Rural America

We went to the beach on the Washington coast for Thanksgiving. One of the things we noticed, at least in our rental house and rental houses next door to us, was that there was no recycling. We spent some time in the rural southwest earlier this year - also no recycling. I mean none - no glass recycling, no paper recycling, no sort-your-own recycling (I presume you can do that at the dumps, but we didn't go there).
Now, that's two for two on trips away from major cities this year. I bet we didn't find the only two rural spots without recycling. I'm sure many do have it, but my guess is more don't. It's expensive to set up.
I'm reminded of something I heard from the American Institute of Architects: the biggest easy gains, the ones that pencil out right away and save resources for the more dramatic changes, are all in conservation. Which also means recycling.
It's also reinforces the idea that cities have the economies of scale to allow for more responsible stewardship of the planet. It's easy to think of the wild west or the wild and fairly unpopulated Northwest coasts as pristine, but per capita, I bet they're a lot harder on the Earth.

Mass Transit is Good for Reading, and so is Amazon

I've been taking the bus a lot more lately, and I rode the 250 Express over to a play in Seattle last night. We were stuck in even-worse-than-usual accident-induced traffic, and I had a chance to finish a book. I also noticed that about a third of the other riders were reading. This on a day when a major study came out about how we're reading less. I also talked to two strangers, which is rare. If I'd been stuck in my car I wouldn't have done either.

Also of note - the bus was packed - standing room only. So why did we just vote down a transportation initiative?

Also -- good for Amazon on releasing its new reader, the Kindle. I haven't got mine yet (I probably will, both as a futurist gadget and since I'm a frequent reader out of physical space for books in my office). But that's less tree-cutting, and hopefully it will get used enough to far offset whatever toxic products it puts in the waste stream later. Whether it becomes "the product" we've all been waiting for as far as making electronic fiction reading actually pleasurable or not, it appears to be progress.

Anyway, today will be driving to the beach (but I get to be the passenger), and I'll try and print the summary of the latest IPCC report as car-reading fodder.

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

And now I've been to the FCC hearing...

But I didn't get to talk to the FCC. Here is what happened....

The hearing got called with almost no notice. For 4:00 - 10:00 PM on the Friday before a three day weekend. Bad FCC. But I'm local, I care about media consolidation, and my day job is related to the FCC as I manage cable franchises and television stations (and a bunch more stuff that that - all of the technology for a medium sized city, so I don't actually get to spend much time on these issues, even though I care about them). I also think the media consolidation we've already had has pretty well ruined the national conversation about key issues like climate change, and further media consolidation is ludicrous.

I had an important meeting scheduled to go to 3 PM at Bellevue City Hall, and it then went over 5 minutes. I drove to a park and ride and took the bus to Seattle (remember climate change) and discovered the bus tunnel for the first time. I made sure I knew how to get back to the tunnel, having learned from big cities like Paris and NY that you'd best check landmarks so you don't get lost in the forest of buildings.

Thus fortified, I walked to Town Hall, which I am a member of, and which was a great place to hold the hearings. I was running over what I'd like to say to the commissioners in my head and trying not to be nervous about the whole thing. I got there about 4:10 to find the Governor delivering a very good speech, although she was facing us instead of the FCC commissioners, which seemed not-quite-right. The room was over half full, but I got a good seat anyway.

Then Maria Cantwell and Jay Inslee and Dave Reichert and other Washington State politicians delivered addresses to us via pre-recorded video. These were all good speeches and they got 5 minutes each. But there wasn't even a pretense that the information had been prepared FOR the FCC except that it ended up in the formal record of the meeting, which might have been the point although no one said so. At any rate, the FCC didn't have any doubt how they stood - they'd just met with them in person in Washington. Then a few more local politicians who had made it here (for the Washington ones, the FCC had scheduled this while congress was in session, so they couldn't be here) talked for their five minutes each. Good for them.

Then each FCC commissioner talked for five minutes (except one, who said he wasn't going to waste our time, but is suspected to be on the pro-consolidation side of the issue and might just have not wanted to be yelled at). Oh - and the audience was very interactive with all of these speeches. And very much against media consolidation. Like 95% or better against media consolidation, and against the FCC and against big government. Not for much as far as I could tell, except a few people, but that's a different issue. And the main topic was something worth being against.

