This past Saturday afternoon, after doing my dance duty at the annual “Dancing in the Street” at Grand Center, across from Powell Symphony Hall, I wandered the booths of the adjacent “Green Homes and Renewable Energy Festival” going on in Grandel Square behind the stage. There were plenty of solar panels, windmills, composters, insulation plans, PAC’s, and so forth.

But what really impressed me was this oversize black surfboard-looking thing under an awning surrounded by young Christians. It was the second place winner of the North American Solar Challenge 2008: The Principia Solar Car.

I regularly see Principia College students who drive down from Elsah, IL to dance with us. But it was a pleasure to converse with the young engineers, craftspeople, and even marketing students who created and support this little marvel.

Each of the little GaAs solar cells costs over $30, and the body was hand made by sudents out of graphite mesh, resin, and structural honeycomb. Even the wheels were custom made. These younguns are every bit as dedicated as I remember from my college daze. [sic]

How can I spot them as Christian? Well, Principia is explicitly “A Liberal Arts College for Christian Scientists”. They might have some odd ideas about Life, the Universe, and Everything, but Gould’s principle of Nonoverlapping Magisteria seems to allow them a solid education outside of that realm.

And How to Build a Solar Car is not their title for these galleries of building the car, but it should be.

How many times have you heard that there is an immense amount of oil shale, from which we can extract lots and lots of oil?   I’ve heard this claim dozens of times, yet the people uttering this claim never know anything at all about what it takes to make oil out of oil shale.

Consider this not-so-good news from the Rocky Mountain Institute:

Mr. Bush said in a statement on June 18 that the Green River Basin likely holds 800 billion barrels of oil and that “if it can be recovered it would equal more than a century’s worth of currently projected imports.”

While there is little debate about the President’s estimate, the challenges and risks of pursuing “unconventional oil” are significant. It’s hard to get, extremely costly, dangerous to the environment, and difficult to use.

If these reasons aren’t enough, oil shale holds less energy per pound than a pile of municipal trash or cow manure. In fact, oil shale has roughly the same amount of energy per pound as a baked potato, according to a report (PDF) from the Community Office for Resource Efficiency. And, like a potato, oil shale must also be cooked before it can be used.

RMI gives oil shale a big thumbs-down due to the difficulty of extracting usable energy from the shale and because of massive potential damage to the environment that would be caused by the extraction process:

Our energy challenges demand more than new ways to boil rocks.  We need to give businesses incentives to pursue fresh paths that will break our addiction to oil.  We need to encourage wide adoption of proven technologies that use energy more efficiently and expand our nation’s ability to harness renewable sources of energy.

Here is the simple goal for those participating in Naked Bike Ride: Protest our dependency on oil and celebrate the power and individuality of our bodies. In America, most people tend to have a warped attitude toward bicycles. They see bicycles as toys and amusements, not as incredibly efficient and serious modes of transportation. More than anything else, Naked Bike Ride is an attempt to change this attitude and to get people to choose bicycles rather than gas guzzling motor vehicles, whenever possible.

This combination was pure marketing genius. If 1,000 people had assembled in the middle of St. Louis to promote alternative sustainable methods of transportation, the media wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass. Because these organizers promised to wrap this serious message about bicycle riding in a package of nudity, however, the media was there in droves.  Here’s an video interview of two of the organizers.

Now, what kind of nudity did those curious media types actually see when they got to the assembly prior to the bicycle ride? Well, they saw some of this:

As well as some of this:

The evening could also have been accurately called Slogans Painted on Partially Naked People on Bikes Night, but that would have been unwieldy.

This use of nakedness to promote the message that we desperately need to start using sustainable transportation methods has been successfully executed in numerous other cities. Tonight, the event came to my home town. I decided to both participate in a minimally naked way . . .

. . . and report on the St. Louis edition of “Naked Bike Ride.” Yes, the message on my back was not creative. I went for the brutally clear approach.

The St. Louis organizers encouraged participants to push the nakedness to the legal limit, but not more than the limit:

[W]e also met with the police tonight. We wanted you all to know the official word after that meeting. Here’s the city ordinance that they went over with us. We are encouraging strategic coverage of the controversial areas (genitals, buttocks, breasts) but maximum exposure within the law and if people decide to bare it all you need to know that that is in violation of the ordinance and the police have to right to make arrests if there are complaints.

