Slow Food

Photo: Aya Brackett for The New York Times

On a gritty block in Oakland, Calif. — the kind of neighborhood that quickens your step even on a bright Sunday afternoon — a whiff of Italy filled the air while skateboarders ollied in the empty street. If you followed the source, a steel pipe sticking out of a ground-floor window, to Anya Fernald and Renato Sardo’s plumbing-supply-store-turned-loft, you would glimpse a spread that was impressive even by California’s bounteous standards: lemon pies and kale tortas cooling on the counter; homemade sausages awaiting grilling in the fireplace; fava beans and peas simmering on the stove; tape-labeled jars of goose fat and tomato sauce standing at the ready. Fernald was eyeballing whether the leg of goat wrapped with homemade pancetta would fit in the new wood-burning pizza oven. (Not quite.) “Do you want some rabbit sugo?” she asked me before I had the chance to set down my bag. “I got 10 rabbits from my client in Shasta yesterday. I was going to make some chicken-fried rabbit for tonight.”

With its high crime and poverty rates, Oakland doesn’t have nearly the same precious food culture — or produce — that defines nearby Berkeley and San Francisco. But Fernald and Sardo’s home is a modern homestead, preserving the larder for leaner (and busier) times. Every summer they host tomato-canning and jam-making parties; fall is for pumpkin-processing events and butchering pigs with 10 guests invited to make sausage, which Fernald cures in a modified wine fridge in a closet. Splitting a steer with friends? Their chest freezer contains a beefy ode to their vacuum sealer.

Fernald, 34, a former family-farm advocate, was the executive director of last year’s Slow Food Nation event. Now she combines her activism and her acumen with Live Culture, a consultancy that helps companies create sustainable food practices and products. Projects range from developing a line of artisanal cured meats in Shasta and an agritourism in Belize to helping an Alabama barbecue chain source better pork; from working with nonprofits to develop value-added food businesses to organizing the Eat Real Festival, (continue reading)

source: New York Times

Green Economy

Street Farmer

Will Allen, a farmer of Bunyonesque proportions, ascended a berm of wood chips and brewer’s mash and gently probed it with a pitchfork. “Look at this,” he said, pleased with the treasure he unearthed. A writhing mass of red worms dangled from his tines. He bent over, raked another section with his fingers and palmed a few beauties.

It was one of those April days in Wisconsin when the weather shifts abruptly from hot to cold, and Allen, dressed in a sleeveless hoodie — his daily uniform down to 20 degrees, below which he adds another sweatshirt — was exactly where he wanted to be. Show Allen a pile of soil, fully composted or still slimy with banana peels, and he’s compelled to scoop some into his melon-size hands. “Creating soil from waste is what I enjoy most,” he said. “Anyone can grow food.”

Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites — through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold. (continue reading)

source: New York Times

Transportation

Sharing Electric Cars in Baltimore

The Maryland Science Center in Baltimore is planning a car-sharing service similar to Zipcar — using electric cars.

The Maryland Science Center is taking its educational mission to the streets with a pack of electric cars. In August, the museum will start renting the cars by the hour in the neighborhoods near its home on the waterfront along Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

“We think an electric car share program is the right thing to do.” said Van Reiner, the president of the institution. “We have a small solar array. We’re going to start building a green roof on Monday. We’re trying to be a leader in sustainability and an electric car share program is just one of the ways we’re trying to demonstrate our commitment.”

The program, co-sponsored by Exxon Mobil and called Altcar, will work like ZipCar and other car sharing companies, but the fleet will consist of battery-powered Maya 300s — the third generation of cars from battery makerElectrovaya.

The Maryland Science Center sits on the edge of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor next to neighborhoods filled with townhouses with little street parking. Mr. Reiner thinks that many of the residents who walk to work will want to rent the electric car by the hour to do errands like grocery shopping. There are even a few big box stores that can be reached without going on roads with speed limits higher than 35 miles per hour.

