Coyote Crossing

1) In the first hour or so of the year, as Annette and I celebrated at our local gaybar-cum-Chinese restaurant,* I suggested that 2012 is the year in which we should make it legal. She agreed. We are happy. Details regarding the wedding are completely up in the air, though Los Angeles is the likeliest location.

1)a: squee.

2) At about the same time I became not-employed by the Desert Protective Council, by my choice. The DPC ate up about 1/2 my time and about 5/3 of my emotional energy, so it was a necessary decision. Nonetheless, the money that came in as a result of the job was, for the last three or four months, just enough to keep us from sliding farther into debt. I need to replace that. Therefore, the job hunt starts now. I’m accepting offers of employment either piecemeal-short-term editing and web design jobs, as well as leads for longer term payrolly kinda deals. Also, if you’ve been putting off tossing a five-spot into the ol’ PayPal jar, or buying a copy of the Zeke book, now would be an okay time for that.

3) In the meantime, I am pleased to announce that Desert Biodiversity has a website, and we are busily assembling an impressive Board of Advisors and will subsequently apply to some 501(c)3 for non-profit status. You can check out the site, sign up, and even toss some cash in toward expenses if you like. (Of course since we’re not a 501 (c)3 yet any donations are not tax-deductible. But they will be much appreciated, and help keep my current cash flow problems from stunting the organization’s growth.)

I’ll have more news on Desert Biodiversity here shortly. Even with a full-time job search I’ll still end up having more time and emotional energy now that I’ve left that job referenced up there.

Oh, and confidential to Sven DiMilo: tried to send you email. Don’t know if I have a good address for you. Ping me if you didn’t get it. Thanks.

* The gaybar-cum-Chinese restaurant is, naturally, called “Wang’s.”

3 comments on "Three Announcements"

As it turns out, I’m kind of taking a bath on offering shipping for free when people buy the Zeke book here at the cover price. Once I sat down and did the actual math, I figured out that I make a few cents on each copy that way, not including the gas for the drive to the post office.

So I’ve bumped the price up by five bucks to 22.99 to cover the cost of priority mailing a padded envelope of the correct size, which is—not at all coincidentally—4.95.

Presumably people who buy the book here are mainly interested in supporting writers, because you can get it used online for less, so this is probably a completely wise marketing strategy that won’t deter potential buyers in the slightest.

But if you were planning to buy the book at the previous price of 17.99, you have a bit of time: I’ll keep the price there until I get back from my birthday trip to Tucson, which should be January 6 or so.

Of course it’s worth noting that one Amazon reseller has a used copy in “like new” condition listed at around thirty bucks. So 23 bucks for an “IS new” book, signed by the author, turns out the be a pretty good bargain, all things considered.

2 comments on "Walking With Zeke price adjustment"

Q: Dear Jesse: My girlfriend has several children by a previous marriage. We get along well, but from time to time I find myself possessed of a desire to kill them and roast them up. I think most men do. Not only would this provide me with needed sustenance, but it would also free my girlfriend up to nurture any potential future offspring that I father, thus ensuring the survival of my genes. I think this makes perfect evolutionary sense. What’s your take?

- Deep-Thinking Hebephage

A: Whenever society screams about cannibalism, it’s probably just caught an especially alarming sight of itself in the crockpot. There are few among us who aren’t the direct descendents of those who were roasted in a fine honey glaze. Naturally I abhor the notion of killing or eating anyone without their consent, and I want to make that clear at the outset. That being said, A humanitarian diet certainly isn’t rare, and as I’ve argued previously, there’s some reason to believe that a cannibalistic orientation would have been biologically adaptive in the ancestral past. Killing and eating the young of a rival male is well-documented mammal behavior, in species ranging from Ursus arctos to the Felis domesticus that lived in my uncle’s dairy barn. Even our nearest relatives the bonobos, Pan promiscuous, have been known to kill and eat the young of others in their troop. Of course, it was a rival female in the one documented case of which I’m aware, and the killer was also a female, but this nonetheless provides support to your assertion in some unspecified way.

As you very likely live in a jurisdiction in which the kind of behavior you wish to practice is frowned upon, I would advise you to have your girlfriend hide her young in the highest, most inaccessible part of my uncle’s hayloft. Most of the kittens that grew up there survived. Though my telling you might have made that plan less effective. Thanks for writing!

