The Greenest (and One of the Last?) Winter Olympics Ever

There is a crack going around about the 2010 Vancouver Olympics that it is “the greenest Winter Olympics ever”. 

The joke refers to the efforts to promote green tech and transportation at the event that has been more than offset by man-made global warming and pollution that has led to record-high temperatures and rain. This has forced organizers to ship in snow (thereby releasing more harmful emissions) to Cypress Mountain that overlooks Vancouver; Whistler, some 2 hours north where most of the outdoor venues are is mild but still in good shape.

My wife and I live in the Metro Vancouver. We park-and-rode into the downtown yesterday to get a feel of the crowds, the activities and the excitement just before the Opening Ceremonies on Friday. One of our stops was at the big downtown Hudson’s Bay department store that had a half a floor dedicated to Olympics merchandise; ‘The Bay’ is a sponsor. I saw a Vancouver 2010 umbrella and cracked to my wife “you’ll need this on Cypress” and she laughed. With even more rain and high temperatures forecast this weekend spectators and the athletes’ retinues will need them.

The Orange County Register has called it right with a Feb.8/9 story ‘Global warming a threat for the Olympics?‘

“One morning last week, environmentalist David Suzuki looked across English Bay from his Vancouver home to Cypress Mountain, usually covered in snow this time of year but now left all but bare by a warm winter.

“I’ve watched in horror as the snow has just melted away from Cypress Mountain,” Suzuki said, referring to the 2010 Olympic Games snowboarding and freestyle skiing venue.

“The view from Vancouver, Suzuki and others say, provides a glimpse into the future for the Winter Olympics.

“It’s certainly an early warning sign and I think and a wake up call to the Olympic movement,” said Ian Bruce, 

“Global warming has placed the future of the Winter Olympics and winter sports from the Sierras to the Alps in peril, according to interviews with environmental scientists, Olympic officials, historians and athletes in recent weeks.

“As the 2010 Olympic Games open this week in Vancouver and Whistler, there is a growing concern within the Olympic and environmental movements that the Winter Games are in jeopardy of being significantly diminished if not eliminated all together by climate change.

“The tenuousness of the Winter Olympics has become increasingly more obvious with global warming,” said Derick L. Hulme, an Olympic historian at Michigan’s Alma College. “It (the International Olympic Committee) should be very concerned about the Winter Olympics. I think many people look out 20, 30 years from now and are concerned about whether the Winter Olympics will still be viable.”

The culprits are in the mirrors. The SUVs, the monster homes, sprawling subdivisions, the office parks, big box stores, and expressways we drive and select and with this the destruction of farmland, forests, open space and wetlands and the air, water and land that we depend on. The treating of the environment as a free lunch whose price is now becoming due but no one wants to pay, and the amount owed is climbing rapidly.

Ultimately the human species, as well as that of every other life form is doomed, as is our planet and solar system and the universe. There is the fatalism that ‘in the long run we’re all dead’ that has created greenlighted wanton materialist, environment-be-d**ned attitude as evidenced in the bumper sticker ‘The one who dies with the most toys wins’. The Algeria-born French philosopher Albert Camus summed it up nicely: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide” and we’re quickly collectively doing in ourselves before the sun going red giant, the collision between the Milky Way with Andromeda and heat death does us in.

So is there a reason to go green, to try and save the planet, when ultimately it is a futile exercise? The answer lies whether each of us has a reason to go on living, or to kill oneself, as Camus posits. We can decide not to look after ourselves and choose to ingest dangerous substances to oblivion too.

My attitude is that each of us are born without being asked into this world, a gift as it were, and we have an obligation to repay the givers if you like by making the best of it in the brief times we are here. Like Zen art just because life, like the planet and the cosmos is not permanent does not mean it is not worth while to create and maintain for it has a unique beauty that is to be cherished for that instant there is. 

And that means looking after ourselves and our planet.

Tags: David Suzuki, Winter Olympics, global warming

Related Entries
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• Carbon Neutral Campaign – Jun 15, 2007

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Desiring Streetcars

        
 
One of the greenest ways of getting around is electric streetcars. These elegant, comfortable rail vehicles use far less energy than cars, can draw their power from sources other than fossil fuels, are much more attractive than buses and can shape development.

