Notice that Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, West Virginia, Tennessee have no plans to enact a Renewable Energy Portfolio standard (REPS).
I’ll try to find a map of clean energy investment to superimpose. My guess is the same white states would be empty.
Update:Here is a link to the DOE version of the map.
At 5P.M. yesterday Mayor Hutton became the 10th mayor in Indiana to sign the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.
I attended and was heartened by the Mayor’s comments that the city will look closely at its energy profile, commit to buying only Energy Star products, reduce environmental footprint of city buildings, support smart development initiatives, and improve the efficiency of the city vehicle fleet.
This is in addition to the stated goal to “Urge their state governments, and the federal government, to enact policies and programs to meet or beat the greenhouse gas emission reduction target suggested for the United States in the Kyoto Protocol — 7% reduction from 1990 levels by 2012″.
I don’t recall her exact words but Mayor Hutton stated that this is an area where it makes sense for us to invest money because it will pay dividends in the future.
From the press announcement:
The City is already implementing or has plans for implementing most of the 12 items listed in the Climate Protection Agreement through the Indiana CLEAN Community Challenge administered by IDEM (Indiana Department of Environmental Management), the Richmond Comprehensive Plan 2006, and the Richmond/Wayne County Environmental Awareness Council.
This is excellent news because it takes the issue local. In order for this to gain traction it will need to show results.
The U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement A. We urge the federal government and state governments to enact policies and programs to meet or beat the target of reducing global warming pollution levels to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, including efforts to: reduce the United States’ dependence on fossil fuels and accelerate the development of clean, economical energy resources and fuel-efficient technologies such as conservation, methane recovery for energy generation, waste to energy, wind and solar energy, fuel cells, efficient motor vehicles, and biofuels; B. We urge the U.S. Congress to pass bipartisan greenhouse gas reduction legislation that includes 1) clear timetables and emissions limits and 2) a flexible, market-based system of tradable allowances among emitting industries
Stay tuned…
Today is my Mom’s birthday. In a perfect world, I would be escorting her up the ramp of cruise ship leaving on a journey to distant ports. Or taking her out to dinner and show. Or dropping off my son for a stay at Grandma’s.
But I’m sitting in a hotel room in Southfield, MI feeling a little disconnected from the person that brought me into this world. We talked on the phone and it was apparent she was not in a very festive mood. A family illness weighed heavily and tiredness from hosting a big gathering the night before had left her not wanting to celebrate. As I hung up the phone, I wished for her to find a moment of relaxation - some satisfaction with her many accomplishments.
Here are some favorite moments with my mom:
5. When she used words such as “Persnickety” in spite of the puzzled looks on our faces.
4. The expression on her face when my Dad, Mark, and I would return from a long camping trip. First, happiness to see us back safely. Then, the realization that everything we wore or carried with us smelled like smoke from the fire, days without a shower, and other pungeant outdoor odors. “Put those things in the garage. They’re too smelly to be in the house.”
3. When she watched my first soccer “slide tackle” at age 10. She fueled my enthusiasm with hers and was kind enough not mention that it happened in the open field with no one from the opposing team around.
2. When she graduated with a Masters Degree in Education after spending many years at home raising my brother and I (while going back to school).
1. The sound in her voice we when we told her she was going to be a grandmother. “Really? REALLY?!!” she said. It was the sound of pure joy.
Love you Mom.
When I arrived home from work on Mon, Laura was very excited to have Bode (who is 3yrs old) tell me what he learned at nursery school that day. With some prompting, he turned to me, smiled, and said
I pledge to myself, on this day
To try to be kind in every way.
With a little searching I found the rest of the pledge..
To every person, big and small,
I will help them if they fall.
When I love myself and others too,
That is the best thing that I can do!
Thomas Kemp, a local attorney and friend, posted an excert from a Washington Post article by Joel Achenbach, who visited an eco-village in North Carolina called Earthaven (post here). His quote from the article gets to the heart of where we find ourselves:
We live in a world we didn’t make, by rules and customs and laws we didn’t invent, using tools and technologies we don’t understand.