Q: Dear Jesse: I spend most of my time in my basement by myself, and I’m generally just perfectly content with that arrangement. I think most men are. Every now and then, though, I feel a powerful urge to go out and find female humans. I have done this in the past by finding potential mates and explaining to them why it is in their best interests to engage in carnal relations with me. This approach, however, has been less than successful. Is there an evolutionary explanation for why they react improperly to my importuning?

—Deep-Dwelling Herb

A: Herb: Though I officially find your behavior a phenomenon to be met with merciless fury and disdain, it would seem you are on solid ground in an evolutionary sense. Consider the genus Magicicada, the well-known periodic cicadas of eastern North America. Every 13 or 17 years, depending on species, males of this species emerge from the ground and start making incredibly annoying sounds in an attempt to attract willing females.

Of course, Magicicada females also spend that long period underground and emerge at the same time. It may be in your best interests to look for female humans who share your periodic-emergence lifestyle. Joining Mensa or the Society for Creative Anachronism might do the trick.

Q: Dear Jesse: I am a woman of childbearing years with a gratifying sex life and a loving family, but I find myself fighting the urge to enslave thousands of adult females in some sort of celibate warrior caste that exists only to bring me sweet, sweet plant materials, while finding a like number of males who wish only to serve and impregnate me. I think most men do. Is this wrong?

- Deep-Packed Chirpra

A: You are, of course, describing the social structure of quite a number of species of ants, and our even closer relatives, the bees. Some psychologists have challenged the popular notion that being enslaved into armies of drones to serve a single absolute despotic ruler is uniformly negative for all in such relationships.

Q: Dear Jesse: Whenever I see a heterosexual couple making love, I kind of want to stab the man in the scrotal area and ejaculate into the wound, thus increasing my chances of passing on my genes by impregnating his mate to his detriment. I think most men do. My question is, do you have plans for Friday next?

- Derp-Hurfing Evo-Psycho

A: Traumatic insemination is widely practiced in the invertebrate world, so evolution certainly doesn’t argue against it. In most species of bedbugs, however, the traumatic insemination does not involve a male intermediary, but rather a strictly diadic pairing between male and female. In short, you should do what your conscience tells you to.

Q: Dear Jesse: I am a 45-year-old man married to a woman two years older. My spouse and I struggle against what would seem to be generations’ worth of social programming, which programming constricts each of us in this society into performing stereotyped roles, keeping each of us from truly attaining the fully realized human being we each deserve to be. My question is, does evolution really prescribe any kind of moral evaluation of our behavior? We aren’t blank slates, of course, but how do we tease out the genetic from the ingrained social strictures? Isn’t the real lesson of human history that cultural evolution produces change at a much more rapid pace than does Darwinian evolution, and that as a result we are free to guide that cultural evolution—to the extent we can—to make the society we would most like our grandchildren to live in?

—Deke Henson

A: I’m sorry, but there really is no evolutionary rationale for you to be involved with a woman in her late forties with diminishing mate value in the throes of intense intrasexual competition with potential rivals for a desirable mate. You say she’s two years older than you are? EW.

12 comments on "Dear Jesse: I Want To Eat My Stepchildren. Is This Normal?"

Individual signers can read the text of the Call To Action below, or click on the widget and read it at change.org. If you belong to an organization that might like to endorse this Call To Action — and there are already quite a few prominent organizational endorsers! — send an email to that effect to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) We’re looking for all kinds of organizations: civic groups, chambers of commerce, professional organizations, PTAs, etc, so your group doesn’t have to be a standard green organization to sign on.

We’ll be delivering the signatures to a number of different people in early 2012.  And very importantly: once you’ve signed, tell your friends. We need more signatures.

