Welcome to the Environmental Policy Page!
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Europe, despite its economic troubles, is banking on clean energy
If the United States were faced with the very real possibility of enduring a double-dip of recession, would our energy investment policy buck the status quo and turn away from the politically influential fossil fuel industry? Not a chance! In fact, the spectacle that the Republicans will put on at their National Convention this summer will undoubtedly feature multiple chants of their 2008 slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”
But Europe, despite being less geographically and climatically suited for solar energy, sank nearly half it’s investment in new electric generation capacity in solar photovoltaic energy in 2011. Sixty-eight percent of new capacity came from the combination of solar and wind energy:
Numbers are in megawatts. Over 32 gigawatts of new clean energy capacity was added across Europe in 2011. Follow this link for a lot more detail at the Climate Progress blog.
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Saw Palmettos threaten Philly!
The United States Department of Agriculture and the Arbor Day Foundation work to evaluate plant growing conditions nationwide. Plant species survivability at any location is critically dependent on the extremes of temperature experienced there, particularly the cold extreme. The USDA and the Arbor Day Foundation regularly publish what is called the Plant Hardiness Map. Each plant has a range of temperatures that it can thrive in, which correspond to geographic zones on the Plant Hardiness Map. For instance, Central Florida is Zone 9, which is quite warm of course, meaning that some plants can’t survive here because it is too hot for them, and some plants that you see in South Florida (Zone 10) can’t survive here because it is too cold here in the wintertime.
Because of this sensitivity, the geographic distribution of plants is an excellent indicator of climate change. As the mean temperature increases, and more importantly as the coldest low temperature in the winter increases, plants from the south can gain a foothold. This goes on all over the planet. Here are two Plant Hardiness Maps, from 1990 and 2012:
Notice closely states like Ohio and Missouri. They’ve experienced a whole zone change in 22 years.
So consider the lowly Saw Palmetto, known here as Another Weed (of particular tenacity). The Saw Palmetto thrives in Zones 8 through 11. Let’s look at a detail from the map in the Mid-Atlantic:
Zone 8 has moved up the Delmarva Peninsula. It will continue to expand northward where the winter cold is least severe, i.e. the Jersey Shore. In another 20 years it may likely be that the southern peninsula of New Jersey (Cape May County) will see some of our beloved weeds take hold. And Philadelphia can’t be far behind at that point!
There’s a particularly cool graphic of the changing map over at the Arbor Day website. Check it out!