Obama's Clean Energy Security Speech

President Obama visited Georgetown University today to deliver an impassioned speech about America's need to once again lead the world in clean and renewable energy. In the speech he pledged to cut America's dangerous dependence on foreign oil by one-third by the year 2025. Obama called for a new clean energy standard to help drive private investment.

Here is an excerpt from the speech followed by video of the entire speech:

"A clean energy standard can expand the scope of clean energy investments because what it does is it gives cutting-edge companies the certainty that they need to invest. Essentially what it does is it says to companies, you know what, you will have a customer if you’re producing clean energy. Utilities, they need to buy a certain amount of clean energy in their overall portfolio, and that means that innovators are willing to make those big capital investments.

And we’ve got to start now because -- think about this -- in the 1980s, America was home to more than 80 percent of the world’s wind capacity, 90 percent of the world’s solar capacity. We were the leaders in wind. We were the leaders in solar. We owned the clean energy economy in the ‘80s. Guess what. Today, China has the most wind capacity. Germany has the most solar capacity. Both invest more in clean energy than we do, even though we are a larger economy and a substantially larger user of energy. We’ve fallen behind on what is going to be the key to our future.

Other countries are now exporting technology we pioneered and they’re going after the jobs that come with it because they know that the countries that lead the 21st century clean energy economy will be the countries that lead the 21st century global economy.

I want America to be that nation. I want America to win the future. (Applause.)"

Improving America's Front Lawn

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being rehabilitated.

The cherry blossoms aren't the only attraction on the National Mall right now. The National Park Service is busy at work on multiple projects that will restore long-neglected parts of America's front lawn.

Current repair and restoration projects include the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the D.C. War Memorial, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Seawall, installing levees, reconstructing Constitution Avenue, building the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, installing center lawn panels, constructing the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial, building the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial and constructing the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture.

By the end of all these construction projects, we will once again have reason to be proud of our front yard.

Earth Hour Photos

Earth Hour is an annual global event organized by the World Wildlife Fund to raise awareness about climate change. This year's event took place last Saturday night when people across the world turned off all non-essential lights and electrical appliances for one hour.

Since this blog focuses on the United States, here are before and after pictures of American skylines and famous landmarks participating in Earth Hour.

NEW YORK CITY

CHICAGO

SEATTLE

LAS VEGAS

LOS ANGELES

Bikers Need to Follow Rules of Road, Too

This guy should not be riding a bike. Photo: Rex Features

As a bicyclist in the D.C. area there is nothing that ticks me off more than fellow bikers who carelessly defy the rules of the road. These cyclists run red lights, weave through traffic, bike the wrong way, bike on the sidewalk, don't wear a helmet and don't use reflective gear and lights at night.

I understand the frustration many drivers feel about these dangerous idiots on two wheels. The biking community expects drivers to share the road and obey the rules. But it is our community that needs to educate people about bike laws, reinforce positive behavior and work with local law enforcement agencies in enforcing laws.

What we have right now is anarchy on the roads and it is not acceptable. Bikers who run red lights make it harder for bikers such as myself who try to follow the rules of the road. New York City has even started a "Don't Be a Jerk" campaign to encourage better manners amongst bikers in the city.

If bikers want to turn American cities into Copenhagens with more bike lanes, bike parking, complete street designs and traffic calming measures, then we as a community need to stop blaming aggressive drivers and car-dependent politicians and start looking inward at the bad behavior amongst our fellow cyclists.

Bipartisan BUILD Act Would Create National Infrastructure Bank

Republicans and Democrats both have to drive on our crumbling roads, walk on our cracked sidewalks and squeeze like sardines into our antiquated buses and subway cars.

Our post-World War II infrastructure is showing its age. The slow decay is all around us. Sometimes it just inconveniences us, as rusting water pipes burst and flood streets or aging trains stall out on the tracks. Other times, it puts us in mortal danger, as the Minneapolis bridge did when it collapsed, killing 13 people during evening rush hour in August of 2007.

Infrastructure improvements should not be about ideology. They are one of the basic elements of a robust economy and provide the engine for economic growth through "shovel ready" jobs. That's why it is encouraging to see Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) announce recently that they’re introducing the BUILD Act, which would create a National Infrastructure Bank.

The $10 billion initial investment will hopefully spur a private construction boom and create thousands of jobs in the process. It will show the the world that America is ready to make the investments necessary to move its infrastructure into the 21st century.

