How about using the heat from the Earth’s core to power your home? Guess what: you already are. Solar, wind and water power are the big three natural and sustainable sources for electric power, but the North Bay also benefits from a fourth—geothermal energy.

The geological conditions that allow access to geothermal heat and steam are scattered in just a few areas around the world, almost always where the subterranean slabs of planetary rock known as tectonic plates are moving against each other. Bruce Carlsen, Calpine’s Director of Environmental Health and Safety at The Geysers, explains the underlying forces.

The same conditions often create numerous hot springs and can be a source of seismic activity—as is also the case in the North Bay. But while earthquakes can alter the flows that feed hot springs, Carlsen explains that the deeper strata that feed geothermal steam fields are not affected.

The Geysers is by far the biggest geothermal generating facility in California, but Carlsen says there are some other locations that could be developed to make a smaller contribution to the state’s energy needs.

Bruce Carlsen talks about geothermal energy in Sonoma County at an informal potluck gathering at the Glaser Center in Santa Rosa on Aug. 31, 5:30-7:30 p,m, co-hosted by the Climate Protection Campaign.

Land-based sewage discharges into the ocean are illegal. Soon that ban will apply to big ships, too, under new EPA rules being announced today.

Jared Blumenfeld, Regional Administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was Environmental Director for the City and County of San Francisco before he was appointed his new job by the Obama administration last January. He would prefer that the ship sewage discharge ban reached at least twice as far offshore, but says three miles is all his agency can cover.

 Even these new rules will only restrict about 4/5ths of the sewage discharges into the state’s bays and other coastal waters; most of the remaining 20% comes from smaller vessels not governed by the new rules. Blumenfeld would like to see an eventual system of controlled dockside flushes into regional treatment facilities, but acknowledges that’s little more than a vision right now.

While the new EPA rules are welcomed, some environmental groups are pushing for more stringent standards. There is also a separate  move underway to impose a full ban on sewage discharges from all vessels on Tomales Bay.

Flood, droughts and rising sea levels and other effects of global climate change are already displacing millions of people around the world, a situation documented in the new film, Climate Refugees.

Documentary filmmaker Michael Nash first screened Climate Refugees at the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen last winter. The film made its domestic debut at Sundance.  And even as he hopes for US commercial distribution to kick in later this fall, Nash says he is fielding requests for showings from a growing number of governmental and church groups.

Climate Refugees is meant to be apolitical, at least in the partisan sense, says Nash (right). And even if the issue he spotlights may be new to many viewers, he observes that it has been building for years.

Nash has said his starting point for making this filnm was a desire to show “the human face of climate change.”  In doing so, he learned that one doesn’t need to go very far to find it.

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2ULoJYTsrM

A new analysis finds there are fewer foggy days along the Northern California coast than there were  100 years ago. That’s bad news for the venerable coast redwoods.

In addition to charting a reduction in the number of foggy days over the past century, U.C. Berkeley researcher Todd E. Dawson says their study also found fewer hours of foggy conditions on the days when the mist was present.

In their analysis, Dawson and  his colleague, James Johnstone, found there was a relationship between drought years and fog conditions, but it’s not what one might expect.

Read the abstract of their published paper on this research here.