Operating costs are the buzz word, from fire departments and caltrain, to family budgets. But thats were the commonality between cites and families end. Cities look at the factors that lead to operting costs like employee salaries. There is no concept of an underlying structural defect leading to higher operating costs. Everyone was used to living off debt, the ATM of unlimited growth, untill energy prices, the proverbial rug under their feet, was yanked out. At $4/- per gallon home owners were made acutely aware to having overstepped their capabilities. Large homes are not only more expensive to operate and access, they also cost more in post Prop 13 California. Taxes, the very force that directly highlights the cost of conspicous consumption, is also the force that turns people against their government. Governments on the other hand behave like children- instead of recognizing the structural cause of the national malaize they hope that people will come to their senses and see the value of the services installed for a society built as if gas is fifty cents a gallon. Forgiving the vehicle license fee bankrupted the state and did nothing to insure people from the effects of higher gas prices caused by living at the edge of the driving economy. We can't grow ciites and by default their services as if gas was 50c a gallon. People realized that at $4/- gallon. Governments instead are trying to blunder through with a concept of regionalism vaguely consicous that people are bonded out and cannot absorb more debt. Regionalism by combining sevice overhead promises lower costs. But regionalism increases the size the government when all indications point to downsizing, a concept that homeowners have absorbed.
Instead of listening to the problems of higher operating costs governments are trying to pretend that nothing is wrong except the ability of people to pay for services.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Greywater
Recycling and reuse of greywater raises issues of pollution at the percolation level based on cleaners used by the household. A UCLA report writes: "The state revised 2007 California Plumbing Code has now eased previous permit requirements for certain untreated graywater delivery and distribution systems. Permit requirements are now based on daily discharge volume, number of household sources, and number of graywater system fixtures. According to the Draft 2010 California Plumbing Code proposed by the California Department of Water Resources expanded indoor and outdoor uses of graywater (e.g., toilet flushing, spray irrigation, etc.) are also possible if the source graywater is treated to meet the California Department of Public Heath statewide uniform criteria for disinfected tertiary recycled water. This implies that, for expanded use graywater (i.e., besides in underground irrigation systems), water quality of treated graywater from small-scale, on-site residential treatment systems would be held to the same regulatory standards as large-scale, centralized municipal water treatment plants."
Permitting greywater can lead to a number of benefits
- Shows an awareness of the toxic problem which until now is unaddressed
- May not be a problem at all if the average person is not growing anything.
- Localizes the pollution problem from what people use for cleaners. This will form a layer at where the water percolates into the soil. If toxic cleaners are used then vegetables should not be grown with this water. Fruit trees which get water from a deeper root system are ok. And over time the percolation layer would need to be aerated so that anaerobic bacterial process can deteriorate the polluted layer.
However note that localizing the pollution source means that greywater (toilet is black water) does not pollute the larger water bodies like the Bay and Belmont Creek.
- Provides an incentive for growers to shift to organic and bio degradable cleaners
- expands the market organic and bio degradable cleaners so that these products can be competitive or lower cost than toxics.
- Reduces the amount of water that needs to moved around the region. Landscape uses the same amount of water as interiors for single family homes (5% each of total freshwater.) In Multifamily homes interior use is 3% of total and external use is 1%! Water movement accounts for 30% of energy use. Reducing demand improves availability and energy efficiency.
Permitting greywater can lead to a number of benefits
- Shows an awareness of the toxic problem which until now is unaddressed
- May not be a problem at all if the average person is not growing anything.
- Localizes the pollution problem from what people use for cleaners. This will form a layer at where the water percolates into the soil. If toxic cleaners are used then vegetables should not be grown with this water. Fruit trees which get water from a deeper root system are ok. And over time the percolation layer would need to be aerated so that anaerobic bacterial process can deteriorate the polluted layer.
However note that localizing the pollution source means that greywater (toilet is black water) does not pollute the larger water bodies like the Bay and Belmont Creek.
- Provides an incentive for growers to shift to organic and bio degradable cleaners
- expands the market organic and bio degradable cleaners so that these products can be competitive or lower cost than toxics.
