Hope is in the Air: What Makes The Boeing Dreamliner Such a Big Step for the Environment

Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pw4OE7gM2M
The plane you see taking off is made with Carbon Fiber, from a kit based on the design of the Piper Cub, the famous bush plane, and perhaps smallest of what would be considered a traditional airplane. They usually weigh about 900 pounds. This one weights 300 less because of the difference in weight between carbon fiber and steel or aluminum. The plane landing likely is Carbon Fiber too. A friend of mine once took third place in this competition landing in about 130 feet with a plane, a Maule, that was handicapped for being slightly larger, but I can tell you that people were shocked when this thing took off in 17 feet in 2007, since even a normal cub souped up like a top fuel racer would still need 50 feet to take off.. not 17. In fact, the voice you hear muttering "Wow.. nice landing.. nice..." at the end is likely a buddy of mine, which I put together a few years ago. He was pretty astounded by what he saw there in 2007, as was the whole Alaska flying community. This carbon fiber thing was something big.
http://www.cubcrafters.com/carboncubex
Fast forward 6 years to 2013, and it's been a tough few months for a low Carbon future in Aviation, specifically, for the Boeing Dreamliner, the biggest innovation in Commercial Aviation since the Concord, the airliner equivalent of that Cub, and the most fuel efficient Commercial Aircraft ever produced, 20% more efficient than any current competitors.

The Restoration of the Mesopotamian Marshes: Twice the size of the Everglades, but being in Iraq makes it..umm.. complicated..

Here's something I never expected to see coming out of Iraq. It looks more like Moab, it just seems too normal, the anal tepid CNN anchor and all:
http://cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/international/2013/04/03/inside-middle-east-iraq-babylon-e.cnn.html

I am better aware than most that the US went to War with Iraq the second time under some pretty attenuated public reasoning.. trust me... I might have heard some of the guys who trumped the whole thing up, in person and privately, in a different phase of my life, scheming about it, but that aside, and with all due respect to Sean Penn, Saddam was a pretty bad dude, and no friend to the environment...
We sometimes make a very Muslim mistake when we get frustrated with a political situation in our country, and we declare the enemy of our enemy to be our friend... and almost no one likes War, and well, if you are going to win a war, you need to so called 'Win the Peace', but no such luck in this case... However, Rummy, W and the boys, they did know a bit more than the average Tom, Dick, and Mustafah about Iraq, and even as they sharpened their knives and pens to `help Iraq rebuild it´s oil and national infrastructure', in that order, they were aware of one or two little things that they didn´t necessarily think would sell as well as the 'Goebbels perfect' WMD fiasco. You see, in addition to Saddam´s mal-treatment of the Kurds, with Chemical Weapons at times, and the Shiites, and the Iranians.. and, well, the Kuwaitis...and any Environmentalist who remembers the burning wells after the Mother of All Battles, which burned 1.5 billion barrels, perhaps only 17 days use at current rates for the world, but straight into the atmosphere which caused perhaps a sharper than usual high in the saw tooth patterns of world atmospheric Carbon charts, should be as pissed as I was.. (that was pure Saddam), he had also destroyed one of the world's distinct Ecosystems, the Mesopotamian Marshes.

The Mouse that's Roaring Less and Less: Nicaragua Works for a Green Grid

This will seem funny for me to write about a country that as of now gets more than half of it's energy from from Fossil Fuels ( CIA World Factbook Nicaragua Energy ).. but wait a second.. or a few years, and Iceland and New Zealand might have something to worry about.
I refer to the latter two because they are examples of countries that have put a concerted effort into having Carbon Free National Electrical Grids. From what I know, Iceland, with it's famous Geothermal Plants creating about a quarter of it's grid energy, and a good deal more of it's bragging rights, not to mention one of the world's coolest spas in The Blue Lagoon, the rest coming from hydroelectric dams. As far as I can tell, Iceland is alone in this distinction.

