The Oil Drum

The fun thing about conferences is that there are also sorts of individual lines that presenters say that could be pulled to the headline, and perhaps be more mischievous than helpful. I was thinking that today, when the opening speaker began with explaining why she couldn’t start her talk with a joke. Turns out that when she tried to Google “ethanol and Joke” all she got was pages of citations of “ethanol is a joke” or “ethanol is a big joke!” Conference, you say, speaker, you say, but I thought the ASPO Conference didn’t start until tomorrow?

Well yes, that’s true, but sometimes if you want to catch some of the developing stuff, or the stories that never make it to the National Meetings, you can learn a lot from smaller conferences, and so I came to Dubuque. Today is the first of two days on “The Impacts of Increased Bio-Fuel Production on the Midwest Landscape.” At a time when the current ethanol situation has been described as “the farmer’s version of the gold rush,” it was interesting to hear what is happening down at the farm level and in planning within the Midwest to look at answers to the looming problem. Some of the papers today discussed switchgrass, and algae, and biodiesel and how to effectively harvest the “crappiest wood” in the U.S. and turn it into useful energy. And in the discussions, in a town where the corn grows right up to the airport runways, there was a lot of realism in the discussions of water needs, and soil nutrition replacement and bottom line cost levels.

This is a guest post from Hans Noeldner, a trustee in the village of Oregon, Wisconsin, a rapidly growing bedroom community of about 8,300 near Madison, Wisconsin. Hans' first piece on the rules of downtown revitalization can be found here and his piece on the "Declaration of Dependence" can be found here.

Today he writes a letter to his fellow members of the Wisconsin Governor’s Task Force on Global Warming (GTFGW). It seems to me that the theme of “unwinding” vehicular one-upsmanship is pertinent…

Note, these are exactly the kind of stories we are looking for for the new TOD:Local segment, please submit them to Glenn or the eds box!

Dear GTFGW – Transportation Working Group (TWG) members:

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Imagine for a moment that we extrapolate into the future, from the relatively modest cars most people drove twenty-five years ago…to the 5,000-pound SUVs and 6,000-pound pickup trucks that dominate our suburbs today…to the vehicles that might cluster ‘round our soccer fields and school drop off zones after another ten or twenty years of “healthy” economic growth:

(You will have to click here, it's a flash module...and click “CST” and “MST” at the bottom.)

I am a trustee in the village of Oregon, Wisconsin, a rapidly growing bedroom community of about 8,300 near Madison, Wisconsin. I ran for public office because I believed that 90% of the work to create a sustainable society must be done at the community level. Having served for nearly two years, I am even more convinced this is true. Our consumption of resources and production of wastes is more powerfully shaped by our land use decisions than any other factor I can think of. And land use decisions are intensely local.

More of Hans' interesting (and it being Sunday, it has an NPR-Michael-Feldman-esque feel about it...) observations on the rules of downtown revitalization under the fold.