BeyondOilNYC

Urban agriculture projects for the 99% - Request for recommendations

2012-03-02T18:24:00.005-08:00

What projects can bring together:

- local food advocates
- Occupy Wall Street supporters
- climate change activists
- those concerned about security of our energy and transportation systems
- neighborhood organizers?

A workshop at the Brooklyn Food Conference in May will set out how the agendas of all these groups come together as part of an urgently needed transition to a renewable energy economy.

We'll and review projects that all of these groups would find valuable - and those especially likely to be put into practice for very basic reasons.

- They are simple and inexpensive to start and operate

- They offer enough benefit – either in income, savings, or production – to appeal to the self-interest of conventional New Yorkers - not just the idealism of true believers.

- Community groups should easily be able to become local partners or customers of the project, or set it up independently themselves.

- Be appealing and profitable for individuals and nonprofit groups within low income communities.

Many projects that are well known to the local food and agriculture communities may motivate dedicated activists, but aren't likely to create income.

Other projects have the potential to produce a lot of income - but require a lot of cash, complex equipment, or highly skilled entrepreneurs to operate.

Please recommend projects that meet these criteria in the areas of urban agriculture and food production, and also in energy conservation, renewable energy, recycling, or transportation services.

Suggestions on how to increase participation in both familiar and new projects are also welcome. A report from the workshop will be distributed to potential allies among nonprofit and advocacy groups. Contact beyondoilnyc@yahoo.com.

More about the workshop
at the Brooklyn Food Conference

With the end of cheap oil, transportation costs will rise. Let’s localize the food system by supporting urban ag projects that are: simple and easy to start; provide economic opportunity in low income neighborhoods; support the goals of OWS and climate change activists; and increase food security. We’ll showcase several existing NYC projects.

Our food is now shipped an average of 1,500 miles from farm to table, but with the end of cheap oil, transportation costs will go up. How can we speed up the localization of the food system? Let’s look for NYC urban agriculture business projects that can spread widely and quickly because: they’re relatively simple and inexpensive to start, can provide economic opportunity in low income neighborhoods, and support mutually beneficial partnerships.

The goals of local food advocates, Occupy Wall Street supporters, environmentalists, and neighborhood organizers overlap as part of the urgently needed transition to a renewable energy economy, with more secure local and regional food systems.

We’ll look at Victory Chicken, Wholeshare, Vokashi, Spring into Action, East NY Farms, the BLK Projek, and others, and how to spread their good ideas.

Workshop Objectives

It is critical for local food and agriculture activists (as well as policymakers) to understand that while better taste and nutrition are important marketing points, regionalizing our food system rapidly is essential because the price and supply of oil will become increasingly volatile in the near future, and long-distance food costs may increase significantly.

Some urban agriculture business models that are more likely to spread widely and become future standard practices are those that are easy to get started, and offer the prospect of income for low income individuals and neighborhoods. Collaboration between these urban ag projects and nonprofit groups serving those neighborhoods have high potential. Hopefully participants will recommend other projects in addition to those showcased, and improve on the hypotheses presented in the workshop.

The clean energy argument you've been missing; search for urban ag projects

2012-03-01T07:40:00.000-08:00

When environmentalists learn about the horrible health and environmental consequences of fracking for natural gas, they're instantly convinced against it. The majority of us who get their news from the mainstream media hears a very different story - optimistic claims of enough natural gas for a hundred years. The pollution arguments don't automatically work on non-environmentalists, who are happy to hear that our future energy supply is assured. But it's not, and people need to know. At the ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil) [http://www.aspousa.org/] conference in November I encouraged Kurt Cobb, one of the regular columnists at ASPO and Energy Bulletin [http://www.energybulletin.net/], to write an article setting out the underused argument against fracking - there's simply not enough of it, and we invest in renewable power instead. He did, and it's been published in the Sierra Club New York State newsletter and a number of other sites. See the summary below.

In turn, Kurt suggested that I write an article about how the transition to a renewable energy economy is now being blocked by the 1%. I did, and it was republished in Energy Bulletin. [http://energybulletin.net/stories/2012-01-09/occupy-sustainability-1-blocking-transition-renewable-energy-economy ]

To help spread this message in various environmental communities and Occupy Wall Street working groups, I'm collecting projects that embody this message, but are less theoretical, and appeal to people's self interest.

What are your recommendations of urban agriculture or sustainability projects that can help build the renewable energy economy, and are relatively inexpensive and simple to start? I found several at the Just Food conference, and pitched the concept at the OWS Forum on the Commons on 2/17. Here's the video. http://media.newhumanist.us/gallery/default.aspx?moid=4518

I'll compile a bunch of projects that express these themes, and present them in a workshop at the Brooklyn Food Conference in May. My next presentation is at the NYC Friends of Clearwater on 3/16.

***

The clean energy argument you've been missing
by Kurt Cobb

Environmentalists concerned about fracking, coal, and climate change need all the ammunition they can get when advocating for clean, renewable energy. That's why I'm forwarding this piece to you because it explains a powerful argument that should be incorporated into the case for a rapid transition to renewable energy.

Please take a few minutes to read it. The piece can be freely reprinted and reposted, so I'm hoping you'll suggest it for any listserv, website, newsletter or other publication with which you are involved. And, I'm hoping you'll forward it widely to friends and colleagues who share your concerns and suggest that they get the piece reprinted and reposted wherever possible.

Question: What key argument are those concerned about fracking, coal, climate change and renewable energy missing?

Answer: Constrained fossil fuel supplies mean there is no fossil fuel "bridge" to renewable energy, not natural gas, not coal, and certainly not oil.

Summary: Some environmentalists speak of natural gas as a clean "bridge fuel" that will buy time for a transition to a renewable energy society. And, industry claims of abundant gas appear to support the idea. But the actual data on natural gas as well as that on coal and oil suggest that no fossil fuel will continue to see its rate of production climb significantly in the decades ahead, and so none of them is a viable "bridge fuel." This means that global society must leap over fossil fuels and move directly to renewables as quickly as possible.

To find out more read: Fossil Fuels vs. Renewables: The Key Argument that Environmentalists are Missing. http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-01-23/fossil-fuels-vs-renewables-key-argument-environmentalists-are-missing

Kurt Cobb blogs at Resource Insights, and is the author of Prelude, a novel about peak oil. He was interviewed this week about high oil prices on the cable news show Crosstalk. http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/

***

Occupy sustainability: the 1% are blocking the transition
to a renewable energy economy

A sustainable world that works for the 99% is possible, if we can respond to climate change, economic injustice and resource depletion at the same time. The transition to a renewable energy economy can be a valuable frame for that discussion. Just as the financial elites brought about the economic crisis, they are blocking the renewable energy transition to reap more profit from their fossil fuel investments. Because of fuel depletion as well as climate change, further delay may prevent a successful transition. Social justice and sustainability advocates can blow the whistle on the 1% for this issue too, and collaborate to speed up the transition locally.
http://energybulletin.net/stories/2012-01-09/occupy-sustainability-1-blocking-transition-renewable-energy-economy

Occupy sustainability: the 1% is blocking the transition to a renewable energy economy

2011-12-20T07:46:00.000-08:00

Occupy sustainability: The 1% is blocking the transition to a renewable energy economy
Dan Miner, Beyond Oil NYC

In order to make our society sustainable, we have to deal not just with environmental issues and climate change, but with the economic crisis and the depletion of natural resources. The most effective responses will deal with all four at once. While climate change response has mostly been blocked, the Occupy movement is rapidly emerging as a major political force.

Occupiers are planning next steps for 2012, looking at new ways to get the public involved, and refining their visions for a more just society. We need to protest and withdraw from corrupt, unsustainable systems and simultaneously create new systems that are both equitable and sustainable. The transition to a sustainable, renewable energy economy can be a valuable addition to this discussion, since it addresses environmental issues and climate change, slows depletion of natural resources, and builds an economic infrastructure not controlled by the financial elites.

The 1% absolutely does not want us to realize how urgently this transition to a renewable energy economy is needed. Their power and profits depend on keeping the unsustainable fossil fuel economy running as long as possible.

They’re heavily invested in it. Of the 10 largest global corporations, 6 are oil companies. The International Forum on Globalization has identified the world’s top 50 individuals whose investments benefit from climate change and whose influence networks block efforts to phase out pollution from fossil fuels.  To continue making as much money as they can, they would have us wait until it’s too late to make a successful transition.

The consequences of our addiction to fossil fuels include the terrible pollution associated with fracking, tar sands development, offshore drilling spills, and coal-fired power plants, and vulnerability to volatile fuel prices and unstable foreign energy supplies. Perhaps we could tolerate those costs of the energy status quo, but we can’t live with the catastrophic climate change it will surely trigger. The pushers of fossil fuels, the world’s largest corporations and their allies, don’t want us to know another world is possible.

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, says that climate change response requires immediate adoption of policies hated by the free market right: reversing privatization; relocalizing much of the economy; scaling back overconsumption; bringing back long-term planning; heavily regulating, taxing and even nationalizing corporations; and cutting military spending. As she says, “Climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.” Right wing activists understand that climate change response and the abuses of unchecked free market capitalism are just not compatible.

But climate change response of the scale needed to work will only take place if there is a massive, popular effort to get corporations out of politics.   The 1% is opposing this. It is lobbying to reduce regulation and oversight on fossil fuels, which will make these pollution problems and climate change worse.

The 1% also doesn’t want us to know that getting off fossil fuels is inevitable, and that a successful transition to a renewable energy economy is not guaranteed. It’s only possible if we stop the 1% from blocking the transition, and start building it now, while we still can.

World crude oil production has been on a plateau since 2006, despite efforts to find more. Discovery of new oil fields peaked in the 1960s. Many analysts – including the US military – predict that in the next few years oil supply will fall short of demand and go into permanent decline. This will lead to shortages and high prices, which will continue the economic slowdown, and high unemployment. Of course, this is on top of whatever financial crises are already waiting in the wings. The longer we wait to get the transition started, the more difficult and costly it will be.

Climate change and the limits to fuel supplies and natural resources may be abstract, but lead to very material consequences including food shortages, natural disasters and wars.   The world’s largest corporations have calculated that they profit more from maintaining their monopolies on the world’s food, commerce and transportation systems than from preventing human suffering and death. Blowing the whistle on the financial elites blocking the renewable energy transition is one place to start. Another is by organizing to create the renewable energy economy at the local level.

Further collaboration between the Occupy and sustainability movements

To respond to climate change, resource depletion and economic injustice our society has to be transformed from top to bottom: from energy, housing, food and agriculture, transportation, urban planning, and local economic development, to industry and manufacturing.

Although transformative federal action in these areas may be blocked, organizers may find opportunities to address these matters locally with little resistance. Projects can benefit the 99% by offering relief from continuing economic turmoil, encouraging production of local goods and services, lowering bills, redirecting the flow of money from large corporations to small businesses, and laying the groundwork for more democratic and just communities. Such projects would be natural ways to extend the values central to the Occupy movement, get more citizens involved, and pressure elected officials to do their parts. They might look less like protests, and more like other parts of the alternative economy now getting underway - consumer and worker cooperatives, barter networks and credit unions.

Two areas to explore for potential projects are energy use and the food system. Residential energy conservation retrofits still offer low hanging fruit. They reduce energy bills, reduce fuel use, reduce pollution and carbon emissions, improve health and can create vast numbers of weatherization jobs.   Unlike the rest of the NYC manufacturing sector, food production is steadily growing. The thriving local food movement and city officials are working together to create a regional food system, which can employ many more area residents in all phases of agriculture and food production.

Projects that enable people to benefit from accelerating the renewable energy transition locally could appeal to broader audiences than the sustainability and social justice movements have activated so far. We need to connect the dots between the many such projects already out there and the broader context of why they’re needed. Sharing the stories of these projects widely will help them get replicated, and catalyze the creation of new projects. With a world to be transformed, we’ve got all the motivation we need.

Read the full version of this article.

Please post your suggestions and comments below, or contact beyondoilnyc@yahoo.com.

***

Full spectrum sustainability: bringing together the climate change and economic justice movements
Dan Miner, Beyond Oil NYC
A sustainable world that works for the 99% is possible, if we can respond to climate change, economic injustice and resource depletion at the same time. The transition to a renewable energy economy can be a valuable frame for that discussion. Just as the financial elites brought about the economic crisis, they are blocking the renewable energy transition to reap more profit from their fossil fuel investments. Because of fuel depletion as well as climate change, further delay may prevent a successful transition. Social justice and sustainability advocates can blow the whistle on the 1% for this issue too, and collaborate to speed up the transition locally.   Read full article

Fossil Fuels vs. Renewables - Kurt Cobb

2011-12-01T13:38:00.000-08:00

Fossil Fuels vs. Renewables: The Key Argument that Environmentalists are Missing

By Kurt Cobb

Which of the following can we count on to act as a “bridge fuel” to a renewable energy economy?

A. Oil
B. Natural Gas
C. Coal
D. None of the above

The correct answer is: D. None of the above.

Mark Twain is reported to have said: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." What most environmentalists think they know for sure is that oil, coal and natural gas are all abundant--so abundant, in fact, that many environmentalists believe they are forced to make a Hobson's choice of natural gas as a so-called "bridge fuel" to a renewable energy future.

Though natural gas produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy than coal or oil, it still contributes mightily to climate change. And, natural gas drilling in the country's vast shale formations pollutes the air and surface waters surrounding drill sites and threatens the groundwater with toxic chemicals used in fracturing operations needed to free the gas.

It turns out, however, that what most environmentalists know about the future supply of fossil fuels is based more on industry hype than on actual data. And, that means that they are missing a key argument in their discussions about renewable energy, one that could be used to persuade those less concerned about pollution and climate change and more concerned about energy security: There is increasing evidence that no fossil fuel will continue to see its rate of production climb significantly in the decades ahead and so none of them is a viable "bridge fuel," not natural gas, not oil, not coal. This means that global society must leap over fossil fuels and move directly to renewables as quickly as possible. In advanced economies this leap must be combined with a program of radical reductions in energy use, reductions which are achievable using known technologies and practices.

Okay, perhaps you are wondering about the data. Let's discuss each fossil fuel separately:

Oil

The first thing you should know about oil is that worldwide production has been on a plateau since 2005. This is despite record high prices and furious exploration and drilling efforts. There have been well-publicized finds here and there that may seem large. However, at the current worldwide rate of consumption, one billion barrels of oil lasts only 12 days. Thus, the multi-billion barrel finds announced in the last decade or so will have little impact on the longevity of world supplies.

Another key issue is one that oil companies do not want to emphasize: depletion. The worldwide average for production declines in existing oilfields has been estimated to be about 4 percent per year. That means that each year just to stay even, the industry must develop new oil production capacity equivalent to the current capacity of the North Sea, one of the world's largest fields. To grow production, it must, of course, exceed this amount, and that hasn't been happening.

When you mention these hard facts in polite company, you will undoubtedly be met with skepticism. But the data are available to the public from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) website. The agency is the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy and is widely considered the gold standard of energy information in the world.

Now, don't be deceived by shifting definitions of oil. When the petroleum glut long predicted by the optimists failed to appear, they started lumping in ethanol, biodiesel and natural gas liquids with petroleum and calling them all "oil." These other products are useful, but they are not as energy-rich, versatile or easily transported as oil. Our current infrastructure is heavily dependent on oil inputs with no real substitutes available in the quantities required.

You will also likely be met with protestations that we still have lots of oil: tar sands in Canada, heavy oil in Venezuela and even oil shale in the American West, primarily Colorado. Well, this represents the difficult-to-get oil. We extracted the easy stuff in the first 150 years of the oil age. And, while it is true that these resources and others like them represent an immense store of hydrocarbons, what matters is the rate at which we can produce them.

Because of the high-cost, capital-intensive nature of such production, the rate of production will be slow to ramp up and difficult to maintain. The hydrocarbons locked in the tar sands and the Orinoco oil belt in Venezuela aren't what we call oil and must be heavily processed at high cost using enormous amounts of energy. As for the oil shale in the America West, the amount of commercially produced oil we are currently getting from that oil shale is zero. No one has figured out how to extract it profitably. Partly this is because oil shale contains no oil. Instead, it contains a hydrocarbon-rich waxy substance called kerogen which must be heavily processed to turn it into oil.

An analogy might be useful: If you inherit a million dollars with the stipulation that you can only take out $500 a month, you may be a millionaire, but you will never live like one. Increasingly, this is the situation we will find ourselves in when it comes to oil. The key issue is the rate of production, not the size of the resource. The hard-to-get oil resources are large, but they take a long time to develop and require strenuous, expensive and energy-intensive methods to extract. All this, when combined with the relentless depletion of existing fields, spells little or no growth in the worldwide rate of oil production in the coming years.

Natural Gas

By now you've been told so many times in television ads and news articles that we have a 100-year supply of natural gas in the United States, that you assume it must be true. While the claim itself is suspect, even if we accept it, there is a very serious omission. The claim in its entirety reads: a 100-year supply of natural gas at current rates of consumption. If natural gas is to be used as a so-called "bridge fuel"--a fuel that will power society with the least environmental cost while we deploy nonpolluting, renewable energy--then its rate of production will have to grow considerably if it we expect it to displace coal and oil.

Simple spreadsheet calculations will tell you what happens to such long-term supply claims under the pressure of a little exponential growth. At just 2 percent per year growth, the 100-year U.S. domestic natural gas supply is exhausted in 56 years. If we assume that production peaks when about 50 percent of the resource is exhausted, this puts the peak within 35 years. Think about it. Even if the optimists are correct, with a production growth rate of just 2 percent per year, the country reaches a peak within 35 years! What will we do after that?

The picture gets acutely worse as the rate of production growth rises. A 3 percent growth rate implies exhaustion in 47 years and peak in 31 years. A 5 percent growth rates means exhaustion in 37 years and a peak in just 26 years.

As it turns out, the EIA projects a growth rate of just 0.4 percent per year in U.S. natural gas supplies through 2035 with production jumping from about 24 trillion cubic feet (tcf) in 2010 to about 26.5 tcf in 2035, hardly a bonanza.

Beyond this consider that the vast resources of natural gas from deep shale layers, commonly called shale gas, may not be so vast. A U.S. Geological Survey assessment pared the EIA's original estimate of "technically recoverable" natural gas in the largest of the shale deposits, the Marcellus Shale, from 410 tcf to just 84 tcf, an 80 percent reduction. And, this says nothing about whether the gas will be economically recoverable.

The 100-year figure was based on inflated estimates of recoverable natural gas and on ignoring the fact that the rate of natural gas consumption would have to rise exponentially to displace other fossil fuels. These two facts suggest that natural gas will not be the bridge fuel environmentalists are looking for.

Coal

Among the environmental community, the big fear is that coal will displace clean natural gas and even become a source for liquid fuels as oil supplies wane. That fear is founded on industry claims of vast coal supplies in the United States and elsewhere. But four studies suggest that coal may not be nearly as abundant as once believed.

A 2007 National Academy of Sciences report concluded that claims of 250 years of coal reserves in the United States at current rates of consumption could not be supported. The number was more likely to be 100 years. However, it said that a comprehensive survey was necessary to determine a more accurate figure.

But if coal consumption were to grow beyond the current rate, then the 100 years of supply would quickly shrink as in the case of natural gas. And, data from EIA shows that the total heat content of coal mined in the United States has been declining since 1998 despite roughly level production. This means that coal grades are dropping and that the actual energy the United States gets from domestic coal peaked in that year.

A second study by David Rutledge at the California Institute of Technology concluded that worldwide reserves are probably half of those currently stated. Rutledge noted that unlike oil reserves, coal reserve estimates have been steadily dropping over time as unwarranted assumptions were stripped away and the focus was put on what is actually minable.

A third study in 2007 by an independent group of analysts in Germany, the Energy Watch Group, suggests a worldwide peak in the rate of coal production as early as 2025. The authors noted that poor quality data hampered their efforts. One of the troubling gaps was China, a country thought to have some of the largest coal resources in the world. Chinese coal data, however, have not been updated since 1992, and 20 percent of China's reserves have supposedly been mined since that date.