- Reduces the amount of water that needs to moved around the region. Landscape uses the same amount of water as interiors for single family homes (5% each of total freshwater.) In Multifamily homes interior use is 3% of total and external use is 1%! Water movement accounts for 30% of energy use. Reducing demand improves availability and energy efficiency.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Is garbage hauling sustainable?
Caveat: this is not a Recology problem even though they are the only named entity.
There are more than twice as many garbage trucks, 179,000, in the US as there are transit buses. These refuse hauling monsters get an average of 2.8 miles per gallon. Garbage trucks move at an average speed of 10mph, an incredibly inefficient pace for a combustion engine, but one that's necessary because of the garbage trucks duties. The average garbage truck guzzles 8600 gallons of diesel fuel a year. Together US garbage trucks use 1.5 billion gallons of fuel, about 4% of all the diesel used in the US, accounting for billions of dollars sent overseas. (from $20 per gallon by Christopher Steiner page 162.)
Now these trucks will also get to go load a train, with garbage from from the Peninsula to Marin, because we don't price out what we throw away. Senator Reid can fix this with a federal tipping rate fee of $100/ton. For the role of tipping fees see Understanding Dynamics of Landfill Gate Rates by Cary Pecket, page 32f. BioCycle, August 2009. Higher tipping fees enable business from recycling including home deconstruction. The money should go to Fish and Wildlife for enforcement of the Clean Water Act since a secondary problem of any dump is toxins leached into the water table.
The primary problem is garbage service as a mechanism to expand sprawl in existing polluted corridors; and roads into openspace, including the road to nowhere, which ends up creating a community by the dump (Steiner's point in the opening quote.)
Recology trucks in the Belmont area are biodiesel. But as Stanford Professor Jacobson showed, when their fossil fuel production component is factored in, biofuels are worse in most metrics.
Since Belmont just signed up with Recology (formerly Norcal) this article could be titled: Belmont boards for burial at Burning Man.
Michael Cabanatuan, Chronicle Staff Writer
In the dusty Nevada desert, about 30 miles east of the playa where Bay Area artists and hipsters gather annually to build a temporary city at the Burning Man festival, a San Francisco garbage company wants to build a dump for Bay Area trash.
But a group of residents in the Winnemucca area, near where Recology seeks to build the 1-square-mile landfill, wants the company to leave the desert alone - and California to keep its garbage to itself.
"The notion that Nevada is some sort of wasteland because we don't have Ponderosa pines covering it is repugnant," said Jim French, retired wildlife biologist from the Nevada Department of Wildlife and a member of Nevadans Against Garbage, a group opposing the planned dump.
Article continues
There are more than twice as many garbage trucks, 179,000, in the US as there are transit buses. These refuse hauling monsters get an average of 2.8 miles per gallon. Garbage trucks move at an average speed of 10mph, an incredibly inefficient pace for a combustion engine, but one that's necessary because of the garbage trucks duties. The average garbage truck guzzles 8600 gallons of diesel fuel a year. Together US garbage trucks use 1.5 billion gallons of fuel, about 4% of all the diesel used in the US, accounting for billions of dollars sent overseas. (from $20 per gallon by Christopher Steiner page 162.)
Now these trucks will also get to go load a train, with garbage from from the Peninsula to Marin, because we don't price out what we throw away. Senator Reid can fix this with a federal tipping rate fee of $100/ton. For the role of tipping fees see Understanding Dynamics of Landfill Gate Rates by Cary Pecket, page 32f. BioCycle, August 2009. Higher tipping fees enable business from recycling including home deconstruction. The money should go to Fish and Wildlife for enforcement of the Clean Water Act since a secondary problem of any dump is toxins leached into the water table.
The primary problem is garbage service as a mechanism to expand sprawl in existing polluted corridors; and roads into openspace, including the road to nowhere, which ends up creating a community by the dump (Steiner's point in the opening quote.)
