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speaking of sustainability and conservation: wot’s Hawaii’s news peg?
Yours truly will reprise the message on sustainability and climate change in Hawaii from my presentation at the 2nd Kauai Conservation Conference for the environmental journalists gathered this week at NTBG.
Honored and delighted would prolly cover it. Good fun, too!
Here’s my presentation, which begins with the question: Can Hawaii conservation efforts succeed without achieving sustainability?
Following the freak-out at HCA’s recent Climate Change Forum, where UH’s Chip Fletcher (the sealevel rise guy) announced “there’s not a lot of good news out there”, I’ll try to communicate a sense of mission for islanders facing climatic conditions that are:
- Hotter (faster increase mauka)
- Drier (more extreme rain events)
- Lower (faster sea level rise)
- Riskier (more hurricanes)
- Sicker (multiple disease vectors)
- Dirtier (more polluted air)
FWIW, I’ll end with this strategic directive:
- Plan for Kauai adaptation to climate change
- Build resilience as we migrate our towns and ecosystems mauka & trim our footprint
Meanwhile, my editor wife worries that these journalists’ editors really don’t yet have a news peg for the multifaceted story of climate change and sustainability.
Perhaps that’s why I close with my subtitle from the keynote last October:
“Sustainability is not what we think…it’s how.”
Certainly, if journalists are going to try to cover this story, they, too, will need to adopt this whole new way of thinking.
Published by Ken on May 16th, 2008 tagged HI-specific, Community Initiatives | Comment now » |
turning up the Kauai volume: RU ready to learn and lead?
Perhaps, like me, you sense an urgent need to accelerate our learning about sustainability on Kaua`i.
We are not alone: “Turn up the volume,” said MIT’s president Susan Hockfield at a recent gathering of the Alliance for Global Sustainability. “We need a serious national discussion of sustainability… The climate won’t wait.”
To advance our Kauaian conversation about the challenges and complexities of island sustainability, The Kauaian Institute is launching a third round of learning sessions in the newly redesigned Sustainability Seminar for Kauaian Leaders (SusSem).
SusSem provides a thorough grounding in the latest sustainability science and best practices for sustainable development. More important…
SusSem offers a framework for thinking about tropical island sustainability that can help Kauaians anticipate the changes coming our way and focus on strategic priorities.
Unfolding in a series of three half-day sessions—each covering a different set of core topics— SusSem will be repeated throughout the year on the second Saturday of each month.
Join us, if you can. Or request a sustainability learning initiative for your own leadership or stakeholder group.
There are still a few slots left for Session A, which starts Round 3:
Saturday May 17, from 9AM to 1PM, in the KIUC conference room, with three 1-hour presentations on:
- Kauaian Sustainability
- Sustainability Thinking
- Renewable Energy
Refreshments and ample time are provided for breaks and discussion.
See the SusSem webpage for dates and details on other sessions and registration information.
We are getting better at thinking about and talking about island sustainability, thanks to the participation and feedback of several dozen Kauaian leaders who have already taken SusSem (starting last September).
Sign up now for this fun and fruitful learning opportunity.
Help Kaua`i turn up the volume!
…and pass this along to others who are ready to learn and lead.
—–
BTW, I’m honored and delighted to join the presenters at NTBG’s awesome week-long course for environmental journalists, where I’ll be addressing “Sustainability and Climate Change in Hawai`i” next week Friday.
Published by Ken on May 6th, 2008 tagged Sustainability Science, HI-specific, Community Initiatives | Comment now » |
Caldeira ramps up ocean warning: overwhelming feedback
Ken Caldeira was in Hawaii some weeks back to talk about the planet’s imminent loss of coral, due to acidification of our oceans.
Wot he didn’t say was how some bubbles in Antarctic ice cores helped us understand why ocean acidification is accelerating now.
Caldeira saved that bit for a new article (with UH colleague Richard Zeebe) derived from a study of long-term carbon cycles (with those bubbles) in the May edition of Nature Geoscience.
We’re overwhelming the planet’s finely tuned feedback mechanism, which has removed excess carbon from the atmosphere for, like, eons. Don’t count on that continuing, says this research.
Why? “Mild acid rain from the atmospheric carbon erodes rocks, sending calcium and carbon into the sea, where opihi, clams, mussels, corals and calcium-bearing plankton gobble up both chemicals, turning them to shells and skeletons that last for millions of years”, writes Rod Thompson in today’s Star Bulletin.
But in the last 200 years, says Zeebe, “humans have put carbon dioxide into the air 14,000 times as fast as the average rate during the previous 600 millennia”, and “human activity has strained a natural process for clearing the atmosphere.”
Importantly, this research finds that mineral interactions on land and in the sea have a larger role in controlling global warming than the well-known ability of forests to take carbon dioxide out of the air.
According to this research, the carbon cycling system is so efficient that “the balance of carbon dioxide going into the air from volcanoes and other natural sources and carbon taken out of the air and water by clams and other creatures never was more than 2 percent out of balance.”
“We have upset this so drastically,” says Zeebe, “that we cannot hope these (mineral) feedbacks will help us in the next few hundred years.”
Forewarned…
Published by Ken on May 5th, 2008 tagged Sustainability Science, Climate Change | Comment now » |
turn up the volume on sustainability, says MIT prez
“We need a serious national conversation about sustainability”, says Susan Hockfield, which would be simply interesting except for Hockfield’s job title: President of MIT.
Wot, ya mean MIT hasn’t solved our tech challenges yet? No, says Hockfield, and “we need to tell the truth about the power and limitations of technology.”