A fourth study published in the international journal Energy last year came to the shocking conclusion that the rate of worldwide coal production from existing fields would peak in 2011. The authors did acknowledge that vast coal fields in Alaska and Siberia remained to be developed, but doubted that these difficult-to-extract and therefore expensive reserves would be developed in time to forestall a decline. They also wrote that production from existing mines is expected to fall by 50 percent over the next 40 years.

The researchers explained that this has serious policy implications. One such implication was that money currently being spent on carbon capture and sequestration technology—a technology that assumes vast additional supplies of coal—would be better spent on outfitting existing coal-fired power stations with supercritical steam turbines, lifting efficiency from 35 percent to 50 percent. This would reduce the rate of greenhouse gas emissions while stretching out the available coal supplies so as to aid an energy transition.

Conclusions

No one knows the future. But making public policy based on industry hype could turn out to be disastrous. Keep in mind that it is the job of fossil fuel industry executives to make sure they can sell their in-ground inventories. And, of course, it's not their job to make good public policy. Our current energy policy, which I refer to as the Good-To-The-Last-Drop Policy, has already meant a huge windfall for oil producers and to a certain extent coal producers. And yet, both regale us with tales of plenty even as constrained supplies send prices skyward.

It is certainly possible that yet-to-be-invented technologies will extend the life of fossil fuel supplies. The question is whether such technologies can be deployed before overall rates of production for oil, natural gas and coal begin to decline. Modern industrial society depends for its proper functioning on the continuous input of high-grade energy resources. If those inputs start to decline or even fail to grow, the system will falter. Some believe we are already seeing the effects of constrained oil supplies on the economy as record high prices suppress economic activity and pressure an already fragile financial system.

It seems doubtful at this time that future technologies for exploiting fossil fuels will be able to do much beyond softening the inevitable declines. And, given the known trends and data, it seems foolish to wait for these yet-to-be-invented technologies to appear. That means that leapfrogging now past fossil fuels to renewable energy is not just desirable but probably inescapable. The only question is whether we as a society will do it with a focused plan for a rapid transition or whether the transition will be chaotic and marked by violent swings in the economy as the world lurches from one energy-induced crisis to another.

Kurt Cobb is a columnist for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen and author of the peak-oil-themed thriller Prelude. His work has also been featured on Energy Bulletin, The Oil Drum, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique, EV World, and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights

Occupy Wall Street: the dominant narrative unravelling

2011-10-17T17:23:00.000-07:00

My activist project for October was promoting four events. Earlier this month, End of Suburbia director Greg Greene did a screening of his classic peak oil documentary at the BMW Guggenheim Design Lab. I had the pleasure of reconnecting with Greg afterward, at workshops the next day at the Lab, and with Jim Kunstler after his not-really-a-debate with the mild-mannered James Russell. Last week was a very modestly attended screening of Chris Martenson's The Crash Course
Come by on Wednesday, October 19 at 7 PM for a larger test of my new product - a screening of Transition video shorts. Details here.

Very few New Yorkers seem aware of the issues discussed at these events. NYC is a busy place, after all. On the other hand, Occupy Wall Street, after weeks of being ignored, has now gone viral. I was there on Saturday afternoon, and went up to Times Square on Saturday night. The tourists had quite the novelty, and so did everyone else reading about it after...is it possible to mix these themes together?

Dave Cohen, who blogs at Decline of the Empire, had this to say about OWS. A great piece in the Onion Magazine on the One Percenters, and their domination of NYC. James Howard Kunstler came out for them. So have Al Gore, Jesse Jackson, a bunch of unions, a dozen NYC Councilmembers.... It would be pointless now, and a lot of unnecessary work, to list who's come out in support of them. The Bloomberg Administration, inextricably tied to its kindred spirits within the One Percent, is on the defensive. OWS is now routinely getting hammered on the front page of the NY Daily News. They may portray OWS as frivolous scruffy anarchist hippies - but they're still on the front page.

Corrupt corporate domination of the US government, and fuel depletion: what the two topics have in common is that they are both repressed material, censored out of officially approved conversation and media. #OWS has forced its way into that discussion. http://www.occupywallst.org/

Doyle Canning, director of national strategy center smartmeme, suggests in this Yes! Magazine op ed that:

"...At smartMeme, we have always been interested in “Psychic Breaks:” moments when the dominant narrative unravels and there is an opening for a new story to take hold on a massive scale. We saw this opportunity come and go in 2008 when the stock market collapsed and $700 billion was given to financial giants. Underprepared and shell-shocked progressives mostly stayed home and kept quiet while the Tea Partiers harnessed common sense opposition to bailing out the rich into a movement that was cynically designed to support the status quo.

But we believe that #OccupyWallStreet is re-opening that window and provoking another such psychic break moment, one that can amplify common sense progressive demands for structural change. At least we hope so.

We have an opportunity to offer a narrative explaining what has happened, how we got here, and how we can move forward together. We are faced with the potential of rooting this insurrectional energy into a strong social movement that can rival the Tea Party and change the story about our economic system—a movement that could unite behind real solutions to the economic and democratic crises we face. The actions by Right to the City this past weekend in Boston offer us an instructive model on the kind of analysis and organizing strategy that is necessary now.

But we must be agile and graceful and bold enough—like the ballerina on the bull of the #OccupyWallStreet poster. We must be visionary and courageous and tenacious enough—like the youth of Roxbury blessing their occupied garden. And we must be brave enough, like Presley Obasohan, to put our bodies on the line and commit civil disobedience against the banks and for the people and planet that we love...."

In the movie The Matrix, when there was a disruption to the digitally produced illusion people inhabited, continuity errors would appear - a cat walking backwards, for example. The OWS movement is a continuity error in the mainstream discourse that has gone out of control.

In other news...

Anne Pope from Sustainable Flatbush recommends a book that approaches the multiple crises in our society a bit differently: Eco-Mind, by Francis Moore Lappe, author of the classic Diet for a Small Planet. "She cautions the environmental movement against what she calls "scarcity mind" and always speaking in terms of diminishing resources; instead she urges us to think of the real problem as scarcity of *democracy*. This is consistent with her argument in Diet for a Small Planet (back in the 70s!) that the hunger crisis was not about a lack of food, but rather about the extreme inequity in how food and resources are distributed..."

Here's a video game about climate change and peak oil.

Learning about peak oil from a comic book.

Come to the Transition video screening on October 19

2011-09-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

Would you like to get your organization or neighborhood more involved in NYC sustainability? We’re setting up video screenings that will expand how New Yorkers think about sustainability, and encourage attendees to plug into existing initiatives.

Yes, New York City is making progress in lowering carbon emissions and becoming greener. But sustainability is more than just responding to climate change and preparing for extreme weather events - neither of which we’re doing as quickly as the science requires, by the way. As supplies of natural resources and fossil fuels deplete, rising costs will cause permanent economic changes. Urban planners and community activists are increasingly striving not just for sustainability, but resilience, so we can adapt as things change. Raising awareness about the interdependence of energy, environment and economy will encourage smart choices. By conserving energy, turning to mass transit and renewable power while relocalizing production of goods and services, we can assure better quality of life in NYC neighborhoods while moving toward real sustainability.

The Transition community organizing method accelerates this process. It starts by educating residents about the full scope of sustainability issues. Then participants envision their community successfully adapted by 2030, brainstorm what steps they need to take, and pick a few to start with (http://www.transitionus.org/). Hundreds of communities around the world have begun Transition initiatives. Many other communities have been influenced by the methods, such as Brooklyn’s Sustainable Flatbush (http://sustainableflatbush.org/).
Step up sustainability action in your neighborhood or organization by co-sponsoring a Transition video screening. After each short video, audience members can share their reactions, with a longer facilitated open discussion at the end of the screenings.

You’re invited to see how this works at the next screening on Wednesday, October 19, 7 – 9 PM. Join us at the Seafarer’s and International House, 123 East 15th Street in Manhattan, just east of Union Square. There is no charge to attend, but a $5 donation is requested to cover costs.

You can also watch the videos at your computer, at your convenience.

“300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds,” Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute, 5 min.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ-J91SwP8w&feature=youtu.be

ABC Catalyst Peak Oil Report 28-04-2011,12 minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaNz3qS5WAo&feature=youtu.be

Who killed economic growth? Animated video with Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQqDS9wGsxQ, 6 minutes

TED talk with Rob Hopkins, Transition: grassroots organizing for resilience; 19 minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8meWY0W40OA

We’re also promoting screenings of related videos:

The End of Suburbia, with director Greg Greene, on October 5 at the BMW Guggenheim Lab

Chris Martenson's The Crash Course on October 13.

Download the flyer for details.

Would you like to collaborate in setting up a Transition video screening for your group or community? Please call me at 718.786.5300 x 27.

Regards,

Dan Miner

Volunteer organizer, Beyond Oil NYC

www.beyondoilnyc.org

Join 350.org on September 24 for Moving Planet

2011-09-20T08:03:00.000-07:00

If you're around this Saturday, consider joining the 15 or so walks and bike rides in NYC that will converge at a climate change rally at the UN. It's one of thousands of climate change actions around the world, organized through 350.org.

While the City did not agree to a permit for a single unified march to the rally site, individuals will be bicycling, rollerblading and walking to the UN from meeting sites throughout the City. Find the one you prefer at:http://movingplanetnyc.blogspot.com/p/find-ride-or-march.html

I will be representing Beyond Oil NYC and helping to lead the march from Merchants's Gate at Columbus Circle, 59th Street and Central Park West. Look for me with several 350.org signs. I'll need some help in carrying the signs, so if you get there by 11:30 you may get one. Or make your own sign and bring it.

Gather at noon and at 12:30, we'll set out down Broadway to 48th Street east to First Avenue, and make our way to the rally at 2 PM at the United Nations' Dag Hammarskjold Plaza on 47th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues in Manhattan. More from the press release below.

"The UN General Assembly will be in session at that time debating important resolutions just 2 months before the UN climate summit in Durban and in the critical run-up to Rio +20.

The NYC event has attracted a wide array of support from student groups, climate change activists, faith and environmental justice leaders, bicycling proponents, and opponents to hydrofracking of natural gas and nuclear power.

The dozens of sponsors of the NYC rally include 350.0rg, NYPIRG, Beyond Oil NYC, Carbon Tax Center, Climate Week NYC, Climate Reality Project, Conversations with the Earth, Earth Day New York, Earth Matters, Environment Action Association, Food and Water Watch, Frack Action, Green Maps System, Green Cents Solutions, Human Impacts Institute, Manhattan Greens (Manhattan Local of the Green Party, No Impact Project, NYC Friends of Clearwater, NYC Climate Coalition, NY Society for Ethical Culture, Oxfam Action Corps, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Sane Energy Project, Small Planet Institute, Slow Food NYC, Solar 1, Time's Up!, Transportation Alternatives, United for Action, Water Defense, We Act/Faith Leaders for Environmental Justice.

350.org recently helped coordinate several weeks of civil disobedience protests at the White House in opposition to the Tar Sands pipeline from Canada.

The demands of the global day of action include: relying upon science-based policies to get us back to 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; rapid, just transition to zero carbon emissions; ensuring adequate funding to assist third world countries with the climate change transition; and lifting the rights of people over the rights of polluters. To preserve our planet, scientists tell us we must reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from its current level of 392 parts per million to below 350 ppm.

The local events are part of a worldwide day of action on September 24 calling for a fossil fuel-free world. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to participate by moving their bodies towards solutions to climate change in nearly 2,000 events across the globe ranging from 5 mile hikes to 350 hour bike rides."

Turning NYC yards into food forests

2011-08-22T13:34:00.000-07:00

For most New Yorkers, food is something grown far away and trucked to the neighborhood supermarket. Occasionally, someone has a garden in their backyard. Recently, as local produce has become popular, neighborhood green markets offer the harvest of farms within the NYC metropolitan area. With NYC food and agriculture policy rapidly changing, we’re sure to see many innovations.

Rooftop farms are newly glamorous but let’s not forget the 52,236 acres of private yards in NYC. [ “Regionalizing the Food System for Public Health and Sustainability,” Columbia U. Urban Design Lab, Nov. 2010, p. 17] Now, they’re mostly planted in lawns and ornamental species. What if we started seeing the food-producing potential of our lawns and yards?

A growing number of landscape designers are planting food forests, which combine fruit and nut bearing trees with lower layers of bushes, vines and groundcovers – all of which have edible yields. Food forestry is a central theme within permaculture, an ecological design movement recently featured in the New York Times.

How might we start food forests in NYC yards? Here’s a few starting points for collaboration between landscape designers, permaculturists, fans of locally grown food, and entrepreneurs.
- Inventory the fruit and nut bearing trees and understory that can make up food forests in NYC.
- Compile a wiki with best practices about their planting, care and harvest.
- Put together sets of marketing materials about food forest options for NYC backyards.
- Create options of various sizes and species customized for space, yard condition, client type, etc. - like a take-out menu.

Who makes it happen?

Anyone who has knows how to apply food forest design principles, and plant trees and shrubs – and who recognizes a new business opportunity. Who’s available to help out? The entrepreneur could put out a call for permaculture design course graduates who want to learn practical skills.

Where does it start?

Go to church groups, environmental justice communities, nonprofits in low income communities, propose a variety of options. Permaculture has a long tradition of permablitzes - volunteer efforts much like barn raisings. Start out by offering permablitzes as long as the recipient raises funds to pay for plants and materials.

Use projects like those to train a pool of skilled participants. Entrepreneurs can take material from the wiki - or the existing books and articles that certainly already exist in the gardening literature - and turn them into open source marketing materials. That sounds idealistic, but only the most enterprising and skilled individuals will actually turn this into a business, so they can earn social capital by adding to the available forest gardening information free to the public - and promote their own services. They could start by promoting backyard food forest makeovers in their own neighborhood, starting with free gigs to raise awareness, leading hopefully to paid gigs.

Raising awareness of urban agriculture benefits

Even where there are active community gardens or community supported agriculture (CSA) group buying services, lots of New Yorkers don’t see the context that makes more urban agriculture not just desirable, but a necessary part of our future. So hosting film screenings on these topics in your neighborhood is a good way of building awareness, and finding out who has some yard they want to turn into a garden. The key is probably making personal connections with leaders of neighborhood civic groups and explaining how they could get their own backyard garden or plant the first food forest in their neighborhood.

Post your comments, suggestions, and improvements!

August update: Will Allen, September film screening, a proposal, 350 on 9/24

2011-08-16T18:41:00.000-07:00

Beyond Oil NYC Update - August 2011

In this issue:

- Screening of Transition video shorts, 9/14
- Report and photos from Growing Power workshop on greenhouse building in Brooklyn
- A proposal on how neighborhood groups can make money from promoting sustainability
- Join 350.org on 9/24 with Moving Planet

***

Here's a monthly update from our exploration into making NYC more sustainable. In July, Will Allen, the founder of Growing Power, led a workshop on urban agriculture in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. We have great photos from Murray Cox. We also organized a well-attended screening of End of Suburbia at Orchard House Cafe, and helped promote a screening of Urban Roots at the Horticultural Society. We're going back to Orchard House in September with a new approach: a series of short videos rather than a single documentary.

My talk at a June conference on African children in conflict zones led to an invitation to co-host an online radio show about African environmental issues. So far that's going well. At the NYC Solar Summit that month I got some ideas on promoting solar PV installations, now in process. Look for details in the fall.

What started as an article on applying Transition organizing methods turned into a proposal for brainstorming events that would bring together entrepreneurs and sustainable business sectors. The goal would be to identify new business models that would allow neighborhood and civic groups to earn revenue from sustainability projects. And incidentally, build public support for PlaNYC. Since the next Mayor may be less green than Bloomberg, or face more economic constraints, PlaNYC is less sustainable than you might think...

Dan

***

Transition Video Shorts and Networking, Wed., Sept. 14, 7-9:30 PM
Orchard House Cafe, 1064 First Avenue (at 58th Street), NY, NY 10022
www.orchardhousecafe.com No charge.

Transition organizing starts with raising awareness about concepts that are very basic, but not widely discussed: to be sustainable communities must address not just climate change, but resource depletion and the economic changes now underway. Following some shorts like "The End of Growth;" "300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds;" and ABC's April report on world oil production, we'll screen a great presentation by Richard Heinberg on his new book, followed by networking and discussion. Here's the trailer.

Urban agriculture in Brooklyn

On July 19 and 20 - the hottest days of the year - Will Allen and his team from Growing Power came to the Brooklyn Rescue Mission in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to build their signature urban agriculture system: a greenhouse with a fish tank, and industrial size worm bins. Photos by Murray Cox. Read the report.

A modest proposal about how neighborhood groups could make money by promoting sustainability - and help maintain future PlaNYC efforts.

It explains how representatives of entrepreneurial groups and sustainable business sectors could come together, to find ways for neighborhood civic groups to earn revenue through sustainability projects. Just one good idea could provide funds for struggling nonprofits, while also building public support for PlaNYC.

Maybe the City's official program to build public support - the Change By Us social media website - will make a real difference in the number of New Yorkers getting involved with green programs. Please look at it and let us know what you think.

Maybe City leaders can be convinced to support social movements that catalyze neighborhood level sustainability organizing, like Transition or Bright Neighbor, a great online platform that's being used throughout Portland, OR. That's probably not likely - but isn't it worth raising the suggestion?

Review the proposal here. With just a few co-sponsors among business schools, green business groups, or civic groups, the process could take off. Add your response to the comment section. If you don't like it, please say so - and please suggest what you think are better ideas.

Join 350.org on Sept. 24 with Moving Planet

Join a bike/march and rally in NYC in support of moving away from fossil fuels and toward a clean energy future. It's part of an international day of action called Moving Planet, aimed at demonstrating the strength of the climate movement and showing decision makers that the climate crisis must not be ignored. Share the new video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ztEgLXSiek.

Contact 350.orgNYC@gmail.com. 350's NYC volunteers are partnering with with Al Gore's Climate Reality Project "24 Hours of Reality" on Sept 14th, and with Climate Week NYC Sept 19th - 26th, http://www.climateweeknyc.org/.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading.

Growing Power Workshop in Bed Stuy, part two

2011-08-05T08:27:00.000-07:00

This is the second part of a report on a urban agriculture workshop using Growing Power's integrated system of greenhouses, fish tanks, worm bins and composting. Thanks again to photojournalist Murray Cox for use of his photos.

Growing Power uses worms to create fertilizer used in their hoop house garden beds, and to make worm compost for sale. Read about it here. During the workshop, some worms from one of the Mission's existing bins were transferred into a new bin.

The bins need to have lots of holes in the bottom.
Really lots and lots of holes.

This is not your home-scale worm bin in a plastic tub. (This past year I've been using such a bin, with much frustration. I'm now planning to return to taking compostables to a drop-off site. Sigh.) Next step is adding layers of compost, and layers of brown - dried plant matter - as well as worms.

It was an honor to hear directly from Will Allen about how urban communities are using these techniques to raise food locally and be more self-sufficient.

There were lots of interesting conversations with other attendees at the workshop about how to promote urban agriculture in NYC.

In a previous post, I set out a proposal for increasing public participation in sustainability initiatives and PlaNYC. What if we could set up a series of brainstorming meetings in which subject matter experts in sustainability intiatives get together with MBA types and those skilled in developing business models?

Might they be able to figure out ways for neighborhood groups, civic associations, and faith groups to make money for themselves while implementing sustainability initiatives? One way of structuring those meetings would be the World Cafe method, but as part of the approach, I'm inviting people who see some possibility here to suggest better ways to organize it. It's open source, so please look at the post and add your comments - or suggestions on how to improve it - below. Thanks!

Growing Power Workshop in Bed Stuy, part one

2011-08-05T07:38:00.000-07:00

On July 19 and 20, Will Allen and his team from Growing Power came to the Brooklyn Rescue Mission in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to build their signature urban agriculture system: a greenhouse with a fish tank. About 30 people came for the workshop.

