It’s Getting Hot In Here

An Open Letter Respectfully Submitted to Dr. James Hansen in Response to His Recent Congressional Testimony. Cross Posted from The Breakthrough Blog.

Dear Dr. James Hansen,

For more than twenty years, your scientific expertise and public statements have helped many (including myself) understand the relationship between human activity and global warming. I felt a sense of urgency as I read your latest testimony to Congress (PDF) regarding the need to curb greenhouse gases and put us on the path to building a clean energy economy. I can only imagine how frustrated you must be by the inability of Congress to pass meaningful and comprehensive energy and climate legislation. As I read your testimony it was clear that you fully grasp the scale of the energy and climate challenge and desire to implement effective solutions that will tackle it head on.

That’s why I felt totally lost when you articulated what you feel is the best way to transform our current energy system. You said, “One hundred percent dividend or fight!”

I do not understand how we will dramatically alter our energy system and spur the rapid deployment of clean, climate-safe energy sources if we rely solely on capping carbon emissions and pricing carbon while returning 100% of the dividends to Americans. Why are you issuing a divisive rallying cry around a market-based approach that has consistently failed to achieve results? A market-based approach such as Cap-and-Dividend will never solve our energy woes alone. I hope you can clarify your policy position, and are open to other solutions that will re-energize America and curb greenhouse gases. Continue reading ‘Dear Dr. Hansen, Cap-and-Dividend NOT Worth Fighting For’

One of the nation’s largest developers is gobbling up our precious open spaces and spitting them back out in drastically altered pieces. Unfortunately, the McMansions Toll Brothers is planting on former farmland throughout Bucks County, Pennsylvania will only yield poor attempts to satisfy families’ hunger for the American Dream.

Bucks County, Pennsylvania – known for rolling hills, quaint riverside towns, open spaces and working farms. Well, it used to be that way at least. Toll Brothers is now offering “luxury living you can’t afford to miss!” on what used to be farmland next to my home. The necessary luxury they offer comes in the shape of 6,000 square foot luxury estate homes “exceptionally priced from the low- 800’s” – well, more on the order of $1.6 million according to the saleslady I spoke with.

My moderately-sized house used to lie wedged in between, and across the street from, hundreds of acres of working farmland. Throughout my childhood, we had the suggestion of neighbors with a few scattered homes down the road.

As I grew up, however, I watched the farmland in our county be devoured by developers eager to capitalize on the landscape and location. Estate homes, villas, age-restricted housing, gated communities, luxury single-family homes, McMansions – these words entered into my vocabulary as a very young adult. I used to lie awake and wonder when we would get word that the farmland next to us would be turned into such a place.

The day of reckoning has come for the surrounding farmland. “The Highlands at Chapman’s Corner” is here, and it is impossible not to take note. Besides the seemingly endless road construction, approximately 20 single-family luxury homes now blight the landscape. They are oddly smushed together and seemingly self-conscious without any trees to soften their exposed edges. The houses come in a variety of flavors: colonial, federal, collegial, columnar, tudor, idiotic, and ugly. “The Highlands of Chapman’s Corner” represents conspicuous consumption at its finest.

I explored the model home the other day; read on to hear more and view what I saw, and get a sense of what the carbon footprint of this single-family home looks like… Continue reading ‘Toll Brothers is Hungry: Eating our Land and Spitting it Back Out’