Here is the statement from Sen. Kerry's press office:

“This is a bi-partisan moment to make a once bi-partisan issue bi-partisan once again,” said Sen. Kerry. “Democrats and Republicans, business and labor, are now united to create an American infrastructure bank to leverage private investment, make America the world’s builders once again, and close the deficit in our infrastructure investments. The BUILD Act will create good jobs, strengthen our competitiveness, and do more with less. Most of all, this bill breaks a partisan stalemate to get America back in the game. When you’ve got a Massachusetts Democrat, a Texas Republican, the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO preaching from the same hymnal, you’ll find a sweet spot that can translate into a major legislative step forward.”

“I have been working to overhaul our nation’s aging infrastructure for nearly 20 years. This national infrastructure bank is an innovative way to leverage private-public partnerships and maximize private funding to address our water, transportation, and energy infrastructure needs. It is essential to think outside the box as we work to solve national challenges, particularly in this fiscal crisis. We must be creative to meet the needs of our country and to spur economic development and job growth while protecting taxpayers from new federal spending as much as possible,” said Sen. Hutchison, who served on the Commission to Promote Investment in America’s Infrastructure in 1993 as State Treasurer of Texas and is the Ranking Member on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee.

“The United States is spending less than two-percent of its GDP on infrastructure, while India spends five-percent and China spends nine-percent,” said Sen. Warner. “As a matter of global competitiveness, we need to find additional ways to upgrade our nation’s infrastructure, and this bank will help us strike the right balance between near-term discipline and investment in future growth.”

“A national infrastructure bank is a great place to start securing the funding we need to increase our mobility, create jobs, and enhance our global competitiveness,” said Donohue. “With a modest initial investment of $10 billion, a national infrastructure bank could leverage up to $600 billion in private investments to repair, modernize, and expand our ailing infrastructure system. While private capital is badly needed, we must also recognize our public financing mechanism is broken. Receipts to the Highway Trust Fund have fallen dramatically, funds are being diverted to non-infrastructure projects, and the gas tax has not been increased in 17 years. We need a multiyear highway bill to meet immediate needs, but we have to figure out a way to ensure we have adequate public investments for years to come.”

The Building and Upgrading Infrastructure for Long-Term Development (BUILD) Act would establish an American Infrastructure Financing Authority (AIFA) – a kind of infrastructure bank – to complement our existing infrastructure funding. This institution, which would provide loans and loan guarantees, would be both fiscally responsible and robust enough to address America’s needs.

Interview: Composting Advocate Jessica Weiss

There is a food fight being waged on Capitol Hill over the Republicans ending the composting program instituted by the Democrats when they took over the House. If only a referee could enter the fray to set some rules about why composting is so important. While composting advocate and Montgomery County, Maryland-based GrowingSOUL founder Jessica L. Weiss won't be trekking up to the Hill anytime soon, she is working hard to educate citizens about how easy composting is and how important it is to the environment.


Green Center: What is GrowingSOUL?


Jessica Weiss:  We are a sustainable food education center focusing on zero waste food production systems. Our mission is to close the gap in the food system by bringing composting to municipal level.

GC: How did you get interested in the sustainable food movement?

JW: I’m a very bad gardener but I’m very interested in the environment and I'm a foodie. I read Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and got very interested in local foods. I’m from California originally and I grew up going to farmers markets. So I started connecting my family to that and we experimented with just eating local food for a year.

GC: What is the organization working on right now?

JW:  On the commercial level we have several small restaurants, a retirement center in Bethesda, and we now have ten Chipotle restaurants with the go ahead to essentially take over all the Chipotle restaurants that we can drive to.

It's really Montgomery County right now. But by talking to Chipotle, what we are shooting for is to create a franchise program so that nationally we would connect Chipotle restaurants with compost haulers and urban farms and food banks and create more of these loops.

GC: What are the benefits you've seen since you purchased a truck that runs on vegetable oil to do your composting hauls?

JW:  Having a truck that runs on the waste from Chipotle that we are picking up allows us not only to have a smaller carbon footprint, but now we aren’t having to pay money for gas. And that was really our biggest expense.

GC: What are some of the other initiatives you are working on?