What goes on during Naked Bicycle Night? The cyclists have the opportunity to take a 12-mile bicycle ride on the city streets devoid of gas-slurping automobiles, along with hundreds of other concerned citizens in various states of cycling nudity.

Perhaps you are wondering whether it would be uncomfortable to ride a bicycle while naked. The national organizers dedicated several paragraphs to that topic here.

It might have been more accurate to call it Underwear Bicycle Ride, but there was, indeed, some nakedness, including several people riding totally in the nude. It was hilarious to watch the expressions of the numerous bystanders who saw the totally naked bicycle riders passing. Many of them had that look (”Oh my. It looks like . . . no, it couldn’t be . . . but maybe it is . . . but is that legal?” I would estimate that there were 500 riders tonight. We passed by a several thousand people staring out hotel and restaurant windows but many more cheering on the streets. Many people cheering knew about Naked Bicycle Ride and were lined up along portions of the route.

The crowds often shouted lots of enthusiasm, honked horns, jumped up and down and waved. As we passed through the applauding people early in the ride, a woman riding next to me said, “This is such a rush.” Indeed.

I snapped this shot as my group paused at an intersection in front of a brightly lit gas station. That’s what it’s all about, right?

There were many creative body paintings. Note this woman’s violin motif, for example. I took most of these photos while riding my bicycle, holding onto the bike with my left hand and shooting with the right, without looking through at or through the camera. Given the haphazardness of the situation, I was surprised that I was able to capture so many usable images. As you can see, this includes images of many people conveying the an unsurprisingly coherent political mood.

(more…)

RJ Matson, Roll Call

Mike Lester, The Rome News-Tribune

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune

Postura Climatica
Tab, The Calgary Sun

The G-8
Dario Castillejos, El Imparcial de México

Televictim
Angel Boligan, El Universal, Mexico City

[Admin note:  All Cartoons are being published at DI with full permission by Cagle Cartoons]

I wrote about complacency once before. I focused on the complacency of most Americans in the face of the energy crisis that is clearly upon us. We have no assurance that gasoline won’t double or triple in price over the next five or 10 years, throwing our economy into a massive depression. With stakes like these, you would think that prolific energy wasters like us would immediately jump on our energy consumption problem by enacting a national conservation plan to cut our petroleum use in half. This could be accomplished by modifying our wasteful energy usage in dozens of ways. For instance, we really could carpool. We could build up our mass transit systems and encourage their use. We could walk and bike more. We could make our homes much more energy-efficient. Instead of building new homes in existing farm fields, we could renovate homes that already exist. While we’re at it, we could cut our use of all other forms of energy in half too. For instance, the technology already exists to make zero-carbon footprint buildings.

Others have written extensively regarding many methods by which we could reduce energy use. Due to the widely accepted law of supply and demand, cutting our use of energy would also have the effect of lowering the price of energy (relative to whatever it would have been had we not taken such measures), thereby diminishing the financial damage from our perennial trade deficits and budget deficits.

My concern is that so many people (including many people I know personally) are absolutely complacent about the need to change the way we produce and use energy. I keep hearing people say that “they will make our gasoline out of corn” or “we have plenty of coal” as though some unspecified “corn plan” would produce net energy without causing people to starve or some fantasy “coal plan” could be a foolproof substitute for petroleum, without somehow contributing massive amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

People are finally buying more energy-efficient cars, but that is only in response to the spiking costs of gasoline. It’s like we need to be kicked in the shin in order to get our attention. Many mainstream news articles discuss that this price jump of gasoline occurred “suddenly,” as though it was impossible to see that high gasoline prices were in our future. We still don’t get it, though. For example, many news articles are currently talking about the high price of gas as though gas will continue to be five dollars per gallon five years from now, as though we’ve hit a stable plateau.

As I suggested in my prior post about complacency, I sense that there’s a rampant attitude that most of the big things in life are not under our control. Rather, they simply “happen.” According to many people, the “free market” decides what will be available for sale and at what price it will be sold. Similarly, “God” makes decisions about disasters and diseases such as heart attacks and lung cancer (even though people cause many of their own problems through climate change in lifestyle at choices). The people who are big believers in the free market and a sentient God see humans as powerless children who simply react to situations. We act like there’s nothing we can do to root corporate corruption out of our national political system.