Brooklyn Rescue Mission is led by the Reverends DeVanie Jackson and Robert Jackson. "BRM envisions urban farming as the starting point for a self-reliance movement, empowering neighborhood residents to take ownership of their own food supply, nutrition and neighborhood revitalization. BRM endeavors to build community pride, provide healthy provisions to its neediest residents, encourage youth entrepreneurship and develop a communal culture towards land use and community health through an innovative sustainable food system."

This post showcases the work of photojournalist Murray Cox. Murray is currently living in central Brooklyn and seeking sustainability projects to document. See his work at www.vistadelmundo.com, and let him know about potential projects. We appreciate Murray's permission to share his images.

Two carpenters who have been working with Growing Power for years directed attendees through the process. July 19 was the hottest day of the year, with temperature over 100 F. It was a little cooler the next day.

Hoop houses start with foundation pipes, hammered several feet deep into the ground at precisely measured intervals. The frame of the hoop house is made from steel pipe that is light enough to be bent on a carefully designed wooden form called a jig. Two lengths are bolted together and bent into a hoop. The hoops are set down on the foundation pipes.

Sturdy wood boards are secured at the ground level, and horizontal pipes and boards connect the hoops.

Next is the construction of a frame for a fish tank and a shallower tank to be mounted above it.

We shared battery powered drills to create holes for large bolts.

A large piece of thick rubber liner will turn the lower part of the frame into a watertight container suitable for fish.

The upper tank with a similar liner will contain a layer of gravel and water plants. Water from the fish tank will be pumped up into that tank, where the plants and the bacteria living in the gravel purify the water for return circulation to the fish tank.

You can try this at home - with the guidance of skilled carpenters! The Growing Power method is not very high tech, but still requires serious skills. Fortunately there are plent of very handy people who can assemble hoop houses and aquaponics tanks.

Next steps for the house would be the addition of plastic roll-down liners that can keep the house warm enough to raise vegetables through the winter, as well as keep the worms and fish comfortable.

The Growing Power method composts food scrap and vegetable waste, then feeds the compost to worms in large industrial size bins. Worm emulsion, liquid drained from the worm bins, nourishes plants in the hoop house. See http://www.growingpower.org/ for details.

Click here for the second part of this post, more of Murray's photos of other parts of the process: compost and worm bins. And some thoughts about how NYC civic groups can learn how to produce real goods and services through sustainability initiatives like this.

How to get civic groups more involved in PlaNYC - to make City efforts more sustainable

2011-07-22T17:45:00.000-07:00

For PlaNYC, the City's long term sustainability program, to survive and grow, public support for it must be increased before the next Mayoral election. Getting many more New Yorkers directly involved in sustainability initiatives is a good way to do that. Rather than targeting individuals, why not aim to effectively engage civic groups? Here's a proposal for public-private collaborations to identify ways for civic groups to earn new sources of revenue through sustainability projects - while broadening the support for sustainability urgently needed in NYC. We can do it - with your help.

Here's a group using the World Cafe method of open source community discussion and brainstorming.

***

How to get civic groups more involved in PlaNYC - to make City efforts more sustainable
Dan Miner, Beyond Oil NYC

Central to the City’s sustainability efforts is PlaNYC, the monumental program linking hundreds of greening initiatives across City operations. Yet how sustainable is PlaNYC itself? As a project of the Mayor’s Office, it was created almost completely by government agency staff and consultants. The public wasn’t involved in creating the plan, so no grassroots constituency or broad public support ever developed around it. The limitation of this strategy was quickly revealed when in 2007 PlaNYC aimed to stabilize mass transit funding and reduce traffic congestion by setting up fees for driving into Manhattan’s business districts. Vehement opposition quickly overwhelmed the initiative. Now, in its 2011 update, PlaNYC officials claim a strong commitment to public engagement. It’s not just pleasant rhetoric: building public support for PlaNYC before the 2013 Mayoral election may be the single most important initiative of them all.

In tough economic times, even the most sensible long-term priorities are at risk from budget cuts, especially for a Mayoral project like PlaNYC, without a permanent official role in City government. Unless the next Mayor has a strong sustainability commitment or constituency, the project is likely to fall from its current high priority. PlaNYC could quickly become a shadow of its former self.

One proposal to assure that PlaNYC continues would amend the City Charter to make PlaNYC into a permanent civic body run jointly by the Mayor and other elected officials, while developing a public planning process to guide its implementation, but logical reasons to support PlaNYC don’t offer strong enough motivation to work. Financial incentives, either through future savings or avoiding future costs, seem to work better. From the failure of the 2007 congestion pricing campaign, we’ve learned that the carrot of secure mass transit funding was too abstract and impersonal to trigger broad public support, but the stick of paying higher fees killed support. On the other hand, some sustainability programs that promise future savings are finding customers. Con Edison is offering free energy efficiency assessments, and 70% off retail price for upgrades. Government incentives now pay as much as 80% of the cost of solar power systems. If participation in even these programs depends on hefty incentives, ad campaigns, and the hard work of salaried outreach staff, is it realistic to expect New Yorkers to spontaneously self-organize neighborhood greening projects through PlaNYC’s new Change By Us social media platform?

How can NYC civic groups find sources of revenue from PlaNYC initiatives?

There are thousands of civic groups in NYC without any current environmental agenda. Despite their diversity, members of business organizations, social service nonprofits, faith groups, and senior centers will all want to know “What’s in it for me?” If we can figure out ways for civic groups to make a buck from implementing sustainability practices, we can engage the public.

Bringing together sustainability experts and entrepreneurs to crowd-source business consulting

Organizations central to sustainability initiative sectors - such as solar power, green buildings, or urban agriculture - could co-sponsor an evening or half-day event. Invited attendees would be practitioners in the field, members of NYC business and entrepreneurial groups, and leaders of civic groups.

It would start with a panel of experts, to brief attendees on products and practices the sector now offers. Panelists would also discuss the opportunities and obstacles in marketing the sector - what has and hasn't worked.

The general meeting would then break into small discussion groups using the World Cafe method of conducting meetings. Participants at each table would brainstorm ways that civic groups could offer value and earn revenue while promoting the sustainability products or practices just reviewed.

Here's an introduction to the World Cafe method. After welcomes and introductions, groups of any size break up into small groups sitting around tables for a round of 20 minutes. Each round is prefaced with a question for the context and purpose of the setting. One member of the group volunteers to be the reporter, and take notes of the table's responses to the question. At the end of the 20 minute round, the reporters from each table take turns sharing their small group's deliberations with the larger group. If there is a second round, everyone except the reporter would then go to another table and the process repeats. After the meeting, notes are summarized and shared via email with all participants. The notes from each meeting will be posted on websites of co-sponsors so the combined insights of many diverse NYC groups and networks will be conveniently available.

The cost of setting up such events won't be that high - compared to the potential benefit from crowd-sourcing business consulting for sustainability practices. If such meetings produce ways for civic groups to promote sustainability initiatives, while lessening their reliance on foundation grants, private donations, and government incentives, wouldn't this be a worthwhile experiment?

Entrepreneurial solutions might include civics earning referral fees for getting neighbors to sign up for installing solar photovoltaic and hot water systems or building energy management systems, or performing energy efficiency retrofits. It could be identifying green micro-enterprises that civics could promote to their constituents. Or compiling portfolios of potential business plans for neighborhood-scale enterprises.

Study existing neighborhood sustainability organizing movements

The prospect of financial gain is necessary but not sufficient. Are there social movements whose narratives or techniques might support PlaNYC? Sustainable Flatbush and the Lower East Side Ecology Center, neighborhood environmental groups cited in PlaNYC, are good models but depend on dedicated staff and funding. Some groups are great at bringing together volunteers, like 350.org for climate change activists and United for Action for opponents of natural gas hydrofracking, but are too narrow in their appeal and lack a local focus. Groups affiliated with the environmental justice movement focus on providing low-income and minority communities with equal protection from environmental burdens, but lack broad appeal. All of these groups have some but not all of the features necessary.

Transition and Bright Neighbor may be better social organizing models for New York City. Started in Britain just a few years ago, the Transition method of grassroots organizing is now being used in hundreds of communities around the world. Volunteer-led talks or documentary screenings show how current economic worries, higher energy prices and climate change are all connected. Volunteers set up local brainstorming sessions, where neighbors meet, envision how their community can become more resilient and sustainable in the future, and create local projects to implement that vision.

Bright Neighbor, a Portland, Oregon software platform for neighborhood sustainability, combines community involvement and online social tools to enable users to get to know their neighbors, build neighborhood and block-by-block barter networks and food systems, inventory skills and items for trade, pay or free, set up ride sharing, and plant neighborhood fruit and nut trees. The network has been deployed in 95 Portland neighborhoods. Portland Mayor Sam Adams calls Bright Neighbor an important city partner, and founder Randy White calls it a training program for communities.

Both Transition and Bright Neighbor build support for their programs by talking about mitigating the effects of future energy prices increases. While fuel depletion is not widely discussed, last year the International Energy Agency admitted that world conventional oil production peaked in 2006 and the cover story of July’s Popular Science magazine is “The Last Drops: How to Bridge the Gap between Oil and Green Energy.” So far, however, the Regional Plan Association is the only major New York City group to venture a comment on how this will affect policies, even though places like Portland, Oregon and San Francisco, California have already issued municipal reports on adapting to both fuel price volatility and climate change.

Next steps for PlaNYC - a laboratory for entrepreneurship and social movements

Let's recap. We must raise public participation in PlaNYC before the 2013 election to ensure that the City’s sustainability projects are themselves sustainable. PlaNYC could gain a vast amount of leverage by recruiting the City’s vast number of civic groups, but that won’t happen by good intentions alone. How can we develop more financial support for public engagement in challenging economic times? If just 1% of the City’s business, social sciences and marketing experts started thinking about the City’s sustainability initiatives, who knows what innovation could result! Citizens who recognize what’s at stake can develop entrepreneurial ways for civic groups to profit from promoting sustainability and better narratives and organizing tools to make PlaNYC a permanent part of the City’s culture. It’s time for that 1% to step forward, and convene the laboratories for social movements that PlaNYC will need not just to thrive, but to expand.

The Central Queens Y needs a community garden

2011-06-29T18:40:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, me and the guys at Sustainable Forest Hills - Erin, Aleks and Derek - along with Peggy from the Y set up a meeting to share ideas about local food and gardening in Forest Hills, Queens. One idea that generated a lot of excitement was putting a demonstration garden in a back yard directly behind the Y facility on 108th Street. The Y is still figuring out what pieces of lawn we can rip up. It's late in the season, so the goal would be to put in a mix of mature plants and fast growing seeds so we can have a credible display by the end of the season - and perhaps recruit a few other yards-to-gardens in the area. Soil test came back with medium lead, which is apparently in the normal range.

The big back yard section, looking at the back of the Y facility, and the empty house.

From another angle. The center of this yard is about 35' x 35'.

And from another angle.

The Y is also interested, to my surprise, of gardening on the sunny strip on the side street, which is open to full neighborhood viewing. Great for us...

Project update, later in July: Our contact at the Y was all for this, but the boss kept delaying a decision...and delaying...finally it became clear the management did not have strong support for the project. And it was getting late in the season. And I'm overcommitted anyway. So no garden, and no plans to do one at the Y.

Localizing food security with sustainable agriculture

2011-06-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

I was invited to make a presentation at the Eng Aga Eze Foundation's June 13 conference The Day of the African Child, with a focus on children in conflict zones. I expect the audience will include staff from the UN and nongovernmental organizations, and perhaps some ambassadors. Here's a summary of my presentation and the full report, with links to the PDFs below.

Scarcity and disruption are triggering factors for conflict. High food prices caused widespread riots in 2008. It's widely recognized that climate change, increased weather disasters, and water shortages will drive up food prices far higher, which will increase the odds of strife and conflict.

Oxfam has reported that over the last few decades, floods and storms have substantially increased. A new Oxfam report details how hotter weather will reduce food production (leaving aside the direct effects of weather disasters). Oxfam bluntly declares the international food system to be broken, and expects no help from nations and major organizations. They call for localized, sustainable agricultural practices. Communities with relocalized food production will be more resilient to scarcity and disruption, and can buffer the factors that lead to conflict. This applies not just to developing countries, but right here in the US as well.

Three positive responses are detailed: a project to teach permaculture informed low input agriculture in Malawi; Geoffrey Lawton's creation of a permaculture oasis in arid Jordan, as recorded in the famous "Greening the Desert" video (spoiler alert - lots of swales); and the use of biochar as a soil amendment and climate change reversal strategy.

Download the conference presentation.

"Localizing food security with sustainable agriculture." It's a fifteen minute discussion and slide show.

If you like that, download the full report.It has the complete narrative, references, and graphics.

Queens Cool Roofs Campaign in NY Daily News

2011-06-11T12:18:00.000-07:00

White is new green for building roofs in Queens to reduce cooling costs

By Sam Levin, NY Daily News, Wednesday, June 1, 2011

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-06-01/local/29624055_1_white-roofs-cool-roofs-reflective-roofs

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/queens/2011/06/01/2011-06-01_white_is_new_green_for_bldg_roofs_in_qns.html

Buildings throughout Queens are going green this summer by going white. As part of the citywide Cool Roofs program, which mobilizes volunteers to paint roofs to reduce cooling costs, the Long Island City Business Development Corp. is creating a network of participants in the borough to join the cause. (As of June 2011, LICBDC - now LIC Partnership - had referred over twenty buildings to the program. - DM)

As part of the citywide Cool Roofs program, which mobilizes volunteers to paint roofs to reduce cooling costs, the Long Island City Business Development Corp. is creating a network of participants in the borough to join the cause. Variety Boys and Girls Club members stand on newly painted, energy-efficient white roof in Long Island City with club executive director Terry Hughes.

The city launched the second season of the initiative last month. The goal is to coat 1 million square feet in the borough. In Queens, volunteers already have painted 14,000 square feet of the Sunnyside Community Center's roof and 8,000 square feet of the Variety Boys and Girls Club of Long Island City.

"It's good for the environment, good for the city, and it's not hard to do," said Dan Miner, senior vice president of the Long Island City Business Development Corp., which has reached out to nearly 15 buildings in Queens to connect them with Cool Roofs.

"These days everybody needs to lower their bills," Miner added.

White roofs reflect sun, allowing the building occupants to reduce air-conditioning costs and emissions, said Danielle Grillo, executive director of community partnerships at the city Buildings Department.

Painting 1 million square feet of roofs white is equivalent to getting 50 cars off the road, according to Grillo. The opportunity is vast in parts of Queens, where there are a lot of large roofs.

"The outer boroughs are where we find we can make the biggest impact," Grillo said, explaining that painting it costs 45 cents per square foot and electricity usage can drop about 30% in the summer.

"It seemed like a no-brainer," said Terry Hughes, executive director of the Boys and Girls Club. "We could never afford to do something like this on our own."

The city works with corporate sponsors to make the program mostly free for nonprofit groups. Other organizations throughout Queens are setting up partnerships with the city.

"This would reduce our carbon footprint and put us in a better position to run our facilities," said Bob Osa, vice president of facilities for Goodwill Industries, which is hoping to coat roofs at its two warehouses in Astoria.

Supporters said the reflective roofs are also a good learning opportunity.

"It was very bright. I couldn't even look down," said Willie Britton, a 14-year-old member of the Boys and Girls Club who recently went atop the freshly coated roof.

Britton added that he was excited to learn that it could actually save the organization money. "It's cool. It's like a giant science project," he said.

To get your roof coated, contact Dan Miner at 718.786.5300 x 27 or danminer@licpartnership.org, or visit http://www.nyc.gov/html/coolroofs/html/home/home.shtml

How the Transition movement can make NYC more sustainable

2011-06-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

New York City is certainly among the greenest of US cities. In 2008, SustainLane ranked NYC fifth, after Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago. In September 2006, Mayor Bloomberg established an Office of Long-Term Sustainability.   The PlaNYC 2030 report it released - with an updated version released in spring 2011 - is truly a remarkable planning document. There are so many sustainability initiatives enumerated in the PlaNYC report that it would be tedious to list more than a few of them. There is no doubt that the City has made great strides.

Still, much more must be done. It is neither ungrateful, nitpicky, or petty to point this out.   On the contrary, we commend the actions of the Bloomberg Administration and the NYC Council. After thanking them, we must resume inspiring them, and ourselves, to further effort.

It is a simple fact that despite the progress toward sustainability, much more must be done in NYC. This is based on the science surrounding accelerating climate disruption and many other issues, and how it conflicts with the state of our politics and sociology, which slow or prevent the evolutionary changes which must take place.  The sustainability discussion in NYC must be expanded.

Toward that end, consider the Transition movement - a system of community organizing which enables decentralized, grassroots responses to climate change and peak oil.

It was developed by British community activists in 2005. There are now over 300 Transition initiatives in the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Italy and Europe. There are over 90 official US initiatives registered with Transition United States. Activists in many other communities - including NYC - are exploring how Transition methods can step us sustainability efforts.

In an upcoming post, we'll look at Transition's twelve steps or ingredients for community organizing, and suggest effective starting points for NYC organizers.

Here's excerpts from the Transition US website:

Transition 101

The Transition Movement is comprised of vibrant, grassroots community initiatives that seek to build community resilience in the face of such challenges as peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis. Transition Initiatives differentiate themselves from other sustainability and "environmental" groups by seeking to mitigate these converging global crises by engaging their communities in home-grown, citizen-led education, action, and multi-stakeholder planning to increase local self reliance and resilience...read more here...

Why Transition?

We are living in an age of unprecedented change, with a number of crises converging. Climate change, global economic instability, overpopulation, erosion of community, declining biodiversity, and resource wars, have all stemmed from the availability of cheap, non-renewable fossil fuels. Global oil, gas and coal production is predicted to irreversibly decline in the next 10 to 20 years, and severe climate changes are already taking effect around the world. The coming shocks are likely to be catastrophic if we do not prepare.

As Richard Heinberg states:

"Our central survival task for the decades ahead, as individuals and as a species, must be to make a transition away from the use of fossil fuels – and to do this as peacefully, equitably, and intelligently as possible”.

The Transition movement represents one of the most promising ways of engaging people and communities to take the far-reaching actions that are required to mitigate the effects of peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis. Furthermore, these relocalization efforts are designed to result in a life that is more fulfilling, more socially connected and more equitable than the one we have today.

The Transition model is based on a loose set of real world principles and practices that have been built up over time through experimentation and observation of communities as they drive forward to reduce carbon emissions and build community resilience. Underpinning the model is a recognition of the following:

Peak Oil, Climate Change and the Economic Crisis require urgent action
Adaptation to a world with less oil is inevitable
It is better to plan and be prepared, than be taken by surprise
Industrial society has lost the resilience to be able to cope with shocks to its systems
We have to act together and we have to act now
We must negotiate our way down from the “peak” using all our skill, ingenuity and intelligence
Using our creativity and cooperation to unleash the collective genius within our local communities will lead to a more abundant, connected and healthier future for all.

The Transition Movement believes that is up to us in our local communities to step into a leadership position on this situation. We need to start working now to mitigate the interrelated effects of peak oil, climate change, and the economic crisis, before it is too late. Together we can make a difference. ...read more here...

Check out this video put together by Ben Zolno on 'Why Transition?':

Diversity in urban agriculture training: a dialogue with Farm School NYC

2011-05-31T17:29:00.000-07:00

Back in April I posted an article on this blog about an urban agriculture conference I attended. The email newsletter I sent out a week ago included a link to it, which brought it to the attention of one of the presenters at the conference, who requested for a correction. The following email correspondence will include that correction, which I hope will create and inspire an ongoing conversation. So read along and feel free to add your comment. I'm in the process of learning more about localizing agriculture, and will be writing more about it in future posts.

So following is my response, and the original email I received from Jane Hodge, director of Farm School NYC. I have invited Farm School NYC and Just Foods to reply in as much detail as they wish. I will update this post with their reply, when it arrives.

