Tainted eggs came from factory farms.

With the latest dustup over unsafe food from factory farms and the Food and Drug Administration’s recall of more than half a billion eggs possibly tainted with salmonella, the health and quality of our food is again in the news.

It’s scary that America’s industrial food system continues to fail at providing families with healthy food. But it’s reassuring that the watchdogs at the FDA are looking out for the safety of the American eater. Right?

Not so fast there, pardner. America’s food is indeed under threat, but it’s not only from big, dirty factory farms. Ironically, our food is also under threat from the federal regulators themselves, those very watchdogs who are supposed to protect us.

Big ol’ softies or jack-booted thugs?

If you ask Joel Salatin and other small farmers, those regulators are truly Janus-faced.  One face is all smiles, when it comes to Big Food. But if you’re a small local producer trying to sell less processed food to your neighbors, you’re likely to get the FDA’s stern face, as their agents strap on their holsters and get ready to raid your field of non-certified corn.

The FDA may not be as bad as the Minerals Management guys before the Gulf oil spill who liked to party down with the oil workers from BP who they were supposed to be regulating. But the FDA has shown that it enjoys being pretty cozy with agribusiness, acting against industrial producers only in the most extreme cases, such as the current egg recall. Otherwise, from GMOs to CAFOs, the FDA has shown that cares less about the consumer’s health than about the financial health of Monsanto, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland.

Read what Salatin told Mother Earth News:

I think it’s amazing that in a country which promotes the freedom to own firearms, freedom to worship and freedom of speech, we don’t have the freedom to choose our own food. If I can’t choose the proper fuel to feed my body, I won’t have energy to go shoot, preach and pray anyway. Half the alleged food in the supermarket is really dangerous to your health. In fact, if we removed all the food items in the supermarket that would not have been available before 1900, the shelves would be bare. Gone would be all the unpronounceable gobbledy-syllabic industrial additives, irradiated, GMO, cloned pseudo-food.

Regulation yes, but at the right scale

First, let’s hope that those bad eggs don’t do much harm. But then, let’s not overreact.

We must not allow the FDA to use this episode as an excuse to blame the wrong people and further hurt small producers. The tainted eggs did not come from small family farms but from big factory operations. Yes, the FDA must regulate Big Food — that should be their job. If they weren’t so cozy with industry they would have been doing it by now. Time to step to it!

But we can’t let the FDA impose more onerous one-size-fits-all regulations that put unnecessary burdens on local producers and thus make it even harder for all of us American eaters to choose the healthy, local, organic food that we want.

Good regulation is all about scale — large scale farms need lots of regulations. But the local farmers of America already have a system of quality-control in place that’s worked well for hundreds of years. It’s called customer satisfaction and reputation. Word has always gotten around a local area if some farmer’s food was good or bad. Today, with the internet, reputation can spread at lightning speed around the world.

A better prescription for downtowns, and its not a bitter pill!

Yesterday I woke up precipitously ill, with strange enough symptoms that, in a rarity for me, I went to the doctor. As a general rule I take a broadly preventative approach to health care focused mainly on diet, exercise, and the use of traditional herbs and roots, along with yoga and meditation.

I even gave birth at home using a midwife over fifteen years ago, when such a choice had even less support than it does today. Perhaps this arose from curiosity about long-standing health practices, or perhaps from something more mundane, such as a coping method after not having had insurance for most of my adult life.

All this is to say how truly unusual it is for me to go to a doctor for anything. But I schlepped out to the top quality County hospital yesterday because it is the final ace in the hole when, once a decade, I feel truly crummy. I don’t have anything against doctors, or Western medicine, generally speaking. It is fair to say that I find some of the gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, skyrocketing costs, and pencil pushing interlocutors an impediment rather than an enhancement to patient care, but who doesn’t. Be that as it may, my real gripe today is about location.

