Sustainability Post #39 – EPA and CO2.

Friday is the last day to voice your opinion on whether the EPA — the Environmental Protection Agency — should regulate carbon dioxide pollution, the primary cause of the climate crisis.  This is a big deal.

The EPA is taking public comment before making a ruling.  Send your message in and it will appear on the EPA’s website, and be part of the public record.

Of course, special interests — like the oil and coal lobbies — are working overtime to defeat a positive ruling and have already gotten thousands of comments submitted in opposition.

Submit your public comment to the EPA here:

http://www.repoweramerica.org/epa/

Here is mine:

Greetings,

The EPA, as the premier overseer of environmental public goods, should understand that carbon dioxide is a important part of breathable air.  The human body regulates breathing through the concentration of Carbon dioxide in the blood stream.  Changes in the the environmental levels of carbon dioxide could have a drastic effect on human health.  As such, even if there is no issue with global warming, the EPA’s mandate would require it to monitor and if necessary regulate the release of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere.

Thank You Kindly,

Topher Belknap

Sustainability Post #38 – Bumper Sticker

“Think Globally, Eat Neighborly”

Sustainabilty Post #37 – Quotation

[From an email from the Rocky Mountain Institute, too good not to share]

The early bioneer Bill McLarney was stirring a vat of algae in his Costa Rica research center when a brassy North American lady strode in.
What, she demanded, was he doing stirring a vat of green goo when what the world really needs is love? “There’s theoretical love,” Bill replied, “and then there’s applied love”—and kept on stirring.

At Rocky Mountain Institute, we stir and strive in the spirit of applied hope. Our people work hard to make the world better, not from some airy theoretical hope, but in the practical and grounded conviction that starting with hope and acting out of hope can cultivate a different kind of world worth being hopeful about, reinforcing itself in a virtuous spiral. Applied hope is not about some vague, far-off future but is expressed and created moment by moment through our choices.

Applied hope is not mere optimism. The optimist treats the future as fate, not choice, and thus fails to take responsibility for making the world we want. Applied hope is a deliberate choice of heart and head. The optimist, says RMI Trustee David Orr, has his feet up on the desk and a satisfied smirk knowing the deck is stacked. The person living in hope has her sleeves rolled up and is fighting hard to change or beat the odds. Optimism can easily mask cowardice. Hope requires fearlessness.

Fear of specific and avoidable dangers has evolutionary value. Nobody has ancestors who weren’t mindful of saber-toothed tigers. But pervasive dread, currently in fashion and sometimes purposely promoted, is numbing and demotivating. When I give a talk, sometimes a questioner details the many bad things happening in the world and asks how dare I propose solutions: isn’t resistance futile? The only response I’ve found is to ask, as gently as I can, “Does feeling that way make you more effective?”

To be sure, mood does matter. The last three decades of the twentieth century reportedly saw 46,000 new psychological papers on despair and grief, but only 400 on joy and happiness. If psychologists want to help people find joy and happiness, they’re looking in the wrong places. Empathy, humor, and reversing both inner and outer poverty are all vital. But the most solid foundation we know for feeling better about the future is to improve it—tangibly, durably, reproducibly, and scalably.

At RMI we’re practitioners, not theorists. We do solutions, not problems. We do transformation, not incrementalism. In a world short of both hope and time, we seek to practice Raymond Williams’s truth that “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, not despair convincing.” Hope becomes possible, practical—even profitable—when advanced resource efficiency turns scarcity into abundance. The glass, then, is neither half empty nor half full; rather, it has a 100 percent design margin, expandable by efficiency.
[editted]

AMORY B. LOVINS
Cofounder, Chairman, and Chief Scientist

Sustainability Post #36 – Shitakes.

It took 2.5 years but it looks like we are finally getting mushrooms from the bit of inocculating we did. My uncle had a large bag of mushroom spore, but no good trees. I, of course, have lots of trees, many in bad shape. So we cut one down; got his truck stuck; (who buys a two wheel drive truck in Maine?); winched it out; and the logs up drilled holes; added mushroom spore; sealed with wax; and ‘planted’. Then we waited. And waited.

Today, I went out and saw a number of mushrooms on one of the logs. The others had similar growths.  a quick sanity check on the Internet confirms that we have shitakes. Woot!