar project for Gerlach and Lovelock, in advance of the board meeting tomorrow, at which time I hope to get formal sign off.

It’s pretty incredible and somewhat complex, so I should probably capture the players and parts:

1. Using rebates and tax incentives, a burner friendly CEO of the world’s only renewable energy VC firm (Renewable Ventures) will bankroll purchase/installation of 150+/-KW of solar power in Gerlach, and perhaps the same in Lovelock. The town will see the power bill on the school, fire station, senior center etc drop 90%+ percent.
2. BRAF could/will work as a fiscal part of the puzzle, delivering non-profit status to the project, and recouping perhaps a steady stream of revenue in return.

3. BWB provides low cost labor/social engineering, and gets a hella cool volunteer project.
4. Sierra Power’s Solar Generations project ( ably led by Scott Gerz ) does a big conservation/efficiency push in Gerlach on Earth Day, dropping the towns usage of energy 20-40% in a weekend. Cost to residents? Zero.  They’ll also do the tech specs for the racks, making them elevated for safety on the playa and easily converted to shaded parking in Gerlach. They’ll use the exercise as a training ground for their engineers, and hopefully help get a few DPW folks certified as installers. Waaay better than being a barrista in the off season.
5. Coolingman donors ( and all other participants ) will drive through town to the event and be able to see their dollars in action, perhaps enjoying a bit of shade from the panels–some will go in before the event, the rest after.

6. Burning Man gets to help gift Gerlach/Lovelock with low cost juice, and gets a very accessible story about taking our gifting values off the playa.

7. Renewable Ventures gets a story about large scale application of their work.

8. Sierra Power gets a wonderful showcase of renewable energy.

9. Gerlach ( fingers crossed ) gets to be, if we scale it enough, the first town in the world to generate more energy than they use.

10. We reduce or eliminate 2,000,000 watt hours of fossil fuel based global warming gasses from the atmosphere. By the end of the year. At no cash cost to anyone.

A gift, given, gives, and moves on to repeat itself. I really hope we can make this work. There must be a thousand snags; time to sharpen my machete.

Entry Keywords:BRAF, BWB, Coolingman, DPW, gerlach, lovelock, renewable ventures, Scott Gerz, Sierra Power solar

The numbers are what the numbers are. And sure, things certainly aren’t always what they appear to be. But you plan for them all the same, don’t you? Your mortgage turning into your retirement. Your trips to the gym flattening your belly. The days adding up till it’s vacation time.

So, then, if you can live by those numbers, imperfect, uncertain as they are, can you live with these? More to the point, can any of us?

Read these numbers from the International Panel on Climate Change.
Of course not. Climate change is real. So, then, what are we going to do about it? We’ve got a year to find out.

Entry Keywords:test