SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Call it an eco-parable: one Prius-driving couple takes pride in their eight redwoods, the first of them planted over a decade ago. Their electric-car-driving neighbors take pride in their rooftop solar panels, installed five years after the first trees were planted.
Trees — redwoods, live oaks or blossoming fruit trees — are usually considered sturdy citizens of the sun-swept peninsula south of San Francisco, not criminal elements. But under a 1978 state law protecting homeowners’ investment in rooftop solar panels, trees that impede solar panels’ access to the sun can be deemed a nuisance and their owners fined up to $1,000 a day. The Solar Shade Act was a curiosity until late last year, when a dispute over the eight redwoods(a k a Tree No. 1, Tree No. 2, Tree No. 3, etc.) ended up in Santa Clara County criminal court.
The couple who planted the trees, Carolynn Bissett and Richard Treanor, were convicted of violating the law, based on the complaint of their neighbor, Mark Vargas, and were ordered to make sure that no more than 10 percent of the solar panels are shaded. . . .
On both sides of the Sunnyvale backyard fence, there is evidence of environmental virtue — one Prius (Ms. Bissett and Mr. Treanor), one electric car (the Vargases), one water-free xeriscaped front yard with recycled-plastic borders (Ms. Bissett and Mr. Treanor), 128 solar panels providing almost all the power for one home (the Vargases), and eight carbon-dioxide-sipping, bird-friendly redwood trees in various stages of growth (Ms. Bissett and Mr. Treanor). . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
04/10/2008 07:15 ||
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Heh! (tm)
I love hot red-on-red action.
Posted by: N guard ||
04/10/2008 9:12 Comments ||
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Chop down the Redwoods onto the solar panels. Win - win.
Posted by: ed ||
04/10/2008 9:52 Comments ||
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If you have ever seen these beautiful trees you would understand that they do not belong in any neighborhood.
Posted by: Dan ||
04/10/2008 9:58 Comments ||
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That was my VERY first thought, too, Dan. I know it takes eons for them to reach the sizes they do in the National Forests/Nat'l Parks, but jeebus, why would you plant them in a backyard?
Posted by: BA ||
04/10/2008 11:03 Comments ||
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but jeebus, why would you plant them in a backyard?
I think Freud would say they were compensating for something....
Redwoods are extremely fast growing. When landscapping in new developments they quickly provide shade and fill in space.
However, they do need to be cut down when slower growing varieties mature. First, unless you have an immense yard, they look out of place. Second, because they have very shallow root systems, single trees tend to blow over in high winds.
#9
If you have ever seen these beautiful trees you would understand that they do not belong in any neighborhood.
And if you had ever seen them in a neighborhood, you'd understand why people plant them. They are quite attractive in a neighborhood of appropriately sized lots, but they grow too quickly, for my taste. They soon (40-50 years) become a liability from a removal perspective. But they sure are nice.
Germany's celebrity polar bear Knut has triggered a new controversy by fishing out 10 live carp from his moat and killing them in front of visitors.
Critics say Berlin Zoo should not have put live fish inside Knut's enclosure. "You know, predators, prey . . . bad combination."
"But we raised him as a vegan!"
German media report that the carp were put there to eat up algae. . . . And is anyone getting upset at the millions of little defenseless single-celled organisms the carp were slaughtering? And why not?
The Frankfurter Allgemeine news website reports that Knut "senselessly murdered the carp", fishing them out, playing with them and then leaving the remains. No, it was perfectly sensible. Knut looked at the fish, and his little bear brain said, "Groceries!"
Posted by: Mike ||
04/10/2008 07:05 ||
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What do they think Polar Bears eat in the arctic?
While they are floating around on chunks of ice in the WATER! It aint turnips.
#9
I just can't believe Germans, of all folks, are reacting this way. Animals react on INSTINCT folks. Only humans (at least, most humans) react based upon logical thought processes.
Of course, as Phil b states, I don't blame Knut at all for *not* eating those nasty fish.
Posted by: BA ||
04/10/2008 11:00 Comments ||
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I think the neocons are behind this. Just read the comments, there is a bias against carp. Damn, is nothing sacred anymore ?
#12
Could have been worse, there could have been seals in the moat.
The psycho bear meme really annoys me. The bear was raised as a human and then isolated/abandoned when he got a little too big to be cute. Can you imagine the effect on a 2 -3 year old child to have everyone he cared about suddenly abandon him? The German media is just as brain-dead as ours.
#17
They're Libruls, libruls can't think. They only feeeeeel!
The predators can take care of themselves in any case, obviously. Even if caged. And even then, they do what they do because they are mean and have no right to live. Now if they were nicer and just ate grass they would be OK.
Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own. They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.
Martin Dominik, from St Andrews University in the UK, said the finding suggested systems like our own could be much more common than we thought. So somewhere on this parallel Earth, is there a parallel Fred who runs a parallel Rantburg with its own Army of Parallel Steve?
Posted by: Mike ||
04/10/2008 10:39 ||
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Parallel Fred: We have a troll. The Agonizer, Mr. Steve.
Posted by: ed ||
04/10/2008 11:22 Comments ||
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There are many more problems to a planet developing intelligent life than simply being the right size, temperature and composition, though that is the first part (and for the more zealous in the religion department, I am going to assume that God could create life in more than one place in the universe if He wanted to).
You need a star that is stable for very long periods of time ... stable for billions of years. You need a magnetic field on the planet so that the solar wind from the star doesn't strip the water out of the atmosphere as happened on Venus. You need a Galactic region that is free from large doses of cosmic rays that can destroy life. Irradiation from a nearby nova can sterilize a planet yet leave it physically intact.
