Green Mass Group is an effort by concerned global citizens (who happen to live in the state of Massachusetts) to build an online community that will engage in a political discourse that is rooted in reality and steeped in compassion.
We have seen the word "Green" robbed of its meaning and we will use this site to reclaim it.
The Green movement is an ecological movement, based on the idea that the whole human experiment is part of nature and not separate from it. Human systems are subject to nature's laws whether we like it or not. Human endeavors are inextricably linked to our biosphere. Our health and well-being is intricately connected to the health and well-being of plant and animal species across the planet. Our economic, social, and political systems cannot change this simple fact -- they must reflect it.
The failures of the environmental community have been
(a) giving up on a "no regrets" strategy that concentrates on all the things the majority can agree on whether or not they believe in "global warming"
(b) concentrating on legislative and regulatory action to the exclusion of grassroots empowerment through practical demonstrations of individual and community solutions
(c) not building a united front of organizations all pushing in the same direction at the same time and actually executing a common strategy long-term through a battery of complementary tactics short-term (the environmental community is notorious for not knowing the difference between strategy and tactics)
(d) motivating almost exclusively by fear and thereby building learned helplessness and despair rather than fostering individual and community competence
(e) focusing almost totally on a problem orientation rather than a solutions orientation
Reversing Global Warming while Meeting Human Needs: An Urgently Needed Land-Based Option
Friday, January 25, 2013
2:00 - 4:00 PM, ASEAN Auditorium
The Fletcher School, 160 Packard Avenue, Medford, MA
Reception to follow
RSVP at http://allansavory.eventbrite.com
Allan Savory, Rancher and Restoration Ecologist, Founder of the Savory Institute and originator of the Holistic Management approach to restoring grasslands, winner of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award, and finalist in the Virgin Earth Challenge
Presented by CIERP's Agriculture, Forests, and Biodiversity Program with the Friedman School's Agriculture, Food, and Environment Program and Planet-TECH Associates
Free and open to the public. Convened by the Agriculture, Forests, and Biodiversity Program of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Fletcher;
the Agriculture, Food, and Environment Program of Tufts' Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy; and Planet-TECH Associates.
First in a Series of "Creating the Future We Want" Events.
While governments posture and dither, a pragmatic practitioner and intellectual entrepreneur, Allan Savory,has been developing and demonstrating a powerful technique that can reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere immediately while reversing desertification and providing livelihoods and food for millions of people. His applied research based in Zimbabwe on the restoration of grasslands has now been replicated on millions of acres worldwide. The application of his methods has the potential to significantly reduce atmospheric carbon through an increase in plant growth and soil formation. This process begins immediately and involves no new technologies, only a shift to the Holistic Management practices for livestock that he has pioneered. Major organizations and institutions are now recognizing his work, but climate scientists and governments have yet to incorporate it into their analyses and policy prescriptions.
BY ROBINSON JEFFERS, 1938 Then what is the answer?-Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know the great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history...for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.
A group of people from the Occupy Wall Street movement is collaborating with the climate change advocacy group 350.org and a new online toolkit for disaster recovery, recovers.org, to organize a grassroots relief effort in New York City.
The combination of the jobs and economic focus of Occupy with the climate change and energy transition ideas of 350.org along with the disaster recovery systems of Recovers.org is a model that can build resilience and preparedness quickly if continued. Add Solar IS Civil Defense, set the Maker Culture loose, and it just might shade over into Solar Swadeshi, Gandhian economics, a non-violent and restorative open source peer-to-peer economic system where we plan for 100% success for all humanity, to paraphrase R Buckminster Fuller.
John Robb is a strategist and theorist of modern warfare. His book, Brave New War, is the best introduction I know of to small group warfare, the way technology has enabled ad hoc groups like Al Quaeda and others to wage war against superpowers like the USA.
In the last few years, Robb has changed his focus to the concept of resilience. Looking at the failure of international, national, and regional governmental, economic, and social systems to confront the challenges of climate change and institutionalized as well as ad hoc criminality, he has started an initiative to relocalize our basic systems of survival as we watch the slow decline and collapse of the overarching social machinery that currently exists.
The solution is to build resilience, is to build resilience at the local level... You take control of the things you can have influence over, the things in front of you, the things that are human scale.... and strangely, when you start looking at building resilience, building local viable communities, it solves all the problems at the global level, economically, environmentally, and in terms of quality of life...
Here is his lecture at the recent NYC Maker Faire. The video starts about 8 minutes in and his description of a resilient community ends around 15:40 when he begins to take questions. These seven or eight minutes are a useful introduction to a reasonable way forward.
