Category: Energy & Sustainability

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , ,

New England Environmental, Inc.’s new headquarters in Amherst, MA just became only the fifth property in Massachusetts (and the first in Western Massachusetts) to achieve LEED Platinum Certification.

I toured this facility several months ago during a Chamber of Commerce event, and saw features such as

  • Pavers that allow water to drain off driveways and parking areas
  • The 40KW photovoltaic array, providing solar electric power
  • Wonderful use of natural light
  • Waterless urinals

The green design features of this design are expected to save the company $21,000 a year, according to today’s Daily Hampshire Gazette (warning: typically, Gazette links are only open to subscribers).

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Marketing Tagged with , , ,

I just love this! While one of Los Angeles’ major freeways was closed (the so-called “carmageddon”), and Jet Blue offered $4 airfares for the 40-mile jaunt between Burbank and Long Beach, a group of cyclists

 issu[ed] a modern-day John Henry challenge: on their bikes, they would beat the plane to the other side of the city.

And they did. The cyclists, part of a group called Wolfpack Hustle, made the ride in an hour and thirty-five minutes. Another member of the group drove to the airport, arrived the requisite hour early, waited in the security line, boarded the plane, landed, and took a cab (which apparently got lost) to the finish line—arriving more than an hour after the cyclists, and after a challenger who made the trip by public transit and walking, and another who rollerbladed it.

That’s right: On Sunday, an airplane got its butt kicked by bicycles, metro rail, and a pair of rollerblades.

Score two for self-propelled transportation (bikes AND inline skates), and another for land-based mass transit. I thought it was pretty cool that when I was a high school student in the Bronx, I could easily beat the bus coming back from school on my five-mile bike ride, and took about the same time on the way there (uphill). But this, I have to say, is so much cooler. 🙂

(Thanks to Eric Eustache  (@E_volution on Twitter) for sharing this terrific article.)


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By Posted on Posted in censorship, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

For more than 30 years, one of the arguments I’ve made against nuclear power is the chilling effect on our freedom.

Now, it seems that Japan may have passed a law heading down that slippery slope. Or not—I am not so far convinced that the claims are accurate.

A blogger for the UK Progressive put up a rambling, jumbled article claiming that Japan has passed a law giving sweeping powers to shut down bloggers, people who post videos on Youtube, etc. when they’re critical of the government and/or TEPCO.

I did a bit of Googling and found dozens of other blogs basing their story on that same article, which I consider unreliable. But I did find this in the Tokyo Times, which seems to be a genuine news organization that fact-checks and posts corrections. The Tokyo Times article says the Computer Network Monitoring Law was passed on June 17.

It also says that during March and April, even before the law was passed, government agents sent 41

“letters of request” to internet providers, telecom companies, cable TV stations and others to take measures in order to respond to illegal information, including erasing any information from the Internet that can be seen as harmful to morality and public order.

However, this article links back to coverage in the Examiner which again ties back to the original, untrustworthy blog post. I certainly am not going to pore over all 6000 citations to see whether this story is legitimate. But it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, Protests and Crackdowns Tagged with , , , ,

Here’s one for the Encyclopedia Idiotica: Entergy, owner of the sorely troubled Vermont Yankee nuclear plant (with a history of safety issues going back at least to 1974 when the plant was quite new),

Cooling tower failure, Vermont Yankee
Vermont Yankee cooling tower fails, 2008. Photo by ISC ALC, Creative Commons license

just spent $50 million on new fuel and committed another $42 million to installing that fuel, knowing full well that the state will consider any operation beyond March, 2012 illegal. And this doesn’t count $100 million in post-Fukushma upgrades that will be required in the next few years.

The issue of whether Vermont Yankee will be bound by state law and forced to shut down March 21, 2012 will be adjudicated in court this September: a lawsuit brought on by Entergy’s attempt to torpedo its 2006 agreement to abide by the state’s decision, once it became obvious that the vote was not going Entergy’s way.

Add to this a few other factors:

  • Vermont Yankee is one of 23 reactors in the US that use essentially the same design as Fukushima; it’s not out of the question that the federal government could unilaterally shut all those plants down.
  • The year-long Associated Press study on nuclear power safety showed glaring holes in the entire industry; a new citizen action network, like the one of the late 70s, could revitalize the safe energy/no nukes movement and bring enormous pressure to close all the nuclear plants in the US.
  • In New England, opposition to nuclear power is already deeply entrenched and fairly well organized. It was New England’s Clamshell Alliance, after all, that gave birth to the national nuclear shutdown movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Even if Entergy manages to win in court, it’s obvious that any attempt to keep the plant running will be met with massive citizen opposition including very public protests and civil disobedience. This will inevitably make keeping the plant open a very expensive and slow operation.