Recology trucks in the Belmont area are biodiesel. But as Stanford Professor Jacobson showed, when their fossil fuel production component is factored in, biofuels are worse in most metrics.
Since Belmont just signed up with Recology (formerly Norcal) this article could be titled: Belmont boards for burial at Burning Man.
Michael Cabanatuan, Chronicle Staff Writer
In the dusty Nevada desert, about 30 miles east of the playa where Bay Area artists and hipsters gather annually to build a temporary city at the Burning Man festival, a San Francisco garbage company wants to build a dump for Bay Area trash.
But a group of residents in the Winnemucca area, near where Recology seeks to build the 1-square-mile landfill, wants the company to leave the desert alone - and California to keep its garbage to itself.
"The notion that Nevada is some sort of wasteland because we don't have Ponderosa pines covering it is repugnant," said Jim French, retired wildlife biologist from the Nevada Department of Wildlife and a member of Nevadans Against Garbage, a group opposing the planned dump.
Article continues
Saturday, January 10, 2009
A food shed on a walking perimeter
City Government has spent the last 60 years building bigger faster roads to the far reaches of the city with all the water and sewer and garbage that can be efficiently and unaffordably moved around. And now we can't walk and bicycling is too dangerous and look: we find ourselves chained to Al Queda and Saudi Arabia and unable to grow old in our own neighborhoods. So lets retire to the Sierras and leave it to another generation to figure out what to do with the bad air water and oil soaked soil.
Council members says that the roads are now too dangerous to bike and can we build separate bike paths- ceding the public space to Bush and Al Queda. Another network is needed to get around slowly without pollution and in peace.
But how to grade separate this new facility? And connect community scattered to the outer reaches of our jurisdiction? It will be expensive, so do we have to live with what we got? One way is to move services into the neighborhoods on an 1/8 mile walking radius and then connect these great neighborhoods via bicycles boulevards. Ideally Transfer of Development Rights would restore the food shed on a walking perimeter of a complete neighborhood. I suggest we think big how we want to use the FARTP and use ABAG's and MTC's priority development and conservation areas monies to get us started repairing our world in the next 25 years.
Council members says that the roads are now too dangerous to bike and can we build separate bike paths- ceding the public space to Bush and Al Queda. Another network is needed to get around slowly without pollution and in peace.
But how to grade separate this new facility? And connect community scattered to the outer reaches of our jurisdiction? It will be expensive, so do we have to live with what we got? One way is to move services into the neighborhoods on an 1/8 mile walking radius and then connect these great neighborhoods via bicycles boulevards. Ideally Transfer of Development Rights would restore the food shed on a walking perimeter of a complete neighborhood. I suggest we think big how we want to use the FARTP and use ABAG's and MTC's priority development and conservation areas monies to get us started repairing our world in the next 25 years.
Monday, December 22, 2008
TV and the four directions
There are four basic needs for a citizens- home, food, health care and a job. The last one because how else can you pay your taxes? The first two are easy to justify. The third is essential if you want to get to work so that the government can tax you for the scandals to warm to.
Quoting Stanley in the Times:
The nation is engrossed in an orgy of scandal, a 24-hour cable news burlesque of greed, graft, cronyism and corruption, with appointed villains so lurid and over-the-top they could be characters in “Bleak House.” (Even their names, Madoff and Blagojevich, have a Dickensian ring, like Skimpole or Pardiggle.)
Credit is frozen, the stock market looks perilously close to flatlining, and neither politicians nor economists can begin to predict the short- or long-term consequences of $700 billion government bailouts and a national debt topping $10 trillion. The root causes — an impenetrable tangle of derivative securities, heedless lending and binge corporate buyouts — are too vast and uncharted to examine for long. The solutions are insoluble.
As Neil Postman writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death we are distracted from the four basics by nonsense by the elites need to reduce taxes instead of jobs.
For one the government is not addressing jobs and homes or health care for all.
And maybe it can't, a whole new emphasis on where we are in the era of Peak Everything.
