General

President Nasheed of the Maldives made a humbling speech to a gathering of climate-vulnerable nations in which he gave terrific reasons for his interest in the climate crisis.  How about the fact that without radical global action immediately, his country will be lost below sea level, even with the two degrees limit agreed upon at Copenhagen?  His country has agreed to go carbon-neutral in ten years, and urges others to follow suit.  If developing nations go green, more advanced countries will have no excuse.  They will no longer be able to point fingers at nations that want growth at the cost of the environment, as America did.

I like the analogy Thomas Friedman uses in Hot, Flat, and Crowded for the clean energy revolution we need, but I’ve got my own twist.  We can’t rely on evolution now.  It’s the sixth day of the seven we’ve been given to come up with a way to save our planet, and as the deciders of our own fate, we need to pull an all-nighter.  We need to pull out all the stops and redesign every aspect of our system to be more than just sustainable.  We need to get everyone’s help on creating the technologies that will make clean energy cheaper than gas.  We need to create the demand for clean energy that will drive the market and force the system to come up with better solutions fast.

“There is only one thing bigger than Mother Nature and that is Father Profit,” Thomas Friedman says in Hot, Flat, and Crowded.  Sad, but true, this statement looks at the underlying reason we have an environmental crisis on our hands, as well as the only way to solve it.  We have sacrificed Mother Nature to the prospect of low gas and energy prices.  Moreover, knowing the planet is in danger is not enough for people to act- it takes money to move people to help the environment.  If we just granted monetary subsidies for making more innovative sustainable energy sources, we could tap the great resource that is human nature.

One Book is excited to present an excerpt of George Nassos’ essay, “Why Are We Selling the Future.” Nassos is a Northwestern alumnus as well as the associate director of the Environmental Management & Sustainability Program and director of the Center for Sustainable Enterprise, both at the IIT Stuart Graduate School of Business.

During the past few years, we have been reading more and more about organizations and people over-extending themselves with respect to their financial situation.  People without the necessary means were committing to purchase homes they could not really afford.  We had the collapse of Merrill Lynch, AIG and numerous banks. The Obama administration recently announced a budget deficit of $1.56 trillion – that is trillion, not billion – for 2010 and a 2011 budget of $3.83 trillion.

Even countries, like Greece, are going broke. Greece continues to spend 13% more than it brings in.  A few years ago, it sold future airport fees and lottery proceeds for current cash to meet its needs.  Basically, we are spending our future assets. (Read more…)

The coal underlying the Appalachian Mountains is a valuable resource for the United States, but this beautiful region is set to become a desolate moonscape of mountaintop coal mining.  However, there is another way to get the energy we need from these mountains while creating sustainable jobs for hundreds of Americans. Mining the coal responsibly would allow us to build a 328 MW capacity wind farm on top of Coal River Mountain, which gets constant wind at great altitude.  This farm would be able to power 70,000 West Virginia homes and provide $1.7 million in taxes every year. Mountaintop mining pollutes the headwaters of rivers that provide drinking water to millions of Americans.  These toxins are increasing the mortality rate in these areas.  You can help.

Ever think about how much CO2 is emitted just to make a slab of concrete?  The limestone used to produce the cement part of concrete has to be roasted (not quite like chestnuts over an open fire, but roasted all the same).  Producing enough heat and roasting the limestone for all the cement for all the world releases almost as much CO2 as all the passenger cars the world over.  Some more perspective for you: manufacturing a single cubic yard of concrete releases as much CO2 (400lbs) as using up 16 gallons of gas in your car.  For me, that’s a full tank!

Everything is out of balance, but it’s going to get worse before it gets better.  We need to start drastic, large-scale projects now toward reducing our carbon footprint.  It will cost our economy a ton of money, but we can’t afford to save a penny and lose a dollar.  We need to throw all the brain power we have at this problem now, because we are failing to act on a scale that will actually make a difference.  Look at an example from Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded- using just nuclear power to produce the electricity we would need from now to 2050 would require 13,000 new reactors.  If we start building one every day right now, it would still take us 36 years to reach this number.  Yes, we need to get moving.

There are lists of these things out on the internet- thousands upon thousands of them.  Some of them seem so simple, and hopefully you do many of them without thinking, but here are some that might just get looked over.

Donate old clothes, books, and toys (instead of throwing them away).

Leave the fridge door closed until you know what you want- don’t stand in the doorway to think about it.

Choose to decorate a live Christmas tree rather than buying a plastic one.  (I blogged earlier about this!)

Stick a plastic water bottle (filled with tap water and capped) in your toilet’s tank to make it use less water every time you flush.

John Deere has really done it this time.  Inside the smart tractor lies a computer led by GPS that takes real-time data as you go about your business.  Each square meter can be tracked for moisture levels and nutrient content as you plow over it.  This in turn allows the tractor to release only enough fertilizer to do the job, and not enough to run off into the streams to kill fish.  (It actually uses an optical sensor to look at how green the leaves are!)  Introduced in 1995, John Deere’s GreenStar precision farming system was one of the first to tie GPS to your sensors and computer.  Tractors are now also capable of steering themselves down the rows and even performing the turns automatically. Check this out for a little more green farming technology history.  Wired also has some numbers for you.

The Maldives are a set of islands southwest of the southern tip of India.  Just a few meters above sea level now, the highest points of these islands are predicted to be underwater within the century as long as we continue in a business-as-usual manner.  President Mohamed Nasheed believes that 350.org and their grassroots efforts to bring the dangerous condition of our planet to the immediate attention of leaders around the world is just what Earth needs.  He himself led the largest underwater demonstration to reach out to the world for help to save his country and his people.  So let’s lend a hand to save a nation- go green!