Kyoto Protocol to come into force 16 February... at last 19 November 04

American brothers & sister, let us individually vow to reduce our greenhouse gases by at least 1/4 over our 1990 emissions, then write our reps & president that we are very disappointed to be so out of sync with the sane, wise, prudent, and compassionate world.

American Businesses, reduce your greenhouse gases, and let us know so we can favor you over your competitors.

I echo your statements Sister and accept your challenge and take your pledge!

I will have to look up what I was doing in 1990!

And may I say to my UK friends, what Lynn proposes to her fellow Americans is 20% more than what the Kyoto Protocol asks for!

Lynn, I am making a book purchase on line and I will be purchasing one of the books you recommended which is entitled Natural Capitalism!

Lynn, stay tuned for my next message I will post after this since it contains some important updated information including topics we have already discussed but we still may be working on!

Your brother has been keeping busy and this is why you have not heard from him until now.

My next post is quite a long one but I am sure it will be good reading!

Yes, this is absolutely fantastic good news!

It is something to be thankful for and this could not come at a better time with our Thanksgiving Holiday in America coming soon this Thursday on November 25.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, many of us here take some moments not to think about past regrets or dwell upon speculating on the prospects of future events. Instead, we think about the progress we have made and those bad things that could have happened but never did happen.

We also see that any perceived setbacks from the past are merely a reflection of our own personal growth process in learning what does not work and a clue to what will work to prevent climate change.

We then see the opportunity for the future with greater hope, faith, and optimism since we have now become smarter, wiser, more creative, and more determined.

We also count our many blessings on being alive and having family and friends that care about us as we care about them.

On the eve of Thanksgiving, I plan to post a more detailed list, which is only a partial list, of many specific things we can all be thankful for.

In fact, I invite everyone from the UK who participates in Mark’s site to celebrate Thanksgiving Holiday with us in America. I also invite you to learn more about the history behind our Thanksgiving Holiday and its customs.

For me, it is a spiritual event even greater than Christmas. And, when I post my list of things to be thankful fornext Wednesday, I may share some personal aspects that many might find quite compelling.

I wish to provide now an update about my current activities from my previous postings and what I desire to post before next Thursday. I hope I get some useful feedback from my friends on some of these topics.

I have been studying our greenhouse gas inventories in the USA and will soon post some good news about methane emission reductions in the USA since 1990 and international initiatives on methane reduction recently being conducted by the USA.

Furthermore, I have discovered that methane reductions may have a much more powerful short-term benefit. I say this because greenhouse gas inventories seem to be calculated using global warming potentials each based on an atmospheric lifetime of 100 years.

Methane, having a relatively short atmospheric lifetime, has a much greater relative global warming potential compared to other greenhouse gases when based on shorter atmospheric lifetimes.

The climate has the potential to change long before 100 years are up so the idea of looking at shorter atmospheric lifetimes concerning greenhouse gas inventories may have more merit at this time. The short-term effects measured in a few decades rather than a century may be more relevant when planning any strategy on climate-change prevention.

Therefore, I am currently in the process of converting the greenhouse gas emission inventories of the USA from 1990 through 2002 which I now have on a spreadsheet on my computer to shorter atmospheric lifetimes other than the standard 100 years for the purpose of a comparative analysis.

This process should be done in time to post my findings before Thanksgiving next Thursday.

I predict that methane, which is currently 16 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions, will go up significantly in its overall percentage.

The benefits I believe to reducing methane emissions in the next decade may be a needed short-term boost for mitigating climate change. By accelerating methane reductions, we may buy valuable time, in the short-run, to reduce the more evasive carbon dioxide emissions.

If aggressively pursued, a short-term boost in methane reductions may help mitigate the runaway speculation previously articulated if that is indeed happening.

Please read more in a later post after I work the numbers better. You might find this concept fascinating.

My earlier intuition to focus on studying methane emissions seems to be paying an unexpected dividend that I find very exciting, encouraging, and motivating.

