Election Day

My legs are sore from walking and knocking on doors. I've talked to a lot of township residents in the last few weeks and I'm once again impressed at the many paths that our residents take in their pursuit of happiness. That drive to live our lives with as much authenticity as we can possibly create, coupled with the capacity to not just tolerate, but to appreciate our neighbors and their unique paths is the key to the economic revival of our township, our region, our state, and our nation.

Sounds hyperbolic, I know.  It’s been that sort of week.  New York suffers under Sandy and suddenly climate change is back on the table and the federal government is competent and people appreciate it.  Here in Leland Township, events have been iconic in a more positive way.  Leland School’s boys soccer team won game after game in their post season until they had claimed the title of 2012 District and Regional Champions, or as it was explained to me “one of the four best teams in the state”.   Their last game was on Halloween in Big Rapids, which left three team members who are also in Mr. Wodek’s  civic class precious little time to complete the required six hours of volunteering on a political campaign.

That’s how I ended up with “bodyguards” on my last weekend of campaigning door to door.  I like going door to door with students, especially on foot. One day we walked from my house down M-204 to M-22.  The next day we walked east from my house into Lake Leelanau.  While we walked, I talked about the the history of the road and the homes, the people who live here now and the ones who are gone.  We met a mom who remembered when Austin’s dad was her oldest son’s soccer coach. We met a 92 year old man who missed keeping chickens in the village. We visited Bad Pony, one of our fledgling internet businesses and, next door, The Washington Building, where Doug Fierberg took time out to give us a tour of the national law firm that they run out of his Lake Leelanau office.  We saw a pileated wood pecker, Provemont Pond, a hidden barn, boots planted with cactus.  Carol Drow told us about her solar panels, "Been there since Jimmy Carter was president!" Simon Dyer turned off his leaf blower long enough to share his comparison between US elections and elections in his native Ireland. 

Sometime halfway through the first day, one of the guys said, “Wow! Everybody here is connected!”  Of course, that’s the point of my patter, the point of the walking tour, the point of going door to door, the point of civics class, the point of serving in local government.  We are all connected, by blood, or by history, or by economics, by sharing the same roads and parks and fire department and lakeshores.

My challenge as supervisor will be to foster that sense of community, and to see where it leads.  The loose ends can be woven in by encouraging our residents to shop locally, by making opportunities for young people to come back and establish their careers and families here, by making township government open and accessible to everyone, not just as a place to complain when things go wrong but as way to meet their neighbors and collaborate to solve problems and create whatever comes next.

I thank all who have helped me along so far, the folks who encouraged me and bankrolled me and advised me and opened their doors and took time to ask good questions and tell me about their lives.  I especially enjoyed the high school students who accompanied me along the way. I hope they have absorbed the idea that governing is not just about winning arguments or elections. 

   

I’m optimistic about the results of today’s voting.  The results for local races will be available at Leelanau.cc  after the polls close, absentee ballots are all fed into the machine, and the township clerk reports the totals to the county clerk’s office. Vote today, and thank our election workers when you do.

Climate-Energy – Leelanau’s Future Sustainability

Wednesday April 15 5:30 to 9:00 PM Old Art Building in Leland

“Climate-Energy – Leelanau’s Future Sustainability”

Come to Leland’s Old Art Building at 5:30 for a delicious chili and

biscuits supper, followed at 7 with presentations by guest

speakers Steve Smiley and Dave Barrons.

Donations at the door

Sponsored by the Leelanau Democrats.

GM Culture

I have been over at The Truth About Cars, reading the first three installments of Dr. Rob Kleinbaum's analysis of General Motor's corporate culture. I have touched on this subject in my a piece about Grandpa Gord, and of course it was impossible to watch even a little bit of the Big Three's performance before Congress without asking "Who the heck do these people think they are?"

Part two of Dr. Kleinbaum's series gives us a clue:

In progressive societies, merit is central to advancement but in static ones it is family and connections. On this point, GM probably gets mixed to negative reviews. The sense is that one must be part of the club to advance, which usually means the right degree from the right school, the right path, and knowing the top guys, who are your mentors. Twenty years ago, GM would have been completely in the static dimension on this attribute, but there has been substantial progress in reaching out to groups that had been excluded in the past and advancing them on their merits.

Unfortunately, this has been much truer for GM’s operations outside of North America and Western Europe than for these two core regions. In North America, the tradition is to pick high IQ people with the right background at an early age and then to rotate them through a series of “developmental” assignments. The consequence is that the people who rise to the very top are very smart with broad experience, but they are almost never people who have truly accomplished anything; who have built something from scratch or grown a business from small to large or turned around a losing operation into a profitable one.

and

Progressive cultures are secular, with limited influence of religious culture and a high degree of tolerance of heterodoxy and dissent. GM scores fairly low on this attribute. There is little tolerance of strong dissent from the prevailing opinion, although there is substantial subversion and passive-aggressive resistance. In discussions about setting direction, much more attention is given to wondering what the senior leadership will think than to figuring out the right path and trying to make it happen. The very senior people are often spoken of in tones of reverence and are seldom debated in any meaningful way.

That first congressional hearing was funny, in a sad sort of way. It was clear that Wagoner, especially, could not quite get his head around the idea that there were people who would actually question his pronouncements and challenge him to support his conclusions with anything more than the sound of his own voice.

This stuff is not just a spectator sport here in Michigan. Last night I spoke with our township supervisor. His business is in auto parts manufacturing; he had just come back from a meeting in Grand Rapids where he had announced a 15% pay cut to all of his salaried employees. Here in northern Michigan we see parts manufacturers laying off or shutting their doors almost weekly. Our tourism business is highly dependent on the automakers as well.

In Detroit a few weeks ago, I stayed at the Renaissance Center, home of GM headquarters. Amusing myself between meetings, I took a tour of the ground floor, which was set up as a museum/showroom for all of GM's cars. Seeing them all at once was weird. They were all so large and clunky, too big for my garage. They all looked the same to my untrained eye. Bored, I started looking at the window stickers, trying to find a vehicle or two that got MPG similar to my 1996 Corolla. When I finally found a car I would consider driving, I glanced inside the driver's window. The steering wheel was cranked to the right, exposing the bottom of the center plate. The center plate had been indifferently installed so that the wiring for the horn and the airbag and everything else was just sitting out there for all the world to see. It was a sight that stays with me, the moment when the Emperor had no clothes.

