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One of the features that come with a roof-top solar system is monitoring software so you can tweak your energy usage. If you’re watching too much TV, for example, you can switch that off and read a book. An electric or hybrid vehicle owner also can manage their energy use by numerous gauges that are part of the vehicle’s package. If you’re getting low on battery power, just turn off your heated seat. Feedback, knowing how and where you are using energy, can give you a lot of control over your energy costs. Without adequate feedback on many of the complicated contraptions we use today, we wouldn’t have a clue how they (and by electronic proxy, ourselves) are performing.    If we are seeking to live sustainably, control our energy costs, and evaluate our footprints on our environment, we need good feedback because the world has become a very complicated place. Of course, our bodies came with a lot of feedback mechanisms—sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste—but these senses ar...

Since Trump won, climate activists are rethinking their strategies. Organizations like 350.org are conducting national call-ins for this very purpose. I understand this sentiment: “The climate movement needs to connect with other conversations like the ones on trade, on gender, on economic rights, because we realize that people are disenfranchised for a reason.” ( Trump won: It’s time for climate NGOs to stop preaching to the choir   (November 11, 2016)  Climate Home )  But I’m not so sure that trying to fit the urgency of Climate Change solely into other people’s concerns is the way to go. Though it is important to focus on the relationships between what folks are concerned about (like clean water and justice), it is also imperative that we prioritize how the physics of Climate Change will affect not only the present but the future. We must get folks to understand that their concerns are linked to Climate Change. For the sake of our future, addressing and mitigating Clim...

Many are feeling pretty hopeless after the US just installed a climate denier for President together with a political majority in both the House and Senate opposed to addressing Climate Change. Let’s face it, now the United States is a great concern to a world that just made the Paris Agreement official.  Donald Trump Could Put Climate Change on Course for ‘Danger Zone’ For a look at how sharply policy in Washington will change under the administration of Donald J. Trump, look no further than the environment. Mr. Trump has called human-caused climate change a “hoax.” He has vowed to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency “in almost every form.” And in an early salvo against one of President Obama’s signature issues, Mr. Trump has named Myron Ebell of the business-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute to head his E.P.A. transition team. Mr. Ebell has asserted that whatever warming caused by greenhouse gas pollution is modest and could be beneficial. A 2007 Vanity Fair prof...

Rochester’s local media probably wouldn’t have shown up to yesterday’s rally against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) if this massive fossil fuel infrastructure development hadn’t been such a wickedly ill-conceived boondoggle. This violent power grab of Native American’s burial grounds, which threats their water, has garnered worldwide attention and motivated hundreds of Rochesterians, including Congresswoman, Louise Slaughter to speak in support of the #NoDAPL protesters. World attention has focused on the horrific police response to Native Americans protesting the destruction of their own lands (in their own nation). Even mainstream media cannot suppress the brutal and craven treatment by the fossil fuel industry when those people get a sniff of more oily profits.  All you have to do is go to #NoDAPL on Twitter and Facebook to find hundreds of thousands of citizen testimonials to the importance of the Dakota lands to their people—and the brutal treatment inflicted on them as the...