ANOTHER UPDATE:

I have just received the watt-meter device I mentioned in an earlier post and it meets every expectation the manufacturer mentioned.

I plugged my coffee maker in it this morning. It measured 0.20 kilowatt hours to make 12 cups and after the coffee maker was on for 40 minutes (OK, I need to cut down on my coffee intake, and Mom drank some of those cups). The device registered another 0.05 kilowatt hours more for the coffee maker to simply to keep the remaining coffee warm for the next 50 minutes.

My quick test has indicated a high degree of precision this device offers at a relatively low cost. It can be used to evaluate refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, computers and most any device one plugs into an outlet. I plan to buy more of these devices and plan to further study in depth my own electric usage.

This monitoring device plugs into a wall outlet and measures the electricity and records both time and kilowatt hours to an amazing level of precision and accuracy. It is only 27 US dollars and now that I have used it, I recommend its purchase for those interested in measuring their electric usage of household appliances.

I plan to write the manufacturer praising them about their product and asking if a similar device is being marketed in the UK based on UK’s electricity specifications.

The device is currently not designed for measuring an electric dryer which we own. I am most interested in monitoring the dryer because of the energy required to dry clothes.

Long ago when I was a child, my mother placed clothes on a clothesline and I wonder if we should return to this practice or at least find a better way to utilize the clothes dryer.

I will also ask the manufacture in my letter if they will market a similar device for an electric dryer or if I can somehow wire 2 devices in serious or invent an accessory circuit that would enable the use of this device to monitor our dryer.

NEW NEWS:

I went to my first Sierra club meeting a few days ago. It is a local chapter in our area and my 87-year old mother came with me. She won the door prize!

The Sierra club is a very important environmental group in the USA and it has been around for over a century. The group seemed very excited about my passion for climate change issues as I talked with various members about climate change.

During the presentation on Smarter Growth which concerned better ways to address traffic congestion in the Washington DC area (I will post more about this later), I shared my views at the end of the presentation on how we could include climate change information when talking about traffic congestion issues and then one member announced to the rest of the group, “Here is our man on global warming!”. Then another member, also being her first time at the Sierra Club, enthusiastically joined in her desire to be involved.

For your information, this lady is very bright and has already read Mark’s High Tide. She recommended to me another book which I will order today entitled Boiling Point by Ross Gelbspan. We had a spirited discussion after the meeting which continued with direct emails to each other. So, I can report that I am getting more involved in my community and connecting with other proactive people.

It does help my morale greatly to be associated with like minded passionate people who are locally based.

I hope we get a meaningful climate-change group going with the help of our local Sierra Club chapter.

ANOTHER UPDATE:

I have been comparing the benefits of the Kyoto Protocol to our Climate Stewardship Act which has not been passed by our Congress.

I have made some interesting discoveries when looking at our greenhouse gas inventories of 1990, 2000, 2001, and 2002 in my comparative analysis.

The short version is that I have discovered that our Climate Stewardship Act being proposed is far closer to nothing that even halfway meeting the initiatives of the Kyoto Protocol. I will more fully elaborate in much more detail in a later post.

And for my good friend Lynn, if you are reading this, I discourage you from sending your letters until you see what I have to share later about the Climate Stewardship Act.

The information I will share later will be very enlightening and it will definitely affect what you may write in your letters.

What I will share later is about how this bill was significantly watered-down to try to obtain passage in our Congress and how the current greenhouse inventories show that it may not have the promised effect many politicians are preaching.

Alerting the congressmen that we know this will add a lot more power punch to the letters we write (or fax).

Also, I will provide, when I work the numbers, how precisely much less the Climate Stewardship Act really is than the Kyoto Protocol adopted by many other countries.

Bottom line on this is that we can do so much better than what this current bill is now promoting. And, I may further speculate on how little difference this bill may actually make if it is passed or not passed with respect to climate change issues.

