I had a meeting with a prof last week about a very interesting project she wants to set up (to run the course as a series of blog posts resulting in a science magazine published by the students - I’ll write more on that later). During the discussion of the project, we got to talking about blogging in general and she mentioned that she had recently started a blog of her own.

Gwendolyn Blue started blogging less than a month ago at Home Grown Alberta, and already has some great posts up about sustainability and local food sourcing. 100 mile diet? In Calgary? Apparently, it IS possible (just a little more difficult due to the insane sprawl of this city…)

I’m looking forward to seeing what Gwen comes up with, and really excited to have discovered her blog!

There. I said it.

Earth day sucks. It’s harmful.

It provides a cop-out, marketing-based, feel good way for people and companies to feel good about half-assed lame excuses for making a real sustainable difference.

Every day should be earth day. This one-day-per-year stuff is garbage. This “oh! what did you do for earth day?” feel good crap doesn’t help. Frack off. Every fracking day is earth day. What did you do for EVERY OTHER DAY OF THE YEAR earth day?

Just like striving for “carbon neutrality” isn’t going far enough. We’ve got to start undoing a half century of crapping all over this planet, and these silly Hallmarkâ„¢ sound bite gestures just don’t cut it.

Yeah, awareness is good. But, really, who needs to have their awareness raised? This is 2008. This is post-Inconvenient-Truth. This is not news to anyone who can or will do anything about it. Can we stop the silliness now, and just assume that saving the earth should be a mainstream, full-time activity and not some stupid annual event? The “Green” issue of Vogue. The “Green” episode of $stupidTVShow. The celebrities touting their guilt-salving charity work. Ridiculous.

As long as we have countries spending a trillion dollars on wars to secure cheap gas for SUVs, all the weak gestures in the world don’t amount to a hill of beans. As long as we have countries willing to strip mine entire provinces to extract petroleum to keep the economy booming, switching a few light bulbs isn’t going to make much of a difference.

Take 30 minutes and watch Al Gore’s presentation at TED 2008. It’s an update to his first one, and is simultaneously more depressing because of the sheer scale of new data, and much more uplifting when framing the response as a call for higher consciousness to break out of our current democratic crises that are allowing the climate crisis to take place.

I’m going to do something today that I have never done before. Ever since I’ve had a “work” computer, starting in 1994, I’ve never turned it/them off. I’ve always left them on as personal testing/staging servers, “just in case” I needed to grab something. It’s often been handy (and occasionally essential), being able to SSH into my work system, or run test web apps on it.

I’ve never given much thought to just how much juice must be sucked up by the systems, even when left running essentially idle evenings and weekends. Apparently, this habit costs US businesses $1.7 BILLION per year.

I really don’t care about the financial cost. My portion is likely just a few pennies per day. The University can afford that.

I do care about the incremental effect this is having on the environment, though. In Calgary, much of our juice is generated by burning natural gas. So my leaving a computer on 24/7 is actually pumping CO2 into the air, and helping suck up more of the petro goo that drives this city.

So, when I leave the office this afternoon, I’m shutting down my quad G5 for the weekend. I’ll have to modify some of my automated backup scripts, which assume they can run at 3am, but that shouldn’t cause too many problems.

I’ve avoided doing the math to see how many watts drive the quad G5 + 20″ Cinema + 17″ Dell LCD + 500GB external drive + power to USB devices…

Baby steps…

There has been much talk and hype about Peak Oil - the fact that the global production of petroleum is about to reach its maximum level, after which it will start to decline until it eventually becomes a scarce resource and we all have to scavenge in landfills for decades-old plastic to recycle.

It may not be as soon as some think. The Saudis are estimating about 4.5 trillion barrels left. Here in Alberta, we’re sitting on an estimated 1 trillion barrels locked in the Athabasca tarsands.

So, Peak Oil may be years or decades away. Unfortunately, that isn’t necessarily a good thing. As we’re all happily buying Hummers and Escalades to drive through Raunchy Ronald’s Drive Thru™, we’re continuously pumping carbon that had been naturally sequestered deep underground, into the atmosphere. The atmosphere can’t hold all of that carbon without leading to the global warming effects we’re observing now. The real, and more immediate, danger isn’t running out of oil. The danger is in not running out soon enough.

The atmosphere will hit maximum carbon load, and then we’ll have to be spending insane amounts of energy working to pump all of that carbon back into stable reservoirs. Sequestering underwater has me just a little bit nervous.

Here’s the parodox. We may manage to delay Peak Oil, at the cost of accelerating global warming. The irony is, if we’d have hit Peak Oil already, our impact on the environment would already be starting to decelerate (not decrease, just slow down for awhile before beginning to reverse).

Unfortunately, I’m not sure we’re (as a species) smart enough to Do The Right Thing any sooner than we absolutely have to, if then. If there’s oil left to burn (even at $300 per barrel) you’d better believe someone will be ready to burn it. Years from now, students will shake their heads in disbelief when they read about what we did with the limited petroleum resource.