Greg’s Corner August 2006
Global Warming–We Can Make a Difference
By Greg Petty

The hard facts are in. The earth is warming. In the eons of our planet’s history, the current warming of our environment is rapid and unprecedented. The scientific community is united and no longer disputes that we have a serious problem.

The first six months of this year saw the highest average temperature since record keeping began. June was the second hottest month on record. We have heard stories of the glaciers disappearing. The glaciers on Mt. Kilimanjaro, at 19,340 feet and Africa’s highest peak, are almost gone after existing there for over 11,000 years. The same melting trend has been reported in Alaska and Patagonia. The most disturbing event has been the recent breaking off of six miles of the Jakobshavn ice pack in Greenland! To quote an article by Robert Holtz in the Los Angeles Times last month, “By 2005, Greenland was beginning to lose more ice volume than anyone had anticipated – an annual loss of up to 52 cubic miles…The volume of freshwater ice dumped into the Atlantic Ocean has almost tripled in a decade.” Picture Wilmington, Myrtle Beach, Washington D.C., Philadelphia and New York City under water. This is not a scare tactic.

These global changes also affect our water tables, the production of electricity from snow melt, and more ominously, the growing season and the shift in the fertility of America’s farmland known as the breadbasket of the world. Birds are migrating earlier and harmful insects such as mosquitoes are proliferating. The outright warning is that past civilizations have succumbed to climate changes and we should not consider our civilization immune to such changes.

Americans, with approximately 5% of the world’s population, consume somewhere around 25% of its carbon energy sources. We simply must begin to make changes to this consumption habit and provide a better model of sustainable economic development for developing countries. The greatest error of all would be for those emerging economies to follow our model of over-consumption. America, along with the rest of the G8 countries, needs to assist developing countries with technology and assistance to develop cleaner sources and production of energy. This assistance goes hand-in-hand with helping them to manage their valuable resources. But we have to do it at home first. Thus far, America has come down heavily on the side of exploitation of these resources rather than on the side of conservation and sustainable assistance. Instead, we are the world’s model of conspicuous consumption. The evidence suggests we continue this course at our own peril and the peril of all the other species that inhabit the earth.

China provides the example of economic development whose continuance the global environment cannot suffer. China, like America, has vast reserves of easily extractable coal and is using its reserves to build many massive power-generating plants without carbon dioxide reducing emission scrubbers or other methods of efficient coal burning. In his review of the book Big Coal-The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future by Jeff Goddell, Corey Powell notes, “Coal accounts for nearly 40 percent of America’s carbon dioxide emissions; it provides more than two-thirds for China, the world’s fastest-opening CO2 spigot.” Guess where the CO2 goes?  Straight to the American Northwest and California. Not only are we receiving particulate matter from their dust storms and auto pollution, we also receive far more deadly carbon dioxide from their power generation. We are paying a direct price for their development at the expense of our environment and impacts on our health.

So What Can I Do?
Earlier this year, I made a contribution to the Union for Concerned Scientists and in return I received a great book entitled The Consumers Guide to Effective Environmental Choices. I recommend this book to everyone who wishes to obtain an in-depth analyses of the large impacts we create living our modern lives. It provides statistics and practical strategies we can employ to mitigate multiple environmental impacts (air, water, land use). The two listings below are from the book.

Ranked in order of the largest impacts, because of manufacture AND usage, are the following consumer activities:

1. Cars and light trucks
2. Meat and poultry
3. Fruit, vegetables and grains
4. Household appliances and lighting
5. Home construction
6. Household water and sewage

The leading consumption-related environmental problems:

1. Air pollution
2. Global warming
3. Habitat alteration
4. Water pollution

Cars and Trucks
By far, the impact of the manufacture, maintenance and operation of motor vehicles contributes the most to all four of the environmental problems above.

What we can do

• Take mass transit–demand more mass transit services and use them. (Have you seen the empty buses go up Davis Drive to RTP?)
• Drive less, walk and bicycle when possible
• Car pool
• Buy a hybrid, fuel-efficient car
• Choose a place to live that allows you to walk to more services and/or provides easy access to mass transit (And you’ll receive a health benefit!)

Meat and Poultry, Fruit, Vegetables and Grain
This category of consumption surprised me until you think about the effects of livestock and food production on land use, water use and pollution as well as air pollution. Beef cattle cause the most effect with poultry second and pigs third. Grain and vegetables have large effects on land and water use and water pollution.

According to the book “…cutting the average household’s meat consumption (both red meat and poultry) in half and replacing it with the nutritional equivalent of grains would cut food related land use and common water pollution – two of the three most serious  environmental consequences of food production – by 30 percent and 24 percent, respectively.

What we can do

• Eat less meat
• Buy certified organic produce and organic meat.

Household appliances, lighting, home construction and household water and sewage
The size, construction of your home and the appliances within your house can have a substantial effect on the environment.

What we can do

• If you plan on moving to a new home, decide if you really need a larger home. Smaller is better.
• Buy or build an energy efficient home with environmentally and energy efficient systems for water (solar, natural gas), heating and appliances. Plan a small space to grow your own organic fruits and vegetables.
• Buy the highest energy efficient refrigerators (25% of home energy use).
• Lighting–replace your incandescent light bulbs with lower watt fluorescent bulbs. According to the UCS, “Replacing just one 75-watt incandescent bulb with an 18-watt compact fluorescent will save about 570 kilowatt hours of electricity over the fluorescent bulb’s ten-thousand-hour lifetime…just one compact bulb will eliminate the combustion of three hundred pounds of coal.”
• Find out if your energy supplier uses renewable sources of energy (wind and solar) and tell them you support these sources.
• Install water saving devices. Collect rainwater for use in the yard. Wash clothes in cold water.

Politics–Our Government
Our political leaders need to hear from us and realize we want changes made. All our institutions should begin to buy climate friendly vehicles and products. Incentives to help organic farmers should be adopted.

On the international level, America needs to rejoin the international community and confirm the Kyoto protocols. We need to repeal the latest Bush revisions to the Clean Air Act and impose stricter controls on energy producers for CO2, mercury and nitrogen oxide emissions. Old power plants should be grandfathered out of the controls. Only until we reduce our own environmental impacts and energy use can we expect China, India and others to follow our lead. The future of the world our children will inherit is at stake.

What we can do

• Ask NC state government to follow UNC-CH and join the CRed (Carbon Reduction) program
  America should build high-speed mass transit trains now on both the east and west coasts of our continent. Ask our Senators and Representatives what are the plans for “catching America up” to the rest of the modern world?
• Demand more funding for Amtrak…those are your tax dollars. America simply cannot allow our railroads to die. The subsidy they receive is a pittance compared to highway funds. The congressional refusal even to fund them adequately (much less make improvements) is a disgrace. We cannot afford to be on the highways much longer.
• Go see the movie, An Inconvenient Truth whether or not you like Al Gore – the science in the movie is sound.
• Write, email or call all of our state and national elected representatives and let them know what the actions you wish them to take. All the desperately needed environmental changes are going to have to come from us.