The Future is Green

'How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?' 30 Million People Wonder

First of all, dear readers, I must apologize for the long silence. I needed to put the blog on hold while finishing up the manuscript for my book, Practical Green Remodeling, due out this summer. It's nearly done (my editor will be relieved to hear) and I hope to resume regular blogging shortly. But I couldn't resist sharing this piece from The Onion that my son alerted me to.

  A local resident discards a plastic bottle—just as he has done his whole life—with no perceivable effect on the environment.

WASHINGTON—Wishing to dispose of the empty plastic container, and failing to spot a recycling bin nearby, an estimated 30 million Americans asked themselves Monday how bad throwing away a single bottle of water could really be.

"It's fine, it's fine," thought Maine native Sheila Hodge, echoing the exact sentiments of Chicago-area resident Phillip Ragowski, recent Florida transplant Margaret Lowery, and Kansas City business owner Brian McMillan, as they tossed the polyethylene terephthalate object into an awaiting trash can. "It's just one bottle. And I'm usually pretty good about this sort of thing."

"Not a big deal," continued roughly one-tenth of the nation's population.

According to the inner monologue of millions upon millions of citizens, while not necessarily ideal, throwing away one empty bottle probably wouldn't make that much of a difference, and could even be forgiven, considering how long they had been carrying it around with them, the time that could be saved by just tossing it out right here, and the fact that they had bicycled to work once last July.

In addition, pretty much the entire states of Missouri and New Mexico calmly reassured themselves Monday that they definitely knew better than to do something like this, but admitted that hey, nobody is perfect, and at least they weren't still using those horrible aerosol cans, or just throwing garbage directly on the ground.

All agreed that disposing of what would eventually amount to 50 tons of thermoplastic polymer resin wasn't the end of the world.

"It's not like I don't care, because I do, and most of the time I don't even buy bottled water," thought Missouri school teacher Heather Delamere, the 450,000th caring and progressive individual to have done so that morning, and the 850,000th to have purchased the environmentally damaging vessel due to being thirsty, in a huge rush, and away from home. "It's really not worth beating myself up over."

"What's one little bottle in the grand scheme of things, you know?" added each and every single one of them.

Monday's plastic-bottle-related dilemma wasn't the only environmental quandary facing millions of citizens across the country. An estimated 20 million men and women wondered how wasteful leaving a single lightbulb on all night really was, while more than 40 million Americans asked themselves if anyone would actually notice if they just turned up the heat a few degrees instead of walking all the way downstairs and getting another blanket.

Likewise, had they not been so tired, and busy, and stressed, citizens making up the equivalent of three major metropolitan areas told reporters that they probably wouldn't have driven their minivans down to the corner store.

"Relax," thousands upon thousands of Americans quietly whispered to themselves as they tossed two articles of clothing into an empty washing machine and turned it on. "What are you so worried about?"

You can see the original here.

Affordable Clean Energy Technology: China’s Sputnik

Dateline: 20,000 feet, somewhere over Michigan

At the outset, let me confess that I am, as I write this, doing just about the least green thing a person can do – flying. Yes, I did buy carbon offsets to ameliorate some of the environmental harm wrought by my round-trip flight to Denver. But it is increasingly hard to fly without anxiety over the outsize greenhouse gas emissions resulting from air travel. The fact that I am flying there to speak about energy efficiency at the Energy & Environmental Buildings Association conference does very little to relieve my sense of unease.

But that’s not really what I want to write about today.

Instead, I would direct your attention to Thomas Friedman’s Op-Ed piece in today’s NY Times. China, he argues in it, as he often has, is gearing up to make renewable energy technology the growth engine of its economy. In doing so, the Chinese will leapfrog America’s fledgling efforts in that field much as the Soviets left us in the dust (at least temporarily) by launching Sputnik in 1957. Unless we make massive investments in science, technology, education and infrastructure as we did upon entering the space race, he warns, we will find it difficult to catch up.

“China’s leaders, “Friedman writes, “mostly engineers, wasted little time debating global warming. They know the Tibetan glaciers that feed their major rivers are melting. But they also know that even if climate change were a hoax, the demand for clean, renewable power is going to soar as we add an estimated 2.5 billion people to the planet by 2050, many of whom will want to live high-energy lifestyles.”

Quoting Lester Brown, author of Plan B 4.0, (highly recommended, btw) he tells us that, while the US has been the world leader in wind generation to date, “by the end of this year China will bypass us on new wind generation so fast we won’t even see it go by.”

China’s embarkation on a path of clean power development and innovation, Friedman concludes, “is the Sputnik of our day. We ignore it at our peril.”

