Electronic devices regularly switched off or unplugged when not in use: laser printer, wireless modem, microwave, radio.

Polypropylene, vinyl, and cotton canvas bags used for groceries and errands. A large soft cotton tote bag is kept folded up and in the car for quick shopping trips. Conservative estimate: saved local grocery stores 800 plastic bags in the past year.

Cereal, pasta, and bread packages reused to store foods and pack lunches (in reusable totes). Savings: at least 500 sandwich baggies in the past year.

Junk mail, school flyers, and other handouts on 8 1/2 x 11 paper with one blank side saved for donation to local schools. Teachers have asked in the past for extra paper, even if one side is printed on, for photocopying assignments and status reports home. Saved so far: 1 1/2 reams of paper.

The review ends with this post, health care reform still has a higher profile, but the issues Thomas Friedman addressed in his book on climate change and the need for a renewable/green energy revolution have consistently been subjects during the past two weeks of major media features. Here are three from this week:
U.S. Chamber of Commerce seeks trial on global warming
LA Times, Tuesday, August 25, 2009
U.S. Biofuel Boom Running on Empty
Wall Street Journal, Thursday, August 27, 2009
Groups launch attack on cap and trade
Politico, Thursday, August 27, 2009

The first and third article deal with organized resistance to climate change legislation, while the second describes the failure of an inadequately planned and subsidized alternative energy program. All three are relevant to Friedman’s main theme: the United States must lead the world in developing clean power and energy-efficient technologies and will therefore have to devote large sums and create controversial tax and environmental policies to support this goal.

The first chapter of the book is titled “Where birds don’t fly” and Friedman contrasts this image with his vision of America as a free-wheeling open space where innovators will find alternatives to carbon-based energy. Later in the book, though, he laments how our political system has impeded quick and decisive moves towards his 21st century vision of renewable energy and green jobs. He contrasts the need to satisfy various constituencies in the United States with the authoritarian approach China can take, citing as an example its sudden, countrywide ban of free plastic bags.

Authoritarian solutions won’t fly here, but Friedman warns that we must implement some unpopular policies if we are to start moving at a decent pace toward a future powered by renewable energy. A cap and trade policy actually isn’t Friedman’s recommended route; he prefers more direct policies and outlines the reasons in his book.

Summer 2009 ends soon, Congress will be back at work, and health care and cap and trade legislation will be on the agenda. Sunroom Desk will be following the debates.

Friedman argues for a strong ethic of conservation, beginning with limits on encroachment into natural habitats and continuing with policies that replace fossil fuels with renewable fuels. He likens humans degrading the natural world with birds or animals fouling their own nests and concludes that “Later is over.”

What is being done about this now? The 2008 book described several ongoing projects along with the author’s visits with scientists and leaders. One year later…

This summer six Occidental College students and three Cal State Dominguez Hills students are conducting on-site ecology and biodiversity research at the 3,900-acre La Selva Biological Station and Reserve in the Costa Rican rainforest through a National Science Foundation grant.

The NSF project is one of many summer study programs offered at U.S. universities and colleges to foster understanding of sustainable development and biodiversity issues. (Here’s one offered by the University of North Carolina.)

Programs sending university students from the United States to ecologically threatened tropical locations have got to be good for academic international relations, but will these programs gather enough momentum to change current practices and stop biodiversity loss?

I found Friedman’s approach to this problem unrealistic in the short term. Dealing with rainforest biodiversity issues means dealing with foreign governments. He considers turning threatened areas into tourist destinations, but these will depend on widespread prosperity. In other words, it depends on the creation of high-paying 21st century green jobs (which the author believes political and economic policies addressing climate change can help to bring about!).

Thomas Friedman argues in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded that environmental and climate factors will make life exponentially more difficult in undeveloped areas of the world, as lack of access to electricity and education will keep even talented and ambitious people from escaping parts of the world devastated by drought, deforestation, or other environmental catastrophes.

I don’t recall much news coverage of this issue, and the author contends it hasn’t received widespread attention. My August 2009 Internet search turned up a number of recent sources on the topic, though, including:

Energy Poverty 101 (from Center for American Progress)

Energy Poverty Action (from the World Economic Forum)

Both of these documents, and others, cite health and environmental problems arising from the need to burn “biomass” such as wood or dung for fuel and heat (CO2 emissions and deforestation problems from biomass burning were highlighted in the previous post).

Next on Sunroom Desk: Yet another threat to the rainforest – biodiversity loss.

This is an energy poverty problem, an environmental problem, a climate change problem, and a biodiversity problem. It is also increasingly becoming a corporate public relations problem, another of the author’s predictions.

Friedman reports in his book on regions in Indonesia and Brazil where uncoordinated subsistence and business uses of forest areas are causing economic and ecological disasters. Businesses are rapidly planting oil palm plantations in the tropics, clearing vast forest areas to do so. Palm oil (from “oil palms”) is used in food and non-food products, including biofuels.

Here in Glendale, California, retailer Lush Cosmetics used sustainability issues with oil palm plantations in a new marketing campaign for its palm oil-free soap.

A few weeks earlier, Nestle Corporation was featured in a news story as one of several companies seeking to buy palm oil that is “environmentally friendly.” According to the Wall Street Journal article, the companies support the goals of the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The Journal article cited problems with both the price premium and uniform standards for sustainably produced palm oil, but gave special mention to Nestle and other large companies for their efforts.