You can now estimate with great detail the solar electric potential of any roof in Cambridge, MA by just typing in an address on a webpage, the Cambridge Solar Tool
(http://cambridgema.gov/solar). For instance, the double triple decker in which I live has six apartments and a total roof area of 2,781 square feet. 1,136 of those sq ft have high PV (photovoltaic) potential. This could support an 18kW solar electric system providing 22,945 kWh per year, enough to power about a third of the electricity used by those six apartments, if each apartment uses the rough US average of around 11,000 kWh per year (my own annual electric use is around 1,600 kWh/yr).
The estimated savings per year for such a PV system are $9,081. The total cost is $101,720. With the Federal tax credit of $30,516 and a MA state tax credit of $1,000, the final cost to the owner would be $70,204. In addition, the Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs) of 27¢/kWh could produce $6,212 per year (at least that's my reading of the MA SREC program, but I could be wrong). Such an investment would pay for itself in about 8 years with a return on investment (ROI) of 12.93%, a better return than gold (10.19%) or the stock market (Dow Jones average: 5.50%). The solar electricity would replace other fuels that now spew 12 tons per year of carbon into the atmosphere.
If the owner did not want to put any money down, they could opt for a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), buying electricity from a third party which owns, installs, maintains, insures, and monitors a PV system on the roof of our double triple decker at a long term, generally 20 years, fixed and lower cost than what is paid now for power.
{Interesting summary of the Green Party and its platform. Not sure this gets to the essence of what the Green Party is all about, but that's probably because the Green Party itself doesn't really get to the essence of what it's all about. -ed.}
If you are like me, you were raised believing that the Green Party was a party of Socialists and Communists; and if you were taught in school like I was taught in school, then you were taught to believe that if the Green Party was a party of Socialists and Communists, then, by default, they were a party of Fascists and Dictators. I have just finished doing extensive research on them (including reading their entire 65-page platform), and I can assure you that you probably aren't getting the full Green Party story.
History
Started in New Zealand and brought to prominence in Europe, the Green Party came to the United States in the 1980s. Then, it was known as the Green Committees of Correspondence, a decentralized network of green organizations formed by members of the North American Bioregional Congress. In 1984, the electoral branch of the Green Party was founded by 60 people at the Macalaster College in St. Paul, Minn. In 1991, the name Greens/Green Party USA was adopted after the electoral and non-electoral wings of the organizations merged. In American electoral politics, the Green Party gained prominence in 1996 and 2000, when they ran Ralph Nader for President. As of 2005, the Green Party had 305,000 registered members in states allowing party registration, and tens of thousands of members and contributors nationwide. Currently, there are 133 elected Greens across the United States, and in the 2008 Presidential election, they were on 31 state ballots, plus the District of Columbia, which translates to 70 percent of voters and 68 percent of Electoral College votes.
The report focuses on three SCLF [short lived climate forcers] - black carbon, tropospheric ozone and methane [an ozone precursor*] - because reducing them will provide significant benefits through improved air quality and a slowing of near-term climate change.
Black carbon and tropospheric (10 - 20 km above ground) ozone are resident in the atmosphere for a few days to three weeks (3-8 days for carbon, up to 4-18 days for ozone). Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of 12 years, ± 3 years.
"Full implementation" of all the identified measures could reduce future global warming by "0.5˚C (within a range of 0.2-0.7˚C)". If implemented by 2030, this tactic might halve the potential increase in global temperature projected for 2050. "The rate of regional temperature increase would also be reduced" wherever they are put into practice.
These measures "could avoid 2.4 million premature deaths (within a range of 0.7-4.6 million) and the loss of 52 million tonnes (within a range of 30-140 million tonnes), 1-4 per cent, of the global production of maize, rice, soybean and wheat each year." Benefits will be felt immediately "in or close to the regions" where black carbon, methane, and tropospheric ozone are reduced. The potential for emissions reductions, climate, health, and economic benefits are highest in Asia but gains can also be realized in Africa, Latin America, and wherever these measures are put into practice.
A few emission reduction measures "targeting black carbon and ozone precursors could immediately begin to protect climate, public health, water and food security, and ecosystems. Measures include the recovery of methane from coal, oil and gas extraction and transport, methane capture in waste management, use of clean-burning stoves for residential cooking, diesel particulate filters for vehicles and the banning of field burning of agricultural waste."
All these benefits can be obtained with existing technology but require significant strategic investment and institutional arrangements to make them widespread, part of general and every day use.
*Ozone is not directly emitted. It is a secondary pollutant that is formed in the troposphere by sunlight-driven chemical reactions involving carbon monoxide (CO), non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs), methane (CH4), and nitrogen oxides (NO ). Ozone in the troposphere is the third most human-emitted greenhouse gas, after CO2 and methane. Ozone formation increases as temperature rises.
(and knowing is half the battle. - promoted by eli_beckerman)
Solar IS Civil Defense - what we are all supposed to have on hand in case of emergency - flashlight, cell phone, radio, extra set of batteries - can be powered by a few square inches of solar electric panel. Add a hand crank or bicycle generator and you have a reliable source of survival level electricity, day or night, by sunlight or muscle power.
This is also entry level electrical power for the 1.5 billion people around the world who do not yet have access to electricity. Civil defense at home and economic development abroad can be combined in a "buy one, give one" program like the Bogolight (http://www.bogolight.com) which is a solar LED light and AA battery charger.
Testing in New Hampshire's Mink Brook watershed during March through May 2011 resulted in calculating radioactive iodine deposition in the soil at a total amount around 6,000 atoms per square meter. Dartmouth research associate Joshua Landis commented that "at these levels, it is unlikely that this is going to cause measurable health consequences." The amount in stream sediments was double the amount in soil but should be reduced by river and stream dilution.
This radioactive waste from Fukushima consists of iodine-131, "highly radioactive, acutely toxic" with a half-life of about 8 days, and iodine-29, less radioactive but with a half-life of 15.7 million years. "Due to its long half-life and continued release from ongoing nuclear energy production, [iodine-129] is perpetually accumulating in the environment and poses a growing radiological risk," the authors of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences report point out. A nuclear reactor produces 3 parts iodine-131 to one part iodine-129. "Once the iodine-131 decays, you lose your ability to track the migration of either isotope."
You have to sign in and thus provide your email address, and you may use all 3 votes to support the UMass project.
From John Gerber, Professor of Sustainable Food and Farming at UMass Amherst:
The UMass Permaculture Project was selected from among 1400 nominations as one of 15 finalists in the White House Campus Change Challenge. After a week of online voting we were leading the nation (until yesterday), when the University of Arkansas got a story in USA Today and picked up thousands of votes. We believe that with a last minute "push" we can retake the lead in the balloting.
If you are willing please vote for us here and ask a few friends to help us out.
Our students have done a terrific job trying to change the culture on campus to be more supportive of local food and farming. This would be quite a tribute to their hard work.
Cowards in Our Democracies: Part 2 28 January 2012
Scientists are finding it difficult to persuade the public of the urgency to reduce fossil fuel CO2 emissions. This is in part because people profiting from fossil fuel business-as-usual support disinformation about the science, so that they can expand extraction of fossil fuels despite the evidence that such expansion will push the climate system beyond tipping points, assuring further climate change with impacts that are practically out of humanity's control.
Scientists attempt to communicate, but are flummoxed by the ability of the profiteers to manipulate democracies. The scientific method (objective analysis of all facts) is pitted against the talk-show method (selective citation of anecdotal bits supporting a predetermined position).
The tragedy is that a common sense pathway exists that would solve our energy needs, stimulate our economy and protect the future of young people. Yet people benefiting from business-as-usual are able to block adoption of policies in the public's interest, via the corrosive influence of money in politics and aided by corporate-dominated media.
Should scientists connect the dots all the way to policy implications? Profiteers strongly oppose that, because scientists are trained to be objective, and profiteers want no interference with their functioning profit pathways. Let's consider that issue after summarizing the situation.
Cowards in Our Democracies: Part 1 27 January 2012
The threat of human-made climate change and the urgency of reducing fossil fuel emissions have become increasingly clear to the scientific community during the past few years. Yet, at the same time, the public seems to have become less certain about the situation. Indeed, many people have begun to wonder whether the climate threat has been concocted or exaggerated.
Public doubt about the science is not an accident. People profiting from business-as-usual fossil fuel use are waging a campaign to discredit the science. Their campaign is effective because the profiteers have learned how to manipulate democracies for their advantage.
The scientific method requires objective analysis of all data, stating evidence pro and con, before reaching conclusions. This works well, indeed is necessary, for achieving success in science. But science is now pitted in public debate against the talk-show method, which consists of selective citation of anecdotal bits that support a predetermined position.
Solar water disinfection
http://www.sodis.ch/index_EN A two liter plastic bottle can be made into a water treatment system simply by filling it with contaminated water and exposing it to the sun. Sodis is an organization that promotes this technology around the world.
The disinfection process can be speeded by turning aluminized mylar snack food bags inside out and making them into reflectors as two young students in Belo Horizonte, Brazil discovered: http://calais.phase2technology...
In 2002, during a long electrical shortage, at Uberaba, São Paulo, Brasil, Mr Alfredo Moser discovered a way to gather sun light in the house through plastic bottles hanging from the roof. First shown at the Globo Reporter in the 25th May 2007.
Alfredo Moser was pressed by a scarce electricity substitution and found out that he could light his house with a bottle of water filled with water and a protection cap made of camera film.
