For people who use real Christmas trees, the question comes up each year—should they switch to artificial? Our general rule is that reusable is better than disposable, but in this case, it’s not that simple.
The consensus (based on at least one peer-reviewed study) is that real trees are the way to go. Continue reading
Cross-posted on pragmaticenvironmentalism.com
A huge Alaskan oil spill, is one of the worst on record, according to Alaskan environmental officials (Greenwire). Yet it seems to have received fairly little coverage outside of some wire stories and local press.
The leak occurred on a North Slope pipeline operated by BP, which has had other problems in recent years including the 2006 spill in Prudhoe Bay. Whatever happened to “Beyond Petroleum?”
Tonight at First Parish Cambridge, located at 3 Church Street Harvard Square from 5-6.30PM, come out and show your support for climate action and the Copenhagan climate conference. This vigil is part of a weekend of global climate action organized with 350.org and TckTckTck.org.
Massachusetts’ citizens will be gathering together tonight in solidarity with the citizens of those nations that will be first to face the impacts of climate change. The candlelight vigil is part of 350.0rg’s call for a science-based international climate treaty and effective U.S. legislation to get us back below 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The program includes compelling speakers invoking the moral imperative for world leaders to act, a group photo documenting the event, and development of photo messages to President Obama calling for action. People will be meeting at Cardinal Cushing Park in Boston, located at the intersection of Cambridge Street and New Chardon Street (across the street from Senator Kerry’s office at One Bowdoin Square). The vigil is being held from 6:00 – 7:30pm with a post-vigil gathering at the Beantown Pub.
This strategic location is aimed to reach Senator Kerry, who will be America’s principal negotiator at the United Nations Climate Change Conference held this month in Copenhagen. It is not clear what will come out of the negotiations, as there is the potential for developing countries to walk out due to resistance from developed nations providing retribution for past carbon pollution. The US has backed away from taking any action until spring, though the US has established the U.S. Center at the Copenhagen Conference. 350.org has called for vigil’s across the globe, urging for a climate treaty that is line with the latest sciuence and protects the most vulnerable countries to safeguard their very survival.
To rsvp for the climate vigil go to: www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=186121428405&ref=
For more info: email 350Boston@gmail.com
For the past seven weeks, college students from around the region have been camping out on Boston Common on Sunday nights calling for Massachusetts to run entirely on clean energy by 2020. After a final, snowy sleep-out last Sunday, the demands of The Leadership Campaign were answered, sort of.
On December 7, state officials introduced a bill to create a task force charged with proposing ways to get Massachusetts to 100% clean electricity by 2020.
The resolution seems like a nice way of saying we’ve heard you, now bugger off, but then again Massachusetts relies on coal for only 25 percent of its electric power (about half the national average) and has set a goal of 20 percent renewable electricity production by 2020.
I wonder what it would take for the state to get to 100 percent “clean electricity”—the Leadership Campaign seems to include fossil fuel plants that use waste heat capture and recycling in its definition of clean—by 2020.
Image Credit: Ian Maclellan for The Leadership Campaign
While we still have great expectations of the upcoming talks in Copenhagen are all fine and dandy, it’s a rather elite event about a topic that touches us all. There have been efforts to democratize the discussion, such as the Museum of Science’s, “World Views on Global Warming,” but participation is still limited to those who can be physically present. Of course, you have another chance to do so at a follow-up session tomorrow (12/5) morning. MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence has also launched a new project, the Climate Collaboratorium, to allow people to share, vote on and discuss ideas about reducing emissions on a large scale.
At MIT, we are training Science Impact Coordinators (SICs) willing to put themselves in the middle between experts, advocates and regulators. Unless someone is able to manage these difficult interactions, we will miss crucial opportunities to protect dwindling natural resources. What does a graduate student with an undergraduate science degree, a passion for environmental improvement and an interest in managing constructive dialogue in politically-stressed situations need to know to facilitate such interactions? That’s what we are trying to determine.
Six years ago, at the invitation of the United States Geological Survey (one of America’s premiere science agencies), our MIT team put together a set of courses and a field-based training program to place apprentice SICs in the middle of resource management controversies all over the United States. Through an action-research program, more than 25 graduates of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning have worked on environmental restoration in Mississippi, desalination of the Colorado River, climate change impacts in the Everglades and on the Chesapeake Bay, strategies for maintaining the near-shore fishery in the Gulf of Maine, ways of ensuring that local knowledge is taken seriously in managing the Sonoran desert; dealing with storm water run-off in Somerville, Massachusetts and Aurora, Colorado; helping coastal cities in Massachusetts adapt to climate change risks, protecting endangered habitats in the Rocky Mountains, and coping with water shortages in Eastern Washington. We work under the banner of MUSIC — the MIT-USGS Science Impact Collaborative and our tag line is “Harmonizing Science, Policy and Politics.” (See scienceimpact.mit.edu).
You’d think by now that the science and engineering establishment would realize that conventional approach to injecting “science” and technical analysis into politically-charged policy-making situations isn’t working. Most scientists and engineers still think that all they need to do is put their studies “out there” and the world will use the information appropriately. They are convinced that they don’t have to talk to non-experts or get involved in the hurly-burly of actual decision-making. We also encounter regulators at every level who think that holding a hearing is the best way to engage concerned citizens and stakeholders in resource management decisions. The fact that nothing gets decided in such setting and that no one has responsibility of reconciling what they are saying with what anyone else is saying, doesn’t seem to bother them. Finally, we see no sign that environmental and health advocates realize how important it is for them to engage in joint fact finding and collaborative decision-making with the companies and agencies they are fighting.
