I did not drive at all on Monday.
If you live in New York City, London, Paris, or on Mackinac Island, and you either have access to a great subway system or cars are banned from your small island, going for 24 hours without driving is not a big deal. But here in Chicagoland, despite a decent public transportation system, driving is a way of life. So I decided to spend a day without getting into my car or any other car, and see how I would fare.
The Phoenix Suns NBA basketball team has announced that they will be installing 1,125 solar panels on their parking garage to help power their arena. The clean energy project will cost about $1.5 million and will reportedly not increase ticket prices for fans. The 194 kilowatt solar power system will provide an equivalent amount of energy to what would be used in about 26 home games per season. The system should be operational next year.
The Suns created a “green committee” last year to help brainstorm and create solutions that would make the basketball team and its facilities more environmentally-friendly. The idea for solar panels apparently came about thanks to the suggestion of star point guard Steve Nash. He is installing solar panels at his personal home and urged the team and franchise to do likewise.
The effort is also part of a larger initiative by the city of Phoenix. The city’s mayor was quoted as saying: “Our goal for Phoenix is to become the first sustainable city of the 21st Century. With this project, we have taken another step toward a sustainable Downtown, powered by renewable energy sources.” The Sun’s solar power system alone will eliminate close to 440,000 pounds of CO2 per year.
While not the first major sports team to use alternative energy, the Suns are still among the few early adopters. As more and more sports franchises follow the lead and begin seeking ways to be more environmentally-friendly, it makes sense that fans will catch on with their personal actions. If anything, it provides an informal education opportunity for large groups of people to see and learn about alternative energy.
Here’s a brief listing of some of the other major sports teams you can support who have also undertaken alternative energy projects and initiatives to decrease their operating costs and negative effects on the environment:
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license
One of my passions in life is climate science and research, and I am a strong defender of the science proving anthropogenic global warming. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has long attempted to bring to the forefront the scientific facts about humanities effects on the environment. Naturally, there have been those who have set out to simply ignore or discredit them at every turn.
One of the focuses of their attacks has been what some call the “notorious hockey stick” graph. The graph shows a fluctuating temperature variation over the past 2000 years (including the Medieval Warming period), with a marked spike at the end; in other words, a flat (for a given value of flat, see graph below) line and a curve at the end, similar to a hockey stick. You will have seen the graph if you’ve watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
Now, a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia” has once again validated the science behind the hockey stick graph.
Another whopping chunk of ice has broken free from Ellesmere Island in Canada’s northern Arctic. This Markham Ice Shelf, just one of five remaining shelves in the Canadian Arctic region, split away sometime in August. The shelf is gianormous. It’s 19-square miles, around the size of Manhattan, and now adrift in the Arctic Ocean. In addition, two other large chunks - totaling about 47 square miles - split off from the Serson Ice Shelf reducing it about 60 percent.
Derek Mueller, an Arctic ice shelf specialist at Trent University in Ontario, told The Associated Press this:
“The Markham Ice Shelf was a big surprise because it suddenly disappeared. We went under cloud for a bit during our research and when the weather cleared up, all of a sudden there was no more ice shelf. It was a shocking event that underscores the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic”
The Markham Ice Shelf is about 4,500 years old and this news comes on the heels of unusual cracks in a northern Greenland glacier, rapid melting of a southern Greenland glacier, and a near record loss for Arctic sea ice this summer. Plus earlier this year a 160-square mile chunk of an Antarctic ice shelf disintegrated. Fact is, Arctic temperatures have risen faster than the global average in recent decades due to global warming:
“These changes are irreversible under the present climate and indicate that the environmental conditions that have kept these ice shelves in balance for thousands of years are no longer present,” Mueller said in an e-mailed statement from the research team sent late on Tuesday.
During the last century, when ice shelves would break off, thick sea ice would eventually reform in their place.