Quoting Uchitelle in the Times:
“It is not in the nature of a market system to have adequate private investment all of the time,” said Robert Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “So we used public investment to smooth things over and improve the climate for private investment.”
That changed. In the 1970s, the public reacted against high taxes and growing budget deficits, and conservatives argued that putting money in private hands would lift the economy more effectively. Public investment tapered off, and was used less as a tool of economic policy as the economy experienced the increasingly sharp ups and downs of the 1980s, 1990s and the new century.
If shortages drive up prices, a good thing, then the pain of being unable to consume frivolously , like the paintings of Dahen, will be difficult to impossible. This will allow resources to go farther since shipping trash around will be impossible. China to the rescue? No but we can learn to live within our means- a concept presently unknown to government, the concept of business itself and us.
For example what's with the rootless society? If we really need a home why don't we settle down and build community and family linked to the neighborhood? Because GM has driven over the dream and created a gridiron of streets which imprison homes away from the community and neighborhood. Without the proximity of a walkable neighborhood there aren't any services, like dentists and farmers markets, wherein to meet and talk to neighbors, and so we move in search of "home."
What missing from this whole scenario? An acknowledgment that without equity we can't solve the peak everything problem and keep from deteriorating into balkanized walled rioting communities. Mumbai is a measure of how far the outside world penetrates comfort to create the trend to balkanized communities. In the movies we get tough on crime, poverty, and punishment delivered. Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood, can erase the margin between constitution and Guantanamo, squarely under the holy cross of Abu Grahib. On the front page America continues to get tough on black and Hispanic youth, spending a whole generation, on the slogan of a racially neutral class free society. Even a fiscal disaster in California won't stop our racist drive over the edge. "Class resentment is the rage" but it doesn't extend to equity in prison spending, education, keep the home economy with jobs, or health care.
Instead we knock charity for economically distressed communities, like community developers (remember Oboam versus McCain), without acknowledging the role of economic empowerment provided by the organizations nominated. In the Brundtland Report which gave us the common parlance of the phrase "sustainable development" we must overcome our elitist disregard for the conditions pf poverty under the mask of a sustainable meritocracy.
Brundtland laid out four principles in Our Common Future in 1987
1- the elimination of poverty is necessary not just as a human right but as an environmental issue.
2- we in the first world must reduce our consumption of resources and production of wastes.
3- Global cooperation on environmental issues is no longer a soft option.
4- Change toward sustainability can occur only with community-based approaches that take local cultures seriously.
Brundtland said they must apply simultaneously to achieve global sustainability.
Work toward the four basic needs is the only way to keep the goddess happy and the home from being nagged to death as any laid off fellow will tell you.
Quoting Stanley in the Times:
The nation is engrossed in an orgy of scandal, a 24-hour cable news burlesque of greed, graft, cronyism and corruption, with appointed villains so lurid and over-the-top they could be characters in “Bleak House.” (Even their names, Madoff and Blagojevich, have a Dickensian ring, like Skimpole or Pardiggle.)
Credit is frozen, the stock market looks perilously close to flatlining, and neither politicians nor economists can begin to predict the short- or long-term consequences of $700 billion government bailouts and a national debt topping $10 trillion. The root causes — an impenetrable tangle of derivative securities, heedless lending and binge corporate buyouts — are too vast and uncharted to examine for long. The solutions are insoluble.
As Neil Postman writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death we are distracted from the four basics by nonsense by the elites need to reduce taxes instead of jobs.
For one the government is not addressing jobs and homes or health care for all.
And maybe it can't, a whole new emphasis on where we are in the era of Peak Everything.
Quoting Uchitelle in the Times:
“It is not in the nature of a market system to have adequate private investment all of the time,” said Robert Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “So we used public investment to smooth things over and improve the climate for private investment.”
That changed. In the 1970s, the public reacted against high taxes and growing budget deficits, and conservatives argued that putting money in private hands would lift the economy more effectively. Public investment tapered off, and was used less as a tool of economic policy as the economy experienced the increasingly sharp ups and downs of the 1980s, 1990s and the new century.
