environment

Greenius on Patch.com: Eco-Minded Should Consider RUHS Alternative

Categories climate change, environment, green education, recycling, Saving Energy, Sustainability, water conservationLeave a Comment on Greenius on Patch.com: Eco-Minded Should Consider RUHS Alternative

With school starting up again it’s easy to remember what an exciting and terrifying time this is for high school freshmen making the giant leap from middle school to the intimidating and initially confusing big-time campus.

They don’t get any more big-time than Redondo Union High School‘s 56-acre campus, one of the largest in all of California.

With a history going back 105 years and an outstanding reputation in academics, robotics, journalism, band and so many other areas it is a very cool thing indeed to be a new Sea Hawk joining the other 2,294 RUHS students.

But there’s another high school in the area that Redondo Beach students are also eligible to attend that few even know about, let alone consider applying for. At first glance you might think I’m nuts to even suggest it: I don’t think any Redondo Beach resident has ever opted to attend, although kids from Lennox, Inglewood, Hawthorne, Gardena, Bellflower, Maywood, Carson and Lawndale have.

READ THE REST OF THE STORY ON REDONDO BEACH PATCH

Greenius on Patch.com: Biking Our Way Toward a Carbon Neutral Fiesta

Categories Bicycles, climate change, energy efficiency, environment, fossil fuelsLeave a Comment on Greenius on Patch.com: Biking Our Way Toward a Carbon Neutral Fiesta

After the overwhelming success of the inaugural bicycle valet operation at the Memorial Day Fiesta Hermosa, filling our free parking lot to capacity for all three days, those of us who worked to make it happen set our sights even higher for the upcoming Labor Day Fiesta.

Even though we took care of 800 to 1,000 bicycles per day over Memorial Day weekend, and made visiting the Fiesta a no-hassle, groovy good time for all those riders, we’re not satisfied.

We are now looking to park three times that many bikes each day over Labor Day weekend. Imagine us taking 7,000 to 9,000 cars off the roads over those three days and replacing them with bicycle riders.

How’s that for a greenhouse gas cutting vision?

READ THE REST OF THE STORY ON HERMOSA BEACH PATCH.COM

What Does Professor Tim Flannery, Top Climate Scientist, Worry About?

Categories carbon producers, climate change, environment, fossil fuels, Ocean, sea-level rise, SustainabilityLeave a Comment on What Does Professor Tim Flannery, Top Climate Scientist, Worry About?

“My great fear is that within the next few decades – it could be next year, or it could be in fifty years, we don’t know exactly when – we will trap enough heat close to the surface to our planet to precipitate a collapse, or partial collapse, of a major ice shelf…

I have friends who work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and they say [when a collapse happens] you’ll hear it in Sydney… Sea levels would rise pretty much instantaneously, certainly over a few months. We don’t know how much it would rise. It could be ten centimeters, or a metre. We will have begun a retreat from our coasts…

Once you have started that process, we wouldn’t know when the next part of the ice sheet would collapse, we don’t know whether sea level will stabilize. There’s no point of retreat where you can safely go back to…

I doubt whether our global civilization could survive such a blow, particularly the uncertainty it would bring.”

Greenius on Patch.com: Redondo’s Most Important Vote Has Nothing to Do With Zoning

Categories carbon producers, citizen volunteer, climate change, energy efficiency, environment, environmental legislation, fossil fuels, Ocean, renewable energy, Saving EnergyLeave a Comment on Greenius on Patch.com: Redondo’s Most Important Vote Has Nothing to Do With Zoning

Although local temperatures have been unseasonably low most of this summer, much of the rest of our planet has been burning (Russia’s historic fires), melting (Greenland glacier chunk breaks off, Arctic Sea Ice Loss), overheating (record heatwaves), or experiencing the extreme weather conditions climate that scientists have been warning about for decades now.

Regardless of what polling of a mostly misinformed and ignorant general public shows, the overwhelming and undeniable consensus of the world’s climate scientists, the people who specialize on the subject, says that we’ve pumped too much greenhouse gas from burning fossil fuels into our atmosphere and it’s overheating global temperatures in the air and in the ocean.

Not surprisingly the fossil fuel industries have spent hundreds of millions trying to con people about what’s happening and focus blame somewhere else. They’ve been doing exactly what the tobacco industry did until the stack of dead bodies from lung cancer victims got too big to ignore.

READ THE REST OF THE STORY ON REDONDO BEACH PATCH.COM

Greenius on Patch.com: Keep Your Hands Off Hermosa’s Recycling, Trash

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It’s a sad comment on our society that we have a permanent homeless population of people who live on the streets, reduced to scrounging their way through trash bins and dumpsters each day to survive.