I had another vision last week, a vision of what it would take to save the GM, and to save Michigan's manufacturing sector. What if they stopped thinking of themselves as a car company and started thinking of themselves as the consumer energy solution company? There's a lot of talk about plug in hybrids. what if GM made a plug in hybrid car that was designed to be charged with GM brand wind generators and GM brand photovoltaics? What if there were GM charging stations at work and a GM motorbike, charging from the same GM home system, for short trips? What if your GM charging system or plug in hybrid could also function as emergency power in case of a blackout? What if.......

Then I woke up. I saw the restructuring plan that they just showed to Congress. As Dr. Kleinbaum put it:

GM’s current response seems to reflect its fundamental beliefs about the way the world works and it’s almost identical to what it has been doing for the last 30 years: cut “structural costs,” wait for future products to bring salvation, and count on cash from the other regions (and, now, the government) to help prop things up in the meantime. But they effect no truly fundamental changes in the business, its structure or the people running it (as they are clearly the best and brightest, know how to manage things in a serious way, and have a sound plan).

The proposed changes are touted as “profound” and “fundamental” but are really the minimum change from status quo the company believes it can get away with. There is a profound reluctance to make hard decisions that would cause short term pain but would lead to fixing the problem in the long run; instead there is a continual compromise of action that leads to “too little, too late” but defers immediate catastrophe. This is reflected in every aspect of the enterprise, from decisions on manufacturing, which never bring capacity into line with market realities, to people, where almost no one is ever fired for poor performance. This has not worked before and it is difficult to believe it will work now.

Part four will be published tomorrow.

20 Billion Dollars

I'm old enough that when Carl Sagan said "billions and billions" it sounded like an unimaginable amount. Okay, I'm old enough that they didn't teach "billions" when I was in school. I have to look it up every time. One billion is one thousand multiplied by one million or 1,000,000,000.

Yet I've been contemplating twenty billion dollars, or $20,000,000,000. That's how much money the people of Michigan spend on outside energy sources -- oil and gasoline, coal, natural gas -- each year. The number came from Dr. Stephen Harsh, of Michigan State University, who was a speaker at the wind energy workshop that I attended last November. Of course, oil prices have fallen since then, so we may be spending less right now. Maybe only $10 billion, if you can say "only" and "$10 billion" in the same breath. No wonder we're broke!

I still can't get my mind around that number, but I have another number to contemplate: 60%. That's how much of Michigan's electricity is generated using coal. Despite all the propaganda to the contrary, all coal burned in power plants today releases its full load of CO2 up the stack. In the future we will be replacing coal plants with wind farms -- a new wind farm is already cheaper to build than a new coal plant -- but for now, electricity use is inextricably linked to coal.

Last week, I had the pleasure of hosting another MSU faculty, Dr. Kirk Heinze, on my blackjack table. After talking to Dr. Heinze, I checked out his blog, which features podcasts of his weekly radio show, The Greening of the Great Lakes. The latest show, which aired January 2nd, featured an interview with Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm. She is enthusiastic about Michigan's energy future, but adamant that it is time to save energy, RIGHT NOW, particularly by doing the old fashioned thing and turning out the lights when nobody is using them.

Well. I had been thinking that very thing on Christmas Eve, as I went out around midnight to check for Santa and saw, not a star in the east, but the glow of the parking lot lights at the new county office building lighting up most of the ENE. There was a time when this sort of thing would have made me long for lost dark skies. Now all I can think is "$20 billion dollars!" when I see all that wasted energy.

The governor sounded a little crazed when she talked about turning out lights. She sounded like your old grandpa, following everyone around from room to room turning out the lights. I've been acting like that at home. I haven't bought an incandescent bulb in years, and I'm looking to upgrade the CFLs to LEDs as soon as I can. I still walk around turning things off.

I've gone back to trying to turn my community's lights off, as well. As township trustee, I've been reviewing the records of the township/county agreement that allowed for the construction of the Connie Binsfield building. I came upon the original land use permit hearing minutes, which seem to require those parking lot lights to go off at night. They've been bugging me for ten years -- they waste money and make my neighborhood look trashy. Maybe I will finally get them turned off. I've also been asking questions at the new county building, and the maintainence department there is looking into replacing the high powered flagpole and sign lights with sky-friendly solar units. They have also agreed to leave the parking lot lights off on weekends and holidays.

Twenty billion dollars. One lightbulb at a time.

What I Didn't Know About Wind Power

Monday night's wind energy class, presented by Michigan State Cooperative Extension, was packed with both information and audience. Although I have written about Michigan's Comprehensive Energy Package in brief, This was the first time I'd heard some of the nuts and bolts applications of the new laws. I had the distinct and exciting feeling of moving toward a hopeful energy future and it was wonderful to be sharing that future with a roomful of over 100 people. (There were also 30 people on the waiting list for the workshop, which will be repeated in January. Watch the Leelanau Extension website for details.)

I can't begin to cover the whole workshop, but here are some of the points that have got me thinking:

It's not just for hippies anymore. In Leelanau we've had neighbors using wind generators for decades now. They were usually "back to the land" types, ready to accept limits to their electricity use and able to tolerate outages that required an investment of their own time or money to resolve. Often people lived "off the grid"on sites so remote that the cost of erecting a tower, installing a windmill, batteries, and an inverter to change from AC to DC was still cheaper than stringing wires to the nearest utility pole. The new generation wind energy systems are designed to work "on the grid", feeding electricity into the same power lines that bring the rest of us power. The new systems require no extra inverters or batteries; the grid itself functions as the battery. The many windmills or solar panels plugged into the grid function as a lot of little power plants in this new system of "distributed generation". Many smaller generation sites result in more power being produced and used locally, lessening the strain and waste of moving large amounts of electricity from one region to another.

