Eco-operate and BlueEarth blogs

Hi all,

I recently created a couple of blogs related to an "eco-operation" that I am forming called Blue Earth (www.blueearth.googlepages.com)... The Blue Earth blog is at: www.blueearthling.blogspot.com, and the Eco-operation blog is at: www.eco-operation.blogspot.com. I am just beginning to fiddle with content, etc. and am learning how to make it easy for others to join and share. The Eco-operation blog is intended for exchange and discussion of ideas related to what eco-operation might mean and might look like. It is also about envisioning a future in which humans are living in harmony with the environment and its ecology and what the steps for realizing the future will have to be. Any thoughts? My best~ jeff

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Focus the Nation

http://www.focusthenation.org/

We Stand at a Critical Time in History

In the next few years, we as a nation will make, or fail to make, critical decisions regarding global warming pollution and clean technology investments. These decisions will have far-reaching and irreversible impacts on the lives of today’s students and the lives of their children. At this moment in time, we owe our young people at least a day of focused discussion about global warming solutions for America.

Focus the Nation is organizing a national teach-in on global warming solutions for America—creating a dialogue at over a thousand colleges, universities, high schools, middle schools, places of worship, civic organizations and businesses, and directly engaging millions of students and citizens with the nation’s decision-makers. Focus the Nation will culminate January 31st, 2008 in simultaneous educational symposia held across the country. Our intent is to move America beyond fatalism to a determination to face up to this civilizational challenge, the challenge of our generation.


Focus the Nation is an educational initiative, but we also promote civic engagement. Each Focus team will invite local, state and federal political leaders and decision-makers to come to campus and participate in a non-partisan, round-table discussion of global warming solutions. US Senators and members of congress, state representatives, mayors and city councilors, all will be receiving dozens of invitations to speak about global warming, from over a thousand institutions nation-wide. Every institution will also vote on their top five national priorities for global warming action, producing a campus and citizen endorsed policy agenda for 2008.

Currently over 1000 institutions, mostly colleges and universities, have signed on to participate, and dozens of college and university Presidents have endorsed the initiative. To maximize both education and civic engagement, Focus the Nation has four key components:

NATIONAL TEACH-IN: On January 31st , thousands of students on every campus, millions of students nationwide, participate in workshops and panels, brainstorming global warming solutions. Are you with us? Are your faculty supporting you? Ask ten, twenty, fifty faculty to stand up as educators on behalf of your future. They will say yes. To make this happen, start with the sample teach-in.

GREEN DEMOCRACY: Campus to Congress. Tell top decision-makers in this country about solutions. Invite every US senator and congressperson to engage in person. If they can’t be there physically, then they will face a student audience via a video-chat. Focus the Nation is working with leaders in the House of Representatives to make this happen, in conjunction with their efforts to green the congress. The face-to-face, intergenerational dialogue of Green Democracy will move America to confront this civilizational challenge.

CHOOSE YOUR FUTURE: Vote on the top five solutions to global warming. Proposed solutions range from a coal moratorium, to large scale renewables investment, to initiatives to strengthen forests for carbon storage. Choose the Future is the place for serious discussion about how to achieve what science and justice demand. The week leading up to January 31st, you vote, and your Focus team delivers the results to your congressional office. Every political leader in the country will hear your voice. Join the discussion today!

2% SOLUTION: A national, interactive webcast, airing live the evening of January 30th, featuring Stanford climate scientist Stephen Schneider, sustainability expert Hunter Lovins, and green jobs pioneer Van Jones. Show the webcast to launch your teach-in. Screen it at your high school, faith group, civic organization, or at a house party. Our goal—10,000 screenings and a determination TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING.

With these four components, together we will Focus the Nation.


“I believe that a business as usual scenario will guarantee disintegration of West Antarctica and parts of Greenland” — Dr. James Hansen, 2/2/07

Over the next decade, critical policy decisions will be made with irreversible consequences for the future. Dr. James Hansen, the top US government climate scientist, believes that if we do not stabilize greenhouse gas emissions soon, we may set in motion a process leading to collapse of the West Antarctic and Greenland Ice sheets, events that would raise global sea levels by over 40 feet, inundating many of the world’s major cities. This of course is just one of the myriad potential consequences of human-induced warming, with regional and global impacts ranging from hurricanes of greater intensity and duration, global water shortages, altered patterns of rainfall, drought and flood, massive forest die-back, and large-scale species extinction.

Students today face many important social, economic, and security issues. Global warming however, is unique, in that if we are to reduce the risk of large-scale, irreversible, world-wide damages, then ambitious—and potentially costly—policy solutions must be undertaken within a very compressed time frame. Failure to act soon increases the likelihood of a swing in global temperatures of Ice Age magnitude within our children’s lifetimes, only in the opposite direction. We have a window of time now to create the foundation for a just and sustainable future.

