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America’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare
Stan Cox, AlterNet
Air-conditioning puts a chill on community spirit, aids the cause of anti-enviros, and just might have given us President George W. Bush.
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Editor’s Note: This is Part II of a two-part series on how air-conditioning has changed American society. Read Part I here.
In 1950, the string of nine coastal Sun Belt states from Virginia to Texas, plus New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada, had a combined population of 33 million, less than half the total population of the 14 New England and Rust Belt states that stretch from Maine to Minnesota. By 2002, the population of the 12 Sun Belt states had doubled and then grown by a third more, to 88 million — almost as many people as then lived in those 14 northern states.
For many migrants, mild southern winters have always been the big attraction. But the price to be paid in summer discomfort is high.
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Along with keeping cars parked, we could start by throwing open a few windows. The United States devotes 18 percent of its electricity consumption just to air-condition buildings. That’s more than four times as much electricity per capita as India uses per capita for all purposes combined
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Imagine a country where economic life, by necessity, slows during the summer. Where potential customers stay home or go swimming on a hot afternoon, so salespeople are sent home early. Where factories simply shut down the line for a couple of weeks. That was this country before air-conditioning, but in 2006, it sounds like a distant, exotic land. In today’s rapid-growth, high-consumption “service economy,” workers and consumers, like computers and ovens, are components, each of which is maintained at an appropriate operating temperature.
(29 June 2006)
You’ll have to read the original to find out the connection between air conditioners and President George W. Bush. -AF
50 Years Driving in the Wrong Direction: Taken for a Ride on the Interstate Highway System
Mike Ferner, Counterpunch
The 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s signing of the Interstate Highway Act is a good time to dust off this review of the PBS documentary, “Taken for a Ride” that I wrote 10 years ago when President Clinton visited my city during the 1996 presidential campaign.
Riding a “Presidential Special” from Columbus to Toledo on tracks that no longer carry passenger trains, Clinton crowed, “I’m goin’ to Chicago (for the Democratic Party convention) and I’m goin’ on a train!”
I wanted to ask him why the rest of us could no longer travel to our state capital by train; why we are the only industrialized nation on earth that refuses to subsidize its passenger rail system? And I asked a question that makes me sick to my stomach to read 10 years later: “How many more billions of dollars and how many more lives will we pay for Mideast oil.?”
Of course I never got to ask him those questions in person, but luckily, two fellow Ohioans, Dayton-area independent filmmakers, Jim Klein and Martha Olson, replied with their film, “Taken for a Ride.”
Their documentary tells the dramatic story of how America’s passenger trains and streetcars were systematically and deliberately killed by what we now call the “highway lobby.” What makes their film so important is that it goes beyond vague conspiracy theories to name names.
Klein and Olson weave General Motors promotional films, Congressional archives, interviews with citizen activists, and Department of Justice memos into a compelling pattern of events that make it clear: we didn’t get into the traffic jam we’re in today by accident.
(28 June 2006)
World weighs in on global warming.
Angus Reid, The Tyee
A Toronto-based investment firm predicted this week that global warming might soon leave governments “facing a choice between feeding people and feeding SUVs.” The U.S. Supreme Court decided Monday to hear a case against the Environmental Protection Agency that would hold the government responsible for regulating greenhouse gasses (or failing to do so). And more locally, Dorothy Cutting, 75, will embark on a six-week trip north to raise awareness about global warming. With Al Gore as the new environmental poster boy and global warming on everyone’s mind, with Katrina’s impact still fresh and forecasts for more of the same and worse, here’s a sampling of international opinion.
In the United States, the latest poll indicates that 59 per cent of Americans think global warming is a serious problem that requires immediate action. For more information, click here.
However, when Americans are asked to rank environmental concerns, global warming is well below other issues, such as water pollution, air pollution, damage to the ozone layer and the loss of tropical rain forests. For more information, click here.
In addition, the number of Americans who rate their government’s actions to protect the environment as poor has increased to 62 per cent. For more information, click here.
(29 June 2006)
Al Gore 3.0
Will Dana, Rolling Stone
The man who won the presidency in 2000 is looser and more outspoken than ever. Is his global-warming movie a warm-up for a third run at the White House?
