Reflections on
Sustainability: Earth
Day, April 22, 2013 (www.EarthDay.org) … (or International Mother Earth Day)
Earth
Day 2013: The Face of Climate Change
It’s not so much that people
don’t care. . .
Being green, and being
sustainable, is something that we all would happily do, if it wasn’t
inconvenient to do so. And if it was easy to do. And if we knew the best place
to start. And if it wasn’t too complicated to do so, we would all be more
sustainable.
That’s a bit of a problem because
there is no sense of urgency. There is, however, a sense of urgency about
getting the economy going stronger and getting more people back to work. But
reducing pollution and improving our water footprint and addressing our carbon
footprint, not so much so.
This is something like saving for
retirement. There’s no urgency to save for retirement until age 65, but it’s a
whole lot easier if you started 35 years earlier. $:-) We need to get the
magic of compounding working for us, not against.
There is no question that we all
have to get sustainable, sooner or later. “Achieving sustainability will
enable the Earth to continue supporting human life as we know it”
(Sustainability, 2013, Blue Marble caption). That’s the definition of
“sustainable”, something that can be done indefinitely and that does not have
external costs or place a burden on future generations.
The
American Planning Association’s four sustainability objectives are to use
planning approaches that:
1. Reduce dependence upon fossil fuels, underground metals, and
minerals
2. Reduce dependence upon synthetic chemicals and other unnatural substances
3. Reduce encroachment upon nature
4. Meet human needs fairly & efficiently (James & Lahti,
2003).
We all have to get started.
Sustainable starts at home, at church, in business, in government and at
school.
We need to take better care of
God green earth. Stewardship is a responsibility, not a luxury.
See these topics below:
I. Global Warming/Climate Change
II. What BIG Feet you Have! … The Human Footprint
III. Sustainable Solutions
IV. Global Acts of Green on Earth Day 2012
V. Become More Informed
Safety & Recycling.
Carefully and correctly dispose of stuff like electronics, paints, oil,
florescent light bulbs. Visit www.Earth911.com
to see how to recycle stuff, and extremely local details of recycling centers. Eventually
everything will be recycled; until then, let’s try to work it out together.
This is the 43rd Earth
Day event since it started in 1970. And still we have yet to take significant
measures to protect the earth we all so clearly need for survival. We all need
to become more informed, as a great place to start. See the book outlined below,
created from the best information anywhere about sustainability issues,
Wikipedia. (Free book, no advertising in it.)
Sustainability is a journey that
is started by us today, but continued by future generations.
"The earth is the Lord's, and
everything in it, the world, and all who live in it." (Psalm 24:1)
God bless,
----------------------------
Elmer Hall
Strategic Business
Planning Company
Planning
for Sustainable Success™
P Before printing this e-mail think if it is
necessary. Think Green!
I.
Global Warming & Climate Change. The statistics for climate
change and global warming seem to only be getting worse, with all continents
experiencing extreme weather of hot-cold, wet-dry, often in the same year. We
have the hottest decade in modern history (based on land, water and air
measures). April 2012 was the 5th hottest April on record, April
2010 was the hottest (CO2Now, 2012). Glacial ice is melting, and melting at an
accelerating rate. There’s evidence the ice in Antarctica, which should be
expanding, is shrinking, and it appears to be melting from the inside out!
What about Greenhouse Gasses
(GHGs) that trap sunlight in the atmosphere and cause warming, just like a
greenhouse in winter? By burning fossil fuels we are pumping gigatons of GHGs
such as Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and Methane (CH4) into the atmosphere, GHGs
above and beyond what the earth systems were used to processing prior to
industrialization starting more than a century ago. And carbon dioxide persists
in the atmosphere for some 100 years. Many scientist had high hopes of
reversing the steady climb of CO2 in the atmosphere and bringing it back down
to 350 parts per million (ppm) that we blasted through in 1985. The hope was
that the US, slowed by a sluggish economy, combined with a switch to cleaner
natural gas would help to lower the CO2 buildup in the atmosphere. Nope. China
and India with their coal-power craze, more than wiped out any slowing from the
US and Euro-zone. As measured by the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii we just
blasted through 397 on our way to 400 ppm. (See CO2Now.org).
This chart, and what it
represents, scares the bejeebers out of me!!!!! I
don’t know about you?
In the 1990s, the IPCC came up
with many projections from the best case where countries was very proactive and
reduced greenhouse gases to the worst case with business as usual (BAU). The
estimates then showed an increase in temperatures of 2 to 6 degrees centigrade
by the end of the century. Since water expands as it warms in addition to
glacial melting, this atmosphere increase would eventually result in about a 3
to 10 foot rise in sea levels. That would be devastating to coastline areas.
Maybe half of the Florida Keys would be underwater, for example. Right
now, about half of the greenhouse gasses are produced by China and the USA,
with the US pretty much going as BAU and China totally out of control. China
now burns half of the world’s coal and adds another new coal power plant each
week. In short, the
problem is real, it is big, and it is getting worse. Not only that, but it is
getting worse at an increasing rate.
With all that gloom and doom, what
are sustainable solutions?
II.
What BIG Feet You Have! … The Human Footprint
A picture is worth 1,000 words, a
video must be worth millions. We humans have been having a gigantic impact on
our environment. How big, you might ask? Really BIG. A couple of the best visual representations
of this are the Human Footprint
series by National Geographic, which follows two humans from birth to death, as
well as, The Story of Stuff and The Story of
Bottled Water (Leonard, 2010a, 2010b).
