Ok team, today I decided to calculate my ecological footprint on The Global Footprint Nework’s website. I have done this before for another class, but I have not done it with this particular calculator and I found the questions more probing and specific and the graphics to be extremely entertaining.

So after trying to answer as honestly (and painfully) as I could, the generator informed me that my personal global footprint is currently 5.8 global hectares and my consumption requires an area of productive land equivalent to 7.1 Canadian football fields. Wowzer. 5.8 also happens to be the Canadian national average, so I suppose I am not alone; however the City of Calgary really shamed me by having an average of 8.6, which I guess might be expected from an oil producing state? Either way, I had grandly and self importantly thought myself to be far more sustainable than the average Canadian. No dice Sampson.

Then I began to ask… Why? I am pretty much a vegetarian, I rarely RARELY eat beef or lamb, don’t often eat chicken, and eat fish probably three times a week. I don’t have a car meaning I ride the bus everywhere and when I am in a vehicle it is my boyfriend’s Jetta turbo diesel, which is quite fuel efficient. I am diligent about recycling and try to limit my garbage. Checking these off, it became clear. It’s my living situation that is the worst.

I live in the basement suite of a three story house with 7 other people. 6 people live upstairs, two parents, two children and two grandparents (try to imagine the noise levels involved) and me and my boyfriend live downstairs. There is no energy efficient lighting, the house has not been upgraded and from what I recall we use a stunning amount of heat and electricity. I went back to the calculator to find out how much I could lower my footprint by imaging my living situation to be significantly different.

I placed me and my boyfriend in a small one-bedroom (all we could afford in Vancouver anyway!) in a multi-level apartment building and gave us all fuel efficient light bulbs, low water, heat and natural gas usage (we used very little in the apartment we rented before our current living situation)  and my new Footprint was 5 global hectares. I felt pretty good about that until I saw the mocking box in the top left corner that read: “we would need 2.8 planet earths if everyone lived like you”… Ouch.

So basically, I definitely want to change my living situation (screaming children have really moved that agenda along) and the least I can do is go out and buy myself some energy efficient light bulbs. I am also going to try and be more aware of exactly where my food is coming from. I would like to support more local companies anyways.

“Necessity is the mother of Invention”.

Nobody is clear on who said this, but everyone is clear on what it means. The Cornucopian idea that as our consumption levels create problems our technological advances will continue to solve them is prevalent the world over. Living under the world wide phenomenon of Global Warming has finally given rise to skeptics of this cornucopian ideal – those that believe our fundamental consumption based way of life has to change if we are to stop the planet from its doomsday trajectory.

Global warming refers to the current and projected increase in the temperature of the earth and oceans.Though there are scientists who remain skeptical of this, the vast majority of the scientific community led by the International Panel on Climate Change have agreed that there is a strong anthropogenic causation link between the actions of mankind and the current state of the climate. This link is commonly known as Greenhouse Gasses, or GHG’s. The GHG on the tip of everyone’s tongue right now is CO2. As the dominant anthropogenic GHG we ostensibly have the most control over its concentration in the atmosphere. CO2 is released primarily by our use of fossil fuels, necessitating any climate change reduction model to focus on a reduction of the use of fossil fuels themselves.

In a paper titled Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies by Pacala and Socolow, they propose that we have the solution already, we just aren’t looking at the problem the right way. Rather than searching for a cure all that will suddenly solve all of our energy needs, we can combine a number of different existing technologies in a dynamic and symbiotic manner to solve the problem as pieces to a puzzle. Pacala and Socolow propose that we need seven different wedges for a proposed total avoided emissions of 25 GtC’s. The idea is to to limit atmospheric CO₂ to a concentration that would prevent most damaging climate change: 500 ± 50 parts per million (ppm), or less than double the preindustrial concentration of 280 ppm.