RSPO’s website says that 28 million tons of palm oil is used for food and non-food products each year, and from the 1990s to the present time,

the area under palm oil cultivation has increased by about 43%…in Malaysia and Indonesia, the world’s largest producers of palm oil.

…there is serious concern that not all palm oil is being produced sustainably at present. Development of new plantations has resulted in the conversion of large areas of forests with high conservation value and has threatened the rich biodiversity in these ecosystems. Use of fire for preparation of land for oil palm planting has been reported to contribute to the problem of forest fires in the late 1990s. The expansion of oil palm plantations has also given rise to social conflicts between the local communities and project proponents in many instances.

In his 2008 book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman takes on global warming skeptics. He quotes scientists and United Nations studies, explains variations in the earth’s orbit and rotational tilt, and goes so far as to categorize the sources of carbon in the atmosphere.

Friedman and others fear that global warming could lead to major disasters because of exponential climate effects. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) used this thesis for a film plot centered on the sudden start of a new ice age (featuring scenes of New York City deluged by a huge wave that rapidly turns into solid ice, and many other impressive special effects).

Reading the book’s attempts to answer global warming critics, I was reminded of Ezra Klein’s recent call for a comprehensive Q&A on health care reform. He cited an existing resource for climate change as a positive example: “Grist’s How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic series.”

The Grist post is a long list of questions linked to answers (which readers may or may not agree with) organized by topic, stages of denial, types of arguments, and level of sophistication in the climate change debate – check it out.

Daily Show fans interested in this topic can check out Jon Stewart’s interview with U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu on capping carbon emissions, or earlier in the show, Stewart’s much raunchier analysis (a “children’s segment” not suitable for children) of negotiations surrounding the proposed cap-and-trade bill (The American Clean Energy and Security Act).

Near the hot, flat, and crowded Los Angeles Basin, it doesn’t matter whether fossil fuels are causing global warming. Local inhabitants still suffer from the effects of living with the most toxic air in the United States. The latest EPA report (summary on Legal Planet, video on KABC) says Los Angeles County residents have the highest risk in the nation of developing cancer caused by breathing vehicle emissions.

Why wouldn’t all of us in Glendale, Los Angeles and Southern California want to do everything possible to stop using fossil fuels and start using clean, renewable energy for transportation? The downside of global warming is just another entry on the long list of reasons to change our ways.

Why are we still waiting? Probably for the some of the same reasons we are still waiting for a solution to the problem of unaffordable health care: number one being that too much money is at stake and big stakeholders are calling the shots.

Interestingly enough, too much money and big stakeholders are also problems for citizens of those foreign oil producing states. In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman repeats the thesis of his 2006 Foreign Policy article The First Law of Petropolitics: as the price of oil goes up, oil producing nations’ governments become more authoritarian and repressive.

Friedman says the 9/11 attacks showed that our dependence on foreign oil is changing the international financial system for the worse, and funding an intolerant, anti-Western, repressive strain of Islam.

He goes on to describe in detail this maddening situation and other ways petrodictatorships are bad for the world and bad for the United States. Even for those of us who remember the 1970s, it is worth reading and reviewing.

U.S. government efforts to reduce demand for fossil fuels, though, could threaten the American middle class with higher fuel expenses.

Friedman wrote in 2008 that countries like China and India will be very reluctant to adopt caps on CO2 emissions, regardless of pressure from the U.S. He also wrote that any effort to significantly effect reductions in fossil fuel consumption would involve politically unpopular measures. Since I’ve been reading his book in summer 2009, the G-8 meeting went by with no international agreement on carbon emissions caps, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (cap and trade bill) stalled before the Congressional August recess, and reports like these have made the news –

From the July 16 Wall Street Journal’s summary of U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s comments to Chinese energy officials:

While noting that developed Western nations contributed most of the carbon dioxide already trapped in the atmosphere, Mr. Chu said China could add more in the next few decades than all the U.S. emitted since the Industrial Revolution.

And from the July 20 Carbon Offset Daily’s coverage of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s meetings with Indian Prime Minister Singh:

India stood firm Sunday against Western demands to accept binding limits on carbon emissions even as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed optimism about an eventual climate change deal to India’s benefit.

More recently, an August 11 Wall Street Journal editorial focuses on the protectionist conflict cap-and-trade energy taxes create for U.S. leaders trying to preserve American manufacturing jobs:

…at least 10 Senate Democrats…sent Mr. Obama a letter demanding that any bill taxing U.S. CO2 emissions must include a carbon tariff “to ensure that manufacturers do not bear the brunt of our climate change policy….We must not engage in a self-defeating effort that displaces greenhouse gas emissions rather than reducing them and displaces U.S. jobs rather than bolstering them,” wrote the Senators.

The book’s organization, however, sometimes makes for difficult reading (perhaps reflecting the difficulty of tackling this global problem). Within the Chapter that calls out hot, flat, and crowded as the three big problems causing a “perfect storm”, Friedman names five more big problems stemming from the first three (and then covers them in following chapters):

• Energy and natural resources supply and demand
• Petrodictatorship
• Climate Change
• Energy Poverty
• Biodiversity Loss

All of these are widely recognized (if debated) issues except Energy Poverty, which Friedman contends is a largely unrecognized problem receiving little to no attention (and those who follow the news can’t disagree).

What is Energy Poverty? Living outside of any energy grid – in parts of Africa, India, and other poorer countries – and thus unable to compete and prosper in the “flat” world.

Following columns on Sunroom Desk will cover Friedman’s perspectives on these problems, and how they are reflected in media headlines this summer.

The next column on Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Five More Problems