The full text of Friedman’s column can be found here. Definitely worth reading.

And please, next time you travel, buy carbon offsets. While being very far from the kind of investment in clean energy we need to make as a nation, it does help finance clean energy and carbon mitigation projects and it doesn't cost very much. CarbonFund.org and TerraPass.com are two excellent web sites that will help you calculate and offset your carbon footprint.

A Wonkish Post About the Waxman-Markey Bill, a.k.a. the American Clean Energy and Security Act

Just back from Atlanta, where I spent four days at the Renewable Energy Markets conference sponsored by CRS, the Center for Resource Solutions.

One of the most striking things about the conference was the acknowledgement by virtually every speaker that a great deal of the clean energy landscape is about to change. Congress is on the verge of passing (we hope) some version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), also known as the Waxman-Markey bill. (The Senate version of the bill is called the Bingaman bill, but don’t let that confuse you).

Though far from perfect, ACESA is a significant step forward in the effort to reduce our dependance on fossil fuels and to curb global warming. The bill will mandate that greenhouse gas emissions be reduced by 80% (from 2005 levels) by the year 2050. That’s ambitious goal to be accomplished in 40 years, but it’s far from impossible. Still, many would argue that it is not ambitious enough.

One of the most crucial features of this 1,200 page bill is a cap-and-trade system for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is the same model that has been highly successful in reducing acid rain, so we know the mechanism to be effective. Simply put, energy producers would first be required to limit their greenhouse gas emissions to 2005 levels, and then gradually reduce emissions each year as the cap is ratcheted down.

Opponents of cap-and-trade claim that the costs will be prohibitive. But experience has shown that the successful acid rain reduction program in the US has been far less costly than originally predicted. And the European Union currently operates under a cap-and-trade system with virtually no negative economic consequences, according to an analysis by MIT.

More importantly, what opponents fail to consider, and should be reminded of at every opportunity, is that the cost of inaction will dwarf the cost of addressing climate change. I am always amazed when professed fiscal conservatives ignore financial consequences that will occur after the next election cycle, let alone in their children’s lifetime. This is conservatism? I call it irresponsible. But I digress.

But back to ACESA. One of the bill’s flaws, which could be easily fixed, is that neither the House or Senate versions contain a provision for protecting the voluntary market for renewable energy credits (RECs). (Click here for more detail on renewable energy credits).

While utilities in 30 states must buy RECs to comply with state mandates for clean energy, called Renewable Portfolio Standards, many organizations voluntarily buy RECs as part of a corporate commitment to environmental responsibility. Some of the largest voluntary buyers of RECs include Intel, PepsiCo, DuPont, Staples, Alcoa, Cargill Dow, Delphi Corporation, and scores of others who have offset from 4% to 100% of their conventional electricity usage. To date, voluntary REC purchases have been responsible for over 50% of all new renewable energy development in the US. Voluntary purchases in 2007, alone, account for 18.1 Megawatt hours of clean energy capacity. It’s a big success story.

A simple change in the bill’s language could rectify this shortcoming. It would take someone far more wonkish than I to explain this adequately, but passing this bill is a crucial step towards tackling climate change. I urge you to write, call, or email your Senators and Representatives to say you support passage of ACESA, and that it should be amended to provide added protections for the voluntary REC market.

New Film, The Age of Stupid, asks Why didn't we stop climate change while we had the chance?

The Age of  Stupid, a powerful new British drama/documentary film about climate change, is having its Unites States premier on September 21 and 22 in theaters in every state. (You can find a list of theaters and show times, and order tickets here.) The film stars Oscar-nominated actor, Pete Postlethwaite, as an old man living in the devastated world of 2055, watching 'archive' footage from 2008 and asking: why didn't we stop climate change while we had the chance?

Within 48 hours of the film's British launch at Tate Modern on September 1, 10,000 people, including Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, all of the cabinet, and the leaders of the UK's three main political parties all signed a pledge to  cut the UK's emissions by 10% in 2010.

Franny Armstrong, director of The Age of Stupid and founder of the environmental organization 10:10 said: "It's amazing that within 48 hours of the campaign's launch, the leaderships of the three main political parties have committed to cut their carbon emmissions by 10%. Who said people power was dead?

The premiere will be simulcast live from a solar powered tent in New York City to over 400 movie theaters at 7:30 PM ET (6:30 PM CT/ 5:30 PM MT/ tape delayed 8PM PT) and will include a live pre-show from the green carpet including Kofi Annan, Gillian Anderson, the film's director Franny Armstrong, and star, Pete Postlethwaite, and other luminaries from around the world including Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, and Ed Miliband, the UK Minister of Energy and Climate Change.