Hockfield seeks elevated public debate because some of our most daunting challenges have been largely ignored.
Like the issue of scale. We need real solutions, says Hockfield, not dilettante’s distraction…which is wot we get if we ignore the scale issue. Everyone has a part, says Hockfield, since individual behaviors must change…
…as must government policy. Industry must respond, and communities need change agents.
For its part, MIT has been training a new generation of leadership that is focused on all three spheres of sustainability.
Hockfield notes that a recent survey of American high school seniors found that 64% believe they could invent energy solutions, yet 69% don’t believe their high school is preparing them for this future.
Echoing remarks by David Hunter Marks, MIT Professor of Environmental Engineering and Coordinator of the Alliance for Global Sustainability, who introduced Hockfield in this video, Hockfield says:
“We need pathways to a sustainable future that are at scale, in time, and for all.”
If ya think that’s easy, go watch the video with Marks and Hockfield’s remarks before Rajendra Pachauri gave the keynote address.
BTW, these pathway criteria are surprisingly similar to wot I presented in the LEGS keynote. “At scale” is like “smart”; “in time” is like “safe”; and “for all” is like “fair”.
Great minds…and all that…
Oh, and, turning up the volume is wot I’m doing…with another round of seminar sessions for Kauaian leaders.
Published by Ken on May 5th, 2008 tagged Sustainability Science, Climate Change | Comment now » |
plain living and high thinking: Pachauri on new paradigm
Rajendra Pachauri recently told the Alliance for Global Sustainability (AGS) about the relationship between our footprint and our practices (via treehugger).
That’s right, Pachauri’s Keynote at MIT, with leading academics from Japan, Sweden, Switzerland and the US in the house, says “We need a totally new paradigm of development that minimizes the footprint of our actions and our efforts on the ecosystems of the planet.”
“We may be able to bring about a greater adherence to the practices, the traditions, the philosophy of Eastern societies. And some of these societies did emphasize plain living and high thinking, so to speak,” says Pachauri.
Still, says Pahcauri, “we are all driven now by a monoculture of development…that has to change.”
So, amid concern that the developing world needs to steer toward a more sustainable path, Pachauri stresses that “the developed world also has to move in a different direction.”
Pachauri addressed AGS’s 12th annual meeting on “How Would Climate Change Influence Society in the 21st Century?.”
This is prime-time stuff…right up there with Pachauri’s Nobel co-winner, Al Gore’s new slideshow.
Focusing on the role of sustainability science, Pachauri says:
“We cannot take a segmented and narrow view of any of these areas of activity. It is vitally important that we look at this within a comprehensive context. Because then only would we appreciate what needs to be done.”
Says Pachauri, “climate change affects all three spheres simultaneously.”
[…and you thought I was making this stuff up!…]
In order to ensure that we contain the worst effects of climate change, “we need at the core a set of adaptation and mitigation strategies that can make a difference”, says Pachauri.
BTW, Pachauri is launching a new program called “Lighting a Billion Lives”. Says Pachauri, 1.6 billion have no access to modern forms of energy.
Pachauri’s new BOP venture is producing low-cost solar torches and lanterns because it will only cost “$15 billion to meet the lighting needs of this poorest segment.”…and it can be done without large-scale energy projects.
Kewl!
I’ll come back in another post with some profound sayings from the AGS hosts, MIT President Susan Hochfield and environmental engineering professor David Hunter Marks, who spoke briefly and introduced Pachauri.
Published by Ken on May 4th, 2008 tagged Sustainability Science, Climate Change | Comment now » |
the wrong stuff (part 2): ‘it’s about tradeoffs’
This new way of thinking called sustainability is more like juggling than playing catch.
It’s not like you throw the ball, then you catch the ball. It’s more like you’re throwing and catching lots of balls all at once.
That’s different from how we were taught to think.
And we’re gonna need to change how we think about sustainability if we’ve got half a chance at pulling ourselves back from the brink of extinction.
So, it might be helpful to review precisely wot’s wrong with our ‘old’ way of thinking.
Here’s an excerpt from my LEGS Keynote on Kauaian Sustainability.
This was subtitled: “It’s Not What We Think, It’s How”:
“…In the beginning was the economy…
We used to think the Economy sphere was the whole thing, and that everything else was an “externality”. The Financial Capital at the center of the Economy sphere was thought to rule the world.
Now, we see that the Economy sphere is inter-looped with and fundamentally shaped by the sphere of Community. And we now recognize that the Social Capital at the center of the Community sphere is at least as important as Financial Capital.
Why? Because this is where we manage our housework and community work. And, BTW, as we have learned to measure the true value of this work, we find that it rivals our Economy in size.
Yet we’re not done, because more recently we have come to recognize that both the Economy and Community spheres are themselves completely embedded in the Ecology sphere and that our Natural Capital is probably more important than anything else.
Why? Because our human system would not function at all without the services provided by our ecosystems.
This is not to say that we should only focus on Ecology, any more than we can focus exclusively on Community or Economy.
We need to think about Economy AND Community AND Ecology all together.
Nor is this an abstract conceptual challenge. This is where we are learning about a new form of Governance. This orange arena where the spheres overlap is where we human’s are beginning to come together to simultaneously manage all three spheres.
Think about that: there is no sphere for Politics. Instead, our Governance arena is defined by the intersection of Economy, Community and Ecology. And in this sense, “politics” is not about conflict…it’s about integration.
It’s not about choosing which sphere will dominate…because that’s not a choice we can make.
It’s not a balancing act, as we are so often told. It’s not about the tradeoffs of one versus the other.