There are a couple things I don’t think to be totally accurate, but you
be the judge.
III. Sustainable
Solutions. We all – everyone, everywhere –
have to start being more sustainable. Well, dah! But that is easier said than
done. We have our entire life and economy and culture built around
non-sustainable practices.
To start, it is relatively easy, and profitable, to cut back on 25%-30%
of utilities. Start with an energy audit from your friendly local power
company.
Smarter transportation will save
huge amounts. Telecommuting saves $30,000 to $50,000 per full-time equivalent
employee, with more than $20,000 savings to the employer. Yes, you might want
to read that sentence again. The actual savings seem to be, all things
considered, are at least 10 times the savings in fuel… That is, $5,000 in fuel
saved related to telecommuting really represents $50,000-$60,000 in total
savings.
Or we could build more roads, buy
more cars, spend more of our lives in gridlock traffic and continue to
accelerate our increase in GHG emissions? I vote for taking our foot off of the
GHG accelerator, and starting to tap on the brake. Just because we may have
another 100 years of fossil fuels left, doesn’t mean that we have to try to
burn what’s left over the next century.
IV. A Billion Acts of
Green. Earth Day commitments are
entered into the earth day website under the “Billion Acts of Green”
campaign. The campaign in 2012 world-wide brought in 1,021,021,112 pledges.
Re-cycle- 9 people
Eat Local Food- 2
Wash clothes in cold water- 3
Use re-useable shopping bags- 3
Pick up litter- 6
Turn off the water tap when brushing teeth- 4
Turn off the computer and the x-box when not in use- 5
Turn off the lights when not in use- 10
Eat all the food on my plate – 3
Re-cycle water bottles- 3
Don’t buy anything new for a month- 3
Share rides- 4
Encourage others to pledge an act of green- 3
Plan a green event- 2
Print on both sides- 2
Use cloth napkins- 2
Write your legislature- 2
Use energy-efficient light bulbs- 1
Eat vegetarian; Plant a tree; Plant a garden; Collect plastic from the
neighbors for 2 weeks;
Reduce beef consumption; Repurpose; Conserve fuel; Plant a tree; Walk
or bike instead of driving;
V.
Become More Informed
It is critical to become more
informed. Companies and governments have millions – trillions, really – worth
of revenues to lose. Think about who wins, when you spend $.005 per gallon for
water from the tap. You win. The environment wins. Coke and Pepsi (the largest
producers of bottled water) lose.
Companies can make healthy
products that are sustainable, and they will. Eventually. We could try to get
the government more involved; but I generally don’t like that. We all need to
become informed and let our money do the voting for us.
The trick is to only accept
accurate facts. The first question of the Four-Way Test from Rotary
International (www.Rotary.org)
is critical: 1) Is it the truth?
Of
course the rest of the Four-Way test is pretty important too – it is kind of
the definition of sustainability when you think about it. Of the things we think, say or do
1.
Is it the TRUTH?
2.
Is it FAIR to all concerned?
3.
Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
4.
Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?
Contact: Elmer Hall.
I do consulting and coaching on Sustainability and sustainable innovation.
Please feel free to contact me for help, advice, or just moral support on your
sustainability issues.
References & Links
Leonard,
A. (2010b). The story of stuff: How our obsession with stuff is trashing the
planet, our communities, and our health – and a vision for change. New York,
NY: Free Press.
LINKS:
WikiBook: Climate Changes
and Sustainability. Following is the outline of a WikiBook created
from 38 Wikipedia articles on Earth Day, April 22, 2013. Because of all
the graphics, the book is 60MB as PDF (or 8MB as ePUB). Note that the ePub has
Earth Day and World Water Day included. Please downloading it, but you can get
the most recent version of each article by going to www.Wikipedia.com
and enter the article title in blue below.
Each article has high ratings for
accuracy and reliability. The entire WikiBook is
downloadable from: http://tinyurl.com/SustBook
(63MB).
Climate Changes and Sustainability
Table of Contents
Introduction
to Sustainability Issues 1
Sustainability
1
Population
density 22
Ecological
footprint 24
Earth
Systems and Climate Change 31
History
of climate change science 31
Atmosphere
of Earth 36
Global
warming 45
Climate
change 64
Scientific
opinion on climate change 75
The
Carbon Cycle 101
Organic
compound 101
Carbon
104
Carbon
dioxide 120
Carbon
cycle 134
Greenhouse
gas 139
Photosynthesis
156
Hydrocarbon/Fossil
Fuels 169
Fossil
fuel 169
Redox
174
Coal
181
Petroleum
197
Gasoline
218
Natural
gas 230
Power
and the Nexus of Energy, Water, Paper, Plastic, etc. 241
Electricity
generation 241
Water
248
Water-energy
nexus 266
Plastic
267
Carbon
Emissions and Sinks 280
Carbon
dioxide in Earth's atmosphere 280
List
of countries by carbon dioxide emissions 286
Carbon
sink 293
Sustainable
Solutions 304
Education
for Sustainable Development 304
Office
of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy 308
Recycling
313
Recycling
by product 325
Paper
recycling 330
Plastic
recycling 334
Sustainable
development 340
Glossary
of climate change 350
Index
of climate change articles 356
References
Article Sources and Contributors 360
Image Sources, Licenses and
Contributors 375
Article Licenses
License
385
April 22, 2025 marks the 55th Earth Day. That’s 55
years since millions first took to the streets in 1970 to demand a cleaner,
more just, and more sustainable future.
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