The need for a magnetic field rules out "first generation" star systems composed mainly of hydrogen and other light elements. Such a planet would need iron and oxygen and nitrogen and calcium and silicon and carbon so it would need to be composed of materials made from an earlier generation of stars. Those elements are products of fusion from the initial hydrogen stars.
So we are looking at 2nd or 3rd generation stars that have been stable for a period of billions of years with no nearby nova and relatively free of damaging cosmic radiation. Such a place will likely be way out on the edges of a galaxy just off of the main galactic plain. Given that stars probably live a few billion years and this would need to be a second or third generation star, such a star could not even form until several billion years after the formation of the universe.
The bottom line is that yes, we could very well be alone even if there are several million planets much like our own. There might be planets that look like ours did a billion years ago. We have only had "intelligent" life in the form of humans that could use tools for a million years or so ... almost no time at all, on a planet that could support life for almost 3 billion years.
(Oh, and our planet has only about 250 million more years or so left before the sun becomes too hot and Earth outgasses all its water)
#9
crosspatch: There are tremendous problems with their being intelligent life "out there".
Remember that life evolved and re-evolved on Earth several times before coming up with an intelligent species, so if Earth has a sister planet somewhere, they might have had an intelligent species 50 million years ago, now long gone.
We have only had about a 50 year window in which to receive intelligent transmissions.
SYDNEY - A 7.5 magnitude earthquake rocked the Loyalty Islands region of the South Pacific on Wednesday, the US Geological Survey said. The quake, centred 85 kilometres (55 miles) southwest of Vanuatu and 175 kilometres northeast of the Loyalty Islands in the French territory of New Caledonia, struck at 12:46 GMT and 88 kilometres deep, the USGS said. There were no immediate reports of damage.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there was no threat of a tsunami, but advised earthquakes of such size “sometimes generate local tsunamis that can be destructive along coasts” within a hundred kilometres of the epicentre.
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/10/2008 00:00 ||
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Thought so - awoke from sleep and felt my PU truck shaking a little strangely, + visually observed EM "Sparks" and "Bands" [moatly dark-color] in the atmosphere over Guam. MY FIRST GUESS FROM SLUMBER 'TWAS A QUAKE BUT WASN'T CERTAIN.
Four death row prisoners have been executed in Japan, the authorities have announced. The four inmates, aged between 41 and 64, were hanged at separate locations in Japan, the justice ministry said.
Japan, one of the few industrialised countries to retain the death penalty, appears to be stepping up the pace of prisoner executions. Three capital sentences were carried out in February, as well as nine executions in 2007.
Human rights groups are critical of the secrecy surrounding executions in Japan.
Relatives are told only after the hangings have taken place and, until December 2007, the names of those executed were not publicly announced.
But justice ministry officials and opinion polls suggest that there is considerable support for the death penalty among the Japanese public.
Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama played down talk of an acceleration in executions. "I have not paid any attention to the interval (since February's executions)," he told reporters. "As justice minister, I am simply carrying out the demands of the law."
Posted by: john frum ||
04/10/2008 06:48 ||
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That would be four they will no longer have to provide a rice ration to. Good on the Nips.
#2
Japan, one of the few industrialised countries to retain the death penalty..
Which means the elites haven't full control yet to dictate to the people what they can and can not have regardless of the quaint terms democracy or republic.
Bets on the number of executions carried out in Japan's homes, streets, businesses, schools, as opposed to, say, those our own States? Those loudest about 'innocent' civilians dying in Iraq et al, seem to be rather deaf and indifferent about ending 'innocent' civilian being intentionally targeted and murdered in their own domain.
#3
China is believed to have executed about 3,400 prisoners last year. Where's the outrage? Liberals and do-gooders never like to take on somebody that will tell them to go f*ck themselves. They much rather prefer to browbeat moderates and truly democratic countries.
I remember when Barack was young, the Associated Press reports:
A bitter Sir Elton John thinks America's sexism may be sinking his friend Hillary Rodham Clinton.
John, a knighted British subject, said that gender discrimination is behind Clinton's problems in the polls as he addressed 5,000 Clinton supporters at Radio City Musical Hall last night in an event that raised $2.5 million for the cash-strapped campaign.
"I never cease to be amazed by the misogynistic attitudes of some people in this country," said John, wearing a spangled black evening coat over a vermilion silk shirt. "I say to hell with them. . . . I love you, Hillary, I'll always be there for you."
But the years went by and Little Rock just died, and the voters went and left her for some foreign guy. Long nights crying by the shredder machine, dream of cattle futures and her old blue jeans
But they'll never kill the thrills she got, when her law firm ran Little Rock
Learning fast as the weeks went past, we really thought the Clinton era would last
Posted by: Mike ||
04/10/2008 17:13 ||
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Sir Elton is an excellent reason for knighthoods in future to be reserved for combat military officers and not fops.
#4
Didn't he bag on the US voters back during the 2004 or 2006 election as well. If things arent going his way there must be some slanderous reason for it rather than politics. Pretty sad that his worldview is so narrow-minded.
A man was killed and six others were injured on Wednesday as sectarian clashes in the Kurram Agency continued for a fifth consecutive day. A jirga is trying to break a truce among rival sects in the agency and several local elders have announced their support for the deliberations. Elders from Parachinar as well as lower and central Kurram are trying to persuade those engaged in fighting to stop violence in the area. Reports say that fighting is continuing in the Puar and Mirma areas of Parachinar for a tenth consecutive day. Meanwhile, the Hangu Aman (peace) Jirga has been trying to broker a ceasefire between the elders of six tribes in Sadda city for the past few days. In a separate incident, a Baleshkhel-bound jirga, consisting of government officials, came under attack in the Sangeena and Baleshkhel areas. The convoy escaped unhurt.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/10/2008 00:00 ||
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"Come to Pakistan and enjoy our gratuitous sects and violence!"
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own. They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun. 
