Monday Mailing 050619

Monday Mailing

Year 25 • Issue 33 6 May 2019 1.

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House Backs Paris Agreement In First Climate Bill In A Decade (Michael Hoch) From McMansion to McMain Street (Bayoán Ware) Walls Raised On First Tiny House (Gabriel Leon) ‘It’s A Groundswell’: The Farmers Fighting To Save The Earth’s Soil The Winding Path To Washington’s Clean-Energy Future (Michael Hoch) UO Team Hopes For A Green Light To Develop A New Bike Signal App RESOURCE – Community Tool Box (Bayoán Ware) ALDI Announces Commitments To Plastic Packaging Reduction (Emily Bradley) Your Questions About Food And Climate Change, Answered (Patrick Lynch) The Terrifying Potential Of The 5G Network

1. House Backs Paris Agreement In First Climate Bill In A

Decade

Quote of the Week:

“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Oregon Fast Fact #32

Discovered in 1874 the caves located in Oregon Caves National Monument are carved within solid marble.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed its first climate-change bill in a decade, voting 231190 to require that Trump administration keep the United States as a party to the Paris Climate Agreement.

The Climate Action Now Act would require President Donald Trump to develop a plan for the United States to meet the goals it committed to in the Paris agreement to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and block federal funds from being used to advance the formal U.S. withdrawal from the pact.

Trump has stood by his 2017 decision to withdraw the United States from the 2015 climate accord and has been dismissive of regulations aimed at slashing greenhouse gas emissions.The trend of states targeting 100 percent clean electricity has gone viral.

The bill, which passed along party lines, as expected, with three Republicans backing the measure, was meant to signal to the international community that many Americans support the Paris agreement regardless of Trump’s decision to abandon it.

“Today we sent a message to the president, to the American people and to the world that we recognize the seriousness of the climate crisis, and that we intend to do our part to address it. Today we sent the message: We are still in,” said Representative Frank Pallone, chairman of the House energy committee.

To access the full story, click here.

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2. From McMansion to McMain Street Drive through any middle-class suburban neighborhood built in the last 25 years and you will encounter the “McMansion,” the aspirational mega-house with its overly complex roof form, dumbed-down architectural details and grandiose double-height foyer. The term McMansion is embedded in the American cultural landscape and the target of frequent derision by planners and urban designers.

But there is another building type that has proliferated in more urban sites, which in many ways reflects the same questionable goal—attempting to create complexity at the architectural scale in absence of complexity or context at the urban scale. We can call this building/development type, the “McMain Street.” Like the McMansion that attempts to mimic the complex roof massing of an entire French village in a single building, the McMain Street attempts to mimic the fine-grained, vertically proportioned facades of the traditional American Main Street—all in a single building. And, more often than not, like the McMansion, the end result appears contrived and inauthentic. The facades lack the variety in design and detail that occurs naturally over time when multiple architects and builders develop a streetscape, one building at a time. With the McMain Street, we are left with a cartoon version of the traditional Main Street.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Walls Raised On First Tiny House

Members of Presbyterian Women helped hoist the first wall in Cottage Village last week, marking a new milestone in the tiny house project at 1430 E. Madison Ave. “This isn’t the answer to our housing crisis, but it’s definitely a start,” said Mayor Jeff Gowing to a crowd of community members and project volunteers who turned out for the April 25 event.

After more than three years of planning and volunteering, the first of 13 tiny homes has begun to take shape as a new phase has begun in the collaborative affordable housing project run by the Cottage Village Coalition (CVC) and SquareOne Villages.

With momentum gathering in the project, Lane County Commissioner Heather Buch stopped by to speak at last Wednesday’s event.

“We all know that housing is a huge issue along the West Coast in general and we’re of course no isolated incident here,” she said. “I want to commend SquareOne Villages for identifying a gap in housing and actually moving as fast as they can to find solutions in small rural locations as well as all over Lane County. What they do is unique and your help in this effort is really commendable.”

To access the full story, click here.

4. ‘It’s A Groundswell’: The Farmers Fighting To Save The Earth’s Soil John Cherry bends down and takes a handful of soil in his hands, brings it up to his face and breathes deeply.

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“You can smell when it is good,” he says, poking it with a finger. “This smells of roots … there is a rich, organic quality to it. It is a good smell.”

Cherry is one of a growing army of UK farmers who are turning their back on the plough – and centuries of farming tradition – in an effort to tackle a little-noticed but potentially devastating environmental crisis: the degradation of the Earth’s soil.

The UN has warned that soils around the world are heading for exhaustion and depletion, with an estimated 60 harvests left before they are too barren to feed the planet.

That message was backed up in the UK by the environment secretary, Michael Gove, who warned that the country is 30 to 40 years away from “the fundamental eradication of soil fertility”. He added: “Countries can withstand coups d’état, wars and conflict, even leaving the EU, but no country can withstand the loss of its soil and fertility.”

To access the full story, click here.

5. The Winding Path To Washington’s Clean-Energy Future

For years, Washington has grappled with a fundamental question about our future: Can we step up to the challenge of addressing climate change and will we do it in a way that invests in good local jobs and builds a better life for everyone in our state? We all deserve access to affordable clean energy, dignified work and a healthy place to live.

Polls indicate strong public support for this kind of action, but they want to know how we get there. This question has sparked pivotal election battles and a decades-long debate about how we can transition to a clean-energy future that includes all of us. This past week, state leaders answered this question with the most significant climate and clean-energy package in our state’s history.

