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Category: eco

Wedding Season

Published August 8, 2013
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Photo by the talented Mélusine, our photographer*.

I am a self-described responsible citizen. On most days, I’m a vegetarian. I regularly shop at the farmer’s market, pay embarrassing amounts of money for milk, and ride my bike everywhere. In making these choices, I believe that I’m somehow making life better for the small farmer and the shop around the corner. So, when my fiancé and I decided to tie the knot, I wanted these lifestyle choices to spillover into the party we wanted to throw. Vegetarian food, check. Local produce, check. Flowers, well, flowers weren’t so easy.

I had heard of the slow flower movement, which had recently gained attention with Debra Prinzing‘s 2012 book, The 50 Mile Bouquet. Like the slow food movement, the slow flower movement encourages supporting local flower farmers. In the quest for my own, local flowers, I slowly discovered that many brides-to-be in the blogosphere have adopted the slow flower philosophy. This is a world in which women vie to have their wedding pictures accepted onto top blogs, and the eco-chic bride reigns as queen, at least for this season. I wanted in.

A surefire way to wedding-blog-acceptance is buying directly from a farm in your neighborhood. Putting potted plants in front of your guests is also a favorite option. A rarity indeed is the bride who plans ahead and grows her flowers herself. Nevertheless, the ordinary eco-chic bride buys her flowers from a sustainable florist.

There’s a catch to that, however. These self-proclaimed sustainable florists don’t all adhere to one single notion of “sustainable”. Veriflora, the authoritative certification on organic flowers, is expensive for small flower farmers to obtain, and it does not assure that your flowers have not been flown into the US from, say, Columbia. Or, you bought your flowers from a Washington farmer, but the bulbs came from the Netherlands. I wondered if putting a couple bins of soil at the center of our tables would get me into this elite club of eco-chic brides.

All of this confusion over what is sustainable and what isn’t doesn’t seem to deter the online wedding media from chronicling the adventures of well-meaning brides. And honestly, it hasn’t stopped me from checking out a few every once in a while. Entertainment is a powerful thing, isn’t it?

Here are some cute-sy eco-chic weddings:

A sylvan celebration, set in a vignette out of the novel Tuck Everlasting

These two took campy to a whole new level.

Brava! This wedding came to the source of the blooms: an herb farm! No cutting necessary.

*http://melusinephotographie.com/

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Shell’s Revenue Dips

Published August 1, 2013

This morning, Royal Dutch Shell plc reported on its website that its earnings during March, April, and June of this year fell 21 percent compared to the same quarter in 2012. The CEO, the Dutch Peter Voser, attributed the decline to “higher costs, exploration charges, adverse currency exchange rate effects and challenges in Nigeria.” Along the way, Shell has devalued its natural gas reserve operations in the United States by 1.8 million Euros.

Undermining its position in the US’s natural gas business may seem contradictory to successful extraction from shale formations in recent years. However, the write-down reflects the commodity’s downward price trend. James Herron on WSJ’s Moneybeat blog wrote:

The industry has been so successful producing gas that the price of the fuel has plummeted from $13 per million Btu in 2008 to just over $3 per million Btu currently, making assets worth less than originally hoped.

Shale gas from the United States may have become a cheaper commodity than Shell would like.

However, Shell has not yet indicated the specific reason for which its shale gas operations have become less valuable but bases its decision on “the latest insights from exploration and appraisal drilling results and production information.” So, a report of some sort.

I covered a talk on energy policy at a recent conference in Delft, a couple of months ago. A representative from the DoE presented some findings from the US Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook 2013 report that said that shale gas demand would only surpass supply in 2020. Until then, low gas prices in the commodities market will be the reality.

Herron points out that Shell’s devaluation in its gas exploration assets might trigger anti-fracking activists to beef up their cause.

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