From so many people, I hear this solution: “They” will come up with something to solve our energy problems, our medical problems, our food production problems, our natural resource supply issues and our pollution problems, as though these problems don’t start with each and every one of us. As though we are not responsible for what “they” need to do. As though we don’t make the messes that “they” need to clean up.

I have no doubt that we could cut our energy usage in half. We could substantially reduce our risks of certain diseases by changing our lifestyles. We could eat foods that are friendlier to the planet, such that the average item of food would not actually need to travel 1000 miles or more to our plates. We could start making difficult decisions that would ensure sustainable supplies of water well into the future, at least for many communities (Las Vegas might not be in the plans). By using much less of everything we consume we could substantially cut the amount of toxic waste we generate. When “we” live more responsibly, “they” have less work to do to save us.

Admittedly, some bad things do seem to just happen to us. On the other hand, many of our biggest problems are caused by us. Therefore, to act complacently as a general rule is a huge cop-out virtually guaranteeing disaster. The real solution is to force ourselves to follow the chain of production through our use of our products and resources so that we can see that our local actions often have tangible national and global consequences. We are incapable of assessing these big problems to the extent that we allow ourselves to overlook problems that have solutions that would be expensive or inconvenient to us.

Sacrifice is a dirty word these days. No politician wants to tell the citizens that we will need to give up some of our wasteful ways. The same thing goes for the many “greenwashing” articles out there. For instance, I read several “green” magazines, including Plenty; they are extremely light on the need for self-sacrifice. (more…)

I was surprised yesterday to find a post by Jerry Pournelle (well known SF author and technology columnist) on MensNewsDaily (a starkly conservative news magazine site with pretensions of middle-of-the-roadism). His column, Intelligent Design: Answers and Questions, is openly favorable to the premise that Intelligent Design and Global Warming denial should be taught in science classes.

I have read much by Pournelle, starting with his collaborations with Larry Niven in the 1970’s and ’80’s, and then his columns in Byte magazine, and his solo novels more recently. There is a strong Libertarian feel in his recent works (such as “High Justice”), where big corporations are the good guys and “liberal” governments merely stumbling blocks to progress or even survival. But he does write some great adventure stories. I was only mildly put off by the contention in “Fallen Angels” that embracing the global warming hoax would lead into international Luddism. I figured that it was just a plot device.

But now I see that the writings of Pournelle reflect an overall feeling that Nature and Man are but players on a stage that no mortal can understand. Perhaps it has something to do with his recurring close brushes with mortality. If you read some of his other columns at JerryPournelle.com, you’ll see that he champions all manner of oddball challenges to “Mainstream Consensus Science”. Sooner or later, one of these challenges may turn out to be valid. But historically speaking, successful challenges to the well established theories of thermodynamics and quantum theory are far between.

An enthusiastic conservation effort, coupled with a wide variety of alternative sources of energy, will soften the blow of peak oil, but it might be too little too late.   And it’s incredibly difficult to get people to actually do something serious about conserving energy (see Janisse Ray’s “Altar Call for True Believers” at Orion Magazine).  In my experience, most people don’t give a damn about our long-term energy situation, not even many of the people who preach that hard times might be right around the corner.

Many Americans refuse to consider serious conservation.  It feels like surrender to them.  It’s wimpy and shameful.  I understand this emotion, but if we want to keep using wasteful amounts of energy, we’ll have to find it somewhere.  Many people suggest coal.  Coal is dirty and dangerously toxic, in addition to being a fossil fuel that drives global warning.  We have limited options for generating levels of energy that we’re currently generating.

What other energy source exists in ample supply?  Did someone say “nuclear power”?  We’re seeing more and more people look to nuclear because there is really no where else to go (given that we’re not willing to wean ourselves of the extravagant use of energy).

Here are two viewpoints on the nuclear issue.  The first is from Rebecca Solnit’s article in Orion Magazine, entitled “Reasons Not to Glow.”

