While no one technology or source of energy can or should claim to be the exclusive savior in our quest to find alternatives to fossil fuels, offshore wind power has moved beyond symbolic feelgood status and become one of the most promising contenders to be an economically viable source of energy.
Aside from the obvious environmental benefit that a malfunctioning turbine or platform doesn't annihilate entire ecosystems, windmill technology has come a long way since its early days. You know it's not just pretty talk when energy companies are investing billions in offshore wind parks. That's exactly what's happening in the North Sea, where major international power companies are currently staking out the future of Europe's energy supply off the coasts of Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland and Britain.
Tonight's EcoAdvocates edition includes posts by rb137 on passing conflict minerals legislation for transparency in minerals trade, Ecocity Builders President Richard Register on making cities sustainable, and tonight's host citisven playing the wind pipes. Plus urgent action to tell BP to stop burning endangered sea turtles alive. |
On April 27th, exactly one week after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Environment Minister Dr. Norbert Röttgen officially inaugurated Alpha Ventus, Germany’s first offshore wind farm 45 kilometres off the coast of the island of Borkum in the North Sea. Built by a consortium of German utility giants EWE, E.ON and Vattenfall Europe, this 250 million Euro project rang in a new era of offshore wind farms that are expected to produce huge amounts of clean energy, not only in Germany but all around Europe.
I happened to be back home in Germany that week, and whether you call it cosmic concurrence or just plain old coincidence, I couldn't help but marvel at the symbolic significance of a burning oil rig flickering across the TV screen while I was reading and looking at photos of Germany's First Offshore Wind Farm Going Online in that week's issue of Der Spiegel.
Having been used to the old ant-like mills a la Altamont Pass, the following paragraph caught my immediate attention:
Twelve wind turbines tower above the icy water, covering an area of roughly four square kilometers (1.5 square miles), or about the size of 500 soccer fields. At a height of 150 meters (492 feet), each turbine is as tall as the Cologne Cathedral and, at 1,000 tons, as heavy as 25 fully loaded semi-trailer trucks.
It's true, these are not your mom and dad's garden variety windmills, these puppies are like little power plants unto themselves. According to the manufacturer, Alpha Ventus will feed at least 220 gigawatt hours of energy into the grid each year, or enough to power 50,000 households. Certainly no reason to write the oil obit, but no chump change either.
The good news is that this is really just the beginning. Many more of these wind farms are going to go into service in the coming months and years, all along German and European coasts, feeding enormous amounts of electricity into the grids on the mainland. In addition to providing unprecedented amounts of power, Alpha Ventus also serves as a study and research project on how to maximize wind power and meet the challenges of building towers almost 500 feet tall and weighing 1,000 tons. This all in rough seas, at least 30 kilometers (19 miles) away from beaches to protect sensitive wetlands and avoid clashes with local residents and the tourism industry.
Where's the U.S. in its offshore wind development? A look at the U.S Offshore Wind Collaborative's state by state map yields a flurry of terms like potential, roundtable, planner’s workshop, or public forum. In the great state of New York, the status on the development of a 40-turbine wind farm off Jones beach reads: Project tabled over concerns about escalating construction and materials costs. If the U.S. Department of Energy is serious about wind energy generating 20% of the nation's electricity demand by 2030, we've got to light a fire under our representative's behinds. It's time to tell Congress why wind works!
Creating clean sources of energy is one part of the equation, not needing so much energy in the first place the other. Rethinking our urban environments is key to reducing our footprint and we've got to make sure we don't build our technologies on the backs of mineral-rich developing countries...
Imagining Ecocities: Making cities sustainable is a crucial challenge
by Richard Register, President of Ecocity Builders
In many ways, cities are the main things we human beings build: the homes, offices, factories, schools, streets and parks gather there, as do the vast supply lines pumping in water, food, lumber, gasoline - and pumping out waste. And yet, the way cities are built, the logic of their internal functions and their connections with resources and natural environment are virtually ignored - they are not seen as potentially whole, living organisms. We can see houses as homes, and so it should be with cities, but even more so. Yet even many conscientious environmentalists, reacting to the negative impacts of our present cities, fail to see the great creative, social, cultural, even spiritual good that cities can facilitate. Perhaps most people give up on building the good city before they even consider it seriously because of the sheer scale of the task, perhaps because technology and "Progress" have failed to give us a secure, humane world and we have lost confidence in the idea that we can shape our own destiny.
Access by Proximity is an important principle of ecological city building. If enough diversity is close enough, you don't need to travel a lot for life's basics: residence, job, school... The idea is to design maximum access right into the city structure. Mixed use zoning again, but the principle goes further than this. Proximity access policies could also include local hiring practices, renting apartments to people who don't own cars and who work nearby, making bank loans available in the neighborhoods from which the savings come (very often low income urban areas have accumulated savings in great excess of the loans made in those same areas, while suburban developers use those funds for anti- ecological construction). Another proximity policy: ordinances permitting increased residential construction in activity centers and prohibiting it in farther-out areas. Land trusts and public bond issues, as in Stockholm, could purchase structures in car-dependent areas and convert suburbia back to nature, agriculture, or ecologically stable villages.
