A green line

I got a chance to read Tyler Colman and Pablo Päaster’s white paper, “Red, White, and ‘Green’: The Cost of Carbon in the Global Wine Trade,” which is summarized in Colman’s post.

The authors perform a detailed analysis of the carbon footprint (in terms of greenhouse gas emissions) of the production and distribution of a bottle of wine for consumption in the United States. The independent variable in their computations is the location where the wine is produced—Australia, France, Argentina, or California. Although they also analyze the effects of different agricultural practices (organic farming as might be typical in the various regions) and other links in the chain (such as CO2 released by fermentation), it turns out that the predominant carbon contributor is the means of shipping the finished, bottled wine and the distance that it must be shipped. For instance, for delivery to Chicago, a hypothetical 750ml bottle of wine from the Napa Valley produces almost 4.5kg of carbon dioxide; 3kg is accounted for by truck shipment from California. By contrast, wine from France, which is shipped by relatively efficient container ship, produces 2.0kg; and even here, shipping accounts for more than half of the total. The other significant components include the production of bottles, land use, and consumption of oak for in-barrel aging.

The results enable the researchers to draw a “green line” across the Midwest and South: to the east of this line, it’s more emissions-efficient to consume wine shipped from France than trucked from California (or Washington, presumably). Of course, if you’re fortunate enough to live in a state that produces its own drinkable wine (like I do, in Virginia), an even better choice would be the local tipple. Buying by the 1.5l magnum also helps: as they say, “shipping wine is often really about shipping glass with some wine in it.”

Two other asides: First, a footnote gives the nod to the general sustainability of cork as a bottle closure. Second, the writers note that growing grapes requires a lot of water for what you harvest: 1.2 to 2.5 megaliters per hectare, or 550 kiloliters per ton of grapes. This is partly due to the fact that grapes don’t yield a lot of mass per hectare, compared to a crop like corn.

Blog Action Day 2008

As a small contribution to Blog Action Day, this year concerned with the problem of poverty, some notes on books from my library, all three worth the read. Each one, in its own way, puts a personal, human face on the abstraction of poverty.

The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997), by David Simon and Edward Burns
I reviewed this book in 1999. It is a fascinating, horrifying report on the drug culture of today’s inner city, specifically the streets of West Baltimore in 1993. Co-author Simon, creator of TV’s The Wire, got his start as a reporter and his journalism informed the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street). Reading this book was like watching a train wreck. It is a shock to find tender photographic portraits of the key figures at the center of the volume. You know in the bones of your head that it its inevitable that some of these people will die by the end of the book.
The Working Poor: Invisible in America (2004), by David K. Shipler
Shipler casts a wider net, interviewing working class citizens from cities and small towns, from D.C. to Los Angeles, from New Hampshire to North Carolina, who are just scraping by. He focuses on what has succeeded in our efforts to job-train the poor into the mainstream of productive work, and what has failed.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, (1941/1988) by James Agee (text) and Walker Evans (photographs)
The controversial, seminal book, now back in print. A forerunner of the narrator-involved New Journalism. Agee’s expressive, polemical, romantic, rambling prose pictures of the lives of sharecroppers in the rural South during the Depression, as powerful as they are, nevertheless are outdone by Evans’s quietly eloquent photographs. Evans and Agee recognize in these lives of grinding dirt and drudgery a serious dignity.

Blog Action Day

Pragmatism

I’m catching up with the Cornell Lab’s new birding blog, Round Robin, so this posting on Ken Otter’s research into wildlife impacts of wind turbine facilities has been out there a little while.

Even though wind power is a green energy source that we’re right to feel enthusiastic about, it does have a cost that can be minimized. Different settings – shapes of ridgelines, prevailing wind patterns, migratory routes – mean that each new wind farm will present different hazards to birds. But with a little forethought and brain power, we can reduce the costs birds pay to satisfy our own energy demands.

Improvisation

please be gentleThe lobby of the building where RFB&D has its Washington offices on the third floor is being renovated. Scaffolding and plywood platforms everywhere. Somehow the workmen have rigged up a dual-direction call button for the elevator. I count five different hands adding instructions and admonitions to the board. Judging from the cutout, I think the original idea was just to frame the existing two-button panel, but frass happens on a job site.

