GusSpeth on Environment 360

Gus Speth, Dean of the Forestry School at Yale, has published a ground-breaking editorial in the Guardian, discussing the failures of the Big ten environmental groups, particularly their failure to understand and embrace the Dalian critique.

It's an excellent piece and should be widely syndicated.

Enjoy.

Environmental failure: a case for a new green politics

A spectre is haunting American environmentalism, says James Gustave Speth, the spectre of failure. From environment360

• environment360 part of the Guardian Environmental Network
• guardian.co.uk,
• Tuesday October 21 2008 17.46 BST

The US environmental movement is failing – by any measure, the state of the earth has never been more dire. What's needed, a leading environmentalist writes, is a new, inclusive green politics that challenges basic assumptions about consumerism and unlimited growth.

The squire, the serf, and the squirrel

One interesting difference between conservation in the US and conservation in the UK is the way the UK's class system is integrated with the conservation system in a somewhat unhealthy way. Because of a longer history of urbanization, but also because the British countryside is so expensive to live in, and remains dominated by the former aristocratic/land-holding elite, who may own vast tracts still complete with whole villages of "tenantry," the great countryside conservation groups have boards and leadership that are often a 'Who's Who" of the former peerage.

This is only a symptom of the larger phenomenon that, effectively, whole social classes have widely different mental models and cultural associations with the countryside, and there's very little overlap.

(The US equivalent would be, for instance, the mental model of countryside held by an average African-American urbanite, compared with that of a white rural-dweller on the low end of the economic scale. Both might have similar incomes and they might even vote similarly (not guaranteed!), but the white rural-dweller's mental model of the countryside would likely include a lot more utilitarian conceptions, as well as specific knowledge of hunting and fishing, farming and other subsistence or "extractive" sporting activities.)

Most social scientists would explain this by reference to the large-scale peer groups historically known as "classes", but a growing number of qualitative studies would use the theory and practice of building "mental models," qualitative description ("thick description") of the conceptual arrangements and explanations of land-use that individuals and classes (of many different kinds, not just socio-economic) might have for the countryside. Class-consciousness is controversial in the so-called “class-less” society held up as an ideal in either country, but class exists and is useful for explaining all kinds of phenomena. Mental model theory is also helpful.

I enjoyed this article, which is purely journalistic, for the way it toys with everyone's class-based cultural assumptions and mental models. In particular, the way that an arguable conservation necessity, culling invasive American squirrels, has become a blood sport following fairly traditional lines is just fascinating, but what is also fascinating are the new associations and mental models that are being used, some of which do transcend barriers of class.

It's about time we shook some of this up a bit. It's been a problem.

In Britain, notwithstanding this new eruption, because of the remaining and powerful dominance of the countryside by the aristocratic classes and the rich in general, and a few other contributing factors, there remains only a tenuous and slender link between the urban working class and the countryside that supports them. Although there is more cultural exchange between the classes around the issues of countryside conservation than there was, say 50 years ago, there remains a huge "barrier to entry" for urban and suburban young people.

This problem of alienation from the countryside, and from nature itself, in different form, with different mental models playing a role, also exists in the United States. (I could go on at length!) But here, at least, it remains relatively affordable for a low-income person to live in the country, or move there.

'Reg' a part time bouncer who has helped Paul Parker of the Red Squirrel protection unit culling grey squirrels in Northumberland. Photograph: Gary Galton

They shoot squirrels, don't they?

It may be wiping out our native red squirrel, but the American grey has finally met its match. Tim Adams meets a pair of modern-day pied pipers hellbent on extermination

Tim Adams, for The Observer.

In Rochester, Northumberland, the last village before Scotland, Rupert Mitford, the 6th Baron Redesdale, and Paul Parker, a pest controller, are examining a map. We are in Redesdale's kitchen, in a cottage that borders the Otterburn army base. Chinook helicopters fly low up the valley, the last stop before Helmand and Basra. Redesdale and Parker, however, are organising battle lines of their own.