As historic downtowns look to infill empty storefronts and increase residential occupancy they often turn to the great hope of tourism. Plying their cultural organizations to the forefront, they seek market share against myriad other small towns competing for the same slice of the pie. To a greater or lesser extent, they build this out with local restaurants and the appearance of local retail. By appearance I mean that in all but the most hyper-local self manufacturing operations most “local retail” acts as a front end for the distribution of superfluous goods manufactured abroad, usually in China.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Tourists are in the market to get away from it all and finally do some spending, so from where goods originate is often of little concern to them and, if complimentary to the overall strategic positioning of the little cultural town that could, such as Staunton, means reliable sales when travelers come for enjoyment.

The hitch comes when we realize the vulnerabilities that come with this global front end outlet. Volatile world markets and volatile energy costs affect not only the traveler, but the cost of goods shipped. Struggling small retailers increasingly shuttering the doors to their tchotchke shops means less for the traveler to enjoy, less revenue for the town, fewer upgrades and services to make the place soar, and hence less of the “whole package” to sell the traveler on. And when one area starts to fail, you can bet other parts are not far behind.

So, what does this have to do with my going to the doctor? Well, I would have loved to hobble downtown yesterday to go to a doctor within walking distance of my downtown home. On peppier days I’d love to skip downtown to the dentist. I’d like a green dry cleaner and a New York size deli-scale grocer, and a working hardware store within a few blocks. Essential services, the basics, need to be more a part of any downtown revitalization because revitalization depends not just on what is imported from without–tourists–but on what grows within–the community.

This is not intended as a swipe against economic developers by any stretch. It is intended as a call to doctors and dentists, specialists, child care centers and service providers of many stripes to also consider yourself a part of the new urbanist entrepreneurial class. You don’t need to think that the first route to success is hanging your shingle on a strip mall with adequate parking. The walking resident wants you!

To truly revitalize small downtowns means first of all to strengthen the community enough to support a broad range of products and services within the local economy. Doctors, as much as anyone enjoying small town amenities want to be able to walk to work, to have their kids walk to school. People working and living downtown want to be able to get to appointments without having to slog out the car and fight the roadways in between meetings or other activities.

The point here is to think strategically about transition culture in such a way that the local economy can somewhat inoculate itself against a declining global and national economy by girding up its core infrastructure from within, in addition to orienting it outward. Magic wands and wishful thinking wont move someone to travel from another town to our town to indulge in its cultural pleasures. That “sell” takes a vast convergence of powerfully positioned marketing undergirded by a web of connections and relationships, collaborations, partnerships, and the individual efforts of given organizations. This can result in great successes, though it almost always rests on significant vulnerabilities. For small towns, and the long arc of small town success, dependency on a stream of outside revenue acts only as a counterweight to what is built from within.

That’s where small town culture and big city life differ greatly. Cities have their own vulnerabilities, of course, but diversity acts as a bulwark against the more immediate exposures that threaten small towns. Here’s where job seekers and prospectors can find their niche.

As urban escapees increasingly seek to downshift toward more localized economies, they can take a page from small town life by getting involved in local government, industry boards, citizen alliances, and independent groups. All these offer avenues to help shape the small town using proven elements from larger cities, such as dense downtown buildouts that support multiple fronts in the viability game. It also meets the crucial (read de rigeur) X factor in small town culture–living where you work and participating in the life of the community.

Part of this involves agitating for fair pricing on the part of owners–a cute town with too many empty storefronts should be lowering rents or negotiating pricing structures that match mutually beneficial performance indexes. Indeed, City government can even penalize absentee landlords with unfilled space through fee structures that motivate renting if its citizens support such a plan.

The bottom line is that you don’t have to think you need $300k in import inventory and a risk the size of Texas to become a relocated entrepreneur. There are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of empty storefronts across the country just waiting to be filled by emerging entrepreneurs offering an array of products and services, including small scale local manufacturing. They key is to find a truly necessary niche, often found in our traditional services, and fill it. The other piece is getting involved to shape the community you want to live in and be a part of building its resiliency and strength.