It’s about integrating our best understanding of the interrelationships between all three spheres all the time.”
See, the concept of tradeoffs is sooo ‘either/or’…so 20th century. Ready to migrate to ‘both/and’?
Published by Ken on May 4th, 2008 tagged HI-specific, Systems Thinking | Comment now » |
the wrong stuff (part 1): ‘cheaper is better’
So much of wot we ‘know’ is wrong and needs to be reworked. Take our essential consumer guide: ‘cheaper is better’. That’s wrong.
Well, it actually depends on wot ya mean by cheaper…and better. If you’re talking about consumer price, then, yeah, it’s wrong. If you’re talking about the planet price…that’s different.
Why? Because few prices include all the costs. Like social and climate costs…you know, the full-on footprint.
Nor do prices account well for stuff that’s truly priceless (better). Like love. Like survival.
Fine. Do we replace it with: ‘greener is cheaper’? And wot about laggards who still put cheaper first?
See, sustainability is about a whole new way of thinking. Which means we gotta shed some old thinking.
And, this ‘cheaper’ bit’s gotta be at the top of the list, no?
This ‘guide’ has terribly badly steered us humans to the brink of extinction.
In a new “ethic of sustainability”, we’re calculating ‘costs’ differently.
And as a consequence, as I noted in my LEGS Keynote, “much of the way we used to do things becomes simply unthinkable.”
Said I:
“In this sense, it’s more like juggling with all three aspects of our earth’s human support system…with three balls in the air at all times. Our challenge is to integrate all of our human behavior and practice so that it becomes a positive feedback loop for system sustainability.
Having come to this realization, we are staggered by the implications: If we need to be simultaneously managing our financial, social and natural capital for system sustainability, then it turns out that most of what we have been doing for the past several hundred years is precisely the wrong approach.
By granting primacy to the Economy sphere, we have pretty much shot ourselves in the foot.
We have done this, mind you, not because we are stupid, but because we were ignorant. We did not know—or at least we pretended not to know—that everything is connected.
The new commonsense is that long-term prosperity and ecological health not only go together, they depend on one another.
Thanks to our new “mental map”, we see much more clearly now that just because it’s complex doesn’t mean it’s incomprehensible. In fact, once we get the hang of sustainability thinking, it’s more often like a “DUH” thing. We go: Sheesh, I knew that!
Most important, sustainability thinking helps us cut to the chase and root out the errors in our ways. Rather than simply gnashing our teeth, we change our ways.
Much of the way we used to do things becomes simply unthinkable. It doesn’t fit on our new “mental map.”
Can we unlearn this ‘cheap’ trick?
Published by Ken on May 2nd, 2008 tagged HI-specific, Community Initiatives | 1 Comment » |
Hawaii’s ’shell’ game on sustainability: HI2050 setback
Ready for another rant on the urgency of Hawaii’s sustainability challenges?
Can’t help m’self after last-minute adoption by the state legislature of a “shell” bill that refers the draft “Hawaii 2050 Sustainability Plan” to the UH Public Policy Center for further review and concretization.
It seems lack of benchmark data was a show-stopper, as the leg flipped through piles of sustainability-related measures in final days of this session.
Never mind that good buddy Diane Zachary pressed to incorporate such metrics before the plan was submitted to the legislature. The question is: can Hawaii wait another 2 years to get its sustainability sh_t together?
And never mind that the plan has only one goal worth mentioning.
Mind you, PPC is a great resource for such an effort, having recently spearheaded the Sustainable Saunders Initiative as a pilot project for the UH-HECO Energy Partnership.
Mike Hamnett, who chairs PPC’s faculty committee on Research, will presumably play a key role in the design of this data-driven review, and is also a key player in the state’s new emissions cap law, where related research is now underway.
(Uhhh…let’s hope it’s clear these are related issues.)
One wonders how hard it could be to derive a broad measure of Hawaii’s current unsustainability that can be tracked as we transform our communities and our lives…Or why this hasn’t yet been done.
Published by Ken on April 30th, 2008 tagged Sustainability Science, HI-specific | 1 Comment » |
planning for a sustainable Kauai: AIA says go!
Lihue will get help from national architects in mapping out a plan for sustainability, thanks to the AIA’s Sustainable Design Assessment Team (via interiordesign).
Citing local “ignorance or denial about the large context issues of global warming, peak oil and the risks and realities of global interdependence”, good buddy Pat Griffin is guiding the Lihue Business Association in this effort to “integrate sustainability principles into the planning process.”
One of 10 American cities chosen for the third year of this great program, Lihue has been grappling with creating a “Town Core Urban Design Plan” since 2003, and needs more help.
Together with Diane Zachary– whose KPAA floated this proposal– Griffin and local architect Palmer Hafdahl and others worked tirelessly to get Lihue this honor.
The SDAT program pairs architects from across the nation with community leaders, local city planners, and such community development professionals as hydrologists to create a blueprint for greater sustainability.
The LBA/KPAA committee will gear up later this year to work with the team of national experts and other local stakeholders.
According to Griffin, Lihue hopes to “create a template for an innovative and dynamic sustainable community planning process and effective ways of involving citizens in building a sustainable future”.
For the record, the last Development Plan for Lihue was adopted 30 years ago, when Lihue still had plantations and the mall was the current County Offices.
Now a series of initiatives is underway to shape Lihue as the “heart of Kauai”, including LBA’s “Lihue Tomorrow” program, the County’s Civic Center Plan, as well as the “Town Core Urban Design Plan” currently under review the Planning Dept.