I will post this information before next Thursday which is my deadline to get caught up. Being caught up will be another thing I can add to my Thanksgiving list!

OTHER UPDATES AND FUTURE POSTINGS:

I plan to post information about compact fluorescent lighting and how we might be able to promote its widespread use. I will address many aspects including the need to recycle the mercury in these bulbs and preventing the mercury from spent bulbs to enter the environment as more of these bulbs come into use in our society.

I plan to post information about a request from a Russian Coal Mining Research group asking for western help in studying how substantial methane emissions from some of their coal mines can be captured and utilized. This is part of the Russian effort to meet Kyoto initiatives.

This particular Russian Research group needs to understand the geological formations of particular gassy coal mines better and they require geological expertise from the international community.

This may be an opportunity for some of our geologists that participate in this site to make an incredible contribution to reducing vast quantities of methane emissions in Russia. For those interested, stay tuned for what I have to share about this later.

I will post ideas on how the UK might be able to better help the USA in reducing our emissions by providing technical information and cultural examples of why UK per capita emission rates are less than half those in the USA. I have some thoughts on this but I need help from the UK on exploring this idea further.

I will also articulate in that post why it may be more useful for people in the UK to spend some of their valuable time in helping their American friends with their initiatives rather than simply focusing on UK emissions.

For the people of the UK, we really could use your wisdom in specific areas. You may not fully understand the value of this wisdom and what you can provide us in the USA but I do understand it and I will elaborate more fully my thoughts on this in a later post.

I plan to make some book purchases on line later this evening. These will include books many suggested by people on this site. I plan to purchase Natural Capitalism which Lynn recommended and Peter Winters mentioned a few resources of which I am interested to find. Mark has many books listed in the back of his book.

I welcome any good suggestions based on what you read in my posts from anyone on this site to help me further my education since I am still a student. Any useful websites and comments are always welcomed by me.

ANOTHER UPDATE

I have been documenting every habit to save energy that comes to my mind on a spreadsheet and have been observing the wasteful habits in our culture. For example, I have always noticed how we use our cars like they were extensions of our bodies. Many people will drive to a spa and walk on a treadmill. Drive home, and then drive a half mile to the grocery store to pick up a loaf of bread. They may walk sometimes in their neighborhoods but seldom associated with another task.

I like the spa myself and I must admit that I miss going there because I like to swim in their indoor pool. I have severely limited my trips to about once or twice a month and have opted for exercise which does not require the use of a car. And with that and other measures, I have drastically reduced my personal car use by walking more and that includes short walking trips on minor errands.

I use a rake manually to move the leaves in a pile rather than using the electric blower as I did before. Since so many Americans are fat from relying on labor saving devices, I have discovered that a return to a bit of manual effort is also great exercise and good to reduce emissions and trim the body.

Just a few of my many thoughts about lifestyle changes I have been documenting. There are so many simple ideas that cost absolutely nothing that can help create not only emission reductions but contribute to a better quality of life.

This does not have to painful! My list keeps growing all the time and I have the expertise to calculate the specific benefits from any activity or lifestyle change which will be an ongoing project of mine.

So, for those of you who labored through reading this very long post, I hope by posting my own efforts can promote a bit of encouragement and that you will join me this Thursday to celebrate Thanksgiving Holiday in spirit.

When I make my post next Wednesday concerning Thanksgiving, I will make a special mention about Mark and that he took his time to write an article in our Washington Post newspaper about the Florida hurricanes.

I am thankful that Mark wrote this article because what subsequently happened to my life, after I read it, forever changed my life.

FINAL THOUGHTS CONCERNING THIS POST

Finally, I want everyone, who read this post to the very end, to know that you are a very powerful person. I know this about you because you logged on this website and took your time to read what I had to share.

What lies inside you is more powerful than anything in the universe. In fact, you are endowed with infinite possibilities for good and have the infinite power of creative imagination locked within your own mind.

We may be an ocean apart but you and I may be united in thought. It may come down to just one extra person being more involved than ever who will make all the difference between success and failure for all mankind!

One more person, who is more creative, more determined, more passionate, more committed, and more engaged in this noble effort to save the planet may be all we need to be successful!

Our power is always in the present moment! In fact, this may be a very sacred moment as you finish reading my post and come to the realization of something quite extraordinary.

In this precious moment of time, which is right now, you may discover that this special person I am talking about is you!

Passing on an interesting short article!

This short story is about a man who went car free in California, USA. It was published on the home page of my Internet Provider. The website is shown below:

http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/Saveonacar/P99756.asp

A survey showed that 8 out of 10 persons reading it agreed it was worth worth passing on to a friend.

So, I am one of those 8 in 10 and pass it on to my friends!

YIPPEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Good news—and just in time to be thanked for at our Thanksgiving! Thank you, rest of world! You give us undeluded Americans some reason for hope! (Please keep it up!)

On Saturday, I discussed whether we could give the middle name of our first baby (due around then) something like “Kyoto”, “Protocol” or maybe even “Hope”. Not sure how keen she is. ;-)

Hi Peter,

Maybe you can name your soon to be baby after a famous Russian scientist or someone within Russia responsible for helping Kyoto be possible for them!

Maybe a Russian name both used in Russia and in English culture and still easily pronounced? I guess it depends on gender as well!

Congratulations Dan

An environmentalist I knew gave his son the name ‘Noah’

For girls, there is Rachel (after Rachel Carsons), but Hope is really good. I knew a small environmental group named H.O.P.E. It stood for Help Our Planet Earth.

I can’t remember where I got this link, but here is an interesting bit about how armageddon preachers & politicians think (we don’t need to save the earth, since the world is coming to an end soon):

http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2004/10/27/scherer-christian/

I’m planning a good response to this attitude, the least of which is: “If you kill people through environmental harm – even if the world comes to an end soon—you will be “raptured” down to a place much hotter than a globally warmed world!”

Many thanks for the suggestions!!!

Hmmm .. Rachael sounds good.

Warm wishes,

Peter

So I was interested in why an environmentalist would name their son Noah. Do you know why Lynn? Thanks.

Noah built the ark and saved all the species from environmental destruction—which is what we are trying to do, in effect.

I have a picture of Noah’s ark in my kitchen!

RE Noah & the Ark, there is a great website, www.ClimateArk.org

It has lots of good climate change info & links to all news items re climate change. Their logo is an ark with Noah & some animals. They are trying to raise money now to keep afloat.

Another good website is www.pewclimate.org

It seems Teddy Roosevelt’s great (or great great) grandson is on the board – Teddy being another great Republican environmentalist, who protected tremendous amounts of our American wilderness from development.

I will save your posts and show them to Noah when he is older!

Here’s a hopeful message from 11/24/04 NYTimes; we could try & copy this in our states, cities & college campuses:

November 24, 2004

Coloradans Vote to Embrace Alternative Sources of Energy

By KIRK JOHNSON been there and done that.

ORT COLLINS, Colo. - Colorado utilities will have to sell a lot more electricity from wind power in years to come under a statewide ballot initiative approved
by voters on Nov. 2, and if they want some pointers they might talk to Adam T. Kremers, a 19-year-old sophomore at Colorado State University here. He has

Mr. Kremers sold wind power to the occupants of individual dormitory rooms this fall, under an agreement between the university and the local utility that environmentalists describe as one of the first such programs in the nation.

Mr. Kremers, an environmental engineering major and the associate director of environmental affairs in the student government, gave out stickers and pinwheels shaped like turbines and threw a “wind power party” to celebrate clean energy, complete with a cake connived from the dining hall.

He ultimately got 187 students – nearly 4 percent of the university’s residence-hall population of 5,000 – to sign up, paying an additional $17 to $52 a year to buy green power to run their computers and lava lamps.

