Last Sunday was another one of our summer days of threatening rain and occasional downpours but I biked down to Henry Street for the first local weatherization barnraising. Lots of people showed up as did the rain while we crowded into the garage to arrange the work parties. One group worked on pipe insulation in the basements, another group worked on weatherstripping doors, and two groups worked on weatherstripping windows, one for simple weatherstripping and another for complex weatherstripping which required the removal of sash.
I worked on the pipe insulation crew. We finished one basement and I believe made a good start on the second. At first, we thought there wasn't enough pipe insulation to go around but it worked out. We spent about three hours getting organized and working on windows, doors, and pipes, and ended up with pizza, pot luck, and a jam session.
Two city councillors and the new head of the Cambridge Energy Alliance attended as well as a reporter from the local newspaper. Whether the reporter did any weatherization work I do not know.
One of my friends is very active in Waltham, MA city politics and invited a couple of us energy mavens to a meeting on July 29 to hear the preliminary results from an audit of the greenhouse gas inventory, a proxy for total energy use in that city. The methodology was based upon the ICLEI Cities for Climate Protection program and software. The work was done by an intern, Jake Yarmus, and a Brandeis professor, Eric Olson, and funded, after a state grant fell through, by Genzyme, a local business.
Such an inventory is one of the requirements for joining the Cities for Climate Protection program and 20 cities and towns in Massachusetts are now members. Waltham joined in 2007 and the program requires
a baseline inventory and forecast
reduction targets
local action plan
implement policies and measures
monitor and verify results
This first draft of the baseline inventory provided an enlightening view, that is, if you are an energy maven. Here are this energy maven's notes.
Now that Obama has evidently won the tire gauge battle it is time to press that advantage. The Obama campaign or another group should produce commercials that go farther. Even a few interested people could make such ads and get them placed on TV through an organization like SaysMeTV, the group that the Get FISA Right group is now working with to place their ads.
Here's the draft for one such spot I'd like to see:
Even John McCain admits that keeping your tires properly inflated will save you gas and save you money. Immediately.
You can save more gas and more money through proper maintenance of your vehicle:
change your oil regularly,
replace your air and oil filters,
get regular tune-ups,
and keep your wheels aligned.
We know these measures work.
Today.
Sometimes the change we can believe in is the change that is simply common sense.
All of Al Gore's We Campaign commercials I've seen are about attitudes. It is especially galling that there's one with Newt Gingrich declaring his support for climate solutions, dating from just before he launched his well-funded "Drill now!" campaign. I wonder if anybody's asked him how that fits with his "commitment" to reducing CO2 with increased drilling everywhere.
None of these commercials promotes immediately useful practice. The fact that Obama seems to have won the tire gauge battle has led me to reiterate the idea of practical energy commercials to the principals of Energize America and others. Why not an ad that not only promotes proper inflation of tires but also changing oil and air filters, getting a tune-up, keeping the wheels aligned, all those simple things we are supposed to do but generally don’t? You could do that in the same amount of time that you show people pulling Gore’s big switch. What about a commercial that shows exactly how to tighten up a window, add an interior storm, use curtains and valences to reduce heat loss, put on insulating shutters or shades? That would teach people to do something that would help them save energy and money as well as keep them more comfortable this winter.
I went to the reception for the International Development Design Summit at MIT on Wednesday, August 6. It is the second year for this project which brings together people from all over the world to work together on what we used to call appropriate technology, affordable technology for people in the poorest countries of the world, innovative solutions for persistent problems that almost everybody can use.
This year over 50 students worked on nine different projects for four weeks. They didn't produce papers. They produced prototypes and presented them to an SRO capacity audience in the Bartos Theater at the Media Lab.
Their motto is "Help me and let me help you." The idea of co-creation, collaboration between the designers and the users, is at the core of their method. It shows.
tracks the sales of fighter jets (guns) and executive jets (caviar). For seventeen years, it consistently found that when fighter jets were selling briskly, sales of luxury executive jets went down and vice versa; when executive jets sales were on the rise, fighter jet sales dipped. Of course, a handful of war profiteers always managed to get rich from selling guns, but they were economically insignificant. it was a truism of the contemporary market that you couldn't have booming growth in the midst of violence and instability.
But that truism is no longer true. Since 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, the index found that spending has been going up on both fighter jets and executive jets rapidly and simultaneously, which means that the world is becoming less peaceful while accumulating significantly more profit.
Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism NY: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Co, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7983-8
2,000 Watts per person per year (or 17,520 kWh) is what we produce now. It is a baseline for sustainability, at least, this is what the scientists of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology believe. This 2,000 Watts includes all activities - working, eating, traveling, and investment in common infrastructure. Currently, Switzerland is a 5,000 Watt society and most other Western European countries are 6,000 Watt societies. The USA and Canada consume 12,000 Watts per person per year.
"At first glance, the objective of a 2,000-watt society appears unrealistic, but the necessary technology already exists," says Moritz Leuenberger, head of the Swiss Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy, and Communications.
Nana lay on her back on the pillows on the floor
as Walter guided her
through the soul journey meditation.
Cradling her head, holding her feet,
all around her we supported her,
touch and intention, as she
relaxed into her private sensations.
Walter talked and Nana answered,
a golden ball of energy,
the astral traveling.
I felt the spirit in the room
rise and expand as Nana
breathed and imagined.