The Mitsubishi Stubby..no, no, I'm kidding, the Mitsubishi i MiEV. Tee hee...

In surprising news out of the White House, The Washington Post reports today that President Obama targeted $2.4 billion for electric car investments in the form of domestic battery manufacturing. Though the article notes that electric car and battery production currently exceeds consumer demand, and will for the next several years, industry insiders believe future growth will eventually meet demand, putting the U.S. in a good position to compete for a share of the electric car market going forward.

Businessman and former Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary candidate Terry McCauliffe believes the same thing, hitching his fortune to the MyCar brand in a bid to enter the market and, if possible, bring jobs to Virginia, or another more business-friendly state if he meets opposition here.

But hidden problems shadow both plans.

On the face of it, a fleet of electric cars may seem greener than standard cars, which emit more pollution. However, coal, the dirtiest source of energy in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, makes up roughly half of all U.S. electricity consumption. It stands to reason then that the electric car hides a dirty secret behind the scenes. In the end, a fleet of coal-fueled electric cars and a fleet of petroleum-fueled combustion engines may shake out roughly the same for their essential dependency on fossil fuel use.

The bigger problem, however, is the myriad other infrastructural pieces undergirding the individual auto paradigm and its unsustainability across several fronts. For too long this blind spot has kept both the government and Americans in general from addressing broader elements in resource use and depletion while perpetuating the illusion that personal cars should remain our central transportation fixture.

Too often an analysis of automobile fuel use remains solely focused on the end user, the driver. When the car is driven, it uses (depletes) fossil fuels and emits troubling pollution (creating a host of externalized costs).

But we have to remember how resource-intensive car manufacturing is in the first place. Car making requires fuel to fashion its parts from raw materials–often petroleum in the form of plastics–and in fuel used to run the plant. Finished cars are shipped, often from across the globe, finally to end up trucked to a final destination where it sits on paved lots or under 24-hour a day spotlights in the showroom. All of this uses fossil fuels, and plenty of it.

And that’s just production. Paving and maintaining the miles of byways, roads, and interstates that make up the lion’s share of the U.S. transportation network eats up enormous resources, relies heavily on petroleum-based products, commandeers land, and, as impervious surface, creates compound pollution conditions for waterways and land in concentrated runoff.

In the face of finite resources, this simply isn’t a workable long term model.

Now, some may maintain that government investment in electric cars serves multiple fronts, including the transition model. Here, they might argue, a _slightly_ cleaner end-use product helps the massive scale auto industry lick some of its wounds, giving auto workers continued work, bringing others back onto the job, while manufacturing a more palatable product for a consumer base increasingly demanding green, more or less green, (or the appearance of green) solutions.

Supporters may also argue that investing in electric cars merely diversifies broader transportation infrastructure strategy—that electric cars do not have to be an either/or as _against_ investment in rail. The case may have some merit when placed in this political and economic context. Such a plan may offer a realistic and temporary measure, though it does so in the face of a longer term and more intractable predicament.

The case has less merit, however, when analyzed within the broader context of resource use and depletion and issues of sustainability. I’m not talking about sustainability as green jargon. This is a business and national security issue as much if not more than consumer demands within changing cultural trends.

To shift in response to resource depletion, to build out vast new infrastructure, calls for decades of planning, manufacture, and deployment, all of which is dependent for its success on the use of existing _nonrenewable_ fossil fuels to supply the needed resources and energy for development. By decades we might actually mean a quarter to a half century. With that in mind, any temporary effort that eats up money, time, attention, and nonrenewable supply becomes a diversion with a measurably negative impact on the development of the new paradigm.

Anyway we cut it, whatever high ride Americans enjoyed with the auto industry, the personal car has a dim future. Whether the impact of this hits in five years or forty-five years, shifting is not something we can wait to do. In an economic crunch, when state and federal revenue, along with private investment, needs to be targeted for the greatest gains, the new model of thinking must include long-term strategy with conservation as its central feature. Conservation, as regards transportation, naturally suggests a shift to rail for both cargo and passengers. Personal autos out, mass transit in.

