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Conservationist pins hopes on clotheslines
Kevin O'Connor, Times Argus (Vermont)
Alexander Lee is working to rope in out-of-control energy costs. So why does he think anyone can do that with a clothesline?

Back in 1995, Lee was student leader of Middlebury College's Environmental Quality club. Worried about the ecological impact of Vermont's two main electrical sources - Hydro-Quebec dams up in Canada and the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant down in Vernon - he invited anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott to give a speech that, to his surprise, would change his life.

"If we all did things like hang out our clothes," Caldicott said in one fateful sentence, "we could shut down the nuclear industry."

That got Lee thinking. One dryer, he knows today, eats up to $100 or more in power each year while emitting up to a ton of carbon dioxide. Collectively, America's more than 80 million dryers annually burn 6 to 10 percent of all residential electricity - second only to refrigerators and the equivalent of 30 million tons of coal or the output of the nation's 15 least productive nuclear reactors.

... Aiming to change attitudes and laws, Lee founded Project Laundry List. What began as a college campaign to promote clotheslines has grown into an internationally known nonprofit organization "to educate people," according to its mission statement, "about how simple lifestyle modifications, including air-drying one's clothes, reduce our dependence on environmentally and culturally costly energy sources."
(22 June 2008)

Urban farmers living off land
Thelma Gutierrez, CNN
CNN's Thelma Gutierrez reports on a family living the ultimate green lifestyle on an urban farm in Pasadena, California. 2:40
(15 June 2008)

What you can do about Peak Oil and Petrol Prices
James Ward, The Oil Drum / ANZ
What can I do about Peak Oil?

First and foremost, cut car use.

Why? It’s simple. Cars use the most oil. The 1 litre of fuel needed to move you and your shopping just 10km by car could get 100kg of freight almost 200km by truck, or 3000km by train.

If we try to keep our car use up by foregoing other luxuries, (a) we damage the economy (reduced consumer confidence and all that), and (b) we don’t actually reduce much demand for oil, because the lion’s share of the demand still comes from our car use. So as long as we keep driving, the oil price will keep rising, until one day we find we’ve actually wiped out the economy - and everyone finds themselves, quite literally, driving on a road to nowhere.

Once you realise that the vast majority of people are not in the “new car” market, you realise that hybrids and plug-ins are not going to fix the problem. It’s actually worse than that, because it seems the people driving the greatest distances are the ones without a great deal of money, living in the outer suburbs and towns. So the inner-urban middle classes can feel good driving the 2km to the organic café in a Prius or riding on a nice tram, while the outer suburbs revert to Mad Max as there is no alternative to the car and the car is too expensive to drive.

Or so we have all been led to believe.

In actual fact, for three quarters of the world’s population, cars have never been affordable and probably never will. It is a worthwhile (albeit humbling) experience to discover that the countries we have so condescendingly called “developing” or “Third World” may in fact hold the long-term answers to our socioeconomically diverse transport crisis. A mental trip to virtually any part of Asia reveals the dominant modes of transport: foot, bicycle, scooter, motorbike, car-pool, and mass-transit.
(21 June 2008)

Task force to address future of fuel
Ken Prendergast, West Side Sun News (Cleveland, Ohio)
By the end of the year, a new task force created by Cleveland City Council will make recommendations on how city departments, businesses and residents can better prepare for a future of permanently high fuel prices.

Cleveland will be the first major city in the Midwest to have such a task force to address the topic of "peak oil," said Jesse Auerbach, special projects coordinator at the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center.

"It's great to see Cleveland take a leadership role on this issue," Auerbach said. "Peak oil will affect all of us. In fact, it may already be affecting us."

Peak oil is the point at which oil production for a region, nation or the planet reaches its maximum output and then starts to fall. No amount of investment in more wells or new technology can prevent the oil from depleting since oil is a finite resource, said Tom Whipple of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas.

"There is no replacement for oil, not in the amounts that we use it," he said. "More education is needed. Too many people aren't aware of the problems we're facing."

Everything from the cost of getting to work to the price of food, the expense of policing and trash collection, and the cost of doing business is rising and is likely to rise higher. Whipple made that sobering prediction at a recent meeting of the National League of Cities environmental and energy committee, held in Cleveland.

