Author: pconnors

The Bush Administration is Ignoring Equally Dire Warnings About How Every Coastal City In America Could Soon Become A New Orleans

By Mike Tidwell, Author of Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast

It’s now clear the Bush Administration helped create the calamity in Louisiana by ignoring evidence of danger and pleas for help stretching back several years. But of the many shocking stories emerging from Katrina, here’s the most shocking: Right now, with similar irresponsibility, the Bush Administration is ignoring raw data and reports from its own agencies that say every single coastal city in America – from New York to Savannah to Los Angeles – could soon become a New Orleans. Within a short generation or two, the same sort of flooding and storm damage and death toll and economic ruin we see in the Crescent City could become an annual occurrence in some other U.S. city, spread across some other American coastline. Why? The answer lies in a phenomenon called the “law of unintended consequences.” In Louisiana we built huge levees that for centuries kept the lower Mississippi River from flooding. The unintended result, however, was that the entire coast of Louisiana – including New Orleans – began rapidly sinking, dropping 2-3 feet in the 20th century alone (more on this later). Worldwide, meanwhile, a different dynamic but with similar catastrophic potential is playing out. Year after year, we burn massive amounts of fossil fuels – oil, coal, and natural gas. The result is that we’ve profoundly warmed our planet’s atmosphere. This change in climate, according to the Bush Administration’s own reports, will in turn lead to 1-3 feet of sea-level rise worldwide by 2100. Here’s the crux: Whether the land sinks three feet per century (as in New Orleans) or the oceans rise three feet per century (as in the rest of the world), the result is the same for America’s 150 million coastal residents and the three billion shoreline inhabitants worldwide: Record storm surges, inundated infrastructure, massive human relocation, economic disruption, and untold suffering and death.

How did New Orleans drown?

In all the recent coverage, the media seem to have uncritically accepted the very weird fact that the city of New Orleans lies below sea level. Why in the world is it below sea level? The answer is the levees. The huge earthen river dikes that have kept the city dry and inhabitable for 300 years have also created the giant bathtub we now see full of putrid water each night on TV. That’s because every great river delta in the world is shaped by two unforgiving geological phenomena. The first involves flooding. The annual, repeated overflow of the sediment-rich Mississippi River is what created Louisiana’s vast deltaic coast to begin with, depositing water-borne sediments and nutrients flowing down from two thirds of America over the past 7,000 years. The second major deltaic feature is “subsidence” or sinking. Those deposits of alluvial soil are extremely fine and unstable. Over time they compact, shrink in volume, and sink. Historically along the Louisiana Coast it was new flooding, new annual deposits of sediments, that counterbalanced the sinking and in fact led to net land building. But by corseting the river with levees right out to the precipice of the Gulf’s Continental Shelf, we are left only with subsidence. Every day, even without hurricanes, 50 acres of land in coastal Louisiana turns to water. Every ten months, an area of land equal to Manhattan joins the Gulf of Mexico. It is, hands down, the fastest disappearing land mass on Earth. THIS is why Katrina happened. THIS is why people have drowned, lost their homes, fled to refugee shelters or died of diabetic shock at the Superdome for lack of doctors. When French colonists first settled Louisiana 300 years ago, there were vast tracts of dense hardwood forests between what is today New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. There were extensive fresh-water marshes and endless saltwater wetlands and a formidable network of strong barrier islands. Today, all that land is essentially gone. Because of the dikes and the law of unintended consequences, New Orleans is a sunken, walled city essentially jutting out like an exposed chin toward the fast-approaching fist of the Gulf. Had Katrina struck two hundred or one hundred or even fifty years ago, the destruction would not have been the same. In 2005, there simply were no land structures left to slow Katrina’s sledgehammer blow.

A Ray of Hope

The good news is there’s a plan to recreate much of that lost land. A detailed restoration scheme has been on the table since the 1990s to literally “re-engineer” the coast, according Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco. The plan is to build up to a dozen dam-like “control” structures right into the levees of the Mississippi. These would then release the sediment-thick water into canals or pipelines that would surgically direct the liquid soil toward the barrier islands and the buffering marshlands that need immediate restoration. This so-called “Coast 2050” plan (visit www.crcl.org) will take many years to fully implement, but the cost is ridiculously cheap at $14 billion. That’s just two weeks of spending in Iraq or the cost of Boston’s “Big Dig.” Yet tragically, like Louisiana’s pre-Katrina requests for federal help bolstering insufficient levees in New Orleans, the Bush Administration has spent four and a half years repeatedly refusing even modest investments in the larger coastal restoration efforts. Given the horror of Katrina, one can only assume the President will now reassess his budgetary priorities. As a nation, our first responsibility is to address the storm’s great humanitarian crisis of this storm. Beyond that, however, it would be criminally irresponsible of us to fix a single broken window in New Orleans or pick up a single piece of debris or fix a single cubic foot of levee without simultaneously committing – as a nation – to the massive plan to rebuild the entire Louisiana coast. To do one without the other is to simply set the table for the next nightmare hurricane.

