A couple of weeks ago I helped organize an event. It was a fun event with decorations, including helium balloons. One of my volunteers took charge of getting the helium for the balloons. In the past I have rented a helium cylinder from a party store and then returned it afterward. My volunteer noted that it was actually cheaper to BUY two small party tanks of helium to fill the balloons and then just, well, I guess throw them out.
So she bought two of them; they came in a cardboard box and weighed about 12 pounds each. I found this idea to be almost comically absurd--if it weren't an actual serious environmental problem. A steel pressurized tank should be a durable item, not a disposable. Yet here we were purchasing 25 pounds of steel and valves to blow up about 75 balloons that would last for at most a day. The party itself was about 4 hours long.
Am I the only person who thinks this is absolutely crazy? How many thousands of these things are sold every year? Where is the iron ore mined? and then manufactured and shipped thousands of miles,etc. Yet, I can hardly find anyone who finds this to be somehow just, well, wrong.
Well, not nobody. If you've never seen the Story of Stuff, watch this.
I was able to recycle them with my curbside recycling, but that was not a satisfying ending for me. Recycling them seems like a huge waste as well--just not quite as bad as sending to the landfill.
A series of events in Arlington VA underscores issues with our political system that prevent good people from serving in public office.
Arlington County recently experienced the following series of events:
County Board member Barbara Favola won election in November to the VA state Senate, requiring her to resign her seat on the Board
The County held a special election in March to fill the empty seat
Arlington School Board member, Libby Garvey won that election, requiring her to resign her seat on the School Board.
The empty School Board seat did not need to be filled by election; the four remaining School Board members chose the replacement board member.
The School Board chose Todd McCracken to fill the empty seat through the end of 2012, at which time whoever wins the election in November will take the seat.
When the school board announced the process for selecting someone to fill the empty seat, sixteen (16!) citizens submitted letters of interest and resumes (disclosure: I was one of those). For a relatively small jurisdiction like Arlington, that struck me as a remarkable level of interest.
On May 19, I attended the Arlington County Board meeting and made comments during the public comment period. Each commenter is allotted two minutes, so I had to keep my remarks short.
(For more details and photos, see my recent post on this issue)
Here is the text of what I said:
My name is
Steve Offutt, and I wanted to bring to the board’s attention recent activity by
the parks department that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.
There has been a proliferation of bollards in Arlington County over the last few weeks. I know of six that have been installed within one mile of my house, all of which are unnecessary.
From conversations with insiders, I have learned that these bollards are being installed without consensus among staff and against the recommendations of some staff with cycling expertise. In any case, they are being installed without community input and without any input from the Arlington Bicycle Advisory Committee, of which I am a member. I have previously posted about how bollards are mostly unnecessary and often create more problems than they solve.
The new East Falls Church bridge went into service last month, and about a week later four bollards were installed: three at one end and one at the other. These three went in first:
On Monday I attended the Queen's Day celebration at the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Washington DC. As it turned out, the trip to and from utilized numerous modes of travel that all added together to make for an interesting trip as shown on this map.
The new bicycle/pedestrian bridge linking the W&OD trail with the East Fall Church Metro station in the Madison Manor neighborhood has been put into service. The old bridge has been demolished and removed. Final construction details are still being completed, but the bridge is now in use.
Watch this video of Margaret Thatcher speaking on the dangers of environmental degradation and continuing human interference with nature. The section on climate change begins about 5:30.
Keep in mind that Ms. Thatcher was a staunch Conservative in the mold of Ronald Reagan (or perhaps he was in the mold of Margaret Thatcher. Well, either way.)
Arlington County has started installing the first of the 250 "wayfinding" signs it has planned for along the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor (as detailed here). I have blogged on trail signs in the past--mostly negative, because they either tend to not exist or fail to function well.
So it's great that these are finally going up. I'm sure I will have criticisms (see below), but signs of almost any kind are better than the absence of signs. So all in all, this is a great step forward.
I took pictures of them and their exact locations are shown on this map:
This one is mounted on the sound wall at the entrance of the trail It is excellent that the signs indicate the name of the trail. In the past, this has often been a problem. Signs would point towards destinations but would fail to tell you where you were. Now someone using Google Maps and given the direction "Turn Right on the Custis Trail" will have confidence they are in the right place when they reach the trail.