Michigan's laws have changed to favor home generated energy. Just three weeks ago our legislature signed a Comprehensive Energy Package, committing to meeting 10% of Michigan's energy from renewable sources needs by 2015. This is not just a matter of feeling "green". Right now Michigan imports almost all of our energy at a cost of some $20 billion per year. Producing more electricity by harvesting our own wind will allow more dollars to go to work building our state's economy.

The Comprehensive Energy Package changes the rules for "net-metering" or selling a wind or solar generating household's excess energy back to the utility. Under the old rules you bought power when you needed it at retail rates but you sold you excess power at wholesale rates, or roughly half of retail. Under the new rules, you can sell your excess electricity for the higher retail rate. Each net metering household gets two meters, one measuring what you use and one measuring what you produce. At the end of a billing period, if you have produced more than you used, you get a credit for the excess. Right now both Cherryland Electric and Consumers Energy, the two power companies who sent reps to speak at the workshop, have billing periods of about a month, but that could change in the future if they invest in more sophisticated metering systems that can charge different rates hourly or daily according to the real cost of electricity. As the rules stand now, you can carry credit forward from month to month, but not year to year, and you can't register a net-metering setup that is rated to produce more than your home currently uses. You would never have a negative electric bill, or even a zero electric bill, as there are base fees that must be paid by everyone. But your bill could be pretty darn cheap.

We can look forward to the cost of electricity going up slowly but surely. For years, residential electricity rates have been kept artificially low because they have been subsidized by business and industry paying higher rates. Michigan needs to encourage energy efficiency and avoid penalizing industry, so the residential subsidy is being gradually phased out.

While not part of the legislative initiative, I also think about the next generation of cars, the plug-in hybrids, and how they will increase our total need for electricity. A plug-in hybrid could also function as a storage device for excess electricity. You would recharge your car at night when your household energy use (or the utility's rates) was low.

With the cost of wind generators falling, the cost of electricity rising, and everything else so unstable, I suspect the next generation of wind aficionados will be people disgusted with the stock market and looking for a more predictable return on a $10K or $20K investment.

Size matters. A few days ago I posted a photo of Mariah Power's Windspire, a compact, vertical axis wind generator designed to provide about one quarter of a typical household's electricity while conforming to most neighborhoods' height and noise ordinances. (Mariah Power is of special interest to northern Michigan because their next generation Windspire will be manufactured in Manistee. Read more and watch a video about their design here.) The windspire' vertical axis design is also bird-friendly, addressing a concern for the many Leelanau residents who live near important bird migration paths.

But the laws of physics still apply. If you use a higher tower, you will be able to take advantage of faster winds. As wind speed increases linearly, the potential power increases exponentially. We may well find that taller towers supporting smaller generators will seem less intrusive. Another physics fact: the colder the temperature, the more energy in the wind, because cold air is denser.

Scale matters. My interest in this class was to learn more about zoning for wind energy. There were a few guys in the audience who make their living installing home-scale wind systems. They were adamant that zoning needs to consider home-scale wind and utility-scale wind as two different applications. One installer decried "cookie cutter zoning" that required him to "put a flashing light on top of a 40 foot tower." The last presenter of the evening was an attorney who advises on utility-scale wind leases. Because of the length of these leases and the expense involved in decommissioning an obsolete wind tower, local planners would be wise to require that any such projects include a performance bond or escrow arrangement to insure that today's wind farm is not the next generation's brownfield. Tomorrow I am attending the Council of Government's class on Zoning for Renewable Energy so I'll write more about zoning later.

Wind generation is an attractive option for utilities. Utility scale wind is less expensive to build from scratch than coal plants or nuclear plants. Wind energy is perhaps difficult to predict on a day-today basis, but in the long run the cost is less volatile than the cost of crude oil or natural gas. Even if we leave climate change out of the equation, wind seems destined to play a major role in our future because it is becoming affordable.

A Windy Week

Home wind generation is coming of age. This is a windspire from Mariah Power, who bill their design as a quiet, unobtrusive, and inexpensive option for home wind energy production. Mariah Power recently announced plans to build their next generation windspires in Manistee.
One of the themes of my campaign for Leland Township has been 21st Century Vision. I tell anyone who listens long enough that we have to make sure that our zoning ordinances allow for home-based wind and solar energy generation. Leland Township is drafting new zoning laws to follow up our new Master Plan; I want to do everything possible to see that our new zoning ordinances don't cost our residents money by denying their right to make their own power.

Knowing what we need to do and knowing how to do it are two different things. I jumped at the chance to sign up for a Home and Farm Wind Power workshop at the MSU Experiment Station this afternoon. This is a timely topic; I was one of 90 people to sign up. With another 30 on the waiting list, there are already plans to repeat the workshop later this winter.

I will be at an all day class later this week called How Do We Plan For Our Renewable Energy Future?, covering more of the planning and zoning aspects of wind, solar, biomass, and hydropower.

I'm also running ad ad in the Leelanau Enterprise this week, listing some of my supporters and issuing this challenge:

Adjusting to higher energy prices and an unpredictable world economy challenges us to reweave the threads of our local economy, planning for home-based businesses and alternative energy while preserving our natural beauty. Our community has the natural resources and talent to thrive in the 21st century –let’s do it together!

When I think about "reweaving" I think about the threads of money and energy leaving our region: money spent on fuel and energy, on pumping holding tanks, on food from far-flung places when our farmers raise such nice food right here. I always told my kids "You can't spend the same money twice." and that goes on a township level, too. We need to spend our paychecks enriching our local economy.

Dan Scripps with News on Michigan Energy

I would read Dan Scripps' blog even if he wasn't running for the State House in my district. He writes about the things that I'm interested in, about the issues and problems that keep me up nights.

Two weeks ago he wrote about the differences between himself and his opponent on climate change. What a treat to be able to cast a vote for someone who is willing to confront climate change without a lot of mealy-mouthed caveats or head-in-the-sand denial.

Last week Dan broke the news on Michigan's comprehensive energy package.