***

May 31, 2011

Jane,

Thanks for getting back to me about my article. As you recall, I sent it to you for comment on April 5, just after I posted it, and did not hear from you until my email newsletter went out on May 24, which included a link to it, and again brought the article to your attention. I am glad that you were finally able to review it. Since I'm clearly a supporter of the mission of Farm School NYC, I was surprised to hear that you were disappointed in the article. Here’s what I wrote about Farm School:

Jane Hodge of Just Food described Farm School NYC, the new school of urban agriculture. Just Food, if you don’t know, has helped start 80 community supported agriculture programs around the City, and a project linking locally grown food to 44 City food pantries and soup kitchens. Its City Farm program trains community gardeners to teach workshops and get out of the garden to interact with the surrounding neighborhood.

In the first year of the Farm School program, students take 15 core courses. In the second year, students will focus on either teaching, advocacy, urban agriculture, or enterprise development, through classes and a lengthy apprenticeship. Demand for training is high. For its 2011 pilot year, there were over 200 applicants for the 20 official spaces in the part time certificate program. Over half of the applicants have been women, a large number in their 20s and 30s, over half from Brooklyn, over half white. The School hopes to put course content online – a very prudent move, considering that the courses are already taking place, and can easily be made available online for what seems to be a large number of eager students with a modest investment in video editor staff time. USDA gave them funding for three years of operations.

It seems that the main reason for your disappointment is one line: “Over half of the applicants have been women, a large number in their 20s and 30s, over half from Brooklyn, over half white.” As you point out now, “less than half of the applicants were white, less than half were from Brooklyn.”

I want to acknowledge this correction. I hope that you will understand that I was taking notes by hand in the back of the room, and didn’t have access to your presentation notes, let alone detailed recall of them.

However, in your email which I copy below, you seem to be a little defensive about your efforts to ensure a diverse applicant pool and student body. I don’t see why you should be defensive, if as you say, less than half of the applicants are white, and less than half are from Brooklyn. Sounds like you've been doing a good job, and that you learned from your outreach efforts.

I agree with you that it is important that urban agriculture training be made available to NYC’s diverse communities, and I salute the Farm School’s commitment to this principle. So I invite you to share what you’ve learned.

As soon as you reply in writing, I'll add your answers to this blog post. I also hope to get lots of comments from readers. Invite your students and partners to comment too!

- What has been the nature of Farm School NYC’s outreach to diverse communities?

- What have your students, partners and contacts in those communities told you are their motivations for getting involved with urban agriculture, and pursuing study at Farm School NYC?

- Have those contacts told you about obstacles or concerns preventing them from studying at Farm School, or pursuing urban agriculture?

- If so, what are they? How can you and other urban agriculture advocates lessen those barriers?

The article also reviewed what I could recall of the presentations of various other speakers: Karen Washington, president of the NYC Community Garden Coalition; green market farmer Keith Stewart; Severine von Tscharner Fleming of the Greenhorns; Jeremy Smith, author of Growing a Garden City; and Christina Grace of NYS Department of Agriculture and Markets. I included quite a lot of links to various websites.

Then, I asked a number of questions about where urban agriculture is headed in NYC.

Because I think Farm School NYC is such an important initiative, and few such trainings exist in NYC, some of the questions specifically mention Farm School. They're rhetorical questions and are not intended to be viewed as criticisms, but as opportunities for thought and discussion, and to advance the goals that Farm School NYC advocates.

The following questions go beyond the diversity issue to the larger context of scaling up urban agriculture in NYC. We will all benefit from Farm School NYC’s experience. I look forward to your responses to these questions, which I will add to the new blog post as soon as you provide them. Here follow the questions from the original April 4 article:

The presenters covered a lot of ground, so to speak. How do we connect the dots, and identify possibilities, obstacles and fixes? Here's a number of questions to fill the next steps in our inquiry. Please add your answers, responses, and more questions in the comments section.

- The Farm School is certainly an attractive training program with strong demand. Where do the students trained in the Farm School go after graduation?

- With only twenty in the program now, what is the expected maximum number of students the program can sustainably train each year? Are there other training programs that are comparable?

- How many agriculture related job openings are there now in NYC? What are agricultural business opportunities not yet widespread in NYC which could reasonably be encouraged?

- Given that limited number of actual openings, is this program overly idealistic, with limited options for its graduates? If more options need to be developed for Farm School graduates, what might they be?

- Are there existing proposals to incentivize and encourage growth of NYC agriculture related jobs?

Thanks in advance for your response, which I will add below your letter.

Dan

***

From: Jane Hodge [mailto:jane@justfood.org]

Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2011 12:44 PM

To: Dan Miner

Cc: jacquie@justfood.org'; Amy Blankstein

Subject: Re: Jacquie & Jane - BeyondOilNYC report from an NYC urban agriculture conference - your comments please?

Hi Dan,

Thanks for forwarding on your article, and I apologize for not getting back to you right away. I appreciate you writing about Farm School NYC, but I feel disappointed about some of what you said.

The information that you gave about the demographics of Farm School NYC's applicants is incorrect and misrepresents what I actually said at the conference. Here is all of what you wrote about our demographics: "For its 2011 pilot year, there were over 200 applicants for the 20 official spaces in the part time certificate program. Over half of the applicants have been women, a large number in their 20s and 30s, over half from Brooklyn, over half white." For a start, your information is incorrect. According to what we presented that day, less than half of the applicants were white, less than half were from Brooklyn. We had applicants from all 5 boroughs and outside of NYC, representing a wide range of ethnic and racial backgrounds, and our students so far have ranged in age from 22 to 87. But what is almost more significant is that you didn't mention anything about our commitment to ensuring a diverse applicant pool and student body, and not only was that my point that day at the conference, but that is one of the strongest foundations of Farm School NYC.

If you remember, I discussed the demographics of our applicants in the first application process after we had done quite a bit of outreach. Then I described the demographics of the applicants in the second round of applications, when we had done no outreach. What we found was that our outreach significantly impacted the diversity of the applicants, and that we are now committed to continuing to do that outreach. That was my message that day, and unfortunately that message is completely missing from your report back.

If you continue to distribute this article, I’d appreciate it if you could make changes to accurately represent what I said and what Farm School NYC stands for.

Thank you

Jane

*******************

Jane Hodge

Farm School NYC Director

Just Food

(212)645-9880 x228

http://www.justfood.org/

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 6:16 PM, Dan Miner wrote:

Hi – I’m looking to identify promising new projects in urban agriculture / neighborhood food security, write about them, and find collaborators. Can you review this article, and suggest what future articles in the series should cover? Forward as you see fit. Please post your comments directly in the comments section of the blog. Thanks! - Dan

***

A report from an NYC urban agriculture conference

Dan Miner, BeyondOilNYC

http://beyondoilnyc.blogspot.com/2011/04/report-from-nyc-urban-agriculture.html

At a recent urban agriculture conference in NYC, panelists discussed: the community garden movement; farming in the metro region for NYC greenmarkets; the transformative potential of community agriculture projects; the NYC Farm School; the growing community of young farmers; and today’s leading urban agriculture projects in NYC. To explore likely next steps in NYC food policy, and promising new projects, Beyond Oil NYC summarizes conference proceedings and poses twenty questions.

Answer a question, share your opinion, post your own question, and pitch your project in the comments section – or contact Dan Miner at 718.786.5300 x 27 or danminer@licbdc.org. Thanks!

Richard Heinberg of Post Carbon Institute and Exxon CEO speak at college graduation

2011-05-22T19:26:00.000-07:00

"Where Elites Fail," Craig Comstock
Huffington Post, May 20, 2011
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-k-comstock/exonn-richard-heinberg_b_864534.html

"Elites in both corporations and government are often quite good at running systems they create, and bad at looking beyond these systems at larger social effects. This doubleness was on display at the Worcester Polytechnic commencement. For its main speaker, the college invited Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon. A group of students and faculty, disturbed that fossil fuel purveyors are causing great harm, exercised the right of protest. One student said "we will not give the Exxon CEO the honor of imparting his well-wishes for our futures when he is largely responsible for undermining [our futures]." This group invited their own speaker, Richard Heinberg of the Post-Carbon Institute and author of Powerdown, The End of Growth, and eight other books. Tillerson gave an unexceptional address (Worcester "embraces the cutting edge of technology," let colleges train more scientist and engineers, let graduates have personal integrity, take time off from your Blackberry every day). While he did allude to "creative financial schemes" that "destroy billions of value in pensions and other investments," he had nothing to say about the peak of oil production or the environmental costs of burning fossil fuel. Those who ducked out to hear Heinberg got an earful. In less than 3,000 words, Heinberg told about challenges that will require much more than personal integrity. He began by reminding his audience that U.S. oil production has been declining since 1970 (nearly a couple of generations ago) and according to the International Energy Agency in Paris, global crude oil production peaked in 2006, leaving oil, as Heinberg explained, that is lower in quality or located in places harder to access..."

***

Peak Oil: A Chance to Change the World
Yes Magazine, May 14, 2011
http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/peak-oil-a-chance-to-change-the-world

Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA invited Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, to give the commencement speech at its 2011 graduation ceremonies on May 14. When students heard this, many were surprised and upset. As Linnea Palmer Paton of Students for a Just and Stable Future put it in a letter to the college president, “[W]e, as conscientious members of the WPI community and proud members of the Class of 2011, will not give [the Exxon CEO] the honor of imparting ... his well-wishes ... for our futures ... when he is largely responsible for undermining them.”

The students then invited Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute, to give an alternative commencement speech. After a few days of negotiations, the college administration agreed to give Heinberg the podium immediately after the main ceremony. Many students chose to walk out during Tillerson’s address. This is what Richard Heinberg had to say.

ExxonMobil is inviting you to take your place in a fossil-fueled twenty-first century. But I would argue that Exxon’s vision of the future is actually just a forward projection from our collective rear-view mirror. Despite its high-tech gadgetry, the oil industry is a relic of the days of the Beverly Hillbillies. The fossil-fueled sitcom of a world that we all find ourselves still trapped within may, on the surface, appear to be characterized by smiley-faced happy motoring, but at its core it is monstrous and grotesque. It is a zombie energy economy.

Of course, we all use petroleum and natural gas in countless ways and on a daily basis. These are amazing substances—they are energy-dense and chemically useful, and they yield enormous economic benefit. America started out with vast reserves of oil and gas, and these fuels helped make our nation the richest and most powerful in the world.

The End of the Cheap Oil Economy

But oil and gas are finite resources, so it was clear from the start that, as we extracted and burned them, we were in effect stealing from the future. In the early days, the quantities of fuel available seemed so enormous that depletion posed only a theoretical limit to consumption. We knew we would eventually empty the tanks of Earth’s hydrocarbon reserves, but that was a problem for our great-great-grandkids to worry about.

Yet U.S. oil production has been declining since 1970, even with huge discoveries in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Other countries are also seeing falling rates of discovery and extraction, and world crude oil production has been flat-lined for the past six years, even as oil prices have soared. According to the International Energy Agency, world crude oil production peaked in 2006 and will taper off from now on.

Exxon Mobil says this is nothing we should worry about, as there are still vast untapped hydrocarbon reserves all over the world. That’s true. But we have already harvested the low-hanging fruit of our oil and gas endowment. The resources that remain are of lower quality and are located in places that are harder to access than was the case for oil and gas in decades past. Oil and gas companies are increasingly operating in ultra-deep water, or in arctic regions, and need to use sophisticated technologies like hydrofracturing, horizontal drilling, and water or nitrogen injection. We have entered the era of extreme hydrocarbons.

This means that production costs will continue to escalate year after year. Even if we get rid of oil market speculators, the price of oil will keep ratcheting up anyway. And we know from recent economic history that soaring energy prices cause the economy to wither: when consumers have to spend much more on gasoline, they have less to spend on everything else.

But if investment costs for oil and gas exploration and extraction are increasing rapidly, the environmental costs of these fuels are ballooning just as quickly. With the industry operating at the limits of its technical know-how, mistakes can and will happen. As we saw in the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 2010, mistakes that occur under a mile or two of ocean water can have devastating consequences for an entire ecosystem, and for people who depend on ecosystem services. The citizens of the Gulf coast are showing a brave face to the world and understandably want to believe their seafood industry is safe and recovering, but biologists who work there tell us that oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster is still working its way up the food chain.

Of course the biggest environmental cost from burning fossil fuels comes from our chemical alteration of the planetary atmosphere. Carbon dioxide from oil, gas, and coal combustion is changing Earth’s climate and causing our oceans to acidify. The likely consequences are truly horrifying: rising seas, extreme weather, falling agricultural output, and collapsing oceanic food chains. Never mind starving polar bears—we’re facing the prospect of starving people.

The Misinformation Machine

But wait: Is this even happening? A total of nearly half of all Americans tell pollsters they think either the planet isn’t warming at all, or, if it is, it’s not because of fossil fuels. After all, how can the world really be getting hotter when we’re seeing record snowfalls in many places? And even if it is warming, how do we know that’s not because of volcanoes, or natural climate variation, or cow farts, or because the Sun is getting hotter? Americans are understandably confused by questions like these, which they hear repeated again and again on radio and television.

Why We Find it so Hard to Act Against Climate Change

Now of course, if you apply the critical thinking skills that you’ve learned here at WPI to an examination of the relevant data, you’ll probably come to the same conclusion as has been reached by the overwhelming majority of scientists who have studied all of these questions in great depth. Indeed, the scientific community is nearly unanimous in assessing that the Earth is warming, and that the only credible explanation for this is rising levels of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels. That kind of consensus is hard to achieve among scientists except in situations where a conclusion is overwhelmingly supported by evidence.

I’m not out to demonize ExxonMobil, but some things have to be said. That company plays a pivotal role in shaping our national conversation about climate change. A 2007 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists described how ExxonMobil adopted the tobacco industry’s disinformation tactics, and funded some of the same organizations that led campaigns against tobacco regulation in the 1980s—but this time to cloud public understanding of climate change science and delay action on the issue. According to the report, between 1998 and 2005 ExxonMobil funneled almost $16 million to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that misrepresented peer-reviewed scientific findings about global warming science. Exxon raised doubts about even the most indisputable scientific evidence, attempted to portray its opposition to action as a positive quest for “sound science” rather than business self-interest, and used its access to the Bush administration to block federal policies and shape government communications on global warming. All of this is well-documented.

This is a big victory for ExxonMobil, but it is a disaster for democracy, for the Earth, and for your generation. And it worked. Over the course of the past few years one of our nation’s two main political parties has made climate change denial a litmus test for its candidates, which means that climate legislation is effectively unachievable in this country for the foreseeable future. This is a big victory for ExxonMobil. Its paltry $16 million investment will likely translate to many times that amount in unregulated profits. But it is a disaster for democracy, for the Earth, and for your generation.

But here’s the thing. Everyone knows that America and the world will have to transition off of fossil fuels during this century anyway. Mr. Tillerson knows it as well as anyone. Some people evidently want to delay that transition as long as possible, but it cannot be put off indefinitely. My colleagues at Post Carbon Institute and I believe that delaying this transition is extremely dangerous for a number of reasons. Obviously, it prolongs the environmental impacts from fossil fuel production and combustion. But also, the process of building a renewable energy economy will take decades and require a tremendous amount of investment. If we don’t start soon enough, society will get caught in a trap of skyrocketing fuel prices and a collapsing economy, and won’t be in a position to fund needed work on alternative energy development.

In my darker moments I fear that we have already waited too long and that it is already too late. I hope I’m not right about that, and when I talk to young people like you I tend to feel that we can make this great transition, and that actions that have seemed politically impossible for the past forty years will become inevitable as circumstances change, and as a new hearts and minds comes to the table.

Even in the best case, though, the fact that we have waited so long to address our addiction to oil will still present us with tremendous challenges. But this is not a problem for ExxonMobil, at least not anytime soon. When the price of oil goes up, we feel the pain while Exxon reaps the profits. Even though Exxon’s actual oil production is falling due to the depletion of its oilfields, corporate revenues are flush: Exxon made almost $11 billion in profits in just the past three months. This translates to jobs in the oil industry. But how about the renewable energy industry, which everyone agrees is the key to our future?

For the past forty years, every U.S. president, without exception, has said we must reduce our country’s dependence on imported petroleum. Addiction to oil has become our nation’s single greatest point of geopolitical, economic, and environmental vulnerability. Yet here we are in 2011, still driving a fleet of 200 million gasoline-guzzling cars, trucks, and SUVs. The inability of our elected officials to tackle such an obvious problem is not simply the result of ineptitude. In addition to funding climate denial, fossil fuel companies like Exxon have contributed to politicians’ election campaigns in order to gain perks for their industry and to put off higher efficiency standards and environmental protections. Denying looming fuel supply problems, discouraging a transition to renewable energy, distorting climate science—these are all understandable tactics from the standpoint of corporate self-interest. Exxon is just doing what corporations do. But once again, it is society as a whole that suffers, and the consequences will fall especially on your generation.

Mr. Tillerson may have informed you about his company’s Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University. Exxon is now funding research into lowering the cost and increasing the efficiency of solar photovoltaic devices, increasing the efficiency of fuel cells, increasing the energy capacity of lithium-ion batteries for electric cars, designing higher-efficiency engines that produce lower emissions, making biodiesel fuel from bacteria, and improving carbon capture and storage. This is all admirable, if it is genuine and not just window-dressing.

Here’s a reality check in that regard: Exxon is investing about $10 million a year in the Global Climate and Energy Project—an amount that almost exactly equals Mr. Tillerson’s personal compensation in 2010. Ten million dollars also equals about three hours’ worth of Exxon profits from last year. You tell me if you think that is a sensibly proportionate response to the problems of climate change and oil depletion from the world’s largest energy company.

Even if Exxon’s investments in a sustainable energy future were of an appropriate scale, they come late in the game. We are still in a bind. That’s because there is no magic-bullet energy source out there that will enable world energy supplies to continue to grow as fossil fuels dwindle.

Renewable energy is viable and necessary, and we should be doing far more to develop it. But solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and wave power each have limits and drawbacks that will keep them from supplying energy as cheaply and as abundantly as we would like. Our bind is that we have built our existing transport infrastructure and food systems around energy sources that are becoming more problematic with every passing year, and we have no Plan B in place. This means we will probably have less energy in the future, rather than more.

A Chance to Change the World

Again, I am addressing my words especially to you students. This will be the defining reality of your lives. Whatever field you go into—business, finance, engineering, transportation, agriculture, education, or entertainment—your experience will be shaped by the energy transition that is now under way. The better you understand this, the more effectively you will be able to contribute to society and make your way in the world. You will have the opportunity to participate in the redesign of the basic systems that support our society—our energy system, food system, transport system, and financial system.

We are at one of history’s great turning points. During your lifetime you will see world changes more significant in scope than human beings have ever witnessed before. You will have the opportunity to participate in the redesign of the basic systems that support our society—our energy system, food system, transport system, and financial system.

I say this with some confidence, because our existing energy, food, transport, and financial systems can’t be maintained under the circumstances that are developing—circumstances of fossil fuel depletion and an unstable climate. As a result, what you choose to do in life could have far greater implications than you may currently realize.

Over the course of your lifetime society will need to solve some basic problems:

How to grow food sustainably without fossil fuel inputs and without eroding topsoil or drawing down increasingly scarce supplies of fresh water;
How to support 7 billion people without depleting natural resources—including forests and fish, as well as finite stocks of minerals and metals; and
How to reorganize our financial system so that it can continue to perform its essential functions—reinvesting savings into socially beneficial projects—in the context of an economy that is stable or maybe even shrinking due to declining energy supplies, rather than continually growing.

Each of these core problems will take time, intelligence, and courage to solve. This is a challenge suitable for heroes and heroines, one that’s big enough to keep even the greatest generation in history fully occupied. If every crisis is an opportunity, then this is the biggest opportunity humanity has ever seen.

Making the best of the circumstances that life sends our way is perhaps the most important attitude and skill that we can hope to develop. The circumstance that life is currently serving up is one of fundamentally changed economic conditions. As this decade and this century wear on, we Americans will have fewer material goods and we will be less mobile. In a few years we will look back on late 20th century America as time and place of advertising-stoked consumption that was completely out of proportion to what Nature can sustainably provide. I suspect we will think of those times—with a combination of longing and regret—as a lost golden age of abundance, but also a time of foolishness and greed that put the entire world at risk.