Small scale recentralization
We hear a great deal about decentralization - but it has to be thought out well or it quickly falls into serious contradictions. Suburbia is perhaps the most decentralized form of human development behind scattered farms and ranches. But suburbia supports the most centralized establishments conceivable: giant automobile manufacturers and oil companies. The suburbanite sits decentralized in his or her little home watching a communications medium so big and centralized only a handful of companies in the whole country can afford to advertise (and decide what goes) on it. From the ecocity point of view, cities, towns and even villages should be recentralized physically and decentralized in terms of participation in community life and politics.
Diversity is healthy
This is perhaps the largest, broadest principle of all. In cities, as in agriculture and most natural ecological areas, diversity is healthy. Some call diversity complexity and shy away from it in many aspects of life. Some are fatigued by life in today's cities and think it's because the environment is complex. But how complex is sitting in one position driving to work in a car hours each week, doing a repetitive job or conforming to dress codes and social expectations? It's far more complex to be deeply involved in your neighborhood or tending a large garden than doing most of the tiring things of life in the present city. With a closer look, the simple life isn't so simple either and the most complex activities of all are probably the choices people have to make about important moral issues. If we look toward ecology and evolution we see that the tendency toward complexity, toward environments and situations involving great diversity, are precisely those environments and situations that cause individuals and species to survive, grow and diversify.
Join or volunteer for Ecocity Builders
Ecocity World Summit 2011 in Montreal
Demanding Transparency in Conflict Minerals Trade
by rb137
There is a brutal civil war taking place in the Great Lakes region of The Democratic Republic of Congo, and we are complicit in this conflict. Many of the metals that are used in technology come from the mining operations that support this war. You might have a device that funded this conflict in your pocket right now.
There is an amendment to the Wall Street reform bill that directly impacts this conflict, and it needs your attention right now. Today is the 11th hour for conflict minerals legislation, which is up for a vote and is under attack by the National Association of Manufacturers:
NAM Concerned with Conflict Minerals Trade Act. New legislation is moving through Congress that could affect global supply chains and create new customs burdens...The legislation would require a transaction-by-transaction import declaration at entry certifying that a company's imports do not contain ìconflictî minerals...
Barney Frank will soon announce the House offer on the Conflict Minerals Amendment to the Wall Street reform bill. It contains some language from HR 4128, which is the Conflict Minerals and Trade Act, but it does not require a certification of non-conflict -- it requires transparancy. If a company buys minerals known to be tied to the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they must report their source publicly.
This amendment is carefully written to avoid intractible certification issues, but NAM is vehemently opposed to this amendment. The corollary to NAM's complaint: US companies will suffer if manufacturers are forced to disclose that they buy metal ore from the FDLR.
The FDLR is a militia called the Forces Democratiques de Liberation du Rwanda -- seeded from a paramilitary organization called the Interahamwe, the same group that perpetrated the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The horror they inflict on the population around Goma is absolutely monstrous, and the money they get from selling mineral ore buys weapons and empowers them to perpetuate the violence.
They use terror to control the civilian population. More than two hundred thousand Congolese women and children have been raped and mutilated -- usually in front of their famillies and often in front of their entire villages. The FDLR is known to grill bodies on a spit and boil children alive in front of their mothers. Gang rapes include penetrating women with weapons and mutilating them, sometimes vaginally disembowling them or setting them on fire.
Those who survive are left incontinent because they suffer from traumatic gynecologic fistula -- destruction of the tissue between the vagina, bladder, and bowels. These injuries are the point of the rape more than the end result.
Jeanne is a teenage girl whose village was repeatedly terrorized by the FDLR. Her parents disappeared in one attack, so she went to live with an uncle. But the FDLR returned a few months later:
"First, they tied up my uncle," Jeanne said. "They cut off his hands, gouged out his eyes, cut off his feet, cut off his sex organs, and left him like that. He was still alive."
"His wife and his son were also there. Then they took all of us into the forest." That militia is known for kidnapping people and enslaving them for months, even years. Men are turned into porters, and girls into sex slaves.
The FDLR killed Generose's husband, hacked off her leg with a machete, and cooked it in front of her family on their kitchen fire. When her 12-year-old son refused to eat it, they killed him.
The FDLR controls the mines and terrorized the population in the region surrounding Lake Kivu:
The UN reports tens of thousands of rapes per year in this area of the DRC: rape that is used as a weapon of terror. Requiring transparency regarding mineral sources is small by comparison. And this region is not an exclusive source for these metals.
