Incentives for going Green?

From Tree Hugger:

Toronto calls itself a green city, and its wholly owned power distribution subsidiary Toronto Hydro has been handing out the CFL's and advertising conservation like mad. It has been so successful that the electricity loads in the city fell by 178.5 million kilowatt hours — enough to power 178,000 homes for a month — between spring 2005 and the end of 2006. Oops, that means a $10.4 million drop in revenue, leading to a 6.3% increase in hydro rates to cover it, eating up almost every penny of the savings. This is such an incentive to turn out the lights, telling everyone to spend money to conserve and then penalizing them for doing it. Only in Green Toronto. ::CBC No, wait, there is the green province of Ontario, encouraging people to invest in green technology. Max Woschnigg did, building a big 80Kw turbine and saving $ 3,600 a year in power, while selling excess back to the grid. He just had his property reassessed for tax purposes and guess what, it is worth more with the turbine and his taxes just went up about $ 3,600. Another great incentive from the Green Government of Ontario. ::Tyler Hamilton in the Star And we wonder why people aren't being serious about conservation.

Defaulting to Green

Yesterday I started a series of posts related to creating our sustainable future. It's the folks at World Changing doing the writing and thinking.

Here is strategy number 1:

"1) Defaulting to green: When relatively equal alternatives exist, routinely choose the greener one, even if its impact is only minimally better (for instance, choose recycled toilet paper whenever possible). This may not produce massive change, but it helps solidify the gains of greener products. We ought to be working to put obviously dumb products -- like bleached, pulped-forest toilet paper or toxic chemical household cleaning solutions -- out of business. That'd be a pretty clear market signal."

My additional thoughts:
In the past, major environmental change occurred when major corporations were convinced to move from Styrofoam to paper, to turn off their PCs on the weekend, mainly because of their large size and footprint. Now, we need individual consumers to begin making their own lifestyle changes, as well as providing the politicians with the political cover they need to create new laws, tax incentives and breaks. Low hanging fruit can taste as good as the fruit at the top of the tree.

Buy our way to a better future?

The folks over at WorldChanging are blogging about how to create the sustainable future we must have. Over the next several days, I thought I'd paste in some of their ideas for further thought. Here's the starter. If you'd like to see the whole article at once, you can find it here.

You cannot buy a better future, at least not the sort of bright green future we talk about here at Worldchanging. That sort of future -- a sustainable one, a future that itself has a future -- is not available for purchase: It doesn't yet exist. You can't find it on shelves, and you can't even order it up custom, no matter how much money you're willing to spend.

You can be heroic in your efforts, but at the moment it's essentially impossible to live a North American consumer lifestyle and do no harm. You can buy only organic food, recycled products, and natural fibers and you won't get there. You can even trade your car for a hybrid, harvest your rainwater and only run your CFLs off your backyard wind turbine, and you still won't get there, both because the waste associated with consumerism is so massive and because the systems outside your direct control upon which you depend -- from your local roads to your nation's army to the design of the assembly lines used to build your car, rain barrel and windmill -- are still profoundly unsustainable.

Tom Swift

Growing up, one of my favorite series of books to read was about Tom Swift, and his friends. Tom always invented cool gadgets that would get him out of scrapes, was always chasing Communist-sounding bad guys, was hyper patriotic, didn't see much need for girls ("Bye Tom, oh please be careful," they were known to murmur), while they stayed at home.

Nevertheless, they were great fun, and launched me on my science fiction reading interest. I love the internet, for I recently came across a great essay on Tom Swift. Enjoy.

Micro Lending

Micro Lending is high up in the news rotations these days, especially after the Grameen Bank founder, Muhammad Yunus, received the Nobel Peace Prize this past year.

So what if we want to learn more about micro credit or lend money to people in developing countries, or people in the United States, who are starting their own businesses?

Here's an article on Slate that details one person's investigation of micro lending companies.

One thing I found interesting was the article's assertion that the best way to give is to give consistently to a few organizations, it creates a larger "bang for the buck."

What's this got to do with poverty? While government has an important role to create level playing fields so that the many have an equal chance to make it, citizens also have a role. What if we could divert some of the billions that we Americans spend on coffee, makeup or other "essentials" into anti-poverty programs that work; such as micro credit? What would that do to reduce poverty?

Unemployment and Homeownership

In the spirit of Freakeconomics research, (i.e. research that leads to some interesting thinking), here's a study about the relationship between home ownership and structural unemployment. The more mobile you are (no mortgage), the more willing you are to move to new places, and take new jobs, you are less likely to be unemployed.

From the article:

English economist Andrew Oswald has shown that across European countries, and across U.S. states, high levels of home ownership are correlated with high levels of unemployment. More conventional factors such as generous welfare benefits or high levels of unionization don't explain unemployment nearly as well as the tendency to own houses. Renting your home and staying flexible do wonders for your chances of always finding an interesting job to do.

The complete article is here:

Falwell Knew Of Gingrich Affair

9:37 PM (38 minutes ago)
Falwell Knew Of Gingrich Affair Before Clinton Impeachment
from Huffington Post by The Huffington Post

In an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson that aired Friday, Gingrich admitted to the affair in 1998. In 2000, he divorced his second wife, Marianne, after his attorneys acknowledged his relationship with Callista Bisek, a former congressional aide now his wife.

"He has admitted his moral shortcomings to me, as well, in private conversations," Falwell wrote in a weekly newsletter sent Friday to members of the Moral Majority Coalition and The Liberty Alliance. "And he has also told me that he has, in recent years, come to grips with his personal failures and sought God's forgiveness."


How much longer will we have to wait before the hypocrisy of some on the religious right is seen for what it truly is: not piety but a power grab. Funny how God and the right easily forgive Republicans: Newt, Rush, etc., but Democrats are bound for hell...

I saw the "it depends on what is is" parsing going on today: it was okay for a Speaker of the House (2nd in line to the Presidency) to have an affair, it's not okay for the President. Oh, what's that? Newt was a Republican?

Gingrich tells Christian group of affair - Yahoo! News

Gingrich tells Christian group of affair - Yahoo! News

Sigh. What more needs to be said? Perhaps something about planks and specks?

A good listen

Need something to listen to? Check out the 12 Byzantine Rulers podcast.

History Lecturer Lars Brownworth gives 13 short (15 min or less) lectures on 12 key emperors of the Byzantine empire. Dull you say? Not at all!

Mr. Brownworth is very engaging, and provides key information as well as anecdotes that bring these ancient figures to life. (Loved the anecdote about the emperor Diocletian retiring to grow cabbages). Highly recommended.

Poverty work

In my classes, we often ask "Why are people poor?" "Why does poverty exist?" The issue is fairly complex, and one of the most interesting groups talking the problem in developing countries is the Millenium Promise Project. Their goal is to "eliminate extreme poverty by 2025."

From their website: "Our flagship initiative, the Millennium Villages, now operating in 78 villages across 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, takes a comprehensive approach to addressing extreme poverty. By combining the best scientific and local knowledge, Millennium Villages address all the major problems simultaneously -- hunger, disease, inadequate education, lack of safe drinking water, and absence of essential infrastructure -- to assist communities on their way to self-sustainable development."

Here's an excerpt from a hopeful email I recently received:

"Koraro, Ethiopia has seen dramatic and hope-inspiring changes since the community began working with Millennium Villages in February 2005. More than 150 new homes dot a landscape that was once barren. Crops like maize and sorghum now grow where only splintered rocks and dusty earth once stood. And parents are now deciding that it makes more sense to send their kids to school than to keep them home to work.

One of the first efforts of the project was to give farmers improved seeds and fertilizer. This together with new farming techniques and the hard work of the villagers has produced crop yields four times as large as when the project began. During the last planting season, in July 2006, many villagers decided to diversify their fields to include oranges, bananas, coffee, coriander and ginger—crops that will improve nutrition in the village and command a higher price at local markets."

For more information on this project, and how to end poverty, see Jeffrey Sach's book: The End of Poverty

Monty Python's Dead Parrot Sketch performed in a unique way!



For complete information on this, read the 419 Eater Blog for all the information on this scamming of Nigerian scammers.

Iraqi Blogs

Seems like I found this collection of Iraqi blogs in an airplane magazine back in January. One way to connect the dots is to seek out different experiences and viewpoints. I offer these blogs, without endorsing any particular viewpoint:

Iraq the Model

Neurotic Iraqi Wife

A Family in Baghdad

A Star from Mosul

Here's a blog on introducing Islam:

Introducing Islam

More words for thought

So how do we feed and nourish our spirit, and the spirit of others?

First find a path, and a little light to see by. Then push up your sleeves and start helping. Every single spiritual tradition says that you must take care of the poor, or you are so doomed that not even Jesus or Buddha can help you.

...There are people in this country who are poor in spirit, worried, depressed, dancing as fast as they can; their kids are sick, or their retirement savings are gone. There is great loneliness among us, life-threatening loneliness. People have given up on peace, on equality.