It’s a time when it will be possible to truly change the world, because the world has to change anyway.

Making the best of our new circumstances will mean finding happiness in designing higher-quality products that can be re-used, repaired, and recycled almost endlessly; and finding fulfillment in human relationships and cultural activities rather than mindless shopping. Fortunately, we know from recent cross-cultural psychological studies that there is little correlation between levels of consumption and happiness. That tells us that life can in fact be better without fossil fuels.

In the Face of this Truth

It’s time to talk honestly about collapse–no matter how others may respond. So whether we view these as hard times or as times of great possibility is really a matter of perspective. I would emphasize the latter. This is a time of unprecedented opportunity for service to one’s community. It’s a time when it will be possible to truly change the world, because the world has to change anyway. It is a time when you can make a difference by helping to shape this needed and inevitable change.

As I travel, I meet young people in every part of this country who are taking up the challenge of building a post-petroleum future: a 25-year-old farmer in New Jersey who plows with horses and uses no chemicals; the operator of a biodiesel co-op in Northampton; a solar installer in Oakland, California. The energy transition will require new thinking in every field you can imagine, from fine arts to banking. Companies everywhere are hiring sustainability officers to help guide them through the challenges and opportunities. At the same time, many young people are joining energy and climate activist organizations like 350.org and Transition Initiatives.

So here is my message to you in a nutshell: Fossil fuels made it possible to build the world you have inhabited during your childhood and throughout your years in the education system. Now it’s up to you to imagine and build the world after fossil fuels. This is the challenge and opportunity of your lifetimes. I wish you good cheer and good luck as you make the most of it.

Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines, and The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality.

The White Roof Campaign: declaring victory and moving on

2011-05-21T12:14:00.000-07:00

I am officially declaring victory in the White Roof Campaign and moving on to new projects. Here's the season wrap-up. If you've followed the White Roof Campaign, some of this will be repetitive, but I'll be quick about it.

The City launched NYC CoolRoofs, its program to paint the roofs of NYC buildings with highly reflective white coating, in the summer of 2009.  It's one of many initiatives within PlaNYC, the City's long-term sustainability plan. Mayor Bloomberg and Al Gore painted the first building in the program, the roof of the Long Island City YMCA. I and other sustainability activists saw its potential as an organizing tool, and a way of getting volunteers involved. Tip of the hat to John Kolp, who convinced me of its merits, and has been one of the program's biggest advocates.

Since then I have been involved in various efforts to recruit volunteers to paint roofs, and to recruit building owners and tenants to get their roofs painted...oh, excuse me...the correct term in the program is "coated." I was told confidentially this has something to do with requirements that painting jobs go to union workers who get high hourly wages, rather than to volunteers or individuals receiving very modest stipends.   So that's coating roofs, y'all. They are highly reflective special coatings - not paint.

In fall 2010, I and Anne Craig of Stop Oil NYC helped organize the coating of four roofs, along with a number of volunteers, around the time of 350.org's 10/10/10 international day of climate action.  The photo at BeyondOilNYC.org was taken on the roof of the Democracy Prep Charter School in Harlem.

In late 2010 and early 2011, I focused on recruiting buildings for the program. Since my day job at a local economic development nonprofit involves promoting City programs, it was possible for me to do this as an official LICBDC initiative. I sent out letters of introduction to elected officials and civic leaders, aimed at getting nonprofits to coat their roofs.

Commercial building owners are motivated by costs and benefits rather than the urban heat island effect. I researched the exact circumstances when putting a white roof coating on a commercial building would yield its owners a profitable return on investment: when it's an owner occupied building, built around 1980 or before, only one or two stories, with a standard black tar roof.

If the owner of such a building uses the CoolRoofs program's offer of free labor, their cost of white coating will be paid back in three years or less through lower air conditioning bills. Outside of those conditions, the coating project is no longer a slam-dunk good investment, and is simply a good public spirited thing to do.   It is a waste of time to ask commercial building owners to coat their roofs when their buildings fall outside that category. Civic leaders and nonprofits are more interested in promoting their participation in City sustainability efforts, so analyzing their return on investment in coating costs is less central to discussions with them.

I also put together: a detailed guide to using the program, reviewed by the program's director; outreach flyers for civic leaders and commercial building owners; and a news release about the program. All of these documents are available online for the use of would-be supporters and participants.   Go for it.

The Bloomberg Administration's Office of Long-Term Sustainability Office wants cool roofs, green roofs, and water retaining roofs to become standard building features. They have their own internal goals and budgets of which I am unaware.

NYC climate change and sustainability activists must evaluate this test campaign to promote the CoolRoofs program and ask whether it is a good way to create grassroots change, raise local participation in climate change response practices, and recruit volunteers and collaborators. And how many roofs got painted, and how many neighborhood residents and leaders knew about it. Is it really a good place in which to invest volunteer efforts - or a waste of time better spent on other actions?

I especially invite activists to comment on whether painting the roofs of buildings white is a good focus, or whether they would suggest better ones. See the YouTube clip here.

Show me the money

In Jerry McGuire, Cuba Gooding plays a sports star who demands that his agent, played by Tom Cruise, show him the money.

I am indebted to Dave Cohen, former Oil Drum editor and ASPO writer, for the technique of illustrating points with movie references and YouTube clips. Dave blogs at http://www.declineoftheempire.com/

We don't know the final 2011 results from my western Queens outreach campaign, but here's what we have so far, from the buildings I referred to the program. In April, NYC CoolRoofs volunteers coated the the 14,000 square foot roof of Sunnyside Community Center, in Sunnyside, Queens, and the 8,000 s.f. roof of Variety Boys and Girls Club in Astoria.

The program is in touch with buildings owned by several Long Island City businesses: Petrocelli Electric Co. (with a roof of perhaps 20,000 s.f.); Mayer Malbin Co., which owns three buildings; Conserve Electric; and Pumpernickel Bagel and Deli. Goodwill Industries has two Astoria warehouses in line for coating – with an unknown number of other Goodwill Industries stores and warehouses around the City potentially to follow.

Other Queens businesses include the Corona clothing retail store All Dressed Up; and Coppola’s Pizza in College Point. There are a few residential buildings. Three buildings of the Linden Towers Co-Op in Flushing are cleared for coating, and co-op board leaders are part of a much larger group of residential buildings.

It’s unclear how many of these buildings will actually be coated this summer, whether there are others that have heard about the program and will seek to get coated eventually and whether media and community outreach connected with any of these projects will have ripple effects, getting yet other roofs coated.

Some really good news is that NYC CoolRoofs just hired two full-time staff to focus on outreach and building recruitment. This seems to be the bottleneck for expanding the number of square feet coated through the program. I encouraged the new staff to contact elected officials, focus on getting their offices to refer well known nonprofits in their districts, and aim for a few highly visible projects that can be leveraged and promoted to recruit similar projects. The same advice goes for any any other activists who want to use CoolRoofs as an organizing tool in their neighborhoods.

I think that CoolRoof boosters should not seek to raise funds to buy coating for a nonprofit. IMHO, activists are better off encouraging nonprofits to be self-reliant and raise the coating funds themselves. If nonprofits want to do this, they can make the modest effort to fundraise among their own members and neighbors, increasing neighborhood support for the project. Then, as long as the discussion is already under way, they can set up next steps: bringing other good sustainability initiatives to their neighborhood, like GrowNYC, and the Con Ed energy upgrade program.

But as far as my involvement with Cool Roofs, I hereby declare victory, and I'm done.  Time to move onto other projects.

One is the question of how the Transition Movement model of community organizing and communicating about sustainability challenges can be applied to NYC. Look for future posts around this theme.  The other is looking for a full time green job. So far, I've sent out some applications but nothing has materialized. A friend suggested that I research entrepreneurial opportunities in regional food production and go into business for myself.  Bright ideas - and comments - are welcome.

Promoting the Global Village Construction Set - and decentralized manufacturing

2011-05-13T16:53:00.000-07:00

Here's an email I wrote to the mechanical engineering faculty members at Columbia University, NYU Polytechnic, and Cooper Union, encouraging them to host a presentation by Marcin Jacubowski, director of Open Source Ecology, an amazing project in decentralized, do it yourself, manufacturing. Much of the text is selected from OSE's website.

***

I’m writing to introduce you to Open Source Ecology (OSE), an exciting technology and economic development project. Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters creating the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS). The GVCS is a low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, do-it-yourself fabrication of 50 different industrial machines needed to build a sustainable civilization, with modern comforts, from scratch. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing, and can be seen as a life-size Lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.

We would like to arrange a September presentation in NYC from OSE Director Marcin Jakubowski. After earning a Ph.D. in fusion physics from the University of Wisconsin, Marcin founded OSE in 2003. As OSE’s lead fabricator, designer, blogger, and technical curator, he lives and works at OSE’s land-based facility, Factor e Farm in rural Missouri. Marcin has been selected as a TED 2011 Fellow. See his TED Talk on the Global Village Construction Set.

“Your project is amazing. Thrilling, actually...It's people like you who really give me hope for the future.” – Chris Anderson, TED Curator

OSE is looking for co-developers: engineers, designers, CAD, prototyping support for the 50 GVCS machines. See the Crash Course on OSE and get involved. You can join us on site for Dedicated Project Visits or for remote work.

The GVCS aims to be a complete appropriate technology platform for the 21st century. It will use local resources as raw materials, drastically reducing transportation costs. GVCS components can run on a variety of power sources: conventional gasoline, steam from locally produced biofuels, or solar power. Respecting real limits on natural resources, and minimizing carbon emissions, the GVCS will allow communities to maintain the basic amenities of industrial society in a modest, sustainable way that improves the environment with time.

America’s declining industrial capacity, financial stability, and employment rates are partly due to our dependence on the global production and financial system. Reducing this dependence will decentralize production and stimulate prosperity. As open source designs, GVCS blueprints will not be patented, but will be widely distributed to entrepreneurs to boost local economies. By catalyzing community-based, small scale industrial production, the GVCS will create new investment opportunities and blue collar jobs.

A presentation by Marcin this fall will be of interest not only to engineering and business students, the clean tech and sustainability communities, and many New Yorkers interested in innovation. Please let me know if you would like to arrange such an event. He will require a $1,000 honorarium. Contact me at 718.786.5300 x 27 or beyondoilnyc@yahoo.com.

Sincerely,

Dan Miner
Volunteer, BeyondOilNYC

***

More about Open Source Ecology and the Global Village Construction Set

OSE Crash Course: http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Crash_Course

OSE Website: http://opensourceecology.org/

OSE Wiki: http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Main_Page

Blog: http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/

Media / Interviews: http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Media_Background_Reading

Two minute GVCS video overview: http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/GVCS_in_2_Minutes

Tri-fold brochure: http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/2011/04/ose-trifold-brochure/

The GVCS is an open source construction set for creating civilization with modern day comforts: food, fuel, energy, building materials, transportation, materials, and fabrication. In the technologies of the set, OSE aims to simplify, modularize, and make transparent the critical technologies used by humans, so they are extremely user-friendly; and allow people to substitute common resources for scarce ones; and substitute benign, closed-loop, small-scale, open source, industrial processes for toxic, centralized ones. OSE aims to complete working prototypes of all 50 GVCS technologies by 2012.
http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Proposal_2012

As of mid-2011, three GVCS prototypes are ready for full production: the Compressed Earth Block Press, the Torch Table, and the LifeTrac tractor.

OSE has already received orders for equipment. OSE’s budget is $50,000 in materials and project management for each piece of equipment. Expected soon are the power module, the soil pulverizer for the CEB press, and a steam engine. OSE is seeking to raise $2.4 million to develop prototypes for the full set.

The Compressed Earth Block Press is a machine that makes compressed earth blocks (CEBs). It takes earth and squeezes it very hard to make solid blocks which can be used for building. Compressed earth blocks have many advantages as a building material: by making the building materials from the ground on the site, they eliminate the need to cart them in from elsewhere. This cuts down the costs and environmental impact of transport. Compressed earth blocks are very strong and insulate well against both heat and sound. Best of all, there is no charge for using dirt; it is literally a dirt-cheap way of building! You can now buy a CEB Press machine from OSE, or a kit, or follow OSE’s instructions to build your own.

http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Category:CEB_Press

The Torch Table is a CNC (computer numerical control) machining device that uses a plasma torch to cut metal – and automate the fabrication of other components of the GVCS. http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Torch_Table_Build

Power Cube III is a 55 HP gasoline powered module that can be attached to other components in the Set. http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Category:Power_Cube

The LifeTrac III combines features of agricultural and construction tractors and a skid loader. It can be equipped with a backhoe, a winch, and a well drilling tool.
http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Category:LifeTrac

RepLab is a proposed digital fabrication workshop equipped with 15 computer-controlled tools that could melt metal and plastic, pour it into molds for any shape, print circuit boards, scan 3D shapes, to make any electronic or mechanical device. In go scrap metal, plastic and silicon - out come bicycles, saucepans, tractors, medical equipment, mobile phones, laptop computers, Internet nodes, solar turbines, sculptures, robots and other RepLabs, allowing the labs to multiply like rabbits. The tools would include the 3D printer, the 3D scanner, the CNC Torch Table, http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/RepLab#Tools

RepRap is a self replicating rapid prototyper, a 3D printer capable of creating any shape you can think of in plastic. http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Category:RepRap

The Multimachine is a multipurpose machining tool. http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Multimachine

Other tools in the GVCS include:

MicroTrac; Bulldozer; CNC Mill, Drill, Lathe, Surface Grinder, Cold Cut Saw, Abrasive Saw, Metal Bandsaw; Ironworker Machine; RepTab (CNC Torch Table; CNC Router Table); 3D Scanner; CNC Circuit Mill; Robotic Arm; Laser Cutter; MIG Welder; Plasma Cutter; Induction Furnace; Metal Hot Rolling; Moldless Casting; Wire Extrusion; Forging; Modern Steam Engine; Gasifier Burner; Steam Generator; Solar Turbine; 50 kW Wind Turbine; Extraction of Aluminum from Clay; Pelletizer; Universal Seeder; Tiller; Spader; Microcombine; Universal Auger (String Trimmer, honey extractor, posthole digger, tree planting auger, slurry mixer, washing machine); Materials-moving Auger; Hay Cutter; Baler; Hay Rake; Loader; Backhoe; Chipper/Hammermill/Stump Grinder Trencher; Open Source Car; CEB Press; Dimensional Sawmill; Cement Mixer; Well-drilling Rig; Inverter; Electrical Motor/Generator; Hydraulic Motors and Cylinders

Key Features of GVCS components

http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Key_Features_of_the_GVCS

• Open Source - we freely publish our 3D designs, schematics, instructional videos, budgets, and product manuals on our open source wiki, and we harness open collaboration with technical contributors.

• Low-Cost - The cost of making or buying our machines is on average 8 times cheaper than buying from an industrial manufacturer, including labor costs of $15/hour for a GVCS fabricator.

• Modular - Motors, parts, assemblies, and power units can interchange, where units can be grouped together to diversify the functionality that is achievable from a small set of units.

• User-Serviceable - Design-for-disassembly allows the user to take apart, maintain, and fix tools readily without the need to rely on expensive repairmen.

• DIY - The user gains control of designing, producing, and modifying the GVCS tool set.

• Closed Loop Manufacturing - Metal is an essential component of advanced civilization, and our platform allows for recycling metal into virgin feedstock for producing further GVCS technologies - thereby allowing for cradle-to-cradle manufacturing cycles.

• High Performance - Performance standards must match or exceed those of industrial counterparts for the GVCS to be viable.

• Flexible Fabrication - It has been demonstrated that the flexible use of generalized machinery in appropriate-scale production is a viable alternative to centralized production.

• Distributive Economics - We encourage the replication of enterprises that derive from the GVCS platform as a route to truly free enterprise - along the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy.

• Industrial Efficiency - In order to provide a viable choice for a resilient lifestyle, the GVCS platform matches or exceeds productivity standards of industrial counterparts.

• Mechanical Infrastructure - life-size, Lego-like construction set for agricultural and utility equipment in which modularity is emphasized. The mechanical infrastructure is based on a chassis (tractor, microtractor, car, or bulldozer) with modular add-ons. Implements, motors, and power units can interchange, thereby maximizing the range of uses that can be composed from a small set of components. For example, the power unit can be interchanged readily between the tractor, bulldozer, or car.

• Agriculture - The food infrastructure for a resilient community (Open Source Agroecology) aims to demonstrate a best-practice system for feeding 100-200 people with a core team of 4 agricultural generalists, or Open Source Agroecologists.

• Energy Infrastructure - includes Fuel, Motive Power, and Electricity. The energy infrastructure consists of solar turbine or by plant biomass.

• Housing - The housing infrastructure consists of a number of multipurpose tools: CEB Press, Sawmill, Cement mixer, Modular Housing Units, Living Machines and others. We will produce professional architecture drawings for CEB and other natural building structures.

• Transportation - includes an Open Source Microcar and utility Truck with implement attachability, all powered by Power Cubes.

• Digital Fabrication - RepLab up to Hot Metal Processing and full-featured industrial robots.

• Materials - Aluminum Extraction from Clay; Bioplastic Extruder including bioplastic synthesis from plants

Starhawk's talk on bringing the spirit of wilderness to the city

2011-05-01T16:22:00.000-07:00

Noted activist and author Starhawk spoke to a sold-out NYC room in early April, organized by Evolver. A recurring theme was the importance of connecting to the natural world.

Starhawk's new children's book, "The Last Wild Witch," tells of a town in which everything is perfectly organized and very orderly. Next to it is a magic forest, in which lives a friendly witch. The town's children are excessively well-behaved but occasionally break into free-spirited behavior, which troubles the villagers, who blame the trees and try to destroy the forest. The children connect with the friendly witch, and find joy and courage as well as wildness. Ultimately, they save both the witch and the magic forest.

Occasionally, we'll encounter natural forces more powerful than ourselves which cannot be ignored, like the recent Japanese tsunami and earthquake. As in the story, we generally plug up our ears to hearing nature's calls, most of which are subtle and easily ignored. But the forces of nature want us to listen. By entering into the subtle conversation, natural forces can help us cope with the mess we've created.

Urban people can't help but be disconnected from nature. For many, the environment isn't a real part of their daily lives, but something outside it, something experienced in a Discovery special. Starhawk teaches gardening to young people in some of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods. As an extreme example of this disconnect, some of them don't know that food comes from dirt.

How do we break the spell of this cultural separation from the natural world? Pressing far past our edge could take us beyond safe urban locations, into the wilderness. While that's good to do now and then, we don't have to go that far to regain the connection. Letting the wildness in can start by simply getting our hands in the dirt, or by regularly making a very simple shift in awareness.

As a spiritual writer and teacher of some note, Starhawk has long had a regular meditation practice. For about twenty years, it was internally focused: the flow of the breath, an image, a thought. Then she was spontaneously drawn to focus externally, silently watching and listening to the natural world. Whether in a park or a garden, or an urban street or vacant lot, we can connect to the natural world through awareness and intent.

In addition to focusing out onto the natural world, we can evoke wilderness within us, through pursuing some form of creativity that's eccentric, silly, and not so socially acceptable. "If you lose social inhibition, you become dangerous." How often have you blocked your own impulse, instead of going into into an uncomfortable place? If you're not making mistakes you're not learning, and part of accepting the wild is acknowledging and allowing our mistakes, and that of others.

While good ways to enhance our personal growth, how do these approaches help accelerate the evolution of our larger society, whose institutions seem paralyzed in the face of multiple world crises?

Starhawk cited systems theorist Donella Meadows, lead author of the 1972 book The Limits to Growth,  one of the first efforts to predict with computer modeling what would happen when rising human population and constantly increasing rates of growth meets limits to the Earth's finite resources.

Here's some background. The book, a major early milestone in the sustainability discussion, concluded that unlimited growth could not continue permanently and would have to be replaced by a steady-state economy. Despite mountains of supporting evidence, The Limits To Growth has been vigorously attacked by business interests ever since its publication.

