April 2009 - Sustainability - list.sfgreens.org

[Sustain] Fwd: Job Opening: Energy Efficiency Outreach Organizer
by Eric Brooks 30 Apr '09

30 Apr '09

*/Contractor Opportunity Announcement:/ Energy Efficiency Outreach Organizer, Bay Localize* Bay Localize, an Oakland-based nonprofit dedicated to catalyzing the emergence of a regional, self-reliant economy that strengthens all Bay Area communities, is contracting an Energy Efficiency Outreach Organizer with a very specific set of skills and experience for a ten-month time period for approximately 10 hours a week. *Role Description:* The Energy Efficiency Outreach Organizer contractor is responsible for conducting outreach to and organizing faith communities to implement residential energy efficiency programs with the congregants. *Essential Job Functions:* * Conduct outreach to and organize congregants in selected faith communities to run a residential energy efficiency program, coordinating closely with religious leaders. * Conduct baseline data entry and coordinate with local utility to access energy use information. * Coordinate with partner organizations and residents to schedule home energy audits. * Coordinate with partner organizations and residents to schedule home energy efficiency upgrades. * Conduct extensive follow-up and case management with select congregants identified as high energy users. * Assess post-program energy use data. * Conduct post-program evaluation interviews. * Assist in preparing final project reports. * Participate in weekly Bay Localize team meetings. * Participate in monthly Bay Localize steering committee meetings. *Skills and Qualifications:* * Experience collaborating with diverse urban faith communities. * Strong knowledge of residential energy efficiency audits and upgrades. * Excellent verbal communication skills, ranging from public speaking to large groups to one-on-one follow-up. * Excellent organizational skills with attention to detailed case management. * Familiar with Microsoft Word, Excel, and web-based e-mail programs. * Enthusiastic, organized, and reliable. * Self-starter capable of working independently and also as part of a team. * Experience and comfort with team consensus process. * Knowledge of and commitment to environmental and social justice. * Non-profit program experience a plus. * Flexible hours, including availability and for some Sunday morning and weekday evening meetings and presentations. This is a ten-month, approximately 10 hour/week contract position beginning in May, 2009, compensated at an hourly rate between $28 and $33/hour based on experience. The contractor is welcome to work from a home office or from the Bay Localize office in downtown Oakland. Equal opportunity employer: women, low-income, LGBT, and people of color strongly encouraged to apply. To apply, please send a resume and writing sample to Kirsten Schwind, Bay Localize Program Director, at kirsten(a)baylocalize.org <mailto:kirsten@baylocalize.org> Aaron Lehmer Network Development Director, Bay Localize "Building Stronger Communities through Regional Self-Reliance" 436 14th Street, Suite 1127 Oakland, CA 94612 (510) 834-0420 [Office] (415) 613-4781 [Cell] aaron(a)baylocalize.org <mailto:aaron@baylocalize.org> http://www.baylocalize.org

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[Sustain] SF Green Party Makes National TV Opposing Bad BioDiesel!
by Eric Brooks 24 Apr '09

24 Apr '09

Cool news all, We got national exposure all day yesterday on Fox News network for our stand against the bad Darling biodiesel plant proposal. To see the video go to http://www.foxnews.com/search-results/m/22138785/greenie-vs-greenie.htm I was interviewed. Unfortunately, the report left out my key repeated statements about corporate factory farming and its environmental impact, and concentrated only on the possibility of genetically engineered fuel animals as the plant's possible big negative. (The early morning report noted in my previous email below (which did not have any interviews) actually covered the issue more effectively. I couldn't find that video online.) On the positive side, at least the basic warning that the plant will make fuel out of animal parts got out there and will probably trigger some concern in a good number of people. Hopefully that word will get around outside of conservative viewer circles. In any case. The SF Green Party is now on the map for the millions of right wingers who watch Fox News ;) cheers Eric Eric Brooks wrote: > Hi all, > > We just got our first mention on Fox News (national) on our opposition > to the Darling International biodiesel plant. (Apparently the reason a > local issue in SF actually got national attention is that it is Earth > Day and the subject is controversial.) > > The reporter said that many environmentalists were strongly opposed to > the plant because its type of biodiesel production could do more harm > than good to the environment, and raised concerns about genetically > engineered animals being produced for fuels. > > The 'Green Party' and PETA were specifically named as opponents, and > the report finished up stating that opponents intend to pass > legislation to require that biodiesel production remain strictly local > and run by nonprofits. > > There were no clips of either opponents or proponents speaking, but > the reporter who generated the piece that he is working to get a > longer report on later on the day. > > If you want to watch for repeats of the report, Fox news is on SF > cable channel 59. > > I'll keep you posted on new developments. > > cheers > > Eric Brooks > -- "I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves." – Che Guevara

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[Sustain] Joint Meeting(Transpo/Sustainability) This Monday Night?
by Eric Brooks 15 Apr '09

15 Apr '09

Hi all, I'm going to be in a clean energy stakeholder meeting with Ross this Monday night and so I can't be present at the SF Green Party office to open up for the regular joint meeting. (Although I can probably be there by 7:30.) I know a lot is going on with both transportation and energy. Can someone else take the ball on organizing the meeting? I'll chime in in the last half on energy issues if people want to wait for that. Eric -- "I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves." – Che Guevara

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[Sustain] A Green Party Generation
by Martin Zehr 10 Apr '09

10 Apr '09

Obviously I am someone who has more time on my hands than I know what to do with. Be that as it may, attached is an updated version of an Earth Day brochure. Print it. Use it. Circulate it.