“It’s a start,” Mr. Kremers said. “Now it’s my duty to keep it going.”

Colorado voters said much the same thing when they approved, over the vehement objections of most energy companies, a proposal mandating that 10 percent of the state’s electricity must come from wind and solar power by 2015.

The law, Amendment 37, makes Colorado the 18th state with an environmentally friendly energy standard, but the first one to have bypassed the Legislature and put the rule into place through referendum. An energy bill similar to the one the voters approved was defeated by Colorado’s Legislature three times in the last three years.

“Because it’s a conservative Western state with a strong fossil-fuel industry, as well as the first one passed by a popular referendum, Colorado represents something of a breakthrough,” said Alan Nogee, the energy program director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit research and advocacy group based in Cambridge, Mass.

And Fort Collins, a city of 118,000 people dominated culturally by the 25,000-student university, got there first.

The city created its own wind energy program in 1998, and its own renewable energy standard in 2003 – a step that only a few other municipalities in the nation, notably Chicago and Austin, Tex., have taken.

Under the program, about 2 percent of the city’s customer base and electricity load now comes from wind power, purchased from wind farms in Wyoming through a nonprofit power authority. The idea is that each purchase of wind power fed into the grid offsets fossil-fuel use. Colorado gets most of its electricity from burning coal.

It was from that municipal utility framework, city and school officials say, that the dormitory project took root. And just like Amendment 37, which clawed its way onto the ballot through petitions, what happened on the campus came from the bottom up. People like Mr. Kremers and a former student, Britta Schroeder, his predecessor at the student government’s environment job, prodded and pushed until they found a way.

“It was almost all exclusively the students doing this,” said Carol Dollard, a utility engineer at the university who got involved in the residence-hall project. The pitch to the administration, Ms. Dollard said, was that wind energy would be an entirely optional added cost for students, and that the grunt work would be done by the students themselves. “We sold it as zero cost, zero effort,” she said.

Mr. Kremers, who has a quotation from Gandhi on the door of his dorm room – “Be the change you wish to see in the world” – considers the new state law a wonderful boost to what is happening on campus.

Fort Collins officials are more guarded. They say that as one of a small number of “home rule” cities that run their own electric systems in Colorado, they want to opt out of the new law because they believe their energy program is better.

It is certainly more ambitious, requiring 15 percent of the energy sold in city limits to come from wind sources by 2017, 50 percent more than the state requirement. City officials also do not like the idea of interference by the state Public Utility Commission, which will oversee the statewide standards, and they worry as well that the Legislature could amend the plan.

The Fort Collins City Council voted to remain neutral on Amendment 37 before the election. Statewide, the measure got the support of slightly more than half the electorate – 53.4 percent voted for it, to 46.6 percent against.

“Does the P.U.C. have jurisdiction over a home-rule city? That’s what people were worried about,” said Michael B. Smith, the general manager of utilities for Fort Collins. “We will be closely watching what happens.”

Environmentalists who backed Amendment 37 noted that it included specific language intended to protect Fort Collins, and other cities that might join its ranks with local standards, allowing them to self-certify out of the program.

But they also admitted that because the measure was passed as an ordinary state law, it could be amended by the Legislature – or repealed entirely, though hardly anyone expects that to happen – and that the Public Utility Commission would also have to work out the details of enacting it over the next year.

“It’s a statute, so the Legislature can change it however it sees fit, but I would hope that since it was passed by the voice of the people, they would respect that,” said the measure’s principal author, Rick Gilliam, a senior energy policy adviser at Western Resource Advocates, a nonprofit environment law and policy center. “My hope is that we would at least go forward into the P.U.C. realm before the Legislature tinkers with it.”

At the university, plans are under way for next year’s wind campaign. Ms. Dollard, the utility engineer, said that one proposal would extend the wind power option to individual professors and departments that might want to buy some or all their energy from the city’s wind program.

