Monday, December 28, 2015

The Forgotten Father of Environmentalism

One of my winter break diversions: Andrea Wolf's  The Invention of Natureabout Alexander von Humboldt. He "revolutionized the Western conception of nature by describing it as an interconnected living web—and in doing so, inspired thinkers from Darwin to Thoreau..."
Alexander von Humboldt was born in 1769 into a wealthy Prussian aristocratic family, but he later left his life of privilege to explore Latin America for five years—a voyage that made him legendary across the world. Humboldt threw himself into physical exertion, pushing his body to the limits. He ventured deep into the mysterious world of the rainforest in Venezuela and crawled onto narrow rock ledges at a precarious height in the Andes to see the flames inside an active volcano. Even as a 60–year–old, he traveled more than 10,000 miles to the remotest corners of Russia. He was curious, charismatic, and incredibly restless—impelled by a “perpetual drive,” he admitted, as if chased by “10,000 pigs.”
He risked his life many times, experimented on his own body to learn more about the world and believed that knowledge had to be shared and made accessible for everybody. He was handsome, adventurous, and worked at a frenzied pace—fueled by his love for nature and science but also by large amounts of coffee which he called “concentrated sunshine.”
(continues)

Friday, June 26, 2015

Power to the People

Why the rise of green energy makes utility companies nervous.

By

 Mark and Sara Borkowski live with their two young daughters in a century-old, fifteen-hundred-square-foot house in Rutland, Vermont. Mark drives a school bus, and Sara works as a special-ed teacher; the cost of heating and cooling their house through the year consumes a large fraction of their combined income. Last summer, however, persuaded by Green Mountain Power, the main electric utility in Vermont, the Borkowskis decided to give their home an energy makeover. In the course of several days, coördinated teams of contractors stuffed the house with new insulation, put in a heat pump for the hot water, and installed two air-source heat pumps to warm the home. They also switched all the light bulbs to L.E.D.s and put a small solar array on the slate roof of the garage.
The Borkowskis paid for the improvements, but the utility financed the charges through their electric bill, which fell the very first month. Before the makeover, from October of 2013 to January of 2014, the Borkowskis used thirty-four hundred and eleven kilowatt-hours of electricity and three hundred and twenty-five gallons of fuel oil. From October of 2014 to January of 2015, they used twenty-eight hundred and fifty-six kilowatt-hours of electricity and no oil at all. President Obama has announced that by 2025 he wants the United States to reduce its total carbon footprint by up to twenty-eight per cent of 2005 levels. The Borkowskis reduced the footprint of their house by eighty-eight per cent in a matter of days, and at no net cost.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Keep it in the ground

Bill McKibben

THE Obama administration’s decision to give Shell Oil the go-ahead to drill in the Arctic shows why we may never win the fight against climate change. Even in this most extreme circumstance, no one seems able to stand up to the power of the fossil fuel industry. No one ever says no.

By “extreme” I don’t just mean that Shell will be drilling for oil in places where there’s no hope of cleaning up the inevitable spills (remember the ineptness of BP in the balmy, accessible Gulf of Mexico, and now transpose it 40 degrees of latitude north, into some of the harshest seas on the planet).

No, what’s most extreme here is the irresponsibility of Shell, now abetted by the White House. A quarter century ago, scientists warned that if we kept burning fossil fuel at current rates we’d melt the Arctic. The fossil fuel industry (and most everyone else in power) ignored those warnings, and what do you know: The Arctic is melting, to the extent that people now are planning to race yachts through the Northwest Passage, which until very recently required an icebreaker to navigate.

Now, having watched the Arctic melt, does Shell take that experience and conclude that it’s in fact time to invest heavily in solar panels and wind turbines? No. Instead, it applies to be first in line to drill for yet more oil in the Chukchi Sea, between Alaska and Siberia. Wash, rinse, repeat. Talk about salting wounds and adding insult to injury: It’s as if the tobacco companies were applying for permission to put cigarette machines in cancer wards.

And the White House gave Shell the license. In his first term, President Obama mostly ignored climate change, and he ran for re-election barely mentioning the subject until Hurricane Sandy made it unavoidable in the closing days of the campaign.

Theoretically his second term was going to be different. The president has stepped up the rhetoric, and he’s shown some willingness to go after domestic greenhouse gas emissions. His new regulations on coal-fired power plants will be helpful, as will his 2012 rules on fuel efficiency for cars and trucks. And his nonbinding pledge that America will cut emissions in future decades may make the upcoming climate talks in Paris less of a fiasco than earlier talks in Copenhagen.

But you can’t deal with climate on the demand side alone. If we keep digging up more coal, gas and oil, it will get burned, if not here, then somewhere else. This is precisely the conclusion that a study in the journal Nature reached in January: If we’re to have any chance of meeting even Mr. Obama’s weak goal of holding temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, we have to leave most carbon underground. That paper, in particular, showed that the coal reserves in the Powder River basin in the West and the oil in Canada’s tar sands had to be left largely untouched, and that there was no climate-friendly scenario in which any oil or gas could be drilled in the Arctic.

And yet Mr. Obama — acting on his own, since these are all executive actions requiring nothing from Congress — has opened huge swaths of the Powder River basin to new coal mining. He’s still studying whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, though the country’s leading climate scientists have all told him it would be a disaster. And now he’s given Shell the green light, meaning that, as with Keystone, it will be up to the environmental movement to block the plan (“kayaktivists” plan to gather this weekend in Seattle’s harbor, trying to prevent Shell from basing its Arctic rigs there).

This is not climate denial of the Republican sort, where people simply pretend the science isn’t real. This is climate denial of the status quo sort, where people accept the science, and indeed make long speeches about the immorality of passing on a ruined world to our children. They just deny the meaning of the science, which is that we must keep carbon in the ground.

Bill McKibben, nyt

Monday, February 2, 2015

Michael Pollan's Trip Treatment

The food ethics guru notes his return to a theme he explored in Botany of Desire, which we read a while back in Environmental Ethics. He's lately
been immersed for much of the last year in a new project, the first fruits of which appear in the February 9 issue of the New Yorker, out today.  I’m eager to share this piece with you because the research has been some of the most exciting I’ve done. “The Trip Treatment” is a long narrative exploring the current renaissance of scientific and medical research into psychedelic drugs. My story looks at several recent and ongoing trials of psilocybin–the active ingredient in magic mushrooms—at Johns Hopkins, N.Y.U. and Imperial College in London, through the eyes of both the researchers and the volunteers. The U.S. trials involve giving cancer patients a guided psychedelic journey to help them cope with their fear and anxiety; most of the volunteers I followed found that the mystical experience they had on the drug radically altered their thinking about life and death.  Psychedelics are also being used to treat addictions (for smoking and alcohol); to explore the neuroscience of spirituality, and, in conjunction with various brain scanning technologies, to try to answer some fascinating questions about the self and consciousness. Here’s a link to the article, which is posted today:http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment?mbid=social_twitter This might at first seem like a departure from writing about food. But those who have followed my work for some time know I’ve also had a longstanding interest in altered states of consciousness. I wrote about cannabis in The Botany of Desire and opium in Harper’s Magazine.  For me, these remarkable molecules are part of the same co-evolutionary story, products of nature with the power to change us.
And in such power comes the possibility of changing our environment and how we engage it. CoEvolution thus becomes companion to CoPhilosophy.