It’s Getting Hot In Here

A shortened version of this post was published at Today’s Campus.

The sustainability movement on college and university campuses has grown immensely this decade. In just a few years, sustainability has gone from a debate in a few campuses to a reality in virtually most colleges and universities. Behind this movement of colleges and universities trying to become sustainable is the energy of students who have organized to push sustainability forward in regards to funding, awareness, policy, and practice.

Students have organized themselves to pressure schools to do more on areas like energy and climate change, waste, food and water, and transportation. But at the same time, another group of non-activist students has been emerging to push sustainability from a different angle. This group is made up of students who don’t necessarily want to become active organizers on campus, but instead want to help colleges and universities research and develop new technologies, practices, and designs that can lower society’s ecological footprint.

There is a strong need to create opportunities for students to develop technologies, practices, and designs that can make campuses more sustainable. While many institutions have been integrating sustainability into curricula, few are actually creating research opportunities that directly engage students in creating or improving the solutions that can help us become more sustainable faster. To add to the lack of student research opportunities, there isn’t a vibrant organized community of students pushing to create these opportunities, probably because such students are simply interested in helping develop solutions but not ready to organize to make such opportunities available.

Continue reading ‘Student Opportunities: Research and Development for Sustainability’

Ha empezado una nueva campaña que busca llevar la voz Latina al centro del dialogo internacional sobre el cambio climatico. 350Dominicana, inspirada por y aliada a 350.org, tiene como objetivo la organizacion de una cumbre regional en America Latina y el Caribe con fines de dialogar sobre el limite de 350 partes por millon de dioxido carbono que tiene la humanidad para prevenir daños catastroficos del cambio climatico en los siguientes 20 años. Para Republica Dominicana, estos daños incluirian:

1) La perdida de gran parte del sector turistico y las zonas urbanas por la subida del nivel del mar;

2) La perdida de recursos hidricos y agricolas por las sequias, la evaporacion, y tormentas tropicales mas intensas; y

3) El incremento de las enfermedades infecciosas.

La campaña 350Dominicana busca que el Presidente Leonel Fernandez proponga a la region una Cumbre Regional Sobre el Cambio Climatico que discuta las consecuencias de no actuar suficientemente contra el cambio climatico a nivel mundial. La Cumbre buscaria formar un consenso regional con principios y estrategias politicas que presionaran al resto del mundo a comprometerse a acciones justas y que puedan prevenir efectos catastroficos del cambio climatico.

Vea el video de introduccion: http://350dominicana.org/2009/06/07/350-dominicana-%C2%A1unete-ya/

Firme la peticion: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/compromiso-regional-definido-para-cumbre-sobre-cambio-climtico-en-copenhague-suena-la-alarma-firma

Suscribete al Boletin: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=cmFxTUwwWUVMSS1DRjJIZEhIelZYSGc6MA..

Continue reading ‘350Dominicana: Creando Una Voz Latina Contra El Cambio Climatico’

While America’s youth are working hard towards having 1 million youth pledge to Power Vote, Google has announced its own PowerVote pledge with its Clean Energy 2030 Proposal. The Internet giant has continued to lead beyond its main business by pledging to make Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal, joining General Electric in figuring out how to get America’s national grid to be “smart,” and even becoming a leader by example with a large solar power installation at their headquarters. Now, Google has announced a proposal that could wean America off of most fossil fuels by 2030, a plan in line with what T. Boone Pickens has called for with his Pickens Plan and the call by Al Gore to make all electricity consumed in America renewable by 2018.

Google’s proposal calls for a 100% reduction in coal and oil consumption in America by installing 300 GW of onshore wind energy, 80GW of offshore wind energy, 170GW of solar photovoltaic, 80GW of concentrated solar power, 15GW of conventional geothermal, and 65GW of enhanced geothermal. It also calls for an increase in sales of plug-in and hybrid vehicles to 90% of all sales by 2030 (reaching 42% of the U.S. vehicle fleet in 2030), increasing conventional vehicle fuel efficiency to 45mgp by 2030, an acceleration of the vehicle fleet turnover from 19 to 13 years (increasing sales by 31%), and building some 32,000 kilometers of new transmission lines.

The bill: $4.4 trillion. If we begin in 2010, this means an annual investment of $220 billion by the private sector and the government, with the majority of it coming from the private sector. It will also mean savings of $1 trillion by 2030 due to the lower price of renewables compared to oil, as well as other factors. These savings exclude the potential of energy efficiency, which is not aggressively considered in Google’s plan. According to estimates, America can cut its energy use by up to 30% by simply having smarter building codes, using more efficient appliances, and increasing fuel efficiency.

Continue reading ‘Google PowerVotes: Clean Energy 2030!’