The cult film Who Killed The Electric Car may arouse sympathy for a cleaner end-burning solution for cars, but it still falls within the road-tripping, wind-in-my-hair, check-my-own-ride auto culture, with all its attendant costs and burdens for society.

At this point, when tight dollars are being dispensed for new transportation projects, investment in rail should be our primary target.

But its just a few bucks..

We in America tend to reference gigantic sums of money like its nothing–”…oh, $2.4 billion here, a couple, three trillion bucks there.” Taking this a step further, if we pit a coupla’ billion against other federal allocations in a hyper-ballooned federal budget, yeah, it doesn’t seem like much to throw a bone to battery makers. In that light, my picking on the electric car looks kind of petty. Besides, batter R & D may lead to other applications for clean energy, so it may be worth it beyond the electric car.

Alth0ugh I still believe that the larger context of automobile production and the attendant infrastructure to support it is not only unsustainable, but actually dying before our eyes, still, worse culprits exist than the electric car with its paltry $2.4 billion in federal backing.

Hell, the military industrial complex, with its focus on excessive centralized security and oil wars, most of which are using up nearly the same amount of fuel to secure access to new oil fields than they will win if those oil fields are secured, are getting far more in federal backing than an electric car or battery factory could hope for in its wildest, most surreal dreams. And, outrageous subsidies to oil, coal, and nuclear power in the United States, from which we all benefit, prop up an illusory economy built on essentially the same house of cards that recently brought down the Wall Street double-dealers. To this, $2.4 billion is like a millionaire flipping a quarter at a panhandler. Its nothing!

For that, forgive me electric car market segment; I don’t mean to be making you the boogey-man here. Far more egregious instances of poor planning, waste, expediency, and industry coddling hold our nation hostage, standing to blight America’s long term arc of success. I hardly think $2.4 billion for you will bring down the Republic.

Nonetheless, there are times when a meandering form of political will and viability allow for a more casual, even touchy-feely fvision, decision making, and action. But, if as many analysts claim, we’re at peak oil now, or roughly  will be very soon, the down side of the slope, even if it gives us say, 30 years that look much like the last 30 years, when seen through the lens of greater global competition, rising prices, and limited access, no longer allows for such a laissez faire mood. In that case, true, we’re on a war footing, but not necessarily one where our first battle plan is balls out, guns-a-blazing.

True tacticians evaluate broad context and respond accordingly. One day a reckoning will come. We will either plan for it, or we wont. I hate to think though, that the path of negligence, in the face of plain geologic fact, became the fate of the nation I love so dearly.

We can do better. So let’s.

Rob Hopkins' The Transition Handbook is available for sale online, or locally, at The Sacred Circle.

Funny to finally be tackling the question, What is Transition? after having been a part of this worldwide movement since last December, officially so since Transition Staunton Augusta became the 61st US group this past March.

In part because much of the work we do is self-evident in its intent, and covered in our About Us page, we did not feel a pressing need to remark on the more sweeping historic factors driving the imperatives behind the transition movement.

But consistently being a part of this movement, researching more and more, getting involved and talking to others both locally and in the online community, has now compelled us to address those factors in helping our own community learn more about why we’re doing this, and why we’re doing this now.

The Transition Movement, begun by a permaculture teacher, Rob Hopkins, who is also a writer and profoundly gifted community organizer, takes as its starting point a response to the energy crisis known as “peak oil“.