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[Sustain] Renewable Energy for Urban Homes
by Martin Zehr 10 Apr '09

10 Apr '09

Renewable Energy for Urban Homes http://www.gdnet.ucla.edu/asis/profile/urpl4.htm Urban planning graduate student and Fulbright fellow T.H. Culhane introduces handmade solar water heaters in Cairo and thinks about how energy projects can address both poverty and environmental problems. His projects focus on meeting energy needs in urban environments, they also seem to have a social impact. Published in Winter 2009, Graduate Quarterly The slums of Darb Al Ahmar in Islamic historic Cairo are separated from the nearby Coptic Christian community of garbage recyclers called Zurayib by the City of the Dead graveyard, but the two neighborhoods are united by their deep and pervasive poverty and lack of water, electricity, and other common urban resources. As he observed the problems, T. H. Culhane wondered "why there was so little evidence of the home-scale, renewable energy solutions being used in similar communities around the world." Putting his question to representatives of nonprofits working in Cairo, T. H. was told it was "because somebody with your interests and your enthusiasm isn’t here. If you want to come, you are welcome." The rest flowed quite naturally. Six years later, most of them spent in Cairo, T. H. is hard at work trimming the 900-page first draft of his dissertation on how slum dwellers there are meeting their needs for hot water. It includes more than 500 pages of pictures and diagrams related to his personal efforts to help residents build solar-powered water heaters on the rooftops of their ramshackle homes. While he’s writing, he’s also back in Cairo starting a second project in the same neighborhoods, this one to provide people with biogas digesters that will allow them to "cook today’s meals on yesterday’s garbage," T. H. says. And both of those projects are part of a nonprofit he’s started called Solar C3Cities—Connecting Community Catalysts Integrating Technologies for Industrial Ecology Solutions. All of the above efforts have earned him a $10,000 award as one of 2009’s National Geographic Emerging Explorers. That money will help him to complete work on making the nonprofit’s headquarters (and his home) in Essen, Germany, completely energy-independent—the third major project on his current agenda. T. H. brings to all of these tasks a lifetime of experience in diverse places and knowledge-gathering of various kinds, beginning as a child in Chicago, when he divided his time between studying exhibits at the Museum of Science and Industry and accompanying his mother into the adjoining neighborhood, where she worked as a Head Start teacher and administrator. "There was this incredible museum landscape on the lake and the ghetto right next to it," he says. "I had foot in both worlds for the first eight years of my life." T. H.’s mother was of Iraqi and Lebanese heritage, and his father was a news correspondent in the Middle East in the 1970s, so T. H. also began at an early age to ask questions like "How are the media representing people? How is development affecting people? What are people really angry about," he says. At Harvard University, he studied biological anthropology, looking to understand "where we’d come from and where we were going," then he took "a suitcase full of Utopian literature" on a two-year journey to the rainforests of Borneo and the urban environment in Baghdad. T. H. thought "the rainforest ecology had a lot to teach us about our societal dilemma and how we might design a better city" and got a receptive response when he shared his ideas with psychologist B. F. Skinner. Rather than pursuing these ideas directly, however, T. H. decided "to go into the ghettos of Los Angeles to fashion a career trying to solve the dysfunction of society, which I blamed on faulty education." Over the next decade at Crenshaw, Jefferson, and Hollywood High Schools, he developed innovative curricula that combined biology and science with multimedia technologies, leading students, among other things, to rap their biology vocabulary lessons. In the process, he was named one of seven NASA Challenger fellows, a program honoring outstanding educators. With all this success, however, Utopian visions still danced in his head, and he looked to UCLA for "some theoretical grounding," seeking out graduate adviser in urban planning Vanessa Dingley. Proposing what he thought might seem a "somewhat outlandish" combination of rainforest ecology, sociobiology, and urban design, he was pleasantly surprised when Dingley started listing all of the departmental faculty who were traveling down kindred roads. One of those was Susanna Hecht, who was an adviser on his master’s thesis in her area of expertise, Central America. On trips to Guatemala and Mexico, T.H. built a sustainable development center and began to study agriforestry for urban purposes. He had formed a nongovernmental organization aimed at "bringing back the breadnut," a staple in the Mayan diet, and was well on the path to a dissertation on this subject when September 11, 2001, changed his direction. "I realized that I was working with every people but my own people at a time of great tragedy," T. H. says. Instead of another summer in Central America, he got fellowships to study Arabic in Beirut and then Cairo, where he was working when Professor of Urban Planning Randall D. Crane decided to make Egypt the setting for a spring study abroad session for graduate students. He asked T. H. to make ground arrangements and accompany the class of two dozen or so graduate students. After that pivotal moment in the Cairo slums, T. H. picked up the challenge he had been thrown and began to work out with Professor Crane what he would need to address the issue, planned a demand survey, and chose to focus on hot water. T. H. began by "building a solar hot water heater with my own hands," he says, figuring that "if I can do it myself, maybe I can introduce it to the people in the ghettos and the slums." A key hurdle was finances, as the necessary materials for a single heater cost about $500, often more than half a month’s income for typical residents of Darb Al Ahmar and the Zurayib. His wife, Sybille, provided money from her teaching income until U.S. AID came through with an important $25,000 small infrastructure materials grant. That work is the core of his dissertation, co-chaired by Professors Crane, Lois Takahashi, and Vinit Mukhija, which focuses on three key issues: economics, infrastructure, and perception. Gas and electric water heaters are often more attractive to community residents because of their association with upper-class people and the relatively low cost of buying fuel, given government subsidies, which are now shrinking. In some places, the building infrastructure will not support appliances, and people are wary because of bad experiences with electric and gas heaters, which can prove dangerous in this environment. Houses, for example, may explode when rats eat through gas pipes. T. H.’s plans for the future go well beyond hot water heaters and Cairo to a much larger world that is beset by problems of poverty and diminishing fossil fuel resources. While his projects focus on meeting energy needs in urban environments, they also seem to have a social impact. As a 13-year-old trial recruit in the Ringling Brothers clown college, T. H. had his first vision of this phenomenon, he says: "People of all different nations, cultures, and languages could work together somewhat harmoniously under the same tent to put on a show." In Cairo, bringing together people from the Muslim quarter and the Coptic community toward a common goal has created "true lasting bonds of friendship," he says. "I’m no longer sure which is the goal and which the side effect." UCLA International Institute Date Posted: 4/9/2009