Mark your calendars and order your tickets now, and let me know what you thought of the film.

Urine Powered Cars; Gas Tanks Made From Chicken Feathers. Is This The Solution to Fuel Efficiency?

I couldn't resist this. A blog post on the GenGreen Life web site this week reveals two innovations in hydrogen-powered car research.

One of the problems, it seems, with hydrogen fuel cell cars is that the fuel tank needs to be extremely strong in order to store enough compressed hydrogen for a decent driving range. A tank made of carbon nanotubes would do the trick but would add about $30 thousand to the price of the car. But researchers at the University of Delaware accidentally discovered that inexpensive hydrogen tanks of great strength could be made using keratin fibers found in chicken feathers, a plentiful and renewable resource.

The other discovery noted in the article was that hydrogen can be derived very efficiently from urine. I know, I know. But think of it - you're on the road and running low on fuel and you need to find a bathroom and there's no gas station for miles. Voila! Talk about killing two birds with one stone. 

You can read the entire blog post here.

Water crisis? What water crisis?

The other day I mentioned to my mother that I've been studying the global water crisis. She replied, "There's a global water crisis?"

Now, my mother reads a newspaper every day, the Baltimore Sun. She listens to NPR. Most mornings she watches the Today Show, and every evening she watches at least one TV news program. Every Sunday at 9:00 AM she watches CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood, followed by 60 Minutes in the evening.

And she doesn't know that there is a global water crisis.

It seems clear that the media is doing a singularly bad job of getting this story out. Yet 12 million people die each year due to lack of access to clean water. A child dies every six seconds for lack of access to clean water. The WorldWatch Institute has called water scarcity "the most underappreciated global environmental challenge of our time." No kidding.

Pollution, climate change, and population growth all contribute to a problem that, if left unchecked, will result in water scarcity for two thirds of the world's population by 2025. By 2030, according to the UN, more than half the population of large Third World cities will have no access at all to water or sanitation services.

But this is not just a Third World problem. Huge swaths of the United States are currently facing severe water shortages. Maude Barlow writes in Blue Covenant that in 2007, " Lake Superior, the world's largest freshwater lake, dropped to its lowest level in eighty years. . . . California has a twenty-year supply of freshwater left. New Mexico has only a ten-year supply. Arizona is out: it now import all of its drinking water."

Barlow also notes that the U.S. Geological Survey found that "the parched Interior West is probably the driest it has been in five hundred years." This is more than a drought. We are running out of water.

The water crisis is complex and of vast proportion. I'll be writing more about it in the coming weeks, both about the effects that are being felt around the world, and what we can do about it. In the meanwhile, Google "global water crisis" and check out one or two of the 44 million hits you'll find there. And, for heaven's sake, stop letting the water run while you brush your teeth.

TELL THE SENATE TO FIX CLIMATE BILL LOOPHOLES

I just did something to help secure a clean energy future for the United States. It took exactly 30 seconds. Maybe 25 seconds. You can, too.

All you have to do is visit the EarthJustice web site where a simple, easy-to-use form will enable you to send a letter (already written for you - how thoughtful is that!) to your senators asking them to support the climate bill passed by the House recently.

THIS IS IMPORTANT.

It is also important to ask the Senate to fix a couple of shortcomings in the House version in the bill.

A recent editorial in the New York Times (see below) explained what the Senate must do to strengthen the bill.

Why is it so important to write to your senators? EarthJustice explains:

Your senator is hearing daily from opposing voices, among them far-right bloggers and talk radio hosts, who do not believe global warming is real and want to keep our nation hooked on dirty fossil fuels. It is time for us to demand that the Senate act swiftly to combat global warming and usher in an era of clean renewable energy. The world cannot wait. The Senate must craft a bill that sets science-based caps on carbon emissions.

Please visit EarthJustice today and send a letter to your senators. It only takes 30 seconds. While you're at it, why not ask ten friends to do the same.

NY TIMES EDITORIAL, "CLIMATE LOOPHOLES"

Published July 21, 2009

The House’s approval of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill earlier this month was a remarkable political achievement and an important beginning to the task of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But in all the last-minute wheeling and dealing, the House bill acquired two big loopholes that the Senate must close.

The first loophole involves coal-fired power plants. Coal is the world’s most abundant fossil fuel — producing more than half the electricity in the United States — and also its dirtiest, with twice the carbon content of natural gas.

The House bill would limit emissions from coal-fired power plants in two ways. It imposes a cap on emissions from all industrial facilities that tightens slowly over time. It also sets tough performance standards on new power plants permitted after 2009, requiring emissions reductions of 50 percent or more. The bill would help underwrite advanced technologies capable of capturing carbon dioxide and storing it underground.

