Green Options

Sonoma County at this point has the largest municipal financing program for solar and energy efficiency, modeled after the Berkeley First program, but run by the city themselves instead of a program administrator. The program allocated $100M and they’ve burned through about $20M of it in a very short period of time, since this is peoples’ favorite flavor of financing for solar.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed the re-designation of 74,223 acres of critical habitat for the endangered California tiger salamander population in Sonoma County.

The action is in response to a lawsuit brought by the Center of Biological Diversity (CBD) to reverse the Bush administration’s illegal reduction of the California tiger salamander’s (Ambystoma californiense) habitat to zero in 2005. According to a CBD press release, the action is part of a larger campaign to overturn decisions made by the Bush administration regarding endangered species. The Cleaning up the Bush Legacy Campaign has so far addressed 8 million acres of critical habitat designation decisions in 28 states for 46 species.

Many of the illegal decisions, including the decision over critical habitat for the tiger salamander, were engineered by former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Julie MacDonald, who resigned in disgrace following a scathing investigation by the inspector general of misconduct at the Department of the Interior.

The whole thing is happening without flashy ad campaigns, so it’s not surprising if you’ve never heard of municipal solar financing. But the financing program, also known as “property tax” financing, is a veritable underground solar revolution.

Last week as we overnighted in the LEED Gold Gaia Hotel in American Valley, we thought that we should take advantage of what everyone else in the region does – wine tasting. But we figured to be a little different. We hit a few wineries of varying organic, green, sustainable qualities and found a few surprises. First, get it out your head to tie “sustainability” to traditional wine making. As Winemaker Steven Canter at Quivira mentions, “There’s nothing sustainable about bottling wine in a glass bottle, corking the bottle, then shipping it all over the country.”

We scooted into the Madonna Winery tasting room during a quite Sunday afternoon. Located in the Carneros Region of Napa Valley, this family produced wine believes in organic farming, without the use of synthetic chemicals and is a proud member of CCOF (California Certified Organic Farmers). But when we asked the two servers if they served organic wine it was as if we asked for a tasting of Miller Lite. One gave this look of confusion and the other got a little condescending. Apparently, they do not make organic wine. According to the servers, that whole organic wine issue deals with the adding of sulfites and they think that serious winemakers have to use sulfites. Everyone gets to do their own due diligence as far as organic this or that but don’t make us feel like idiots for bringing up the question.