JW: We're trying to bring reusable composting to Montgomery County and the Metropolitan D.C. area. So we're going to take the vegetable oil truck and similar to having paper drives when I was little, we are going to have a mobile unit. We'll drive around to specific sites, either people's houses or a grocery store parking lot, and people can bring us their compostables and throw them in the back of the truck for free. And we'll use that to donate to make the compost for the food bank.

We want to get fresh food to the people that need it the most. The tagline is that we are creating the healthy soil in which good food and strong communities grow and thrive. So we want to get people to think about composting the same way they think about recycling. It's what you do. It's how you sort your trash. And we want to instead of calling it trash or waste, we want to call it landfill so that people realize what they are doing when they throw it into the trash.

GC: Why do you think composting is so important to a healthy society and  a healthy planet?

JW: There was a statistic that really struck me -- if you take a piece of organically grown broccoli and compare it to an organically grown piece of broccoli from 50 years ago, it has 75% fewer nutrients in it now then it did back then just because of the soil erosion depleting all the nutrients.

What we can do is take those nutrients and put it back in the ground and grow more nutrients that we can feed people.

GC: Why has there been more awareness about recycling than composting?

JW: Because people are grossed out by composting. People are willing to touch a dirty beer bottle but aren't really happy picking up bones that someone else has eaten or banana peels. It rots and it smells and it gets gross sitting in your trash can.

It's dirty work. I happen to love that. To me it smells like the day after it rains. In some ways it's a mindset about how you feel about nature. Just taking inner city kids and showing them a tree that's growing or seeing how a vegetable grows is mystifying.

GC: How do you change that societal aversion to composting?

JW: We give them compostable liners and we get these free pickle barrels from restaurants. We have these buckets available. They can take them home, put a liner in it like they would put a trash liner in their trash can and throw their coffee grounds into it. It fits under their sink. They can put a lid on top of it so it doesn't smell. If it smells they just put their coffee grounds on top of it so it smells like coffee. And then they just pull the liner out and toss it in our truck. So it makes it pretty clean.

A lot of what you need to do is teach the interconnectedness and how many people are involved in the food system. And food should really cost a whole lot more than it does. So if we don't want to encourage the cost to go up, how do we keep it down. Well, we can do things like use renewable energy. The bulk of the transportation of food in this country is using diesel engines. We can create a network of co-ops around the country where these trucks can fuel up on vegetable oil and cut down on their carbon footprint and cut down on the cost. So we are working more on sustainability. That's an initiative I really want to push through.

GC: Where do you see the composting movement going in the future? Will it get bigger?

JW: Oh yeah. You look at places like San Francisco, Seattle, Ontario. Canada is way ahead of us. They have municipal composting. The reason recycling has caught on in this country is because there are haulers willing to do the recycling. And the biggest problem with recycling is that a lot of times with plastic and stuff we end up crushing the stuff and sending it out to China to do the recycling there because it's unaffordable to do it here.

When I was growing up you had to collect your bottles and take them to the recycling center. The reason it's caught on is because there is a bin everywhere you look now. What we're proposing for municipal composting is that you have a green bin and you have a blue bin and then you have your landfill.

People are inherently lazy but they want to do the right thing. I don't want to say lazy in a bad way. People are really busy and if they have to go out of their way it's not going to happen. Some people can afford to pay someone to make it happen. But most people can't.

If you think about the cost of gardening, it makes sense to recycle your own food scraps. Composting is the recycling of food scraps.

'Into Eternity' Explores Dark Side of Nuclear Energy

What to do with all that radioactive waste? That is a question not asked nearly enough in the debate about nuclear power. There is also the disturbing question about the finite resource of uranium that is needed for nuclear power. Not to mention the harmful environmental impact of uranium mining.

But the uranium question is for another film. "Into Eternity," which screened recently at the Avalon Theatre in Upper Northwest Washington, D.C. as part of the 19th Annual Environmental Film Festival, explores the reality of storing the waste from spent fuel rods.

The nation of Finland is currently carving out of solid rock the world's first permanent repository for nuclear waste. The Onkalo underground storage facility is an enormous system of underground tunnels that is supposed to last 100,000 years. This is because a radioactive element such as plutonium has a half life of 24,100 years.

Through interviews and filming deep under the earth, Director Michael Madsen takes us into uncharted territory and asks many provocative questions about how our use of nuclear energy today will affect future generations. Given the constant news updates on the nuclear crisis in Japan, this documentary couldn't be more timely.

Here is the trailer: