|
| Username: |
Chris Searles |
| PersonId: |
6371 |
| Created: |
Thu Oct 01, 2009 at 06:26 AM CDT |
Chris Searles's RSS Feed
 |
|
Fri Oct 19, 2012 at 00:56 PM CDT
|
|
Rolling Stones Capture the Moment, almost
The world's greatest rock band released their 100 & something-th single last week. "Doom & Gloom" tackles society's fall and the effects on modern media saturation on Mick's feelings... Who can't relate? See the video & more here: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c...
###
|
|
Discuss
:: (0
Comments)
|
|
Tue Oct 16, 2012 at 09:05 AM CDT
|
|
This digest is chock-full. On the negative side, it's time we enviros who are focused on global issues look at a new phase. The fossil fuel economy has won out over the timeline to save the world from global warming. On the positive side, maybe our new phase can mean we'll continue to come together and find new ways to create a culture of environmental awareness, sanity, and dare i say it, love. Here are some things worth sharing:
Arctic Ice in Free Fall
On a grand scale the earth is rapidly changing -- and not for our benefit. "Comparing recent melt seasons with historical records spanning more than 1,400 years shows summer Arctic sea ice in free fall." (Earth Policy Institute) The Arctic's ice melts are not only massive and unprecedented; the melting process has crossed a threshold wherein it now seems unstoppable. Some in the scientific community believe the Arctic could be ice-free as early as Summer 2016. Read Earth Policy's full report here: http://www.earth-policy.org/da... or my brief: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c...
Austin Drought Report
(Not a blog, here's some quick info:) After more than a year of being in various stages of drought, from "Dry to Extreme to Exceptional" and beyond, Austin is finally on the edge of returning to normalcy (!!). Take note, however, even after numerous torrential downpours Austin's drinking water resources (the Highland Lakes) remain way below historical averages. So some good news, some not. See the LCRA's lake level report here: http://www.lcra.org/water/cond... and the US Drought Monitor's drought report here: http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/...
How Powerful is the TransCanada Pipeline?
The fossil fuel industry is massive, hungry, rich, globally-diversified, and embedded in the future of our civilization in too many ways to list. Here's a good example. About a week ago the TransCanada folks were able to get local law enforcement to imprison a Texas grandma for "trespassing on her own land. See my brief here: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c...
Fossil Fuel Companies, "You Win!"
Was it naive of us enviros to think we could "win" on global warming? Given the omnipresence and wealth of fossil fuel industries in our lives; yesterday, today, and tomorrow, i believe it's time we start talking about how we'll live in a world where these industries continue to dominate. How will we balance the impacts? Read my blog: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c...
And Now for Something Positive
The blog above generated some great conversation when posted on LinkedIn, and inspired some new ideas. Since we can't win on our biggest issue -- stopping climate change, can we instead come together? I mean ALL of us, professionals, hippies, moms, athletes, students, civil servants, and etc. to make a 5% difference? This blog is 100% inspired by the good ideas of others in our broad community. Read my short blog here: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c...
###
|
|
There's More...
:: (0
Comments, 38 words in story)
|
|
Mon Oct 08, 2012 at 02:44 PM CDT
|
|
I'm writing lately as an environmentalist who's reckoning with our having lost on climate change. My latest blog elaborates on this and three additional points:
1) Greenhouse Gas Economy. Society is going forward with life in a fossil-fueled world for the foreseeable future, despite the scientific consensus on global warming, what's causing it, and the damage global warming will cause.
2) New Enviro Activism. I suggest we enviros start incorporating fossil fuel use projections into our vision of sustainability and transition, rather than fight against those who benefit the most from fossil fuel use. We must get to know the climate projection scenarios and start thinking of contingency plans.
3) Fossil Funds for Good. A few new ideas for enviro activists: i. We need to start defining the ecologic costs (in dollars) of various economic growth strategies here in the US, ii. We should assume, from here on out, that those who benefit most from ecologic damage will cover the costs of their damage, iii. Our new phase activism should be to share our costs information far and wide with the expectation that those responsible for the damage will cover its costs, iv. We must work to define how that "damage money" should be reinvested, so that it best serves the environment we all rely on.