Entropy reduction

I’ve just returned from a family business trip that consisted of mostly sorting paper, so I am all fired up to do more of the same here at home. I’m going to deal with the crew of dust nubbins under my monitor; I’m going to ask myself, Do you really need this stack of paper? When I threw out my stack of utility bills from Northern States Power (the electricity company for the Twin Cities) several years ago, I never missed them.

Meanwhile, my connectivity at home is sluggish, especially weekday evenings. My wireless connection to the router cuts out for five seconds at a time, and even wired, I’m seeing timeouts. Maybe the internet has too much clutter in it.

A roost

As we parked at the Kensington Armory this evening to see a show—it was early dusk, about 7:15—we saw a sizable flock of Chimney Swifts (Chaetura pelagica) swirling about, ready to come into to roost for the evening. We didn’t find the chimney that they were using, but it is no doubt somewhere nearby.

Appalachian Trail: Maryland middle third

crossing I-70A good hike today, the Appalachian Trail from I-70 to Maryland 77, led by Cliff Fairweather of Audubon Naturalist Society. We spent a lot of time looking at living things, so we covered the 8.5 miles (or 9.5 miles, no one is quite sure) in 7:45. Not quite a “naturalist’s shuffle,” but leisurely. The path lies between 1300 and 1800 feet on the elevation chart: I measured at most a change of 600 feet. The climbing is not too hard, rising through a long tract of mountain laurel, and most of the walking is fairly easy, but there is a stretch of rocks along the ridgetop of South Mountain that’s good for some knee-twisters (as my left one can attest) and ankle-breakers.

shroomgood smellsWe paused for a look at sawfly larvae on the leaves of an American Chestnut. Only one of the chestnuts we saw was head-height; most were about 3 or 4 feet high. Participant Joe was working on his mycology, so we stopped several times to see many, many fine examples of fungus. We smelled the faint sweetness of Hay-Scented Fern (Dennstaedtia punctilobula). Cliff pointed out a saddleback caterpillar that my point-and-shoot was not able to image. Towards the end of the hike, we saw some very dark brown examples of Squawroot (Conopholis americana). Squawroot is a parasitic plant of the Broomrape family, which also includes Beech Drops.

at the topcoming downWe took side trips to Annapolis Rocks to the west and an unnamed viewpoint to the east. Table Mountain Pine (Pinus pungens) at Annapolis Rocks and a fun little rock scramble to reach the eastern view. Not much in the way of bird life: woodpeckers, a few chickadee friends, Blue Jays imitating hawks, a couple of mystery vocalizations, maybe a tanager? Participation on these hikes is pretty broad, all the way from hikers who don’t stop for much of anything to shoe-gazing botanists. My carpool mate Susan and I were the most experienced birders.

out for a slitherBy far the big sighting of the trip was this lovely butter-yellow Timber Rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus) that sauntered across the track. A first sighting for a lot of us; as for myself, it’s been several years since I’ve seen one of these guys.

14 questions: 2

Thanks to the presidential campaign of John McCain for likewise responding to Sciencedebate 2008’s 14-item questionnaire. Without offering too much in the way of specifics, McCain does make it clear that he understands how complicated water issues in the West can be.

10. Water. Thirty-nine states expect some level of water shortage over the next decade, and scientific studies suggest that a majority of our water resources are at risk. What policies would you support to meet demand for water resources?

As a westerner, I understand the vital role that water plays in the development of western economies and to maintaining a high quality of life. Water is truly our lifeblood. I believe that we must develop, manage, and use our limited water supplies wisely and with a conservation ethic to ensure that we have sufficient supplies to meet municipal, tribal, industrial, agricultural, recreational, and environmental needs. I believe that water rights must be respected, and that disputes are better resolved not in the courts but through negotiations that build consensus, and provide justly for the needs of the west’s diverse interests and needs. I understand the importance of state law and local prerogatives in the allocation of water resources, and that all levels of government must work together with stakeholders to ensure that our lifeblood is protected, managed, and utilized in a wise, just, and sustainable manner.

I support constructive, continuing cooperation and dialogue among the states and the water users in a manner that is fully consistent with existing compacts and agreements. This is an approach that is forward looking, and ensures cooperation in achieving implementation of water agreements among the states and the Department of the Interior and is mindful of potential technological developments that could potentially reduce water demands in certain areas.