Tamarac City Commissioner Patte Atkins-Grad was miffed last Thursday when Broward officials met to discuss the region's water shortage -- at a breakfast meeting where many people never touched their glasses of water.
''This is a water summit, and it irritates me to see all this wasted water,'' she told the crowd.
Atkins-Grad has encouraged restaurants in Tamarac to stop serving water to diners unless they ask for it.
Speakers talked about the need for Broward cities to work together to find additional sources of water, including waterless urinals and treating salty water.
But no one talked about the cost. Chip Merriam, deputy executive director of the South Florida Water Management District, has said in the past that the price to develop new sources of water could cost billions.
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How about we 1. limit development, 2. encourage native plantings 3. discourage car washing, golf, waste 4. save the everglades.
oh and drink yo water.
In Coconut Grove, things can get a little emotional when it comes to trees. That's why activists turned up at a city of Miami hearing Tuesday to fight for a scraggly oak that stands in the way of a developer's driveway.
Anthony Rubino, whose duplex in the 2800 block of Shipping Avenue remains off the market because the tree has prevented him from laying a driveway and sidewalk, wants to raze the oak, located on the public right-of-way.
But the city denied his request, leading Rubino to appeal to the Historic and Environmental Preservation Board Tuesday, where in a scene reminiscent of a daytime courtroom drama, Rubino went toe to toe with activists over the fate of the tree.
The developer, who says he initially wanted to relocate the tree, provided years' worth of pictures of the tree and testimony from arborist Lisa Hammer that said the tree ''is in fair condition at best'' and should be removed.
''I'll relocate it now if you want me to,'' he told the board. ``I'll do it, but it will die.''
But the TreeWatch Committee of the Cocoanut Grove Village Council and the Tree-Man Trust countered that the tree is sick because of construction-related damage -- which Hammer disagreed with -- its death is hardly imminent and besides, driveways are overrated.
Miami's Historic and Environmental Preservation Board agreed.
Members voted 5-2 that the tree should stay.
''The duplex should have been designed to accommodate the tree where it is,'' said Board member Gerald Marston.
Rubino said he was given the runaround by politically connected activists who used their influence to pressure city officials into saving the tree.
Public Works Assistant Director Francis Mitchell said the tree must be removed but he could not issue a permit because he would lose his job if Liliana Dones of TreeWatch and Jim McMaster of the Tree-Man Trust disagreed, Rubino wrote in his appeal.
Mitchell would not comment on the statement after the meeting.
''I don't have the power to have Francis Mitchell fired and neither does Jim, but we're very flattered,'' Dones said Friday.
Mitchell told the board that Rubino had left out the tree's location on site plans when the duplex and driveway designs were approved.
Rubino said the omission of the tree's location was an oversight.
The developer, who last year received permits to remove two trees from the property, said he didn't pull a permit for the oak because he wanted to see how the tree would fare before deciding to remove or relocate it.
That got him into hot water with Board Chairman Timothy Barber.
'We don't want people to do the `wait and see,' '' he said.
Marsten said Rubino was playing a shell game.
''It seems to me you were proposing to plant that tree in front of someone's front door and have them remove it,'' he said.
On Friday, Rubino said he wishes now that he had removed the tree when he first bought the property and was disappointed that the issue became more about the circumstances surrounding the tree removal than about the actual health of the tree.
''I'm disappointed it went that way because it took the focus off the tree and the facts of [Hammer's] report,'' he said.
Rubino said his tree woes comes at a time when Grovites are outraged at the federal government, which last September cut down a number of trees at the Grand Avenue Post Office. The post office was fined $10,000 by Miami's Code Enforcement. As of Friday, the fine had not been paid.
Arborist Pierre Sands said people should treat trees as if they were a dying relative.
''I take it personally,'' he said.
---------It's nice to see people fighting so hard for trees. I love the old oak trees in Coral Gables and the Grove. Too bad the developer didn't use more foresight.
“This plant will save humanity, I tell you.”