The bottle is just refracting sunlight very effectively and produces an equivalent light power compared to a 50/60W lamp. In a rainy day, even without much light and direct sun, one still have some light. Scientist have now visited Moser and are looking into ways to take this concept to maximize its potential.
"The Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, in association with state regional groups that work on high-level radioactive waste policy, will be hosting public meetings to solicit feedback on the draft commission report (pdf alert: http://www.brc.gov/sites/defau... ). The participant host groups include; the Western Governors' Association/Western Interstate Energy Board, the Southern States Energy Board, the Council of State Governments-Midwestern Office, and the Council of State Governments- Eastern Regional Conference.
"The meeting[s] will be held to present the draft Commission report (issued on July 29, 2011) and hear feedback from state, local and tribal perspectives - as well as from interested members of the public. The meeting will begin with a briefing from Commission staff on the draft report, followed by comments from elected and appointed state and regional representatives. The latter portion of the meeting will be devoted to facilitated and interactive breakout sessions open to all who attend and will conclude with a public comment period.
"All public are welcome to attend. Pre-registration is strongly encouraged but not required. Information about registration will be available in the near future. The meetings will not be video webcast. Transcripts of the meetings will be available on the website, along with all written comments anyone chooses to offer. Comments can either be made directly to the website at http://www.brc.gov or by email to: CommissionDFO@nuclear.energy.gov. Comment deadline is October 31, 2011."
September 13, 2011
Embassy Suites
1420 Stout Street
Denver, CO
My policy is zero emissions, 100% recycling for all wastes, including low level and high level radioactive waste, and my immediate concerns for "America's Nuclear future" are 1) how quickly we can move commercial spent fuel from wet storage, which requires a constant supply and circulation of cooling water, to dry cask storage which does not; and 2) how many of the 35 US boiling water reactors like Fukushima have spent fuel pools above buildings outside the radiation containment structures and how soon can that be remedied? Neither of these issues are top priorities in the present Blue Ribbon Commission report as they are looking at a different scale and timeframe.
(The problems are in our heads. Solutions abound. Economical use of simple solar can help move us out of the hole we're digging. - promoted by eli_beckerman)
"Any window that sees direct sunlight is a solar collector. You can learn how to use that free energy to make your home more comfortable and secure. Caulk and seal the window against drafts. Install storm windows on the exterior, interior, or both. Cover the window at night with an insulating curtain to prevent conduction, convection, and radiative heat loss. A valence above the window will stop night-time drafts and reduce condensation. A sunny window can double as a greenhouse for starting seedlings or growing house plants. Expand the solar space below, above, or beside the window with a windowbox solar air or water heater. You can even design a living system to provide fresh vegetables and fish year round while producing space heat, cleaning the air, and reducing waste. A south-facing window is already a solar collector. Learn how to use it."
(Germany on its way to a better, brighter future. What about U S ? - promoted by eli_beckerman)
A couple of years ago, Dr William Moomaw of Tufts mentioned a regional scale experiment with an all-renewable grid in Germany. I've been curious about that project since then. Today, I did a little googling and found a seven-minute youtube called "Fully renewable: biogas + wind + solar"
Dr Jurgen Schmid at the University of Kassel, Department of Efficient Energy Conversion is the spokesperson from this December 2007 video. The system described is wind with pumped hydro storage and grid scale solar with methane from biomass (corn biofuels). When the sun isn't out in the South, the wind may be blowing in the North. When there's too much wind, it can be used to pump water into reservoirs that will provide hydroelectricity days or weeks later. When the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, biomass can be burned or converted to methane. They say Germany can have a 100% renewable grid by 2050. Dr Schmid, along with John Sievers, Stefan Faulstich, Mathias Puchta, Ingo Stadler, is the co-author of "Long-term perspectives for balancing fluctuating renewable energy sources" (pdf alert: http://desire.iwes.fraunhofer.... details the steps necessary to get to a fully renewable grid.
Green Mass Group is an online forum for Green thought and collective action in Massachusetts. It is a community forum for justice, sustainability, democracy and health in the Commonwealth and beyond.
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Quotes
"The time has come for global action to build a new world economic system that is no longer based on the illusion that limitless growth is possible on our precious and finite planet or that endless material gain promotes well-being. Instead, it will be a system that promotes harmony and respect for nature and for each other; that respects our ancient wisdom traditions and protects our most vulnerable people as our own family, and that gives us time to live and enjoy our lives and to appreciate rather than destroy our world. It will be an economic system, in short, that is fully sustainable and that is rooted in true, abiding well-being and happiness."
--Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley of Bhutan, where the government tracks the nation's "Gross National Happiness"
