Ecology Wins This Year's Nobel Peace Prize

This year's Nobel Peace Prize, as you may well have heard since yesterday, is being awarded to Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This prompted us to go back and reread the series of articles we posted in January and February about energy and environment issues, and we commend them to you again (go here for one of them). We confess that we are not convinced about the science Mr. Gore and the IPCC espouse; "climate change" has characterized the entire history of the earth, not just the 20th Century. But, as our earlier articles explain, we do know that actions and practices we humans carry out every day are harmful to our environment and we do know that we have been consuming energy at a frightful rate. So the need for individual and community actions is clear. And, whether we agree on the policy response to this or not, Al Gore has probably done more than any other individual to make "climate change" and "environment" mainstream, household concerns.

The alarm-bells Gore has sounded beg for solutions. What can we actually do that will help? We talked before here about the Rocky Mountain Institute*, a think-tank and consulting firm near Aspen, Colorado. A recent interview with their Founder and Chairman Amory Lovins appears in the current issue of Plenty Magazine**. Lovins talks about the light-weight car he drives that gets 64 mpg, his own showcase year-round mountain home that has no heating system, the prospects for "micro-power" electrical cogeneration from factories and office buildings and from renewable sources. Initially, though, the single most important thing we can do, Lovins urges, is really very simple: "unscrew an incandescent bulb and put in a compact fluorescent – you get the same light, it uses five times less electricity, and it lasts about ten times longer. And next time you're going to buy a household appliance, get the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy's guide to the most energy-efficient appliances..."*** Lovins points out that various actions like this have multiple advantages: "A super-insulated window, for example, isn't just insulated – it actually has ten different benefits."

So, as with many issues in the world, the kind of consciousness-raising that Al Gore has done is crucial. But once we see the problem, we also need to see that we and all of our neighbors can act, sometimes right along in the ordinary stream of everyday life, to help bring needed change to the climate change threat.

*Find the Rocky Mountain Institute at www.rmi.org.

**Tracie McMillan, "Labor of Lovins", Plenty Magazine, October-November 2007, page 27. In the same issue, also see an article on roof-top wind turbines for generating electricity in cities and a feature on LEED buildings, among other topics. Try their website, http://www.plentymag.com/. although we found commentary there somewhat uneven.

***http://www.aceee.org/. This website is very interesting, and if you don't know it already, you should! It has information on building a "green" house and driving a "green" car, the latter including mileage and environment ratings for some 10,000 vehicles.