The legislation passed by the state legislature yesterday is an important first step in building a long-range energy plan to make Michigan more competitive and in creating jobs now in this exciting growth area. What’s more, the fact that the legislation was supported by groups ranging from the Michigan Environmental Council to the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and the Michigan Manufacturers Association shows that renewable energy solutions can help slow global warming and protect our natural environment while creating jobs and sparking investment in Michigan. This truly is a win-win, and a step towards a more diversified economy and a more prosperous Michigan. The cost for this: $3 a month. Not bad for a plan that can add 30,000 jobs to Michigan, and as part of an overall clean technology strategy than can reduce our highest-in-the-nation unemployment rate by nearly two points.

Pretty good stuff if we can slow climate change while putting people back to work.

Saying No to Coal

One of the questions at Bill McKibben's talk was about the meaning of the phrase on many politician's lips: "clean coal".

McKibben was very clear that, from a climate change point of view, there is no such thing as clean coal. We know how to use stack scrubbers to take out the sulphur and lead from coal plant emissions, but any technology to remove the carbon and put it back underground is only imagined, not in in use.

After the talk, the Sierra Club organizer was overwhelmed by the people lining up to sign a petition to Governor Granholm asking her to:

fight against climate change by issuing an executive order that prevents the permitting of more coal plants until stronger protections are put in place against dangerous global warming carbon dioxide pollution.

You can sign the petition too, online, just click here.

Notes from Bill McKibben's Traverse City Talk

About halfway through McKibben's talk it dawned on me that I had posted, last fall, parts of his essay entitled Climate Crisis in National Geographic magazine. I quoted from it with abandon because I so admired his calm way of talking about a situation that tends to overwhelm people into ignoring or denying it. I also admired his ability to break this big problem down into manageable pieces.

The word "connections" is in the title of this blog because I'm usually quite good at connection ideas from many different sources. But I've been overworked this summer. I knew I wanted to go see Bill McKibben, and so did Liz. I wrote a rather lame announcement of his appearance, forgetting that I could have quoted myself from a year ago.

Back then I described how the people around me were living in two different worlds:

Most folks seem to recognize that the world is getting warmer, and that something needs to be done. I have seen the average size cars in the parking lot shrink. I am seeing people considering relocating to be closer to work, or looking for jobs closer to home. Nobody brags about their new snowmobiles anymore. I also have small, concerned conversations with people who are worried about the future but unable to figure out the best way to prepare for change or to shoulder their responsibility.

Watching the Republican convention last week was truly watching another world. While most of the people I talk with are looking for strategies for using less energy, the people chanting "Drill, Baby, Drill!" on the floor of the Republican convention seemed to think that finding more oil to burn would automagically fix everything.

McKibben's talk was calmer, more thoughtful, and much more grounded in everyday reality. McKibben has a quiet, everyman persona, much like talking to one of my more reticent neighbors. He has a habit of rubbing the back of his head as he formulates his thoughts, much like a farmer swatting flies away with his tractor hat. He used a lot of self-deprecating humor; it was interesting to me that after a while the women were still responding to these jokes but the men were silent.

He spoke of two different worlds. He described the mood in the world of climate scientists as "terrified" and related the new evidence that suggests that climate change is progressing faster than most had believed possible. He described the response in the world of policy making that was basically no response at all, and told the story of a walk across Vermont that eventually included about 1000 people meeting in the capital and asking their elected leader to pledge support for a goal of an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

"80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050" is included in Obama's platform. (McCain's goal is 66% by 2050). Nobody was talking about any goals fro 2050 before McKibben and his friends started walking. This was one of his main points -- that regardless of how cynical the American people have become about the political process, the process can still be made to work.

McKibben's new goal is to publicize the number 350. He wants the world to embrace a target of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the number that we need to attain in order to stop the course of dangerous climate change. Before the industrial revolution, before we started burning large quantities of fossil fuels, the Earth's atmosphere was about 280 parts per million of CO2. This year, in 2008, the number is 387 and gaining every year.

How do we do this? McKibben spoke of how we keep looking for a "silver bullet" that will fix things without too much individual effort. We tried that approach with ethanol, and the results have not been good. He introduced a new metaphor: "silver buckshot" to describe the many smaller changes that are going to add up to the change we need:

Make no mistake--getting back to 350 means transforming our world. It means building solar arrays instead of coal plants, it means planting trees instead of clear-cutting rainforests, it means increasing efficiency and decreasing our waste. Getting to 350 means developing a thousand different solutions--all of which will become much easier if we have a global treaty grounded in the latest science and built around the principles of equity and justice. To get this kind of treaty, we need a movement of people who care enough about our shared global future to get involved and make their voices heard. ( from 350.org)

The video at the top of this post is part of the international effort to publicize the 350 goal worldwide. The is more of an explanation of this effort at www.350.org. McKibben was enthusiastic about the potential of using the internet to organize a worldwide citizens' movement, saying "If there is a reason for the internet, if God decided that humans needed to create the internet at this point in history, it is surely so that we can use it to solve the climate crisis, the most dangerous problem we have ever faced."

I think that we are not facing this problem because we are scared. We have amped up our our economy on cheap energy for so long that we fear that no more cheap energy means, as one audience member put it, "a return to the horse and buggy days." McKibben cited surveys in which Americans have been asked, every year since 1956, how happy they are. Every year since 1956 we report that we are less happy, even though our consumption of material goods has increase threefold since then. McKibben spoke of how our bigger homes, spread out across the landscape and the miles of roads to connect them all have left us all more isolated and lonelier.

Bill McKibben's new book is Deep Economy, The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. His premise is that rebuilding our communities is neccesary for both energy efficiency and to reach the sense of well-being that we have been seeking, but not finding, through our last half century consumption binge. While I'm skeptical of uniform measures of happiness, I find such satisfaction in the nuances of community that I'm interested to read the new book.

Bill's Traverse City talk can be heard online here.

More on Gas Mileage

 

To tell the truth, I felt a little foolish after I found out how much gas we saved by driving 60 instead of 70 on our recent trip. I had been thinking that 31 mpg was awesome mileage, and here we went and got 39 mpg on one tank and over 42 mpg on the other; all this is a 1996 Camry that needs some muffler work. I'm kicking myself thinking about how much money I could have saved had I slowed down maybe 5 years earlier.