Global warming: We all live in New Orleans now

But even this multi-billion dollar coastal rehabilitation effort will be in vain unless we immediately address another facet of the law of unintended consequences: global warming. First off, please remove from your mind any thought that global warming is a junk “theory” peddled only by Greenpeace extremists. No less an authority than the Bush Administration itself has confirmed this crisis to be real. Soon after taking office in 2001, Bush asked the nation’s premier scientific body – the National Academy of Sciences – to look into the issue. Their report back to the President: global warming is happening, it’s driven by our use of fossil fuels, and one major consequence will be 1-3 feet of sea-level rise by 2100. (The rise is from melting glaciers and the “thermal expansion” of the world’s warming oceans). The President’s own 2002 “Climate Action Plan” drew the same conclusion: 1-3 feet of sea-level rise by 2100. Most recently, in an August 2004 letter to Congress signed by the Secretary of Energy, the Administration again confirmed that fossil fuels are driving global warming, with all the implications for serious sea-level rise. Pause for a moment and let that fact sink in fully: Up to three feet of sea-level rise worldwide. That means battered and fragmenting barrier islands WORLDWIDE on a par with those sinking in Louisiana at a rate of 2-3 feet per century. It means vanishing coastal marshes worldwide, the need for massive hurricane and flood levees worldwide. It means vu
lnerable ports and other imperiled infrastructure. It also means the risk of massive human suffering, death, and staggering refugee problems along every shore. If you want to know what will consume the attention and resources of all the world’s great coastal cities in the not so distant future, turn on your TV right now. Look at New Orleans. Tomorrow is on full display at the 17th Street Canal and the littered Convention Center. It’s there in the 9th Ward rooftop evacuations and the military occupation of historic streets. Global warming, left unchecked, will spread New Orleans like a curse to every community within earshot of waves and tides. Yet just like the Administration’s blatant underfunding of levee repairs in New Orleans and the cold shoulder it gave to barrier island restoration, the Administration now blatantly refuses to join Japan and Europe and the rest of the world in pushing for greenhouse gas reductions under the Kyoto Protocol. Over and over again, the President refuses even to discuss modest plans to address global warming while his own reports create the paper trail that future historians will use for their harsh, harsh condemnations.

One Last Chance

If only we could turn back the clock 25 years and rebuild Louisiana’s marshes and barrier islands exactly the way those lonely activists – warning of an approaching Katrina – had been asking for over and over and over again. If only we could go back just a year or two and at least reinforce a few New Orleans levees. But we can’t go back. The clock has run out. The nightmare has come in full. But for all the world’s other coastal cities, there’s still time. We can avoid the mistakes of New Orleans or at least dramatically minimize them. We don’t need massive new levees right now to protect Miami. We need a rapid global switch to modern windmills for our electricity. We don’t need sea walls to save San Diego. We need hydrogen fuel cell cars and energy efficient appliances and bio-fuels. The Kyoto Protocol is just too expensive for our country to adopt, George Bush says, presumably the same way bolstering the 17th Street Canal levee was once deemed too expensive. We’re now spending billions of dollars and burying thousands of people because of that mistake. How much, in the end, will global warming cost us?

MARYLAND’S FIRST 90% RENEWABLE-ENERGY HOME

The story of how one Takoma Park family is fighting global warming on a budget, and how you can do it too

By Mike Tidwell

It’s a lovely, breezy, autumn day, temperature in the forties, not a cloud in the sky. Inside my house I set the heat at a toasty 70 degrees then reach for a cold beer from the refrigerator while turning the television to an NFL football game. Later I’ll unwind with a hot, steaming bath while listening to classical music CDs.

Just another glorious day of modern Western life — and profligate energy use — leading inexorably to runaway global warming, right?

Wrong. All but a small fraction of my household energy budget comes from renewable, CO2-neutral sources. The electricity arrives from photovoltaic panels on the roof, the heating from an electronically-controlled pot-belly stove that burns corn kernels and warms most of my Takoma Park home, and the hot water from a separate rooftop panel that converts sunlight to infrared heat.

Obviously, I’m a very wealthy man to be able to afford such extravagant gadgets. Everyone knows that amazingly effective renewable-energy technologies are out there. The problem is that average Americans — the very people who need to switch if we’re ever going to stop global warming — simply can’t afford them. Right?

Wrong again. In my case, I’m a hopelessly middle-class, self-employed writer with a nine-year-old son. No rich uncle died allowing me to become a self-indulgent techno nerd. And I didn’t scrape together years worth of savings to make this dream come true. I made all of the energy changes abruptly, within six months, and now I’m spending the handsome sum of — get this — $30 per month to pay for them.

