UPDATE: It's not just the heat, it's the acidity (Part II)

Image via Wikipedia

Ho-hum, just another sign that we're approaching a collapse in the ecosystem in which all terrestrial life ultimately depends, no biggie ...

In addition to contributing to a global greenhouse effect, some of the carbon dioxide from cars, factories and power plants dissolves in the ocean, creating the same carbonic acid that gives soda pop its tang. The process makes seawater slightly more acidic, and also gobbles up carbonate, a basic building block of seashells.

The result can be an environment where shells dissolve, destroying plankton, marine snails and other small creatures that sustain the rest of the marine food web. Acidified water also can kill fish eggs and larvae.

Byrne and his colleagues developed a more precise way to measure pH, using a dye that turns from purple to bright yellow as acidity increases. On board the ship, they used instruments called spectrophotometers to measure the color change and nail pH levels 10 times more accurately than possible before.

Debby Ianson, an ocean climate modeler for Canada's Institute of Ocean Sciences who was not involved in the project, said the approach is a good one. "We need studies like this," she wrote in an e-mail.

As expected, the researchers found acidification was strongest in the top layer of water, closest to the atmosphere. Normal seawater is slightly alkaline, with a pH value of about 8. Over the past 15 years, average pH levels in the top 300 feet of the ocean dropped 0.026 pH units. That sounds tiny, but is equivalent to a 6 percent jump in acidity, Byrne said.

Time for a Repost: crucial 11 minute video

On the heels of Greg Craven's great talk in Salem last night, I was moved to dig up this video, posted a couple years ago -- about 11 minutes. Helps inform your exploration of "What's the Worst That Could Happen?" as Greg's excellent book puts it.

Update on Oregon's #1 Polluter: Too Little, Too Late

A coal power plant: Schematic for a weapon of global mass destruction. Image via Wikipedia

While it's somewhat good news that PGE is now proposing to shutdown Boardman, Oregon's top pollution source, in 2020, that's at least six years too late. The right answer remains 2014 at the latest.

Note that Salem's own M. Lee Pelton, President of Willamette University, earns a very handsome fee for sitting on the PGE Board. When you see him around, you might ask him why PGE claims to need a decade to convert Boardman to natural gas when everyone else around the world can get gas turbines built in two years or less (especially when siting them in an existing power plant facility) -- and ask him what he's going to tell his children and grandchildren about PGE's lackadaisical non-rush to get off coal in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence for our urgent need to do so ASAP.

Here's an update from Environment Oregon.

Over the winter holidays, you took action asking the U.S. EPA to adopt the nation’s first major greenhouse gas regulations. I want to update you on several great things that have happened since.

On December 22, 2009, Environment Oregon and our citizen outreach team released its “America’s Biggest Polluters” report. The report highlighted Oregon’s biggest polluter, Portland General Electric’s coal-fired power plant in Boardman, Oregon. Our press conference was a lot of fun with Santa Claus checking his list, checking it twice, finding the Boardman coal plant naughty, not nice. Also speaking was Jocelyn Orr, who is one of our citizen outreach directors; Robin Everett of the Sierra Club; and of course myself. You can watch a video of the press conference at NaturalOregon.org. Our report was also covered by The Oregonian and the Willamette Week.

Going into the Copenhagen climate summit, we knew that states had already made serious commitments to reducing global warming pollution, and our report showed that these state climate policies meant the Obama Administration was well- positioned to put down serious commitments to the international community. An important lesson was learned at Copenhagen: the world’s states and provinces will remain the laboratories of democracy and innovation in our fight to reduce global warming pollution.

The biggest thing happening right now in Oregon to combat global warming is the effort to shutdown PGE’s Boardman coal plant. It’s amazing that as much wind and hydro power our state has, 40% of our energy still comes from coal, and nearly a third of that pollution is from PGE’s Boardman power plant. In addition, the Boardman coal plant has spewed out mercury-forming toxic air pollution that exceeds Clean Air Act levels for decades.

