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- A first sustainability conference for the Freeport Apollo Group (FLAG) near Pittsburgh:
Notable speakers on historic preservation, outdoor recreational tourism, stormwater management, urban forestry, green building practices, and locally grown food and agriculture are at the crux of a “sustainability conference” being hosted by the Freeport Leechburg Apollo Group.
Also interesting is that they’re including a panel on historic preservation, which I’ve always thought belongs in discussions of sustainability, because it helps people connect with their (cultural) environment better.
- Professor John Sterman of MIT interviewed on sustainability:
But the perspective of those of us at the S-Lab is that sustainability is much broader than just an ecological concept. We think of sustainability as encompassing not just ecological issues but economic issues, social issues, political and even personal issues. You can’t have a sustainable ecosystem if there’s extreme poverty, if there’s no opportunity for people to meet basic human needs and realize their potential. And of course you can’t have a healthy economy if the result of that economic activity is the degradation of the environment.
Framing this as loggers versus spotted owls, growth versus green, economy versus environment—as opposition—doesn’t work and isn’t right. These things are fundamentally aligned. And I think people are hungry for that alignment.
- Paul Krugman’s NY Times piece on building the green economy:
Like the debate over climate change itself, the debate over climate economics looks very different from the inside than it often does in popular media. The casual reader might have the impression that there are real doubts about whether emissions can be reduced without inflicting severe damage on the economy. In fact, once you filter out the noise generated by special-interest groups, you discover that there is widespread agreement among environmental economists that a market-based program to deal with the threat of climate change — one that limits carbon emissions by putting a price on them — can achieve large results at modest, though not trivial, cost. There is, however, much less agreement on how fast we should move, whether major conservation efforts should start almost immediately or be gradually increased over the course of many decades.
In what follows, I will offer a brief survey of the economics of climate change or, more precisely, the economics of lessening climate change. I’ll try to lay out the areas of broad agreement as well as those that remain in major dispute. First, though, a primer in the basic economics of environmental protection.
It really is a good overview on the basics of the economics of climate change mitigation.
- The American Society of Landscape Architecture (ASLA) notes the creation of the SEED standard from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design:
A group of architects, designers, activists, and community leaders interested in “public interest design” came together in 2005 at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and conceived of a set of principles and tools that would feature a greater focus on the social and economic facets of buildings and neighborhoods. Five years later, a team has launched a new standard called SEED (Social Economic Environmental Design). SEED is designed to provide guidance, evaluation, and certification on the social, economic, and environmental aspects of buildings and neighborhoods.
Engaging local stakeholders is critical in the SEED process:
SEED maintains the belief that design can play a vital role in the most critical issues that face communities and individuals, in crisis and in every day challenges. To accomplish this, the SEED® process guides professionals to work alongside locals who know their community and its needs. This practice of ‘trusting the local’ is increasingly recognized as a highly effective way to sustain the health and longevity of a place or a community as it develops.
- The ASLA’s Dirt blog also highlights Cuba’s big strides in sustainable agriculture following the collapse of the Soviet Union and their economic aid twenty years ago:
Farmers and agronomists responded to economic isolation by localizing food production, which has now taken off across Cuba’s urban areas. In fact, urban farms in “vacant lots in the capital, Havana, and a network of producers across the country” now provide 80 percent of the country with local, organic produce and helped turn Cuba into an “unintentional leader of the green movement,” says Solutions. CBS News adds that most urban farms where organic produce is grown are walking distance from residents.
The fall of the Soviet Union meant the end to external support, and green agricultural practices had to be scaled up quickly. In the early 1990’s, ”agricultural production in Cuba, dominated by sugar cane production for export, following Spanish colonial practice, shrank from 88.1 Million Metric Tonnes in 1990 to around 2.2 MMT in 1993. Supplies of corn, Cuba’s other main product and a staple of the Cuban diet, fell by 70 percent. In Havana, the average caloric intake over the same period fell from 3,052 calories per day to 2,099. Some reports suggest that many were surviving on only 1,500 calories a day.” To save Cubans from starvation, agronomists and farmers pushed for the decentralization of agriculture, an end to collective farms.