And I’ll bet that Entergy will raise an argument on the order of “you can’t make us shut down, we just spent $92 million to refuel.” Since the company knew full well that this money could be completely wasted and went ahead anyway, I hope that Judge Murtha not only refuses to consider that line of “reasoning,” but makes sure the entire cost is borne not by innocent taxpayers and ratepayers of Vermont, not even by stockhoders who had nothing to do with this decision, but by the members of the Board of Directors who voted to squander this money, and to the executives that pushed for this vote.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Business Tagged with , ,

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, my area of Western Massachusetts grew wheat, barley, and other grains. Until recently, though, in my lifetime, farms around here basically grew no grains other than corn. Maybe a bit of amaranth as a decorative flower.

In the past five years or so, that’s begun to change, thanks in large measure to two local artisan bakers and a few craft beer brewers who have created demand for local grain.

Today, I stumbled on an announcement in my local paper about a two-day conference (today and tomorrow) on growing, processing, and marketing a variety of local grains. I’m not a farmer and won’t be attending. But as someone who thinks local community food self-sufficiency is going to be a very important issue in the coming years, I think that’s pretty darned cool.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , ,

If you’re thinking of solarizing your home, starting to compost, building with straw bales or other eco-friendly materials, collecting and reusing rainwater, or just learning about new green technologies you can easily make a part of your life, this weekend’s SolarFest in Tinmouth, Vermont may be very well worth the trip.

If past gatherings are any indication, this will be an informative, enjoyable festival, with lots of hands-on workshops, vendors offering a wide range of solutions for both do-it-yourselfers and have-it-dones (many at surprisingly low price points)—and some pretty good music, too. It’s a New England back-to-the-lander’s dream.

Tjhis years workshops are once again divided into these five tracks:  Renewable Energy, Green Building, Sustainable Agriculture, Thriving Locally, and (for kids and teens) The Solar Generation.

Within these categories, choose from such options as The Ecological House New England and How to Design a Zero-Carbon, Net-Zero-Energy Home (both in the Green Building track), separate seminars on raising chickens, goats, worms, and mushrooms (Sustainable Agriculture), increasing local food production and repairing your own bike (Thriving Locally).

The festival is an easy drive from Western Massachusetts, Albany, and much of Vermont and New Hampshire—and not too outrageously far away from New York City and Boston. Camping on-site.

For the second year in a row, I’ll be presenting. My session, “Green And Profitable: Harnessing the Marketing Advantages of Going Green,” will be in the Thriving Locally tent, sunday at 12:30, with a book signing immediately following at Northshire Books’s booth. Please stop by and say hello.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

In the UK Guardian, George Monbiot once again holds out nuclear as our salvation to the very real problem of climate change.

And I again disagree with his illogical conclusion. Here’s what I posted on the comment page:

George, what crazy logic you show! I wish I were going to be around Wednesday morning to debate you, but it will be 4 a.m. my time.

You cannot simply wave a magic wand and wish the problems of aging, badly designed nuclear plants away. That Daini did not have a meltdown while its neighbors at Dai’ichi had several is no argument that nuclear is safe. I am old enough to remember how the plants of the early 1970s were the new, safe generation–but these are the plants that failed not only at Dai’ichi, but at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl–and that in a very scary long-term study by the Associated Press (conducted over a year) that many of these (US) plants are literally rotting away, while regulators relax safety standards because the plants can’t meet them! 23 nuclear plants in the US alone use the same faulty design as Dai’ichi.  Chernobyl alone has caused a shocking 1 million deaths and $500,000,000,000 in property damage.

Oh, and then there are the dozens of near-miss–accidents that could have been catastrophic but by luck were fairly minor. From 1952 to 2009, there were at least 99 accidents causing loss of life or at least USD $50,000 in property damage, and that does not count the Fukushima accidents in 2010 and 2011.

Add in the many other problems: reliability, safety, waste storage, routine and nonroutine radiation releases, risk of terrorism–and subtract the enormous amount of energy and expense it takes to mine uranium, process it into nuclear fuel, transport it great distances, run it through the reactors (a very power-intensive process right there), and then keep the waste cooled and “safe” indefinitely. Now factor in the very long cycle of building a nuclear plant and getting it online, the completely unproven technologies of future reactors that we’re asked to embrace, and a host of other factors. Then consider how we could meet those energy needs easily and cleanly with deep conservation, solar, wind, small hydro, geothermal, etc. Why on earth would we want to risk all for so little benefit through a new nuclear programme?