Redesdale, in a lived-in tweed jacket, eventually locates his home on the well-used Ordnance Survey. 'This house was ground zero,' he says. 'In the first six months we had cleared everything to here,' he gestures towards a wooded area to the south. 'May to June we got down to this line here. July we did Newcastle.'

Parker, shaven headed, chips in, in his broad Geordie, tracing his finger along the Tyne. 'We were doing the damage in this area. They can swim, but they'd rather use the bridges. We hammered them here and here and here. Now we are really hunting them down in ones and twos.'

Redesdale continues, with boyish excitement. 'We developed what we called our killing strategy. Hit them in the woods. Dipton Woods: we took 2,000 out. If you clear a woodland you suck all the surrounding population to it. Then you hit them again. Suck 'em in, hit them.'
'Slaley Forest,' Parker says. 'We took 3,500 out of there. In the winter there's no cover and you can pick them off with the .22 rifle. They all get together in the cold. You can get eight or nine with a couple of shots. All huddled together. We just annihilated them.'

Redesdale is a tall, consummately charming, slightly distracted man, who attended public schools in north London and studied archaeology at Newcastle. He can trace his bloodline back to the Norman conquests; the Mitford sisters were his great aunts. Having been relieved of his hereditary peerage in Blair's reforms, he became the youngest elected life peer and is now, at 41, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for the environment in the second chamber. Parker, who grew up in the west end of Newcastle, was not much for school. Once he was seven or eight he was off in the fields, rabbiting, shooting crows and starlings and selling them to local butchers for pies. He and Redesdale, who rents him a house up the road, are an unlikely double act.

Together, camouflaged crusaders, they form the Red Squirrel Protection Partnership.
This is not a resurgent Tufty Club. 'We only call ourselves the Red Squirrel Protection Partnership because if we called it the Grey Squirrel Annihilation League people might be a bit less sympathetic,' Redesdale announces, chuckling. 'But we do nothing with red squirrels apart from save them by killing grey squirrels!'

Read more...

Herman Daly

My PhD advisor and former teacher Herman Daly posted an interesting essay at The Oil Drum blog, which was then written up by Andrew Revkin at the NYT, and so appeared on my regular morning blog rounds. Herman generally doesn't do blogs, so this was a nice surprise.

Herman was the chief economist at the World Bank in the early 1990s, before teaching at the Maryland School. That was two financial crises ago, for those of you who are reckoning time in the new fashion. Apart from being what my sainted Welsh farm-girl Grannie would have called "a real gentleman" and extremely nice guy, Herman is one of very few people I've met in my life who totally mastered the English language, as well as economics, philosophy and metaphysics/spirituality, and united them all coherently.

A Zen master.

Enjoy. (This is assigned for students in Environmental Sustainability.)

Warning: It's long for a blog post. But be Zen. You'll get through it. And by the time you're done, maybe the crisis will be over.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3941#more

Home made turbine

Anyone interested in the plans from our home-made wind turbine, which is suitable for a student project, but also could be used in a developing country or back country cabin setting, can download them in PowerPoint from from my primary college website here.

This is for those readers arriving here from the USAToday article.

A belly-full of the beast.

I had to go on a business trip to a different college, on the edge of New York City for three days. It was fine, apart from some flight delays and an unexpected night in a hotel at JFK airport in New York.

But as usual, it reminded me of how grateful I am for for my wife and home. And why I don't live in the city, the suburbs, or indeed any place in the country that has been "found" by wealthy folks yet and gentrified accordingly.

Then I returned, and, happily situated on the couch with Aimee, watched Jon Stewart on TV. There was a skit on the stock market crash, lampooning survivalists: how folks would be better off with food and weapons and the ability to make fire than with stocks and shares right now.

No s..t. And no joke.

Aimee and I aren't survivalists by any means. But I'm especially pleased this recession winter to have all my firewood and hay in, all my food put up or frozen, and my house and barn tight and warm against the coming cold. I'm also happy that we aren't over our heads in mortgage and consumer debt to pay for this. We could, if need be, get by on one income if the other took a few hours work. We have more than enough food and fuel for the winter. We won't have a heating bill, and our efficient lights and appliances mean our electricity bill will be low.

