The focus of this blog

Hi!  This blog will focus on various matters relating to the topic - sustainability.  Mostly, I'll be focusing on issues of resource sustainability, like water, energy, and so forth.  There's a veritable plethora of information on sustainability, as you likely know.  As my blog takes shape, I'll probably re-visit this description.  Come back and watch it morph.

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What is Sustainability?

To some extent, this term suffers from the same problems as does the term - natural, or, better yet, "Green."  What is natural versus what isn't natural?  It's not defined in law, and as a result, to a large extent, what it means is in the eye of the beholder.  Here are some takes on it's meaning. The project in Sustainable Management of the Presidio Graduate School starts by stating the obvious "There are many ways to measure or define sustainability."  One particularly inciteful definition is "the property of being sustainable."  The AFSC defines it thus: "Sustainability: Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."   Scripps Colleg e for Women takes a similar approach - "Sustainability: Sustainability seeks to provide the best outcomes for the human and natural environments both now and into the indefinite future."  The NADA also takes this approach...
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Coal Generated Electricity Not Banned from Oregon

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A bill (SB1547) signed into law in March '16 does not contain language banning coal-fired electricity from delivery to Oregon's retail customers.  Even so, the Oregon Global Warming Commission’s 2017 Biennial Report to the Oregon legislature (Report) erroneously reports the existence of such a ban after 2030.   It also erroneously reports that both Portland General Electric (PGE) and PacifiCorp (PAC) are prohibited from allocating to Oregon retail customers any cost or benefit from coal-fired plants.  Figures 7-9 in the Report illustrate past and future CO2 emissions by these two utilities (Fig. 7 for PAC and Fig. 8 for PGE) and the statewide CO2 emission levels (Fig. 9) assume that Oregon takes credit for lowered CO2 emissions, even though SB1547 did not address coal plant operation in any way.  Furthermore, the statute in question expressly permits PGE to continue to include costs of its portion of Coalstrip in Oregon retail rates after 2030.  The law als...
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Challenges with Solving the Climate Change Problem

The fundamental problem , I think, is that the globe is already above the CO2 concentration that is widely considered to allow for sustainability.  This makes this problem very difficult to solve politically since it requires people to change just to get back on target.  In economics terms, we have a surplus of CO2 and a shortage of carrying capacity.  This is a very different problem than if we'd be starting with a surplus of carrying capacity. Here's an analogy.  Let's say you have a bakery and another bakery is going to open.  Yet, there doesn't seem to be enough people around to support both bakeries.  What to do?  Contrast this with the situation where the same circumstances exist except one - there's demand for baked goods that's been going unmet.  Ah, very different problem.  Right now, the situation we're in with Co2 is closer to the former situation.  Whose willing to make changes in order to share the carrying capacity? ...
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