Links to three of the four parts of the AP report are on my blog, at https://greenandprofitable.com/latest-ap-nuke-safety-report-population-growth-not-factored-in/ and https://greenandprofitable.com/nuclear-safety-procedures-are-absolutely-unacceptable/.

I did some research on newer nuclear plant designs recently, as I was adding a new introduction for the forthcoming rereleased Japanese edition of my book on nuclear power. And I can tell you I was NOT reassured that these newer designs are safer. The “generation 4” are just as unproven as the old ones, and they won’t come on line until 2040 anyway–far too late to address the climate change issue. Meanwhile, the ones currently in planning stages are Generation 2 and Generation 3–technology that the backers of Gen 4 reactors have already acknowledged is not adequately safe. WHY are we doing this?

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Politics

Guest Blog by Paul Rogat Loeb

Following the weather is beginning to feel like revisiting the Biblical plagues. Tornadoes rip through Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma-even Massachusetts. A million acres burn in Texas wildfires. The Army Corps of Engineers floods 135,000 acres of farmland and three million acres of bayou country to save Memphis and New Orleans. Earlier in the past year, a 2,000-mile storm dumped near-record snow from Texas to Maine, a fifth of Pakistan flooded, fires made Moscow’s air nearly unbreathable, and drought devastated China’s wheat crop.  You’d think we’d suspect something’s grievously wrong.
But media coverage rarely connects the unfolding cataclysms with the global climate change that fuels them. We can’t guarantee that any specific disaster is caused by our warming atmosphere. The links are delayed and diffuse. But considered together, the escalating floods, droughts, tornadoes, and hurricanes <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=warning-flooding-ahead>fit all the predicted models. So do the extreme snowfalls and ice storms, as our heated atmosphere carries more water vapor.  So why deem them isolated acts of God-instead of urgent warnings to change our course?
Scientists are more certain than ever, from the National Academy of Science and its counterparts in every other country to such “radical groups” as the American Chemical Society and American Statistical Society. But the media has buried their voices, giving near-equal “point/counterpoint” credence to a handful of deniers promoted by Exxon, the coal companies and the Koch brothers. Fox News’s managing editor <https://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46409.html>even prohibited any reporting on global climate change that didn’t immediately then question the overwhelming scientific consensus. The escalating disasters dominate the news, but stripped of context. We’re given no perspective to reflect on their likely root causes.
Meanwhile, leading Republicans who once acknowledged the need to act, like <https://motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/tim-pawlenty-will-steger-climate-change>Tim Pawlenty, disavow their previous stands like sinners begging forgiveness.  A Tea Party Congress insists that they know better than do all the world’s scientists, dismissing decades of meticulous research as Ivory Tower elitism. Even Obama has fallen largely silent, as if he can’t afford an honest discussion.
As a result, too many Americans still don’t know what to believe. We can’t see, smell or taste the core emissions that create climate change. The industrial processes that create the crisis are so familiar we don’t even question them, no more than the air that we breathe. And if we’re not getting hammered by the weather, the world still seems normal, particularly on a lovely summer day. Plus we’re told that in the current economic crisis we can’t afford even to think about climate change or any other urgent environmental issue, even though the technologies that provide the necessary alternatives are precisely those our country will need to compete economically. Add in a culture of overload and distraction, and it’s easy to retreat into denial or self-defeating resignation.  It’s as if <https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/28/gallups-public-opinion-on-global-warming-dead-last/>half our population was diagnosed with life-threatening but treatable cancer-visited the world’s leading medical centers to confirm it–and then decided instead to heed forwarded emails that assure them that they can freely ignore the counsel of the doctors and simply do nothing.
The antidote to denial and the forces that promote it is courage. And as Egypt and Tunisia remind us, courage is contagious. We need to act and speak out in every conceivable way, and demand that our leaders do the same.  We need to engage new allies, like religious evangelicals who’ve recently spoken out to defend “God’s creation,” from best-selling minister Rick Warren to highly conservative organizations like the Christian Coalition. We need to work with labor activists who link this ultimate issue with the renewal of American jobs. A recent <https://www.bluegreenalliance.org/about_us/organizations>BlueGreen Alliance conference, for instance, brought together leaders of major unions like the United Steel Workers, SEIU, Communications Workers of America, United Auto Workers, Laborers’ International, and American Federation of Teachers, with environmental groups like the Sierra Club, National Resource Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation and Union of Concerned Scientists, all speaking about the need to invest in an economy where both ordinary workers and the planet are respected.  We need to join with these allies and others to voice our outrage at those risking our common future for greed. We need to find creative ways to do this until America’s political climate comes to grips with the changing climate of the earth. Here’s hoping the mounting disasters will finally teach us to turn off The Weather Channel and begin taking action.
Paul Loeb is author of Soul of a Citizen, with 130,000 copies in print including a newly updated second edition. He’s also the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. See <a ahref=”https://www.paulloeb.org/”>www.paulloeb.org</a>  To receive Paul’s articles directly please email <a href=”mailto:sympa@npogroups.org”>sympa@npogroups.org</a>  with the subject line:  subscribe paulloeb-articles