[E]very stage of the nuclear fuel cycle is murderously filthy, imparting long-lasting contamination on an epic scale; that a certain degree of radioactive pollution is standard at each of these stages, but the accidents are now so many in number that they have to be factored in as part of the environmental cost; that the plants themselves generate lots of radioactive waste, which we still don’t know what to do with—because the stuff is deadly . . . anywhere . . . and almost forever.

Solnit was reacting to a position now held by James Lovelock, the former anti-nuclear power advocate.  Lovelock’s conversion (and the conversions of other prominent environmentalists) is reported by Gwyneth Cravens, published in Discover Magazine, in an article entitled, “Is Nuclear Energy our Best Hope?” Here’s an excerpt:

Lovelock explained that his decision to endorse nuclear power was motivated by his fear of the consequences of global warming and by reports of increasing fossil-fuel emissions that drive the warming. Jesse Ausubel, head of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, recently echoed Lovelock’s sentiment. “As a green, I care intensely about land-sparing, about leaving land for nature,” he wrote. “To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy such as wind, water, and biomass cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors.” All of this has led several other prominent environmentalists to publicly favor new nuclear plants.

That’s the message of Audrey Schulman, writing in Orion Magazine. Her article is entitled, “How to be a Climate Hero.”

Schulman describes psychology experiments where the subject is surrounded by stooges, everyone in the room doing a mundane task.  Eventually, something untoward happens. For instance, smoke starts pouring out of the vents, indicating a dangerous fire. If there are stooges present and they do nothing, the subject will usually do nothing.

It’s been repeated with many variations on the type of emergency: staged robberies, lost wallets, people in hallways crying for help, etc. Every time, if there was more than one person witnessing the event, all of them were almost certain to do nothing.

What does this lesson about the Bystander Effect have to do with climate change? Most of us are sitting around doing nothing at all, because most of us are sitting around doing nothing at all.

Right now everyone understands that something truly horrible is happening to the planet’s climate. The heat waves and forest fires, the floods and droughts. But there are 6 billion of us now—quite the Bystander Effect. So we stay in our seats filling out forms, trying to ignore the smoke swirling thicker around us. We bustle about our normal lives, assuming it can’t be as bad as it seems because surely, then, everyone would be marching in the street about it.

Here’s an important lesson you can learn from Schulman’s post. Learning about the Bystander Effect “innoculates” you against its destructive effect. When you are made aware of the Bystander Effect, you don’t have to do nothing just because most everyone else is doing nothing. You can jump into gear, reducing your carbon footprint and making lots of noise for change. Write those letters to the editor and write to your representatives. Discuss these issues with even a few friends; they will then be comfortable talking with their friends. We don’t have to be a country that still sells SUV’s and incandescent bulbs, a country that is still carving out exurbs and failing to enact a responsible national energy policy.

The lesson Schulman is teaching is a lesson we can all use every day in a massively dysfunctional society. It’s time to speak up, even if no one else is speaking up. Everyone else needs you to act first.

The best way to get people to neglect a cause is to dedicate a Special Day to that cause each year. On that one special Day, we will hold thousands festivals where we treat the cause in a trite way and we will ignore that cause the other 364 days. We’re just too busy with our amusements and distractions to give a damn about important things here in America. Earth Day fits the mold perfectly. You would think that at Earth Day festivals, people would take the purpose of Earth Day seriously. You’d think that people would feel the need to make substantial immediate changes in their lives in order to live and procreate in healthy and sustainable ways, leaving the planet in good shape for the following generations of humans and the other animals. What could be done on Earth Day? We could talk big. We could make real plans to take the actions suggested by visionaries like Lester Brown, who proposes that we cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2020. It could really be done. Here’s how Brown describes his plan in his book, Plan B 3.0:

First, dramatically and systematically raise the efficiency of the world energy economy; second, massive investment in renewable sources of energy; and third, increase the earth’s tree cover by planting billions of trees.

Really doing something on a big scale could “inspire awareness of and appreciation for the Earth’s environment.” But most people aren’t doing anything at all. They are content to live the same wasteful lives people lived 20 years ago.

I discussed Earth Day with several people recently (in stores, not at the Earth Day festival). They rolled their eyes when I suggested the need to actually change the way we live our lives. They think that Earth Day is run by a bunch of hippies and they don’t trust hippies.