To read the full blog, go here: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c...
|
|
Discuss
:: (0
Comments)
|
|
Sun Sep 16, 2012 at 00:30 PM CDT
|
We got problems, people. Big unsolvable ones, it seems. In a world where addressing global warming isn't on the popular agenda my armchair analysis concludes: the whole climate change situation is far more severe than even environmentalists are willing to acknowledge. It had to be said. So i did.
But before we start the "Now What?!" conversation, here's a no-holds-barred view on climate change and what we earthlings are up against. I hope it generates some critical thinking and conversation. Read my full blog here: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c... or just skim some selected headlines below; a short list of things NOT being talked about regarding climate science and the future of our climate:
Baby We've Lost. Emissions-wise, we've crossed all safety thresholds.
Our Future: Burn-Melt-Add Gas-Repeat. From a stored greenhouse perspective, more heat today = huge heat tomorrow.
The Cutting Edge Political Convo Ain't Realistic. Are international negotiators trying to come to terms over the wrong agreement?
Your Job Depends on Greenhouse Gasses. I couldn't work if it wasn't for fossil fuels. Do you want to give up your job?
Are We Really Counting All the Emissions? Taking into account flares, leaks, spills, and industrial off-gassing, my gut says there are far more greenhouse gasses emitted every day than what's actually being accounted for. Are we too focused on the tail-pipe?
We Don't Have a Solution. Cap & Trade type regulations haven't been able to reverse overall global warming contributions in the fearlessly democratic/socialist, anti-business "enclaves" of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. OK. So now what d'we do?
Your comments appreciated. To read the full blog, please visit: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c...
|
|
Discuss
:: (0
Comments)
|
|
Sun Sep 16, 2012 at 00:30 PM CDT
|
After a long break from blogging several things came together to motivate this piece http://chrissearles.blogspot.c... For one, the leader of the Stop-Global-Warming-Movement recently admitted, "we're losing the fight, badly and quickly." For another, I spent a good part of the summer trying to explain climate change to our guitarist. (My day job is playing drums for American songwriting treasure Alejandro Escovedo: http://alejandroescovedo.com/ We're currently touring Europe, Canada & all parts of the US.)
Here are the 5 headline points from my blog:
#1 Most Interesting Thing -- Weather Disruption. Freakish weather year-round; that's global warming in a nutshell.
#2 Most Interesting Thing -- Too Late To Stop It. Computers say we're on track to a 11F increase in global temps by 2100.
#3 Most Interesting Thing -- Economic Lock In. The world's largest financial institutions are committing to fossil fuels; if the science is true, your retirement won't be about taking it easy.
#4 Most Interesting Thing -- People. Stubborn, busy, anti-social, confused... who has time for the hard work of Democracy?
#5 Most Interesting Thing -- Shoot and a Miss. Re: winning on warming, we environmentalists have a fundamentally flawed strategy.
My best and most popular writing to date, I humbly and sincerely recommend you read this entire blog: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c...
###
|
|
Discuss
:: (0
Comments)
|
|
Wed Aug 15, 2012 at 07:40 PM CDT
|
|
Fellow Burnt Oranges,
Wanted to share this blog with you, written from "the road" with Alejandro Escovedo. It's well written and worth your 15 minutes. The piece looks at Bill McKibben's recent Rolling Stone admission, "we're losing the fight, badly and quickly," as well as my trying to explain climate change to our guitarist, from a van in Italy. (Don't try this at home.) Read "The 5 Most Interesting Things About Global Warming" here: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c... Thanks
My work on Burnt Orange Report: http://www.burntorangereport.com/user/Chris%20Searles
|
|
Discuss
:: (0
Comments)
|
|
Fri Apr 20, 2012 at 03:34 PM CDT
|
|
In 2006 i produced Austin's largest Earth Day Festival to date, "The Sustainable Shopper's Ball!". It was a grand event and an awesome team effort. The event was all dressed in pop-up tent tops, located outdoors with vendors, entertainers, speakers, food, music, activities, sculpture, lectures... Roughly 5,000 people: shopped local green businesses, learned from local green nonprofits, listened other speakers, watched jugglers and tap dancers and kid's entertainers, rocked to a solar-powered James McMurtry, walked their dogs, and more. It was six hours of inclusive, green paradise. Those of us working on the event were celebrating the dawning of a new culture, one invented by our X & Y generations and the internet, one that looked forward to the end of the G.W. Bush era, embraced the idea that global warming was urgent and actionable, and believed that the necessity of building a better world would soon win the day.