From "Let Us Commence," by Anne Lamott. Found in her book Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

Words to live by

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because some day in life you will have been all of these."

George Washington Carver

(from a colleagues email signature line)

New for 2007

I've done a major update on the sidebar info, and promise that I will be refreshing the blog more often in 2007. Of course, now that I'm ready to post, I've dried up with things to say....

Al Gore and John Woolman

There's a nice little brouhaha over the following oped piece published in USATODAY yesterday, which I paste in here (my comments after the story):

Gore isn't quite as green as he's led the world to believe
Updated 8/10/2006 10:44 AM ET
By Peter Schweizer
Al Gore has spoken: The world must embrace a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." To do otherwise, he says, will result in a cataclysmic catastrophe. "Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb," warns the website for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. "We have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin."

Graciously, Gore tells consumers how to change their lives to curb their carbon-gobbling ways: Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, use a clothesline, drive a hybrid, use renewable energy, dramatically cut back on consumption. Better still, responsible global citizens can follow Gore's example, because, as he readily points out in his speeches, he lives a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." But if Al Gore is the world's role model for ecology, the planet is doomed.

For someone who says the sky is falling, he does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film's distributor, pays this.)

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.

Gore is not alone. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has said, "Global warming is happening, and it threatens our very existence." The DNC website applauds the fact that Gore has "tried to move people to act." Yet, astoundingly, Gore's persuasive powers have failed to convince his own party: The DNC has not signed up to pay an additional two pennies a kilowatt hour to go green. For that matter, neither has the Republican National Committee.

Maybe our very existence isn't threatened.

Gore has held these apocalyptic views about the environment for some time. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.

Living carbon-neutral apparently doesn't mean living oil-stock free. Nor does it necessarily mean giving up a mining royalty either.

Humanity might be "sitting on a ticking time bomb," but Gore's home in Carthage is sitting on a zinc mine. Gore receives $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc, which operates a zinc concession on his property. Tennessee has cited the company for adding large quantities of barium, iron and zinc to the nearby Caney Fork River.

The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility. If he genuinely believes the apocalyptic vision he has put forth and calls for radical changes in the way other people live, why hasn't he made any radical change in his life? Giving up the zinc mine or one of his homes is not asking much, given that he wants the rest of us to radically change our lives.

Peter Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy.

First, I note that Schweizer is a fellow at the Hoover Institute: a conservative think tank. Second, I'm sympathetic to Gore's argument and message, so I'm more inclined to give him the doubt.

I think what Schweizer has pointed out illustrates the difficulty there is in living an American lifestyle that doesn't contribute to pollution and global warming. Because I am sympathetic to Gore, I don't shoot the messanger just becuase not all of his words are backed by actions.

I contrast Al Gore with the Quaker John Woolman, mostly known for his Journal. Woolman was instrumental in convincing the Quakers to give up their slaves. One way he did this was by altering his own lifestyle: he owned no slaves, quit his tailor business (he was afraid he was going to make too much $$), and he wore no dyed clothes; for dye often came from the West Indies; a place which used African slaves to create the dyes. Once Woolman figured out where he was part of the problem he was trying to tackle, he took action. I like Woolman a lot. He is an inspiration to me to remember that one person, acting from conviction, can make a difference.

Here's one of his most relevant quotations:

"May we look upon our treasures, the furniture of our houses, and our garments, and try whether the seeds of war have nourishment in these our posessions."

Which Wolf do you Feed?

From graduation musings by Rabbi Marc Gellman:

An elder Cherokee chief took his grandchildren into the forest and sat them down and said to them, “A fight is going on inside me. This is a terrible fight and it is a fight between two wolves. One wolf is the wolf of fear, anger, arrogance and greed. The other wolf is the wolf of courage, kindness, humility and love.”

The children were very quiet and listening to their grandfather with both their ears. He then said to them, “This same fight between the two wolves that is going on inside of me is going on inside of you, and inside every person.”

They thought about it for a minute and then one child asked the chief, “Grandfather, which wolf will win the fight?” He said quietly, “The one you feed.”

The new Masculinity?

Looking at his empty plate after consuming a pizza, Mr. Singer [director of the upcoming Superman movie] had a further thought about the nature of masculinity, super or otherwise. "If there's any virtue in it, it has a vulnerable side," he said. "Because without vulnerability one can tend to lack compassion. And without compassion one can tend to lack humanity. And these are some things a man should strive to have."

Leaves of Grass

from the preface to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches,
give alms to everyone who asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not
concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people and your
very flesh shall be a great poem.


Happy belated Earth Day, Jeff St.

Lemonade anyone?