Environment Oregon, Sierra Club, Citizens’ Utility Board, Northwest Energy Coalition, Pacific Environmental Advocacy Center, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Ecumenical Ministries, Friends of the Columbia Gorge, and many other organizations have been fighting to shutdown PGE’s Boardman coal plant by 2014. PGE 30-year plan for its power generation is under review by the Public Utility Commission right now and PGE’s plan is to continue operating the Boardman plant over that timeframe.

Operating Boardman past 2014, let alone all the way to 2040, is simply unacceptable. PGE’s own plans, and our studies, demonstrate the most cost-effective year to shutdown Boardman is in 2014. The electricity can be replaced with a mix of efficiency, wind, solar, natural gas, and biomass. The key is to get these technologies built as quickly as possible.

Last week, we had a tremendous win. PGE announced it would pursue a 2020 shutdown of Boardman. (You can read my statement in reaction here.) While this isn’t nearly soon enough, it’s a great step in the right direction. Over the course of the next three months, Environment Oregon will be focused on drumming up public support from thousands of Oregonians just like you to show PGE and the Public Utility Commission that the public supports a 2014 shutdown.

PGE’s 2020 announcement couldn’t have been done without our support. And not only will we need your continued support for shutting down Boardman, but also for EPA’s ongoing rulemaking to enact the nation’s first greenhouse gas regulations. We’ve sent a few action alerts over the past couple weeks on how Senator Murkowski of Alaska is trying to block the EPA’s action. Hopefully you’ve already sent a message to Senators Merkley and Wyden.

As our campaigns to shutdown PGE’s Boardman coal plant and to enact federal greenhouse gas regulations proceed, I will be sure to keep in touch. In the meantime, keep reading the papers. I expect you will see our name frequently.

Sincerely,
Brock Howell
State Policy Advocate
Environment Oregon
1536 SE 11th Avenue, Suite B
Portland, Oregon 97214
Cell: (503) 421-9936
Work: (503) 231-1986 x314
Fax: (503) 231-4007
Email: brock@environmentoregon.org
Facebook: http://facebook.com/enviroregon
Twitter: http://twitter/enviroregon

UPDATE: Letter to the Editor -- Well said!

Here they go again

PGE's announced plan to shut down Boardman in 2020 reminds me of Yogi Berra's quote, "deja vu all over again." In 1992, two ballot measures proposed to permanently shut down the Trojan Nuclear Plant due to a lack of high-level nuclear waste disposal and persistent corrosion in Trojan's steam generator tubes. PGE had operated Trojan for 16 years and desperately sought to keep it open. Yet four months before the election, it announced it would voluntarily shut it down in 1996 and any effort to close it before that time would cause massive cost increases, combined with blackouts and brownouts. Both ballot measures failed.

Six days after the election, a radioactive leak from a steam generator tube shut down Trojan. Then a leak from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission showed that NRC scientists had opposed a waiver allowing Trojan to operate in 1992 with its deteriorating steam generator tubes. On Jan. 3, 1993, PGE permanently shut down Trojan. No massive cost increases, blackouts or brownouts occurred.

Fast forward to Boardman. This coal plant is a dangerous polluter and the risk of catastrophic climate change is driven in part by the 5 million tons of carbon dioxide that Boardman emits annually. According to many scientists, we do not have much to time to prevent a tipping point in global warming. While PGE willingly admits that this warming is taking place, its actions are similar to the case of Trojan.

We should not let PGE gamble with our future. It has had more than enough time to massively invest in energy efficiency and renewable energy. Operating Boardman until 2020 spews 30 million more tons of carbon into the atmosphere, lasting a thousand years. The Sierra Club analysis is correct. PGE should close Boardman in 2014.

LLOYD MARBET Boring
The writer is executive director of the Oregon Conservancy Foundation.

A harbinger of Spring's Abundance: Minto Island Growers CSA Signup

Image via Wikipedia

Salem is smack dab in the middle of the Willamette Valley and its superb growing conditions for myriad crops and animals. Living here means that, compared to most places, it's easy to enjoy food that is far fresher, tastier, and more nutritious than people can get elsewhere.