The cars will start at $9 per hour and drop to $7.50 per hour for those who commit to using the car at least three hours per month. These prices are competitive with ZipCar but they may not cover the entire cost of the car, (continue reading)

source: New York Times

Green Technology

Interview: Shawn Frayne

hawn Frayne, president of Honolulu and Hong Kong-based Humdinger Wind Energy, is a prolific inventor and innovator whose work has been inspired by the need for resourceful problem-solving in the world’s most vulnerable regions.

While working in Haiti, Frayne noted that providing wind power on a global scale would require hardware that’s simpler and much cheaper than what we’ve got. In response, he teamed with aeronautical engineer Jordan McRaeand mechanical engineer Dr. Kurt Kornbluth to develop the Windbelt(pictured below), a radically different power generator that uses a fluttering membrane, magnets and a metal coil to turn wind into power (watch a video here). With no turbine, the Windbelt can produce energy at a cost-per-watt that’s significantly lower than conventional devices. In 2007, Frayne received aBreakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics for the device. He and his collaborators have since improved the Windbelt to a point where they can produce wind power for $1 per watt.

Frayne’s philosophy of simple ingenuity and accessible solutions is reflected in other projects he’s involved in as well: among them, for example, is a solar water purification bag that can be easily locally manufactured and cheaply distributed. Frayne believes that we need more than just incremental innovation in water and energy technology, and thinks that the constraints of the developing world can provide the necessary inspiration to make significant technological leaps that can benefit the Global South and Global North simultaneously. His grand plan: to establish a global network of invention incubators to foster just that change.

I spoke with Frayne after watching his presentation at Sustainable Brands 2009.

Adele Peters: You often use the phrase “confluent technology.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

Shawn Frayne: There’s a confluence of the problems and talents in developing countries with the problems and talents in wealthy countries. Problems — particularly in the fields of energy and water — that are being faced now by developing countries are soon to be faced by the entire world. Thirty years ago, when technology created a new low-cost solar panel for Africa, or a low-cost wind tower to be used in Haiti, that might have been isolated to those places. Now those types of technologies can transcend the boundaries between developing countries and wealthy nations, and, at least the theory goes, go on to create new industries in wealthy countries as well.

AP: What’s the difference between now and 30 years ago?

SF: The problems are more acute now. I suppose what allows this to be possible now, what allows designers and inventors around the world to collaborate on creating new products is the high speed of FedEx, Skype, online whiteboard tools, all those things that I think basically over the last five years allowed this idea of the global invention factory to become a reality.

AP: I know you have a new project under development that arranges the Windbelts into a panel-form to generate electricity from the wind. Can you describe how that works?

SF: This new development is called a ‘Windcell Panel,’ and its functionally a lot like a solar panel that catches the wind instead of the sun. The Panels consist of 20 individual Windbelts in a single frame, adding up to a rating of 100W of power per panel, with an off-the-line cost of around US$100. This translates to uninstalled electricity of around 4 cents per kWh with 6 m/s average winds — four or five times cheaper than solar PV. We’re engineering these systems to be simple, very low cost, modular, and able to catch low speed winds.

The Humdinger team believes this new version of the Windbelt technology will allow cities to finally capture urban air flows over buildings and under bridges on a large scale of 10 kilowatts on up to 100 megawatts of grid-tied per installation (say, under the 30 km bridge recently installed in Shanghai, as shown in the illustration). We’re also going after coastal installations and rural power — basically, anywhere other energy technologies can’t go cost-effectively. Or quickly — we believe we will ramp up to several hundred installations relatively fast (relative to wind turbine farms or solar farms), since the Panels will be as easy to transport and install as a fence.

AP: Why do you think the big clean tech of the future will be born in the developing world?

SF: An engineer sitting in Silicon Valley may look at the solar panels easily available in his or her vicinity and think, “I can redesign these panels to get an additional 1% efficiency.” That’s good, and that incremental innovation is necessary, but in different environments, where there’s a different set of constraints (such as in developing countries) designers and inventors can sometimes be pushed to create more than incremental changes. Silicon-based solar is decreasing in cost, partially due to supply and demand, but it’s also due to incremental efficiency that’s grown over time with that technology. But you can never push that below, say, $2/watt, even over the next ten years of development. A more disruptive technology, that isn’t based on silicon, could push it to a quarter a watt.