The East Falls Church distance indicator is swapped with the one on the sign below. This sign is actually closer to East Falls Church than the sign below, but indicates that it is farther away.
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I just joined Car2Go, a new car-sharing concept that has just debuted in Washington DC. I was able to join for free during a promotional period (if you are in the area, try the promo word "capital").
I'm not sure when I'll try it out, but since it was free to join and there are no costs until I actually use a car, there's no downside.
I saw some tweets suggesting that Car2Go will supplant Zipcar. No doubt there will be competition, but Zipcars can hold more passengers and they are available outside the city of DC, which is where I live. So for now, I can see opportunities to use both.
The Edison Foundation held their 1-day meeting, Powering the People 2.0, on Thursday, March 22. I was able to visit for a short while, visiting the electric vehicles outside, listening to the introductory speakers and first panel, and visiting the area they called "Innovation Avenue."
My favorite moment of the entire meeting was when the President of Pepco Holdings greeted everyone by saying, "I want to take credit for the early blooming of the cherry blossoms." I'm pretty sure he did not realize the irony of his own statement, what with the significant contribution the electricity sector makes to climate change. (One could point out the Pepco owns no generation, but I still found his statement amusing.)
"We're going to reduce our carbon footprint fifty percent," Lowell McAdam, Verizon's CEO, said in a sit-down with Bloomberg's Alix Steel. "We are now beginning to install solar arrays for powering our cell tower sites, and we've got our first data center powered by geothermal going in."
I am a FIOS customer of Verizon in Northern Virginia. When we had Fios service installed, they placed a backup box unit
in my house that draws a continuous 20 watts. 24/7/365. It does not
power down when the battery is charged nor when there is no call for
service. Just a constant 20 watts. That costs me (and all customers) about $20
per year. Not a lot, but a nice lunch.
I cannot turn this box off. If I unplug it, then it just draws down the battery until it's used up, which is senseless. I could pull the battery out, too, but that's a lot of effort--not as easy as pushing a power strip switch, which I can do with my wireless router.
Without realizing it, the 5-year anniversary of my original blog passed by last month. Since then I have posted 368 posts here. Many of these have also been featured on other blogs, including:
I get the occasional email from my skeptic friend highlighting the latest study he's seen on Watt's Up With That and how the entirety of global warming science is thrown into question. He included this statement in his last email:
". . .the earth has been cooling now for
the last 15 years, while CO2 is still rising."
This is a common meme among the skeptics: that there has been no warming recently despite increasing CO2, therefore global warming has stopped.
The main problem with this argument is that 15 years is too short a period to make any definitive statements about long-term trends. It also fails to take into account other forcings, such as solar intensity (down), ENSO (more La Nina lately) and increased aeresols from Chinese coal burning (study here).
Location: Robert H. Smith School of Business
Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center
1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20004
Concourse Level - Room C3
BRUCE PIASECKI is President and founder of AHC Group, Inc. , a management consulting firm. For more than thirty years, AHC Group has focused on the critical areas of corporate governance consulting, energy, and environmental strategy, product innovation, and sustainability strategy. Whether working with Toyota, Shaw Industries, Suncor Energy, or FMC, Bruce and his team show companies how to compete on price, quality, and social needs. Piasecki has evolved from a niche expert on environmental issues for Fortune 500 corporations to a mainstream advocate for sustainable strategies for everyone.
Benjamin Franklin knew instinctively what so many of us have forgotten: Frugality and industriousness are the ways to wealth. After the last set of business scandals and financial busts, many powerful interests, from governments to multinational corporations, are exploring how to do more with less. Doing More with Less dives into our primal competitive instinct, which embraces frugality as a crucial competitive edge.
Recently Montgomery County has estimated that the additional costs to the Purple Line of building the bike/ped trail through the Bethesda tunnel could add as much as $40 million to the project. Using financing mechanisms to capture savings could ameliorate part or all of these costs and improve the project and the community at the same time. (Update: the Washington Post reported on February 25 that the MTA has rejected proposals to put the trail in the tunnel.)
In order to fully appreciate this proposal, we have to accept a couple of assumptions that I believe are true:
1) It is cheaper to build the Purple Line and the trail if there are no buildings and/or building supports in the way during construction
2) It is cheaper to build commercial buildings when there is not an operating transit line below them.
3) Conclusion (to accept for the sake of argument) - It would be less expensive for the Purple Line project AND the building developers to design and build everything at the same time.
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