That’s all. For the cost of a cup of coffee a day, with no help from friends or relatives, I’ve gotten off the planet’s back almost entirely at my home. And here’s the best part: Most of these planet-saving technologies are available and affordable right now for many American homeowners willing to do a little bit of research, borrow a modest sum of money, and spend that money wisely.

For me it was last year’s bombshell findings of the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that motivated me to plot my home energy revolution. Disastrous planetary warming of up to 10.4 degrees by 2100 is doubly horrifying each time you look out at your innocent son playing whiffle ball in the backyard with playmates destined to live till 2070. I knew that the relatively modest targets set by the Kyoto protocol wouldn’t save the planet either. Most scientists believe the world’s CO2 emissions must drop a full 80 percent below current levels to stabilize the climate.

So that became my goal: 80 percent. If I could cut my household CO2 emissions by that amount — or at LEAST by 50% — I would have done my part. It was the least I could do in a nation where our government barbarically sabotages even modest international efforts to stem climate change while proposing no solutions of its own. If our leaders won’t lead, we Americans owe it to the rest of the world to get the job done on our own, house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood.

So I developed a budget: $7500. That’s what I would spend, no more. Being of modest means, I had to borrow the money in the form of a home equity loan.

My very first investment was a book called Homemade Money, published by the Rocky Mountain Institute for people wanting to save money through improved energy use. The first step, I learned, was to eliminate unnecessary energy consumption and to use more efficiently the energy you can’t live without.

So I switched to compact fluorescent light bulbs, bought an extremely high efficiency refrigerator (it consumes less than a third the electricity of my previous 10-year-old unit and is bigger) and I began drying my clothes on a line. With these and other painless changes, including never ever illuminating an unoccupied room, I cut my electricity use a remarkable 52 percent from 3760 kilowatt hours in the year 2000 to an annual rate of around 1800 kilowatt hours now.

With my electricity demand now well trimmed, it became plausible to meet at least part of that demand with my own solar generation. And here’s where I encountered the first of several big and pleasant surprises: I could go solar, in a very big way, even on a very tight budget. I quickly learned that my state of Maryland offers grants of up to $3600 toward solar photovoltaic systems plus a deduction of 15% of the cost of the system from my state income tax. With a hefty grant in hand, I went shopping for solar panels and got another big surprise: A solar advocacy group – the Virginia Alliance for Solar Electricity — was heavily discounting the price of panels thanks to a subsidy from the U.S. Department of Energy. Taking advantage of both of these programs (both open to all homeowners in Maryland, by the way) and installing much of the system myself, I was suddenly able to realize my greatest dream: 36 solar panels on my southeast-facing back roof generating 70 percent of my electricity.

Amazingly, having tackled the big hurdle of electricity, I had almost half of my original $7500 budget still in hand to apply to my next big challenge: heating my house. I knew from research that a typical American household spends 44 percent of its total energy budget heating and cooling the home. As for cooling, my sturdy old house has high ceilings, partial shading from trees, and a nice sleeping porch, so I get by with ceiling fans. But in winter I spend up to $300 a month heating with natural gas. Given that my house was already reasonably well insulated, there could be no new savings through conservation. So I had to find a new source of heat.

But what? Thankfully, a small company in Hutchinson, Minnesota answered the question. Twelve years ago, ex-farmer Mike Haefner, president of American Energy Systems, engineered the first ever corn-burning stove designed to heat modern homes. Sales were flat until last year when rising fuel prices and growing concerns about the environment increased company sales 500 percent. This relatively small and easy-to-install stove easily heats a two-thousand-square-foot home (mine is 1600 square feet) and can accommodate a thermostat for extra convenience. The stove can store up to two days worth of corn in a side bin and self-loads the corn with a low-energy electric auger. All you have to do is set the stove to the heating level you want and enjoy the radiant heat.

Burning corn contributes almost nothing to global warming if the corn is raised responsibly through “no-till” planting and organic fertilization. Like all plant material, corn absorbs CO2 as it grows, and, with this stove, the corn burns so efficiently that the net CO2 released is at least 85 percent less than with natural gas heating. Moreover, corn is cheaper than natural gas — I save $200-$600 per winter — and it’s easily purchased here in the Washington area thanks to the urban corn silo and corn home-heating cooperative I’ve set up with 16 other local families. And corn is an almost endless energy source. Studies show American farmers can grow ten times more corn than is needed to meet all of America’s energy needs. So it’s good for farmers, good for the climate, easy to use, saves money. No brainer.