- Natural gas mining has recently been entering a boom period in Pennsylvania, because of a technique called “fracking” that allows drillers to pump hundreds of thousands of gallons of salt and mineral laden water known as “brine” to penetrate the “natural gas,” which is primarily methane but lots of other compounds as well, trapped in the Marcellus shale rock underground. What to do with all of that brine? Well, more often than we’d like to think, it’s just dumped either into old coal mines, where it winds up in local waterways, or directly into streams. This brine pollution is often highly toxic to plants, and animals nearby and downstream. Local Pennsylvania landscaper Bob Donnan has experienced these wells first-hand:
They say “fools rush in.” Are the good folks of Pennsylvania being caught unawares by all this? Will the citizens of New York State be the next to jeopardize their precious water resources? Whatever those answers are, they probably won’t be very long in coming. It’s a rapidly changing landscape out there around Hickory, as well as other small communities sitting atop these Marcellus Shale gas reserves.
This web page was created to share photos of what gas development looks like around Hickory Pennsylvania. I suggest you follow some of the links below, do some reading, and take a look at this issue for yourself. I can only share what I have personally experienced and seen in these early stages of drilling. Time will tell where this natural gas boom will lead us. As with the huge National debt, our ultimate hope is that we don’t leave our children, and their children’s children another nightmare to deal with sometime down the road.
- The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on drillers being caught dumping their brine into the Allegheny National Forest:
Two men from a Kansas oil-drilling firm pleaded guilty today to illegally dumping 200,000 gallons of brine water down an abandoned well in Pennsylvania’s only national forest.
The pollution by Swamp Angel LLC in the Allegheny National Forest could contaminate groundwater and streams, but authorities have not linked any water damage conclusively to the pollution, acting U.S. Attorney Robert Cessar said.
The pleas before a federal judge in Erie should send a signal to oil and gas drillers to properly dispose of brine, a saltwater byproduct of the drilling process that sometimes also contains metals, Mr. Cessar said.
“These guys were drilling oil wells, produced this brine water and decided they weren’t going to pay for its disposal,” Mr. Cessar said. “This is the result of them getting caught. That’s the case in a nutshell.”
- There’s also the significant risk that all of this brine water will contaminate underground drinking water. According to Richard Caperton and Tom Kenworthy at the Center for American Progress, the oil and gas industry would like the EPA to not regulate their fracking operations:
The latest draft of the climate and energy bill being written by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) reportedly includes language saying U.S. EPA would not regulate the oil and gas drilling technique.
Hopefully, this is just wishful thinking by gas companies, rather than a proposal that’s actually in the comprehensive, bipartisan clean energy and global warming legislation under development by the three senators.
The EPA should have the ability to protect people from all potential sources of drinking water contamination, including hydraulic fracturing (also known as “fracking”). Recognizing the potential threat to water supplies, the EPA announced last week it will undertake a major study of the process to see if it poses dangers to public health and safety.
In the fracking process, a solution of water, sand and chemicals is injected into underground rock formations. This cracks the rock, releasing natural gas that wasn’t previously recoverable. Unfortunately, as CAP’s Tom Kenworthy recently explained, there’s a risk that the chemicals in fracking fluids will pollute nearby drinking water sources. This is especially important in light of today’s news report (subscription req’d.) that a gas drilling company has violated an agreement with the government and injected diesel fuel near drinking water aquifers. “One of the world’s largest oilfield services companies continued to tell U.S. EPA it was complying with an agreement barring the injection of diesel fuel near drinking-water aquifers, documents show, after admitting to Congress that it had violated the pact,” according to the report.