So, now we're a hour and a half into the hearing, maybe more. We've heard a lot of short and very well-written and well delivered speeches. Could have been a national debate final or something. About two of them have been cautiously trying to explain to a hostile audience why media consolidation is good. They were pretty ineffective.

Next, a panel of experts gets five minutes each. Frank Blethen from the Seattle Times did a great job. Some Latino labor union people got the audience almost in tears. Three-quarters of these speakers were against further consolidation. These are also all professionally delivered talks, and I learned from listening to them. There were about fifteen television stations worth of cameras in the room, and I actually think this part would be the one most worth listening to as far as the prepared speeches go.

Now it's 6:30 and not one member of the general public has gotten to talk to the FCC until now. So the general public gets two minutes each. Belatedly, I figure out I need to sign up and go find the table. It's in the far back, on a different floor, in a darkish corner. I'm number 227. Why wasn't the table right up front when you walked through the doors?

I go back up and listen to the public testimony. It's actually quite good. I'm proud of us - the general public. Mind you, by general public, I mostly mean local broadcasters, local small press, activists, people who do their own shows on public TV, minorities, children. Bright people with the skin in the game of this issue. There's actually some humor now, too. We've been in the room for over three hours being talked to, and now there's some punchy but good humor and some tender moments.

But 8:30 or so, they're on speaker number 29. I'm 227. A little over an hour to get through 20 speakers. That means there's 10 hours worth of people who want to talk, and I'm hour number 10. Now, some will give up and go home. So maybe I'll get to talk by midnight. I haven't had any dinner, and thank god I brought water since there isn't any of that either. There's no support except bathrooms and a sign that says "bottled water only" but doesn't provide any bottled water. I've never taken a bus from Seattle after dark. I think I can find the bus tunnel. I'm hungry. It's been a long week at work, not one of those 40 hour weeks of hard work that feel about right, but one of those 50 to 60 hour weeks, and I've got a novel to finish approving the copy edits on, to boot. I decide I can't wait until midnight to talk to the FCC, and they probably won't be able to hear anything by then, anyway, even if they try. They're human, and six hours of talking heads all saying close to the same thing will wear anyone out.

So I find the bus tunnel, which is closed (it wouldn't be closed in Paris). But given the evening, this seems oddly appropriate. It takes about 15 minutes of wandering around Seattle in the dark and the rain while people are rowdy and a little scary to find the bus stop that will work, and I get twenty blessed minutes to sit and read fiction while I get driven across the lake and back to suburbia.

Surely we can do public process better than this? That's partly my job, so I'll mull over it after I've caught up on my sleep. In the meantime, well, if you see the FCC, tell them media consolidation is a bad idea.

I've been to Villahermosa, Mexico, and New Orleans, LA, US

And I'm pretty sure neither will ever look the same. Both were beautiful cities, both centers of unique cultures.

It's not any one weather event, even these, but the unrelenting showy pounding we're getting that seems so dramatic.

Everyone I've heard talk recently, and every credible scientist I've read, suggests that things are happening faster than models predicted. Ice is melting faster. Species are getting in trouble faster (note to self - I'm part of a species). I'm wondering if I need to get to the Inside Passage or to Venice in the next few years to see them at all.

Also at risk? New York, NY. Ever been to Central Park is when the cool spring air is scented by colorful flowers dripping from every corner and birds seem to be trying to fill all the tree branches at once?

Two Events of Note

Saturday September 10th is being billed as Carbon Offset Day - which translates to an opportunity to plant trees. Always a good idea.

And more related to climate change than you might think (by dint of the damage media consolidation does to the variety and power of what we hear), the FCC is in town on ridiculously short notice for a hearing. They want to know if we think three or less people should own all the media in the US. Yes, that's an oversimplification, but no by much. Drop by Town Hall on the 9th and tell them that's not a very good idea. Note that there appears to be an email address you can use if you can't get there in person.

