Citizens Climate lobby Roscommon/Crawford Chapter

  Roscommon/Crawford Chapter Fires, Floods, and Sick People Many of the top news stories in the United States over the past several weeks have been about weather-related catastrophes that owe their intensity to climate change. The recent Hurricane Laura capped a record 13 named storms that struck the southern coast of the US. Texas and Louisiana coasts suffered as Laura brought 150 mile/hour winds, the highest ever recorded in Louisiana. The winds and the related storm surges caused home and building damage and loss of municipal services leaving more than ½ million customers without power in Texas and Louisiana. The total costs for clean-up are not yet clear but one observer gave a hint of the problem, “there aren’t enough roofers in Louisiana to fix all the roofs.” As I write this, a new Hurricane to be known as Sally, is now forming in the over-warm waters of the gulf coast. Hang on. While Laura’s winds were raging, the hurricane brought flooding from the resulting storm su...

                                                                Roscommon/Crawford Chapter  Roscommon County Takes 1 st Step in Going Green   Roscommon County took a giant step forward in going green when the Houghton Lake Sewer Authority (HLSA) implemented the use of a large solar array to provide power for its pumps at the Denton Township Wastewater Treatment Irrigation Site. The solar panels began powering the pumps on July 21 at the completion of a 2-year project to study the feasibility of using the sun’s energy to   provide power for the treatment plant pumps used in converting septage into clean water. The new Denton system is the County’s only large-scale commercial solar array in operation, and it is also the first and only use of a solar array anywhere in Michigan de...

                                                                                                                       Roscommon/Crawford Chapter   If you mention climate change to most people, they immediately think of emissions from electricity generation as the chief culprit provoking adverse weather and other negative climate change effects. It was the correct assumption until data was tabulated in 2018 that showed transportation had suddenly become the largest source of carbon pollution in the United States at the end of 2017. The reason for this...

How We Got Here What’da We Do Next   Regular readers of this blog know that the cause of global warming and the resultant climate change is human-induced air pollution caused by burning coal, oil, and gas. Over time, we humans have demanded more and more energy to fuel the industrial revolution leading to more and more air pollution. The concentration of C02 has been carefully measured in our atmosphere by sophisticated techniques and scientists have proven that the increase is the cause for the greenhouse effect that is beginning to cripple our earth. The graph below shows in stark reality the increasing CO2 emissions from 1900 till today, by listing the number of giga tons ( giga is one billion tons) of CO2 released into the atmosphere. The graph ends with an estimation of the effect for the remainder of 2020. Although I have not included it to save space, a separate graph showing the average temperature of the earth exactly follows the graph below, just as you would expe...

Roscommon/Crawford Chapter What’s Happening  Regular readers of this blog will remember that Citizens Climate Lobby has developed and supported a proposal to mitigate climate change by enacting a national tax on fossil fuels. Some people refer to the idea of taxing fossil fuels as a carbon tax, although the formal name for Ccl’s proposal is Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. The idea was first introduced in the US House of Representatives and is now known as House Bill 763 as it awaits action from the full House and Senate. Although the bill is widely lauded, action by both the House and Senate has been slow in coming since many believe the administration would surely veto the proposal if it were passed by Congress. What’s happening now is that our politicians are finally beginning to come to their senses in considering solutions for climate change. It seems that nearly everyone in both the House and Senate, regardless of political party, concurs that a...

Roscommon/Crawford Chapter Bhutan In a recent blog, we discussed the book, The Future We Choose , which spoke of opportunities for mitigating climate change . This blog suggests a model that we might emulate as we find our way forward from our nation’s current problems. The model is a most unlikely one, it comes from a small nation in the far east with a king. You may be shocked at their wisdom.  Bhutan, officially known as the Kingdom of Bhutan, is a landlocked country in South Asia. Located in the Eastern Himalayas, it is situated on the ancient Silk Road between Tibet, India and China. A small nation, Bhutan reports a total population of just under a million people with a land mass of 14, 824 square miles (less than ½ the size of lower Michigan). In 2008, Bhutan transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy and promptly created their National Assembly, a bicameral parliament of the Bhutanese democracy. For the last few years, Bhutan has...

      Roscommon/Crawford Chapter Another Way to Fix the Climate Problem We all know about the carbon cycle and how plants take in carbon dioxide and give off life-giving oxygen used by people and animals. Plants are essential for our world to exist as climate scientists have proven over the last 50 years. Seen in this light, the problem of climate change is that we have too many people on earth demanding energy (from burning fossil fuels) and too few plants taking in enough carbon dioxide. As result, our atmosphere has been gradually filling up with greenhouse gases. In trying to find solutions to the climate problem, folks have been talking about sequestration of carbon (a fancy term meaning taking in carbon dioxide) by whatever means possible, up to and including large machines powered by electricity to suck in air and capture the carbon/greenhouse gases. Such a large and complicated answer for a simple problem – why not let plants do the job? C...