My dad asked why we did better on the way home compared to the way there. On the way home Richard kept talking about having a tail wind, although I remember the flags pointing south, which would have been a crosswind. I suspect that he had not totally bought in to the "drive slower, increase your mileage" idea, but on the way home he was converted and thus kept to speed even while I slept. It helped that bragging about your miles per gallon has, these days, replaced bragging about what good time you made.

Mickey, my NASCAR loving co-worker, was not at all surprised that we were able to affect our mileage so much. "How you drive makes a HUGE difference," he said. "The best thing we could do to save everyone from higher fuel prices is just to put the speed limit back down to 60." I'd vote for 55, since everyone feels entitled to drive 5 miles over the limit.

 

I can't get behind the "just stay home" sentiment. I'd skip shopping any time, but you need to get out and see the world. Here's Anna contemplating the mighty Mississippi from Munsinger Garden in St Cloud.

Northern Michigan's Online Ride Board

I have had a great car pool arrangement for the past few months, riding about three days a week with a guy who doesn't like to ride in other people's cars and would rather have homemade bread than gas money. Unfortunately, Joel has decided to move out west and gave his two weeks notice last week. Everyone at work is thinking about alternate transportation ideas, so I thought I might as well talk about the Northern Michigan Transportation Alliance online ride board.

This is an online version of those old college bulletin boards where people posted where they we going and whether they needed a ride or wanted someone to share the gas. It is well planned as a website; you can enter your start point and destination, your schedule, specify smoking or non. It is under utilized and under publicized. Probably it needs a block of people, like me and my coworkers, to move in and be the first adopters.

The site has the shortest user's agreement I've ever seen; unfortunately if you read the user agreement, there is no button to get you back to the registration page -- I had to start all over again. The site uses Google Maps; don't skip the street address or mapping part or you'll lose all your schedule input when it tells you to resubmit. It's also hard to figure out when you've completed the process of posting a ride. I ended up pushing submit three times before I gave up and went to see if my offer was posted. I was sure to put an end date since some of the rides showing now have been there for a couple of months.

I don't know if I'll get a new carpool out of this, but it's worth a try. The site needs much more advertisement and use.

Climate Change: No More "Belief" Debate

It was nice to see the headline "McCain Differs With Bush on Climate Change". Suddenly, finally, we are not debating whether we believe in climate change, we are beginning the debate on how to best address climate change.

I've said all along that my two big issues in this presidential election are climate change and restoring our constitution. It looks like we might see an actual discussion of one of my issues between now and November. I'm getting ready by studying Obama's energy policy and McCain's Cap and Trade proposal and climate change page.

Obama is talking cap-and-trade, too, but it is only one part of his comprehensive plan. Obama specifies a 100% auction cap and trade system; McCain is not very specific, so it would appear that he intends to "grandfather in" some current carbon emitters. Doing so has been criticised as amounting to a windfall for existing polluters.

Of course, making a serious effort at combating climate change will take a whole host of plans, not just a cap and trade plan. Obama is ahead of the pack on this, addressing everything from conservation to reinventing the electrical grid. I think that we will see more ideas from McCain, and I'm welcoming the chance for a healthy debate.

Leelanau Grand Vision

Anna, a few years ago, in the garden, eating peas and offering them to her dog

I participated in the Leelanau Grand Vision workshop at Suttons Bay School last night. A lot of other people participated as well; the venue was packed and the presenters seemed a little overwhelmed by the crowd. The idea was to gather input from the community our how we would prefer to see our area grow, and then use that to formulate a coordinated plan for the Grand Traverse area. Our elected officials can then refer to this plan when they are making decisions about zoning, transportation, energy, and other infrastructure.

I found out that I'm not that much into scenery. Or maybe that my idea of scenery is a lot broader than other people's idea of scenery. They started out by giving us a score sheet and asking us to give our first reactions to a series of outdoor scenes. Much of the audience was murmuring in approval or tsking in disapproval at various pictures. I was in the back, and couldn't see that well, but all I saw was buildings, grass, and trees. Or sometimes grass, trees, and buildings. My responses were all in the middle range. There was one picture of a vineyard, but no gardens, no playgrounds, no livestock, no orchards, none of the scenes that I find pretty or restful. It was like they looked at Leelanau through the eyes of a suburbanite and couldn't see anything else. (The photo above is closer to my idea of nice looking scenery.)

But that was that. The next part was the part where we got together with the people at our table and plotted the next 50 year's growth on a giant map of the county. Or a giant map of most of the county, as our map did not have Peshawbestown, the National Lakeshore, or the gravel pits in Kasson denoted. The group at my table included three younger people, one full time farmer, one part time farmer, three people from Northport, two from Suttons Bay, two people who worked with the Leelanau Conservancy, and a master gardener. Our group spent a good deal of time plotting out the best farmland in the county, then plotting out the Lakeshore and Pere Marquette Forest, then the critical bird habitat on the tip of the penninsula. After that, we were supposed to figure out where 20,000 more people were going to live, and how to get them the goods, jobs and services they would need.

We started out brainstorming a list of what we wanted for the future. We wanted everything --a protected environment, vibrant villages, open shorelines, broadband access, local food chains. The younger people wanted to walk everywhere -- to work, to shop -- or they wanted to ride bikes. The lady next to me kept saying "Ban Cars! No Motorized Traffic!" and I couldn't tell if she was serious or sarcastic. I threw out my own far-fetched idea, calling for small scale alternative energy -- wind and solar -- with a smart grid so that households could sell excess power back and local electricity storage so that our county could be self sufficient in electricity.

The people of our future were at least going to eat. We were given stickers that represented one household for every five acres, and we could trade stickers in to get fewer stickers representing higher densities. It was clear that if we let everyone have the 5 acre mini-estate, we would end up cutting up farmland and crowding out critical habitats. We would also end up with a scattered population that would be far from the village centers and harder to serve. But it was hard to envision any of our current villages absorbing even one whole sticker's worth of people, so we took the higher density stickers, cut them up, and shoehorned them in around the existing villages. That all took a lot of time, especially the part where we debated the exact size of an economically viable farm. So we quickly sketched in some light rail transit lines to connect the villages and drew in a few (not enough) bikes trails and Table 19's contribution was complete.