Seattle Shines

(This is a cross-post from one I made at Futurist.com)

The City of Seattle reported that its on-target to its Kyoto goals. That is fabulous. There’s a conference of Mayor’s meeting there this week that includes other global warming luminaries as well (Clinton/.Gore – sound like a ticket to you? And perhaps they are now doing even more good than they did in the White House).

In a post awhile back, I mentioned that Global warming is a problem we need to solve on a global basis. I still believe that. The good we do in Seattle must be joined by the good we do in Shanghai, in Dubai, and in Mexico City. To succeed here, we must have an unprecedented level of global cooperation.

But that doesn’t diminish the value of the shining light in our region. I’m quite proud of Seattle. Of my city, Kirkland, too (We have signed up and are working hard to get a handle on measurement. We’re behind Seattle in our program, but still, we’re in there making real changes). Cities, in particular, matter. Statics show that over half of the world’s populations will live in cities in the very near future. We should all cheer the luminaries leading them to cleaner and better designs.

CNN's Planet in Peril

Appears to be a good show so far, about 10 minutes in. It's a bit interrupted by fire news. Global warming news interrupting global warming news.

A Conversation at Work...

Depending on which south you're in, the world is drying up around you or burning up around you. I work in the Pacific Northwest, where warmer and wetter seems to be the prevailing crystal-ball fuzz about us and global warming. The conversation went something like this.

"Glad we live here."
"All that must be climate change, right?"
"Pretty much."
"We're lucky we have so much rain."
"But we're not always out of the woods for drinking water."
"Snowpack's been bad some years."
"Last winter was okay."
"Think about places like Arizona, where there's too many people for the ecosystem. What happens when California wants the Colorado River water back?"
"Where are all those people going to go?"
"Uh oh."

Kansas blocks coal plant

This morning I found a Washington Post story re-printed on page A16 of the Seattle Times. Pretty well buried. "Kansas cites carbon emmions in blocking coal plants," by Steven Mufson.
Good for Kansas.
Good for us, too. The ruling by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment was based on the April April Supreme Court ruling that greenhouse gasses could be considered polltants.
This is too big to bury on page A16 - it's a rather important ruling, particularly if it gets held up.
I wouldn't have expected this to come from Kansas, but I'm really pleased it did. That sends an even stronger message than if one of us on the coast started this trend.

Resource Wars: Water in the South

I get an email called something like "The Homeland Security Daily Wire" every day at work. One topic in yesterday's email was the drought in the south. It showed up again in the paper today - in an AP article, so it's probably in everyone's paper today.

Climate change is going to redistribute resources. At this point, at least in the American south today, we're dealing with it in the courts. But what happens when if whole communities run out of water?

What kind of long-term thinking do we need to do now to manage this kind of issue globally?

Al Gore and the IPCC Deserved the Medal

It's amazing how much grumbling has been going on about the Nobel Prize award today. But maybe that's a sign of how good and important the work is.

Peace requires a world without resource wars. Think about Maslow's hierarchy. It defines those things we need, like food and shelter, as required before we can reach for the higher-pinnacle stuff like enlightenment.

Before we can reach for anything as lofty and elusive as peace, we need the bottom of the pyramid built - we need solutions to problems like hunger and inexpensive and healthy energy, like basic human health and freedoms, and the right to lay our head down at night and know that we won't be killed for something as uncontrollable as gender or race, as ethnic origin or religion.

Let's all quit grumbling and get on with all the myriad ways we're looking for peace - for ourselves, our families, our countries, our home.

Bits from Discover Brilliant

I learned a lot from the Discover Brilliant conference...the last post referenced a little bit of it, and there was way more than I have time to post. But I wanted to mention a few things I learned.

One - I'd never really thought about the fact that the energy grid isn't really a storage mechanism...its a great big on-demand delivery network. So if power gets produced that doesn't get used, it generally gets lost. That makes me understand a few things more clearly, including why extra hot days or extra cold nights are so hard on the system. Of interest, a renewable grid might have more storage (for example in form of plug-in hybrids) and have more origination points.