Being homesteaders: providing our own heat fuel, meat and vegetables, fixing up our own dwellings, vehicles and equipment, and making much of our own entertainment, is really a third income to us, and it means we can afford to live, and live well, which is more than we can say for many other Americans right about now.

What's so funny about that? Sounds like a good idea to me.

City dwellers often look down on the country. Country pastimes like hunting and fishing seem idiotic to fashionable urbanites. And who wants to deal with all that manure and hard work? Life without easy access to theatre, music, movies? No fashion? No expensive cars? Fancy furniture?

Sounds great to me.

The urban life is way over-rated, both in terms of security and convenience. There's nothing at all secure in most urban employment. You're at the mercy of the employer or the markets. And there's nothing convenient about the crowding, pollution, crime, and stress of the urban environment. Most urban pleasures are intense, it's true, compared with, say, watching sheep play, or watching the leaves turn and fall.

But the problem with intensity is that you forget to breathe, you're not as conscious of your own life, your body working, your heart breathing. You have to make yourself exercise, in a gym or on a track. It doesn't come naturally and smoothly out of your work. You will carry far more of the stress hormone cortisol in your system than is good for you. You won't enjoy or digest your food properly. You will worry about silly things that might otherwise be benign or even pleasurable, like getting old, or getting wrinkles.

And you will naturally miss a good deal of your life that way.

Jefferson thought that the yeoman farmer was the root of democracy and national security. Patrick Geddes thought that equities markets and other more liquid forms of wealth were illusory and that the only real source of wealth could be found in homes, farms, and gardens. Aristotle, Ruskin, Leopold, and Cobden all warned of the dangers of urban money-grubbing, as compared to rural dirt-grubbing.

I'll stick to my dirt-grubbing. I'm thinking about a little diversification in my portfolio, though. Vineyards, maybe, because we need to think of crops that will resist the climate change brought on by urbanism. A milch-cow for Aimee's cheese, some gentle doe-eyed Jersey? Maybe I should just junk these junkers and get a buggy horse again?

Ah, the stress...

Keynesianism defunct?

(A longer version of a response published on the The Guardian's "Comment is Free" page, Saturday Dec 11, 2008.)

A new article by David Marquand for the Guardian speculates that Keyne's economic theory is in need of revision, and that we in fact need a replacement for the Bloomesbury gent himself. I'm not so sure about that.

I think Marquand's siren call rests on an unscientific view of economics. If economics was like literary theory, or politics, then we should be able to throw away all previous understandings of economy and start over completely every few years or decades. Surely this is at least in part what happens with art and fashion?

Four legs good, two legs bad.

But economics is depicted by most practitioners as a social science. A scientific endeavor doesn't renounce all previous knowledge every few years. An alternative hypothesis, once tested and accepted and replicated, has to be accounted for in new theory. Science builds on itself. Despite having far more room for opinion-izing, and far more connections to politics, than most other scientific endeavors, economics lays claim to scientific authority, and even carries all of the trappings of science as it does its work. Hypothesis formulation and testing, statistical significance, peer review, all are widely used. To just toss out all of the thinking of Keynes, or indeed, any scientific economist, even Hayek or Friedman, would be to reduce economics to an absurdity as a rational field of inquiry.

And isn't this in fact what we've done, especially starting January 20th, 2001, when we threw away what was then a de-facto Clinton-Blair-EU operated, New Keynesian/Neoclassical/social democratic consensus. We meaning George W. Bush. And instead instituted a c-average, B-school version of Hayek and Friedman. Without even a hint of scientific conservatism. Even Reagan's attempt to do much the same was bolstered by economists of decent if not Nobelite reputation.

I won't bother to list the other sciences we threw out that day. Funny too, how Reagan managed to reverse himself by his second term and run up the biggest deficit since WW2.

Deficit spending? Isn't that Keynes?

When I studied ecological economics at the University of Maryland, the primary concern of my mentors was to take economics and reunite it with science, particularly ecology, to in fact correct a few scientific mistakes in economics. That still seems to me to be a useful endeavor, as climate change and oil depletion appear to me to be harbingers, if not perfect density-dependent indicators, of the planet approaching or exceeding carrying capacity for humans.