A Percolating Renassaince for The LA River

I don't want to ruin the movie magic.. I don't want to impose fact where fantasy should reign supreme, shatter the illusions that drive the American Fantasy Machine, but have you ever wondered what the heck this was?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b08DChU5qsg
or hows'about this Greese reprise from the cult classic Repo Man:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN2AXsF-kwc
Oh wait, we got one more! God I miss the 70's.. how's this for a svelt action hero:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF-dgroq4TI
Go Cannon!
That was so random that it looks like the last time I played bumper cars at Lake Quassapaug as a kid...
So kidding aside, it's the LA River, and what makes the LA River so vital in it's current form is that, well, it's kind of a natural disaster, and it has grit, and well, grit can be in short supply in Sunny La La land, but fantasy there is a business (and tongue in cheek, I will say fantasy is a business even more so up in the San Fernando Valley where the river originates, but I will leave that joke up to the adults to figure out!). So when you are too cheap to film on location like The French Connection, why not run people through the world's biggest drainage ditch to supply a little cement bottled desperation to spice up the visual, even though Paris Hilton is tweezing her dog's eyebrows a few blocks west.. it's what's called character in the land of Sun and Fun.
But I bet a few of you didn't even ever figure that was a river, ever.. a few of you figured it was just some massive public works thing in the Home from Nowhere landscape of the American industrial nightmare, and I wouldn't blame you, but a river it is.. and it used to, and upper parts of it still do, look like this:
LA River Kayakers
http://activerain.com/blogsview/3380586/kayak-down-the-los-angeles-river-
Does this photo seem like they have no association with the videos above?

What's That Stink?!: Low Sulfer Diesel.. One Small Step for Man..

Soundtrack: I always thought this song was called What´s That Stink, but it's What´s at Stake, which is somehow even more appropriate for this post:
Mighty Mighty Bosstones: What´s at Stake
If I had a version of hell as a kid, it was being stuck in the back of the family Station Wagon, the seats all taken by others, trekking down an anonymous American Interstate, in the families 1980 Diesel Station Wagon. It was the Griswalds meet something out of the horror movie Hostel. The stench from the sulfur from both our car and the surrounding trucks made me want to pass out more than once, and perhaps once or twice I did, propped up between my dad´s musty suitcases and the back window, which I used to beg to have opened from 12 feet away to the front seat for air, just to have the stench kick in from the tailpipe, curling up in the icy slipstream of what was usually a New England winter, and make me realize the true devils bargain I had struck, and that we were striking with Diesel. We had a cat named Snowball that gave up the ghost on one of these trips. We assumed it was because my older sister, also once stuck in what we called the Waaay Back with me due maybe to a family friend along (she used to use her 2 years advantage in size in any way possible to avoid this fate), clogged off his little cat box breathing holes with the necessary down jacket some winter trip, but I´m now going to chalk it up to carbon dioxide poisoning in my past the environmental innocence of the 70´s´ new found awareness (this post ifs for you, Snowball!.. sniffle...). I didn´t think much about conservation at age 5, but I sure as hell knew something wasn't right. This car, by the way, became a legendary turkey, is now on the list of ten worst cars of all times, the Oldsmobile, Buick, or GM station wagons from 1980. You see, Diesel is powerful, and needs a high compression ratio to burn (1 to 9 is typical for a gas engine, like ti was supposed to be, and for a Diesel, you start at 1 to 14 minimum, and go up from there to as high as maybe 1 to 24), especially with just a glow plug instead of a spark to make it commbust, and what GM did, since it takes about 2 years to cure the steel an engine block properly, or at least did in the technology of the day, is take a bunch of gas engines they had on hand, and just call them diesel after the country went mad for fuel efficiency in the wake of the Gas shortages during the OPEC crisis.. since they were short on appropriate ones and people were clamboring for diesel. The end result, to the endless snickers of the Click and Clack´s of the world, was that the crank shaft would literally blow off the bottom of the engine after a while...

10 worst cars of all time

There she is.. the Cutlass Cruiser.. our´s was light blue..
should have been a warning!

So diesel, you have smelled it for years unless you grew up like Romulus and Remus.. it is the power of world ground transportation, and much of our medium scale water transportation as well..