This is truth. Our culture, in large part, is focused on consumption. It is the purchase, the checkout, the finish line that matters. The foundations, history, and the true accounting of our technological triumph in retail sales and electric and fuel distribution is for scholars, retirees, or the coffee table.
Thomas has spoken on this topic, with Chris Hardie of Richmond News Review, as it applies to the food we eat and specifically concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). He asks if we need “industrial farming to meet our nutritional needs?” I don’t believe we do, but it certainly distances us from the process of production (that is unless you live next door).
It is partly because our production systems are so efficient that we are so removed from them. Unfortunately, if we allow ourselves too much separation from the pork we eat or the electricity we use, we lose the big picture. We stop valuing the energy, engineering, and effort that gave us the end-product. And we lose the biological connection between the life of the pig and our need for nourishment. We lose the ecological connection between the land stripped for coal and the power line running to our house.
We don’t all need to go back to building water wheels and killing what we eat. We can be more intentional about our choices and examine why we make them:
On the official Earthaven tour, a banker with a small farm who was taking the tour just to get tips on animal husbandry, shook his head at the thought of living by consensus with lots of other people. “That’d kill me,” he said.
What the visitor realizes at Earthaven is how much energy is expended in mainstream culture just keeping other people out of our hair. There’s a reason everyone on the block drives separately to the grocery store. It’s a waste of energy but, arguably, a rational purchase of independence. For the most part, we don’t use energy to be powerful; we use it to be alone
[emphasis added]
Last Sunday after meeting, Phil Seybold talked to an audience of 20+ at First Friends Meeting Richmond about sustainability, green building, saving energy and the environment. Click HERE for the mp3. It should play in your browser.
Phil (and the audience) provide a lot of information but a couple of things really stick out: 1) Reducing the energy requirements of your house, i.e. conservation, through the use of compact flourescent light bulbs, effective use of storm windows, and insulation will pay for itself very quickly - on the order of a year. 2) When accompanied by conservation, alternative energy solutions such as solar panels and wind turbines, are much more cost effective than you might think. I have heard a figure of $9/watt installed for solar panels. Looking at our last electricity bill, we used 860 kWh for the month. Divide that by 30 days = 28.6 kWh per day. If the avg. number of peak sun hours is 5 then we would need to harvest 5.7 kW during each hour that sunlight is available. Multiply that times 1.43 to account for system losses** and we come up with 8.2 kW per hour. $9/watt times 1000 watts = $9,000/kW times 8.2Kw = $73,788. A second mortgage! But if we can find ways to reduce our energy use by 2/3rds that figure goes down to $24,571. A new car!
If that is the simple cost of sustainability, and we know it isn’t always simple, then we have a starting place. There is no risk to going down this path. The technology is proven. It is reliable. It makes use of a limitless energy source. There _is_ risk to continue down the path of burning coal to power our homes.
I’ve wanted to upload this for a week now. Thanks to Phil Seybold (Phil, if you have a website send me a link and I’ll add it here), Doug Gwyn and First Friends Meeting Richmond, and the Cope Environmental Center for allowing me to record this. I hope you’ll give it a listen because I think it’s really important to make this a regular conversation.
**Real Goods
[technical details]
The podcast is stored using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Ask me for more details.
After a few weeks of post-holiday activity I’m trying to get back to organizing things here so that I can use this site as a template to get some others up and runnning.
After a few years hiatus, the web site has a new home (at Micfo.com). More than a few years really. This site used to be tailrace.org. We’ve since moved from the farm in Hagerstown to Richmond so I registered retherford.org. I’m happy with this hosting service thus far and find that the combination of Tomcat/JSP, PostgreSQL and MySQL capabilities gives me great flexibility.
If your stumble across this site and are a relation or friend, send me email. I’d be happy to host your site or WordPress blog.