Can’t happen soon enough…says here.
Published by Ken on April 30th, 2008 tagged HI-specific, Community Initiatives | Comment now » |
speaking of fixes that fail: wuddup with hydrogen?
Good on Alice Friedemann to revisit the hydrogen hype of only a few years ago and recapitulate all the reasons this turned out to be a false hope (via eskeptic).
“The laws of physics mean the hydrogen economy will always be an energy sink”, says Friedemann.
Mebbe this explains why we haven’t heard much talk about hydrogen in recent months.
Meanwhile, says Friedemann, “the United States government should stop funding the Freedom CAR program, which gives millions of tax dollars to the big three automakers to work on hydrogen fuel cells.” Instead, the greatest net energy savings are in fuel efficiency, says Friedemann.
“Automakers ought to be required to raise the average overall mileage their vehicles get — the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard.”
Here’s the hit on hydrogen, according to Friedemann:
“Hydrogen’s properties require you to spend more energy than you can earn, because in order to do so you must overcome waters’ hydrogen-oxygen bond, move heavy cars, prevent leaks and brittle metals, and transport hydrogen to the destination. It doesn’t matter if all of these problems are solved, or how much money is spent. You will use more energy to create, store, and transport hydrogen than you will ever get out of it.”
Oh, and, turns out that both fuel cells and hydrogen storage are heavy and expensive bits of equipment. For example, Friedemann notes that hydrogen fuel is 20 times more expensive and over 5 times heavier for 1/3 the driving range of a gas-powered car.
Mebbe there’s still a way to produce greener, cheaper hydrogen for mobility here in the islands, yet it looks like long odds.
Published by Ken on April 29th, 2008 tagged Energy, Systems Thinking | Comment now » |
congressman sees forest with trees for ‘green’ energy
PIKO’s gotta great video of
You can see and hear first-hand how Cowern is doing sustainable forestry on Kauai.
Cowern does a show-and-tell on agrichar, biogasification, pyrolysis, micro-hydro electric, plus a whole lot more, and Abercrombie seemed impressed.
Cowern is a big fan of albizia, and will use all parts of this tree in his business. The tops will go into fertilizer to replace imported nitrogen fertilizers, the bark will go into animal feed, and the rest will be milled into lumber or chipped for biomass energy.
Published by Ken on April 28th, 2008 tagged Energy, Community Initiatives | 1 Comment » |
zero to 60 in a few months: time for new movement?
“A fantastic spasm of altered weather patterns is crashing down upon our heads right now”, says Mike Tidwell, and “the only question left for America is this: can we snap along with the climate? (via orionmag).
“We need a mass movement of concerned voters that ’snaps’ into place overnight—as rapidly as the climate itself is changing”, says Tidwell, “Time is running out fast” to transform our economy and our lives.”
“Can we, as the world’s biggest polluter, create a grassroots political uprising that emerges as abruptly” and “demands the clean-energy revolution in the time we have left to save ourselves?
Wonders Tidwell: “Why is this not dominating every minute of every presidential debate?”
“In a world of obvious climate snap, any obstruction, any delay, from any quarter, is hands down a crime against humanity.”
Like the ear-splitting shriek when a microphone gets too close to its amplifier, literally dozens of major feedback loops are screeching into place worldwide, all at the same time, ushering in the era of runaway climate change.
Actually it’s the so-called feedback loops that have tripped up scientists so badly, causing the experts to wildly misjudge the speed of the climate crash. Having never witnessed a planet overheat before, no one quite anticipated the geometric rate of change.
As a boost to the prospects for such a political snap, Tidwell notes that “the sudden and unexpected speed of global warming is nobody’s fault.”
How so? Tidwell says “new evidence shows that we were almost certainly locked into a course of violent climate snap well before we first fully understood the seriousness of global warming back in the 1980s.
“Even had we completely unplugged everything twenty years ago, the momentum of carbon dioxide buildup already occurring in the atmosphere clearly would have steered us toward the same disastrous results we’re seeing now,” says Tidwell.
So, we have this sudden need to “rethink everything a.s.a.p.” The good news, says Tidwell is that “the clean-energy solutions to global warming grow more economically feasible and closer at hand with each passing year.”
“Here we are stripped of exaggeration and rhetoric, and hard pressed by the evidence right before our eyes. Our destiny will be decided, one way or another, in the next handful of years, either by careful decision-making or paralyzing indecision.”
Says here: the /snap’ time must come soon to America.
Published by Ken on April 28th, 2008 tagged Energy, Climate Change | Comment now » |
please don’t PLA me: another ooops story?
Sure PLA is biodegradable, yet wot does it degrade into? Methane? How unkewl is that?
And leave it to the Brits to monkeywrench our ’silver bullet’ for baggin’. They’re much more serious about this stuff than Americans, and they wouldn’t want polylactic acid (PLA) to turn out like palm oil from Indonesia.
So, yesterday the UK Guardian headlined a story on how ’sustainable’ bio-plastic can damage the environment, noting that “corn-based material emits climate change gas in landfill and adds to food crisis”.
While PLA is said to offer more disposal options, the Guardian has found that it will barely break down on landfill sites.
Plus, it can only be composted in the handful of anaerobic digesters which exist in Britain, but which do not take any packaging.
In addition, if Pla is sent to UK recycling works in large quantities, it can contaminate the waste stream, reportedly making other recycled plastics unsaleable.
Dontcha hate it when this happens? I mean, all that effort to ‘go green’ with our Taste of Hawaii event…and ya mean ‘biodegradable’ is not necessarily a ‘green’ thang? Alas!