The person who said that is O.P. Singh, a horticulturist for the railway ministry of India. What plant is he talking about? A shrubby weed called jatropha, whose seeds contain an oil that Singh and others believe may power the biofuel revolution. Here’s how the Journal’s Patrick Barta puts it:
With oil trading at roughly $70 a barrel, this lowly forest plant is suddenly an unlikely star on the world’s alternative-energy stage. The seeds from jatropha’s golf-ball-size fruit contain a yellowish liquid similar to palm oil that can be made into biodiesel … But unlike other biodiesel crops, jatropha can be grown almost anywhere — including deserts, trash dumps, and rock piles. It doesn’t need much water or fertilizer, and it isn’t edible. That means environmentalists and policy makers don’t have to worry about whether jatropha diverts resources away from crops that could be used to feed people.
Barta’s article also includes some Goldman Sachs data on the estimated cost per barrel of fuel made from a variety of sources:
Cellulose: $305
Wheat: $125
Rapeseed: $125
Soybean: $122
Sugar Beets: $100
Corn: $83
Sugar Cane: $45
Jatropha: $43
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/will-this-weed-really-save-humanity/
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Imagine the Jatropha (which we sell!) creating energy for our planet! It's a beautiful concept and I hope it comes to fruition.
Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.
Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.
The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.
“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”
Mr Goodall, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West & Abingdon, is the latest serious thinker to turn popular myths about the environment on their head.
Catching a diesel train is now twice as polluting as travelling by car for an average family, the Rail Safety and Standards Board admitted recently. Paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic because of the extra energy needed to manufacture and transport them, the Government says.
Fresh research published in New Scientistlast month suggested that 1kg of meat cost the Earth 36kg in global warming gases. The figure was based on Japanese methods of industrial beef production but Mr Goodall says that farming techniques are similar throughout the West.
What if, instead of beef, the walker drank a glass of milk? The average person would need to drink 420ml – three quarters of a pint – to recover the calories used in the walk. Modern dairy farming emits the equivalent of 1.2kg of CO2 to produce the milk, still more pollution than the car journey.
Cattle farming is notorious for its perceived damage to the environment, based on what scientists politely call “methane production” from cows. The gas, released during the digestive process, is 21 times more harmful than CO2 . Organic beef is the most damaging because organic cattle emit more methane.
Michael O’Leary, boss of the budget airline Ryanair, has been widely derided after he was reported to have said that global warming could be solved by massacring the world’s cattle. “The way he is running around telling people they should shoot cows,” Lawrence Hunt, head of Silverjet, another budget airline, told the Commons Environmental Audit Committee. “I do not think you can really have debates with somebody with that mentality.”
But according to Mr Goodall, Mr O’Leary may have a point. “Food is more important [to Britain’s greenhouse emissions] than aircraft but there is no publicity,” he said. “Associated British Foods isn’t being questioned by MPs about energy.
“We need to become accustomed to the idea that our food production systems are equally damaging. As the man from Ryanair says, cows generate more emissions than aircraft. Unfortunately, perhaps, he is right. Of course, this doesn’t mean we should always choose to use air or car travel instead of walking. It means we need urgently to work out how to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of our foodstuffs.”
Simply cutting out beef, or even meat, however, would be too modest a change. The food industry is estimated to be responsible for a sixth of an individual’s carbon emissions, and Britain may be the worst culprit.
“This is not just about flying your beans from Kenya in the winter,” Mr Goodall said. “The whole system is stuffed with energy and nitrous oxide emissions. The UK is probably the worst country in the world for this.
“We have industrialised our food production. We use an enormous amount of processed food, like ready meals, compared to most countries. Three quarters of supermarkets’ energy is to refrigerate and freeze food prepared elsewhere.
A chilled ready meal is a perfect example of where the energy is wasted. You make the meal, then use an enormous amount of energy to chill it and keep it chilled through warehousing and storage.”
The ideal diet would consist of cereals and pulses. “This is a route which virtually nobody, apart from a vegan, is going to follow,” Mr Goodall said. But there are other ways to reduce the carbon footprint. “Don’t buy anything from the supermarket,” Mr Goodall said, “or anything that’s travelled too far.”