It seems like the United States, to be followed by the rest of the world, is about to create a new oligopoly. Today, there are many existing oligopolies for commodities that are very difficult to produce because of technological and ownership issues. These include such industries as the automakers, the media, oil, beer, tobacco, etc. An oligopoly is a market form where a few companies are largely in control. Some are inevitable because the cost of market entry is too high and therefore only a few can survive. Others, like some monopolies, can be government-granted to ensure a certain standard that is of high interest to the public. In general, we hate having monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies when we don’t really need them. This is because these are generally less efficient in terms of distributing resources than truly competitive markets, like those of grocery stores in cities. Yet this may be changing soon as the world, led by the United States, embraces the creation of a new, non-competitive market: The Carbon Oligopoly.

It seems like the entire world is not pretty sure that global warming is about to cook us alive this century if we don’t bring greenhouse gas emissions down seriously (to zero). Current events, like the tornadoes sweeping through the United States, the pine beetle range extending further through North America, signs of a very thin Arctic ice, and the cyclone that hit Myanmar recently, confirm to us that we’re in for a really big show. However, the world is not yet convinced, of course, that we actually need to bring the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (now 385 parts per million) down to 350 ppm, but it seems likely that new efforts (350.org and We Can Do It, for example) are poised to convince the world that we’ll have to take CO2 out of the atmosphere as soon as possible (and certainly much earlier than mid-century). So, everybody is waiting for 2009, when a new White House declares that it is ready to engage in an international treaty to try to keep humanity from being fried alive by global warming. But what exactly are they, as of now, likely to agree to do?

Continue reading ‘The Carbon Oligopoly’

After a long break from blogging, I’m glad to have the time to get back! First of all, from my title you will have probably noticed that I’m partially against cellulosic and plug-in hybrids as the solution to the world food crisis that biofuels and oil are helping to fuel. Sure, cellulosic can ensure we don’t use corn for ethanol and we don’t change wheat, barley, and other crops to corn fields for ethanol production. Sure, we can use plug-in hybrids and, if we’re lucky to scale renewables enough, power them with clean electricity and wean ourselves off of coal and oil. But have you stopped to think about what that means? I bet Mr. Henry Ford would have told you that you don’t have to think about it, that you should just go ahead and support the “real” solutions… Right!

In the last two weeks, biofuels have been attacked more than ever before from many angles. The world food crisis has become so severe that anybody who supports any biofuel that either uses food crops or takes land that would have otherwise gone to food production is criticized sharply. The arguments against biofuels, especially corn ethanol, are clear.

·         First, ethanol produced from corn takes a chunk away from the corn that would otherwise go to direct human purposes, excluding livestock (of course, nobody ever questioned before the fact that directing corn and soybeans to cows makes the supply available for exports lower, and therefore keeps prices relatively higher; in other words, food prices before the current crisis could have been much lower if it wasn’t because of the luxury of eating high quantities of meat; maybe a big tax on meat can lower other food prices, which politician will be smart enough to propose this?).

·         Second, as the demand for corn and soybeans surges, land that was used for other purposes is converted to corn and soy fields, therefore increasing the cost of the other crops (wheat, barley, etc.) because they’re less available.

·         Lastly, using ethanol has no impact on how much oil we use because the energy balance is 0 or negative. On top of all this, we are losing benefits from cheaper ethanol that could be imported from Brazil if our goal was really to get rid of oil at the lowest possible cost.

So, we know all these things. We also know that the increasing price of oil, now nearly $125 per barrel, is also pushing food prices up, and that decreasing water supplies and crazier weather is also pitching in into the food price hikes we’re seeing. What we also know is that every policymaker and the public at large is thinking that the way out of this is making ethanol from something that doesn’t take up food or converting our cars to plug-in hybrids to have them run on electricity. So lots of money is going into cellulosic research and lots of venture capitalists are fully funding new ventures that hope to bring to market “environmentally-friendly” plug-in electric vehicles. At the same time, GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, and other car companies are stepping up their development of these same technologies to bring such cars to market soon. What’s the problem with this?

Continue reading ‘Cellulosic, Plug-In Hybrids Are Biofuel Solutions? Think Again!’

Over the years, many island nations have fought hard to be heard in the international arena about the effects that global warming is already having on them. Some islands have already been lost in the Pacific, and the forecast is that many more will go in the coming decades, especially if nothing is done to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions globally. Now, in the Caribbean, the picture is looking bleak as well. Today, the top newspaper in the Dominican Republic reported that global warming will eliminate tourism by 2050 under business-as-usual.

The Caribbean islands, for the exception of Cuba and Haiti, are largely dependent on tourism. Coastal development for the purpose of tourism is growing in the region at a high rate despite a recent regional decline in tourism. In the Caribbean, tourism accounts for 15% of the gross domestic product, with higher rates in many islands, and over 2.4 million jobs (about 16%). It has also pushed populations towards the coasts. For example, in the Dominican Republic, over 50% of the population lives near coasts where a 6-m sea-level rise would plunge them into the sea.