The bill does not, however, impose any performance standards on existing power plants. And it explicitly removes these plants from the reach of the Clean Air Act. This is a mistake. The overall cap on industrial emissions will not be fully effective for a long time, and, meanwhile, the government should be able to impose lower-emissions requirements on the older, dirtiest plants.

There is little doubt that the Clean Air Act authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency to require existing plants to reduce emissions by, say, using cleaner fuels or increasing efficiency. But the House bill says otherwise, at least when it comes to carbon dioxide. The Senate must fix this problem by writing standards for existing plants into its bill or restoring the E.P.A.’s authority to do so. The old plants simply cannot be let off the hook.

The second loophole involves the tricky matter of offsets.

Ahmadinejad, Gas Prices, and the Price of Freedom

Why is this man smiling? I'll tell you why; he can't believe his luck; Oil addicted Americans keep flooding his treasury with obscene amounts cash. This makes his life very easy. He can afford to suppress dissent and he can afford to develop nuclear weapons. Why wouldn't he be smiling?

In today's New York Times, Thomas Friedman again reminds us that we are Ahmadinejads enablers, and that . . ."the one thing we could do, without firing a shot, that would truly weaken the Iranian theocrats and force them to unshackle their people  . . . is to end our addiction to the oil that funds Iran’s Islamic dictatorship. Launching a real Green Revolution in America," he writes, "would be the best way to support the “Green Revolution” in Iran.."

Friedman's column, "The Green Revolution(s)," is well worth reading. He points out that we could effect change in Iran and other petro-dictatorships simply by cutting our oil use. And the way to achieve that, he says, is to impose ". . . an immediate “Freedom Tax” of $1 a gallon on gasoline — with rebates to the poor and elderly — [It] would be a triple positive: It would stimulate more investment in renewable energy now; it would stimulate more consumer demand for the energy-efficient vehicles that the reborn General Motors and Chrysler are supposed to make; and, it would reduce our oil imports in a way that would surely affect the global price and weaken every petro-dictator."

When gas gas hit $4.00 a gallon, Americans immediately reacted by using less of it. Keeping gas prices high is the smartest thing we could possibly do. This is how we can bring Iran into line, speed the development of clean energy, save the auto industry, and slow global warming. It's the bargain of the century.

Lawn Care and Other Unnatural Acts: Are Eco-friendly Lawns an Oxymoron?

Few things give me as much pleasure as spending time on my front porch. In all kinds of weather I love to sit here, where I am as I write this, and enjoy the show: the change of seasons, the play of sunlight on foliage, the antics of the squirrels and chipmunks, the call of songbirds, the perfume of flowers. Such peace.

All too often, however, the peace is shattered. With fearful regularity, a small battalion of gardeners swoops down on the neighborhood, unloads the materiel and ordnance of lawn care - mowers, edgers and blowers, with their noisy, smelly, and highly polluting two-stroke internal combustion engines, along with sacks of fertilizers, weed killers and pesticides, and proceeds to wage war on crabgrass, insects, dandelions, and any blade of grass which isn't precisely the same height as every other. 

Lately, I've been pondering the tyranny of grass, the cultivation of which is, after all, an unnatural act. It's such a ubiquitous feature of suburban life that we tend to assume this is what nature intended. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Grass is the least green thing you can plant.

The American lawn, that lush carpet of green that is the icon of suburbia, didn’t always exist. Heretical as the thought may seem, this uniform swath of emerald is a complete fabrication, something not found in nature.

Entirely the creation of mankind’s desire to control nature – a futile task, if ever there was one, lawns have been around for a long time. Just how long is a matter of conjecture, but one of my favorite theories on the origin of lawns was put forth in the musical comedy, The Apple Tree.

In Act One, based on Mark Twain’s The Diary of Adam and Eve, we find a somewhat testy Adam listening to yet another in a long list of helpful suggestions from the garden’s other two-footed tenant:

EVE     I’ve been thinking . . . we’re different from anything else on earth. And our home should be different.
ADAM    I thought it was.
EVE    And today I had the feeling that the grass around our hut should be different from all other grass.
ADAM    Different how?
EVE    Shorter.
ADAM    How could it be shorter – unless it was . . . cut?  

Somehow, we have come to accept the inevitability of lawn care. We love our lawns. We must – why else would we devote such vast amounts of time, effort and expense to cultivating an estimated twenty million acres of this industrial monoculture. We enthusiastically water, weed, fertilize and mow in pursuit of a more perfect lawn than our neighbors. 