One of the best ways to do that is to join in as part of a community-supported agriculture (CSA) venture, such as the one offered by Minto Island Growers here within the Salem city limits. CSAs are different, because you're not a mere customer -- you're a shareholder, an investor who provides two vital ingredients for a successful small farm: patient capital and an eager market. Unlike a customer who trades cash for produce at the store (often from California, Chile, or even beyond), a CSA shareholder is an integral part of the operation, because you join the CSA and invest your capital up front, assuming some of the risk of the farming operation, while gaining the benefits of abundance and making small, human-scale farming remain possible in these days of very high land costs and excruciatingly tight lending.

In return for your capital investment, you get a regular produce box of whatever is in season, typically once a week in June - October, where your investment is more than repaid with interest with fresh, just-picked fruits and vegetables from right near home. You are still investing, not buying -- if there's bad weather and production is down, you will get a smaller box, and maybe some crops will fail entirely. But, on the other hand, when conditions are good, as they so often are here, you will get way more than the value of your investment share back as ultra-good eating.

CSA share investment opportunities go fast, because many people are learning to recognize a good deal when they see it, despite its slightly unconventional nature. There may be a few shares left in the Minto Island Growers' CSA -- check with them first. (And check out their newsletters from years past, where you can see the contents of each week's produce box.) But if not, keep looking and asking around--the more of us that want better food, the more people will want to provide it, and together we can restore local, responsibly grown food to our tables.

Another good way to promote good food is to help support the Salem Saturday Market by joining with and volunteering with the Friends of Salem Saturday Market. It's a fun group of local folks who are intent on polishing our local market, already a gem, into something even finer. They're looking for more folks to help out, and it's a great way for you to get plugged into the local food scene.

Good rundown on our peak oil predicament

Follow the bouncing economy -- oil prices drop, demand rises, prices spike, sending demand down with prices to follow, and so on. Note that the "good times" get less good each iteration of the cycle. Image via Wikipedia

Just like the Butterscotch Man couldn't run till he got warm and could only get warm by running, we're in a fix -- now that the easy oil is gone, the cost of getting the remaining (deeper, more distant, more sour) oil translates into a price that the economy can't sustain.

Excellent writeup on this in the mainstream press here.

Speaking of Limits to Growth

A LOVESalem foreign correspondent (from Bellingham, WA) writes:

With one minor exception, this well-written article is my public presentation in a nutshell. We cannot burn carbon we don't have, and carbon we cannot burn cannot contribute to global climate change. Furthermore, stimulus to make tons of green widgets at a time of declining energy supplies cannot succeed unless we deliberately reduce energy use (and economic activity) elsewhere in the 'economy.' Bad things are already happening in the world because of human-induced climate change, and I don't doubt we will burn as much of the remaining carbon as we're able, thereby causing even worse effects as we continue our grand climate experiment. However, some of the wilder climate possibilities constantly referred to in Copenhagen would require continued exponential growth (hence energy use) for the remainder of this century - and that is impossible. As Chris points out, creating a totally new energy infrastructure has always taken 2-3 decades - and that was in times of economic growth. The infamous 2005 Hirsch report emphasized that unfortunate constraint and warned of impending economic disaster because of the (then) upcoming oil peak; five years have now passed and we've basically made zero progress in creating any new energy sources and had one large economic hiccup. We've also bumped up against one of the limits to growth (oil supply), and it was unpleasant; soon our 'recovery' will bump into it again (if that recovery is actually real).

The one minor exception occurs in the very last part of the article, where Chris implies a need to reduce population. If he had read Catton's books "Overshoot" and "Bottleneck" he'd be able to complete the argument - that peak everything includes food and people (but apparently not fantasy). In the end, nature has always had her way, and always will. What we can do is guide as many toward that bottleneck as we're able to influence, and try to re-learn the ways of quasi-sustainable production of food and other stuff so that some humans actually pass through Catton's bottleneck.