The FARC as Forest Stewards

War is a funny thing.. loaded with unintended consequences... so what happens when the world´s longest war happens in one of the World´s most beautiful countries.. well, amongst other things, a lot of preserved wilderness.
Now this is a funny argument to make, might even be controversial, but hear me now and believe me later, the FARC have been good for the ecology of Colombia. Now before this sounds like an advocacy of the FARC, let me first say that I am not even going to pretend I advocate anything about them. I don´t tend to have much patience for cafe revolutionaries. I could compliment them.. they are tough, they can be effective, and they have held out for a long time, sadly with the aid of a lot of Cocaine Money, and even some help from old Uncle Hugo next door. I could even say that most of the FARC rank and file genuinely believe in what they are doing, I can´t take that away from them, there are a lot of kids living in the jungle with good intentions, but it has been a long 50 years, and even old advocates who saw just how oligarchic Colombia was now believe that it's time to move on from this struggle. I will say in addition that things like the Valle De Cauca Assemblia Hostage Taking, and the accident though it might have been, up in Bojaya, Choco, with the Gas Cylinder Bomb, give me chills, it was brutal, but war is a funny thing, the world is a funny thing, and somehow, I am arguing, the FARC have been good for the forests.

Hope Unda' Da East Riva!? Yu serious!? Serious as a tidal rip...

When you think of NYC you actually do think of environmentalism, but it's usually along the lines of efficiency and quality of life. With it's progressive mayor for life, Michael Bloomberg (now replaced, but the impact of his 12 years of policies likely won't be undone by new Mayor DeBlasio), party notwithstanding, making dictates that are in the public interest, no matter how annoying they might have become, and it's quite settled limo liberal upper class, and just it's car free big building lifestyle, New Yorkers actually have perhaps the lowest carbon footprints in the United States, about 9 tons a piece I once read, compared to 20 for the rest of the country on average. The way New Yorkers inevitably share walls with each other during hot days and cold winter nights serves in part to make them more efficient, it's like a big Adobe Pueblo with a great public transportation system, and shows, did I mention the shows!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Pueblo_Peoples
(if the above link were perfect, i would have thrown in a subway car with photoshop, but I have forgotten how!)
But when you think of the big projects, the big ambitious stuff, you inevitably think of the vast American West, of the West Coast, places where Pick Up Truck Engineers mix with Cash Drunk Entrepreneurs and dream up harebrained schemes that somehow eventually work... these are open land projects, heartland ambitions.. people who will deny global warming until some tornado or freak weather event finally convinces them otherwise, so they throw on their Carhardts and come up with a solution on AutoCad while the kid is asleep and the horses have been fed... but never count out the romanticism of America's most ambitious city (sorry Chicago, you do go big, but you rarely go refined!) because sure enough, despite New York's, and especially Manhattan's distinctly white collar reputation, da workin' stiffs who risk a bit of slight at a cocktail party for admitting they do something tangible, create a concrete and not just intellectual product, have been up to something on the bottom of the East River.. the East Frikin' River.. can you believe dat! Get da F%$ outtta here! Right next da FDR.. drive by dere every day! up from da UN, like 50 sometin'! Across from dat frinkin' Roosevelt Island.. who da hell lives dere? And dat's like the most polluted river in the world eva! (Translation: I am having a hard time believing you. it's in the East River alongside the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive. I know the Location well. It's north of the United Nations. Approximately in the area of the streets numbered 50 to 59. The location is alongside Roosevelt Island, whose residents I have never met and have always been a mystery to me. It's Ironic because the river is alleged by New York conventional wisdom to be highly polluted.)
http://verdantpower.com/what-initiative/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-23/tidal-energy-project-in-new-york-s-east-river-wins-license.html

Remember The Ol' Hole in the Ozone Layer? How's He Doin'!?

Steady and Improving..Doctor...
Remember the Ozone Hole.. remember how scary it was.. like that guy in high school who seemed so intimidating.. what's he up to now, now that you have gotten your life together and faced some significantly bigger challenges, kind of can't wait to see him at Reunion to stare him down, ha.. Ozone Hole.. what a prick he was!