The Chinese had to cancel the Olympic torch run in Paris today because of thousands of pro-Tibet protesters. I don’t see how they can continue this thing through to August given the protests that have dogged it so far. China’s leaders are displaying a profound misunderstanding of the depth of feeling about this issue and others like their support of Darfur. When people start talking about a global boycott of Chinese goods (which is now in the wind) they may finally understand that they can no longer control the flow of information regarding their internal policies.

This is only the beginning of their troubles. Their horrendous pollution problems are going to be spotlighted as athletes start to wonder whether it is safe to compete in a place where people routinely wear masks when they go outside. Despite plans to virtually halt traffic weeks before the game and stop all polluting industries temporarily I doubt the skies will clear and the water miraculously become clean.

Again, this is a control issue. China can’t control their environment any better than they control information. The world is watching and China invited us.

I have a three year-old Honda Accord that is about to come off of a lease. I have three options: Turn the car in, lease another on very favorable terms or buy the car, again on favorable terms (it’s very low mileage). All three probably cost me a similar amount. I either continue making a payment for a new car or for the existing one. Most leasees would go for the new car.

In the Marcc 2008 issue of Metropolis magazine (sorry no link that I can find) Roberta Gratz has an essay on the environmental impact of historical renovation as opposed to tearing down and building a new ‘greener’ building. She notes that:

” The greenest building is one that’s already built”

The struck me as being very relevant to two themes of this blog and my life these days: The hidden carbon cost of apparently environmentally-friendly products like organic produce (shipped how far to reach a wintry city like Rochester?) and the fact that when I buy something used I’m keeping its materials out of landfills and eliminating the need to make something new.

So I decide to buy the car I have already rather than buy a new one and thus add a carbon-intensive new motorized object to our collective environment. And while I have a dream to build a contemporary urban living space, I think I have to find a building and reuse it rather than build new. The ‘cost’ of tearing down and recycling or landfilling the building would far outweigh the advantages of ‘green’ new construction.

We cannot think about environmental issues the way we did in the past. Food that is grown without pesticides and fertilizers is great until you ship it a thousand miles to the consumer. That shipment just wiped out any advantages from an environmental perspective (the health advantages are also offset by the emissions associated with the travel). There is no free lunch for those who believe that they do right by buying this stuff.

Economically, with a recession upon us, the current administration’s solution is to hand out money and tell people to go forth and consume. This will allegedly stimulate the economy by increasing demand which in turn increases manufacturing. There’s only one problem with this: We live in a world that has fundamentally changed. If we all keep consuming at some point we turn all the raw materials of the planet into manmade objects. Not a pretty picture.

I saw a headline today that there are worldwide grain and food shortages because of American farmers growing corn for ethanol, a fuel most of us cannot use or afford if not subsidized by the government. The complexity of the idiocy behind this is mind-boggling.

The point here is that you cannot take a short term, simplistic approach to any purchasing decision these days. Do I buy a Prius to get an extra 20 MPG when that decision pushes a car somewhere into a landfill and adds another, albeit efficient, car into our global inventory? That’s the kind of question we have to ask ourselves in an environmentally damaged world.

Solar thermal power is generated by building a field of concave mirrors that focus the sun’s heat onto a liquid encased in pipes. The liquid is superheated and used to generate steam that powers turbines, generating electricity. In the south west, where open desert land and sunlight are plentiful, they are building these facilities as fast as they can. They are completely unrelated to conventional solar panels that convert light into electricity but are very costly to build.

“On sunny afternoons, those 10 plants would produce as much electricity as three nuclear reactors, but they can be built in as little as two years, compared with a decade or longer for a nuclear plant. Some of the new plants will feature systems that allow them to store heat and generate electricity for hours after sunset.”

NYTimes.com (link above)

New designs that focus the heat onto towers will work in less sunny areas. With a lot of discussion about starting to build new nuclear plants which are very efficient but create an unsustainable stream of radioactive waste, it’s important to understand that we have very clean alternatives. There are environmental impacts of building these large facilities on open land but they are nothing compared to the impact of any conventional energy source such as coal, gas or nuclear.

A team of US climate scientists using computer models has determined that there is no flexibility in how much greenhouse gas emissions we can continue to emit if we want to stop warming. The only viable goal is zero emissions. The value of this is that it gives us an unsullied goal, one that is easy to measure but very difficult to achieve. In fact I suspect the target we really have to shoot for is a negative emissions goal, one in which sequestration is an equally important part of the total number. This will be necessary to offset the growing demand for and use of energy worldwide by a rapidly growing global population. Those of us in the Western world have a responsibility to go beyond zero in our carbon emissions.