Coincidentally, in a few hours I'll be attending a presentation continuing a topic from 2 months ago put on by a group calling itself "Great Decisions" - on the subject of the world food crisis. Fred Berman, a local "small" farmer and eatery owner, is presenting. - tooj

I'm not as optimistic as he is about economic collapse preventing us from the worst scenarios of runaway climate change --- recall that, because coal is so filthy, the UK is still the nation responsible for the largest share of the carbon emissions that are destabilizing our climate, even though the size of the UK was never large relative to the size of the US economy, much less the global economy of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

In other words, there are those who say economic collapse will save us from the worst because of reduced carbon emissions. I think it more likely that the dominant paradigm (that it's possible to have this thing called an "economy" that can exist and be healthy in a world of collapsing ecosystems) will continue long enough to burn enough coal that we'll see emissions go up even as economic activity goes down. If that's the case ... I'm reminded of Khrushchev's warning that, in the wake of atomic warfare, "the living will envy the dead."

UPDATE: I skipped a step -- remember, essentially all the IPCC projections IGNORE feedbacks from melting tundra and offshore methane clathrates, both of which are huge, huge, huge stockpiles of a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 is. We're already seeing arctic melting in Alaska, Siberia etc., and we're finding more and more methane bubbles all the time. As the atmosphere warms, the tundra will be releasing ever-greater volumes of methane into the atmosphere, accelerating the process. Once we warm the shallow oceans off the continental shelves, where the methane trapped in ice crystals is stored, then it's all bets are off for climate, as we have no solid way to know how many other feedback loops we'll trigger, including (in addition to those above), forest fires -- huge carbon reservoirs "drained to the atmosphere" in days, and droughts destroying tropical forests -- releasing all the trapped carbon in the soils.

Don't forget tonight, 1/19, at Salem Public Library at 6:30 p.m.

A talk by Greg Craven, creator of "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See" and the author of the excellent book "What's The Worst That Could Happen: A rational response to the climate change debate."

What higher ed will look like in a post-carbon world: The Communiversity

The "education bubble" -- characterized by the sprawling mismatch between the costs and benefits of higher education -- is going to pop because the only way the bubble can stay inflated is by piggybacking on other bubbles, the kind that have been popping left and right lately, and that seem highly unlikely to be able to reinflate now that we are comprehensively broke and without the cheap energy bonanza that, for the last two centuries, made "growth" nearly effortless.

UPDATE: Moody's doesn't like the prospects for higher ed either.

To a great extent, an abundance of wealth--the kind that supports institutions of higher ed--is nothing but a marker for the presence of an abundance of cheap energy. In fact, one would not be far wrong to state that money is little more than an accounting trick for tracking society's total throughput of energy. Only problem is that money, the accounting trick, appears to remain even after the energy has been converted from a useful, high-quality, low-entropy form into waste heat or waste materials. Thus, as we've ridden up the peak energy mountain, we've created a bigger and bigger mountain of money to account for all that energy. Now that the net energy available for use is declining faster and faster, the money is becoming, shall we say, dubious. Sure we'd all like some to use right away, but the days of intelligent people telling kids to assume tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for "an education" are rapidly drawing to a close.

It's interesting to reflect on how we'll recover from our fling with mass higher education -- here's one prospect for the future of higher education for a post-carbon world.

An intriguing experiment in community-oriented higher education is coming to Sandpoint, Idaho: it’s called the Communiversity. It’s not a college. It’s a cross-generational, interdisciplinary learning center.

From the Bonner County Daily Bee:

SANDPOINT — No one is using qualifying phrases like “instead of” or “apart from.” To the contrary, members of the local business, education and government communities are careful to note that they believe a proposed new plan for higher education will complement, not compete with, the Wild Rose Foundation’s pledge to build a University of Idaho campus here.

But with that plan on the back burner for more than two years now, excitement has shifted to a wholly different kind of university concept.

“It’s called a ‘Communiversity,’” said Connie Kimble, who oversees the individualized occupational training for the work-based learning program at Sandpoint High School. “It’s the same idea we’ve been talking about for years.

“The Wild Rose Foundation wanted to build a campus, but got stopped because of economic reasons,” she added. “In that case, a single entity would have driven things, but under this model, the community drives it.”