The second motivation for this project is to explore a new model of collaborative, interdisciplinary education, on a national scale. Focus the Nation will require campus-based teams of faculty and students to draw on campus expertise across the broad range of disciplines. Focus the Nation provides an exciting model opportunity to create, for one day, a true national community of scholarship bridging traditional disciplinary boundaries.

This is an opportunity for educators to take a leadership role, and catalyze a process which indeed will “Focus the Nation”. For the last 150 years we have been engaged in an unprecedented natural experiment, drastically altering the basic nature of the planet’s climate control system. Focus the Nation is engaging the country with the question: How far can we let that experiment go?


To be a part of Focus the Nation, simply SIGN UP to participate. By signing up, you are committing to help organize an educational event about global warming solutions at your institution on (or around) January 31st, 2008. This involves, at a minimum, screening The 2% Solution webcast, but the times demand, if at all possible, that we step into a real leadership role as educators in our communities. As colleges, universities, high schools, middle schools, faith organizations, businesses, and civic groups come together, we can launch a discussion far-reaching enough to change the future.

Once you sign up, you will receive bi-weekly updates from Focus the Nation that will suggest many ways to build your event. To hold global warming to the low end, we have only a few short years to act. To ensure action, we have only a few short months to Focus the Nation. Please sign up today.

THE FOCUS THE NATION RESOLUTION
Once you have a launched a Focus the Nation organizing team at your institution, build support for a truly deep conversation by obtaining the endorsement of the following resolutions by your President, Head of School, CEO, Boards of Directors, Student government, Faculty Senate, or Organization. (See who has already endorsed!).

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biodiesel from grass

ALTERNATIVE FUEL - BIO-DIESEL FROM GRASS.

SUBJECT: ALTERNATIVE FUEL - BIO-DIESEL FROM GRASS

SOURCE: JUAN WILSON juanwilson@earthlink.net

POSTED: 29 December 2006 - 8:30am
Going Native: Bad news for Big Ag Biz

These plots of mixed grassland species in Minnesota showed smart choice for biofuels

Diverse grassland plants edge out crops as biofuel
by Aimee Cunningham on 9 December 2006 in Science News

Mixtures of plants native to prairies can give a better energy return as biofuel than corn and soybeans do, a new study finds. Biofuel production from grassland plants would also result in lower emissions of carbon dioxide and reduced pollution from agricultural chemicals.

Corn-grain ethanol and soybean biodiesel are starting to replace some gasoline and petrodiesel Science News: 7/15/06, page 36: www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060715/fob4.asp

However, corn and soy crops need large amounts of pesticides, water, and fertilizers.

TilmanEcologist David Tilman of the University of Minnesota in St. Paul and his colleagues determined the resources required for and energy gained from biofuels made from perennial grassland plants. These species wouldn't require regular herbicide treatments, irrigation, or fertilization and could be grown on agriculturally abandoned land. Grassland plants aren't yet used in biofuels.

In 1994, the researchers planted 152 plots of agriculturally degraded land with different numbers of perennial grassland species, such as legumes, grasses, and herbs. They monitored and sampled the plots from 1996 to 2005.

The researchers found that the most diverse plots—those with 16 different species—were also the most productive, with the potential to generate more than three times as much energy as plots that bore only one species.

The prairie-grass mixtures would give a net energy return that's more than 17 times that of corn-grain ethanol, Tilman says.

His team also calculated that with the use of an alternative chemical process now being investigated for biofuel production, fuel from grassland plants yields 51 percent more net energy per hectare than corn-grain ethanol does. The scientists report their findings in the December 8th, 2006 Science Magazine.

The production and combustion of both corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel increase carbon dioxide emissions, although less so than those of an equivalent amount of gasoline and petrodiesel. Therefore, the researchers determined how much carbon dioxide the prairie plants sequester in their roots and the soil and the amount of this gas that would be released from fossil fuel combustion during the cultivation, transport, and processing of the plants and combustion of the biofuel.

The team found that each acre of diverse prairie plants removes from the atmosphere the amount of carbon dioxide released by burning about 190 gallons of gasoline.

In the search for new energy sources, "we should be trying to optimize all the things that society needs," says Tilman. He adds that the planting of degraded lands would prevent competition with food crops.

"The answer to sustainable energy production is going to be to use sound ecological approaches like they've spelled out here," says John Sheehan, who works on energy efficiency at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. But with the large amount of agricultural land in the United States, "it may make very good sense to use at least a portion of that land for energy production," says Sheehan. .

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