Here’s what Gov. Jay Inslee, Sens. Reuven Carlyle and Rebecca Saldaña, and Reps. Joe Fitzgibbon, Kristine Reeves, Gael Tarleton, Beth Doglio and many others just passed for Washington: • 100% clean energy for everyone in Washington by 2045. This is the strongest cleanelectricity law in the nation. It removes all coal from our electricity supply by 2025, incentivizes energy efficiency to keep lowering customers’ bills, and maintains reliability during the transition away from fossil fuels.

• Cleaner, healthier buildings for our state. This includes putting in place energy-use requirements for large commercial buildings over 50,000 gross square feet, establishing conservation and efficiency requirements for natural-gas use in buildings, and requiring new buildings to be equipped and ready to charge electric vehicles.

• A first step toward adopting environmental-justice principles statewide. It establishes a new task force charged with developing strategies for how state agencies can discharge their responsibilities to address environmental-health disparities. The task force includes leadership from communities most impacted by pollution.

To access the full story, click here.

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6. UO Team Hopes For A Green Light To Develop A New Bike Signal App

Every cyclist who rides around the city knows the feeling: Breezing along, wind in your hair, making good time, and then — a red light.

Foot down, momentum gone, and a seemingly interminable wait for the green.

Now two UO professors are working on ways to help ease the way for cyclists and make them a more seamless part of a city’s transportation system.

Stephen Fickas, a professor of computer and information science, and Marc Schlossberg, a professor of city and regional planning, collaborated on an experimental smartphone app that allows cyclists to communicate with and trigger a traffic signal at a busy bike corridor near campus.

“We wanted to find a way to make it more convenient and easier for people on bikes to get through a transportation system built for and optimized for motor vehicle traffic,” Schlossberg said.

Schlossberg is co-director of the Sustainable Cities Institute, and much of his research focuses on ways to redesign cities so more people can walk, bike and take transit. He also teaches a class on bicycle transportation and leads a study abroad program that focuses on the topic.

To access the full story, click here.

7. RESOURCE – Community Tool Box

Millions of people use the Community Tool Box each year to get help taking action, teaching, and training others in organizing for community development. Dive in to find help assessing community needs and resources, addressing social determinants of health, engaging stakeholders, action planning, building leadership, improving cultural competency, planning an evaluation, and sustaining your efforts over time.

To access the resource, click here.

8. ALDI Announces Commitments To Plastic Packaging Reduction

BATAVIA, Ill., April 3, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- ALDI is pleased to announce a series of commitments it has made to help combat the global plastics crisis. By 2025, 100 percent of ALDI packaging, including plastic packaging, will be reusable, recyclable or compostable. ALDI will also reduce packaging material across its entire range by at least 15 percent.

ALDI has the ability to influence how its products are sourced, produced and brought to shelves because more than 90 percent of its range is ALDI-exclusive. The company is committed to working with its supplier community to achieve the following comprehensive goals: •

By 2025, 100 percent of ALDI packaging, including plastic packaging, will have reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging;

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• • • •

By 2025, packaging material of all ALDI-exclusive products to be reduced by at least 15 percent; By 2020, 100 percent of ALDI-exclusive consumable packaging to include How2Recycle label; By 2020, implement an initiative to make private-label product packaging easier for customers to reuse; Guide continuous improvement of product packaging by internal expertise and external evaluations.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Your Questions About Food And Climate Change, Answered Does what I eat have an effect on climate change?

Yes. The world’s food system is responsible for about one-quarter of the planet-warming greenhouse gases that humans generate each year. That includes raising and harvesting all the plants, animals and animal products we eat — beef, chicken, fish, milk, lentils, kale, corn and more — as well as processing, packaging and shipping food to markets all over the world. If you eat food, you’re part of this system.

Which foods have the largest impact?

Meat and dairy, particularly from cows, have an outsize impact, with livestock accounting for around 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases each year. That’s roughly the same amount as the emissions from all the cars, trucks, airplanes and ships combined in the world today.

In general, beef and lamb have the biggest climate footprint per gram of protein, while plantbased foods tend to have the smallest impact. Pork and chicken are somewhere in the middle. A major study published last year in the journal Science calculated the average greenhouse gas emissions associated with different foods.

To access the full interactive article, click here.

10. The Terrifying Potential Of The 5G Network n January, 2018, Robert Spalding, the senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council, was in his office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House, when he saw a breaking-news alert on the Axios Web site. “Scoop,” the headline read, “Trump Team Considers Nationalizing 5G Network.” At the time, Spalding, a brigadier general in the Air Force who previously served as a defense attaché in Beijing, had been in the military for nearly three decades. At the N.S.C., he was studying ways to insure that the next generation of Internet connectivity, what is commonly referred to as 5G, can be made secure from cyberattacks. “I wasn’t looking at this from a policy perspective,” he said. “It was about the physics, about what was possible.” To Spalding’s surprise, the Axios story was based on a leaked early draft of a report he’d been working on for the better part of a year.

Two words explain the difference between our current wireless networks and 5G: speed and latency. 5G—if you believe the hype—is expected to be up to a hundred times faster. (A twohour movie could be downloaded in less than four seconds.) That speed will reduce, and possibly eliminate, the delay—the latency—between instructing a computer to perform a Page 5 of 6

command and its execution. This, again, if you believe the hype, will lead to a whole new Internet of Things, where everything from toasters to dog collars to dialysis pumps to running shoes will be connected. Remote robotic surgery will be routine, the military will develop hypersonic weapons, and autonomous vehicles will cruise safely along smart highways. The claims are extravagant, and the stakes are high. One estimate projects that 5G will pump twelve trillion dollars into the global economy by 2035, and add twenty-two million new jobs in the United States alone. This 5G world, we are told, will usher in a fourth industrial revolution.

To access the full article, click here.

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