Best Green Blogs is “a comprehensive resource for all things green and sustainable in the blogosphere.”

There’s hundreds of sites listed here, with a short description of each, and you can view by category too. Highly useful.

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John Robb blogs about the current South Africa blackouts where the usual culprits of inadequate maintenance, poor planning, and bad management have, combined with bad weather, causing a massive electricity shortage that will take years to fix.

The blizzards in China have caused severe damage. The electrical grid, primarily fueled by coal, can’t reliably power major cities and transportation has come to a standstill.

The storms have reportedly resulted in the collapse of 107,000 buildings, and destroyed 42 billion square meters of crops.

And more storms are coming.

Again, bad weather (fueled by La Nina) may have been the precipitating factor, but clearly the infrastructure of China is ill-maintained and not able to withstand shocks. Let’s not be too smug and say it can’t happen here…

We need resilent communities, says Robb, to safeguard against such crises.

This conceptual model creates a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses. These services are configured to provide the ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid.

Local power, local food production, and most of all, contingency plans are what a resilient community needs if the national grid gets disrupted. A decentralized system will always be more resilient and flexible than one that is centralized.

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Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), launched in 2003, is the world’s first and North America’s only active voluntary, legally binding integrated trading system to reduce emissions of all six major greenhouse gases (GHGs), with offset projects worldwide.

Reductions achieved through CCX are the only reductions made in North America through a legally binding compliance regime, providing independent, third party verification.

I’ve been skeptical of this, but apparently it does get results. Emissions trading has been successful in phasing out lead from gasoline and in reducing acid rain.

Wikipedia explains how it works.

The buyer [of the emissions credit] is paying a charge for polluting, while the seller is being rewarded for having reduced emissions by more than was needed. Thus, in theory, those that can easily reduce emissions most cheaply will do so, achieving the pollution reduction at the lowest possible cost to society.

This assumes that the system can’t be gamed and that it operates transparently and openly. It is also important for the controlling body to continually be reducing the number of emission credits available over a period of time to force the price up.

The system can scale, at witness the European Union Emission Trading Scheme, the largest greenhouse gas trading system in the world. It appears to be mandatory for large emitters, unlike the US market which is voluntary.

In order to make sure that real trading emerges (and that CO2 emissions are reduced), EU governments must make sure that the total amount of allowances issued to installations is less than the amount that would have been emitted under a business-as-usual scenario.

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The Bush administration’s decision to deny California the right to regulate greenhouse gases from vehicles exploded like a grenade here and in California. But it was hiding in plain sight for weeks.

Schwarzenegger says California will sue the federal government, which certainly indicates an open rupture among Republicans. And at least eight other states are joining California in the fight.

I wonder, does Bush have any allies left? Or has he alienated all of them?

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