Two - There is some talk about energy star like labelling of buildings. I mean we had things like Medallion All-Electric homes (is anyone else old enough to remember those?), but this is about efficiency and might be a useful scrap of transparency. A buyer might want to know this, for example.

Three - We don't have much information. For example, I don't know if my frig or my washer or my heater or my various entertainment electronics are using more power except anecdotally. A household measuring grid would be cool. Think RFID and Wireless and little bitty personal meters. Then expand that though into commercial buildings, which are starting to get there via something called a Building Information Manager. Although I bet a lot of buildings don't have them. Or don't have good, modern ones.

Four - for all the hype about alternative sources of fuel (and that is an important issue), there are easier and bigger gains in conservation - in buildings, around driving and travel, at home, etc.

So with that I'm out of lunch hour...

A Cross-Post on Futurist.com

I'm attending days one and two of the Brilliant Green conference in Seattle. I got up early this morning and wrote a blog post over at Futurist.com on the conference opening. I promise to post more later - this is a really rich conference.

At the moment I'm hearing from a City of Seattle staff member mentioning how strong Seattle is on green building. I know the cities around Seattle are doing the same thing - working on green building programs. Lets hear it for us.

Weeding the Park

I spent the morning pulling invasives out of Watershed Park as part of a volunteer effort called "Green Kirkland" that is sponsored by the Cascade Land Conservancy. The Nix and I walked to the park (which took an hour and fifteen minutes), and then she laid down and watched me (and was a very good golden retreiver) while I wandered about pulling pretty-smelling weeds and wondered if I was going to have energy to weed the garden (no). It took up two hours to get home, and Nixie held up better than me.

It seemed like a lot of people (there were around twenty-five or thirty) making very small progress, but at the end of the three-hour stint, there really was visible change. Mitigating climate change is going to be a lot like that.

Maybe I'll get to my own garden tomorrow. It has its share of invasives.

Local events for Seattleites

This is "Sustainable September," which seems to be catching on as a green event. A Google search finds an Australian site for it first. Well, in Kirkland, we have our own version of Sustainable September, which is sponsored by our Chamber of Commerce, in partnership with local cities and colleges. And as is the way of the world, one piece of knowledge leads to another, and at the opening event for Sustainable September, I learned about a Seattle area conference, Discover Brilliant 2007. Both local events look like good opportunities to learn.

Weather Extremes

We just enjoyed a nearly-perfect Labor-day weekend, even managing to get a painting project done that we'd put off for a month because of an excessively rainy and overcast late summer in Washington State. We tend to do family check-ins around the holidays -- and the Arizona and California Cooper contingents both reported extraordinary heat. The California heat apparently played havoc with the power grid down there, and Phoenix has had a record number of three-digit temperature days this year.
Hurricane season is off to a strong start (Felix is heading toward land in Central America as I write this). Certainly there have been many other weather-related top news stories (maybe some chicken and egg, but the events have been happening). Floods in West Africa. Worse Monsoons that normal in India.
As a futurist, I generally avoid predictions (in favor of broader termed discussions about likely outcomes), but I'm willing to predict that wilder weather pretty-much worldwide. Even though there's progress on some small fronts and a lot more attention to climate change, we're still increasingly destabilizing a very sensitive system.
I think I'd best be sure out emergency stocks are good before the end of summer!

News from this month

August seems to be full of news on the global warming front. From today, three bits. A CNN article says Arctic sea ice expected to hit record low. This is not particularly news as it's been predicted widely, but it's one of the global warming affects we really don't want to see happen even faster than current models predict. This is one of the feedback loop problems - the more ice you have, the more sunlight reflects away from the earth, and the more ice you keep (or gain). The less ice you have...well, you get the idea. And there are a lot of feeding grounds up north for key animals in the food chain which depend on typical (cold) conditions.

There is, of course, Hurricane Dean. While we had hurricanes before global warming, they are expected to be be stronger and more frequent as they like warm water. Dean is approaching Jamaica at a category 4 as I write this, and may hit Cancun at a category 5.