Once targeted for elimination by a combination of an apathetic public sold on the vision of unlimited mobility, not realizing that the dark side of congestion and environmental destruction lay just around the corner and by the beneficiary car and tire makers and petroleum companies, streetcars have been making a comeback in cities throughout North America.

The latest city to witness their return, if only for a short time, is Vancouver, B.C., Canada. The City of Vancouver and Bombardier have launched the Olympic Line, a 1.2 mile demonstration route from the Canada Line rapid transit near the Olympic Village to Granville Island, a popular shopping and entertainment hub long notorious for terrible parking. A pair of state-of-the-art 100 percent low-floor Bombardier streetcars, borrowed from Brussels, Belgium began operating last Thursday and will continue to do so until March 21, with the close of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics and Paralympic Games. The service, which will be provided every six to 10 minutes from 6:30am to 12:30am, is free.

The tracks the streetcars use a rebuilt freight spur operated on by restored heritage streetcars in summer months. Vancouver lost its local streetcar system in 1955; its longer-distance electric interurbans in 1958. Rail transit, in the form of automated rapid transit, first returned in 1986 and has been expanded since.

Vancouver hopes to keep the streetcars going after March 21; it is planning a network that will connect offices, retail, transportation hubs, sports venues and parks in the downtown. City officials are keeping their fingers crossed that strong public demand and support will enable them to convince provincial and federal governments especially, for operating and capital financing. 

Vancouuver is eyeing The City of Seattle, some 2-1/2 hours to the south, which has greenlighted a second new streetcar line that will connect its King Street/International District Amtrak/commuter rail/LINK light rail hub with First Hill and Capitol Hill. The first streetcar line, connecting Lake Union with the Westlake Center, a retail/transportation center that joins LINK with the Seattle Center monorail, opened in 2007. They will be part of a network that Vancouver hopes to replicate.

Tags: B.C., Olympic Line, Vancouver, green transportation, streetcars

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Fantasy Island 100 Percent Renewable and Giving Back

During the third quarter 2009, the small Danish island of Samsø reported 4000 residents, with no grants or funding, switched almost completely to renewable energy through a combination of community owned wind turbines, district heat plants (run on local biomass) and offshore turbines (installed to offset the emissions of the island’s transport). The island is self-sufficient, and produces 140% of the energy it consumes and is exporting energy back to the mainland. That is amazing!

Watch slideshow of this project at ScientificAmerican dated January 19, 2010. 

As an aside to another blog I contribute to, Monetizing IP Communications, here is a list of voice over Internet providers for Denmark.

Tags: Denmark, Samso, Samsø, island, renewable, sustainable, turbines, voip, wind energy

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Green Box: Green tech survey and patents

A couple of items have landed in my inbox that are of interest:

Symantec via its PR firm forwarded the green facets of its recently released findings from the firm’s 2010 State of the Data Center report. Among them:

* 70 percent of enterprises mentioned energy savings as a somewhat/absolutely important initiative, which was one of the top ten

* 94 percent of enterprise said that reducing energy consumption was important, 89 percent said Green IT was important

* Green IT/energy savings came up in every cloud computing topic

36 percent are considering private cloud computing, 33 percent are looking at public cloud computing, 30 percent are considering infrastructure as a service, and 33 percent are considering platform as a service to become green. 

Also 32 percent of firms are using storage as a service and 34 percent are deploying storage virtualization while 32 percent of enterprises are using storage virtualization–all as ways to go green.
 
–

Also Tom Ciesielka has kindly passed on this release to me on green tech patemts: 
 
January 15, 2010 – Five weeks after the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) began a test program to fast track certain “green” technology patent applications, most of the 3,000 positions are still available. Only about one third have been applied for.
 
Businesses wishing to patent their proprietary green technologies are being given special “front-of-the-line” status in having their application reviewed. Unexamined pending applications that are accepted could have the processing time reduced by as much as one year.
 
“This may be used in conjunction with other governmental programs to speed the prosecution of foreign applications as well” said Paul Craane, attorney with the intellectual property law firm Marshall, Gerstein & Borun LLP. “Assuming your application falls within the proper class, this program is tailored for an application focused on a single invention,” Craane said. Craane recommended that applicants contact their patent attorney and get their petition in as soon as possible.
 