More recently, Meadows proposed twelve leverage points at which to intervene in systems, based on the observation that there are levers, or places within a complex system (such as a firm, a city, an economy, a living being, or an ecosystem) where a "small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything." The most effective interventions are those that change or transcend the system's dominant paradigm. Meadows wrote that "...Many today see Nature as a stock of resources to be converted to human purpose. Many Native Americans see Nature as a living god, to be loved, worshipped, and lived with. These views are incompatible, but perhaps another viewpoint could incorporate them both, along with others..." Starhawk's injunction to get back in touch with nature is just such a paradigm-changing middle way.

Speaking to more mundane leverage points in the system, she noted that our government is doing the exact opposite of what should be done - laying off firemen, cops, and school teachers - so a tiny minority of the very rich can avoid paying taxes.   "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that the Arctic is melting. Yet, the people who thought they could safely harness nuclear power were dumb enough to put the plant's backup generators in their basements, vulnerable to same floods that could knock out the plants."

We need to evoke the primal creativity of wilderness now in society, to alter the self-destructive systems of business as usual, and bring abundance out of scarcity. Bringing the wild into our urban lives can put us in greater harmony with the natural world, and allow us to receive help from allies within the forces of nature - such as bacteria, compost, and mushrooms.

With things falling apart, we have a time of opportunity to create new things, and we need to have a vision and the energy to make it happen. Part of the vision is a relocalized food growing systems, to create systems that are both smaller and more complex.

With constantly increasing use of resources no longer possible, a new paradigm based on maximum cycling and recycling of resources is the only sustainable course.  Not mentioned by Starhawk, but a good illustration, is Annie Leonard's online video, The Story of Stuff. It shows how our economy is based on rapidly turning natural resources into consumer goods, many of which are not truly needed, and then quickly into trash, trucked and landfilled at great cost. The alternative includes full product reuse and recycling, and the composting of all biodegradeable waste, returning it to the soil.

Mushrooms can play a big role. Botanist Paul Stamets explains in this TED Talk how mushrooms can clean polluted soil, produce insecticides, and break down the toxins in nerve gas.

To help manifest this broad vision, Starhawk produces permaculture trainings which aim to teach visionary and practical sustainability solutions to social change activists, and to teach practical skills, organizing and activism to visionaries.

Starhawk encouraged listeners to take a risk and go past their edge; and to exercise the power that they already have in order to strengthen their capacity to be of service. To those already working to improve the world but still feeling overwhelmed with all the bad news, she offered a note of comfort: remember that you're not the only person working on this. We're all part of a team.

Organizing permaculture trainings in India

2011-04-19T14:31:00.000-07:00

"Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that are modeled on the relationships found in natural ecologies. Permaculture is sustainable land use design. This is based on ecological and biological principles, often using patterns that occur in nature to maximise effect and minimise work.

Permaculture aims to create stable, productive systems that provide for human needs, harmoniously integrating the land with its inhabitants. The ecological processes of plants, animals, their nutrient cycles, climatic factors and weather cycles are all part of the picture. Inhabitants’ needs are provided for using proven technologies for food, energy, shelter and infrastructure. Elements in a system are viewed in relationship to other elements, where the outputs of one element become the inputs of another.

Within a Permaculture system, work is minimised, "wastes" become resources, productivity and yields increase, and environments are restored. Permaculture principles can be applied to any environment, at any scale from dense urban settlements to individual homes, from farms to entire regions."

So says Wikipedia's definition of permaculture. I took the basic 72 hour permaculture design course at the Hancock Permaculture Center a few years back. Since I don't have a garden, my opportunities to apply it are limited, unless you count my office worm box.

Permaculture came up in conversation with my friend and colleague-in-networking Bill Verdone. Bill, who serves on the Board of Directors of the Helena Kaushik Women's College in Rajasthan, India, thought it might be an interesting addition to the school's curriculum. Up in the arid Indian north, permaculture's water-conserving agricultural techniques would be especially valuable. Bill called up the school's founder. We made a brief pitch, and Dr. Kaushik asked us to send a proposal.

The next day, a conversation with NYC permaculture teacher Claudia Joseph clarified the next steps: invite a number of senior permaculture teachers with expertise in dry land agriculture to put in a proposal for an introductory permaculture design class at the school. Depending on how that PDC goes, the college may want to sponsor PDCs on a regular basis, or develop longer programs with a permaculture teacher in residence.

I've spoken with a senior permaculture teacher who will be submitting a proposal soon.

In the video Greening the Desert, you can see how permaculture techniques were successfully applied to a 10 acre demonstration plot in the Jordanian desert.

A brief search turned up another effort to set up a permaculture training for India. Lend-A-Hand India hopes to design a training program for high school students, to consist of pilot permaculture courses at two rural locations in the state of Maharashtra, and the creation of a permaculture curriculum translated into local languages and adapted for local conditions.

"The course will be designed to empower these rural students to help their communities meet their food, water, and shelter needs sustainably. Training in permaculture based farm design, water harvesting, waste management, locally appropriate building design and construction, and community action will enable better use of local resources, improved self-reliance, and rehabilitation natural ecosystems." It's a big country - with need for many such projects. Here are some other items that came up:

Permaculture India

WWOOFing in India (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms - a network linking volunteers with apprenticeships)

"A short report on the evolution of permaculture in India," from the 6th International Permaculture Conference, in 1996

Indian permaculture pioneer Narsanna Kopulla (video interview)

A visit to Columbia University grad school of public health

2011-04-06T20:37:00.000-07:00

Several months back, at the start of this blog, I set out two approaches to advancing the sustainability discussion in NYC. One was promoting an appealing, win-win sustainability initiative at the grassroots level, the other was delivering a very detailed message about our multifaceted predicament to a network of thought leaders. The first project has been rolled out through the white roof campaign.

For a campaign of the second sort, I contacted Dan Bednarz, a public health PhD who writes about how medical and health institutions can become sustainable in preparation for climate change, resource depletion and financial crisis.

He agreed to take the bus from Pittsburgh to NYC if I could book him a talk at Columbia University's graduate school of public health, which I did. My theory was that spreading the word about these issues, and ways to respond, within specialist networks, might accelerate the change process. That whole viral marketing thing, you know? Well, we can only guess at the final effects, but we did get about fifteen grad students to hear Dan, way uptown at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital complex north of Harlem around 168th Street. Dan's a nice guy, an occasional contributor to Energy Bulletin. It turns out the American Journal of Public Health is planning a special issue on fuel depletion, and Dan will have an article in it on how hospitals can prepare for volatility of price and supply of fuel. He's not yet a big star in public health academia.

Bednarz repeatedly tried to explain that physical constraints on fuel supplies would have real world effects, and that while technical innovation can extend limited fuel supplies, it cannot magically increase or replace them. It was amazing to listen to the students. Although clearly very bright people, they were mostly unable to grasp his points.

Dr. Bednarz writes about how health institutions, facing financial and resource constraints, will have to increasingly focus on having highly trained medical personnel teach community volunteers about public health and preventative health practices. Before such a conversation can take place, the audience must be willing to accept that the possibility that such constraints are likely, and that preparing for them would be prudent. Since neither was the case, the work of the evening was to present an introductory peak oil talk, which Bednarz did. We thanked our graduate student hosts and went our separate ways into the night. Such is the nature of the work.

With the completion of the campaigns based on the two organizing approaches mentioned before, neither with outstanding obvious success, at the moment, I'm at a crossroads, seeking new project ideas, and potential collaborators.

Also, by the way, I'm starting to look for a new day job. It looks like the conventional job I've been at for many year has just come to the end of its story arc, or I'm in a different place, or both. If you have any ideas regarding full time work promoting or implementing sustainability initiatives, please contact me.

***

Last week there was a panel on peak oil and peak soil, with James Howard Kunstler, Joan Gussow and Michelle Owens, organized by Eating Liberally and the New School. Kudos to blogger Kerry Trueman of EL, and Nevin Cohen of the NS, for being willing to connect the safe and acceptable topics of local agriculture and healthy eating with the fuel depletion issue, still deeply taboo in NYC. Perhaps more important than whatever wit and wisdom the panelists displayed was the opportunity to have these issues connected in public with an audience of over 80, by sponsoring organizations perhaps willing to repeat the exploration.

Last night, Evolver.net sponsored a rare appearance of author and activist Starhawk, who has been famous for decades, within certain modest circles. In contrast to the Columbia talk, a room of over 100 seats was entirely sold out. Yes, she's famous enough to actually sell tickets! As aware of the multiple crises as Dr. Bednarz, she has responded through spiritual, psychological, cultural and political practices.

How have those responses managed to make her so popular and so famous? Notes from the Starhawk talk coming up in the next post.

A report from an NYC urban agriculture conference

2011-04-04T20:01:00.000-07:00

Our food is grown on industrial farming operations, generally far from where they are finally eaten. They’re extensively processed, turned from their original forms into a host of food products. Potatoes, corn, pigs, wheat, leafy greens pass through factory portals and emerge in our supermarkets and restaurants. That’s the mainstream American food paradigm. It’s an effort to imagine a different way. Go back a few decades. Back in World Wars One and Two, Americans were urged to produce much of their own food in Victory Gardens.

There’s a new interest in growing food in our community or relatively nearby. An urban agriculture conference organized by the Horticultural Society of NYC in March asked how we city residents connect with our food. Panelists included: Severine von Tscharner Fleming, the Greenhorns; Christina Grace, Urban Food Systems Program, NYS Department of Agriculture and Markets; Jeremy Smith, author of Growing a Garden City; Keith Stewart, of Keith's Farm, and author of It's a Long Road to a Tomato; and Karen Washington, of the NYC Community Garden Coalition.

When Karen Washington, president of the NYC Community Garden Coalition, got started 25 years ago, there were about 15,000 vacant lots in the City. Many New Yorkers who couldn’t move out of neighborhoods troubled by crack, crime, police brutality, and lack of affordable housing had no choice but try to improve their neighborhoods. Since most community gardens are on City property, gardening is inherently political. “Urban agriculture is the new civil rights movement,” said Washington. While urban agriculture (UA) can’t produce more than a small fraction of the City’s food, it is a valuable educational component, reminding New Yorkers of all those who grow, process and transport food, usually out of our attention. If agricultural use of land is temporary and not secure, food grown on it can’t properly be called sustainable. Washington hoped that urban agriculture can be both inclusive and innovative, transcending the standard raised-bed community garden to spread to roof gardens, church garden projects, and gardening in front and back yards. We need to get more youth, especially youth of color, involved. A greater partnership between urban consumers and rural farmers is needed.

Keith Stewart raises vegetables and herbs for the Union Square green market, on a 14 acre organic farm in Orange County, NY. Keith has written a book about his 25 years of farming, and has appeared on many radio and TV programs. He reported a steady increase in the number of applicants for interns on his farm, and interest in both local and urban agriculture within NYC. He also pointed out that there’s no way that the City can produce more than a tiny fraction of its food – increased production from the surrounding region is central to any pragmatic urban agriculture discussion.

Jane Hodge of Just Food described Farm School NYC, the new school of urban agriculture. Just Food, if you don’t know, has helped start 80 community supported agriculture programs around the City, and a project linking locally grown food to 44 City food pantries and soup kitchens. Its City Farm program trains community gardeners to teach workshops and get out of the garden to interact with the surrounding neighborhood.

In the first year of the Farm School program, students take 15 core courses. In the second year, students will focus on either teaching, advocacy, urban agriculture, or enterprise development, through classes and a lengthy apprenticeship. Demand for training is high. For its 2011 pilot year, there were over 200 applicants for the 20 official spaces in the part time certificate program. Over half of the applicants have been women, a large number in their 20s and 30s, over half from Brooklyn, over half white. The School hopes to put course content online – a very prudent move, considering that the courses are already taking place, and can easily be made available online for what seems to be a large number of eager students with a modest investment in video editor staff time. USDA gave them funding for three years of operations.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming of the Greenhorns strives to "recruit, promote and support" the rising number of young people becoming new farmers. The group produces a weekly radio show (it’s easy to listen to podcasts while conducting farm chores), a blog, a wiki-based resource guide for beginning farmers, a GIS-based mapping project, and dozens of mixers and educational events for young farmers all around the country. Their graphic style is heavy on whimsical hand drawn illustrations, but Greenhorns is serious about helping small farmers succeed as individual businesses, and as a unified political interest group.

The enterprise model of the small vegetable farm is a good entry point for beginning farmers because of limited initial costs, said Severine. Since new farmers have to make do with very old equipment and limited budgets, innovation is needed. One new farming technique is recycling plastic beer cups, abundant at college campuses, into seed starting containers. Greenhorns brought farmers and MIT engineers together in the FarmHack project. As a co-founder of the National Young Farmers Conference, Severine is helping develop a policy platform for young farmers to be released soon - along with their video documentary. (Here’s the trailer.)

Jeremy Smith came in from Missoula, Montana to plug his new book, Growing a Garden City. Urban agriculture projects can catalyze both personal and civic transformation, says Smith. His book offers fifteen first-person stories making the case from the vantage point of farmers and community garden members, a low-income senior and troubled teen, a foodie, and a food bank officer, accompanied by seven sections explaining the working of student farms, community gardens, community supported agriculture (CSA), community education, farm work therapy, and community outreach.

The local food movement, despite recent rapid growth, is just getting started, added Smith, predicting that communities will have much greater direct support from agriculture in the future. He started with an extremely safe argument: with one in three kids in poor health by age 18, we’ve got to get kids to eat more fruits and vegetables. For earlier grades, good starting points are setting up more school trips to visit working farms, and more school gardens. Sending troubled youth to community farming programs, where they’re paid $8 an hour to learn how to grow food, costs far less than sending them to detention homes – and yields more direct and indirect benefits. Since the produce from these projects are sold at a deep discount to food banks or seniors on fixed incomes, they don’t compete either with standard farmers markets targeting middle class customers, or Whole Foods-type stores.

Community agriculture projects present an opportunity for religious institutions to sponsor gardening projects. Organizing stakeholders starts by helping people to sort out the answers to very basic questions: what they can contribute, and what do they need? “The local food movement can fix many of society’s problems, including poverty, addiction and sense of disconnectedness,” concluded Smith.

Christina Grace of NYS Department of Agriculture and Markets pointed to the potential for creating more green jobs through urban food production. One of the leading exponents of UA is Will Allen’s Growing Power project, based in central Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In Buffalo, NY, farming within city limits has been allowed by city officials. Buffalo is the third poorest city in the country. 75% of the residents of its city center are black. A 2009 survey conducted by GrowNYC identified nearly 500 NYC community gardens. However, since NYC open space is in relatively short supply, the examples of Buffalo and Milwaukee provide valuable starting points but can only go so far in suggesting the future of agriculture within the City. Grace reviewed some of the most notable urban agriculture sites.

• Not far from the 30-acre Queens County Farm, is John Bowne High School in Flushing, Queens, with an agriculture program that dates back to WWI.

• The Garden of Happiness in the Bronx is popular neighborhood gathering spot, with bees and chickens as well as vegetables.

• In the East New York Farm, under a highway overpass, Caribbean immigrants farm plots of land.
• The Bed-Stuy Farm, the regional training partner of Growing Power, grows vegetables behind the Brooklyn Rescue Mission for its food pantry recipients.

• Added Value turned a baseball field in Red Hook, Brooklyn into a community farm in 2003. Added Value works with New York City schools to provide hands-on farm-based learning to over 1200 students each year. Produce goes to a neighborhood CSA, a farmer’s market, and local restaurants; and runs an extensive community composting program.

• Grow to Learn is the City’s new initiative to start school gardens.

• The Eagle Street Farm has 6,000 s.f. of vegetable garden on a Greenpoint rooftop. Brooklyn Grange, in Long Island City Queens, has a 40,000 s.f. roof.

Where can newly trained farmers go, Graced wondered? Perhaps to one of the very few big open areas left in the City, like Floyd Bennett Field, NYC’s first municipal airport.

Figuring out next steps: twenty questions

The presenters covered a lot of ground, so to speak. How do we connect the dots, and identify possibilities, obstacles and fixes? Here's a number of questions to fill our the next steps in our inquiry. Please add your answers, responses, and more questions in the comments section.

- The Farm School is certainly an attractive training program with strong demand. Where do the students trained in the Farm School go after graduation?

- With only twenty in the program now, what is the expected maximum number of students the program can sustainably train each year? Are there other training programs that are comparable?

- How many agriculture related job openings are there now in NYC? What are agricultural business opportunities not yet widespread in NYC which could reasonably be encouraged?

- Given that limited number of actual openings, is this program overly idealistic, with limited options for its graduates? If more options need to be developed for Farm School graduates, what might they be?
- Are there existing proposals to incentivize and encourage growth of NYC agriculture related jobs?

- Given that social services groups and nonprofits can create valuable community agriculture programs, why are there so few of them? How can successful models for such programs be shared with the nonprofit community?

- Given the challenging funding environment, how can these groups create and staff more community agriculture projects?

- What kind of skills and training would those groups and individuals need?

- What are the agricultural products that can be grown in NYC and the surrounding region that can profitably compete with those products grown elsewhere by standard industrial farm methods?

- Does anyone have data on the amounts and types of agricultural goods imported into NY State, and which could be partly replaced by goods grown on New York City or State farms?
- What proportion of NYC’s food requirements be met by urban agriculture?

- Recognizing that urban agriculture can supply only a small fraction of NYC’s food needs (whatever that fraction turns out to be), how can its potential as an educational process and cultural change agent be maximized?

- How can urban agriculture increase the connection between New Yorkers and farming within New York State and the surrounding region?

- How can we increase the amount of NYC’s food that is produced within New York State farms?

- What are ways to rent, lease or transfer farmable property to third party organizations which can represent and train farmers who can't afford their own property?

- How might such organizations collect and distribute such produce in ways that don't conflict with existing green markets, while meeting real market needs?

- What are the obstacles to recruiting more State residents to being productively occupied, full or part time, in food production?

- What do the recent food policy reports produced by Speaker Quinn's and Borough President Stringer's office have to say about the above questions?

- Why did no one, during the entire conference, say that the rising price of oil would make long distance transportation of agricultural goods by truck increasingly expensive, and render NYC increasingly vulnerable to fuel price and supply disruptions?
Isn't the latter a more compelling reason to rapidly scale up urban and regional agriculture than mild-mannered appeals to better nutrition? (The remedy to fuel depletion is not more domestic oil drilling, which can only marginally increase supplies, but by reducing the amount of fuel used in food production. Hence, more local and regional agriculture.)

Raising this issue would allow boosters of local food and UA would be able to say not only that their practices would give New Yorkers healthier, more nutritious food, but would become inevitable within the next few years and needed to be scaled up rapidly as a matter of national and municipal food security.

What other questions should we be asking? Do you have some answers, or responses? Don't be shy now.

March 10, 2011 newsletter: white roof campaign launches in western Queens...

2011-03-22T16:10:00.000-07:00

Here's the email update of March 10, 2011
White Roof Campaign launched in western Queens

White roof painting may have much broader appeal to New Yorkers than other sustainability initiatives. It's easy to do, it's a short-term outdoor project that photographs well, it lowers air conditioning bills, and it slows climate change. It's even supported with an official NYC program.

Can white roof painting be used to connect climate change activists and conventional neighborhood leaders, and catalyze a surge of interest in NYC sustainability initiatives beyond the City's very small green community?

In last fall's trial run, the roofs of four buildings were coated by volunteers. Beyond Oil NYC has launched a search for more building roofs to be painted white this summer, targeting western Queens elected officials, civic leaders and nonprofits. Find out why we cite both the Naked Cowboy and Transition movement leader Rob Hopkins to describe this process.

What's in it for your nonprofit, or your neighborhood? Find out how you can plug into the program, or take it to your own community. Contact us for sample outreach letters, and a guide to accessing the NYC CoolRoofs program.

Beyond Oil NYC interview in Green Real Estate Daily

The NYC sustainability discussion should be expanded to include building resilience to disruption, as well as slowing climate change. How? Acknowledge that higher and more volatile fuel prices are on the way, and discuss how to prepare for them. Since there is so much resistance to taking action on climate change, due to high powered disinformation campaigns, focusing on energy security and lower energy costs can get results and avoid obstacles. Full interview here.