Yet lawns are an environmental nightmare. The millions of tons of chemical fertilizers and weed killers that we apply have high environmental costs. They wash off our lawns and run into our wells, streams, and lakes, wrecking havoc with aquatic ecosystems, and turning up in our food supply and drinking water.

Power motors contribute to air pollution and global warming. One lawn mower emits as much CO2 as a dozen or more cars. Grass clippings that are bagged and hauled away clog our landfills, and the watering of lawns depletes critically scarce water supplies.

In our zeal to eradicate the lowly dandelion we blithely pour poison onto the soil and then watch our children and pets gamboling on that grassy patch of green we call the back yard, all the while feeling grateful to be raising our family in the safe, healthy, leafy suburbs. It doesn’t even occur to us that there might be an alternative.

Sustainable alternatives
There are many ways to reduce the negative environmental impacts of our lawns and gardens.

Paul Krugman on Climate Change: Is Krugman the new Thomas Friedman?

It seems like Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist is out to beat Thomas Friedman - also of the Times and bestselling author of "Hot, Flat and Crowded," at his own game.

In the last several weeks Krugman has been devoting more column inches to climate change than ever before, while Friedman has mostly gone back to writing about foreign affairs and the economy.

Krugman wrote, in his column of April 30 (which I blogged about at the time) called climate change legislation an "Affordable Salvation." Then on May 14 in a piece called "Empire of Carbon," he highlighted the enormous environmental problem of China's coal-fuelled growth, and followed that up three days later with another piece, "The Perfect, The Good, The Planet," about the importance of passing the Waxman-Markey bill, now before Congress. I recommend that each of you send a copy of that one to your representatives and senators today.

Friedman hasn't been entirely AWOL on the subject, though. His March 14 column, "The Next Really Cool Thing," offers a tantalizing glimpse at the recently completed National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The facility uses 192 giant lasers to heat a small pellet of frozen hydrogen to over 800 million degrees Fahrenheit, “far greater than exists at the center of our sun.” The heat generated can then, theoretically, heat up liquid salt which would, in turn, drive steam turbines that produce electricity with no CO2 emissions. (Except for the CO2 produced by the electricity that runs the lasers, but who's counting?) The trick, which still needs to be worked out, is energy gain - making the system produce more electricity than the lasers consume. It's still a few years off, but apparently feasible. Stay tuned. And stay tuned to both Friedman and Krugman to see who ultimately writes more about climate change this year. I'll be counting words.

Put a little green in Mother's Day

The approach of Mother's Day reminds me that I've been wanting to introduce my readers to the Good Guide. It's a web site that provides detailed, reliable information on the health, environmental and social impacts of thousands of consumer goods.

On their home page today they offer a large number of suggestions for green mother's day gifts. If you haven't already bought your mom something -- and if you haven't, what's taking you so long? don't you know Mother's Day is tomorrow? Do I have to remind you of everything? And would it kill you to pick up a phone? All my friends' kids call their mothers every day . . . -- oh, wait . . . I'm not your mother. But as I was saying, if you haven't already gotten something for Mom, check out Good Guide.

I first learned about Good Guide from the book, Ecological Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, which I recommended here a couple of weeks ago. Their team of scientists, researchers and academics has assembled detailed information on over 70,000 products and rates each one, providing a simple way to find out how the things you buy everyday measure up in three categories - environmental, health and social impacts.

They also have a cool iPhone app that puts all this information in your pocket while you shop. Here, in their own words, is how Good Guide was started, and what their mission is.

One summer a few years ago, Dara O’Rourke was doing what he’d done dozens of times before: putting sunscreen on his five-year old daughter Minju before she went outside to play in the summer sun. The thought occurred to Dara, "I wonder what’s really in this stuff?" So, being a Professor at the University of California-Berkeley, Dara researched the sunscreen. What he found was surprising and disturbing: the sunscreen he’d been putting on Minju for years had a toxic ingredient.

At that moment, Dara realized how little we know about the products we bring into our homes every day. He knew that other parents should have the same access to product information that he and his fellow researchers had. He also wanted to solve the problem of increasingly confusing marketing claims regarding whether products were actually healthy, safe or green.

So he brought together both academic and technology experts to create a world-class team of scientists, consumer researchers, technologists and industry professionals. From Google, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and Intuit, to MIT and the University of California, we’ve developed a "For Benefit" startup at the forefront of integrating science and technology, working to fill a huge information gap in the marketplace.

Our team is dedicated to combining the best science and technology available, with what’s most important to you. Our goal is to provide the most comprehensive, credible, and useful information in the world, on products and companies delivered whenever and wherever you need it. We’re making information available and easy to use so each of us can express our own values and concerns in the marketplace.