Infinite growth on a finite planet is as unscientific as Bishop Usher.

But it would be very silly to toss out all of economics in this endeavor. More appropriately, the two contrasting explanations of how the planet works, the ecological and the economic, have to be carefully reconciled, as scientifically as possible. They also have to be guided by moral principles capable of withstanding the trend towards various forms of xenophobia and fascism that will accompany any widespread recognition of planetary carrying capacity.

For a model of intellectual morality and moral bearing, we could do far worse than study Keynes, one of the architects of the United Nations, the theorist of the Marshall Plan, the father of the IMF and World Bank, and a humanist and thinker whose reputation is far beyond reproach, and whose General Theory shows how the relationship between governments, commercial firms, and households, the business cycle, can and should be stabilized by government regulation.

If George Bush had read and understood this and a few other more serious books at Yale or Harvard Business School, instead of the sorry platitudes about free markets, personal leadership, entrepreneurship, and, of course, infinite growth on a finite planet, that pass for theory in far too many MBA programs, we might be better off right about now.

We should treat the Bush era as a replication of the Reagan experiment, accept the null hypothesis that New Keynesian remains in fact correct, or at least the best explanation of business cycle regulation we have for now, and use this hard-won knowledge to shit-can neoliberalism once and for all.

Marquand, otherwise an impeccably left-of-center theorist, should join with a few other folks whose particular personal well-being is perhaps closely connected to the market cycle right now, should take a long weekend and cool off. There'll still be an economy on Tuesday. No-one has demolished a single house or a factory. In fact, because of the speed of the collapse, it hasn't had time to affect production yet. Mines are still mining, production lines still running, crops are still growing in the fields or waiting in barns and silos to be eaten. The only indicators that went south were a) house prices, which any fool could tell you were too high for ordinary folk, and b) a few mortgages, primarily because the house prices underlying the mortgages were too high.

This too shall pass. Along with George Bush.

By the time the US election is done, there'll be trillions of dollars of investment potential sitting in far-too-safe havens looking to make a better buck. Half the industrial capacity in the world will be undervalued by up to 50%, compared to its potential.

And Keynes will still be the theorist who explained how to get out of a Great Depression.

Not Mr. Marquand.

Situation vacant: a theorist is sought to succeed Mr Keynes

The capitalist system is the least bad we have, but the role of states and markets need redefining for the modern economy

David Marquand

Forest/climate theory revisions

The proposed solution to the "missing carbon" problem in the study of terrestrial carbon flux: that soils and growing plants sequester more carbon than previously thought, hasn't penetrated to the minds of negotiators of offset treaties, at least according to this Reuter's piece. Were forest offsets to work and work well, this would be win-win for conservation and climate, and if true, probably good news for the planet as a whole, although how forest offsets are accounted for and certified remains a problem. But as the missing carbon story shows, there is a good deal of uncertainty.

Caveat emptor: I haven't had chance to go back and check the recent primary literature to see how accurately the newsies have got the story. Their track record is so poor on reporting climate stories accurately. Even Reuters failed to connect the new initiatives to "missing carbon" theory.

If true, though, it underscores something I've been saying for a while about how you study climate for policy purposes. There's considerable danger for the planet in long-term fixed notions of what the correct policy should be. As if the Kyoto debacle wasn't sufficient bad press. Dozens of similar false starts await us, if we can't train a new generation of policy people who have really good science comprehension and science study skills, so they keep up, year after year, after year, with the material. You can't study climate just once. You have to keep studying it. And your science has to be very good, especially your analytical, synthetic and quantitative skills.

There's no good way to a climate fix through the arts and humanities. They have an important role to play. But this is a job for science majors. Actually, the best proof of this is the routinely bad journalism. But I've also seen some pretty huge science bloomers made by so called climate activists, most of whom just liked the look of what probably seemed to them to be a new liberal political bandwagon called climate, a bandwagon they wanted to smash into their pet problem: economic globalization.