The Nation Magazine launches online video series on peak oil and climate change

Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Nicole Foss, Richard Heinberg and others describe the diminishing returns our world can expect as it deals with the consequences of peak oil even as it continues to pretend it doesn't exist. Videos here.

Talking about oil - Complacency, panic and ignorance

By Dave Cohen. 34 years ago Energy Secretary James Schlesinger described the American approach to oil supply problems. We have only two modes-complacency and panic. Neither are good responses. Start with a realistic assessment: more domestic drilling won't help us...

Oil Quake in the Middle East

By Michael Klare. Whatever the outcome of the protests and rebellions now sweeping the Middle East, one thing is guaranteed: the world of oil will be permanently transformed...

Presentation on public health, resilience and peak oil at Columbia U. in April

2011-03-20T17:01:00.000-07:00

Last winter I contacted Dan Bednarz, PhD, who writes nationally about how public health systems can become more resilient in preparation for peak oil, climate change and economic, ah, constraints. I offered to set up a presentation by him at a NYC university, which could then be promoted to local public health and medical administrators.

He eagerly agreed. Many emails later, a student group at Columbia University's Mailman Graduate School of Public Health accepted our offer. We have a presentation scheduled for Wednesday, April 6! This is a great opportunity to deliver a highly targeted wake up call to many of NYC's health administrators.

Can you help me spread word of this presentation to NYC healthcare and medical administrators?

This presentation will be specifically targeted to students and faculty at the Mailman School – and most importantly, NYC health administrators and professionals. We're trying to alert the leaders of our healthcare systems, so they get a better idea of how to plan for NYC's future healthcare needs. Can you help spread this important wake-up call?

Do you know any doctors, nurses, or staff at hospitals, clinics, or social services organizations? Please email the following invitation to them.
Can you go online, look up the executives at your local hospital or clinic, and email it to them? Extra credit for sending it to your contacts at NYC Department of Health!

Please let me know who you sent it to at beyondoilnyc@yahoo.com.

***

How Resilient Is Health Care?
Ecological, Fiscal and Economic Challenges.

A free talk for public health and medical professionals on making NYC healthcare institutions sustainable, by Dan Bednarz, PhD

Wednesday, April 6th, 7 – 8:30 PM

Members of the Columbia University community, and NYC public health and medical professionals, are invited. Dr. Bednarz will discuss how public health systems can be made more resilient in a time of declining government funding, climate change, and depleting resources such as oil and water.

Hess Commons Room, Allan Rosenfield Building
Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
722 W. 168 Street, New York, NY 10032 [map]

Sponsor: Future Healthcare Leaders, Mailman Graduate School of Public Health, Columbia University

Humanity is in a sustainability crisis that has ecological, financial, economic and political dimensions. In light of this public health’s prospective role is multifaceted:

1) Following Thomas Frieden’s health impact pyramid, it is imperative to protect the social – or non-medical - determinants of health.

2) Due to declining governmental taxes and revenues, public health must accomplish the above by designing resilient infrastructure. This resilience imperative applies even more so to medicine, as it consumes vast amounts of natural and fiscal resources.

3) Public health can play a leadership role in articulating how ecological realities (the peak of worldwide oil production, climate change, fresh water scarcities, population growth, overfishing and finite resource consumption, etc.) threaten population level health as well as economic, financial, scientific, educational, and political institutions. This is directly relevant to PLANYC and, at the macro-level to aligning social institutions to adapt to what E.O. Wilson calls the bottleneck of environmental challenges.

4) From the macro-perspective the public policy question facing the nation is “How to create socially just public policy with a shrinking economic pie?” (This assumes that the policy process in the USA is either broken or captured by elites but still can be reclaimed by citizens.)

Dan Bednarz, PhD spent three years as the Associate Director of the Center for Public Health Practice at the University of Pittsburgh and has lectured at the university level in business strategy, organizational studies, sociology, and policy analysis. He runs a consulting firm, Sustainable Health Systems, and co-edits a website, Health after Oil, exploring why public health and healthcare must design health systems that are fiscally, economically and environmentally sustainable.

He is the co-author of a paper on hospital preparedness in an upcoming American Journal of Public Health special issue on peak oil.

“Medicine after Oil”, Dan Bednarz, Orion Magazine, July/August 2007.

“Sustainable medicine: an issue brief on medical school reform,” Dan Bednarz, Energy Bulletin, May 2010

White roof campaign launches in western Queens

2011-03-08T18:29:00.000-08:00

What's in white roof painting for you? A lot. You don't even have to mention climate change. Roofs painted white are cooler in summer, so their buildings are cooler, use less air conditioning, have lower electric bills, and burn less carbon-emitting fossil fuels. Climate change groups have lists of people who like to go out and paint roofs on a weekend. The City has a program which coordinates the whole thing, providing expert supervision, project management, roof inspection, paint purchase and so on. The City will send work crews out to paint building roofs, as long as the building owners will buy the paint, and share their before and after electric bills.

My theory is that by promoting a tangible project that offers something to everyone, white roof painting can bridge the huge gap between climate change activists and conventional citizens. The trial run: last year, several volunteer groups pitched in and painted the roofs of four buildings, in collaboration with 350.org's International 10/10 International Day of Climate Action. This spring is the full NYC test. Or at least the full Queens test.

Since NYC CoolRoofs is a City program, and one that lowers energy costs, I've had enough cover to promote it through my day job throughout western Queens, to elected officials and many civic leaders and nonprofits.

I laid the groundwork by writing a six page memo explaining exactly how nonprofits and commercial building owners can use the program. NYC CoolRoofs had not prepared anything like this themselves. Like most other things, painting the roofs of buildings white seems simple until you get into the details, and quickly becomes complex and confusing. The project guide, reviewed and approved by NYC CoolRoofs - available on request - explains exactly what one can get from the program, and how to do it.

Next, I wrote a letter to elected officials, civic leaders and nonprofit managers, customizing each email, and the corresponding phone call, to appeal to members of each group in turn. Straight up self interest.

- Elected officials can get photo ops, and direct City funds to their favored constituent nonprofits.
- Nonprofits get a visible, public project that looks good in the weekly paper and community networks.
- Everyone likes to support a City sustainability program, as long as it doesn't cost them too much.
- Everyone likes lower air conditioning bills
- I hardly allude to how white roofs lower the City's overall carbon emissions, and don't even mention the urban heat island effect.

The deal gets sweeter. The City wants to find nonprofit facilities with roofs of over 10,000 square feet, close to Manhattan via mass transit, for some corporate sponsors who want to set up volunteer painting days for their employees, and they'll buy the paint too. I've customized the pitch and sent it out widely, using my excellent day job connections in western Queens. Not quite as good as money falling from the sky, but not bad either.

So far, I've referred the Variety Boys and Girls Club in Astoria, with a 40,000 s.f. roof. I should get more hits. If a few do it, the word may spread and others may follow. For roofs that are approved, NYC CoolRoofs will pull together volunteers, which I hope to be able to supplement from the groups who worked on the issue last summer.

I will also be pitching it to commercial building owners through my day job newsletter, which goes out to thousands of contacts in Queens.

For the business community, it's a different pitch. The City will send out free labor to coat roofs white, and the owner buys the paint. Their cost of materials will be returned within about three years through lower air conditioning bills, if:

- it's an owner occupied building
- built before 1980 (and so is not very insulated)
- is only one or two stories tall
- and has a black tar roof.

Again, strictly appealing to self-interest.

I have obsessively spent an inappropriate amount of time and effort to promote this program, since it was piloted in LIC in 2009. I must see this test completed before I can move on.

What if all effort gets no more than five responses? In that case, I don't think that this program can be sold by anything short of having Mayor Bloomberg conduct news conferences and walkthroughs in every Queens community board, accompanied by the Naked Cowboy playing guitar, and aides strewing hundred dollar bills behind them.

Not Mayor Bloomberg. Guess again please.

What's the yield if it works? A model for climate change activists to organize NYC civic networks at the neighborhood level, getting beyond NYC's very small environmental activist community.

This week I was at two events. One was a panel about how NYC agencies are preparing City infrastructure for severe weather, floods and climate change events. Very wonky, and very far from the public discussion. Another was a get together with about twenty green activists. Less wonky, but equally far from the majority of the public. In both cases, a vivid reminder about how few New Yorkers are really tracking these issues.

In my pitch letter, I suggest the other elements of the program. That white roofs, or another conversation starter, can identify and attract neighborhood leaders who can be sold on promoting other elements of a proactive NYC sustainability campaign: green building retrofits, energy conservation, mass transit, local and regional agriculture. And I list other NYC groups who are working in those areas. Can an approach like this connect the vast numbers of NYC civic leaders with the sustainability programs they need, but aren't aware how and why?

Transition backwards

The Transition movement is a neighborhood scale organizing method, most widespread in England. It starts by public education about climate change, peak oil and economic contraction, and guides participants in finding community-level responses. (I tried doing this between 2006 and 2008, with little success.)

Rob Hopkins, at a Transition event. Not in NYC, for sure.

One could describe this project - a conversation starter that recruits for a portfolio of sustainability programs - as applying the Transition model backwards. We'll see if it works.

Want to place bets? Suggest other conversation starters you think would be better than white roof painting? Offer me a job or a beer?

Want to try this in your neighborhood? Contact me at beyondoilnyc@yahoo.com.

White roofs, a conversation starter

2011-02-22T20:31:00.000-08:00

Rolling out the strategies according to plan, but behind schedule.
Things got very busy at the day job. There was a major grant application that took up a lot of the organization's bandwidth, contributing to a lag of several weeks since my last post.

During that time I've been moving forward with the first strategy, of targeted outreach. After pitching Dr. Bednarz to a slew of graduate student groups at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, and contacts at the New School and NYU, I have one interested group, and am simply waiting to see if they proceed. I pitched The Nation Magazine on one or more local events to tie into their online video series, but they weren't interested.

The second strategy - grassroots organizing around appealing sustainability initiatives - is less paradigm changing, but easier to make progress with. Here are the ways it plugs into the larger goals discussed on this blog:

- There are many civic groups that don't see themselves as sustainability advocates, but who can transmit very green initiatives into far-reaching local networks - if they see where those initiatives further their own agendas.
- City level green initiatives can always use some promotional support.
- Positioning oneself on the edge of City level initiatives, and neighborhood networks who could potentially adopt them, allows the social change entrepreneur to offer value to both groups. Permaculture people will recognize the potential of edges within ecosystems.
- This work can develop a growing community of contacts who can be educated about still more sustainability initiatives.
- More crucially, that community can eventually be educated about why sustainability initiatives will be increasingly necessary. However, it will be very counterproductive to raise those topics prematurely.

So, focusing on the NYC CoolRoofs program, I've done a few things. Working closely with the program staff, who operate out of the NYC Department of Buildings, I put together a seven page memo that explains in great detail exactly how commercial building owners and nonprofits can get the City to paint their roofs white, what they have to put in, and what they get from the City or other partners.  It also serves as a marketing piece for commercial building owners. It's always good to be able to talk about lowering electric bills, and free labor to apply the white paint.

They care only about whether and how they financially benefit from the program, and would be distressed or offended if any appeal so much as mentioned climate change response. My research revealed that white roof coating of older NYC commercial / industrial buildings, with little insulation and black tar roofs, that are only one or two stories tall, will pay for the cost of the white paint in three years or less.   I'll target that appeal first to Long Island City commercial building owners that I know well, and then to larger lists. If that service doesn't appeal, and the opportunity presents itself, I'll tell smaller electricity users about Con Ed's free energy efficiency survey, and its 70% discounts on many upgrades.

To encourage western Queens nonprofits and civic groups to step forward and get their roofs coated, the appeal is partly about lowering air conditioning bills, but more about being perceived as a neighborhood leader. The full memo on how to work the NYC CoolRoofs program is available on request.

Progressive magazine The Nation launches Peak Oil video series

2011-01-17T18:31:00.000-08:00

The Nation, a leading progressive publication, has taken a highly visible stand on peak oil. On January 5, 2011, The Nation announced that it would post a series of videos about peak oil and climate change from its website.

"The scientific community has long agreed that our dependence on fossil fuels inflicts massive damage on the environment and our health, while warming the globe in the process. But beyond the damage these fuels cause to us now, what will happen when the world's supply of oil runs out?

Peak Oil is the point at which petroleum production reaches its greatest rate just before going into perpetual decline. In “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate,” a new video series from The Nation and On The Earth productions, radio host Thom Hartmann explains that the world will reach peak oil within the next year if it hasn’t already. As a nation, the United States reached peak oil in 1974, after which it became a net oil importer.

Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Nicole Foss, Richard Heinberg and the other scientists, researchers and writers interviewed throughout “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” describe the diminishing returns our world can expect as it deals with the consequences of peak oil even as it continues to pretend it doesn’t exist. These experts predict substantially increased transportation costs, decreased industrial production, unemployment, hunger and social chaos as the supplies of the fuels on which we rely dwindle and eventually disappear.

Chomsky urges us to anticipate the official response to peak oil based on how corporations, news organizations and other institutions have responded to global warming: obfuscation, spin and denial. James Howard Kunstler says that we cannot survive peak oil unless we “come up with a consensus about reality that is consistent with the way things really are.” This documentary series hopes to help build that consensus. Click here to watch the introductory video, and check back here for new videos each Wednesday."

Here's the first video, with Noam Chomsky, Richard Heinberg, Bill McKibben, Nicole Foss, Thom Hartmann, Dmitry Orlov, and Jim Kunstler.
The second video is all Richard Heinberg.  As he says, our economy is only designed to operate under continuous growth.  Without continuously increasing energy supplies, economic growth as we've known it won't be possible, especially under current economic and debt burdens.   And it's not just peak oil, it's all the nonrenewable resources on which we depend: coal, uranium, rare earth metals...it's peak everything.  As more of the original resource is used up, more and more energy and cash are required to extract the ever smaller amounts that are left behind. Politicians won't want to acknowledge the end of growth. They'll stick to pleasant falsehoods about how business as usual can be extended indefinitely, as long as they can, so we can't depend on them.  Eventually we'll have to accept constraints and adopt serious lifestyle changes, and to get to that point, we'll need grassroots organizing: getting people to ask, what can we do as citizens?

For an iconic progressive media outlet like The Nation to acknowledge resource depletion is a major step forward. Since financial and political elites have succeeded in putting the urgency of climate change in doubt for many Americans, we have to talk about sustainability in terms of climate change, fuel depletion, and economic transformation, all at the same time. Even stunningly misled Americans will higher oil prices and oil shortages seriously.

Likely? No, certain. Our top sources for imported oil, by the way, are: Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Nigeria. Most of Canadian oil is inefficiently squeezed from oil sands. Production from Cantarell, Mexico's major oil field, is dropping quickly, and will inevitably reduce what we can hope to import from what's currently our #2 import source.  You get the idea.

Let's help the Nation get this video series out. Please visit their website, and forward links to your friends.

I contacted The Nation with the following proposal.  After that is a big quote from Lindsay Curran's great article on how peak oil could save the Obama Presidency.

***

January 10, 2011

Re: The Nation’s new video series on peak oil and climate change

Dear -----
I am writing to heartily congratulate the Nation for its bold and farsighted new video series, in collaboration with Thom Hartmann, on peak oil and climate change. By forthrightly addressing fuel depletion, the Nation has leaped far ahead of the majority of environmental, sustainability and progressive organizations.

I would like to propose that the Nation capitalize on its leadership position by cosponsoring a series of NYC presentations, addressing the local implications of issues raised in the series. Look at how NYC was affected by slow snow removal after the recent blizzard. How would oil price spikes or shortages affect operation of municipal vehicles, trucks, or mass transit, to give just a few examples?...

This series would bring together leading national experts, along with a panel of local experts, to discuss fuel depletion and local impacts and responses. Events could focus on themes like transportation, job creation, urban revitalization, or food. I am currently organizing such an event with Dan Bedarz, PhD, on how to make public health and medical institutions more resilient to resource and financial constraints.

Here are some benefits to the Nation and the larger community:

(1) The Nation will promote its leadership within the national progressive community to NYC's concentrated population of progressive readers, thinkers and activists - all of whom are potential subscribers or website visitors.

(2) The Nation can build partnerships with NYC progressive networks, and should this initiative succeed and be replicated, within other major cities
(3) As the Nation’s own description states, the series hopes to build a reality-based consensus for a national response to peak oil. Co-sponsoring presentations would promote the series, and the Nation’s goals for its broader effect.

(4) Bringing fuel depletion into the national discussion will provide an opportunity for progressives and President Obama to regain the initiative, and influence the 2012 election.

As Lindsay Curran writes, by forthrightly addressing peak oil, President Obama can put out a tangible and compelling narrative around which to rally the people. International Energy Agency's 2010 World Energy Outlook, which officially admits world oil production peaked in 2006, will give Obama all the cover he needs. If he’s willing to present peak oil in full detail, Obama can turn the entire conservative narrative upside down. He can call for an emergency effort to prepare America for the end of cheap oil, and create domestic jobs in energy, transportation and manufacturing, as a matter of national security. Spreading this message widely in the progressive community can give the Obama Administration and other politicians the push they need. An aggressive effort to promote the Nation’s series could be pivotal.

The Nation should seize this opportunity to make the most of its farsighted progressive leadership, for its readers, the City, and the country. I would be glad to assist or advise the Nation on such a project. Please contact me at ....

***

Peak oil could save Obama's PresidencyThe increasingly common view is that America is a nation in decline. Peak oil blogger Lindsay Curran says Obama has an pportunity to address it forthrightly and turn things around, by putting out a compelling narrative around which to rally the people When Obama keeps ignoring the elephant in the room—peak oil— he also fails to grasp a way out of the mess in which he and the nation is stuck. A vague and undirected "hope for change" has much less to offer than one with an identifiable target to aim for or a predicament to address, says Curran. This is such an important point that I'll quote extensively from his article.

"Fortunately, the International Energy Agency's 2010 World Energy Outlook gives cover to any top-tier politician or candidate who wishes to bring the issue to the table. Effectively he or she can take the approach that, "It's not my idea, it's the IEA's assessment."
How could peak oil play the hero in breaking political gridlock while motivating American enthusiasm? Well, nothing else is working, for one. So, what is there to lose with a Hail Mary pass? Second, leveling with people after a long period of obfuscation and avoidance itself can help break long-festering tensions and restore trust.

Look at what's been been said by every American president of the last nearly 40 years—the old "fossil fuels are running out and we need an energy independent solution" refrain. In response to which, what has been done? Nothing. Nothing has been done...Finally, exposing a true predicament while also offering a viable and optimistic strategy to address that predicament creates myriad opportunities for hope to morph into vision and vision into strategy....

But when Obama meets with these CEOs he should forget about job creation in the predictable areas. Forget the same-old same-old cars-and-highways paradigm. It isn't working and it has no real future in the wake of peak oil. Forget GM and Detroit unless they're diversifying and going into new projects such as rail cars, hybrid vehicles, and solar and wind parts for other infrastructure. Forget expanding oil and gas. These are sunset industries.

Instead, Obama should focus on sunrise areas. Here's my three-point plan:

1.Call for a full throttle effort to prepare America for a world beyond cheap oil. Present it as competition with China, as Energy Secretary Steven Chu has dubbed it, "America's Sputnik Moment." Lay out in stark and unforgiving terms just what's at stake if America grows any more inert. Call it a straight path to that spectral decline. By speaking boldly and directly about the implications of peak oil on American quality of life, the president can pose infrastructure renewal and build-out, particularly in rail, as a way to protect the home front. But the president must explicitly present all these improvements as a direct response to peak oil. He needs to tell the public that if we don't undertake this project, we're going to be twisting in the wind in 30 years. Guaranteed. Then he must use every ounce of the bully pulpit to drive it home. America dealt with the Civil War, and World Wars I and II, so we can deal with this, too. We have it in us. In fact, we almost need it.

