PBS e2 Documentary Series

I caught an episode of the e2 (e squared) PBS documentary series one night and found it intriguing. That particular episode dealt with renewable energy and how it can be implemented in different ways. I kept an eye out for it for a while but never managed to see it again. So I decided to buy the DVDs from the PBS store as a Christmas present to myself.

I've been watching the series over the last few weeks and its a really good documentary series. The first two seasons have mainly dealt with architecture and how to design sustainable buildings. It's a little surprising, but it turns out that buildings account for about 48% of greenhouse gas emissions. There are some neat ideas presented in each episode about managing water and solar energy in buildings.

A whole episode is even devoted to renewable energy efforts in China. One vision they shared was about bringing agriculture into urban areas through the use of rooftop farming. China definitely has bad environmental image on top of a bad image in terms of human rights. Dirty smog-filled urban areas come to mind. Even with this image though, one architect made the point that once a totalitarian regime gets hold of the idea of relying less on fossil fuels and implements more sustainable energy systems, the whole country can be transformed very quickly. They even built a test building that implements numerous ideas for sustainable design that developers and architects can visit, learn about these ideas, and put experiments into place. It's not all pleasant though; there are some alarming numbers about rural to urban migration and coal consumption. It'd be interesting to see how China develops in this regard.

India, Tibet, and Columbia are mentioned in addition to American cities. No Canadian content so far. It seems that we're lagging behind in innovation in the area of sustainable development even though the environment gets a lot of air time on the news here and politicians seem to talk about it a lot.

The only downside is that each episode starts with an ad by Autodesk. They sponsored the series so I guess it's not a bad thing. You can always fast forward through them.

Anyways, the e2 website has previews of episodes and worth going through. It's a fairly new series so most libraries probably don't have it yet. I'm definitely going to pass my copies around, but the DVDs are not expensive and definitely worth the money.

An Inconvenient Truth

With a big snowstorm blowing through and nowhere to go really, I decided to watch Al Gore's movie: "An Inconvenient Truth". I bought a copy of it while I was in Hong Kong. I'm not sure if it's in video rental places like Blockbuster, but if you come across it on video or in a theatre, you should watch it. It's basically about his presentation on how bad our environment is getting and he does point out some alarming data.

After the movie I decided to start clearing our long driveway from up to 3 feet of snow. It took me around 2.5 hours to clear it even with the help of our inefficient and highly polluting snow blower.

If you keep up with the news in general, then you'll know that the environment is in the headlines quite frequently these days. Canadian politicians are competing for the public's attention on the subject with the Conservative Party all of a sudden turning into champions of the environment and experts on how to fix it without hurting the economy.

They also keep pointing out that Canada's CO2 emissions rose sharply under the Liberal government and that our record is worse than that of the US. I don't know why, but it seems to me that the Liberals and the other opposition parties are failing to point out some vital facts to debunk the Conservative rhetoric:

1. The substation portion of the increase in Canada's emissions is due to the development of the Oil Sands in Alberta which became financially viable and profitable once the price of oil rose to it's current value. The political base of the Conservative party is predominantly in Alberta and they are not about to put the reigns on any businesses in Alberta.

2. Our levels of pollution are not worse than that of the US. Granted we are far above our Kyoto targets, but we are a long way from being worse polluters than the US.

Have a look at this graphic from Nationmaster.com. In 2003, the US produced 5,762,050 metric megatons of CO2 from energy use and cement manufacturing, while Canada only produced 521,404 from the same type of sources. Canada's CO2 emissions are around one tenth of that of the US. Not even close.

I think that the whole issue about pollution would be a lot clearer to the public if everyone stuck to the facts and not try cloud the issue with rhetoric and half truths.