Digital not necessarily greener

Image by jpockele via Flickr

Digital devices take a lot of energy, even if they only consume a little bit during operation. Tremendously important that we understand this as we head into the Long Emergency.

Great idea: refer the Gas Tax/Highway Porkfest to Voters

Who's destabilizing the climate -- that's right, we are! Graphic is 2000 per-capita greenhouse gas emissions with red highest, natch. Image via Wikipedia

Environmental group pushing Legislature to combat emissions

SALEM — An environmental group is threatening to refer the Legislature’s gas tax to the ballot unless lawmakers do more to combat greenhouse gas emissions in the Eugene-Springfield area specifically, and elsewhere in Oregon. . . .

Another Salem Cinema gem

We are so lucky to have Salem Cinema.

Help collect the data needed for better bike facilities in Salem

Eric L., the indefatigable instigator of incessant bike information sends:

Image via Wikipedia

Hello!











Last summer, 21 volunteers counted bicycles at 32 locations and generated
40 manual counts. It was a great success! Already it is informing decisions about bicycle infrastructure, funding, and future demand.

And it's time to do it again!

Help document the way biking is growing in the Salem-Keizer area. We need volunteers to count bicycles at key intersections in the region. We hope to bring the number of locations up to about 50. There are areas of town where we didn't count, significant new pieces of infrastructure to assess (hello Union St. Railroad Bridge!), and year-over-year changes to note.

Counts will be performed in July, August, and some in September. They will be scheduled for a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, and occur during rush hour - either between 7am and 9am, or between 4pm and 6pm. You can choose the day and time slot that works best for you!

If you'd like to participate, we'll treat you to some pizza and soda. On Wednesday, June 24th at 5pm, the City of Salem, Salem-Keizer Area Transportation Study, and Mid-Willamette Valley Bicycle Transportation Alliance will hold a training and orientation. It will last about an hour. Please RSVP to salembikes [at] gmail [dot] com.

For more see the Breakfast on Bikes site (2008 or 2009).

A little reality with the bark off

The acerbic (cranky, dyspeptic, misanthropic, you pick the adjective) James Howard Kunstler is one of the best at describing the period we're entering and perhaps the most-consistent advocate of a sensible policy approach to responding. From this week's blog post:

Which brings me back to the New Urbanist annual meet-up last week in Denver. Given the gathering conditions of what I variously call The Long Emergency or the economic clusterf[log], they have had to shift their focus starkly. For years, their stock-in-trade was the greenfield New Town or Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND), a severe reform of conventional suburban development. That sort of reform work was only possible when

1. the continued expansion of suburbia seemed utterly inevitable, requiring heroic mitigation and
   
   
2. when they could team up with the production home-builders to get their TND projects built.

To the group's credit, they realize that these conditions are no more. Suburbia is now cratering, both as a repository of wealth in real estate and as a practical matter of everyday existence. They get that the energy crisis and all its implications are real and that our response to it had better be deft. They understand that the capital resources we thought we had for Big Projects are flying into a black hole at the speed of light. Mostly they see that he time for "cutting edge" fashionista techno-triumphalist grandiosity is over.

To put it bluntly, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) is perhaps the only surviving collective intelligence left in the United States that is producing ideas consistent with the reality. They recognize that our survival depends on down-scaling and re-localization. They recognize the crisis we will soon face in food production, and the desperate need to reactivate the relationship between the way we inhabit the landscape and the way we feed ourselves. They recognize that the solution to the liquid fuels crisis is not cars that can run by other means but on walkable towns and cities connected by public transit.

This is exactly what you will not find in the pages of The New York Times or the political corridors of power. Oh, by the way, the Obama administration contacted one of the leading lights of the New Urbanism in the weeks after the inauguration. He never heard back from the White House. I guess they're not interested.

Cross your fingers!

Image via Wikipedia

A real-estate developer is putting together a downtown grocery store. Hope it succeeds --- which would mean he's found someone with a lot of successful experience in the grocery trade to run it. It's a tough business, with thin margins.

Americans are incredibly spoiled when it comes to groceries and very price-conscious. You see people dump incredible sums on electronic toys that will be landfilled in a couple years, tops, and yet many of these people won't buy food that is priced to permit a decent life for the people who grow it. These same people have a cardiac if their milk or eggs go up a quarter, yet they buy bottled water by the case . . . .

A downtown grocery in Salem should quickly work to make deals with as many local growers as possible and to help them make the investments necessary to provide fresh seasonal fruits and vegetables year-round and all the local cheeses, meats, and breads from places like Cascade Baking Co. If the store only offers generica, well, people can get generica at Costco, Winco, and Fred Meyer for a lot less than a small downtown grocery can provide it for.