I had to be the presenter. (I always have to be the presenter.) The various tables had a host of different problems that they were trying to solve. Some groups were trying to move cars -- several groups proposed a bridge across South Lake Leelanau from Hohnke Road to Bingham; one group wanted to make M-22 one way north and Center Highway one way south. Several groups were trying to move people, and were plotting ferry routes. One guy said that he had already located some vintage ferry boats in good condition and made an appeal for investors in a new ferry business. One group made a vastly expanded Suttons Bay village the focus of their planning. One group presented their map with a bunch of population stickers out in the Bay. When asked for an explanation, they said "We didn't know where to put them." A guy in the crowd said, "I guess they just have to sink or swim."

Since we were last (I wasn't going to wait in line) I talked about the things that the other groups hadn't mentioned. I said that we were interested in food first so we had plotted out farmland first and shoehorned the populations around that. I got applause by saying, "We need broadband access everywhere." and more applause talking about small scale alternative energy. So I went out on a limb and spoke about dark skies, my own favorite sort of scenery. Finally I said, "Our table, like everyone here, likes the county the way it is, but we're willing to be flexible, so that others can enjoy what we have."

I'm not sure if that last statement was exactly true, exactly yet, but it can't hurt to portray ourselves as less selfish and more interested in the common good. Sometimes people learn to live up to their reputations.

Which Way Amtrak?

I've been following the news on Amtrak since Liz started going back and forth to school on the train. Well, sort of on the train....the closest Amtrak comes is to Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo. We usually drive her to Kalamazoo, a still a four hour drive, but closer than going all the way to Chicago. We put her on the train and drive back home; by the time we come in the door, she has come into Chicago, switched to the Metra, walked home from her stop, and is just about walking into her dorm room. We wish that the train came farther north, or that the bus trip to meet the train wasn't so time-consuming. But we're glad that she can take the train at least partway.

If President Bush has his way, Amtrak will be going backwards. The president's proposed 2009 budget includes a 40% cut in Amtrak funding. Amtrak ridership is rising, along with gas prices and airline delays. We need more investment in low-carbon transportation alternatives, not less.

Last October, the US Senate passed the Passenger Rail Improvement and Investment Act, which will provide Amtrak with a stable source of funding through 2011, and provide for expansion of passenger routes using a 80/20 match of federal and state funds. We are still waiting for sponsorship of the corresponding House bill, but it is already the basis of efforts across the country to add or restore intercity rail services.

When Liz first started riding the train in 2006, you almost had to be a broke college student or a climate change visionary to put up with the poor service. Sometimes the train was on time, but once it fell a little behind, it just got later and later as it sat by the side and let freight trains pass it by. It seems that the passenger trains were allotted a certain time slot on the track, and if it fell behind schedule, it had to wait for an open slot instead of going ahead of the freight. So I was interested to read about this study that "describes how delays to Amtrak trains that operate over freight railroad lines cost the company almost $137 million in fiscal year 2006, an amount equal to 30 percent of its federal operating subsidy." It seems that, by law, passenger trains always had priority over freight, but the tracks are owned by the freight companies and nobody did anything about it when they put their own business first.

Liz thinks that the trains have become much more reliable since she started riding. I wonder if the improvement is due to different priorities or because the economy has slowed and so there is less freight moving. I don't think that moving freight is unimportant. The rise in just in time manufacturing depends on moving freight quickly and reliably. Passengers and freight competing for space on the same aging tracks is just another facet of our nation's failure to keep investing in infrastructure. Much made about jobs moving overseas due to cheaper labor, but I wonder if the future belongs to the nation with the more up to date railroads.

If so, we'd better look at Shanghai. Great Lakes Guy posted a story about the high speed mag lev train they're building for passenger service. It's top speed is over 300 miles per hour; normal operating speed is about 268 MPH:

That means, if we were building this sort of advanced transportation technology in the United States, you could get from Detroit to Chicago in just over one hour. It's at least a 4-hour car ride if you're hauling the mail down I-94.

Chicago to Minneapolis, nearly a 7-hour drive, would take less than 2 hours. Cleveland to Pittsburgh? Be there in 30 minutes. No gas fillups, no traffic jams, no exorbitant downtown parking fees.

With that sort of perspective, it just doesn't seem all that extravagant when I wish for the sort of train service that was routine in the US around, say 1950.

Granholm Pushes Alternative Energy for Michigan

I missed the State of the State address. There was nothing exciting about the news coverage of the State of the State address. But I heard the end of Governor Granholn's radio town meeting yesterday, when she was talking about luring alternative energy industries to Michigan by making a commitment to use alternative energy to meet the state's needs. I was enthralled. After all that "one state recession" talk, it is wonderful to hear her so comprehesively articulate the whole range of competitive advantages that Michigan has.

Here is part of the transcript of the State of the State address:

Why alternative energy? Because - to borrow a line from Wayne Gretzky - if you want to win, "don't skate to where the puck is - skate to where the puck is going."

The puck is going to alternative energy.

Any time you pick up a newspaper from here on out and see the terms "climate change" or "global warming," just think: "jobs for Michigan."

Because of the need to reduce global warming and end our dependence on expensive foreign oil, the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries will create millions of good paying jobs.

There's no question that these jobs are coming to our nation. The only question is, where?

I say we will win these jobs for Michigan and replace the lost manufacturing jobs with a whole new, growing sector.

Why us? Because, no other state - indeed few places in the world - have what we have to offer: our wind, our water, our woods - and thanks to the working men and women of Michigan - our skilled workforce.

Look at each of these resources.

The unique geography of our peninsulas makes us windy. Experts have said that we have the second best potential for wind generation and production in the country. In fact, the wind turbines we'd use to capture that power can be built right here in Michigan, because we have what's needed: manufacturing infrastructure; available factory space; a skilled workforce. And water - the Great Lakes - are one of the best ways to ship these huge turbines.

