Two Minnesota organizations have released an important document, the Statewide Conservation and Preservation Plan. Created by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR), the new plan makes policy and research recommendations that are intended to preserve the state’s natural resources in the face of increasing demands and impacts from our society, including climate change. Carbon emission reductions are one of the important goals of the plan.

I haven’t yet had time to do more than a cursory reading of the report’s executive summary and its transportation chapter. Here are a few excerpts from the executive summary:

The Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR) funded a unique partnership among the University of Minnesota and the consulting firms of Bonestroo and CR Planning to evaluate the state’s natural resources, identify key issues affecting those resources, and make recommendations for improving and protecting them. More than 125 experts, including University scientists and public and private natural resource planners and professionals, participated in the 18-month effort. …

• The key issues for which recommendations are made in this report are:
• Land and water habitat fragmentation, degradation, loss, and conversion
• Land-use practices
• Transportation
• Energy production and use, and mercury as a toxic contaminant related to energy production

Here are the three recommendations from the Transportation chapter:

• Transportation Recommendation 1: Align transportation planning across state agencies and integrate transportation project development and review across state, regional, metropolitan and county/local transportation, land use and conservation programs.
• Transportation Recommendation 2: Reduce per capita vehicle miles of travel (VMT) through compact mixed-use development and multi- and intermodal transportation systems.
• Transportation Recommendation 3: Develop and implement sustainable transportation research, design, planning, and construction practices, regulations, and competitive incentive funding that minimize impacts on natural resources, especially habitat fragmentation and non-point source water pollution.

The report clearly deserves closer reading and the attention of state leaders. Note especially the involvement of leading state scientists and planners.

For more information, see the official press release and a Star Tribune article.

Earlier this month the Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group (MCCAG) released its final report. This group of over 50 stakeholders was formed by Governor Tim Pawlenty to assist in developing a Minnesota Climate Mitigation Action Plan (that’s a lot of capital letters). It has some impressive names on it, including Will Steger, the polar explorer and climate change activist; Prof. David Tilman of the University of Minnesota, one of the most esteemed biologists in the world; and J. Drake Hamilton of Fresh Energy, whom I heard recently give an excellent speech on climate change and our response to it. The group also has many other prominent figures representing business, labor, churches, environmental organizations, and other groups.

I’ve read the executive summary and Chapter 5: Transportation and Land Use and was encouraged by what I found. The group has outlined policies for achieving a nearly 30 percent reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2025 (with 2005 being the base year), and most of the recommendations were approved unanimously.

The public can now enter comments about the report online (deadline is midnight on Sunday, April 27), and I encourage people to do so. At the very least, you can read the executive summary before doing so, though it is not all that short at 16 pages.

It wasn’t entirely clear to me whether the report claimed that enacting the policies would provide a net savings to the state and its people. It seems the policies would save the public money rather than cost them money, judging by the discussion on page 6 of the executive summary. The report does attempt to quantify the cost of various policies. The most cost-effective measure, for example, is improved statewide building codes; that’s the no-brainer. Read the rest of this entry »

Something very encouraging is happening at my church, the United Methodist Church of Northfield, Minnesota. A group of us have formed a church “Green Team” to focus on Christian stewardship of creation.

Another label we might have chosen for the group is “Creation Care Team.” In some ways I like that better, since it connects us more to our Christian roots. For some, the word “green” has negative political connotations.

We had mentioned forming a group such as this for a while, but then rather suddenly a few weeks ago, following an adult education forum on energy usage, we decided to meet informally during and/or following the church’s Wednesday night dinners. Many of us were already attending these dinners, and child care is provided, so the setting seemed to be a natural one. Thus we began to talk about environmental issues each week.

Last Sunday, the team made a group presentation at the Sunday education forum, each taking a few minutes to address a specific topic. One person made an impressive, well-substantiated presentation on “peak oil” - the concept that a peak in oil production has been or will soon be reached. Another, an engineer, spoke on his long-standing connection to energy research, including work on solar power and innovative window designs. He said the obstacles to making significant strides in energy conservation are political rather than technological or economic. Another engineer spoke of his work on our city’s energy task force and his use of a device to monitor real-time electricity usage in his home. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been nearly a week now since the Bali climate talks ended in a last-minute agreement that involved compromise on both sides: the sides, in this case, being the United States and most of the world. After being booed and hissed, the U.S. delegation, led by the Bush administration, finally agreed to continue talks on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that would limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Here is a summary of the agreement from an excellent Dec. 16 article by New York Times reporters Thomas Fuller and Andrew C. Revkin.

The world�s faltering effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions got a new lease on life on Saturday [Dec. 16], as delegates from 187 countries agreed to negotiate a new accord over the next two years � pushing the crucial debates about United States participation into the administration of a new American president.