The USPTO has indicated that if this program is deemed successful it could very likely be continued and expanded. For more information about the USPTO pilot program to accelerate the examination of certain green technology patent applications visit the website:
http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2009/09_33.jsp
 
 

Tags: cloud computing, infrastructure as a service, patents, platform as a service, storage as a service, virtualization

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To Go Green (In More Ways than One) Go Virtual…and Bus and Rail

Want more proof that going green by virtualizing offices i.e. teleworking and locating those functions that need people to interact with each other and with equipment inside energy-efficient buildings at high-transit-accessible locations is the smart way to go? Why it will save green in more ways than one.

A new report by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2010 covered on TMCnet  illustrates why staying or locating in traditional suburban sprawl office buildings is a bad financial idea. It paints a bleak outlook for investors, owners, and landlords for office space.

“[D]on’t expect any spikes in this recovery given the dearth of employment generators and rising vacancies. New demand could stall well into 2011 or even 2012. Employers continue to seek outsourcing and productivity gains, especially in the financial industry.

“Big companies pursue various options to reduce costs, use space more efficiently, and increase “people-per-seat metrics. They count on young employees to adapt to paperless environments as well as more work-at-home and open space hoteling strategies.” These secular trends could “mitigate any office rebound.”

Suburban office markets are in a much worse position than those in downtowns and accessible on transit. The central cities have and will outperform suburban sprawl, which it has done since 2007, as an investment prospects, with vacancy rates tracking approximately five percent less downtown than on the fringes.

 ”Avoid suburban markets,” recommends the report. “Urban and infill areas should benefit from demographics changes and economic shifts working against many suburbs. The “move back in” by echo boomers and empty nester baby boomers continues, and office tenants migrate toward suburban nodes with more urban amenities. Rising car-related costs (gas, insurance, user fees, loans) and increased congestion don’t help the suburban office story, either. In particular, obsolescence threatens older office parks.”

Yes, there are deals to be had, and landlords are willing to bend over backwards. But Diety forbid you have to pull up stakes–a key consideration because how quickly things change–the chances of finding someone to take over your lease or if you decide to own a building, you’ll have your finances dragged into the mud by this white elephant.

Here’s another green-in-many-ways-tip: if you have to have your staff travel, for short trips put them on buses and trains instead having them fly (or drive) to ensure that they can work productively enroute.

A new report from DePaul University also reported on TMCnet found that the ability and ease of bus and train customers to use portable electronic devices as compared to those who fly is prompting their greater use. So much so that it is offsetting the longer travel times resulting it says growing market share for bus and rail.

The study: Is Portable Technology Changing How Americans Travel? A Survey of the Use of Electronic Devises on Intercity Buses, Train, and Planes reported in the transit trade magazine Metro, says curbside bus and high-speed Boston-New York-Washington, D.C. Amtrak Acela Express trains travelers are the heaviest users of portable technology. At randomly selected points during trips, it said that 39.6 percent of passengers on curbside buses are using some form of portable device. This is two percentage points more than on conventional Amtrak trains and more than twice that on commercial flights and traditional Greyhound buses.

In contrast to rail and bus users, on the average commercial flight, only 17.6 percent of passengers are using technology at any given point. The report points to the requirements that devices must be deactivated after leaving the gate and remain off for an extended period. Also the aircraft design makes power outlets and centralized computer-equipped work stations impractical to install.  While airlines make special allowances for passengers to travel with laptop and notebook computers but when flights are full, keeping such equipment at seats can be awkward. Even the seemingly simple act of retrieving a laptop from an overhead compartment can be difficult, as many are filled to capacity.

“Due to gradual reductions in seat pitch, escalating load factors, and the “hassle factor” of airport security in the post-9/11 environment (requiring travelers to complete a series of tasks before boarding the plane and taking their seat), many travelers opt to bring only the smallest devices, such as cell phones and iPods, with them,” says the report.

The trends identified by the DePaul report will accelerate. It came out just before the attempting bombing of Flight 253 and the resulting added security measures that has added to the total air travel time, and the resulting hassle. Both Amtrak and Greyhound are accelerating their Wi-Fi deployments notes the report. Wi-Fi provisioning came up at a meeting last month in Vancouver, B.C. Canada on improving cross-border intercity rail. Washington, Oregon, the province of British Columbia and Amtrak have been working together to drive more customers into the spiffy Amtrak Cascades Talgo trains that operate between Eugene, Oregon and the Canadian city, which is home of the 2010 Winter Olympics, by way of Portland and Seattle. 