Continue reading ‘Global Warming To Eliminate Tourism in the Caribbean’

At the close of the Bali climate change negotiations, we are left again with the disappointment of the Bush administration and all the other climate criminals in Washington. These fossil-fuel-phillic people have slowed down negotiations, stripped key renewable energy provisions in the US energy bill, and pretty much told the rest of the world that they don’t care if global warming cripples their economies. Ted Glick, now in a climate emergency fast for over 100 days, recently said the truth about these climate criminals, and Gore made it clear at Bali that the world must move without the US for the moment. Of course, wonderful things are building on the ground in the US, but we’ll have to wait until 2009 to get seriously going on this issue in the US.

But we don’t have to stop here. We have to make 2008 bigger than 2007. So, to kickoff the year, I created a petition, with the help of peer organizers, for youth around the world to tell world leaders that we want, in 2008, mandates to get rid of coal use by 2020. Dr. James Hansen from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies has made it clear that we can’t continue burning coal if we can’t capture it, and that it must stop within the next decade, or else we risk runaway climate that will literally cook the planet. So, youth have to tell world leaders that we want exactly that. On January 1st, we need to send these leaders a strong message with international media on this Youth Call to End Coal by 2020!

To make this really big, we need 10,000-100,000 youth from around the world to sign the petition and get ready to do media work on January 1st about it in every major global warming polluter. So, what are you waiting for? Sign the petition now and tell your friends to do the same! Go!

From November 16-18, students from across the state of New York gathered at Cornell to launch the NY Student Sustainability Coalition (NYSSC, pronounced NISC). The New York Climate Summit ended with a structured coalition of campus student groups that will work from now on with the goal of getting climate legislation passed in Albany in 2008 that will require the state to reduce its emissions 80% by 2050.

The Summit included students from Cornell University, Fredonia College, Ithaca College, New Explorations High School, NYU, Plattsburgh University, St. Lawrence University, University of Rochester, Wells College, and Westchester Community College. It also included members of the Central NY Climate Change Action Group, Sustainable Tompkins, and Energy Independent Caroline.

Our strategic plan includes a push for New York to be a leader on global warming at the upcoming Presidential Debate on Global Warming in New Hampshire, a coordinated Focus The Nation event where we invite legislators and demand them to state their position on global warming and a bill to reduce emissions 80% by 2050 in the state, and a Lobby Day during St. Valentine’s Day (Date Your Elected Officials, Show Love For Warming Action).

Our website will soon be up at www.nyssc.org, but in the meantime people (especially NY students) can visit our google group.

I’m going to join everyone in saying that Powershift was absolutely mind-blowing! The energy there was incredible and no words can describe what we all felt when we were together as a growing movement with its eyes on a clean energy future. We are ready to take this to the next level. It’s Getting Hot In Here should continue to grow and tell the stories from around the world (see here). I wanted to share with everybody Ted Glick’s Future Hope Column for this week. Ted, one of the best activists in the nation, has been fasting for over 60 days now. He was at Powershift sharing with all of us young people the incredible energy that this movement has. His column sums up what most of us feel like after Powershift:

“Words fail me as I try to figure out how to capture in words the profound significance of the student-based Power Shift conference which took place November 2-5 at the University of Maryland and on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

Historic—Powerful—Deep—Amazing—Awesome—Astounding—Incredible—Hope at the Highest Level: these are the adjectives and phrases that come to mind.

So what happened?

Continue reading ‘“We Want More”’

So we all want the world to be climate neutral, right? Yea, some people spit out numbers like 50% and 80%, but in the end we just want to get rid of fossil fuels for good. Those that claim that fossil fuels are going to be an important part of the energy mix for the world in the future are either ignorant, are not aware of what global warming is already doing, or are simply obsessed with fossil fuels. Sorry if it annoys anybody, but this is true. So, assuming we want a climate neutral world (with no net greenhouse gases coming from humans) or perhaps a climate positive world, we need to address sectors like electricity and transportation, among others. In the transportation sector, there has been a huge push for different fuels (biofuels) and for increased fuel mileage. Unfortunately, proponents of these seem to also be obsessed with fossil fuels and, particularly, cars.

Let’s start with biofuels. Ethanol and biodiesel are the big ones today. Ethanol from corn, sugar cane, and cellulose (which is far away into the future anyways), and biodiesel from vegetable oil from any source. Ethanol from corn is simply an extremely bad choice. First of all, there isn’t even consensus on whether corn ethanol is energy positive. The numbers range from slightly energy positive to slightly energy negative. The energy positive folks are simply supported more widely because people want to jump into the lucrative corn ethanol bandwagon. If positive, the small gains are extremely small and are largely outweighed by the fact that we’re depleting more farmland to do this. At the same time, it’s taking a huge amount of corn agriculture and shooting up prices like crazy, which may be good for the big food companies, but bad for people in Mexico and elsewhere. So those people investing in corn ethanol are investing in something that will come to an end. At best, they’ll cash out of the boom, but many will be left severely hurt.

Continue reading ‘Transportation in a Climate Neutral World’