Green Options

Berlin is a great bicycle city! Full of bicyclists, bike art, bicycle infrastructure, and unique bikes for a variety of different purposes, Berlin is #7 on this “great bicycle cities” list.

If you go to Germany, you will probably hear some Germans saying how much they love their cars (i.e. Mercedes, BMW, Audi). However, you will probably be surprised to see how many people actually love their bikes. Berlin is perhaps the best example. You can see people from across the class spectrum using the bicycle for a wide range of purposes. Even the postal service and other delivery services use bicycles.

Filmmaker Ken Burns’ most recent PBS documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, is a stunning and utterly engrossing tribute not only to our country’s many awe-inspiring natural landscapes, but also to our nation’s fundamental democratic principles. Burns interviews scores of ordinary people, from park rangers and activists to journalists and historians, as they trace the origins of our greatest collectively-owned resources, and share their unique personal experiences in the vast beauty of our national parks.

“When we look at the parks and we look at the United States and we examine the whole idea of democracy, I think that the park experience is an exploration of the idea of freedom.”

-Shelton Johnson, Park Ranger

The Showtime series Weeds brings us this abbreviated animated history of marijuana. It wanders from China to Turkey to Queen Victoria, and also states that cannabis is the number one cash crop in the United States, raking in nearly $36 billion untaxed dollars every year.

Wheatless Wednesday, along with her currently more popular cousin Meatless Monday, were the brainchild of Herbert Hoover during World War I.  Already active as a food relief administrator in Europe, Hoover was appointed to preside over the U.S. Food Administration in 1917, just before the United States entered the First World War.  It would be twelve more years before Hoover was inaugurated as the 31st president of the United States, but by that time he was already a household name.

Hoover’s massive food preservation program encouraged Americans to reduce food consumption so that the food supply for the troops and war-torn Europeans would remain strong.  The uniqueness of his plan– as opposed to later World War II efforts — was that Hoover’s program avoided rationing, while still successfully reducing American food consumption by 15%.

As you recover from your day of Thanksgiving feasting, you might be curious as to whom you should really thank for your day off from work or school day of celebration. There are many stories, myths, and misinformation surrounding Thanksgiving history. Equally significant are the many strong emotions and opinions evoked this holiday, including everything from the feel-good and sense of hope, to doubt and downright condemnation of the infamous feasting day.

But there’s a little-known truth about Thanksgiving that you may not realize. The real reason we celebrate the fourth Thursday of every November as “Thanksgiving” is because of a journalist, not the pilgrims.

There is no doubt that yesterday’s US presidential election was a historic event. No matter who you supported in the race, the fact that Americans elected a multiracial president is a significant event in a country where African Americans were once slaves.

One of the biggest problems facing meteorologists and climate scientists is the fact that we simply don’t have long term climate data. Sure, we’ve seen our planet get hotter and nastier in the last few decades, but, did it happen the same time a hundred years ago? What we’ve needed are data from the past, so that we can see just what is happening.

And thanks to Captain Cook and Lord Nelson and the East India Trading Company, a wealth of information has been uncovered by experts from the British Meteorological Office.

Kansas City MO architect Bob Berkebile is one of the key figures in establishing the importance of green building in this country.  Berkebile was instrumental in the founding of both the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) as well as the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on the Environment (COTE).

Those once-radical ideas have started to go mainstream. In 1993, Berkebile helped create a new group that wasn’t confined to architects: the U.S. Green

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Yabba dabba doo! Thanks, as always, to Brad and Peter for allowing us to republish “Shades of Green.” You can find more of their work at The Green House. And, of course, there’s always more on alternative transportation at Gas 2.0.

The Solar Thermal Edition

In my first post about the feast or Famine Cycles of American Clean Energy Development, I discussed renewable energy more broadly and used the example of wind to show my point. I also touched upon the up and down nature of federal funding for renewable energy deployment in the late 70s and early 80s. With that said, the following examination adds some more context with a historical-institutional perspective of what went down in the early 80’s, how, and why. And in the spirit of some of the earlier posts this week that covered the technology of solar thermal, and the practical application of solar thermal technology to entire neighborood developments, I have decided to follow suit by writing about solar thermal as well. I hope to show that the decline and slow fazing out of federal support for solar thermal research and development during the Reagan and George Bush administrations has had a substantial effect on where the industry is today.