If shortages drive up prices, a good thing, then the pain of being unable to consume frivolously , like the paintings of Dahen, will be difficult to impossible. This will allow resources to go farther since shipping trash around will be impossible. China to the rescue? No but we can learn to live within our means- a concept presently unknown to government, the concept of business itself and us.
For example what's with the rootless society? If we really need a home why don't we settle down and build community and family linked to the neighborhood? Because GM has driven over the dream and created a gridiron of streets which imprison homes away from the community and neighborhood. Without the proximity of a walkable neighborhood there aren't any services, like dentists and farmers markets, wherein to meet and talk to neighbors, and so we move in search of "home."
What missing from this whole scenario? An acknowledgment that without equity we can't solve the peak everything problem and keep from deteriorating into balkanized walled rioting communities. Mumbai is a measure of how far the outside world penetrates comfort to create the trend to balkanized communities. In the movies we get tough on crime, poverty, and punishment delivered. Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood, can erase the margin between constitution and Guantanamo, squarely under the holy cross of Abu Grahib. On the front page America continues to get tough on black and Hispanic youth, spending a whole generation, on the slogan of a racially neutral class free society. Even a fiscal disaster in California won't stop our racist drive over the edge. "Class resentment is the rage" but it doesn't extend to equity in prison spending, education, keep the home economy with jobs, or health care.
Instead we knock charity for economically distressed communities, like community developers (remember Oboam versus McCain), without acknowledging the role of economic empowerment provided by the organizations nominated. In the Brundtland Report which gave us the common parlance of the phrase "sustainable development" we must overcome our elitist disregard for the conditions pf poverty under the mask of a sustainable meritocracy.
Brundtland laid out four principles in Our Common Future in 1987
1- the elimination of poverty is necessary not just as a human right but as an environmental issue.
2- we in the first world must reduce our consumption of resources and production of wastes.
3- Global cooperation on environmental issues is no longer a soft option.
4- Change toward sustainability can occur only with community-based approaches that take local cultures seriously.
Brundtland said they must apply simultaneously to achieve global sustainability.
Work toward the four basic needs is the only way to keep the goddess happy and the home from being nagged to death as any laid off fellow will tell you.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Infrastructure change challenge and opportunity
Society pays for education in the hope of a reward that will benefit the larger public good. Resources undermine this goal because they offer the road to wealth through speed i.e quick ill-gotten-gains. Education produces Engineers who figure out how to use resources, like diamonds, to make a product that no one wants; and Marketeers who figure out how to get people to ask for it; and products from the schools of public policy who torture people far from the intended markets (because of local depletion which led to the formation of empires) to work in the resource industries and produce the goods and rules to keep competition from the product markets. AIG shows that private insurance is another such useless product.
That infrastructure of military and government and markets is overbuilt. The energy source of cheap fossil fuels is running out. If that was it we would be fine. But transferring them from the ground to the air, water, and our body tissue has given us the problem of global warming. Worse the intellectual edifice around the engineers has collapsed- the experts don't know what to do; their solutions try to retard innovation and entrench the past. The challenge is to build a coalition to address necessity is immense since the discourse around the topic is shrouded in the fear of the power of state inspired terror and the business elites- BAU. We need to go beyond the calling cards of power: entitlement and corruption.
However as long the challenges remain unaddressable and the discourse is limited there will always be the O'Tooles and GW Deniers who make an industry from seeming to be right.
The Guardian writes Wednesday December
Discussions in Brussels and Poznan this week will be decisive in terms
of setting the tone for next year, when the world must agree on a
successor to the Kyoto protocol or face irreversible and devastating
climate change. The signs do not look good: in Brussels, Italy, Poland
and Germany are trying to water down commitments on emissions
reductions, backed by shortsighted business lobbies. Meanwhile in
Poznan everyone appears to be waiting for someone else to move first.
Society needs to reevaluate its goal of economic progress. Everything points to the immense benefits of recessions and depressions including a lower population. Government needs to get out of the economic progress business so that we can live in a healthy depressed economy where we grow our own food and recycle our own trash. We need to address consumption. Without addressing the necessity of the demand side why put in (a different) infrastructure? Is it any different then?