One of the proposed Wedges is Wind power, a current renewable energy option that is already being utilized all over the world. According to Pacala and Socolow we would need to add 2 million 1-MW-peak windmills (50 times the current capacity) occupying an estimated 3% of the area of the United States, some 30 million hectares. One of the main issues with Wind Power is that it does take up a lot of viable land and is often located on prime plots of land along the coast line in order to optimize the weather. However, one of the most promising points that is offered is that because of the wide spacing of wind turbines, there is an option of multiple uses of the land. Turbines can be located on farms without significant detriment to the fields. Wind power could potential be located on the same land as corn/switchgrass ethanol crops, using the land to provide two sources of renewable energy.

According to this graph by the European Wind Energy Association wind power has become increasingly popular over the last decade and is primed to continue to do so.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiCaptionURL&_method=retrieve&_eid=1-s2.0-S0301421508007118&_image=1-s2.0-S0301421508007118-gr4.jpg&_ba=&_fmt=full&_orig=na&_issn=03014215&_pii=S0301421508007118&_acct=C000050484&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1022551&md5=201a9c6452c15fa06718b92164aec93f

In 2008 the U.S. Department of Energy released a report assessing the technical and economic feasibility of achieving 20% wind penetration by 2030, which they are currently making strides towards. In an article entitled Wind power price trends in the United States: Struggling to remain competitive in the face of strong growth by Mark Bollinger and Ryan Wisler  they discuss some of the current problems facing wind power: “shortage of wind turbines and turbine components, along with rising materials costs and weakness in the US dollar has, in recent years, placed upward pressure on wind turbine prices, installed wind project costs, and, ultimately, wind power prices” ( Bollinger 2008).

Wind Power I believe, can contribute significantly to a stabilization wedge due to its clean nature, the ability to combine land use – possibly with other renewable energy projects, and its high rate of technological development that already exists. The worry is that it will simply be too expensive to be developed to a point where it can become a strong stabilization wedge. If governments accept that a stabilization wedge method is what is necessary, I believe government subsidies for renewable energy mixed land use projects could be the answer.

On January 26th, 2012 A unusual group of people gathered to share their concerns, excitement, and growing knowledge of Biofuels at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver Campus. A Town Hall Meeting called to discuss and debate the future of Biofuels in Canada and their importance world wide, and it soon became clear that the only thing these two groups had in common was a concern for the environmental future of North America. Scientists both for and against biofuels, government officials (including the Minister of Agriculture Don McRae)  NGO’s such as Friends of the Earth and Farmers from as far as Latin America gathered in Vancouver to debate over no less than North America’s energy future. Biofuels have been heralded as the savior of the modern energy crisis, offering an alternative to fossil fuels that to some solves all of the age old problems. Those opposed to Biofuels however, raised some serious issues with the production of Ethanol in North America that led to a heated debate regarding whether they were the golden solution some parties were claiming.

While agricultural minister McRae called ethanol a “win win” for Canadians, Scientist Wendy Tang from Cornell University presented two main issues: the limit to land availability to grow corn for ethanol production that could lead to deforestation, and the fact that the plants used to produce ethanol have a tough lignin, an organic polymer, that requires heavy chemical treatment before it can be turned to ethanol as biofuel.

The NGO’s also brought up important points such as the disproportionate effects in developing countries when vital food crops are replaced with ethanol producing crops. The fact that fertile soil is a non-renewable resource was not lost on the debate and provided, excuse the pun, ‘food for thought’.

Another issue that the Farmers brought up is that producing ethanol requires a mono crop, which necessitates pesticide usage to avoid blight. Despite these pressing issues, a scientist from Turkey felt strongly that as research finds new solutions to these problems, ethanol is still the most viable alternative to fossil fuels.

My humble question was this: “what happened to the lesser of two evils?” Sure, there are going to be problems with Ethanol, or any other biofuel (which is my next point). Surely though, despite these problems, they are still a better option to continuing researching and implementing than fossil fuels? Besides that, there was little to no talk of biofuels outside of ethanol, of which there has been massive headway made in the last few decades. Biomass Gasification, Biofuel from Algae, Goat corpses, Methane from cows; these are all innovative and interesting options that were not properly discussed in the Town Hall meeting. What I would like to see more of in the next discussion is the wealth of biofuel options available to us today.