» 2007 » July

Air travel is the latest guilt trip for the environmentally conscious consumer. Here’s how flying contributes to global warming and what is being done to cool the jets.

This spring, meteorologist Robert Henson was thrilled to be one of the six finalists for the prestigious Royal Society Prize for Science Books for “The Rough Guide to Climate Change.” There was only one problem: All finalists were required to appear at the awards ceremony. Henson lives in Boulder, Colo. The ceremony was in London.

The irony of jetting halfway around the globe and back — merrily spewing the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming — to honor a book about the pressing dangers of the warming planet was not lost on the meteorologist. “I wanted to be there, and I had agreed I would be there by entering the contest,” says Henson. “But I wanted to do it in the most greenhouse-friendly way that I could.”

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS » Unfortunately fellow travelers, we should be paying the real cost for flights which should include carbon offsets (at least until we find a way to eliminate emissions) and that cost should be imposed by government regulation and not left up to the consumer whom on average is loathe to pay a sent more than they have to in order to be stuffed like a sardine in a tin can onto an airplane. But maybe you have a better idea other than simply not flying, which infringes on our god-given right to travel at will.

Is it crazy to imagine free public transit? Or crazy not to?

Dave Olsen is not shy about his advocacy for bicyclists and sustainable transportation. As one newspaper wrote about him, Olsen “carpet-bombs city bureaucrats with e-mails (and copies correspondence to media) about anything from dangerous crosswalks and potholes to fences blocking off downtown cycle paths during Canada Line construction. If a pothole wrecked your morning commute, chances are Olsen has already made some city engineer’s life hell over it.”

Olsen grew up in North Delta and has seen the region sprawl while growing ever more reliant on the automobile. He often wondered why passengers were forced to fork over handfuls of change every time they boarded a bus, or to pay escalating costs for transit passes. Other social goods, from schools to health care to the road system, are funded by the broader public through taxes, and daily use is free of charge. Why not the same for public transit, especially since charging for it tends to penalize the poorest in society, and encourage polluting behaviour?

Source: www.theytyee.ca/…

LS » This is the kind of thing that we as a society should be seriously exploring. Could you imagine what a paradigm shift that would be? But it makes such eminent sense if you sit down and think about it. Of course there are a lot of logistics to figure out in actually implementing such a system but we can’t let the details bog us down when it comes to innovating.

The greening efforts made by the jazz festival seem designed to reassure: More than 150 green and blue recycling bins are sprinkled about the site, signs wax lyrical about the energy saved by can recycling, Jazz-Net cleanup teams collect recyclables before sweeping up and each year almost 150,000 cups are recycled. To the untrained eye, this temporary musical hamlet - youthful, wild, creative and fun - appears to be shipshape, orderly and unpolluted.

“We are obliged by the city to do some things,” says Sonia Pepin, director of logistics for the Montreal International Jazz Festival. “But we really believe in recycling and do more than that.”

The festival boasts an on-site compactor for cardboard boxes and even began recycling some of the wood used for stage construction this year. Organizers have also procured some recyclable plates.

With an on-site recycling sorting centre and some 20 tonnes saved from the landfill each year, organizers of the 11-day fest call the system “a model for countless public events.”

But not all festival-goers are impressed. “It kind of makes me laugh,” says Lee Schnaiberg chuckling. “They’re basically trying to take credit for cleaning up, and that’s not a greening program.”

Source: www.canada.com/montrealgazette/…

LS » If music is cool and it is cool to be green then obviously music should be green.

The right has revved up its claim that the environmental pioneer who criticized DDT was responsible for the spread of malaria that killed millions. The facts say otherwise.

Rachel Carson has been shouldering a lot of blows lately, especially for a woman who has been dead more than 40 years. Last month marked the 100th birthday of the woman whose 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” is credited with launching the modern environmental movement. While environmentalists paused to celebrate Carson’s legacy, those politically opposed to environmental regulation took the opportunity to engage in some birthday-bashing. They blame Carson and her successors for millions of deaths by malaria — deaths, they say, that could have been prevented if she hadn’t scared the world away from the potent pesticide DDT.

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS » Yeah, yeah, the minutiae of the details might be wrong but her real legacy is in pointing out that we need to be aware of our human actions on the rest of the planet — a rather important point I would say.