Kimble first heard about the Communiversity concept while attending an education seminar in Atlanta. The first such institution, she learned, got underway in 2005 when a Georgia firm called the Warren Featherbone Company donated 127,000 square feet of unused manufacturing space on seven acres of land to create a community learning center in Gainesville, Geo.

By the following year, the City of Gainesville had partnered with surrounding communities, as well as nearby Brenau University, the Lanier Technical College and the Georgia Power Company, to bring multiple financial and educational resources together under the single umbrella of the Featherbone Communiversity. Along with degree-oriented classes, the campus offered myriad continuing education and special interest courses, coupled with a business incubator that helped carry entrepreneurial dreams forward and an interactive children’s “Imaginarium” designed to spark a lifelong passion for learning.

Kimble returned from Atlanta convinced that she had seen the direction for higher education in her own community.

Quick, easy, humane mousetrap

A vicious killing was recently reported close to LOVESalem HQ -- of an errant mouse who found its way into the house of a person who very strongly preferred otherwise.

Well, timely this then. Click the illustration to go to the writeup.

To be ignorant of history is to remain forever childlike

Image via Wikipedia

A LOVESalem field correspondent sends news of this delightful citizen-powered community building project:

Local historian Virginia Green and the Salem Heritage Network (SHN, pronounced "Shine") are proud to present "Shine on Salem 150." This project will highlight 150 years of Salem government, culminating on Oct. 22, 2010: the 150th anniversary of Salem's city charter.

Join us each day on the SHN blog as we highlight one year in Salem history. Each day, we will also provide a different event, meeting, visit or other activity for Salem residents to learn and participate in their city.

Visit the Salem Heritage Network blog every day starting Monday, January 22, to learn new tidbits about the City of Salem and find interesting things to do: http://salem-heritage-network.blogspot.com/

A press release follows below. For more information, please contact Virginia Green at vagreen9@gmail.com or (503) 581-6221.

Thanks!
Stephanie Matlock Allen
Salem Heritage Network
samatlock@gmail.com

**********
SHINE on Salem 150

Beginning on January 22, 2010. Salem Heritage Network will begin highlighting each of the 150 years of Salem’s municipal history, one year each day, continuing for 150 days.

Each day’s feature will be headed by the year, followed by a notation of two or three important world events of that year.

Next will be an illustration of a local event in that year. The black and white historical photographs are from the Oregon Historical Photograph Collections of the Salem Public Library, administered by volunteers led by Don Christensen. Tom Green, Jr. took the contemporary color photographs.

The historical event will be described in a brief paragraph.

The feature will conclude with the location of the photograph and an invitation to visit the present-day site or to attend a civic activity associated with this event.

Since this is an internet blog, there is opportunity for comments by any viewer. It is hoped that this will become a community effort, with many new events and personalities added.

The purpose of this feature is not only to recall local historical events, but also to introduce the city government itself. Several Departments, as well as Boards and Commissions, have offered information about their founding and their activities.

Both our cultural heritage and the present organization of our city government are very much part of our daily lives. This online feature can suggest ways to participate in our current community services and help direct the course of our city’s future ~ perhaps for the next 150 years.

Some history

Salem began in 1842 as a classroom, the Oregon Institute, now Willamette University. The pioneering Methodist missionaries founded the school. In that year their settlement near Wheatland was moved to Mill Creek.

In 1844, the church discontinued the mission and appointed William Willson as agent to sell off lots to "worthy individuals" in order to raise money for the Institute and attract settlers to the new town, which they named Salem. Willson drew up the first plat of Salem, covering an area thirteen blocks by five blocks, bounded by the Willamette River and Mission, Church, and Division streets. The Marion County Clerk recorded the plat in 1850.

Salem became the capital of the Oregon Territory in 1851. The Oregon Territory became a state in 1859. The process of Salem’s incorporation as a city began in 1857, but was a controversial issue, and the charter was not granted until October 22, 1860, 150 years ago. This is the date we are celebrating on the website as the feature “SHINE on Salem 150.”