Towards the end, she described
the orange light of gratitude that reached out to touch
everyone
on the planet
then returned to her body
to infuse each of her cells.
Thank you magnified
the fundamental blessing.
According to the Guardian, this herbicide marketed by Dow AgroSciences as Forefront, among other names, has entered the food chain.
It appears that the contamination came from grass treated 12 months ago. Experts say the grass was probably made into silage, then fed to cattle during the winter months. The herbicide remained present in the silage, passed through the animal and into manure that was later sold. Horses fed on hay that had been treated could also be a channel.
The manure was sold to gardeners all over the UK resulting in withered or "grossly deformed" potatoes, beans, peas, carrots and salad vegetables. Never come between the English and their gardens.
This house has been solar heated for nearly 28 years now, the glazed black box on the south wall pumps heat into the living room whenever the sun shines, consistently and reliably. It was built in the Riverside neighborhood of Cambridge, MA in 1980.
This solar collector is an air heater that takes air from the kitchen,
moves it past the black absorber plate with a fan,
and then exhausts the solar heated air back into the living room.
Sometimes on sunny winter days, the people who live there have to flip the damper and dump the collector's air outside to prevent overheating.
It has worked unfailingly all these years without any major maintenance, even for the fan and the thermostat that turns it on and off.
July 4th is a good day to read the Declaration of Independence aloud and hand out copies of the 4th Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This is what the latest FISA battle is about. Does the US government have the right to search and seize our papers, email, phone calls and persons without probable cause - AS THEY ARE CURRENTLY DOING - and provide retroactive immunity for the telecommunications and other corporations who have been helping them, without benefit of any legal cause, for the last few years.
Celebrate your independence on the 4th of July. Read the Declaration of Independence at the bus stop. Hand out 4th Amendment FISA flyers and copies of the full Bill of Rights then watch the fireworks.
On June 23 in New York City, John Todd, one of the founders of New Alchemy Institute, received the first Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award for his Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World, a practical plan to remediate Appalachian coal lands with
An economy built on environmental restoration, carbon sequestration, renewable energy and ecological design
He wants to apply his decades of experiences with Eco Machines for water remediation to cleaning coal slurries and rebuilding healthy soils from the slag. He has outlined a process that goes from waste and water treatment to reforestation with a full renewable economy based on biomass and local wind power. With his experience building Agricultural Industrial Ecologies, as in Burlington, VT, he proposes a regional succession of industrial ecologies that can provide healthy lives and environments for larger populations over centuries if not millenia.
For nearly two decades, there was a nonviolent army, an army of satyagrahis, organized along military lines. It was made up of Pashtun people of the then Northwest Frontier of the British Empire, now Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same places where the Taliban remain active today. They were called Khudai Khidmatgars, Servants of God, or Red Shirts because of the color of their uniforms, and were established by Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Badshah Khan, an associate of Gandhi's.
Badshah Khan started building schools for his people, girls as well as boys, in 1910 and by 1930 there were enough graduates to make up the Khudai Khitmatgars. The organization lasted until 1947 when it was outlawed and disbanded by the Pakistani government.
Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan, a Man to Match His Mountains by Eknath Easwaran
Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1984/1999
ISBN 1-888314-01-x
I want
the Dalai Lama's
laugh,
that full throat rumble
straight from the Buddha belly
free
and smooth
as a strong stream
moving
big rocks
inexorably.
I want that laugh
and the wisdom
to let loose with it
often.
I've been hearing about an MIT (student) project to build low-cost solar concentrators using off the shelf materials since January when the project was part of the Independent Activities Period. (IAP happens in January and anyone from a professor emeritus to a student to a janitor can offer a non-credit course. It is a hold-over from the student demonstration days of the Sixties™ but less and less of interest is happening during IAP as the years go by.)
Yesterday, I went to see their prototype. Their breakthrough is not in technology but in materials. They use standard mirrors that sit in a frame so that they "sag" into a shallow parabolic shape and focus up to 1000 suns on a black coil which can then heat water to as high as 400º F. This is "low" temperature steam, capable of providing process heat but not enough to run a steam turbine. The machinery that moves the concentrator to track the sun is an off the shelf TV satellite dish motor. The model I saw does not yet have an automatic tracking system but, again, off the shelf components are available. It is an impressive machine.
I finally finished a short video (less than two minutes) on WWII posters for the Homefront. These posters exhorted all of us to become part of the war effort. It wasn't about "going shopping" then, it was about energy and resource conservation, rationing ourselves for the benefit of our armed forces, and making the Homefront an effective front for fighting the Axis powers.
I've been wearing an "impeach Bush" button since just after the 2004 election. Personally, I believe we need to impeach the whole Bush/Cheney Junta, turn them over to an international criminal court, and establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission between the peoples of Iraq and the United States of America. And that's only the beginning of what we have to do to redeem our national reputation and collective souls.
Lately, the comments I've been getting are that it's too late and it wouldn't matter so close to the end of their term. I respond by saying, "What makes you think they're ever going to leave?"
Today, reading Glenn Greenwald on David Broder, I realized that there may be another way. Broder and many others demanded that Bill Clinton resign over the Lewinsky affair. Why is there no demand that the Bush/Cheney Junta resign?
How do we make the Bush/Cheney Junta resign? Would a public hue and cry to that purpose be useful?
I think it would. How do we force the Bush/Cheney Junta to resign?