Many of them have serious disabilities of one kind or another, or addictions, or have simply fallen through the people-sized holes in the safety net we all hope catches any of us if we slip off the high wire we balance on.

Like the man says, “there but for the grace of God go I,” and it is with no small measure of compassion that I approach the subject of whether it’s right or wrong for homeless people to take the cans and bottles from a homeowner’s or the city’s recycle bins.

READ THE REST OF THE STORY ON HERMOSA BEACH PATCH.COM

Greenius on Patch.com: Having Coffee with the Man of Power

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Eric Pendergraft and I have already been using Redondo Beach Patch.com to engage in a good conversation about the AES power plant in town after I wrote a column a few weeks back. I asked him to turn the Harbor Drive facility into a utility scale solar power plant, and he then thoughtfully replied with his own column explaining why that wasn’t possible.

I really appreciated the approach he took and the fact that he didn’t get hung up on either protocol — as the President of AES Southland he certainly could have easily ignored me — or on the fact that I had disparaging things to say about the look of the power plant and its carbon footprint.

Last week, he took me up on my offer to buy him a cup of coffee at the location of his choice, and we met for a face-to-face conversation at Catalina Coffee Company.

READ THE REST OF THE STORY ON PATCH.COM

Greenius on Patch.com: Let’s Give Some LUV to the Electric Cars Tooling Around Redondo

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I’ve got to admit I came to this column about short-range, slow-speed Neighborhood Electric Vehicles (NEVs) with a negative bias.

I’m a strong proponent of full speed electric vehicles and I’ve been growing increasingly excited about the new plug-in Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt coming to market later this year.

So I just couldn’t get too worked up about the South Bay Cities Council of Government’s “LUV” (Local Use Vehicle) test program of neighborhood electric vehicles that are restricted to a 25 mile per hour top speed, could only be driven on streets with a maximum 35 mph speed limit, and came with no air bags or other advanced safety features.

When the first cars in the LUV program were introduced at last year’s Riviera Village Summer Festival, I was one of the volunteers showing the cars off to the public, answering questions about them and signing up potential test drivers.

READ THE REST OF THE STORY ON REDONDO BEACH PATCH.COM

Greenius on Patch.com: Carbon Neutral City’s Friday Night Secrets Revealed!

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This is the first time I can write about any of what’s gone on at the Hermosa Beach Carbon Neutral City committee meetings, which I’ve actively participated in as a committee member since the first weekly meeting on a Friday night in April.

Since then our ad hoc group has gotten together in a nondescript conference room to kick off our weekends with two-to-three hours of exciting reports, discussions, updates and brainstorming. No one knows how to have a wildly wonky word workout like we do.

Four months later, not only are we still at it on Friday nights, but also on other nights, we’ve added subcommittee assignments.

Because I write this column for Patch as well as my own Creative Greenius blog, I’ve agreed to keep what I see and hear in our Carbon Neutral City committee meetings confidential and not write about them.

READ THE REST OF THE STORY ON HERMOSA BEACH PATCH.COM

Don’t Think of it as “Global Warming,” Think of it as Destroying our Atmosphere and Altering the Delicate Balance of Nature

Categories climate change, environment, fossil fuels, green education, SustainabilityLeave a Comment on Don’t Think of it as “Global Warming,” Think of it as Destroying our Atmosphere and Altering the Delicate Balance of Nature

I first saw this video produced by Dr. James Powell, the Executive Director of the National Physical Science Consortium on Joe Romm’s Climate Progress site last week.

Do yourself a favor and take 10 minutes to watch and grok this simple and easy to understand climate change lesson.  Memorize the information as if you were going to be tested in school on it.  Then use this knowledge to help explain reality to your friends and associates who have been duped and conned by the dirty energy industry into believing this is some kind of hoax.

It’s no surprise that the coal, oil and gas industries want us to keep using their dirty, unsafe fuels of the past which are running out and which are spewing pollution and deteriorating our atmosphere while they cook us inside the greenhouse.

But what is surprising is how many people we know and interact with argue against their own best interests and argue against a rapid transition to the clean safe fuels of our future which will never run out and which protect our health, our environment and our younger generations best chance for peace and prosperity.

So many lizard brains and scared little sheep among us in addition to the industry mercenaries and the always loudly heard defiantly ignorant.  They will surely be our damnation unless we find a way to reach and teach them before it’s too late.  The odds are that we’re already too late by a couple of years now at least and each passing day puts us another 24 hours behind.

But I’m still not ready to cash in my chips yet and start partying like it’s 1999. And I’m still up for the greatest fight between good and evil, between ignorance and enlightenment, between liars and truth tellers that ever played out here on good old planet earth.

Because in the Kingdom of the Lizard Brains the Autodidact with the high school diploma is King.