And in today's PI, a more upbeat editorial called Global warming: The race is on in our state, by Joe Copeland. He lauds our leaders who have taken strong stances related to global warming and talks about Bracken Hendrick's and Jay Inslee's new book, Apollo's Fire, which according to Copeland suggests that tooling up for new, clean energy will bring up many good things - economically and for the planet. That's the attitude we need - that we can make this better.

Santa Barbara's Light Blue Line

You know how some issues get City Council halls overflowing? I've seen it happen over siting a jail in a city, over hosting a tent city, over almost anything residents are a little frightened or a little worried about. It is almost always a good thing when an idea galvanizes a community enough (pro or con) that a lively conversation ensures. Democracy at work and all that.
My dad sent me one of those from Santa Barbara, California. Now, if you've never been there, Santa Barbara is the kind of place you imagine when you think of an oceanfront utopia. It's got beautiful beaches, history, well-kept lawns, a University, an old California Mission, excellent restaurants and shopping, and growth has been managed so tightly housing costs keep most normal human beings out of town except to visit. Every time I've been there (visiting), there's been a wonderful art show on the water.
There is also now a proposal to paint a light blue line around town to show sea level after the Greenland ice-sheet melts. I think this is a brave and smart move. But like most other decisions about global warming, there are valid concerns. For example, do property values go down on the seaward side of the blue line? Will it become a tourist attraction and is that good or bad? Will it be more expensive to remove than to apply?
I'm sure it will be a conversation piece. It looks to me like a vivid reminder of what we might lose if we stay complacent. A lot of beach and a lot of a major coastal highway appear to be on the seaward side. There are pictures here.
The line is not painted yet, and I don't know if it's going to be or not - Santa Barbara is still having a conversation. I hope they do paint it, and if they do, I'll probably try to go visit. After all, Santa Barbara is one of my favorite towns anyway.
I think I can take the train.

Lake Shasta

We took a train trip from Seattle to San Louis Obispo last week. On the way, we passed by Lake Shasta. The bare reddish banks were so dry and so tall that boats looked tiny against them, and even though the lake still holds a lot of water, it looks lower than I've ever seen it. So I went out to see what other people thought once I got back to civilization and connectivity. According to this article, it's the lowest it's been in 13 years.
Now, I know it's not a given that's climate change is the main cause. But many of the commenters on the article seemed to think so. I also learned an interesting little side-note - dams emit a bunch of methane, which also a dangerous greenhouse gas.
Anyway - I really like the lake and hope it doesn't become a new normal.
Otherwise, things looked pretty healthy from a train window passing by at 50 miles an hour. That's a good thing. When you live in a busy suburb of a busy city, and spend a bunch of time flying and driving to other busy suburbs of busy cities, you forget how much open country there is. The Coast Starlight passed through a lot of very pretty land with few people. It all looked worth protecting.

Hawaii: Asking about Global Warming

I just got back from the island of Maui, in Hawaii. We enjoyed perfect weather – cool all morning because of the fabulous trade winds that blow fine mist and the scent of the sea and tropical flowers into obscure corners of the island. There were two fires in the week and a half we were there, which snarled traffic and blackened large sections of hills. Meanwhile, while we basked in cooling winds and 85 degree highs (still slightly brutal to Seattleites), the home front has had warmer and nastier days. We’ve heard on the news that major cities have been opening “cooling shelters.” This is new vocabulary for Seattleites, and I’m hopeful we won’t have to get used to it.
When I travel, I often like to ask local people about the signs of global warming. Not always scientists, but normal people, too. When my parents and I took a hiking day, we asked about the fires at the nature center on the way up to Iao point. We heard that Maui was having a drought which had already lasted over two years. Days later, I was out accompanying Katie, my partner’s ten-year-old, on a parasail ride. I asked the guys that drove the boat what signs of global warming they saw in Hawaii. They said the weather had been warm a few years, but who can tell if that’s global warming? They truly didn’t seem too concerned. Except one of them looked over just after he two people up into the clear blue sky strapped to a bright gold and green parasail. “But the one thing they say might happen to us is we could lose the trade winds.” He did look a bit afraid at that. Me too. The winds were what made Hawaii habitable, at least for us.