“Reduced sea ice conditions and unusually high air temperatures have facilitated the ice shelf losses this summer, and extensive new cracks across remaining parts of the largest remaining ice shelf, the Ward Hunt, mean that it will continue to disintegrate in the coming years.” said Luke Copland, director of the Laboratory for Cryospheric Research at the University of Ottawa. “We have now reached a threshold where the environment is too warm for these ice shelves to exist anymore,”
These ice shelves contain many unique ecosystems that have yet to be studied. This is an opportunity lost because of how long these shelves take to form. This is just another horrifying reminder of how the climate crisis is rapidly effecting both the Arctic and us.
Arctic Breakup Growing Each Week
Giant Cracks Appearing in Arctic Ice
Arctic Ice in Battle for its Life
Image source: nick_russill on Flickr
With Alaska in the political spotlight, and with that spotlight showcasing someone with a less-than-stellar record when it comes to the environment, reading about sustainable life in Alaska, in this case, the rural Arctic, might just be a blast of cold, last frontier air. Seth Kantner’s second book, Shopping For Porcupine (Milkweed Editions, $28), a collection of memoirs on his life in Arctic Alaska, documents his upbringing by transplanted parents and his current life with his wife and daughter in Kotzebue. Accompanied by Kantner’s stunning photography of life in the tundra, Shopping for Porcupine is a beautiful tribute to land that, despite its remoteness, is slowly succumbing to the influence of globalization. Read the rest of this entry »
Why is it so easy to be green in Canada?
I spent the first night of my summer vacation in a bed-and-breakfast in Toronto with my family. (Yes, I blogged while on vacation. That’s what happens when free wireless is available everywhere and you have obsessive-compulsive disorder.) We drove from Chicago in our Toyota Camry. It’s not exactly a Prius, but while averaging about 30 MPG, we had a smaller carbon footprint than we would if the three of us traveled by plane. We brought most of our own meals and snacks in reusable containers, printed out travel and maps on previously used paper, and reused our water bottles. So we thought we were being green. But a morning walk around Toronto made us feel only light green, at best.
A new study in the journal BMC Ecology indicates that coastal wolves in British Columbia switch to eating salmon in the fall as a primary food source, rather than deer. Scientists arrived at this conclusion after analyzing wolf poop they collected over a four year span.
Among the thousands of stools that were collected by the researchers in the spring and summer months, 90-95% of them contained some indications that wolves were eating deer as prey. In the fall, however, this number dropped significantly. About 40-70% of the stools in this time of year indicated that wolves were dining on salmon.
So what’s the big deal? Read the rest of this entry »
According to one study released last week, your answer doesn’t matter much: even if you walk to the burger joint, your food will have its own set of wheels—and an exhaust pipe.
While it’s now common knowledge that activities like driving conventional cars cause global warming, the environmental impact of what we eat continues to slip under the mainstream radar. The study, performed by Germany’s Institute for Ecological Economy Research, could change this with its comprehensive and comprehensible findings.
For the first time in recorded human history, the Arctic has become an island to itself, completely separate from the landmasses that the Arctic ice normally stretches out onto. This distressingly historic event has been captured by NASA satellites, depicting both the Northwest and Northeast passages as ice free.
For the past few years we have seen the Arctic ice sheet melt, dropping to lower and lower levels. And though we haven’t seen the 2008 melt season drop below 07’s record numbers, the ice has melted in such a way that now the Arctic has become an island.
With a constant need to look out for the planets ecosystems, it is always saddening to see that some governments simply are not. So when I saw the news that, over the past 12 months, deforestation in the Amazon rain forest had jumped 69%, I was literally shocked.
According to the National Institute for Space Research, or INPE, which monitors destruction of the Amazon, since August 2007 a total of 8,147 square kilometers (3,145 square miles) was destroyed within the Amazon. This is the first such increase in 3 years, and saw a 69% jump over the 4,820 square kilometers (1,861 square miles) felled in the previous 12 months.
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