Published by Ken on April 27th, 2008 tagged Ecological Footprint, Best Practices | Comment now » |
the fuzzy logic of ‘food miles’: think ‘last mile’
Fashionable as it may be to favor local food, for footprint’s sake, the advantage gets fuzzier as we delve deeper into the footprint factors.
…Like how far we drive to get this local food and how it is prepared.
Bottom line: footprint savings in food production are often dwarfed by the footprint of distribution, storage and preparation.
So, if you drive from Kilauea to Hanalei in your SUV to pick up your local fruits and vegetables…forget about saving the planet.
This illustrates how we’ll need to resolve all our challenges together, and how, at least on Kauai, mitigation and adaptation are the same thing.
Recent research for the food footprints in Seattle found that the footprint of local, organic food was 50-80% smaller than supermarket food, yet if you drive 4 miles farther to get it than you would drive to the supermarket, you could blow the advantage…given the much larger footprint of our cars.
Oh, and, if the supermarket food is already processed and you eat it right away (so no storage is required), this can vastly reduce the footprint of processing and storing it at home…given the much lower efficiencies of the latter.
So, to mitigate our Kauai footprint, we need to grow organically, power renewably, and distribute cooperatively.
Just so, a Kauai adaptation strategy would focus on reducing our reliance on fossil fuels in ag, electricity, and transport.
See wot I mean? Same, same.
To nudge the nuance, take chickpeas, for example, says Robin McKie in today’s UK Guardian:
Turns out, the chickpea poses a genuine “green dilemma”. Says McKie:
“Chickpeas are sold in supermarkets in two versions: dried or cooked. The carbon footprint of the latter is far higher than the former. The only processing involved in drying chickpeas is to lay them out in the sun to drive off moisture. By contrast, heat is needed to cook chickpeas before they are tinned. Hence the carbon gram total for tins of cooked chickpeas would be far greater than those on packets of the dried variety.
‘That seems straightforward,’ says Graham Sinden, of the Carbon Trust. ‘But you can’t eat dried chickpeas. You have to cook them. And when you take them home you find the carbon you emitted when cooking those chickpeas exceeds the figure for the tinned variety - because cooking small portions at home is inefficient compared with that of large industrial kitchens.’
As a result, when the trust system is taken up and used widely, the gram measure on a packet of dried chickpeas will include an estimate of the heat that will be used in a customer’s home to cook them. But that figure will be a guess, for it will depend on whether the customer uses gas or electricity for cooking. The former is more efficient and less prone to carbon emissions.
As for individuals who use renewable energy to heat their homes and kitchens, they would completely negate the point of carbon labels in many cases. ‘That is why it is impossible to have accurate carbon labels on a lot of products,’ says Gareth Edwards-Jones, of Bangor University.”
Get it? OK, so it’s not enough to just talk about “local food”…
Published by Ken on April 27th, 2008 tagged Food, Energy, Ecological Footprint, Adaptation | Comment now » |
more islanders taking the bus: the case for bigger budgets
Ridership on the Kauai Bus has been jumpin’ of late, up an average of 2% per month since early 2005, totaling more than 300,000 annual trips last year. Let’s guess why that is, shall we?
Now, the $3.5M local share of next year’s $5M budget is slated to jump 15% over last year, and the County Council wonders whether that’s enough.
Green energy advocate and good buddy Ben Sullivan is pushing for even more funding, and not just because “it’s the best way we know to get 300 mpg on your way into work in the morning”. Wot he said!
With more than twice the ridership in 2000, Bus executive Janine Rapozo has been adding routes and buses, and that trend is likely to accelerate, with gas prices up another 30% last year.
All the important performance measures are heading up. Average weekday ridership has doubled from barely 600 in early 2005 to over 1,200 this year, while the number of passengers per bus run climbed from 15 to 22 over the same period. And, over half of riders use a Bus pass. A net of 3 new buses is being added to better cover the Westside and north mainline routes where ridership is high.
In my nabe, there’s 14 daily bus trips to Lihue leaving on the hour, plus 11 trips up the Kawaihau ridge with 6 stops enroute to Kapahi Park.
Wot a different footprint Kauai gets from this form of mobility, no? Wot with more than 800M auto-dependent miles driven annually on our island.
BTW, a typical day’s traffic includes a coupla dozen bikes. Oh, and, The Bus also provides para-transit service, which adds another 20% to total ridership.
Oh, and, bravo to former mayor JoAnn Yukimura for pushing the early development of this public transit system, and leveraging the Hurricane Iniki disaster into expansion of our fleet.
Surely this is one area where Kauai will look more akamai in the years ahead as we switch away from cars…because we have no choice.
‘Course I’ve been a patron since before this was the Kauai Bus…back when our small fleet was transporting seniors and handicapped folks, you could sometimes get a lift with advance notice.
And the combo of bus and ebike pretty can handle a large majority of my mobility needs. Yeah!
Published by Ken on April 26th, 2008 tagged Transport, Community Initiatives | 1 Comment » |
Hawaii soils and the fertilizer crunch: rethinking indicated
Wouldn’t it be tragic if Kauai taro farmers folded in the face of fertilizer inflation and supply disruptions?
Good buddy Stacy Sproat reports (via email) a critical shortage of fertilizer on island as large growers hoard the available supply and hedge against continuing skyrocketing fertilizer prices.
Meanwhile, ag economist Dale Lattz reports that US average fertilizer prices in 2007 were up 70% from 2003, seed up 53%, and fuel up 100%.