The first step in resolving any science-intensive policy dispute is getting the right parties to the table. This is best handled by calling on trained mediators (i.e. professional neutrals) to interview all the relevant groups and organizations – on a confidential and not-for-attribution basis – to scope the agenda, identify who should be involved, lay out a work plan, and engage the relevant stakeholders in specifying the ground rules that will govern their interactions. The details of how to do this are now well-known (see Susskind and Cruikshank, Breaking Robert’s Rules, Oxford University Press, 2006). Students in the MUSIC program help prepare these assessments as assistants to professionals working for the Consensus Building Institute (www.cbuilding.org).
Once all the parties are at the table, including the relevant regulators, the group can initiate scientific or technical investigations required to understand the current situation as well as possible ways of proceeding given the likely impacts of alternative decisions. Often this requires developing models or forecasts. Sometimes it requires gathering new data. Inevitably, it involves interacting with a range of experts (with conflicting disciplinary and technical opinions about what ought to be done or how a problem should be approached).
Eventually, the group needs to decide what it wants to recommend based on the homework it has done and the concerns of all the stakeholder groups involved. Unlike a hearing where each person sounds off and then sits down; the collaborative processes MUSIC students are learning to facilitate aims to produce informed consensus — even in the face of scientific uncertainty and intense technical disagreements. What’s interesting is how often it is possible to reach agreement in such situations when the parties are given the information and help they need. Books like Susskind et. al, The Consensus Building Handbook (Sage, 1999) offer numerous “worked examples” to show that this is possible.
When groups are invited to participate in collaborative resource management, that doesn’t mean that government agencies are turning over to them the power to make final decisions. The product of such deliberations almost always takes the form of a recommendation. Agencies have legal responsibility for making policy choices. Most of the time, though, if all the relevant parties engage in a good-faith effort to produce an informed agreement, the regulators are likely to move in that direction. They take the informally negotiated agreement and translate it into terms and conditions imposed as part of a permit or license. This makes the policy enforceable.
We expect SICs to invest two years in intensive graduate study. About 1/4 of their time is devoted to field-based apprenticeships. The rest is spent taking courses dealing with the techniques of policy analysis, tools for forecasting and modeling change in socio-ecological systems, environmental ethics, environmental leadership, strategies for promoting sustainable development, and consensus building strategies. Their field-based assignments are guided by federal agency staff and MIT faculty advisors. They have to fulfill a contract each semester that requires them to produce work products that meet the needs of the communities and agencies with which they are working, and contribute to theory-building. In their final semester, they are required to produce a thesis. In early November 2009, we will publish The Best of MUSIC, highlighting some of the most important theory-building contributions of the MUSIC interns.
We are pushing hard to get the U.S. Department of the Interior to make a formal commitment to hire Science Impact Coordinators at of its headquarters and regional offices. We hope that NOAA, EPA, DOE, Army Corps of Engineers and make similar commitments. It’s time to adopt a new approach to harmonizing science, policy and politics.
This weekend we went on a cooking/cleaning binge, and one of the things that needed cleaning the most was the filter in our dishwasher. It was surprisingly easy to remove, but so disgusting that Jason and I took turns washing it out—neither of us wanted to deal with it for long. It definitely hasn’t been cleaned in the year we’ve lived in our apartment and, from the looks of it, for years before that, either. I didn’t even know it existed until I read Don’t Throw It Out!
Since the length of most dishwashers’ cycles depends on how much dirt they’re sensing coming off the dishes, cleaning the filter can make them more efficient. Although many newer dishwashers have self-cleaning filters, it should be one of the first things you check if your dishes aren’t getting completely clean.
I know what some of you are thinking: Why are you using the dishwasher in the first place? Isn’t washing dishes by hand more efficient?
People can be very proud of their particular dishwashing methods, but the best study to date, from the University of Bonn, has shown that a full dishwasher load washed by hand takes an average of 27 gallons. Even the most efficient handwashers used 8 gallons of water. By comparison, an Energy Star–qualified dishwasher uses less than 5.8 gallons per load.
Water conservation isn’t a big deal in the Northeast, but in this case the most energy is used in heating the water, so water consumption is a good yardstick. I probably wouldn’t run out to upgrade a five-year-old dishwasher just to improve its efficiency, but a 15-year-old dishwasher uses twice as much water as a new one. While some people argue that the production of the dishwasher makes it less efficient than handwashing, studies have shown that over a 15-year life cycle, energy use accounts for 95% of its environmental impact.
You could argue that with all the variables, it’s impossible to say exactly how your particular hand-washing stacks up to my particular dishwashing. But even with the benefit of the doubt given entirely to the by-hand proponents, it’s a wash, and in that case it’s much like the paper or plastic bag debate—not worth arguing about (except to say, use less of them). I’m not a big fan of handwashing dishes to begin with, so the dishwasher’s my choice. I’m just happy that my laziness is justified by facts.
Things we can do to make our dishwasher even more environmentally friendly include:
And, by the way, federal dishwasher standards are changing in January, and Energy Star standards are changing in July 2011, so if you’re planning on buying a new dishwasher, you might want to wait for the more efficient models. Check out Consumer Reports’ eco-site Greenerchoices.org for more buying tips.
Cross-posted on pragmaticenvironmentalism.com
Cape Wind is still embroiled in politics, and CommonWealth Solar may soon be. The state’s grant program to promote solar energy is effectively bankrupt. On the plus side, if you already have a photovoltaic installation or other renewable energy system, you can now sell much more electricity back to NSTAR.