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[Sustain] NO To Corporate Sponsorship Of Sunday Streets
by Eric Brooks 10 Apr '09

10 Apr '09

Susan King and all, Susan, I am concerned. Here are excerpts from a Guardian blog report by Steve Jones on Sunday Streets, including a quote from you.. "-- it's unsettling to see Sunday Streets brought to you by some of the most villainous corporations in town, including PG&E <http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?catid=77&entry_id=1927>, Lennar <http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=6843&catid=4>, WebCor Builders <http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics/2007/10/procar_crowd_draws_first_blood.h…>, and Clear Channel Entertainment, and laid out as a promotional tool for the very Fisherman's Wharf merchants who opposed it last year. Yes, it costs money to close streets, money that the city and community event promoters just don't have right now. But what does it say about San Francisco when we need to rely big corporations in order to use and enjoy our public spaces? Of course, that's not the only way to look at this, particularly when one's goal is to push the envelope on seizing back space from cars. Susan King, a Green Party member helping to organize Sunday Streets for Livable City, acknowledged my point-of-view but said that it's a step forward when institutional powers are willing to help with progressive goals. "It really mainstreams the concept of carfree spaces," she told me, noting that directing traffic through and around the street closures is a complicated effort that will cost between $40,000 and $50,000 per event. "The costs are associated with how difficult it is to take a roadway and repurpose it."" I was grudgingly willing to go along with this dubious Newsom initiated program when it clearly had some merit. But now that Newsom is simply using it as yet another tool to greenwash corporations that are destroying our city, like PG&E and Lennar, I am vehemently opposed to this. Furthermore, I am sure that very few Greens agree that partnering with evil corporations mainstreams them with supporting public goals. On the contrary, it helps them to co-opt and destroy those goals and make it easier for them to plunder our environment and community, and control our politicians, while they make themselves look good to the public; thereby making it easier for them to kick our ass in ballot measure battles like the recent props F and H. And as to the events themselves, I have completely stopped attending street parties in San Francisco because they have become such a tawdry, dingy, corporate controlled joke. The last thing we need is for the same ugliness and cheapness to descend on our Sunday Streets events. This experiment has now gone too far. We need to find a way to nix the corporate sponsorship of these events pronto, so that this takeover doesn't ruin the Sunday Streets project. I would like to see this agendized at the next GM so we can make clear that the SF Green Party does -not- support corporate sponsored Sunday Streets events. sincerely Eric B -- "I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves." -- Che Guevara

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[Sustain] SFPUC Rate Fairness Board to Hear Public Comment on SFPUC’s Proposed 2009 – 2013 Water & Sewer Rate Proposal
by Martin Zehr 04 Apr '09

04 Apr '09

SFPUC Rate Fairness Board to Hear Public Comment on SFPUC’s Proposed 2009 – 2013 Water & Sewer Rate Proposal Published: 04/02/2009 | Updated: 04/03/2009 Published By: Communications and Public Outreach The members of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) Rate Fairness Board will hold a special meeting on Monday, April 6th at 5:30 p.m. to hear public comment and testimony on the SFPUC’s proposed 2009 – 2013 water and wastewater rate proposal. The Rate Fairness Board was created by voters in 2002 to review proposed SFPUC service rates and rate structures and is comprised of City financial staff and representatives of ratepayers and the public.

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