Complex systems exhibit particularity. There can be, if you know what you're doing, certain levers and buttons whose operation requires very little cost, but whose consequences (good or bad) are disproportionately large. It pays to know which buttons and levers work which way, and to press the right ones. Pressing the wrong ones can be just embarrassing. Or it can ruin people's lives or kill them. In climate science there are some buttons we have figured out, and some we know very little about. Our knowledge of the operations of the complex system we call climate is far from perfect.

But most people are very bad at complexity. They want things to be easy. Part of this is psychology. Easy answers give false hope to folks whose reserves of character are shallow. Complexity is also quantitative, and most people suck at math. Ecology, contrary to the opinion of many greenies, is a mathematical science whose main work is the quantification of matter and energy flows between plant and animal communities in complex ecosystems. Ecological models are complex equations whose terms are often exponential and so may have surprising outcomes. So, for that matter are climate models. Really really huge, complex equations. What most green activists think of as ecology is actually natural history, some nice notions of biology without any specificity to the terms of the relationship and no math at all, let alone a quantifiable model. Most so-called green activists fail right off the bat to even begin to study real quantitative ecology, let alone apply it to political and economic reasoning. Few, in fact, ever study the economics they despise so much sufficiently to comprehend its own inherent flaws of quantitative reasoning.

This failure to comprehend complexity and quantification of complexity in general would probably include many if not most of our politicians. Witness the current meltdown in the complex system known as global finance.

A strange parallel.

The early Bush administration had some easy answers: Neo-liberal economic theory. Pure Milton Friedman. Deregulate, reduce taxes on the rich, and wait for the dollars to trickle down. Combined with the theory of American exceptionalism they also espoused, the "go-it-alone, we don't need the UN, we don't need those Eurotrash, we don't need your economic theory, we'll make our own history" attitude that was rampant at the time. And look where that got us. Is it possible that all they really wanted were some selfish tax breaks for themselves?

An educated electorate would have seen right through that. Just as we should see through climate bandwagon-ing. We'll never fix the climate if all we really want is to shaft corporations or hug the planet. Isn't it possible that capitalism could actually help reduce carbon emissions? That the dreaded WalMart or Home Depot could soon be selling (even more) energy efficient appliances, insulation, or wind and solar equipment to millions of American homeowners? Might there not be inherent contradictions between the flaws of reasoning in anthropomorphic environmentalism and fixes needed for climate ecology, such as the possible need to abandon some endangered species, too costly, or even impossible to save in the face of climate change?

And where would the bandwagon be parked then?

So, more cautiously, we should reinvestigate this new policy move. We probably should make some good positive moves towards tropical and subtropical forest conservation. And if we do, well, I for one will be glad because it is win-win, a possible victory for climate and biodiversity conservation. Those have certainly been few and far between lately.

But the offset-makers will have to work harder to keep up with the science.

October exam haiku

(For the Zen moment of not having to teach while an exam is invigilated)

Chairs creak,
Noses sniffle cold virus gobs
Teacher breathes, class quiet, leaves fall

Sachs on Anti-Intellectualism

Jeff Sachs, probably the leading economist of development in the US today, and highly influential, just released an editorial on the last decade's trend in anti-intellectualism, connecting Sarah Palin to the trend.

I think it goes beyond that. As a Brit with 20-plus years in country and therefore an unofficial anthropologist of American culture, I can easily bear witness to the fact that you only have to step outside your door and interact with people to find the American anti-intellectual trend. A trip to the barber shop, the waiting room at the Jiffy-Lube, or the supermarket check-out, will quite ordinarily turn up someone who wants to tell you some conspiracy, deus ex machina, about how the world runs, all of their own making, while the great efforts to figure out how the world really runs, in social science, economics, biology, geophysics, sometimes seem virtually unknown in popular culture.

This despite (or perhaps because of) cable and satellite TV widely available with hundreds of channels, many carrying superb scientific content, and despite (or perhaps because of) a liberal press system that surely must be the most diverse and unfettered by libel or government interference of any in history.

By comparison, the UK system I grew up with thirty years age (four TV channels, a handful of national papers, seemingly few specialist magazines, and draconian libel laws) seems thoroughly deprived and trammeled, like the two-up/two down houses many of us Lydgate Lane Primary kids lived in. A spartan existence. When I were a lad....