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It is probably not fair to say that global warming excites Al Gore, but get him going on the subject and he becomes possessed by the spirit of a Holy Rolling preacher, swelling and quaking in his chair, hitting high notes, speaking in tongues. We are meeting in a cramped waiting room outside two TV studios in midtown Manhattan. Gore is spending the afternoon here, knocking off a dozen or so interviews with broadcast outlets across the country, one after the other, intimations of the apocalypse sandwiched between the local-anchor happy talk and car-dealership ads in markets like Houston and Kansas City.
Gore is in the middle of an exhaustive campaign to promote An Inconvenient Truth, a surprise hit that transposes to film a lecture about global warming that he has given more than a thousand times in the past six years. (An accompanying book of the same title is climbing the best-seller lists.) But while Gore’s message may be grim — in a nutshell, a warming climate threatens civilization, and if the human race wants to survive, we’ve got about ten years to start turning things around — Gore himself seems funnier, warmer and more relaxed than he ever did during his political years. You used to think: I wouldn’t mind taking a class from this guy. Nowadays, you wouldn’t mind having a beer with him. His recent appearance on Saturday Night Live, when he addressed the nation as president and boasted that gas prices were so low that the government had to bail out the big oil companies, was the single funniest moment on the show all season.
(13-27 July 2006 issue)
Ten-minute interview of Gore on the Daily Show.
U.S. Emits Half of Car-Caused Greenhouse Gas, Study Says
Janet Wilson, L.A. Times via Common Dreams
American cars and pickup trucks are responsible for nearly half of the greenhouse gases emitted by automobiles globally, even though the nation’s vehicles make up just 30% of the nearly 700 million cars in use, according to a new report by Environmental Defense.
Cars in the U.S. are driven more miles, face lower fuel economy standards and use fuel with more carbon than many of those driven in other countries, the authors found. According to the report by the environmental group, due out today, U.S. cars and light trucks were driven 2.6 trillion miles in 2004, equal to driving back and forth to Pluto more than 470 times.
The report’s authors hope their findings will bolster efforts in Congress to require federal regulators to raise fuel economy standards for vehicles and set a mandatory cap on greenhouse gases from all sources. Numerous studies have linked carbon dioxide emissions from burning of fossil fuels such as gasoline to global warming.
One surprising finding was that small cars emitted more carbon dioxide than SUVs, 25% of the total compared with 21%. That is because there are more older small vehicles with higher emissions still in service, said lead author John DeCicco, a mechanical engineer specializing in automobile research.
“Even though SUVs get worse fuel economy and burn more gas, there’s roughly twice as many small cars in operation,” he said.
That will change in a few years based on car scrapping rates, he predicted, with SUVs bought over the last 10 to 15 years taking the lead, even if consumers begin buying small cars again because of sharply higher fuel prices
(28 June 2006)
Related at Washington Post: New Report Cites U.S. Motorists For Production of Greenhouse Gases.
Study shows global warming may not lead to greater crop yields
Michael Hawthorne, Chicago Tribune via Charlotte Observer
CHICAGO – Scientists had thought that there was one potential upside to global warming: more food to feed the world.
Years of laboratory tests led them to believe that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could fertilize food crops such as corn, soybeans, wheat and rice, offsetting the plant-damaging effects of higher global temperatures and less rainfall.
But a new study with field tests in Illinois and other spots around the globe is challenging that assumption, suggesting that any increase in crop yields due to the buildup of greenhouse gases would be modest or nonexistent.
Lower-than-expected yields could have dire consequences for the world’s food supply, the study’s authors concluded. They called for more research into plant varieties that could withstand the atmospheric assault.
The prevailing scientific wisdom has been repeatedly cited in government projections on food supplies and by Bush administration officials who oppose mandatory limits on emissions of heat-trapping gases.
Authors of the new University of Illinois study, published Friday in the journal Science, said their findings are more accurate because they mimic predicted atmospheric changes in farm fields. Instead of growing plants in a greenhouse, the researchers set up plots surrounded by rings of tubes that spray carbon dioxide and ozone over the crops.
They found that corn yields didn’t increase at all when the air over the plots contained the amount of carbon dioxide projected to be lingering in the atmosphere by 2050. Increases in wheat and soybean yields were about half of what was previously thought.
(29 June 2006)
Related from SciDev: Rising CO2 levels not as good for crops as thought.