Even those who don’t scoff at the idea of Earth Day mostly believe in belief in Earth Day (just like most religious believers, who often believe in belief). Many Earth Day’ers believe it’s sufficient to merely say and think responsible things, even if the way they live their lives are indistinguishable from those who don’t believe in Earth Day. Many of these people celebrating Earth Day drive to Earth Day festivities in SUV’s from their homes way out in the Suburbs. When they’re done shopping at Earth Day (and there are lots of non-essential things to buy at Earth Day), they drive back out to the suburbs. This inaction reminds me of a neighbor who mentioned a topic to which I responded “That really concerns me.” He immediately chastised me: “No it doesn’t. If you were actually concerned, you’d be doing something about it.” (more…)

Tell them what Architecture 2030 says about coal:

Because coal is the only fossil fuel plentiful and supposedly cheap enough to push the planet to 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.  Because reaching 450 ppm (or possibly less) triggers potentially irreversible glacial melt and sea level rise.

Because 53% of Americans live in and around coastal cities and towns and, beginning with just one meter of sea level rise, many of these cities and towns will be inundated.

Scientists are forewarning that at approx. 450 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, we will trigger potentially irreversible glacial melt and sea level rise “out of humanity’s control.” We are currently at 385 ppm, and are increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at approx. 2 ppm annually.  At this growth rate, we will reach 450 ppm in 2035 . . .

In the US, there are over 600 existing coal plants and 151 new coal plants in various stages of development.

Tell them that there is a smarter and better way.   And a cleaner way.  Tell them that mining coal is not only ugly, it’s dangerous for miners and everyone else.

Tell them to take a close look into a train car full of coal (as I did yesterday) and to ask themselves if coal looks like the fuel of the future. 

I thought about coal as I noticed a train loaded with coal go by (I took these photos).  I thought about how little most people know about coal yet how politicians and their constituents don’t have the dangers of coal on their radar.   Some of these dangers are set forth in my earlier post, The Banality of Burning Coal.   

I’ve been told by a man who works with the biggest electric company in St. Louis that each coal burning plant eats an entire train full of coal each day.  That is confirmed by Wikipedia:

Coal is delivered by highway truck, rail, barge or collier ship. A large coal train called a “unit train” may be two kilometers (over a mile) long, containing 100 cars with 100 tons of coal in each one, for a total load of 10,000 tons. A large plant under full load requires at least one coal delivery this size every day.

Most people I speak with resist serious energy conservation as a matter of principle.  Many conservatives belittle conservation, as though it is a matter of weakness.  They scoff at conservation.  When I bring up global warming, they deny it.  When I bring up peak oil, they have no logical response.  They resist energy conservation as if they were 3 year olds whining that they don’t want to try a new sort of food that their parents put on their plates.   It’s an irrational emotional resistance (not that emotions are always irrational) that is endangering our economy.  Conservation is one-half of the solution out of this big mess. (more…)

I read quite a few textbook quotes from this report and I must agree:  they are shockingly inaccurate.  This book repeatedly pushes the conservative line, even when the facts don’t support it–just like the Bush Administration.   The existence of this high school textbook is yet more evidence that we are living in a post-fact era. 

Here’s the press release from CFI:

The Center for Inquiry (CFI), an international think tank promoting science and secularism, released a 25-page report today detailing what it calls “egregious errors” sufficient enough to warrant “immediate correction,” in a widely used civics textbook found in many secondary schools around the country, including advanced placement courses. CFI believes that the textbook American Government: Institutions and Policies, 10th edition, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) contains inaccurate and misleading statements, in particular in its analysis of global warming and certain constitutional law issues. In response, CFI’s legal experts have analyzed the textbook and prepared a critique that sets forth recommended changes. 

Derek Araujo, a lawyer and executive director for CFI’s New York office, spearheaded the textbook review project. Araujo stated that he was “surprised and dismayed that a textbook used in advanced placement courses would contain clearly erroneous statements about significant issues, such as global warming and school prayer.”

“The free market–the invisible hand–will take care of everything.”