But, as Tapton School showed us later, we were both more educated and educable. Most of us were, at least. But in this country, even the brightest kids from the best schools can be quite ignorant of science when they arrive at college.

(Believe me, I've been educating young Americans about science for long enough. I should know.)

But how can this be so?

One explanation is the BBC. With only two, and then three, TV channels in 1960s and '70s Britain, two of them government-run, it was inevitable myself and my school friends would study science in front of the tube. This wasn't an accident. When did Reithianism become a bad word?

Another explanation is that American conservative anti-intellectualism is one obvious outcome of a country founded at least partly on religious separatism and extreme protestant exceptionalism, and remains very long-lived indeed. The Pilgrim Fathers were less bastions of freedom, more religious dictators, iconoclastic and austere. The Scopes Trail is in direct descent from the Salem Witchcraft trails, and the Know-Nothing Party is alive and well.

Sarah Palin may co-occupy the same 50 states as the best and most widespread scientific program in history, but that doesn't mean to say she has ever been part of it, or even educated in what it has, can and will do. As such, she's more commonplace than exception.

The American Anti-Intellectual Threat

By Jeffry Sachs

NEW YORK – In recent years, the United States has been more a source of global instability than a source of global problem-solving. Examples include the war in Iraq, launched by the US on false premises, obstructionism on efforts to curb climate change, meager development assistance, and the violation of international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions. While many factors contributed to America’s destabilizing actions, a powerful one is anti-intellectualism, exemplified recently by Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s surging popularity.

By anti-intellectualism, I mean especially an aggressively anti-scientific perspective, backed by disdain for those who adhere to science and evidence. The challenges faced by a major power like the US require rigorous analysis of information according to the best scientific principles.

Read more...

RealClimate in the Guardian on Palin and Climate

How could I resist?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/oct/06/network.climatechange

From Stef at the DEP: TV disposal

If you're not in Maine, contact your state environmental agency or town office to find out what you can do with your old tv set...

Don't let your television end up In Our Back Yard
The Digital TV Transition May Make Many Televisions Obsolete
Been watching much television lately? If you have, then you have probably heard that big things are happening this coming February. On February 17, 2009 all full-power broadcast television stations in the United States will stop broadcasting on analog airwaves and begin broadcasting only in digital. Digital broadcasting will allow stations to offer improved picture and sound quality and additional channels.
Unfortunately, many of the television sets in people's homes cannot accept the digital broadcast signals. These analog televisions will not work with the digital broadcast signals after February 17, 2009, when the analog signals disappear. So what happens to the old set? For many people, their first response is, "Toss it! We need a new TV anyway."
And that's a real problem.
Televisions and other modern electronics contain dozens of metals, including many valuable ones like gold and silver. They also have lead, cadmium, and even mercury. If not recycled, if simply tossed into the garbage, we are potentially causing harm to the environment. Cast-off televisions have several toxic components. The glass in a TV screen alone contains anywhere from one to seven pounds of lead!
That is why Maine has an Electronics Waste (E-waste) Recycling Law. Because of their quantity and toxicity, used electronic products are the most rapidly growing problem in our waste stream. Used televisions and computer monitors can no longer be tossed in the trash. They must be recycled, and municipalities are responsible for ensuring their residents have a place to deliver their televisions and computer monitors for recycling. Many municipalities operate an on-going collection center, some do regular one-day collections, such as an "E-waste collection day", and others have their residents deliver their electronics directly to a near-by private Universal Waste management company. These collection sites ship the TVs and monitors to a recycler that maximizes the materials reclaimed for reuse and manages all hazardous materials in an environmentally-protective way. In 2006 and 2007, Maine residents recycled more than 8 million pounds of toxic electronics through this system, with the recycling paid for by the TV and monitor manufacturers,
But do you know what is even better than recycling your old television set? Keeping it, using it, and NOT buying a new one. For a net cost of approximately $30 you can buy a converter box that will keep your current analog television working with digital signals. To help consumers with the DTV transition, the Federal Government established the Digital-to-Analog Converter Box Coupon Program. You can get a coupon worth $40 toward the purchase of eligible digital-to-analog converter boxes, and almost all the eligible converter boxes are well below $100. So keeping their current television set will be an attractive option to many people. Go to www.dtv.gov or call 1-888-388-2009 to apply for a coupon, and remember that you must have the coupon with you when you purchase your converter box.
Got cable? You don't need to get a new television. "Cable and satellite TV subscribers with analog TVs hooked up to their cable or satellite service should not be affected by the February 17, 2009 cut-off date for full-power analog broadcasting." (source: www.dtv.gov )
This article was submitted by Peter Moulton, an environmental engineer with the Maine DEP Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management.