Solar Done Right Call To Action for Energy Democracy

Whereas,

We must take rapid, effective, innovative action to change the ways we generate and use energy;

Renewable energy is ubiquitous, offering a new model of energy generation that is local, democratic, and free from the abuses of a centralized monopoly;

The US government’s current renewable-energy policy and the policies of most US states push industrial solar and wind development onto public lands;

This industrial development is proposed for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of acres of our public lands—much of that acreage consisting of intact ecosystems which provide habitat for rare and endangered plants and animals, sequester carbon, and offer the chance for ecosystem adaptation to climate change;

The utility-scale solar and wind generating plants now proposed, most with footprints of several thousand acres, would transform these ecologically-rich, multiple-use lands to single use industrial facilities, in effect privatizing vast areas of public lands;

Once developed, those lands cannot be returned to their previous state after the life of a project – conversion is total and permanent, even though most such projects will generate power for only 15 to 30 years;

The thousands of miles of new transmission infrastructure necessary to carry power from remote solar and wind electric generating plants to urban demand centers drastically inflates the cost of renewable energy, while imposing its own serious environmental impacts;

The federal government has provided tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in cash grants, loans and loan guarantees for remote industrial-scale solar and wind development to many of the same corporations that have dominated the Fossil Fuel Era, created the problems renewable energy is designed to rectify, and helped hasten the recession, while states and local governments have incurred substantial costs to expedite these for-profit projects;

Efficiency upgrades and “distributed generation”—point-of-use energy generation on rooftops, in parking lots and highway medians, brownfields, and throughout the built environment—are cost-effective, efficient, clean, and democratic strategies that are quick to implement, and would serve communities, ratepayers, and taxpayers by improving local economies and adding to home values, and creating millions of local jobs;

Efficiency and distributed generation further have far less environmental impact than industrial scale solar or wind power on intact ecosystems, while making our electrical power grid far less prone to catastrophic failure;

Feed-In Tariffs (FITs) and true net metering programs, in which utilities purchase democratically produced, decentralized renewable energy at a fair price, have been proven a cost-effective way of stimulating rapid deployment of local solar and other distributed generation, while providing economic stimulus to communities rather than multinational corporations, even in cloudy countries like Germany;

The Environmental Protection Agency’s “Re-Powering America’s Lands” program has identified 15 million acres of degraded or contaminated land potentially suitable for renewable energy development, and is committed to working with renewable energy developers to remediate these lands for use as utility-scale renewable energy generation sites where large projects may be desirable.

THEREFORE, WE DEMAND:

That the Federal and state governments abandon their current path of industrialization and destruction of our public lands;

That any large-scale solar or wind installations be restricted to degraded, contaminated, or already-developed lands, including those identified by the EPA;

That Federal, state, and local governments facilitate a massive deployment of efficiency
upgrades and point-of-use solar power;

That no new large, long-distance electrical transmission projects be approved to serve remote solar or wind projects until distributed power generation and energy efficiency are maximized;

That the Federal Housing Finance Agency immediately lift its de facto freeze on property assessed clean energy (PACE) loans, which provide critical low-risk financing for efficiency upgrades and home energy retrofits;

That Federal and state funding and other incentives be made available to help states establish and expand generous Feed in Tariffs (FITs) modeled after successful programs like Germany’s, and improve net metering policies, and that Congress work to establish the proven solutions of German-style FITs and less-restrictive net metering at a national scale.
————————

Sincerely,

[Your name]

1 comment on "Please Sign the Solar Done Right Call To Action for Energy Democracy"

I’m starting to work on a new project to do pretty much what it says in the image here: to help people explore, respect and defend our irreplaceable desert biodiversity. Oddly, this is a gaping hole in the range of topics environmental groups work on. There are several groups with desert agendas, and some of them are fine indeed, but none work on all living things throughout the desert.

If you’re interested, you can sign up for the Desert Biodiversity email list using this form — if the form actually works here. If not and you’re seeing this text, I’m scurrying to fix it and edit the text RIGHT NOW.

Desert Biodiversity also has a Facebook page here and a Googleplux page here. Both are slightly sketchy at the moment but growing. They’ll grow faster if you share them and comment on them.

Finally, at some point Desert Biodiversity will ask you for money, but until we get the accounting set up if you’d like to offer a little financial and promotional support we do have T-shirts and other gear available. Check it out.

Join the Desert Biodiversity Email List:

1 comment on "Desert Biodiversity"

If you haven’t seen the amazing time-lapse video generated from footage shot by residents of the International Space Station, you should do so now. I’ve embedded it here. It’s undeniably beautiful. But there’s something about it that’s incredibly disturbing. Watch it first, then let’s talk.