I’ve addressed this topic of the free market as alleged panacea several times before.  I’ve referred to this blind faith in the market as unsubstantiated.  I’ve mockingly referred to the common belief in the wisdom of the invisible hand as a belief in the Fouth Person in the Holy Quartet.  Why mock?  Because stark shortages of critically important natural resources loom in every direction.   And yet we’re in denial. You deny the denial?  Then how is it that we tolerate, this year, big U.S. metropolitan areas like Raleigh-Durham and Atlanta had only a few weeks left of their municipal water supplies?  We tolerate that we are drawing down unreplenishable water sources throughout the desert southwest.  Intelligent civilizations don’t deny such dangers.  They consciously deal with their problems.

I’ve just read a well-phrased description of why the modern version of the free market can’t save us from our problems regarding impending shortages of essential natural resources.  The following quote is from a new book available free on-line from Population Connection: PLAN B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by environmental analyist, Lester R. Brown (2008).

Now with the economy as large as it is, the indirect costs of burning coal—the costs of air pollution, acid rain, devastated ecosystems, and climate change—can exceed the direct costs, those of mining the coal and transporting it to the power plant. As a result of neglecting to account for these indirect costs, the market is undervaluing many goods and services, creating economic distortions.

As economic decision-makers—whether consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers, or investment bankers—we all depend on the market for information to guide us. In order for markets to work and economic actors to make sound decisions, the markets must give us good information, including the full cost of the products we buy. But the market is giving us bad information, and as a result we are making bad decisions—so bad that they are threatening civilization.

The market is in many ways an incredible institution. It allocates resources with an efficiency that no central planning body can match and it easily balances supply and demand. The market has some fundamental weaknesses, however. It does not incorporate into prices the indirect costs of producing goods. It does not value nature’s services properly. And it does not respect the sustainable yield thresholds of natural systems. It also favors the near term over the long term, showing little concern for future generations.

Dick Cavett once said: “It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.”  Plan B 3.0 is the kind of information that those rare people ambivalently clamor to hear.    It’s clearly written and well documented.  There’s nothing shrill in Lester Brown’s book; just the facts—lots of facts that paint a dire picture.  Over and over, humans are overexploiting precious resources, and the situation is getting dangerous in many ways.  What’s at stake?  You name it.  Oil, food, water, forests, health, fisheries.   On the topic of fisheries, did you know that there are essentially no cod to be caught in the North Atlantic Ocean any more?   Gee, how did that happen?  Why didn’t the “free market” protect the North Atlantic Ocean?

Brown argues that we need to dramatically change the way we live and consume.   He argues that the “free market” is not a cure, unless we first make the true costs of over-exploitation visible and force purchasers to pay the full price.   We need to “Get the market to tell the ecological truth.” For example, the true cost of a gallon of gas is not $3/gallon, but more like $12/gallon. (more…)

I’ve spent a lot of time studying Republican political anatomy.   You see, I’m not only an armchair anthropologist, but I’m a social neuro-surgeon (a brand-new expertise, created today).   After careful review of all available relevant data, I have developed a precise chart (click on the thumbnail below) detailing each of the major features of the modern Republican brain.  

No, you won’t find “Iraq” on this anatomical diagram, even though it reveals each of the major neural substructures found in the modern Republican brain.  That’s because the modern Repubublican has developed relatively recently.  No specialized “Iraq” module has thus had time to evolve. You will nonetheless find each of the brain structures that, working together, compel the instigation of multiple fear-induced, needless, destructive, ineptly planned, corrupt and potentially non-ending military conflicts in the Middle East. 

Whenever sufficient numbers of these malignant features are found in the brains of those who hold substantial political power, one can expect the atrophy of an entire country, absent immediate and dramatic political resuscitation. 

Without further ado, here it is.  Just click on the thumbnail for all the gory details:

If you’d like to review some fascinating and rigorous psychological data of what it means to be a conservative, check out this post regarding a study by Frank Sulloway or this post considering the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

I’m in Chicago with my nine-year old daughter and Shedd Aquarium was an important destination for us.  We spent much of our Aquarium time at the Wild Reef exhibit. 

The coral reefs of the world support about a quarter of our sea life, so they are immensely important, yet humans are destroying them in a wide variety of ways. 