From Stef at the DEP: TY disposal

If you're not in Maine, contact your state environmental agency or town office to find out what you can do with your old tv set...

Don't let your television end up In Our Back Yard
The Digital TV Transition May Make Many Televisions Obsolete
Been watching much television lately? If you have, then you have probably heard that big things are happening this coming February. On February 17, 2009 all full-power broadcast television stations in the United States will stop broadcasting on analog airwaves and begin broadcasting only in digital. Digital broadcasting will allow stations to offer improved picture and sound quality and additional channels.
Unfortunately, many of the television sets in people's homes cannot accept the digital broadcast signals. These analog televisions will not work with the digital broadcast signals after February 17, 2009, when the analog signals disappear. So what happens to the old set? For many people, their first response is, "Toss it! We need a new TV anyway."
And that's a real problem.
Televisions and other modern electronics contain dozens of metals, including many valuable ones like gold and silver. They also have lead, cadmium, and even mercury. If not recycled, if simply tossed into the garbage, we are potentially causing harm to the environment. Cast-off televisions have several toxic components. The glass in a TV screen alone contains anywhere from one to seven pounds of lead!
That is why Maine has an Electronics Waste (E-waste) Recycling Law. Because of their quantity and toxicity, used electronic products are the most rapidly growing problem in our waste stream. Used televisions and computer monitors can no longer be tossed in the trash. They must be recycled, and municipalities are responsible for ensuring their residents have a place to deliver their televisions and computer monitors for recycling. Many municipalities operate an on-going collection center, some do regular one-day collections, such as an "E-waste collection day", and others have their residents deliver their electronics directly to a near-by private Universal Waste management company. These collection sites ship the TVs and monitors to a recycler that maximizes the materials reclaimed for reuse and manages all hazardous materials in an environmentally-protective way. In 2006 and 2007, Maine residents recycled more than 8 million pounds of toxic electronics through this system, with the recycling paid for by the TV and monitor manufacturers,
But do you know what is even better than recycling your old television set? Keeping it, using it, and NOT buying a new one. For a net cost of approximately $30 you can buy a converter box that will keep your current analog television working with digital signals. To help consumers with the DTV transition, the Federal Government established the Digital-to-Analog Converter Box Coupon Program. You can get a coupon worth $40 toward the purchase of eligible digital-to-analog converter boxes, and almost all the eligible converter boxes are well below $100. So keeping their current television set will be an attractive option to many people. Go to www.dtv.gov or call 1-888-388-2009 to apply for a coupon, and remember that you must have the coupon with you when you purchase your converter box.
Got cable? You don't need to get a new television. "Cable and satellite TV subscribers with analog TVs hooked up to their cable or satellite service should not be affected by the February 17, 2009 cut-off date for full-power analog broadcasting." (source: www.dtv.gov )
This article was submitted by Peter Moulton, an environmental engineer with the Maine DEP Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management.

Hadley on stabalization wedges

A new report from the excellent UK Hadley Centre, with four scenarios for emissions reductions, and likely consequences:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/oct/01/climatechange.carbonemissions1

Sarah and the Skeptics

Sounds like a garage band.

Here's the Guardian's Ed Pilkington with a well-documented review of how Ms. Palin turned to some ExxonMobil funded climate skeptics for copy with which to oppose listing for polar bears.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/01/sarahpalin.climatechange

Enjoy.