Rob's Ramblings

Although I use a bike for most of my transportation I am a member of a car cooperative because there are still times when I think I need a car. For example when one has to move homes. Or maybe not.... Last weekend myself and seven other cyclists with bike trailers moved a friend across the city. photo by Guy Vera

I came across an interesting article that points out that hydroelectric dams may not be as "green" as we have thought in the past. It also has implications for calculating the ghg offsets for those of us who are installing other forms of renewable energy systems in BC where much of our power comes from hydro-electric dams.

Here are my comments for a public hearing at Vancouer City Hall: We who live in Vancouver often like to consider ourselves world leaders when it comes to environmental sustainability. Will the new South East False Creek development be a world leader in environmental sustainability? There is no doubt that the planners and others that worked on this project have put a lot of hard work into it. It will undoubtedly be one of the most sustainable neighborhoods in the Lower Mainland and British Columbia. But will it be the a world leader? I have concerns that it may not be. An example of a world class environmentally sustainable community being planned is Mata de Sesimbra in Portugal. It is part of the One World Living project. There are two areas that I would like to emphasize when looking at the sustainability of SE False Creek. The first is transportation. I think a large portion (if not all) of the community should be car-free. I know this sounds like a radical idea but in a...

One of the organizations I am very busy with right now is the Vancouver Renewable Energy Cooperative . Myself and three other people began this project several months ago as an experiment in democratic economics, community based financing and sustainable energy production. The website has been down but now it is back up (this post is part of my attempts to get it back in Google).

I have been reading a little about the Word Social Forum specifically and Brazil generally. And this got me thinking about the future of economics and communities. Or at least what the future should be. I think that we need to do away with the idea that we need some monolithic “ism.” We need to put both communism (authoritarian socialism) and capitalism in the history bin. And embrace the many wonderful alternatives that are already being developed. Things the like: The Open Source model (currently used for software development perhaps useful elsewhere) and the related ideas of a Creative Commons The Community Supported Agriculture model Cooperatives and Credit Unions Collectives The Emili-Romagna region in Italy Local Living Economies (David Korten's ideas and the BALLE movement) Microcredit Social entrepreneurship (Ashoka) ParEcon

Feeling guilty about taking a airplane flight to Calgary last week, I decided to calculate my total green house gas emissions for the past year. There is a good calculator at: http://www.climcalc.net/ . I came up with total emissions of 3.3 tonnes per year. Well below the Canadian personal average of around 6 tonnes but I probably could do better.

I have been thinking more about TransLink 's decision last week to approve the RAV line . Environmental concerns are often cited as one of the main reasons to support the new rapid transit project. And certainly any project that reduces low occupancy vehicular traffic does have some environmental benefits. But if one is to judge the true environmental impacts of a mega-project we must look at more than just the changes people will make in their transportation choices. What about the recourses that will be consumed constructing the tunnels and the elevated track? A surface LRT line would have consumed fewer resources during construction, and better utilized existing infrastructure. This type of narrow thinking sometimes occurs when we look at solutions to environmental problems. Often technological options are seen as the best or only solution. We often neglect choices which would mean reducing consumption. Usually it seems that the best solution is combination of tech...