Many officials and environmental campaigners said American negotiators had remained obstructionist until the final hour of the two-week convention and had changed their stance only after public rebukes that included boos and hisses from other delegates.

The resulting �Bali Action Plan� contains no binding commitments, which European countries had sought and the United States fended off. The plan concludes that �deep cuts in global emissions will be required� and provides a timetable for two years of talks to shape the first formal addendum to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty since the Kyoto Protocol 10 years ago.

I recommend reading the full article for a sense of the drama of the talks and of U.S. foot-dragging regarding substantive, timely action on mitigating global warming. The U.S. was shamed into action, and in acknowledging that I feel a sense of shame about my country.

Here are some more excerpts from the article, including the description of the two-track approach that the U.S. agreed to, in which developed and nondeveloped countries would come to separate agreements on the response to climate change:

Read the rest of this entry »

This past year turned out to be a record-breaker for Arctic warming, according to scientists quoted in an article by Seth Borenstein, Associated Press science writer. The portents are not good and should embolden us to act more aggressively to curb carbon emissions.

Below are some excerpts from the article. Warning: some of the quotes from the scientists are among the most alarming that I’ve seen on the climate change issue.

Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo. Read the rest of this entry »

So much is happening now on the issue of our response to global warming. Here’s a quick overview of a few major developments:

� The United Nations Climate Change Conference is occurring in Bali, Indonesia, December 3-14. The conference will look at changes to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, including the Kyoto Protocol. Here is a description of the goals of the conference, taken from its web site:

What is needed is a breakthrough in the form of a roadmap for a future international agreement on enhanced global action to fight climate change in the period after 2012, the year the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expires. The main goal of the Bali Conference is threefold: to launch negotiations on a climate change deal for the post-2012 period, to set the agenda for these negotiations and to reach agreement on when these negotiations will have to be concluded.

A very important meeting indeed.

� The U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee approved a landmark bill that would call for a 70 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, partly through the use of a cap and trade system. (Environmentalists favor cuts of 80 to 90 percent.) The bill would need the support of ten or twelve Republicans in order to pass.

The legislation is sponsored by Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and John Warner of Virginia, the latter a Republican. Warner’s rationale for taking action, stated yesterday, is good: if we don’t take action on this, then China and India can hide behind us, saying that they don’t need to take action. See a New York Times article for more info.

Contact your senators, folks, and tell them to pass this bill. This is one of the most important issues of our times, and we can’t sit on our hands.

� Here in my state, the Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group continues to meet and has approved its first recommendations for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, I didn’t see a comprehensive list of those recommendations in the media, but the group is not scheduled to conclude until early February. See the Transportation and Land Use Technical Work Group document for more info on that topic.

Yesterday was Laity Sunday at my church, the United Methodist Church of Northfield. Three of us - myself, Ron Griffith, and Rev. Mary Keen - were asked to prepare short talks that would take no more than five minutes to read - in effect, mini-sermons. Here is what I said:

I was asked to comment on the topic of my discipleship and the care for creation, and I want to relate that to our reading, the parable of the ten lepers (Luke 17: 11-20). I take several lessons from the parable: first, it is God who makes us well, but to be completely well, to receive all of God�s gifts, we must have faith; our faith makes us well. Second, God asks us to give thanks and praise for his gifts. Third, God heals and cares for all people, even the foreigner, the stranger, in this case the Samaritan. Here as always, Jesus is an example to us; we are asked to love and care for the alien, that strange other who is also our neighbor, though we often resist seeing him or her that way.

Now I relate this to our care for God�s creation in this way: We are to give thanks and praise for creation, to make our faith in God central to our lives, and to follow the example of Jesus as healer � healer not just of our immediate neighbors, not just the members of our nation, but the people of all nations.

Now I ask, are we acting as healers today in the way we live? In many ways we are not, I believe. And here I extend our notion of care for the stranger to our care for God�s creation, which sustains all of us. The food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, these are part of creation. They sustain all of us, and to the extent that we endanger them, we endanger our neighbors; and when we care for them, we care for our neighbors. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning I read an article in the StarTribune about today being Blog Action Day, during which all bloggers are invited to address a common issue of concern - in this case, the environment. That topic comes up regularly in this blog, and I had already planned on addressing one aspect of it.

I was pleased that the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave its Peace Prize to the scientists of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore for their work on global warming. During the past year I’ve commented about the most recent IPCC reports (see posts on February 26, May 4, and May 11), which predict disastrous consequences if humanity does not take steps to mitigate global warming. Fortunately, we’re seeing more action on this issue every day. Read the rest of this entry »

My summer break from blogging went on longer than I’d planned. A week after returning from Washington and Oregon, I was in Princeton, New Jersey, working at Educational Testing Service, my former employer, for 12 days. What with visiting old friends and working, and also lacking a laptop, I was either too busy or unable to post.

What follows is a brief review of my summer travel. Read the rest of this entry »