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government

Here’s the latest installment in the Associated Press’s very disturbing report on nuclear power plant safety.

Adding to the previous reports’ deep concerns about neglected maintenance and regulators who scale back requirements rather than enforce them, the newest installment demonstrates that regulators have basically ignored massive population growth in many areas around  nuclear power plant sites.

Part of the “safety planning” (such as it was) for nuclear plant siting was to place the plants in relatively remote areas (still far too close to major population centers, but usually 20-50 miles away). But suburban/exurban infill has changed the picture dramatically. Evacuation plans designed to move out a rural population have in most cases never been upgraded to deal with the new realities.

As one of many examples cited in the study, a 10-mile radius around Florida’s two-reactor Saint Lucie complex had only 43,332 residents in 1980; now, the population is 202,010 (more than 4-1/2 times as large).

Following the Fukushima accidents, the US government recommended that its citizens living closer than 50 miles evacuate. If there were a 50-mile evacuation at Indian Point, 24 miles north of New York City, 17 million people in three different states would be affected. Ever try to get out of NYC at rush hour? This would be far worse. Even the 268,906 who live within 10 miles of the plant would be quite challenging to evacuate.

HOW have we allowed this madness to continue?

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , ,

Here is the smoking gun—the clear, hard evidence that the nuclear industry AND its regulators care nothing about our safety.

The Associated Press spent a year investigating nuclear power plant safety. And found something really scary: when regulators encounter problems, instead of shutting the plants to make repairs, the regulators relax their standards. Double-plus ungood, as George Orwell would say.

In a long bylined story by investigative reporter Jeff Donn, the respected journalism group lays out a harrowing picture of deferred maintenance, aging parts, reactor licenses renewed without any semblance of adequate investigation, and a “regulatory” agency whose response to problems is to say, oh, we didn’t mean to be so tough, sorry, go right on risking the public safety:

Time after time, officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased…

The result? Rising fears that these accommodations by the NRC are significantly undermining safety…

Examples abound. When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised…

Failed cables. Busted seals. Broken nozzles, clogged screens, cracked concrete, dented containers, corroded metals and rusty underground pipes…could escalate dangers in the event of an accident.

To name one of many examples cited in the article: valves that were allowed to leak up to 11.5 cubic feet per hour each (there are four, so total permissible leakage was 46 cubic feet per hour per plant) could not meet that standard, so the NRC bumped the limit all the way up to 200 cubic feet per hour for the set of four—that’s more than 500% over the original standard. Even this was not enough, however; one Georgia plant admitted releases of 576 cubic feet per hour.

In short, not only have we experienced a whole lot of radiation releases as these parts age, but the risk of catastrophic accident is far higher than most of us would have imagined. Especially since the plants were only designed with a 40-year lifespan in mind, and yet the NRC is granting 20-year license renewals in a way that seems almost like a pro forma rubber stamp.

And speaking of radiation releases, Donn posted a new article June 21, documenting that…

Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping

Under the best of circumstances, nuclear power is an extremely risky, energy-intensive operation where human error and mechanical failure can combine to create massive catastrophe. And this is far from the best of circumstances; this is playing Russian roulette not with a single individual but with the lives of thousands or even millions, all around the country.

This is a game with no winners.

It is time to demand from Washington the leadership it should have shown all along. It is time to shut down every operating nuclear power plant and take steps to stabilize the infrastructure so serious accidents won’t happen even after the plants are no longer generating power. The stakes are unacceptably high.

Read those two stories all the way through—and let’s think together about action!

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