Oh, and, Bill Cowern sees a potential fertilizer spinoff of his biomass biz, though prolly not in time to help the taro farmers, whose operations are already showing ultra thin margins.
And how is all this related to our lousy Kauai soils? Are there lessons to be learned from recent research on overuse of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers?
Douglas Barnes notes that “no civilization that ruined its soil has survived, so we ignore it at our peril.”
Yet that’s exactly what our industrial approach to mono-crops has done, according to new research from soil scientists in Illinois on “The Myth of Nitrogen Fertilization for Soil Carbon Sequestration“.
Saeed Khan, Richard Mulvaney, etal. found that in one of the famous “Morrow Plots”, greater inputs of nitrogenous fertilisers and crop residues resulted in 20% lower yields of corn.
More worse, according to Khan, “there has been a net decrease in soil organic carbon and the decline became much greater with the higher nitrogen rate.”
As Kate Melville points out, the Morrow Plots are America’s oldest experimental fields, dating back to before the current practice of fertilization began.
Says Melville, “over-fertilization followed from the assumption that fertilizer supplies more nitrogen than the soil”, yet the research at Morrow found “the opposite is true”. Plus, “The loss of soil carbon has many adverse consequences for productivity, one of which is to decrease water storage. There are also adverse implications for air and water quality, since carbon dioxide will be released into the air, while excessive nitrogen contributes to nitrate pollution.”
Cowern, meanwhile, notes (via email) that “in 2006, 60% of our chemical fertilizer came from the Middle East, and some researchers now claim that we are more dependent on the Middle East for food than we are for oil.”
Cowern’s solution? “The nutrient rich tops of harvested biomass trees will be removed to provide fertilizer. The amount of fertilizer produced is so significant that it will not only provide the nutrients for bio-fuel products, it will also provide enough fertilizer to be packaged and sold locally as a high-end retail product.”
Cowern believes his venture could supply the nutrients necessary for all of Kauai’s food production.
Let’s hope we have time to switch practices and sources before we lose all our taro farmers…
Published by Ken on April 25th, 2008 tagged Island Vulnerabilities, Community Initiatives | 1 Comment » |
defending China: the Olympics got nuthin to do with it
China does have a water problem, says Fred Pierce, yet it is “long-term and of global importance”…and “the Olympics are completely irrelevant” (via newscientist).
Why? “Beijing is draining surrounding regions, depriving poor farmers of water”, as one newspaper put it, yet that’s not “to keep taps flowing for the Olympics”.
Says Pierce, this is “hyping a non-story. That water would be diverted regardless of the Olympics.”
Pierce notes “the myth that the Olympics is drying up China is partly the fault of its politicians. The country has a major water crisis in the drier north of the country, the traditional breadbasket. For some years now virtually no water has flowed into the sea from the once-mighty Yellow River.”
And, with an eye to the symbolism, its leaders decided to complete one phase of the south-to-north scheme “in time for the Olympics”.
Like much of the rest of China’s PR connected to the Olympics, this piece of bravura has blown up in its face.
Yet, according to Pierce, “those Chinese farmers that Western journalists have uncovered complaining about losing their water to the Olympics are actually suffering from continued drought, recently described by Chinese meteorologists as the worst in 50 years.”
“The crisis is real enough without inventing an Olympic ogre”, says Pierce.
“Feeding a few thousand Olympians is not a big deal when you already have 1.3 billion mouths to feed.”
Published by Ken on April 24th, 2008 tagged Systems Thinking | Comment now » |
Kennedy on carbon: banish byzantine rules for energy boom
We’re there, says Robert Kennedy, Jr: We know how to hasten the switch away from fossil fuels.
And wot he didn’t say here in Hawaii last month is…he knows exactly wot the next president oughta do. For that, ya gotta go read Vanity Fair.
The next President oughta do three things: establish a cap-and-trade system, invest in a smart grid, and prepare green buildings and vehicles to plug into it. That’s wot.
Kennedy did mention geothermal, as he did out here, noting the US sits on the 2nd-largest such resources on the planet.
And he called the Midwest “the Saudi Arabia of wind”.
The challenge, says Kennedy, begins with “several obstacles that impede the kind of entrepreneurial revolution we need.”
One is the “trillion dollars in annual coal-and-oil subsidies” that “gives the carbon industry a decisive market advantage.”
Another is, an overstressed and inefficient national electrical grid that can’t accommodate new kinds of power.
And, then there’s “a byzantine array of local rules impede access by innovators to national markets.”
Under these circumstances, says Kennedy, cap-and-tade “is quite simply a no-brainer” as a way to put downward pressure on carbon emissions.
There are a number of things the new president should immediately do to hasten the approaching boom in energy innovation.
Then, we urgently need more investment in our backbone transmission grid, including new direct-current (D.C.) power lines for efficient long-haul transmission, with built-in “smart” features like storage points and computerized management overlays, allowing the new grid to intelligently deploy the energy along the way.
Finally, the federal government needs to work with state authorities to open up the grids, allowing clean-energy innovators to fairly compete for investment, space, and customers– an initiative analogous to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which required open access to all the nation’s telephone lines.
Estimating this would require about a trillion dollars over the next 15 years, Kennedy notes this is roughly a third of the projected cost of the Iraq war. More important, the government doesn’t actually have to pay for all of this…if the president works with governors to lift constraints and encourage investment.
Kennedy quotes James Woolsey (with whom he shared a panel seat at Blue Planet Summit) as saying “10 percent of venture-capital dollars are already deployed in the clean-tech sector, and the world’s biggest companies are crowding the space with capital and scrambling for position.”