“It was a three-year process to get the residence halls through, so we’ve said let’s not take on too many things until we’ve learned the lessons from the first part,” she said.

Mr. Kremers, meanwhile, is plotting how to get financing for his second-year marketing plan. He wants to print advertising cards that could be put in every mailbox of next year’s incoming freshman class – about 5,000 students – and he has a strategy in mind.

The university’s recycling committee, mostly composed of faculty and administration, works on issues like reducing waste in the dining halls, and he is the student representative on the board.

“The recycling committee has a good budget,” he said. “We’ll see.”

As I research Methane on the Internet, I ran across a Russian Research group focused on extracting methane from coal seams. This helps Russia comply with their Kyoto agreements.

Methane recovery from our fossil fuel industries around the world is a good thing since Methane is a potent greenhouse gas which is many times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Methane is also a clean fuel source. Recovering methane that would naturally have escaped into the atmosphere and then using it as a fuel has immediate benefits for climate change prevention.

The International Coal & Methane Research Center – Uglemetan located at 21, Rukavishnikov Street, Kemerovo, 650610, Russia is asking for western companies, individual brokers, and investors for the implementation of feasibility studies on methane recovery.

In particular, Uglemetan requires expertise to learn more about geological conditions and the best appropriate ways of methane utilization with respect to gassy mines in the Kuzbass region. These mines currently emit more than two billion cubic meters of methane annually.

Uglemetan’s ongoing Pervomaiskaya mine project will result in the annual reduction of 6,750 tons of methane emissions as well as in reduction of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and particles emissions.

My resource for this information was the UGLEMETAN website which I list below:

http://www.uglemetan.ru/HTML/GeneralEng.html

In addition, I have been sharing information I have learned about reducing methane emissions from time to time in my posts.

So, continue to read what I have to share because reducing methane emissions may have a more important impact then previously realized.

For the record, the USA has currently reduced methane emissions 7 percent below our 1990 emission levels. Methane is the only greenhouse gas that the United States has significantly reduced since 1990. This amounts to about 50 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent reductions which is nearly 1 percent of all 1990 USA emissions. And, 50 percent of these reductions came from improvements in methane recovery from coal mine seams.

Now, please continue to show interest in this seldom discussed topic because methane reductions have merit.

Methane is a short lived greenhouse gas and it has 23 times the greenhouse warming potential of carbon dioxide.

However, this fact degrades the short term impact of methane because it is based on the effect of methane gas over 100 years when methane’s average life in the atmosphere is less than 10 years.

So, the effect over a decade or two is even more pronounced in reducing global warming than when looking at the standard 100-year horizon.

So, watch for my next post on methane since I am converting USA greenhouse gas inventories to shorter-time horizons and seeing what the impact is for us for the short term with a more aggressive methane reduction initiative.

This is relevant if impending climate changes are coming more within the 100 year time frame which I think Mark would believe to be true.

The Gandhi quote, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” is in the same line as one of my favorites, attributed to Camus: “There are no ends, there are only means.”

Yes, Be the change! I like that!

“Be the change you wish to see in the world,”

And Gandhi accomplished his objectives without the use military power!

And along these lines, are simply Walk Your Talk! and Lead by Example!

Lynn is a person I look up to on this website because I see her setting such a good example in her own life and that only inspires me and empowers me to do the same.

I see Mark Lynas concerned about his own carbon emissions from his plane trip to Austrailia when his sole intent is to inspire an entire continent!

And you Bill are among those who lead by example by using the sun and sharing your thoughts with us!

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts Lynn. I learn so much from you!

You have reminded me about the energy and idealism of young college students.

I have thought about this before myself. It is the smart young college students we have to help.

The future will be mostly their world and they would naturally be motivated to want make a difference.

I will reread your post later this week to remind me again of the power of youth and to think of how I might be able to encourage more involement of bright college students.

Also, in your post, you share important insights into the politcal process. You always seem to have an awareness that I can benefit from.