Photo of Andy Arthur

Andy Arthur

October and already the leaves are fading away in the Adirondacks. 🍂 Most shocking to me is that we are less then a month away from November, which in many ways should be a sigh of relief with the craziness of work and with the deep blue skies and crisp days of that month.

Sun coming over New York City, school bus driver in traffic jam, staring at the drivers in rearview mirror 🌅

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Only in America, dreaming in the Red-White-and-Blue. I know what song I’ll be playing a lot today.

Those days of Brooks and Dunn seem like yesterday 🇺🇸 but really were 23 years ago now. So distant but so close. I still remember that crisp September day like it was yesterday, watching the buildings fall on 9/11 from that classroom at Hudson Valley Communication College, the classes dismissed early and I went up to Partridge Run, found myself wandering around off of High Point Road in Berne, noticing the airplane free skies. 🛬 I was looking at the album covers of Brooks and Dunn and the promo pictures, and I couldn’t help but think what a long time ago that was,  an era all but completely hauled to the local garbage dump.

Looks like another beautiful day is ahead for today, ☀ and I greased the bike up 🚲 and I will ride in this morning. Hopefully that will stop the creaking issue I’m hearing until the bike warms up. Maybe listening to some Brooks and Dunn, with memories of that day so many years ago now. It’s kind of funny how things come full circle, 🌕 how I used to be a Macintosh computer geek 🤓 but then had such bad grades in math 🔢, ended up studying political science and a quarter century later are now the Director of Data Services, writing R code like a mad man, filtering and joining data, householding mail lists and generating label 🔖jobs. Only in America.

I am still really digging those truly wireless ear buds. 🎧 I thought loosing the original wire to the earphone jack was a big change when that technology became affordable a few years back, but now the completely wireless earbuds are so awesome. I am a late adopter of technology the kids have had for decades, but it doesn’t make it any less awesome. ☺ It may not be branded with an apple 🍏 but I’m good with that. I used to like Macintosh OS stuff but that was a long time ago now, like back when Brooks and Dunn were a thing, though after 1998 I’ve been an almost purely open source guy.

I still want to escape to Vermont this weekend, 🏕 and work remote on Friday and Monday, but I will be so busy with work as I have so much data processing to do. Literally, I was going through my list and starting at 8 AM or maybe earlier, I have at least 5 different tasks scheduled to run. Fortunately, most of them don’t require a lot of additional coding, but they do require scripts to run, outputs to be proofed, lists to be requested, 📃 and mail jobs to b run. ✉ Basically all the things you might think a data person would do. And I don’t see things slowing for the weekend, though I could see finding time for riding the bike, maybe floating on the Deerfield River and some campfires. 🔥 Rensselearville would be a safer, easier choice though. I have to decide today, as I’ll probably want to pack and leave after Thursday’s meeting.

Rensselearville

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Driving through Rensselearville on a mid-September afternoon.

Be cognizant of environmental impacts of renewables

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Climate change action is important but let’s be cognizant of the environmental impacts of renewables

Burning fossil fuels has largely known and well documented impacts. From the much touted carbon emissions to air pollution and acid rain to acid mine discharge from coal mines and scarred landscapes from mountain top removal and strip mines to drilling cuttings, fracking chemicals and produced water to cracked casings and oil spills the impacts of fossil fuels are well documented and somewhat regulated and controlled but probably not to ideal levels as production and low cost is often emphasized over safety and environmental protection.

But what is much less discussed and documented is renewable energy impacts. It must be green so there is no environmental impacts or the impacts are de minimus. But that’s far from the truth. Renewable energy consumes enormous amounts of land, it in future years has a real possibility of urbanizing enormous parts of countryside, paving over farm land and forest, producing enormous amounts of toxic waste like wind turbine blades and discarded, broken solar panels to impacting watersheds and fisheries alike, reducing scenic beauty and take land out of other uses. Things that deserve serious consideration and environmental analysis.

To be sure we do need to build more renewable energy but we have to always thinking about the consequences of our choices, not blindly building it because renewables are good and climate change is really bad and scary. Being aware of the environmental impacts of renewables doesn’t mean you’re pro fossil fuels, it means that you are a thinking society, trying to avoid negative environmental problems down the road.

  • We need to take a serious look before we leap – is the solar plant or wind farm appropriate for the place we are sitting it
  • We need to mitigate like planting pollinators friendly or native grasses around solar farms
  • We need to look at building more renewables in cities – be it mandatory solar panels on buildings, over highways or in urban waste lands like old garbage dumps, highway medians, or contaminated industrial sites

Wind Turbine Looking Towards The Adirondacks

Why build a solar farm over green farm fields or forests when you can build over Love Canal?