As important as the reefs are to world ecology, reef life is also stunningly beautiful.  You can see these communities up close at Shedd.  The irony is hard to ignore whenever you can view warm water life in Chicago while it’s bitterly cold outside. 

Shedd Aquarium does a wonderful job displaying its marine life.  It’s difficult to stop taking photos, if you have a digital camera. I took more than 100 photos, then deleted many of them, leaving about a dozen photos I liked.  The challenge is not finding beautiful scenes to photograph.  The Aquarium is full of such opportunities.  The challenges are the low light conditions (no flash photography allowed, for the protection of the animals), combined with the quick movements of some of the creatures.  Note:  I took all of these photos with a Canon A700, a modest consumer-grade digital camera that is about 2-years old.  Also, these photos are only minimally retouched.  Comparable scenes await anyone interested in traveling to Chicago to visit Shedd Aquarium.

Many of the organisms living at a reef look like underwater plants, but they are actually animals.  Those animals include the corals themselves, as well as sea anemones, sea urchins. crinoids and sponges (for more on our sponge cousins, see here–actually all living things our the cousins of humans).  Some of the reef animals simply sound like plants, such as sea cucumbers.  To learn more about the lives of corals, wonderful footage and explanations are included in David Attenborough’s Blue Planet series, which costs $43 at Amazon.  As an aside, I can’t believe the large number of people who consider $43 to be too much to spend on a educational documentary of breath-taking beauty, yet they will spend more than $100 many times each year to take their families to watch their favorite sports team play games.

Without further ado, here are some more of the incredible (and incredibly beautiful) things you can see at an ocean reef (or at the Shedd Aquarium):

This display includes several jelly fish pushing up against the glass and against the bottom of the display (the jellies are about 5 inches in diameter).  Members of this species of jelly fish hold their tentacles out (rather than dangle them down) to capture prey.

My daughter viewing one of the elaborate displays of coral at Shedd Aquarium.

Garden eels stick up out of the sea floor.   

My favorite animal counsin, the sponge. (more…)

Two can live more energy-efficiently than one, according to this article from New Scientist: 

“Divorced households are smaller than married households, but consume more land, water, and energy per person than married households,” says Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, who carried out the 12-country analysis with colleague Eunice Yu.

In the US, for example, 627 billion gallons of water, the use of 38 million rooms, and 734 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity would have been saved in 2005 alone if no-one had got divorced.

In the same year, divorced households spent 46% more on electricity and 56% more on water per person than if they had stayed married. And following a split, US households consumed 42 to 61% more resources per person than while married.

Being married isn’t the only way to live together, of course.  This article points to our energy-expensive future as one where people will more readily share living spaces.  Master bedrooms in the 1950’s were about 130 square feet.  In moderately priced new homes, master bedrooms now measure 300 square feet.  Right after WWII, the average new house was 750 square feet.  Now, it’s almost 2,500 square feet.  We have insatiable cravings for more stuff and bigger stuff.  If energy continues to rise dramatically in cost, large suburban houses will become more of a challenge to maintain by small families or single people.

What else uses lots of energy?  According to a second article at New Scientist, the answer is storing computer data on a server, which is about as energy efficient as driving an SUV:

Global Action Plan, a UK-based environmental organisation, publishes a report today drawing attention to the carbon footprint of the IT industry in the UK.

“Computers are seen as quite benign things sitting on your desk,” says Trewin Restorick, director of the group. “But, for instance, in our charity we have one server. That server has same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not.”

This second article fails to note an important mitigating point: providing data with computer server actually saves lots of energy compared to providing that information in the form of catalogues, reports and other hard copy paper forms that would need to be delivered by using fossil-fuel burning vehicles.  For example, the server used by Dangerous Intersection is shared by numerous other web sites.  On a typical day, DI alone is visited by 2,500 people who view about 8,000 pages of information.  This total sometimes rises to more than 10,000 people.  Consider whether there is a more energy-efficient method of distributing information.

On the other hand, the report does call attention to the enormous amount of energy consumed by computers: 

The global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry.

Today, the following Associated Press article was run on page-19 of my local newspaper (the St. Louis Post-Dispatch):

An epic drought in Georgia threatens the water supply for millions. Florida doesn’t have nearly enough water for its expected population boom. The Great Lakes are shrinking. Upstate New York’s reservoirs have dropped to record lows. And in the West, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is melting faster each year.

