Ecologically clothes-minded

Above is $32 worth of second-hand glory.

There’s a system of bike paths that cuts through Northern Virginia, connecting the outlying burrows of DC to its city center. This time of year the path is draped with dramatic bursts of color, popping from the Magnolia trees, Cherry Blossoms, and other varieties of splendor I have yet identify. Without getting too Tolkien on you with the landscape, suffice it to say rain really brings out the color. If you’ve ever read the Celestine Prophecy, then you’ll understand how the colors of Northern Virginia’s landscape emanate beyond their spatial parameters.

Anyhow, I went shopping in Crystal City today after a four mile longboard in the rain with Ileana and her best friend Lydia. Shopping and I are pretty much incompatible. If I do go, it's about twice a year in a “let’s get in and get the hell out” time of mindset. But today was a special occasion. I shopped consignment and the proceeds went to the Junior League of Washington. 

If you’re ever contemplating shopping for clothes, I highly recommend consignment.  It’s a thrill to think about how much money you’ve saved – I got two pairs of casual pants, three dressy shirts, a pair of socks, and two kitchen towels for $32. But even better than the money, and the charity, was the environmental perk of it all. Because I bought used clothes, greenhouse gasses weren't emitted in the production of new clothes, carbon expended in the clothes' transport was minimal (items were donated by individuals of the charity hosting the event, so transportation merely involved getting those items to the event) and I didn’t add to the conversion of natural resources into consumer goods. 

According to a BBC article, “it takes ten times more energy to make a tonne of textiles than it does a tonne of glass, and when you throw wool and cotton clothes into landfill, they produce methane.” Methane is estimated to have a warming effect about 25 times as great as CO₂, according to the article.

Climate change: here to stay?

  

On Friday March 9, during a record day of warmth, Ileana takes in the scent of a blooming Magnolia by the Washington D.C. Smithsonian Castle.

It’s here guys. Global warming is no longer intangible. Throughout the United States, over six thousand heat records have been set this March. In the past few decades, extreme weather events like heat wave, storm surge, sea level rise and flooding having become have become more prevalent and with higher intensities. Between global population rise, standard of living increases, static economic infrastructure, and political malaise, humans have emitted more carbon dioxide in the last 50 years than throughout our entire existence and are having great difficulty stopping the trend.  

Some of these things you’ve heard, you know, and like me are searching for the answers or waiting for realistic measures to reverse climate change. The environmental world is now pushing something called adaptation, to circumvent the politics and overall taboo issue of climate change. Adaptation recognizes that our climate is constantly changing and that strategic responses to these changes are necessary to preserve the earth’s life systems. Yet, less psychologically damaging than climate change, which is embedded with the difficult truth that human life systems are causing the Earth’s climate to change, adaptation is value neutral and doesn't fault humans.

It notes that our climate is changing and will continue to change, and that the impacts of climate change are affecting our earth’s systems and these effects are predictable within certain intervals. In other words, there is no way to ascertain exactly what will happen to our earth’s systems, but there is enough of an understanding to plan for a probability of events, take action, and then continue to adapt a coherent strategy for a given earth system. 

I have great hope for our species, but less hope for our federal governing apparatus. Environmental strides, such carbon accounting, local and statewide greenhouse gas compacts, and robust environmental networks, have emerged despite climate change censorship in the Bush regime, and increased oil drilling during the Obama administration. Meanwhile non-profits are fueling an environmental awareness that’s spreading like wildfire among consumers, and some of the corporate world is responding to the fervor by supplying sustainable products, gridlock in Washington is preventing much needed and eagerly awaited environmental legislation to incentivize the rest of the business world and the major utilities to bring us to the energy future we’ve been envisioning for the last half century. 

Check out this podcast on adaptation.

 This is just on feel, but once China surpasses the United States in renewable energy supplied per capita (I’m thinking 2020-2025) and signs the Kyoto Protocol or an equivalent, the federal government will get its act together.

From the trenches

Photo taken by GMU Associate Professor Todd La Porte

 

Embracing Jetson-like technology, our class- conferenced with UC Berkley PhD Student Esther Conrad about climate adaptation strategies for watersheds.

Loyal blog readers, I promised a post from the trenches. Grad school is basically one enormous bowl of Pho. You can see that there’s good stuff in it, but it requires so much effort getting through the boiling brothy stuff that when your finally there you say “fuck it, just give me some ice cream.” 

Alright, let’s start this post over, because grad school has nothing to do with Vietnamese soup.

I’ve learned a lot, and it may take a couple of posts, but I want to disperse some pearls of knowledge, for your benefit. 

The first thing is, though the U.S. government sucks fuck at being able stave off any sort of environmental problems, state and local governments are kicking ass and taking names in the environmental arena. “To date more than 700 American local governments and nearly all state governments have engaged in some form of climate change policy making” (U.S. Conference of Mayors). 

And get this, states are working toward the big picture, capping carbon emissions. “Twenty-one states are actively involved in establishing regional zones for capping and trading carbon emissions from electrical utilities” (Rabe 2008b; Pew Center on Global Climate Change 2007).

There are some big ideas at work. Though a backlog of info is required to qualify this next statement, it gets at the general trend of dealing with environmental issues. The federal government is at an impasse when it comes to climate change, any sort of overarching legislation that the government could pass won’t happen (A) because its political suicide to have your name attached to anything containing the phrase “climate change” (I’ve got to thank our Fox “News” viewers for that one) and (B) because at this point anything the government actually did pass could actually hinder the environmental movement. This is because it would probably be too soft. Any bill that actually makes it through Congress comes out on the other side so badly hacked up and altered that it lacks any substance and bears little resemblance its original form. I wouldn’t want a federal “dud” to restrict the eco-fury of the glory states like Oregon or California, which set the agenda for the rest of the degenerate states out there.

  ***Read following paragaph for an example, or skip following paragraph if you have Steve Bert ADHD***

(I’m thinking of what happened under California’s lead, when fourteen states banded together to win a U.S. Supreme Court case designed to force the federal government to allow states the discretion to establish the world’s first carbon dioxide emissions standard for vehicles. Bush originally rejected California’s waver before the successful collective effort put him in his place. If the federal government has any role besides getting overturned it would likely err on the side of being too soft to have any meaningful ecological impact. For those of you environmentalists who think Obama is on our side, please realize he operates under the guidelines of economic primacy and has already showed his hand many times with his eagerness to drill.) 

With state and local governments circumventing our sham Congress and our president who is caught in the web economic primacy, we’ve got the stage set for our current framework for understanding and dealing with environmental issues: climate adaptation. 

This post has been a long one so we’ll get to that goodie soon. 

Ciao and farewell for now, 

Steve