Essentially a technical term, peak oil refers to the highest point on the bell curve of oil extraction, meaning that point when we’re pumping more of the stuff out of the ground than we ever will again. Peak oil happens not only in individual wells, when the max output occurs and then the rest of the well basically empties out, but also in individual oil fields, when the max comes out of the whole field and then supply goes downhill from there. Similarly this occurs in whole regions, say the United States for example, which, in spite of what the Sarah Palins and Rush Limbaughs of the world would have you believe,  hit the peak of its production in the 1970s. Peak oil also refers to worldwide peak oil–that point when we’re pumping the most out that we possibly can on a global scale, and then after that, we’re on the downward resource slope, never again able to get as much oil out as we once did. Oil is a finite, nonrenewable resource after all. You can’t pump the same well twice.

Add to this peak an increasing worldwide competition for oil due to its nearly magical exponential power output, and we have the twin problems of increasing demand and decreasing supply. Oil is so “magical” in fact, that, however much we must embrace clean energy, nothing green will ever take the place of oil.

That’s the short story of peak oil on what is already becoming too long of a post. You can read more about it in books such as Richard Heinburg’s The Party’s Over and Peak Everything, James Howard Kustler’s The Long Emergency, and John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent, to name a few of my favorites (and the most readable).

Suffice it to say that while peak oil is an undeniable geologic fact its not a topic that government and “leaders” have the stomach for, particularly as they remain beholden to business interests rather than exhibiting the vision and action necessary for the long term arc of success in the broader economic organization of societies. Similarly, the main stream media has better things to talk about, such as Lindsay Lohan’s recent court-ordered  jail time, the merits of Lady Gaga, and LeBron James’ relocation choices.

In the end, the Transition movement is about people who aren’t waiting for government to step up to the plate, for business to “self-correct” in response to market imperatives, or for broadcast media to get the word out about a coming shift in society’s most basic common resource denominator–energy–and the way this affects EVERY aspect of how we live and how we will live going forward.

The Transition movement offers one response to the crisis of peak oil, and is among the most positive responses in that its key feature rests on the involvement of ordinary citizens to strengthen their communities through shared ideas, plans, and actions that relocalize their areas for resilience. By that I mean to address local economy, food, production and manufacturing, transportation issues, water quality and many other of the infrastructural elements undergirding localities. The model could in fact broaden to include states, regions, countries, and the globe, but for now its defining feature is the local nature of the project as expressed in citizen groups throughout the world.

Hopkins built a model for nurturing and developing local involvement, and his founding group, Transition Town Totnes, released a comprehensive Energy Descent Plan governing their local infrastructure that could be a model for localities worldwide. It is our aim to engage the Staunton-Augusta community to produce one for our area. An energy descent plan is considered necessary to transition groups because resource depletion requires a cogent response. If we’re used to living one way, utterly dependent on a fuel source, a sole crop, or any other central infrastructural feature, its absence requires that we adapt to a new reality and craft a workable response so that we can preserve life and social stability.

There’s ten million other things that can be said about peak oil and the Transition Town response model, but this is just one blog entry designed to deepen the conversation at the local level and broaden transition outreach where we can.

One thing worth addressing is the sense of looming catastrophe and social collapse that some in the peak oil movement believe is immanent. That view is not one taken by the Transition movement, which looks to respond with positive local solutions to the predicament of peak oil.

There is no getting around, however, that a permanent decline in a finite resource suggests that the paradigm under which industrial society has developed stands to change. At Transition Staunton Augusta, we’re not in the crystal ball business. Although the transition model engages with scenario planning, looking at a variety of responses and their degree of effectiveness, it does not purport to entirely know the future. In the face of positive planning, there may yet be (and likely will be) mini scenarios that aren’t pretty, whether in the form of disease, safety and security threats, scarcity, and perhaps worse. There are also overly optimistic responses not grounded in physical reality, such as technology saving us with its ever-renewing discoveries. This response fails to acknowledge advanced technology’s complete dependence on fossil fuels, and the role of fossil fuels in the deployment of vast new infrastructure for a giant global population.