Call Blanche Lincoln and Bob Corker:
Blanche Lincoln and Bob Corker are Senate conferees on conflict minerals and are reported to stand with NAM in opposition to this legislation:
Sen. Lincoln (D-AR): 202-224-4843
Bob Corker (R-TN): 202-224-3344
Please call their offices today, and tell them to support the House offer on conflict minerals.
Another thing you can do quickly without leaving your chair: urge all of the House and Senate conferees on conflict minerals to vote "yes" on the House offer on Congo minerals.
Please use this quick action email link to tell selected members of the House and Senate to support this important conflict mineral amendment. Members of the House and Senate have agreed upon language that is a useful first step -- and it is manageable for the companies that consume conflict metals, as well. This legislation simple requires transparancy with regard to buying and selling minerals.
To the degree you can, please call the conferees individually. In particular, ask them to to yes on the House offer on Congo minerals.
Senate members
Chris Dodd (D-CT) (202) 224-2823
Tim Johnson (D-SD) (202) 224-5842
Jack Reed (D-RI) (202) 224-4642
Charles Schumer (D-NY) (202) 224-6542
Richard Shelby (R-AL) (202) 224-5744
Bob Corker (R-TN) (202) 224-3344
Mike Crapo (R-ID) (202) 224-6142
Judd Gregg (R-NH) (202) 224-3324
Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) (202) 224-4843
Patrick Leahy (D-VT) (202) 224-4242
Tom Harkin (D-IA) (202) 224-3254
Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) (202) 224-3521
House members
Howard Berman (D-CA) (202) 225-4695
Leonard Boswell (D-IA) (202) 225-3806
John Conyers (D-MI) (202) 225-5126
Elijah Cummings (D-MD) (202) 225-4741
Barney Frank (D-MA) (202) 225-5931
Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) (202) 225-8203
Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) (202) 225-6511
Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH) (202) 225-2015
Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) (202) 225-7944
Gregory Meeks (D-NY) (202) 225-3461
Dennis Moore (D-KA) (202) 225-2865
Gary Peters (D-MI) (202) 225-5802
Collin Peterson (D-MN) (202) 225-2165
Bobby Rush (D-IL) (202) 225-4372
Heath Shuler (D-NC) (202) 225-6401
Edolphus Towns (D-NY) (202) 225-5936
Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) (202) 225-2361
Maxine Waters (D-CA) (202) 225-2201
Mel Watt (D-NC) (202) 225-1510
Henry Waxman (D-CA) (202) 225-3976
Spencer Bachus (R-AL) (202) 225-4921
Joe Barton (R-TX) (202) 225-2002
Judy Biggert (R-IL) (202) 225-3515
Scott Garrett (R-NJ) (202) 225-4465
Sam Graves (R-MO) (202) 225-7041
Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) (202) 225-3484
Darrell Issa (R-CA) (202) 225-3906
Frank Lucas (R-OK) (202) 225-5565
Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) (202) 225-2711
Thanks for all that you do.
Take-Action Items
- Tell BP to stop burning endangered sea turtles alive.
- Join Hands Across the Sand this Saturday at a beach near you to protest Offshore drilling and stand in solidarity with the Gulf States. Visit http://www.handsacrossthesand for more info.
- Support Wind, Save a Mountain: Sign the petition.
- Tell Congress why wind works
- A Climate Justice Path To A Safe Climate. Endorse real solutions to the climate crisis
- If you're in San Francisco, please consider coming to Ecocity Dreamin', the first annual silent art auction benefit for Ecocity Builders, tomorrow evening, June 24th, from 6-9pm, at the SPUR Urban Center on 654 Mission Street. Your $50 donation goes towards silent auction bidding of art by Richard Register, Letitia Ntofon, Marco Vangelisti, and others. Acoustic guitar entertainment by yours truly, citisven.
- Organizing for America: Stand up for Clean Energy – Write your Senators
Photo credits:
Prototype of the new Offshore-Windmill Multibrid 5000: Ingo Wagner dpa
Offshore-Windpark Alpha Ventus, closeup: David Hecker/ddp
Offshore Windpark Alpha Ventus, bird's eye: DOTI/Matthias Ibeler/ddp
Ecocity sketches: Richard Register
Congo maps: GRIP - Groupe de Recherche et d'Information sur la Paix et la Sécurité
EcoAdvocates is a new series initiated by Meteor Blades and Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, who are contributing editors. This series focuses on providing more effective political pressure and taking action on environmental issues.
Contributing writers provide a diversity of perspectives including wind/energy/climate change; water; agriculture/food; mountaintop removal mining/coal; wildlife; environmental justice; and indigenous/human rights/civil rights. Contributing writers include: Bill McKibben, Jerome a Paris, mogmaar, boatsie, Aji, rb137, Ellinorianne, faithfull, Oke, Jill Richardson, Patric Juillet, Josh Nelson, beach babe in fl, Ojibwa, Muskegon Critic, Desmogblog, A Siegel, gmoke, DWG, citisven, mahakali overdrive and FishOutofWater.