Even after all of these purchases — fridge, bulbs, photovoltaic panels, stove — I still had enough money to tackle my last major source of greenhouse gas emission: Heating my water. And here I got lucky. My heroic local solar contractor stumbled across a used but perfectly good 5-year-old solar hot-water system and sold it to me installed for $1000, thus closing out my expenditures at just over $7500. The solar system “pre-heats” the water for our natural gas heater. Thus, on sunny days, all of my hot water comes from the sun and on cloudy days I get as much help from solar as I can and then the gas burners kick in to
bring the temperature up to the 110 degrees I desire. I’m thus guaranteed hot water year round no matter what the weather.

Solar hot-water systems sell new starting at $3500 installed, so I caught a big break by buying mine used, the only sweet deal in my mix of energy investments, however. Maryland permits home owners to deduct 15 percent of the cost of such systems from their state income taxes, and if you use hot water for your dishwasher and for washing clothes, your pay back can come in less than ten years.

For my own purchases, here’s the bottom line: Except for a little natural gas to cook my food and heat my water on really cloudy days, plus the small portion of my electricity that still comes from my local utility, I now contribute nothing to global warming through home energy use. In the process, I’ve reduced my estimated CO2 contribution from 19,488 pounds per year to just under 2010 pounds, a drop of almost 90 percent!! If every household in the industrialized world were to make only half of these changes we would be well on our way to solving global warming.

I also do well by doing good. By conserving energy and switching to renewables I save an estimated $684 each year. That’s $57 per month. My monthly payment for the $7500 loan is $87. The difference is a little more than a dollar a day, a minuscule price to help preserve the planet. And that sum will quickly diminish as energy prices continue to rise. In ten years, when my loan is repaid, savings probably close to $1000 per year will go straight into my pocket.

But what are the drawbacks? Where’s the catch? Surely such an abrupt switch from fossil fuels entails some hidden sacrifices.

Actually, there are none. Yes, several times a week in the winter I have to reload the stove with corn, which takes about five minutes. And every two weeks I have to clean the stove a little and empty the ashes: another 15 minutes. And since the stove radiates heat, a room can only be warm if its door is left open, meaning someone wanting an extended period of complete privacy might get a little chilly. Other than this, my life of modern comfort is essentially unchanged.

Except for one more thing: I now live with greater hope for my son’s future and that of the whole planet. If I can make such big changes so quickly and for so little money, the rest of the world, when it finally makes up its mind, can do the same.

(Mike Tidwell is a writer and climate change activist in Takoma Park, Maryland. He can be reached at mtidwell@gmail.com)

WHAT I BOUGHT:

1.5 kilowatt photovoltaic system (partially installed by author): $3396

CO2-neutral corn-burning stove: $2,400

Solar hot-water system (used): $1,000

High-efficiency refrigerator: $750

20 compact fluorescent light bulbs: $140

Total: $7,686

HOW I PAID FOR IT:

$7,500 ten-year home equity loan at 7% interest rate. Monthly payment: $87.

Monthly energy savings: $57.

Final cost of converting our house almost entirely to renewable energy: $1
per day (until loan is paid off.)

Global Warming & Gardening

Differences between 1990 USDA hardiness zones and 2006 arborday.org hardiness zones reflect warmer climate< P>

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ESSAY:

Use Your Green Thumb to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint:
How Native Gardening Fights Global Warming
Link to the essay by Lauren Sher

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LINKS:

The Gardener’s Guide to Global Warming NWF — http://www.nwf.org/nwfwebadmin/binaryVault/Gardener’sGuideToGlobalWarming.pdf

DC Urban Gardener News — http://www.gardenrant.com/dc_urban_gardeners/2007/08/global-warming-.html

Sustainable Gardening with Susan Harris, Gardening Coach —
www.sustainable-gardening.com

With sadness and best wishes, the CCAN staff will say goodbye this month to an extraordinary member of our family: Anne Havemann. Barely out of college, Anne began working for CCAN five years ago as an executive assistant and quickly rose to become our communications director for the past three years. During her tenure, Anne has given as much heart and soul and sweat to the climate movement as anyone on the planet. For five straight winters she jumped into the Chesapeake Bay as part of our annual “Polar Bear Plunge.” She was such a fierce opponent of dirty coal in Maryland that former Republican Gov. Bob Ehrlich directed the state police to illegally spy on her (true story). She melted away with the rest of us during summertime rallies on Capitol Hill and she had her eyelashes turn white during a snowstorm rally for clean energy in Annapolis. But mostly we at CCAN will remember Anne for accidentally setting on fire a small bouquet of flowers during a CCAN fundraiser in Silver Spring, MD. The carbon emissions!

In late August Anne will become a student at the University of Maryland Law School in Baltimore with the goal of becoming an environmental lawyer of great global renown one day.

Anne: We already miss you so much it hurts. You made CCAN a great place to work and be happy despite the great storminess of climate change.

With great love and respect, we say so long for now.

The CCAN Staff