Just a Bit of Venting...

From my wife & me: We just finished a week in which we attended the “2030 Districts Network Summit” kickoff in Burlington, VT (www.2030districts.org/) where reps from the 42 enrolled cities from all over the U.S. & Canada networked about making their cities environmentally & economically sustainable, & listened to the Mayor describe Burlington’s progress over the last 10 years or so.

Then we spent two days @ the “Renewable Energy VT 2023” conference (www.revconference.org/rev2023), where we heard from U.S. & Canadian legislators, officials, vendors, engineers, planners, etc. -- so much intense commitment, youthful energy & deep dives into both the science & the tech coming online to ameliorate pollution & its effects. One of the presenters noted th@ the applause we afforded the speakers was louder than the VT spec for wind turbines -- a sad but true & hardly funny observation.

[An aside: VT’s waaaay outdated & seldom enforced bldg. code, & its refusal to site wind generation, is a constant source of embarrassment, even as we are proud of our relative social enlightenment up here.]

Finally, we spent time w/ our town’s Planning Commission (Middlesex, VT) & a group of consultants from Boston, MA (utiledesign.com/) learning about infill housing to address the housing crisis. They presented an infill housing toolkit, asked questions, then toured four example properties in town to see how zoning might be used to solve some of this problem. (Our 38 square mile town has 47 miles of gravel roads, and 1800 souls. Topographically it is mostly forest and is quite hilly, & we still have a ways to go to repair our roads after the historic flooding this summer. Ours was one property visited. Current zoning requires 10 acres/house, on average.)

Brab & I finished this week soooooo pumped up about the solutions & progress we saw. Everything th@’s needed to bring our polluting ways to a sustainable level is available!! Of course we need to ramp up our supply of engineers & installers & equipment; but th@’s not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is our individual & collective resistance to make even small sacrifices of our personal status quo -- thru strategically chosen ignorance, refusal to take responsibility for our choices, our misplaced attention to “The News,” & how we choose our leaders.

Our takeaways from the week? Well, for one thing, most folks are still blaming others. Citizens blame Big Oil & the Gummint for not doing more -- even as they search for the cheapest gas for their gasmobiles & for propane for their cooking, heating & electricity. The big companies & the gummint in turn note th@ EV uptake is lowest in our “1st World” country & th@ our 401Ks & our gas stoves/furnaces/cars are demanding th@ they ‘keep on keeping on’ w/ “business as usual.”

You might think th@ the % of EVs in the parking lots @ these events would be huge -- you’d be wrong. Likewise, reading the news @ www.GreenEnergyTimes.org & www.CleanTechnica.com might lift your spirits as you see all the new green energy & green tech coming online -- but while the GHG emissions of our good ol’ U.S. of A. have wavered up & down over the past 33 years, they are only so very slightly down overall th@ the future looks increasingly bleak. How many people do you know who work in the “Green” industries & efforts who still have gas or methane tanks or lines in their homes, vehicles or yard equipment?

Many headlines point to reports th@ “we still have time” to keep under 2C warming, or such. Well, who’s the “we” in those claims? We can tell you who they are NOT! They are NOT the several millions of actual, real “men, women & children” who’ve already died & otherwise had their lives ruined by simply breathing the atmosphere we use as an open sewer -- not to mention those who’ve already suffered & died from the slow ramping up of our increasingly stronger weather events. Nor are they the likely billions of others who will suffer the same fate even if we were to stop polluting right now!

[Fun(?) demo you can safely do @ home: place a dime on your 12" desk globe of the earth. Then realize th@ the atmosphere we breathe & which holds our weather & into which we exhaust stuff th@ would kill us if released into our homes, th@ atmosphere is about ? the thickness of the dime. And we’re even burning down the trees & draining the wetlands th@ help to clean it up.]

We’ve modified our planet to the extent th@ “natural” disasters are no longer natural. Even some seismic & volcanic activity is being influenced by our actions. However, as we’ve been told by too many folks, “The kids will fix it, when it gets too bad.” Ummmm, aren’t we those kids? Apparently not, to most of us. Instead, we are the smokers w/ cancer who just can’t quit. Bill McKibben has put it well:

"But the truth is that we could win every other fight that we face and if we lose the climate fight, the other victories will be pyrrhic. I don't think even people who are worried about climate change quite understand the scale and speed with which we're now shifting the planet.“