In our group we aim to take the middle way approach, planning for the best, preparing for the worst. This is a must do in response to an entire shift of the economic and energy paradigm as we know it today. And while this may take a century or more to fully play out, precipitating events along that trajectory suggest that we can’t wait to begin planning the response. If we look at how vast our given infrastructure is now, in its current state, it does not take much intelligence or insight to recognize that a comprehensive response will take time–the idea that things shift on a dime is a foolish approach.

I hope this small primer helps folks in the Staunton Augusta area (and others reading this online) to begin to think about the pervasive quality of energy in our lives, and the essentially hidden aspect of its role in how we live now, and how we are likely to live going forward. I view this as an opportunity, not only for humanity but frankly, for business.

In my view peak oil is the most serious crisis modern civilization has ever faced, the extent of which will touch all of our lives and, even more, the lives of our descendents. I take the transition to the next paradigm as a moral imperative calling us to engage as stewards, responsible, caring, and committed to the best that can be realized in our human relationships as social creatures at a specific time in history. This is what Transition is about, building the resilience that allows us to advance humanity in a manner that goes beyond current views of progress, and into the unknown, with open hearts and minds, willing hands, individual initiative, and community strength. I hope you’ll join us on this journey.

Tom Hylton of Save Our Land, Save Our Towns

Save Our Land, Save Our Towns, the second film in the summer season of our Local Motion Film Series, plays at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, July 15, in the Mockingbird Restaurant Roots Music Hall and is co-sponsored by Staunton Green 2020 and the Valley Conservation Council (VCC). This warm-hearted yet provocative documentary examines the causes and effects of — and then remedies for — suburban sprawl.

Vibrant towns or sprawl?

Americans are frustrated with traffic congestion, angry about the loss of open space, and perplexed by the decline of America’s cities. Many think sprawl is inevitable. But it’s not. Small town newsman (and Pulitzer Prize winner) Tom Hylton explores how America can save its cities, towns, and countryside in this one-hour film.

Save Our Land, Save Our Towns is a story of hope — logical reasons why America’s towns can be rebuilt and its countryside preserved from strip malls and subdivisions. The program is designed to be engaging and personal — a voyage of discovery, rather than a mere recitation of facts, with moments of revelation, humor and emotion.

Enter the Conversation

After the film, during the community conversation portion of our evening, Sara Hollberg of the VCC and Bill Frazier of Frazier Associates will take questions.

The film is free. To have dinner first, call 540.213.8777 for reservations in Mockingbird’s Roots Music Hall.

The Rest of the Series

Our other showings will be held on the third Thursday of each month:

August 19 — A Crude Awakening, Life After the Oil Crash
September 16 – The Green House; Design It. Build It. Live It.

All showings begin at 7pm at the Mockingbird Restaurant at 123 W. Beverley Street in downtown Staunton. Doors open at 5:30pm for dinner — Come enjoy local food and brews with great conversation.

We hope to see you there!

Thomas Jeferson's lovely Rotunda on the UVA campus.

A couple of days ago I suffered from a miserable funk. Why? Because it’s so easy to become discourged by what’s not happening in response to the looming energy crisis brought about by peak oil.

Indeed, we should have moved faster and long before now to create the new energy economy. It is clearly an abdication of leadership at the highest levels along with short-sighted corporate dominance of government that has lead to a situation where, no matter what we do now, it will be too little, too late. For this we will all pay the price in a rough and rude awakening to a markedly depressed lifestyle going forward. Just you wait and see.

That said, we still have to give credit to those individuals like Delegate David Toscano, localities such as Charlottesville, and programs like LEAP that point the way toward change in a way that is both manageable and palatable given larger social, economic, and cultural resistance to change.

That’s why I found yesterday’s program Energy: Plugging the Leaks, in Charlottesville City Council chambers, so inspiring. The seminar included four guest panelists representing industry, government, and the non-profit sectors . The panelists, who spoke both on conservation measures and energy programs for those in need, lifted me out of a mercurially disparaging view and, while not prompting euphoria, at least brought me back to focusing on gains where gains can be made.