If the industry succeeds in getting a fracking exemption in Senate energy and climate legislation, it would expand special treatment for hydraulic fracturing that started with the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that exempted the process from EPA regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Allegedly, the draft proposal would also protect the oil and gas industry from having to publicly disclose the chemicals they use, which removes neighbors’ right to know about the risk posed by adjacent drilling.
- One way to deal with all of that brine water is to treat it by removing the dissolved salts and minerals in the water and hand it back to drillers to re-use the water, and a facility in nearby New Stanton, Pennsylvania is opening this Spring to handle some of the commonwealth’s growing supply of drilling wastewater this way:
The treatment plant will create 20 to 30 jobs, said Frobouck, who scrapped plans for an ethanol plant at the East Huntingdon facility last year. The drilling companies would truck the water to the plant, but Frobouck said he envisions establishing transfer stations later.
The treatment process will remove total dissolved solids — salts, organic matter and other materials. Treated water will be returned to the drillers for re-use, and the remaining sludge will be dried and sent to landfills, Frobouck said.
This is a short and wonderful book about the Allegheny Riverfront Park in downtown Pittsburgh. It offers the reader a behind the scenes look at the entire process of the park from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s initial idea through its design, building, and into its present use. The book provides this perspective through a series of recorded interviews with the landscape architects of the project.
As I began the book, I was turned off by Michael Van Valkenburgh’s seeming distaste for environmental concerns as well as his 1980s ethos of post-modern design. However, as I read and reflected about the project and its result, the more I became convinced that this was the right landscape architectural firm for the job. Indeed, I was so taken with the following paragraphs from pages 115-117 that I quote from them here:
Today Pittsburgh’s downtown is on its way back, so different from when we started there a decade ago, and ARP [Allegheny Riverfront Park] plays a big part in this vigo: It show how much more livable cities are with parks. It makes me want to know more about the public discourse of the first half of the nineteenth century, in which great thinkers as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson Downing were having public conversations and writing essays about the role of parks in the lives of city dwellers in a democratic society. Parks were being discussed in teh same conversations along with museums, concert halls, railroads, sanitation, and roadway systems.
…
As landscape urbanists, landscape architects are the only design professionals who fully understand the complexity of a park as an urban social organism.
…
The visceral nature of parks is the oppose of the virtual that so pervades our Information Age. The trees on the lower level of the Allegheny are palpably close to you when you are there, and their rough bark and thickness play in extreme contrast to the soothing water sheet of the river nearby. This kind of thing is impossible to photograph, and understandable only when it hits you in the gut as you are standing there. Working in Pittsburgh extended my understanding that the significance of parks is their contribution to the daily life of urban dwellers. They have the potential to unlock imaginations by offering up a million different versions of the kind of physical contrast I just described, bringing us back to Bachelard’s idea about psychological immensity and its relationship to the forest. City dwellers don’t just want parks; they need them so they can be connected to time and place. [emphasis mine]
This is a wonderful book about a wonderful park.
- Justin Wolfers asks whether you, as a social scientist, can trust census data. Note that he is not asking whether you can trust the census, nor is he suggesting that the census is some sort of socialist-fascist plot designed to destroy America.
No. At least that’s the conclusion of an important new paper (ungated version here) by Trent Alexander, Michael Davern and Betsey Stevenson, who find enormous errors in some critically important economic datasets.
- Deborah Weisberg notes that fly fishing lessons in western Pennsylvania are available this month at a number of regional locations. I will note that according to my as yet unpublished research, the trout streams in the Laurel Highlands are among the least-threatened by specific pollution sources in Pennsylvania.
- Native Hawaiians are getting closer to achieving full indigenous status within the United States.
Their kingdom long ago overthrown, Native Hawaiians seeking redress are closer than they’ve ever been to reclaiming a piece of Hawaii.
Native Hawaiians are the last remaining indigenous group in the United States that hasn’t been allowed to establish their own government, a right extended to Alaska Natives and 564 Native American tribes.
