Save the Leyden Road

If you only ride in Jeffco, you may have no idea how much better the roads are in Boulder county.  We have redneck death traps like Golden Gate Canyon and Coal Creek Canyon.  Boulder has Left Hand, Sunshine, Sugarloaf, Flagstaff.  QED.  East of the mountains North of Boulder there are roads like Nelson, Hygiene, Nebo, St. Vrain (all east-west), and all the connecting north-south roads.  Fantastic scenary and modest traffic.  What do we have in Northern Jefferson County?  the Leyden Road.  That's pretty much it.  The creeping Kudzu of  Arvada is bent on covering every blade of grass with concrete and filling every open vista with office parks and Taco Bells.  Evidently Arvada has not been sated by the Candelas eco-cide.   The signs shown are new.  They were recently planted on the Leyden road and suggest that Arvada has turned its rapacious attention to this last lovely vista.  if you blow this up, you'll see the details of the "planning" commission meeting.  Here is a link to the full-sized picture

Climate fallacy #1

Small changes in inputs lead to small changes in ouputs.  

This assumes the Earth is a linear system.  But it's not.  There are many climate-related feedback mechanisms which, once excited, can lead to unstable, out-of-control changes.  For example, ice-albedo feedback.  A small rise in termperature is not just a small rise in temperature.  It can result in reducing the reflectivity of the Earth's surface (the albedo ) by melting ice.  This in term increases the absorption of sunlight, which leads to more ice-melt and off we go.  It works in the other direction too.  Decreasing temperature causes the albedo to increase as ice forms.  This can lead to uncontrolled cooling. 

Climate Scoreboard

N simple, inexpensive things to reduce our carbon footprint

These recommendations were written in the context my local campus community but I'm sure they apply, mutatis mutandis, more generally. Send me your ideas, I'll be happy to include them.

Expensive remedies such as PV and wind are great, but it is much easier to conserve energy than to produce it. For some reasons we Americans tend to seek solutions that are expensive and sexy but require no individual effort or commitment. Oh, and by the way, we have no money so let's do nothing. Some people will think these suggestions are too hard. But hard is curing cancer. Hard is stopping domestic violence. Using a broom instead of a leaf-blower? Requiring campus vendors to provide healthy food? Trivial rewards for people who walk or ride their bikes instead of driving? It's slightly embarrassing that we even have to discuss these things. Embarrassing or not, here goes:

the problem is not too little energy

Jared Diamond, January 2, 2008 New York Times: "Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures."

Diamond also does a great job explaining why the problem is not too little energy but too much consumption. He points out that if the developing world were brought up to the standards of consumption and waste of the developed world, it would be as if the Earth's population were 72 billion people!