A carpet showroom and a parking lot got bombed by ice- I would think that's just global warming deserts for melting the ice caps. But the fact that these losing enterprises are around, except powered by windmills, is not a long term solution. Government builds industrial blocs like autos through subsidization of land uses, easy money credit, and unethical thumb in the pot Congressional oversight which results in zeroed out 401ks. Shouldn't we know better?
If we go around wailing for leaders we are lost. We need to know how to grow our own food or support a local food system with a farmers market in walking or biking distance. And we need to figure out how to recycle our own trash including composting toilets. That is not leadership material. Its the end of asking for government to design in economic progress since we now know for most generations it leads to worthless 401ks.
That infrastructure of military and government and markets is overbuilt. The energy source of cheap fossil fuels is running out. If that was it we would be fine. But transferring them from the ground to the air, water, and our body tissue has given us the problem of global warming. Worse the intellectual edifice around the engineers has collapsed- the experts don't know what to do; their solutions try to retard innovation and entrench the past. The challenge is to build a coalition to address necessity is immense since the discourse around the topic is shrouded in the fear of the power of state inspired terror and the business elites- BAU. We need to go beyond the calling cards of power: entitlement and corruption.
However as long the challenges remain unaddressable and the discourse is limited there will always be the O'Tooles and GW Deniers who make an industry from seeming to be right.
The Guardian writes Wednesday December
Discussions in Brussels and Poznan this week will be decisive in terms
of setting the tone for next year, when the world must agree on a
successor to the Kyoto protocol or face irreversible and devastating
climate change. The signs do not look good: in Brussels, Italy, Poland
and Germany are trying to water down commitments on emissions
reductions, backed by shortsighted business lobbies. Meanwhile in
Poznan everyone appears to be waiting for someone else to move first.
Society needs to reevaluate its goal of economic progress. Everything points to the immense benefits of recessions and depressions including a lower population. Government needs to get out of the economic progress business so that we can live in a healthy depressed economy where we grow our own food and recycle our own trash. We need to address consumption. Without addressing the necessity of the demand side why put in (a different) infrastructure? Is it any different then?
A carpet showroom and a parking lot got bombed by ice- I would think that's just global warming deserts for melting the ice caps. But the fact that these losing enterprises are around, except powered by windmills, is not a long term solution. Government builds industrial blocs like autos through subsidization of land uses, easy money credit, and unethical thumb in the pot Congressional oversight which results in zeroed out 401ks. Shouldn't we know better?
If we go around wailing for leaders we are lost. We need to know how to grow our own food or support a local food system with a farmers market in walking or biking distance. And we need to figure out how to recycle our own trash including composting toilets. That is not leadership material. Its the end of asking for government to design in economic progress since we now know for most generations it leads to worthless 401ks.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
petition on globla warming
Save our Environment dot org has a petition to Obama saying "It's time to Repower, Refuel, and Rebuild America.
We need to get our economy moving by building a clean energy future. We applaud your efforts to make energy a top priority, and urge you to adopt these goals:
* Move to 100% electricity from clean small distributed sources such as wind and solar
* Cut our dependence on oil and coal by 95%
* Create 5 million new clean energy jobs
* Reduce global warming pollution by at least 80%
* Tax fossil fuel consumption not working America.
We call on you to introduce a plan in your first 100 days that will reach these goals, and to utilize the federal budget and any economic recovery package to get us started.
We need to get our economy moving by building a clean energy future. We applaud your efforts to make energy a top priority, and urge you to adopt these goals:
* Move to 100% electricity from clean small distributed sources such as wind and solar
* Cut our dependence on oil and coal by 95%
* Create 5 million new clean energy jobs
* Reduce global warming pollution by at least 80%
* Tax fossil fuel consumption not working America.
We call on you to introduce a plan in your first 100 days that will reach these goals, and to utilize the federal budget and any economic recovery package to get us started.
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