We thought light bulbs, local farmers and green architecture were most of what was needed to fix the world's enormous environmental problems. We just needed to increase enthusiasm so more people would start buying the right stuff and "preferring" a greener, sustainable world. I coined the term -- at least I thought I did because so few people seemed to understand it, "sustainable consumerism" based on the idea that consumers have more influence over business than any other force in society, and therefore, indirectly, consumers control the markets, politics, and media of our Western civilization.
So now, six years later, i ask where do we stand?
In 2006 we knew time was of the essence. We told ourselves we had just a few years before the battle to save humanity (and biology as we know it) from the impacts of a rapidly changing climate system would be lost. This kind of doomy-gloomy conversation was vindicated in a terrifying way when in November of 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11... the top professional in the world of climate science, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said,
"If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."
In this regard every influential business and politician fell short. None of the world's local, state, or national leaders stepped up to the plate or heeded the repeated calls to "act now" issued by the international climate science community. Personal politics, profit, willful & unintended ignorance, and personal fear got in the way of making 2007 our collective turning point. Fairly said, neither the leadership nor the 'public will' were there for meaningful change and creative activists like me and my team of Sustain-a-Ballers were not well enough informed or endowed to change the game. It wasn't lightbulbs and higher values we needed, it was big-scale, rapid shifts in economic policy. "Sustainable Consumerism" and all the rest was on the right track but what our planet really needed on Earth Day 2006 was a smarter, wiser perspective from the grassroots. So please allow me to share a few 2012 ideas. And allow me to first substantiate the urgency of changing the way our economy is wired.
To read the rest of this blog, please click: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c...
###
|
|
Discuss
:: (0
Comments)
|
|
Sun Apr 08, 2012 at 09:53 AM CDT
|
|
Thank God there are still no reported deaths in the DFW area after Tuesday's tornado outbreak. (I have friends there, you probably do too.) The devastation will surely take a toll on local economics, wildlife and ecosystems, however. The questions burning in my mind, how does this link to climate change? What's the history of tornadoes in the Dallas area? What size do tornadoes in this region tend to be? Are they often close to cities? What are scientists saying about the causes of yesterday's events, which threatened the lives of more than seven million Americans?
Turns out the climate science story on this is grouped under the very broad headline, "extreme weather events will increase as our climate system warms." More about that in a moment. Historically speaking, tornadoes in the Dallas area are somewhat common (see image below). Dallas County has had 75 recorded tornadoes since 1953, with the total number of fatalities at less than 20 people. (Good news.) But these tornadoes have historically been much smaller than yesterday's, with damages generally ranging from as low as $2,000 to $5 million per event. There have of course been larger moments, a string of tornadoes in 1994 looks to have caused well over $500 million in damages for instance...
All of the above info comes from TornadoHistoryProject.com, which takes its data from the NOAA's National Weather Service. I recommend checking out TornadoHistoryProject, it'll make understanding (Dallas and other cities) tornado history effortless.
As an additional perspective, LiveScience.com reported that Tuesday's tornadoes "came 12 years after a historical bout of storms that raged through Fort Worth and Arlington March 28, 2000, injuring 80 and killing two." That would be just about the worse single event on record. But April 4 2012 will prove historic in financial losses. The Red Cross was estimating at least 650 homes damaged, another 200 destroyed. Baseball sized hail ripped from the sky before the tornado arrived, damaging rooftops, automobiles, and over 100 commercial airplanes, among other things. And you've probably seen the video of 15-ton trailers at the Schneider National Trucking Company lot flying through the air like paper debris -- if not check the link below to my blog (where the video is posted; note commentators trying to make sense of what they're seeing). The video gives a good sense of what other large scale damage might have taken place -- highways, bridges, waterways, cell towers, power lines, pipelines?...