Those sorts of technologies typically only get invented when the constraints demand that sort of serious change. Most of the innovations that the modern world rests on today were formed over 100 years ago, and those key foundational inventions were formed to pull the world out of poverty. Now we’re in a weird situation where grand changes — grand inventions and new starting points — are needed, but most of the designers and inventors that can get funding are in wealthy countries where the pressures and constraints don’t push them to design the fundamental shifts. (continue reading)

source: worldchanging

Opinion

Just Do It

There is much in the House cap-and-trade energy bill that just passed that I absolutely hate. It is too weak in key areas and way too complicated in others. A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic that we couldn’t do better. It is appalling that so much had to be given away to polluters. It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it.

Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.

Why? Because, for all its flaws, this bill is the first comprehensive attempt by America to mitigate climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Rejecting this bill would have been read in the world as America voting against the reality and urgency of climate change and would have undermined clean energy initiatives everywhere.

More important, my gut tells me that if the U.S. government puts a price on carbon, even a weak one, it will usher in a new mind-set among consumers, investors, farmers, innovators and entrepreneurs that in time will make a big difference — much like the first warnings that cigarettes could cause cancer. The morning after that warning no one ever looked at smoking the same again.

Ditto if this bill passes. Henceforth, every investment decision made in America — about how homes are built, products manufactured or electricity generated — will look for the least-cost low-carbon option. And weaving carbon emissions into every business decision will drive innovation and deployment of clean technologies to a whole new level and make energy efficiency much more affordable. That ain’t beanbag.

Now that the bill is heading for the Senate, though, we must, ideally, try to improve it, but, at a minimum, guard against diluting it any further. To do that we need the help of the three parties most responsible for how weak the bill already is: the Republican Party, President Barack Obama and We the People.

This bill is not weak because its framers, Representatives Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, wanted it this way. “They had to make the compromises they did,” said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, “because almost every House Republican voted against the bill and did nothing to try to improve it. So to get it passed, they needed every coal-state Democrat, and that meant they had to water it down to bring them on board.”

What are Republicans thinking? It is not as if they put forward a different strategy, like a carbon tax. Does the G.O.P. want to be the party of sex scandals and polluters or does it want to be a partner in helping America dominate the next great global industry: E.T. — energy technology? How could Republicans become so anti-environment, just when the country is going green?

Historically speaking, “Republicans can claim as much credit for America’s environmental leadership as Democrats,” noted Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. “The two greatest environmental presidents in American history were Teddy Roosevelt, who created our national park system, and Richard Nixon, whose administration gave us the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.” George Bush Sr. signed the 1993 Rio Treaty, to preserve biodiversity.

Yes, this bill’s goal of reducing U.S. carbon emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 is nowhere near what science tells us we need to mitigate climate change. But it also contains significant provisions to prevent new buildings from becoming energy hogs, to make our appliances the most energy efficient in the world and to help preserve forests in places like the Amazon.

We need Republicans who believe in fiscal conservatism and conservation joining this legislation in the Senate. We want a bill that transforms the whole country not one that just threads a political needle. I hope they start listening to green Republicans like Dick Lugar, George Shultz and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I also hope we will hear more from President Obama. Something feels very calculating in how he has approached this bill, as if he doesn’t quite want to get his hands dirty, as if he is ready to twist arms in private, but not so much that if the bill goes down he will get tarnished. That is no way to fight this war. He is going to have to mobilize the whole country to pressure the Senate — by educating Americans, with speech after speech, about the opportunities and necessities of a serious climate/energy bill. If he is not ready to risk failure by going all out, failure will be the most likely result.

And then there is We the People. Attention all young Americans: your climate future is being decided right now in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, where the coal lobby holds huge sway. You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon. That will get the Senate’s attention. Play hardball or don’t play at all.

source: New York TImes, Thomas L. Friedman