“The new president must take all of this in hand at once”, says Kennedy.
See any candidate heading that direction?
Published by Ken on April 24th, 2008 tagged Energy, Systems Thinking | Comment now » |
sustainability and ignorance: more humility indicated
Mahalo to Steve Talbott for this heads-up: Some of our best minds see ignorance as a virtue (via netfuture).
Say wot? Yup…guided by minds like Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, David Orr, Bill McKibben, Vandana Shiva, a new “Culture of the Land” book series has just published “The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge”.
Ignorance of a particular sort: “joyful”, editor Bill Vitek calls it. With co-editor Wes Jackson, Vitek uncorks a potent brew of fundamental rethinking about our knowledge-based hubris.
I’m reminded of Donella Meadows saying we cannot “figure out” systems, yet we can “dance” with them.
According to Vitek and Jackson, the dominant view says that we can know enough to figure out the otherwise apparent randomness of the universe. And mebbe the dominant view is wrong.
For one thang, it may not be all that random.
For another, it may be dangerous to think we can ever know enough.
It might be more prudent (and fun) to assume we know very little and cannot ever know much more than what’s right in front of us.
How does this relate to sustainability? Perhaps the hubris that got us into this mess is incapable of guiding us out.
Vitek thinks that this knowledge-based worldview is “inadequate and dangerous. The solitary Cartesian mind is insufficient for the task ahead.”
In which case, we’re gonna need something more like the “civic mind”, as Vitek describes it.
Joyful ignorance, Vitek claims, is “a willful, defiant, rebellious act in the face of the obvious, of certainty, of security and control, and of domination.”
While Vitek likens a knowledge-based worldview to hunting, he compares the ignorance-based worldview to gathering.
Says Vitek:
“In the ignorance based world view, you are not collecting, you are not competitive, and you must understand a broad range of things, much like in gathering, where you must understand seasons, terrain, and plants.
An ignorance-based worldview is broad, rather than specific. Its practitioners understand that they will fail often.
Like civil minded people, they see things as relationships. In this way, the ownership that comes with the knowledge-based worldview is transformed into fellowship.”
That’s wot I’m talking about: we need more “fellowship” with our island sustainability challenges.
At least in such fellowship, we’re less vulnerable to wot we don’t know we don’t know.
BTW, this underlies my tendency to call our sustainability seminar a “conversation.” I certainly don’t “own” the knowledge we’re sharing. Nor am I dishing “answers”, and not just because we don’t know the answers. The key point is: we’re in conversation with each other and in communion with our surroundings as we seek guidance. The answers are not right in front of us.
Published by Ken on April 24th, 2008 tagged Systems Thinking | Comment now » |
betcha can’t live like there’s just one planet…
As if EarthDay were like a birthday or New Years, with obligatory spot checks on our progress of some sort.
It’s not about “we’re getting greener” anymore. It’s more like “are we toast yet”?
And if Al Gore’s right about the link between fixing the climate crisis and fixing our democracy, then we have cause to pause.
Listen up as Sean Gonsalves rants about the state of journalism, and quotes anonymous: “Great minds focus on ideas. Average minds focus on events and small minds focus on people” (via commondreams). Says Gonsalves, “That giant sucking sound you hear is democracy wheezing.”
So, whatever else we’re commemorating on EarthDay, it’s about one very big idea: we have only one planet.
Accordingly, I agree with Joe Romm: “We need a new name.” (via salon)
Romm’s suggestion? “Let’s call it Triage Day. If worst comes to worst, at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.”
Right. Romm was gonna urge calling it homo sapiens day, yet we’d have to put the “sapiens” bit in quotes “until we see whether we are smart enough to save ourselves from self-destruction.” (heh)
Me? I’m ignoring EarthDay. Mebbe it has something to do with the fact that I joined the first such event in DC all those years ago, and long since lost the hope I sensed then.
Today, as Romm notes, “much of the environment is unsavable.”
Like Romm, I think the world should be more into conserving the stuff that we can’t live without.
Unfortunately, as Romm notes, “Conservative Day would, I think, draw the wrong crowds.”
Published by Ken on April 22nd, 2008 tagged Ecological Footprint, Climate Change | Comment now » |
fixing footprints is easy; climate change is something else
Now that humans are running out of time to fix the climate crisis, we see how simple it would be to live sustainably.
We can provide for ourselves without diminishing the world, notes Michael Pollan, in a powerful essay titled “Why Bother?” (via nytimes).
We don’t have to spend 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of food, says Pollan.
We know how to fix that part. After all, notes Pollan, Americans once grew 40% of our food in “Victory Gardens”.
The problem is, we’ve gone so far toward unsustainability that our human support system is failing. Time’s up.
That’s wot climate change represents: a road too far.
Don’t believe that? “Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared”, says Michael Pollan
I know of wot he speaks, having spent time with some of the top climate scientists at the recent Oahu conference, where their sense of freakout was palpable.
So, why bother, indeed?
Here’s Pollan’s answer:
“Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.”
Do anything for ya?
Published by Ken on April 21st, 2008 tagged Sustainability Science, Climate Change | 1 Comment » |
the rising cost of a free ride: on driving externalities
The “freakonomics” dudes wanna know: wot ‘negative externality’ caused by our driving costs more? Emissions, congestion, or accidents? (via nytimes mag)
Their answer may surprise you. As for me, their answer makes me think economics is truly freaky.
Auto accidents are by far the most costly, note the Steves (Dubner and Levitt), racking up 7 cents per mile in damage to people and property, while congestion costs 2.5 cents per mile in wasted fuel and lost productivity.