2.Work with industry to create domestic manufacturing jobs in both energy and transportation but also in textiles, steel and consumer products. Dealing with distributed power, conservation efforts and transportation will bolster national security and connect our transport networks on land in order to be poised for the time when distance costing money will mean the real end to significant global trade. In the post peak economy (long before 2030) distance will cost money and we'll be so glad those folks are back to work and those goods are available here. Alternatively we could let ourselves become China's bitch, grateful for 20-cents-an-hour jobs making the products for the growing appetite of middle-class consumers in Shanghai. It's our choice.

3.Create a vocal culture of encouragement surrounding relocalized economies, so that regional areas remain vibrant by making and exporting specialty local goods both abroad and within the US. Encourage local farming, smaller scale production, smaller scale clean energy production and local transit solutions. Follow the American people's leadership on the desire to shop locally and lessen stress. Bring back Buy American! This isn't protectionism. It's survival. Revival.

Together, these three bold responses will create jobs, spur the right kind of growth, and lift the leaden eyes of a downcast population toward the vision of a new paradigm, one they sense and that more than a few long for. How are we going to pay for it? Let's figure it out.

And what's the alternative, besides the abyss? Should we embrace instead going full scale into dirtier oil, mountaintop removal in spades, more coal fired plants, and war, war, war? The other alternative is illusion, and with it, sure decline. If not now, when?

Spit it out, already!

As long as the president is afraid to say the words peak oil, he's got nothing to rally the nation around. Everything else we've heard so far from the White House or seen in the news is just too vague. But in contrast to something like global warming, an invisible and amorphous threat that's all too easy to deny or ignore, everybody can understand that oil is a finite resource. Obama got close to this in his Gulf oil spill speech, but then dropped the ball. It's time to pick it back up again and make a bee line for the basket.

We can't turn a finite resource into an infinite one, however much wishful thinking we apply to it. And however much business and other interested parties try to deny the reality of peak oil in order to achieve their own interests— short term personal profits, the long arc of American success be damned—there is no more time to waste.

Every driver understands the price at the gas pumps. Those prices are rising, and with it, so are food prices. The jobless are crying out for relief. All that pain needs an explanation. Peak oil is not a hard story to tell. And moreover, it's as true as the sunrise this morning.

Once Obama uses that bully pulpit to his advantage, lays out the case on peak oil, and invokes competition with China for conservation and clean energy solutions as crucial to reviving our national purpose and drive, he'll get somewhere. Then he must not let up.

And who doesn't love the prospect of solar panels? Who doesn't love the romance of the train, especially while surfing YouTube and reading your email, free from the burden of driving?

Look, ten years of green marketing has laid the groundwork. The people are ready. Now if the leader steps out in front and rides the tail wind, we'll maybe get somewhere.

The detractors can yell from the sidelines all they want. But the people will be relieved that at last America is not pussyfooting around any more. Fear of the diagnosis is the only thing in our way. First you cry, then you get on with it.

It's standard political messaging, President Obama. You start the conversation, you own it. Don't get stuck playing defense; make the other side respond to your bold initiatives. Then, they're playing on your quadrant and you're on top.

We can talk illegal immigrants and anchor babies in 2012. Or we can talk jobs now.

Making public health sustainable and resilient

2011-01-08T11:35:00.000-08:00

NYC is a big place, with lots of stuff going on, and people talking all at once: a challenging place to advance new ideas at the best of times. In an earlier post on this blog, I set out the theory that the larger discussion of preparing NYC for the future can be positively influenced by planting innovative ideas in very specialized networks and communities.

There are many such networks. It's not just the upper echelons of the Bloomberg administration and Wall Street financiers. Local networks include academic organizations, trade and professional associations, bloggers and online columnists with large readerships, and religious communities. Don't forget civic organizations with diverse neighborhood links and participants. John Michael Greer has encouraged sustainability activists to join fraternal organizations, like the Masonic Lodge, Kiwanis Club or Rotary, which used to be major players in American culture.

How to pick a network, and work through it to influence a larger community?

- The network would have to be small enough, and publicly accessible enough, so a handful of cultural activists could identify and contact their gatekeepers.

- The network has to be sufficiently important to the operations of the larger community so discussions within it quickly diffuse into other powerful networks.

- The innovative material to be presented is critical enough to the interests of the network to be relevant to its gatekeepers, and just provocative enough to be interesting, without crossing into red zones.

- If the material presents taboo topics or dire consequences, or violates any of countless subtle social norms, automatic shut-off circuits will be activated, resulting in both the material and the messenger being ignored.

- If the material presents potential responses that offer hope, as well as the risks, and if the responses promised to mitigate other problems already acknowledged within the network, or advanced some elements of the network's agendas - then, the material might be taken up within the network.

Applying the approach to NYC's health and medical community
One of the best people to do this is public health expert Dan Bednarz, whose articles appear frequently in Energy Bulletin. As he explains, our current health care system will have to adapt to constraints, and he sets out ways of doing it. I proposed introducing him to decision makers within this NYC network. We came up with a draft proposal letter similar to this...
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How can we make NYC health institutions both more sustainable and more resilient?

We are arranging NYC presentations by Dan Bednarz, PhD, in spring 2011, and are seeking multiple co-sponsors. The public health and medical communities have not yet been sufficiently engaged in the Bloomberg Administration’s PlaNYC 2030 groundbreaking effort to address climate change and sustainability. As a leading expert on these questions, Dr. Bednarz can stimulate your colleagues to enter the PlaNYC discussion.

He can tailor presentations for physicians and hospital executives about countering threats to the sustainability of current medical systems, or help public health administrators redesign systems to reduce dependence on government funding by increasing community participation and using trained volunteers to disseminate public health information.

As co-editor of Health after Oil, Dr. Bednarz coordinates research and discussions on how healthcare institutions can respond to the unprecedented challenges of rising population pressures, increasingly limited energy supplies, climate change, and the economic disruptions now impacting health care budgets at all levels. He advocates for sustainability strategies that incorporate cost cutting and preventive health care as well as traditional environmental concerns – making this a win-win approach for executives and administrators.

At the invitation of special editor Howie Frumkin, former head of the CDC Center for Environmental Health, Dr. Bednarz, Jeremy Hess, MD and Jessica Pierce, PhD, have submitted “The Health Care System and Petroleum Scarcity” to The American Journal of Public Health for its forthcoming focus issue on peaking petroleum,.

Because modern health care is fundamentally dependent on petroleum, particularly for transport of patients, staff, and supplies, and for pharmaceuticals feedstocks, it is vulnerable to price fluctuations, cost spikes, and scarcity of raw materials. The article will address how health systems can prepare for service disruptions and related sustainability challenges.

Starting March 2011, Dr. Bednarz will be teaching an online course on Sustainable Public Health Systems through Bristol Community College. It will cover how to create a viable 21st century public health system, to reconfigure systems and become more resilient to declining state and local tax bases by developing a new public policy context with a synergistic relationship between professionals and local communities.

Would your organization be interested in co-sponsoring a presentation by Dr. Bednarz on these themes? If so, do you have an easily accessible lecture hall in Manhattan at which this could take place? To raise these topics in the NYC medical and public health community, Dr. Bednarz is able to make such presentations without requiring an honorarium.

Dr. Bednarz can also collaborate on internships and research projects for graduate students in public health, in which interns inventory resilience and sustainability challenges in public health systems, design ecologically sustainable system responses, and build consortiums across health sciences and professions.

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Next, I'll contact some local medical and public health schools, and see if I can find a graduate student to do an internship on this project.
Beyond Oil NYC's experiment in open source activism has room for you. If you think this campaign makes sense, your assistance in distributing the message would be most helpful. I do this stuff for my nonprofit day job all the time, so I can guide volunteers through each step.

Keep it manageable: think of the hospital or health care institution that serves your community. Go to its website. Find the contact information for its senior executives and community affairs contacts. Customize the above letter and email it. Follow up by phone to describe the project. It's a great project for current or would-be graduate students, and those between jobs. Contact Beyond Oil NYC.

Encouraging Anthony Weiner’s role as angry prophet

2010-12-27T16:24:00.000-08:00

Encouraging Anthony Weiner’s role as angry prophet

My Congressman, Anthony Weiner, does not need any encouragement to forthrightly speak his mind. Google him, and you’ll quickly discover Weiner's brief but memorable speech from July 30, 2010. Talking Points memo gives both the background, and a link to the video.

The House was debating a bill last night that would provide up to $7.4 billion in health care aid to rescue and recovery workers who have faced health problems since their work in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The bill ultimately failed to get the needed two-thirds majority, 255-159, and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was not happy about it. Not one bit.

In a rant that lasted for almost two minutes, a hopping mad Weiner railed against "cowardly" Republicans who claimed they were voting against the bill because of "procedure." Weiner spat: "It's Republicans wrapping their arms around Republicans, rather than doing the right thing on behalf of the heroes!"

Weiner attacked those who "stand up and say, 'Oh, if only we had a different process we'd vote yes.' You vote yes if you believe yes! You vote in favor of something if you believe it's the right thing! If you believe it's the wrong thing, you vote no!"

"It is a shame! A shame," he exclaimed.

Political theorist Andrew Bard Schmookler thinks Weiner’s talent for fiery rhetoric can be put to greater use. Schmookler, the creator and author of the website NoneSoBlind.org, has a Ph.D. in history, and has written several books on political psychology, ethics & culture. He’s been a commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered,” and is a go-to call-in guest on radio shows, in both blue and red states, on the controversial issues of the moment. One of Schmookler’s readers knows that I live in Weiner’s district, and put me in touch with him. After some discussion, I walked a full version of the proposal you’re about to read, in hard copy, to Weiner’s district office.

Lately, Schmookler has been musing in his blog about the need for a progressive champion. Ideally, this would be President Obama, but it’s been a lot of water under the bridge since the 2008 appeals for hope and change. (You can already see where this is going, right?)

Schmookler summarizes a number of his articles here,  but I’ll put it in a nutshell for you. America’s governing forces and elites habitually lie in ways that reveal “an arrogant and dangerous disregard of the need to respect reality.” These amoral ruling forces are rapidly dismantling the structures that have protected goodness and decency. They have succeeded in deceiving many good Americans. The situation can easily become much worse.

The American people urgently need to recognize and repudiate both the leaders, and those dark aspects of the American culture that they have embodied. Many American liberals have a hard time with that job, because they have a moral blind spot. Many are unable to recognize that evil is a real concept, and how profound the distinction between good and evil is. Liberals are unable to connect with and articulate their deep moral values.

Schmookler says we need "a prophetic social movement that speaks moral truth about amoral power in such a way as to awaken our traditionalist countrymen from the trance state into which their leaders have put them."

A comeback strategy for progressive champions

When a conflict on some important issue emerges between Obama and the Republicans, Schmookler suggests, the President should challenge to the Republicans to debate the issue on national television. Frame it explicitly in terms of what’s best for the country. Whether the Republicans fail to accept the debate, or defend their position, which will tend to overlap with those of wealthy, corporate interests, the dark reality of so-called conservatism will be revealed. Obama can reissue this challenge over and over. If the Republicans refuse to debate, Obama can give a talk to the nation comparing his and the Republican proposals. Obama sometimes seems conflict-averse, but he is a very good debater, and with solid positions to defend, is likely to do well. As a way of further anchoring the debates to objective reality, Schmookler suggests including a panel of experts, who can instantly respond to disputed matters of fact. The panelists would be selected impartially by the most respected professional groups in their field, such as the National Academy of Sciences, or the American Bar Association.

What if Obama prefers bipartisanship over confrontation?

It’s possible that President Obama might refuse this role as too confrontational, and damaging to his efforts at bipartisanship. In this case, shouldn't progressive national leaders find someone willing to step up, and turn around the momentum for 2012? Rep. Bernie Sanders is capable of the job, but as the Independent (socialist) Congressman from Vermont, can't represent the Democrats on the national stage. They need someone in a safe seat, with a very aggressive temperment. Weiner might be the right man for the job. Which is why I paid a visit to his Kew Gardens office last week.

A respectable tradition of angry prophets

Maybe I should have asked Schmookler about this.  How accurate is the sterotype of the Old Testament prophet as full of rage on behalf of God against the moral decline of the people, calling for repentence? Wikipedia suggests it's right on target:

In his book The Prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel describes the unique aspect of the Jewish prophets as compared to other similar figures. Whereas other nations have soothsayers and diviners who attempt to discover the will of their gods, according to Heschel the Hebrew prophets are characterized by their experience of what he calls theotropism — God turning towards humanity. Heschel argues for the view of Hebrew prophets as receivers of the "Divine Pathos," of the wrath and sorrow of God over his nation that has forsaken him.
He writes: "Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profane riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet's words. (The Prophets Ch. 1)"

We have a lot to be angry about. Some of us are capable of channelling prophetic anger on a regular basis, in an inspiring, effective way. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are able to hide their anger in a matrix of humor.

James Howard Kunstler blogs about peak oil and the collapse of the funny money economy.  He's darkly funny, although without Stewart and Colbert's extraordinary comedic gifts or capacity for mirth.   I go to his site every Monday morning.

Some contemporary versions of the prophetic archetype - eloquent, very angry, and not funny at all - are Keith Olberman and William Rivers Pitt from Truthout. So are Bill McKibben, James Hansen, and Anthony Weiner. They perform a valuable function, and as Schmookler points out, we need to crank up the volume on our societal prophecy speakers. So please support your favorite prophets, your local prophets, and your own call to prophecy, whatever it may be.

The role of grassroots sustainability organizing

2010-12-12T15:27:00.000-08:00

Summary: After the midterm election, selling climate change got even tougher than it was before. Since the NYC sustainability discussion is mainly framed as climate change response, civic and business leaders should expand it to include the more marketable concepts of increasing resilience, and preparing for higher and more volatile energy prices. Those price changes are coming in the next five years, acccording to sources including the US military and the International Energy Agency, but NYC isn't talking about them, let alone preparing for them. In this post and the next, two parallel strategies to change that are set out, based on the time-honored principle of WIFM - "what's in it for me?" First, highly targeted outreach to networks of thought leaders, on how their fields will benefit from initiatives that conserve energy, lower costs and build local resiliency. Second, outreach to NYC civic networks on behalf of appealing sustainability projects that offer something to all participants. Volunteers and collaborators will be invited.

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The role of grassroots sustainability organizing

Changing the sustainability discussion is important, as a means of getting people involved in practical, effective efforts to make their communities more sustainable. Discussion must lead to action. Otherwise, mere talk, no matter how well informed and well intentioned, is cheap.

Many activists responded to failure of national and international climate change legislation by turning to decentralized grassroots action. Joining the invitation from 350.org to a global work party on 10/10/10, people at over 7,000 events in 188 countries, got to work on the climate crisis. By digging community gardens, installing solar panels, planting trees and more, they aimed to send a message to political leaders: “if we can get to work, so can you!”

This is clearly informed by the Transition method of community organizing, now being applied in many UK towns and cities, as described in the New York Times. Neighbors educate themselves about climate change and fuel depletion, envision their community having successfully adapted twenty years in the future, and then work backward, planning what needs to be done to make that future possible. Collaborating on local projects, participants begin creating that future piece by piece.

In large cities, environmental and sustainability groups organize presentations and films all the time, but without recruiting partners who live in close proximity, and who share permanent social networks. However, many city residents are very involved in neighborhood concerns through countless civic groups.

Seeking happy attractors

Can sustainability initiatives be distributed through well-established local networks? Perhaps – if one can find initiatives appealing enough to inspire different sets of volunteers, who usually operate in different realms, to collaborate. What initiatives might fill this role? What initiatives offer enough benefits to be easily sold, implemented, duplicated and expanded? What will motivate environmental activists, neighborhood leaders, and additional volunteers and partners? The initiative must:

- inspire climate change and sustainability activists to volunteer themselves and promote it to others;

- offer clear cost benefits or savings, without considering environmental benefits;

- be easy to understand, describe, and see as positive;

- must be quick, inexpensive, and simple enough so volunteers can dive in and successfully accomplish projects, inspiring others to follow; and

- must offer enough public relations benefits to local partners and civic groups so that they have an incentive to expedite these projects.

One comparatively simple way to lower the City’s air conditioning use in the summer happens to fit all these requirements. It is a happy attractor: there is nothing distressing about it; it is empowering, patriotic, and it distributes goodies all around with minimal cost. It offends no one, has no enemies, and is welcome at parties. It is a great conversation starter. If you can think of other programs like this, please let us know immediately!

Painting roofs white

Black surfaces absorb more of the sun’s heat than white surfaces. Each summer, NYC’s many flat, black tar roofs can get up to 100 degrees hotter than outdoor air temperatures, increasing the amount of air conditioning required to cool the building below. This means more energy used, more carbon emissions, more pressure on the City’s already strained electric grid, and higher risk of blackouts. By radiating that heat to their surroundings, black roofs contribute to the heat island effect, whereby urban areas can reach temperatures up to 15% hotter than surrounding rural areas.

White roof coating projects are an important part of NYC’s climate change response, with the NYC Cool Roofs program. “Reflective rooftops are a simple yet powerful tool in the fight we have been leading against climate change,” said Mayor Bloomberg, and a means to channel “the power of our volunteers to address some of the City’s greatest needs.” U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has called for “white roofs everywhere” to help fight climate change.

In the fall of 2010, inspired by 350.org’s 10/10/10 Global Work Party, several groups collaborated with NYC government agencies to paint the roofs of four nonprofit facilities white: the Bowery Mission, Harlem’s Democracy Prep Charter School, Fountain House in midtown Manhattan, and the SCO Ottillie Campus in Briarwood, Queens. Organizers and volunteers came from StopOilNYC, White Roof Campaign, White Roof Project, Manhattan Young Democrats, 350.org, Greenpeace, OxFam, NYPIRG, and New York University student environmental groups.

Projects like these will not only make real improvements in lowering energy use, but can help recruit more partners and volunteers, and set up other local sustainability initiatives. To find potential nonprofit facilities with roofs to paint in 2011, we’ll start with the Council Members we contacted who were eager to refer us to nonprofits in their districts.

The matter of paying for the paint creates an opportunity. Instead of seeking corporate donations, we’ll work with the nonprofit to organize winter events to raise the money locally. Besides gaining local supporters and media attention, these projects allow environmentalists from outside the neighborhood to wield rollers and brushes alongside volunteers from within it.

For the full proposal for neighborhood leaders, and flyers from the City Cool Roofs program, go to www.whiteroofcampaign.org/ or Beyond Oil NYC.

Green neighborhood Trojan horses

With positive relationships already established between organizers and the nonprofit contacts seeking to fund their white roof project, we can introduce the next stage of the project. What are the overlaps between community needs, and the green services that are already available in the City but not adequately distributed? Usually centered on promotion of energy efficiency programs, government agencies regularly set up panels at which representatives pitch several programs to neighborhood leaders and residents.

- Are energy bills too high? Con Edison and NYSERDA, the State agency which incentivizes energy efficiency retrofits, offer a number of cost-cutting energy efficiency upgrades for homes and businesses.

- Do neighbors want more fresh fruits and vegetables in local stores? Green markets? Many nonprofits offer gardening classes, and want to help residents convert lawns and yards into vegetable gardens, and set up community gardens and composting areas.

- Are there complaints about inadequate mass transit service? Let’s find the advocates and alternatives who can address this community need.

- Job training providers, for both green and conventional programs.

- Food assistance and public health programs for those in need.

White roof project organizers can introduce community leaders to these other programs, making their outreach efforts easier, and reinforcing the new green network forming within the neighborhood.

This might work something like a Transition initiative. Here, the organizing process would start, not with a common education process around climate change and fuel depletion, but with unthreatening projects that have something to offer a broad range of participants. Should the ingredients come together – and external events reinforce the importance of more sustainable and resilient neighborhoods – the project may be able to recruit more volunteers, develop a network, and evolve in other productive directions.

Some questions on which you might like to comment:

Would you like to intern, volunteer or collaborate with a white roof project?

Are there happy attractors and green Trojan horses better than white roof painting?

Or ones that you like better that you would like to collaborate on with us?

What's going on with Transition initiatives in the United States, and what can we learn from them about how to make NYC more sustainable?