Similar peak oil task forces were formed in Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Calif. and Austin, Texas. As a result, those cities reallocated funding to help businesses become more energy efficient, provide guidance to residents seeking to reduce their commuting costs, encourage urban gardening and promote land use development patterns that require little or no driving.

“We just can’t be reacting to rising oil prices,” said Ward 15 Councilman Brian Cummins. He and Ward 17 Councilman Matt Zone are co-chairing the task force. “The science is pretty well established that we’re at or near peak oil. This is going to cause significant problems and it’s important to be proactive.”

More people are being sought to serve on the peak oil task force, Zone said.

“We need to identify important stakeholders to get out in front of this issue,” he said. “There’s a lot of analysis of this (peak oil problem) that’s needed.”

“There are ways to get around without driving,” said Ward 19 Councilwoman Dona Brady, a sponsor of the resolution creating the task force. “But what are the alternatives for delivering food or for heating our homes? These are some tough questions we have to face.”

Andrew Watterston, Mayor Frank Jackson’s sustainability programs manager, said Jackson supports the task force and will participate in it.

Whipple said peak oil skeptics can also find reasons for supporting the recommendations of a peak oil task force, such as programs that reduce energy costs, help businesses become more efficient and improve the environment.
(19 June 2008)
Hat tip to Ed D'Amato.

The Post-Materialist: Design’s Past, Future
Nick Currie, The Moment (New York Times blog)
The Post-Materialist took a vacation on an island in the windswept Scottish archipelago of Orkney last week. Since the trip coincided with newspaper headlines about sharply rising oil prices, I began to see the gorgeous ancient designs on display in the museums as strangely futuristic - things we could perhaps learn from and re-use in a post-Peak Oil age. This stuff, after all, uses locally-sourced materials, recycles efficiently and gives us elegant solutions to the problems of energy conservation and high-density living.

The first designs that impressed me on the island were the box beds; they reminded me of the beds in Japanese capsule hotels. Used until well into the 20th century, box beds gave crofters - whose chilly cottages typically contained only two rooms - some warm and private space to retreat into. In a closet-cocoon of blankets, parents could stay warm, sleep, escape the demands of their children and work on conceiving more. The spaces above and below were used for storage; boots below, a spinning wheel above.
(20 June 2008)
The cutting edge in design -- forward to the past. -BA

How to Live With Just 100 Things
Lisa McLaughlin, TIME
Excess consumption is practically an American religion. But as anyone with a filled-to-the-gills closet knows, the things we accumulate can become oppressive. With all this stuff piling up and never quite getting put away, we're no longer huddled masses yearning to breathe free; we're huddled masses yearning to free up space on a countertop. Which is why people are so intrigued by the 100 Thing Challenge, a grass-roots movement in which otherwise seemingly normal folks are pledging to whittle down their possessions to a mere 100 items.

"Stuff starts to overwhelm you," says Dave Bruno, 37, an online entrepreneur who looked around his San Diego home one day last summer and realized how much his family's belongings were weighing him down. Thus began what he calls the 100 Thing Challenge. (Apparently, Bruno is so averse to excess he can't refer to 100 things in the plural.) In a country where clutter has given rise not only to professional organizers but also to professional organizers with their own reality series (TLC's Clean Sweep), Bruno's online musings about his slow and steady purge have developed something of a cult following online, inspiring others to launch their own countdown to clutter-free living.
(5 June 2008)

One Approach To Sustainability: Work Less
John de Graaf, World Changing
About six years ago, I addressed the annual state conference of the Associated Recyclers of Wisconsin, an organization of private and public waste managers. The topic of my talk, “Haste Makes Waste,” was focused on overwork and overconsumption. I told the assembled solid-waste handlers, “if you want to reduce landfills, reduce working hours.”

I argued that the long hours we in the United States work -- some 300 more per year than western Europeans -- mean we are more likely to rely on “convenience” and disposable items, such as heavily-packaged fast foods and single-use goods. I told my audience that many people had told me they were “too pressed for time even to recycle.” Moreover, our long work hours allow us to produce and buy more and more “stuff,” resulting in a greater pressure on resources and an inevitably stream of more waste.

A few members of the audience told me they agreed with my remarks, but I’m sure most thought I was pretty far out. Since then, the arguments for cutting working time to save the planet have only gotten more compelling.
(20 June 2008)