But the bigger story here might be that just a few days before Dallas's catastrophe the world's leading international panel of climate scientists issued a report saying prepare for the worst http://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_ev...
...To read the rest of this blog, see the flying trailers video and some pretty amazing photos, please visit my page: http://www.chrissearles.blogsp...
... To help victims of Dallas's disaster please visit the American Red Cross Disaster Relief or text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation: http://www.redcross.org/
|
|
Discuss
:: (0
Comments)
|
|
Tue Apr 03, 2012 at 06:44 AM CDT
|
|
I had the distinct pleasure of playing drums with Bruce Springsteen a couple of weeks ago. Austin's local paper ran a photo of the two of us over and over again during SXSW's five days (really nice). Even more amazing, the paper ran the photo again 10 days later next to a syndicated review for Bruce's new album, Wrecking Ball.
Coincidentally, that review's description of the record's overall spirit "encapsulates" some of my own most treasured values. Excerpts:
"These first years of the millennium have been extraordinarily trying, especially for a nation that had passed a quarter century in relative peace. Then came terror. Then came wars. Then came economic meltdown. And in the last we were galled to find that what had brought us to the brink of ruin was greed, corruption, mendacity and predatory practices of giant money houses and that we were now required to save them...
"It is from the heart of this disconnection, the chasm between the America that is and the America that ought to be that Springsteen issues his report... He finds depression, lamentation, and resignation... He finds anger, too... there is also defiance... There is something quintessentially American in that. One recalls Gen. McAuliffe's one-word rejection of a Nazi demand for surrender, 'Nuts!' One recalls Franklin Roosevelt's standing up to 'fear itself...'
"That is what America is -- hope and defiance in the face of challenge -- and there is something oddly patriotic in Springsteen's evocation of that in these hard times. Not the easy patriotism of Lee Greenwood's song and children waving sparklers on July 4th, but the hard and determined patriotism of those who never stay down, never accept the gap between the America that is and the one that ought to be.
"It is Springsteen's triumph to honor anger and lamentation, but also to look beyond them. And to remind us that, though hard times come and hard times go, hope and defiance still abide and sustain.
"Bring on your wrecking ball." ~ Leonard Pitts, Jr.
###
See "syndicated review" here: http://www.miamiherald.com/201...
See my short blog on playing with Bruce here: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c...
See my original post on this here: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c...
My tweets: https://twitter.com/#!/chrisse...
|
|
Discuss
:: (0
Comments)
|
|
Tue Apr 03, 2012 at 06:44 AM CDT
|
Hats off to those rare celebrities committed to living their values. Actor, director, activist Mark Ruffalo has recently formed a non-profit, WaterDefense.org http://www.waterdefense.org/ which seeks to counter the media rhetoric on natural gas hydrofracking. I learned of this watching Ruffalo do a six minute interview with Stephen Colbert last week. http://grist.org/list/mark-ruf... Ruffalo gets skewered more than once -- even loses his composure, but manages to squeeze in a few points, too:
"We have hydrofracking, tar sands, mountain top removal, deep sea drilling. All of these things destroy water. In particular, hydrofracking." ~ Ruffalo
The organization's website states,
"Less than one tenth of one percent of all the water on earth is safe and available for us to use. One in five people worldwide doesn't have safe drinking water. One in two don't have water for sanitation... America has a choice between dirty fossil fuels that poison water and clean energy that rebuilds our economy. Water Defense's mission is to make sure America makes the right choice. Water Defense works to create a world where water is safe to drink, a world where the oceans don't rise and the economy is powered by clean, sustainable sources of energy like wind, water and solar."
WaterDefense frames the energy debate around what today's fossil fuel based economy is doing to water supplies. The group focuses on educating people about this perspective and halting natural gas fracking. Re: the economics of fracking -- in the Colbert interview Ruffalo claims the US Geological Survey just revised America's natural gas forecast, stating it believes we have 20 years of supply at current consumption rates. We are apparently not "the Saudi Arabia of Natural Gas."
###
See my original post on this here: http://chrissearles.blogspot.c...
Follow my tweets: https://twitter.com/#!/chrisse...
|
|
Discuss
:: (0
Comments)
|
|
|
|
|
|