That Pure Michigan water will do even more for us. The natural movement, the waves of our Great Lakes waters, creates enormous energy. We are talking with businesses right now about coming to Michigan to convert water currents into electric currents.

And wood! The wood waste from the pulp and paper industry is being used to produce the next generation of biofuels. Cutting-edge companies like Mascoma, Chemrec, NewPage, and others are turning wood waste into fuel for your vehicles, and they want to come here because of our vast sustainable forests.

Our automotive base is also a huge asset: we are the automotive research capital of the world, and we are building the engines of the future - hybrids, clean diesel, electric, fuel cells, flexfuel - all of that is being, and will continue to be, researched, designed, and produced right here in Michigan.

There may be one or two other states that are sunnier than we are, but we are already a huge player in the solar energy industry. We have in Michigan the world's largest producer of the stuff that makes solar panels work. Polycrystalline silicon. Made by Hemlock Semiconductor right here in Michigan. They are in the middle of a billion dollar expansion, hiring 500 people in the Saginaw area. They have even bigger plans. And just last week, Dow Solar Solutions announced it was locating a new $52 million manufacturing facility in Midland, focusing on solar energy generating building materials. Saginaw Valley can be the Silicon Valley for the alternative energy business!

Even waste is being used: companies are taking household trash in landfills and converting it to green energy - the Lansing Board of Water and Light is doing it right now. Farms are turning animal waste into methane gas. Opportunities are everywhere in Michigan to create green energy.

Michigan must do as any successful business does. To compete, we need to capitalize on our natural advantages. For us, it's our geography and our history. Auto ingenuity. And our solar edge. Wind. Woods. Water. Workforce. Even waste. If we do this right, Michigan can be the alternative energy capital of North America, and create thousands and thousands of jobs.

But, for Michigan to win the race for those high-paying jobs, we have to out-hustle the competition. How?

First, we must commit as a state to use alternative energy to meet our own energy needs.

To understand the connection between renewable energy and jobs, just look at Sweden - a country with striking resemblances to our state: the same size population, similar geography with two-thirds of their land covered by forests, a strong automotive sector. Sweden set high goals for their use of renewable energy. The result? They created over 2,000 businesses and 400,000 jobs in their renewable energy sector. 400,000 jobs!

Alternative energy companies have watched closely as 25 other states have set aggressive goals for their alternative energy use. We have to meet and beat other states' goals here in Michigan if we are going to attract those companies here. That's why I am asking the Legislature to set ambitious alternative energy goals for Michigan - produce 10 percent of our electrical energy from renewable sources by the year 2015 and a full 25 percent by the year 2025. Thank you Sen. Patterson and Representative Accavitti for working to craft the bipartisan legislation that will transform our state.

There is no way to overestimate the importance of setting state renewable energy use goals when it comes to creating jobs.

It is interesting to actually watch the address, because you can see how flat footed the legislature seems when the governor segues from a hockey metaphor to the alternative energy spiel. She might as well be speaking French.

This is, of course, where we the people need to step in. I will be checking out Governor Granholm's proposal and leaning on my legislators to support it.

Looks Like Spring to Me

I don't care if it was only 16 degrees today, or that the north wind blew the chop ice into Suttons Bay and clear our to Peshawbestown. I don't care if it was icy in the shade; the sun on the deck was warm and drying. Spring is near, if not here.

The birds know it's spring. The chickadees and Cardinals and nuthatches have switched to their spring songs and they are singing them insistently The chickens are laying, and one is thinking about setting. I hope she's still broody when it gets warm enough to actually hatch chicks.

I went to the laundromat this morning and hung these clothes out about noon. the light stuff got pretty dry, but the towels and jeans froze stiff as boards. Still, the sun is high enough and the wind was strong enough to pull moisture out of the clothes, frozen or not. It only took a little dryer time to finish them.

I stopped drying clothes outside in November, not because it was too cold, but because the days were too short and the sun never rose high enough to clear the barn and hit the clothesline. The sun's trajectory now is the same as mid-October, and the days are lengthening faster as we approach the equinox. I'll be planning the laundry for sunny days now.

My clothesline is in full view of everyone driving by. People will comment now that I've hung laundry. It is a sign of spring for many of the neighbors. I always think of it as a statement about energy conservation and being unashamed of doing housework. The folks at The Laundry Project have a website devoted to energy conservation, clothesline advocacy and laundry tips. I tried their technique for hanging towels doubled up and pinned at the top to make them flap against themselves in the wind and dry softer. It didn't work this time, but it might work if it was warmer.

I snapped the picture around 5:30, just before I took it all down. There is a downy woodpecker on the feeder. My favorite part of hanging out clothes in the warmer months is standing out in the yard folding clothes as I take them off the line and watching the birds.

Victory Gardens

A World War II era Victory Garden poster. (Oops, I mean WW I)

I've been on a list binge for a while and I planned on writing a list of reasons for planning a garden this year, even if you didn't last year. Sharon, over at Depletion-Abundance, beat me to it, with a nice post listing many reasons for growing a garden. I'm long overdue on posting pictures, so I found another version of her Victory Garden poster, and will add my own thoughts on gardens.

I read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma this winter. Having spent a lifetime thinking about food and where it comes from, I didn't expect any big mind-blowing revelations in this book, but I got some anyway. In the first third of the book, Pollan examines the energy origins of the fast food meal, and in the process ends up talking about a good deal of the food we find on the grocery shelf. Most of the components of processed food are derived from corn, corn is dependent on nitrogen fertilizer, and nitrogen fertilizer is manufactured from natural gas. When you look at the fuel used to plow, plant, spray, harvest, dry, transport, and further process corn and it's derivatives, you start to think of eating corn as tantamount to eating oil.

Synthetic nitrogen became plentiful at the end of WW I as nitrogen was no longer needed for the production of explosives. Our current system of industrial agriculture arose as a way to use this new abundance of nitrogen. Without synthetic nitrogen we would be soon be searching for alternate sources of calories. The caption on the poster, "Every Garden a Munitions Plant", was originally meant as a metaphor, but we might think a moment about our food security in an age when America is dependent on foreign fossil fuels to put food on the table.