With a final vote pending in the Senate and Hawaii-born President Obama on their side, the nation’s 400,000 Native Hawaiians could earn federal recognition as soon as this month — and the land, money and power that comes with it. They measure passed the House last month.
- The magazine Real Simple conducted a faux-survey of “time-saving cities,” where everything in life is better cause it’s more efficient. I only link to it, because Pittsburgh, of course, scored so well at #8 a little below DC and a little above Miami.
According to a survey by Real Simple, the living is surprisingly easy in these urban areas.
Takeout on every corner. Easy access to a doctor. Timed traffic lights. These conveniences can ease even the most chaotic days.
To assess which places help you make the most of your precious hours, we sorted through reams of data on dozens of large American cities, ranked each on various criteria in five categories (see below) on a scale of 1 to 5, and added up those categories to get an overall score.
Category 1: Getting around –Includes average commute, walkability, traffic congestion, airport on-time performance.
Category 2: Health and safety –Includes average wait to get a doctor’s appointment, physicians per capita, response times of emergency medical services.
Category 3: Information and technology — Includes broadband and wireless availability, bookstores and libraries per capita, helpful resources such as 311 hotlines.
Category 4: Green time-savers — Includes recycling access and cost, number of farmers’ markets and community gardens, bike friendliness.
Category 5: Lifestyle — Includes number of personal trainers and organizers, restaurants offering takeout per capita, miscellaneous time-saving services.
- Eric Alterman reminds us that more Americans get their news from talk radio, which is dominated by extreme right-wing partisans and their syndicated shows, than from anywhere else. Ever wonder where the bizarre ideas you’ve heard your crazy uncle talk about come from? Talk radio.
It’s hard work listening to these shows, but progressives should be paying attention to the impact they’re having: 48 million people get their news from these guys, according to the Pew Project For Excellence In Journalism, and the numbers of radio stations that carry at least some talk shows grew to 2,056 from 1,370 the year before, according to Inside Radio magazine.
That’s more than twice the collective audience for the three TV network evening news shows combined, more than five times the audience of the three network Sunday news shows, nearly seven times the combined audience for cable news shows, nearly 10 times the audience for NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” and 16 times the audience for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
Progressives—and I (Eric) plead particularly guilty here—tend to focus their outrage on Fox News, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and pro-torture and antiscience op-ed writers on The Washington Post op-ed page, among others. But as these numbers indicate, we’re not looking at the one place where most Americans get their news. And 9 of the top 10 talk radio shows are hosted by implacable conservatives.
On top of that, the rhetoric on these shows is even worse than Fox News—much worse.
 Jack Webb Shilling for Fatima Cigrarettes This audo advertisement (click the Fatima picture for the audio) for Fatima cigarettes originally aired on April 15, 1954 during a Dragnet episode called “The Big Pug.” Fatima, a Liggett and Myers tobacco company brand, was the sponsor of the episode and ran similar ads as “public service announcements” at the start, middle, and end of the episode. This is the ad from midway during the show. It’s about a minute and a half long.
While listening to this old episode of Sgt. Friday doing his “Just the facts, ma’am” Dragnet best, I was struck by how bold the assertions were during these ads. ”It’s wise to smoke Fatima cigarettes” is their constant refrain. This particular ad features a woman who works as a late-night news journalist at a big-time news agency. In this ad she equates working longer with smoking more.
A paper by Professor David Rosner of Columbia University I recently read about the role that historians have been playing in pending law suits against tobacco companies made me think about whether people who became addicted to cigarette-delivered nicotine in past decades were aware of the health risks of smoking. A great many consulting historians are arguing for their tobacco company employers that people were indeed aware of these risks and have been submitting histories of their awareness as evidence in these court cases. Ads like this one suggest that smoking was not only a normal part of life, but also a routine part of life as successful hard-working career men and women.
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