How to get a grip on meth and other ills in Salem

Stop giving a medical/social adjustment problem to the police to handle.

Have you had "The Talk" with your kids and grandkids?

Ignore the cement -- fossil fuel carbon emissions are a perfect correlate to consumption (depletion). Image via Wikipedia

The Talk is in essence a constantly updated survey of the state of the planet through a hydrocarbon geologist's eyes. It plows methodically through reams of energy-geek data. World Conventional Oil and Oil Sands Reserves, 1980–2007. Energy Profit Ratio for Liquid Hydrocarbons. Canadian Gas Deliverability Scenarios from All Sources. The small-font notes at the bottom of each PowerPoint slide enumerate sources that read like a general anaesthetic in print form: BP Statistical Review of World Energy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, EIA International Energy Outlook. Pie charts and bar graphs with several rainbows' worth of colour and an overabundance of italicized and all-capped words: "The absolute first priority," that kind of thing. (By the way, it should be "to reduce energy consumption as soon as possible.")

The Talk is all kinds of policy-wonky. Your eyes could glaze over. You could even miss the two slides Dave always says are the only ones you must remember. The first is a single-line graph depicting "World Per Capita Annual Primary Energy Consumption by Fuel 1850–2007," which climbs by 761 percent over its 157-year timeline and flips from 82 percent renewable biomass (mostly wood) at the 1850 end to 89 percent non-renewables (almost entirely fossil fuels) at the 2007 end. The second critical slide has three line graphs in horizontal sequence, all tracking curves that begin in 1850, around the time humanity started drilling for oil in a serious way, and then spiking impossibly high at the right-hand, 2007 termini of their X axes. Global population today: 5.3 times global population in 1850. Per capita energy consumption today: 8.6 times that of 1850. Total energy consumption today: 45 times 1850's.

You could also miss the way these figures resonate with The Talk's voluminous data on oil and natural gas and coal reserves. You could miss how our current trajectory obliges us to rely on hydrocarbons for 86 percent of our projected primary energy needs in 2030, and how that fits with the strong case Hughes makes that the global hydrocarbon peak (the point at which global energy supply will begin an irrevocable decline, making the energy price shocks of the past couple of years start to look like the good old days) is estimated to occur nine years before that date.

Here’s the upshot: if you plan to drive a car or heat a house or light a room in 2030, The Talk is telling you your options will be limited, to say the least. Even if you’re convinced climate change is UN-sponsored hysteria or every last puff of greenhouse gas will soon be buried forever a mile underground or ducks look their best choking on tar sands tailings, Dave Hughes is saying your way of life is over. Not because of the clouds of smoke, you understand, but because we’re running out of what makes them.

As Salem thinks of locking up Minto farm acres forever

The question should not be how many acres of farmland can we afford to trade for cash today at the expense of people tomorrow. The question is how many acres of asphalt can we rip up and turn back into Willamette Valley farmland, and how fast. Image via Wikipedia

Smarter people recall the most important thing about good farmland:

"They aren't making any more of it."

The money quote from the story:

The fundamentals remain in place for a long-term boom in the prices of everything ag-related. The simplest metric to consider is the amount of farmland per person worldwide: In 1960 there were 1.1 acres of arable farmland per capita globally, according to data from the United Nations. By 2000 that had fallen to 0.6 acre (see chart above, "Precious Acres"). And over the next 40 years the population of the world is projected to grow from 6 billion to 9 billion.

"Land is scarce and will become scarcer as the world has to double food output to satisfy increased demand by 2050," says Joachim von Braun, director general at the International Food Policy Research Institute. "With limited land and water resources, this will automatically lead to increased valuations of productive land. And it goes hand in hand with water. Water scarcity will probably increase even more than land."

Don't forget to attend City Council on Monday, June 22!

Salem Daily Photo -- a nice find

Here's a site full of the abundant beauty that surrounds us here in Salem: Salem Daily Photo, a just-discovered website that has been documenting this beauty for some time. SDP is on reduced-posting status now, but still offers a huge archive of nice shots that remind us to take time to smell the roses, observe the beauty of the rhodies, and to eat the fleeting strawberries, because we can never know what tomorrow will bring.

UPDATE -- A kind reader sends: There's a similar site called "Salem, Oregon Daily Photo Diary." It started as a challenge to prove to the photographer's out-of-town family that there's something interesting to do in Salem every single day: http://salemphotodiary.blogspot.com