If one does need to fly, and one’s destination is the Seattle area, Sound Transit has just opened its LINK LRT to SeaTac airport. It offers a 36-minute ride to the downtown. Flying to Seattle, then riding LINK and taking Amtrak can be a less expensive as well as a scenic, if longer option to reaching Vancouver, B.C. 

Tags: Amtrak, air travel, bus, green buildings, sprawl, telecommute, telework, video conferencing

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Tags: air travel, Amtrak, bus, green buildings, sprawl, telework, telecommute, video conferencing

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Keeping the Desert Green By Banning Solar Plants, Wind Farms

One of our blog’s readers, Sally, sent me a Dec.21 New York Times story on legislation introduced by U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein to protect some 1 million acres of the Mojave Desert in California for two parks, the Mojave Trails National Monument and the Sand to Snow National Monument. Yet doing this, said the paper, will scuttle some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for these lands via leases.

The newspaper reports that a fair-sized portion of that land had been donated to the federal government a decade ago by an environmental group, which had purchased the property from Catellus Development with private and federal money. The rest has been protected in some form or another.

The rub comes with commitments for conserving this wide open space when the land was accepted and goals for green energy from two Administrations.

The Times said the federal government “made a competing commitment in 2005 when President George W. Bush ordered that renewable energy production be accelerated on public lands, including the Catellus holdings. The Obama administration is trying to balance conservation demands with its goal of radically increasing solar and wind generation by identifying areas suitable for large-scale projects across the West.”

“Not only is the desert land some of the sunniest in the country, and thus suitable for large-scale power production, it is also some of the most scenic territory in the West,” adds the story. “The Mojave lands have sweeping vistas of an ancient landscape that is home to desert tortoises, bighorn sheep, fringe-toed lizards and other rare animals and plants.”

Sally adds that some believe the desert is the best place for utility scale wind and solar. “But that is not true, especially solar,” she said. ”Especially for solar thermal. Because the kind of solar proposed for that area needs lots of water and lots of new power lines. Neither of which exist where the power plants were proposed.”

Sally and the other environmentalists who want to preserve the vistas have a valid point. Just because the power source is green it doesn’t mean the power is green.There is not only the habitat destruction and the visual pollution–”utility sprawl”–but there’s also emissions from the service vehicles. 

This isn’t new for those of who live in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia especially. Our rivers have been dammed (damned?) for decades for green hydroelectric power, which have wreaked havoc on the salmon runs and the salmon fishery. And there are few scars uglier than the tree stumps and other remains when the water levels drop in the reservoirs. Except for the slopes stripped and despoiled with wires and pylons.

Senator Feinstein is striving to balance the green and the green. The Times reported that she had shrunk the parkland from 2.5 million acres; her bill would provide a 30 percent tax credit to developers that consolidate degraded private land for solar projects.

“I strongly believe that conservation, renewable energy development and recreation can and must co-exist in the California desert,” Mrs. Feinstein said in a statement.  “This legislation strikes a careful balance between these sometimes competing concerns.”

The Senator has a point. The green energy developers would be better off in more ways than one if they brownfielded their projects instead. For (and ironically) they are falling into the same lazy and environmentally destructive pattern of commercial and residential developers by focusing on greenfields.

Further to the legislation why not look for alternative power sites at the huge parking lots at malls, ‘office parks’, and distribution centers many of which are vacant and whose landlords are hungry thanks to the downturn. Couldn’t panels be mounted on new rooftops to create covered parking? Or wind turbines erected on towers that also carry power/voice/data, cell repeaters, and lighting. One big benefit is that the utility infrastructure is already there, which minimizes construction costs and line losses.

Here is another option: how about locating these plants over and by the massive amounts of publicly-owned ‘freeways’ throughout the region? The ‘power rights’ can be sold to support California’s planned new high-speed rail (HSR) line, and when the trains begin to roll, to supply electricity to them. The same concept could be deployed in the Northeast with supplemental power to help power the region’s large electrified high-speed and commuter rail networks. And in Texas where LRT lines are expanding in Dallas and Houston. With creaking progress now being made towards HSR in Florida perhaps solar power in the Sunshine State can help make that a reality. 

Going green does not have to mean destroying green.

Tags: green energy, solar power, sprawl, wind farms

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