Some of the highlights of the forum included:

Virginia Dominion Power’s business and consumer conservation measures in the form of its Smart Cooling program, and renewable incentives through its net metering initiatives, showcased in an SPCA solar experiment.

Virginia’s Fuel Assistance Program was represented, with coverage of heating and cooling aid along with crisis measures. While these programs remain crucial for low income individuals, it was a telling moment when manager Kathryne Presson noted significant program budget reductions enacted by the General Assembly. What was once assistance up to roughly $450 a season for cooling has now capped at $100. That’s a hefty cut! As visionary alternative energy guru Van Jones argues, the likelihood that a kind of Eco-Apartheid will arise with energy scarcity is revealed in just this kind of budgetary reduction.

Now, we can argue the validity of compulsory cooling for all consumers, including those without the ability to pay, and the unsustainability of that in today’s economy—and the case will have merit. But that does not change the impact of an energy-haves versus energy-have-nots scenario and the real world impact that creates. I think we’re seeing the beginning of this and, at the very least, it should give us pause to consider myriad scenarios that a tightening energy market and a declining economy provoke.

A second program, GAP (the Gas Assistance Program) unique to Charlottesville, offers additional help to those in need throughout the year. All of its donor funding exclusively goes to provide gas assistance to needy individuals and families, while its administrative function is funded by City revenue as part of the City-owned gas utility.

Finally, LEAP, the Local Energy Alliance Program, rolled out a suite of incentives, backed by 800,000 in stimulus funding garnered through the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance, to spur residents of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District toward conservation measures in their homes. In addition to $250 in home energy audit rebates, and $1000 in rebates for retrofits, LEAP also launched a $10k home energy makeover contest for area residents. LEAP also provides a comprehensive program from start to follow-up designed to move homes toward 20% more efficiency. To make it pay, LEAP hooks participants up with other local, state, and federal incentives, a tactic they hope will help residents move past any resistance they might have to taking the plunge toward efficiency measures.

Net result? For Charlottesville the effort to explain more directly and in one place and time multiple fronts where the City and its partners are taking on conservation, worked well. The event, filmed live, will be broadcast on local public access TV Channel 10 throughout the fall.

For me it was a helpful reminder that, absent revolution, social change tends to be glacial at best. While I expect there to be precipitating events that will change this in the future, and not always for the better, at least in the meantime there are many people both locally and in the wider world who choose the path of positive change over disgruntled cynicism, enacting measures, however small, to begin the change of a power down.

That’s inspiring.

It's riskier now NOT to invest in clean energy.

Today a Washington Post writer assailed President Obama’s call for clean energy as unrealistic, arguing that there is no merit in investing in unproven technology.

While the beneifts of clean energy are largely overstated in relation to what fossil fuels provide, to brush them aside wholesale reveals a worse ignorance. I responded to Ramesh Ponnuru’s post on his blog Right Matters today, lambasting his myopic view while laying out a plan of action going forward. What follows is the text of my post on washingtonpost.com with some slight edits added:

While it might make sense to use a cheap, readily available fuel source, in spite of its myriad problems (pollution, externalized costs, environmental disasters that kill off livelihoods, ecosystems, and food sources) that source is still only as good as it is available.

Perhaps Ponnuru missed a key moment in Obama’s speech. OIL IS A FINITE RESOURCE. Anyone living today should know this (mandatory if they are providing commentary) and frame all of their analysis accordingly, particularly when we have an exponentially growing global population all chomping at the bit to get a slice of the cheap energy pie.

Does Mr. Ponnuru believe that continuing to consume a finite resource at an increasing rate is going to lead to some…miracle down the line? That’s an improbable approach at best, a feckless and irresponsible response at worst.

To transition to the clean energy economy we first must conserve, recognizing that elements of conservation will lead to (areas of) economic contraction. But the notion of endless economic growth was always a fool’s game (or an evil geniuses’, if we count Wall Street playing by its own negative rules).