What jumps out at you first? Possibly the amazing auroras, a near-solid layer in the atmosphere that fluoresces like a raver’s plastic jewelry. Or maybe it’s the flashes of lightning dancing across whole regions of the dark side of the Earth.

But I’m guessing the amazing degree to which we’ve made our mark on the night-side of our planet is in the top three. Perhaps you even picked out a place you know at night by the patterns of the lights, as I did with the area around Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto and Buffalo at time 00:20-00:21.

Twinkly lights at night can be pretty, though the objections of astronomers and others concerned about the loss of our dark skies are gaining increasing support. When you spend as much time out in the desert as I do, the tiny vestiges of dark sky become increasingly precious. One of the things I’ll miss about where we live: you can actually see more than a handful of stars in the sky from downtown.

There’s a bigger problem, though.

Light is energy. Every single artificial light you see shining from the night-time side of the earth means we are broadcasting a staggering amount of energy out into space, enough energy that the light can be seen shining brightly from 220 miles up,  which is approximately the distance between the ISS and the Earth’s surface. Imagine how powerful a light would have to be for you to see it from 220 miles away, and then imagine the energy used by continents full of those lights. To a first approximation, all of that light is generated with electrical power — though open flames here and there may add a few lumens to the total, it wouldn’t be much. Assuming figures from a couple of years ago are still accurate, half that electricity in the United States comes from burning coal, another fifth from burning natural gas, with nukes, hydro, diesel and a few other sources making up the remainder.

Those lights you see, in other words, come mainly from burning fossil fuels.

This isn’t news, really. But think about what we use those lights for: safety and security, comfort, productivity, reading at night and deterring crime and reading the street number of the house to which you’re delivering the pizza, and a thousand other things.

None of those arguably worthwhile goals are accomplished by shining light into space, but that’s what we’re doing. We want to fill our local, nighttime environments with enough light to be comfortable and secure, but aside from those lights intended to direct aircraft, we end up wasting every single photon directed skyward. That’s about 30 percent of a typical unshielded outdoor lightsource.

Tracking down the source of that glare of light being seen from the ISS is complex. There’s stationary outdoor lighting such as streetlamps, traffic signals and other such fixtures, which accounts for about eight percent of the energy used in lighting. There are household and industrial exterior lights, generally not tracked as a distinct subsection of each location’s total lighting budget. There’s glare through windows from brightly lit building interiors. There’s vehicular lighting. But just that first category — streetlights, stoplights, etc. — consumes the output of more than 15 gigawatts of electrical generating capacity in the US, which means the energy just that category of outdoor lighting wastes into space is a little more than 5 gigawatts’ worth of generating capacity. Half that mix comes from coal, which works out to 7 million tons of coal burned to illuminate the underside of the ISS as it flies over the US each year.

According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, there’s a low-tech way around this issue:

If 30 percent or more of the light from a typical outdoor source is wasted into space, as shown on the left side of the above envelope, then simply putting a reflective cover over that bulb (as seen on right) would bounce those ISS_bound photons back down onto the sidewalk where we could use them. This would mean that we could swap out that 100W bulb on left for a 30 percent dimmer one, keep our sidewalks just as well illuminated, and burn less coal and oil while keeping our night skies darker.

For perspective, that 5 gigawatts of generating capacity wasted just by stationary outdoor lights and not counting private homes’ and businesses’ outdoor lighting, fugitive indoor lighting, or lighting from vehicles? That’s about 40 times the generating capacity of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System. Not that Ivanpah will power streetlights: they go on at night when solar doesn’t work. But still. We could retire that much fossil fuel burning by killing 148,000 acres of desert, or we could put hats on streetlights and cut down their wattage a bit. And like I said, that’s not counting the 1000-watt floodlight over your neighbor’s deck that shines into your bedroom window.

So when I look at the video here, my glee at seeing aurorae in the Van Allen Belt is tempered a bit by the reminder of just how profligately we waste electrical power. If it’s such a scarce and dangerous commodity, threatening to bake our planet, so that we have to kill native deserts for industrial solar and wind, why are we flinging terawatts of it into space where we’ll never get it back?

4 comments on "Energy waste as seen by the International Space Station"

7 comments on "Though leaving the Sierra Club was wrenching,"