Emissions, meanwhile, impose social costs of less than a penny a mile. How skewed is that? Mebbe we’re not correctly calculating our carbon costs?
After all, the cost conscious among us might focus more on fender-benders than fume filters, right? Go figure!
For example, the new Hawaii-specific carbon calculator hosted by Evolution Sage figures the cost of carbon offsets at $18 per ton.
That’s based on the island average of 9,965 miles driven annually with a small car getting 29 mpg.
So, we’re spewing 0.7 pounds of carbon equivalents for each mile we drive…and it costs only $57 to offset this? That can’t be right.
Turns out, that calculation is based on a price for carbon of barely $16 per ton.
Ah! So if we think fixing the climate crisis is more important than fixing the fender-bender, that must mean we’re pricing carbon too low, no?
After all, we can drive crumpled cars, yet we’re going nowhere with catastrophic climate change.
Published by Ken on April 21st, 2008 tagged Ecological Footprint, HI-specific | Comment now » |
wot are we conserving? presentation on Kauai’s prospects
Took the highlights from the climate change conference into my presentation on conservation at the Kauai conference to show the need for some re-visioning.
As in…the ecosystems we’re trying to conserve today will be gone tomorrow, given wot we now know about Kauai’s climate change prospects.
Wot with less rain, more storms, and higher seas, we’ll be losing many of our tropical ecosystems…so conservation will be increasingly beside the point.
Instead, words like “translocation”, “transition” and “resilience” are cropping up in more and more conversations about conservation..
Which is why Kauai is gonna need a plan for adaptation to climate change.
…Prolly more than a piecemeal approach to saving habitat for a few favored species.
Expecially when that habitat is gonna move.
OK, I know that was soooooo last week, yet I’ve been busy elsewise. (Oh, and, I’m preparing to give these sorts of presentations for a much broader range of leadership and stakeholder groups.)
Still, then, I dutifully warned the audience to expect some “freaky stuff” from the climate model results, yet urged all to adopt a proactive sense of mission.
Let us Kauaians, said I, “build resilience as we migrate our towns and ecosystems mauka (upland) and trim our footprint”.
Recall that, in our new way of thinking about sustainability, we’re looking to solve all of our challenges together. So, if we’re migrating our towns and our ecosystems upland, there’s lots of inter-connected stuff we’re gonna need to think about.
…Like wot kind of structures we’re gonna build in anticipation of extreme weather events…and wot kind of trees we’re planting in our former rain forests…and
Published by Ken on April 20th, 2008 tagged Best Practices, Community Initiatives | Comment now » |
diverted by webwork: on making TKI sustainable
So much effort has gone into this SusHI blog that my day job has suffered.
That would be The Kauaian Institute, where I conduct market and ecosystem research and advise companies and communities on sustainability strategy.
Least I could do is bring the TKI website up to par…and so I did.
The intent is to integrate this blog more tightly into the larger work of TKI, and generate additional interest in my TKI products like the ahupua`a poster, and services like my presentations on island sustainability.
Have a look, and consider supporting this work as you enjoy my blogging. Everything’s connected!
Published by Ken on April 19th, 2008 tagged HI-specific, Community Initiatives | Comment now » |
nanosolar goes utility-scale: CEO poo-poohs rooftops
Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen is inviting energy execs along on a Euro trip to view utility-scale solar projects.
Why? Nanosolar wants to sell lots of their breakthrough printed solar cells, and rooftop installation doesn’t get ‘em there. Says Roscheisen, “municipal solar power plants can be deployed at a different level of efficiency and speed. This is just not yet known very well to the public” (via nanosolar).
“A silent revolution is going on that the press rarely reports about,” says Roscheisen, pointing to piece on Marin going solar as the exception. Ya gotta wonder if KIUC got the news yet.
Mebbe Randy Hee could do the Euro trip and get on Nanosolar’s waiting list for their new product.
[Mebbe that’s how we could spend KIUC’s still untapped CREB funds…which the press hasn’t reported, either…]
Published by Ken on April 17th, 2008 tagged Energy | 1 Comment » |
wanna help save Turtle Bay? on the upside of a downturn
When Kuilima Resort Company (KRC) tanked last year, they were mid-stream in plans for a dramatic expansion at Turtle Bay on Oahu’s northshore.
Lucky us! Now Governor Linda Lingle’s collaborative effort to buy the 850-acre resort property is under a full head of steam and looking for folks like you who care and are willing to help, according to Kevin Chang at Hawaii’s Trust for Public Land.
Chang notes you can contact the Governor’s Advisory Working Group at TurtleBayAWG<at>gmail.com to contribute your ideas and financial support.
The goal of the working group is to negotiate a voluntary conservation sale and acquisition.
Turtle Bay AWG will also:
- plan for the enhancement and long-term financial stability of the existing resort,
- seek innovative ways to create high-quality jobs with low environmental impact, and
- create a sustainable future for the North Shore.
The Trust for Public Land is also part of the Ko’olauloa North Shore Alliance, a network of community and non-profit organizations supporting the initiative to protect this country “forever.”
For background, read the recent Honolulu Weekly piece on this.
Kokua mai!
Published by Ken on April 15th, 2008 tagged HI-specific, Community Initiatives | Comment now » |
switch away, says he…says we: on greening power and mobility
Multi-tasker that I am, I was watching/listening to David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy, at a recent Princeton seminar on Energy, Climate, and Environment, while simultaneously calculating the potential mitigation impact of switching Kauai vehicles to electric (via