After conservation, we must invest in transportation and clean energy. First, a nationwide rail infrastructure including freight, passenger, and local light rail. This is non-negotiable if we think we are going to move goods and people in the future. We also need an updated smart grid, and more distributed power to localize energy, adding to our national and local security. Finally, our building projects must be dense new urbanism, infilling our cities and towns with development, and the cultivation of green belts around those cities to provide food without it having to travel long distances.

Given the fact that a Post commentator and moderator seems to either be wildly uninformed or willing to misinform his readers, perhaps the first step requires more than admitting our addiction to oil, but rather, coming to terms with its finite nature. Coming to grips with what we’re facing is key. Now, perhaps the right will choose to squander our future by playing political ball over this as they have with climate change. But peak oil and its ramifications are far more immediately evident than climate change is at this stage. No amount of wishing will change that oil is a finite resource.

We have to face that we will not be living the Jetsons life down the line, nor even a life like we live now. We will be scaling back, but we can do it in a smart way. If we fail to plan, we will plan to fail.

Yet, there is a way in the short term to have a boom amidst this–and that is when we change the nature of commodities and products, when we research, develop, and implement new solutions, we roll out new production, we naturally create jobs, and demand for new products and infrastructure. That is a stimulator.

Anyone who refuses to believe in the declining fossil fuels future is signing the death warrant on our fate. It is time for the U.S. to come together, get past the petty bickering of the past 20 years and make this transition. The fate of our nation hangs in the balance.

If Obama failed at anything on Tuesday night it was in NOT impressing enough how this is a pivotal moment, with irreversibly dire consequences if we fail to act. Of course, folks don’t want to hear that, and political strategists advise against saying it. But it’s true anyway.

Developing rail offers key to recovery.

News that China leads the world in high speed train production and railway deployment inspires envy. While the U.S. has dedicated some funds to reinvigorating rail, the amount remains paltry in comparison to China’s huge layout, and small in relation to our continued investment in roadway infrastructure.

Whatever situation we may find ourselves in now relative to current rail beds and railway infrastructure matters little. The preconditions should not inhibit America, Virginia, or localities from taking the initiative now to move forward on rail projects both large and small. Crafting legislation, proposing incentives, and evaluating the network arteries for rail offer significant first steps. From there, lay, baby, lay…tracks that is. Start manufacturing shops in the most out-of-work areas to make needed parts. Get this engine running.

The unflinching reality of Peak Oil and its myriad implications demand that we look closely at the architecture of our future lives. Done right, trains allow communities and nations to move goods and people cheaply and efficiently. Just as we have carved a constitution with the noblest aims, expanded westward, overcome slavery and segregation, built a national highway system, sent a man to the moon, and drilled from semi-submersibles three miles into the earth, we can also envision a nationwide train grid, manufacture its parts, and deploy its infrastucture all while crafting the single largest jobs creation initiative in history. If ever there was a way out of our collective financial morass, this is it, and right on time.

NASA's Jim Hansen has a better plan than cap-and-trade.

The Obama Adminstration and its allies in Congress think that cap-and-trade will help us transition towards clean energy and conservation by making fossil fuels more expensive.

They’re right about the second part — oil and coal will become more expensive under this scheme.

But NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen,who’s become an outspoken policy advocate, says that what he calls cap-and-tax won’t help get the economy off of fossil fuels.

Instead, as they become more expensive, the public will just have no choice but to pay more, because cap-and-trade will not encourage alternatives. All the extra cost generated will simply go into the pockets of Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs that developed cap-and-trade in the first place.

Hansen has a solution that’s simple and that should appeal to conservatives and liberals alike: impose a fee on all fossil fuels at the wellhead and then distribute the proceeds as direct payments to all legal U.S. residents.

Washington could define a path that would lead the world toward a clean energy future. And, incidentally, it would solve the climate problem – without requiring anyone to agree that there even is a climate problem.

Hansen outlines his idea in an essay sent to his email list where he also throws some sharp barbs at the New York Times.