So that's my new reason to grow a garden. In my last post, I listed four reasons to save energy. Now I'm presenting gardening, even just a little gardening, as a way to save energy and ensure our food security--as if eating well wasn't it's own reward!

Correction, although I found the Victory Garden poster on a website devoted to WW II, it clearly dates back to WW I

Four Reasons to Save Energy

Too much is made of whether or not people "believe" in global warming. Many people who "believe" are still overheating over sized homes and driving over sized cars all over hell's half acre. Quick now, because I've got chores to do, are four reasons to cut down on energy consumption:

Climate change. Yup. Cutting down on your energy use is the fastest way to cut your carbon footprint. If you aren't cutting back on energy, you aren't really doing much.

Energy security. Mike Huckabee put it this way:

None of us would write a check to Osama bin Laden, slip it in a Hallmark card and send it off to him. But that's what we're doing every time we pull into a gas station. We're paying for both sides in the war on terror - our side with our tax dollars, the terrorists' side with our gas dollars.

It makes sense to be mindful of where our money is going. It makes sense to make our country more energy independent.

To save money. You can't spend the same money twice. You can't spend the same tax dollars twice, either, so we should be demanding energy efficiency in government buildings, as well.

Save some for the kids. Crude oil and natural gas are not just energy sources. They are also the raw materials for plastics and nitrogen fertilizer, and a lot of other stuff I don't know about or that hasn't been invented yet. You might need a new heart valve someday. Wouldn't it be ironic if the doctor told you, "Sorry. We used that oil back in '08 to fuel a few Hummers....."

Cutting Back on Driving.

For the first time in years, it seems I will pass the date on the oil change sticker in the corner of my windshield before I pass the miles number. Driving less than 1000 miles per month is quite an accomplishment when you live in Northern Michigan, but I've done it, at least this once. I don't feel deprived, or cabin feverish. I certainly don't miss filling up the gas tank once or twice a week.

I did it by being more deliberate about driving. I used to drive to school to drop off a lunch or Anna's clarinet when she forgot it. When I started saying, "No, remember global warming?" she stopped forgetting the clarinet.

Then I stopped driving to Traverse City. I used to drive to TC once or twice a week, for groceries or other errands. We started relying more on local produce and our own garden. I would still be tempted to hit Meijer's for the produce section, at least in the winter, if I wasn't so disgusted by the company's attempt to manufacture a grassroots movement to recall The Acme town board after they didn't like the results of a zoning board decision. I'd rather shop at Hansen's in Suttons Bay.

I've been car pooling to work two days a week. One other day, I give a coworker a ride home. I've always tried to combine multiple errands when I drive to TC, but I'm surprised how much driving I can save by combining trips to closer destinations, like Leland (5 miles away) or Suttons Bay (6 miles). We still can't find time to walk to Lake Leelanau (1 mile) as often as I'd like, but in summer Anna is always up for a bike ride.

For the most part, I've cut out the driving that I wasn't enjoying anyway. Anna has become adept at using Mapquest to plan out rides to her friend's houses. "I'll ride to Suttons Bay with Liz and then ride home with your Mom when she comes home from work!" was a plan she made last summer.

Lasr school year we drove Liz to and from Chicago a few times, also to the train station in Kalamazoo. This year she is acclimated to university life and doesn't seem to need to come home so much, although she'd like to.

Richard fishes closer to home, now, but we still splurged and took some road trips down to Benzie County this summer to see if the blueberries were ripe yet. I knew they weren't, they don't ripen until after the star thistle blossoms, but I indulged my husband and went on a 60 road trip.

Recession!

The nation has suddenly discovered that we are in a recession. In Michigan, this is no surprise. We have been in hard times for a few years already. I remember two Halloweens ago, trick or treating with one of Anna's classmates, a family that was trying to relocate from downstate. The friend's dad told me that in their subdivision downstate (Brighton, I think) half of the homes were for sale and a third were in foreclosure.

That was some time ago, but Michigan suffered quietly until our presidential primary a few weeks ago. Having all of the candidates show up and try to speechify about our "one state recession" was odd, sort of like when the doctor tells you you're going to be fine but your friends are acting like you're in your final days. Mitt Romney made me laugh, vowing to bring back every single one of Michigan's lost jobs, as if the jobs were lost sheep and Mitt was a sheepdog.

I think of this recession like labor pains. If houses aren't selling, well, no wonder! You can't build bigger and bigger houses farther and farther from civilization without buyers eventually deciding the all that commuting and home heating is more than they can afford. You can't expect to sell bigger and bigger trucks and SUVs to that same commuting population without eventually seeing that market collapse when oil prices get squirelly or when global warming becomes too hard to ignore. You can't outsource all manufacturing to cheaper labor markets without eventually causing consumers to doubt the quality of the goods that you're trying to sell.

When a person starts to think that they're travelling down the wrong path, the natural instict is to stop and think. That's where I see our nation right now, stopping and thinking about taking a new path.

Congress and the president are anxious to nip this recession stuff quickly, and they have been quite speedy in deciding that a tax rebate is just the thing. I don't think they've stopped and thought at all. I sent this message to my congresspeople today:

The talk radio today was all about the looming recession and the federal government's response to it -- another tax rebate. There seems to be general agreement that the recession was triggered by high oil prices. I wonder, then, why the stimulus package is not targeting energy conservation?

Instead of a "spend it how you want it" tax rebate, why not give cheap loans so that folks can install solar hot water heaters, put up home wind generators, update to more efficient furnaces, install effificient windows and insulation, trade in their gas guzzlers, renovate properties along public transit routes (start with the ones in foreclosure) relocate their businesses out of the suburbs and back to the cities, along public transportation routes?

We have contractors and skilled laborors sitting idle, ready to do this work. For an even quicker stimulus, we have organizations like Traverse City's Father Fred Foundation in need of funds to help families with home heating bills. Give them money tomorrow and it will be out in the economy next week! Another tax rebate seems like a knee-jerk response, and not a very effective one at that.

I suspect that my message is too late, as the tax rebate plan seems all but a done deal.