Across America, the picture is critically clear — the nation’s freshwater supplies can no longer quench its thirst.

The government projects that at least 36 states will face water shortages within five years because of a combination of rising temperature, drought, population growth, urban sprawl, waste and excess.

“Is it a crisis? If we don’t do some decent water planning, it could be,” said Jack Hoffbuhr, executive director of the American Water Works Association, based in Denver.

Water managers will need to take bold steps to keep taps flowing, including conservation, recycling, desalination and stricter controls on development.

The price tag for ensuring a reliable water supply could be staggering. Experts estimate that just upgrading pipes to handle new supplies could cost the nation $300 billion over 30 years.

“Unfortunately, there’s just not going to be any more cheap water,” said Randy Brown, utilities director for Pompano Beach, Fla.

Truly, this is a major story; our country is running out of a critically important resource.  Combine that lack-of-water news, though with the equally unreported news that the world is running out of another critically important resource: oil. How bad is it?  I’ve previously reported on the issue of peak oil before (and see here).

Recently, I’ve read a book that, even if it is only partially accurate, should be front page news in every newspaper in America, day after day.  

The book is The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century, by James Howard Kunstler (2005).   Kunstler writes that

America is still sleepwalking into the future.  We walked out of our burning house and we are now headed off the edge of a cliff.  Beyond that cliff is an abyss of economic and political disorder on a scale that no one has ever seen before.  I call this coming time The Long Emergency.

Kunstler writes that the main problem is the end of cheap oil and natural gas.  These resources

underlie everything we identify as a benefit of modern life.  All the necessities, comforts, luxuries and miracles of our time-central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lighting, cheap clothing, recorded music, movies, supermarkets, power tools, hip replacement surgery, the national defense, you name it-we owe their origins or continued existence in one way or another to cheap fossil fuel.

Kunstler argues that the steady technological progress we’ve experienced thanks to cheap oil has tricked us “into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough can come true.”

What are Kunstler’s facts?  Here are some of them (starting on page 66):

The total planetary endowment of conventional nonrenewable liquid oil was roughly 2 trillion barrels before humans started using it.  Since the mid-19th century, the world has burned through roughly one trillion barrels of oil, half the total there ever was, representing the easiest to get, highest-quality liquids.  The half that remains includes the hardest oil to get, lowest quality liquids, semi-solids, and solids.

Worldwide discovery of oil peaked in 1964 and has followed a firm trend line downward ever since. (more…)

I was checking on the latest news about the Creationist Museum, and found myself browsing a conservative blog site, Townhall.com. The hot issue of the day is debunking the whole Al Gore Global Warming issue. Try this post, for a taste.

What truly bugged me is that, among the innumerate and sometimes marginally literate responses, there was a kernel of actually reasonable doubt. Those who follow the actual science (a minority on that site) know that there is no doubt about the present warming trend, nor about the unprecedented rise in fossil CO₂ in the last century. However, there is no certain model for the causality leading to or spawning from these facts.

Doomsayers love the fantastic, sudden, apocalyptic models of global warming that Hollywood likes to portray. It’s quite dramatic, and cannot be ruled out. However, most models show that the big and civilization-altering changes that are likely to occur will take generations to notice. The present conservative movement is more interested in the next fiscal quarter than the next generation. Therefore, this is not a “real” problem.

The real problem with the Gore campaign is that it is covered as a binary issue. Either Global Warming is a big and serious and immediate problem that requires drastic solutions, or it an imaginary scare tactic. The truth is somewhere in between. Fossil atmospheric carbon dumping is (and will be) a tiny blip in history. Maybe three centuries total out of the almost hundred centuries (so far) of human civilization (or 46,000,000 centuries of geological record).

What scares me is the total ignorance expressed of what Global Warming really is. Everything I read talks about the average temperature rising. Most people hear this and assume that a degree of temperature rise means adding a degree to every reading we now have. In practice, it means adding energy to the weather system, which means wider spreads from highs to lows. Sharper warm and cool fronts. Bigger low and high pressure systems. Faster transitions from one to the next. Bigger winds. Bigger storms.  Heavier winters and harder summers. (more…)