Chip Giller, Grist founder, on NOW

A great interview of Chip Giller by David Brancaccio on PBS's NOW. Really good, you should watch it.

10 Reasons to ditch your car

We could all use fewer cars on the road, and most of us could do with a good many fewer hours spent in them. So here it is! From Personal Finance Advice blog, ten mainly financial reasons to adapt your lifestyle to not include that pesky gas-oholic. In summary: no car payment, no car insurance, no pain when gas prices increase, no car repair bills, better health, environmentally friendly, no gym membership, better organization, less stress, a much healthier bank account.

Granted, there are some times when it is very useful to have a car. For example: in bad weather, it is difficult and uncomfortable to walk or bike. When traveling long distances when you're transporting heavy things, it is much easier to have a car than to take public transportation. If you have a physical disability, perhaps sometimes it is easier to drive.

But most of our lives are not spent in such conditions. Thus, I would put my vote in for carsharing or something similar as the most environmentally friendly option for a reasonably mobile, normal human being. If you want to go farther than that and remove cars from your life entirely, more power to you. It's just that for most people, that wouldn't work so well. These are some useful points to consider, though, when trying to make that decision.

Two exciting tidbits

So, I just read on Treehugger (or Grist, but I think it was TH) about "navy showers". Apparently this is how they take showers in the navy. It's really simple: you turn on the water long enough to get yourself completely wet all over, then turn it off while you soap up. Once you're done soapifying, you turn the water back on and rinse off. Saves a ton of water, and I actually found today that it reduced the amount of time my shower took up significantly as well. You do lose on the comfort of the water cascading over you in a gentle, massaging tumult, but really, how important is that to you compared to saving gallons and gallons of water?

Second, apparently my home state of Massachusetts has enacted immediate legislation to require all large building projects to estimate the energy usage of their project. The developers would then be required to make efforts to reduce that consumption. This means that all new big developments in the state will be more energy efficient than if they hadn't been thinking of the environment at all. It's an extremely worthy start, I think.

Progress in Europe

It's nice to see British political rivals Gordon Brown and David Cameron competing on the basis of environmental issues.

But the real big news this week is of course the agreement reached by members of the EU regarding action on climate change. At a meeting during this past week, they adopted two binding targets: CO2 emissions 20% below 1990 levels by 2020, and 20% more energy from renewable sources in the same time frame. Apparently, if other major polluters like the US, India, and China do something similar, the EU might boost its targets to 30%.

Very good start. Keep 'em coming.

Smoking and Environmental Damage

I've long been turned off, to say the least, by cigarette smoking. I would never smoke, and have long been subconsciously searching for a valid reason why other people shouldn't smoke either. Today Treehugger has an article about the consequences to the environment of global smoking habits. They seem pretty severe. And Treehugger links to all of its sources, many of which seem to be highly reputable international organizations. Any environmentalist smokers in the audience? Your thoughts?

Top 50 personal actions to stop global warming

So, I came upon this list via Digg of the "Top 50 Things To Do To Stop Global Warming". It's actually a really good list; it covers most of the bases I've heard about. So for anyone who says they want to do something, but don't know what to do: take a look. And most of these things can be done without any significant financial burden. A lot of them actually save you money.

So, on one side of the scale:
-being part of the environmental solution
-saving money

On the other side:
-resistance to change
-laziness/comfort

Take your pick.

This isn't about Gore's carbon shoe-size

David Roberts engages in some more tasty articulation over at Gristmill. Conservative hacks like to try to make Gore look hypocritical, pointing out that he doesn't do everything he could to reduce his environmental footprint. Well, first, for a semi-cheap shot, I doubt Sean Hannity is doing nearly as much as Al Gore to reduce his footprint. But, as Roberts points out, that's not even the point.

Being a high-profile advocate makes it very difficult to be anything but bad for the environment, directly. Even as a normal citizen of a Western country, it's very difficult. To have a non-existent carbon footprint, one basically needs to grow all of one's own food, live off the electric grid, only use self-powered transportation, and not buy anything that's not local and completely zero-footprint itself. In other words, it's impossible to be a normally functioning citizen and be perfect with regard to the environment.

What Gore and others of like minds are on about is that the system needs to change. Living as environmentally as possible needs to become the unthinking default lifestyle. There are numerous things we can do, changing the way we think, to fix our currently fetid and broken system. Not until a critic is themselves actively working toward such systemic change, I think, do they have the moral justification to throw punches at the consistency of those who already do.

Thin-Film Clobbering non-Renewables?

So to paraphrase this Treehugger article, solar energy is awesome, but honestly, too expensive right now for mass adoption. But apparently a spokesman for this Swiss thin-film solar company predicts that this new kind of solar panel will be cost-effective in less than five years, and be twice as good as non-renewables in ten. As Treehugger says, "That’s what is technically referred to as clobbering."

Current solar panels are made using silicon, which is expensive. Thin-film technology instead uses a type of manufactured semiconductor material called CIGS (Copper Indium Gallium Selenide), which is less expensive. The solar cells made with it can be printed onto material, which is chemically and financially more efficient than the process for creating silicon cells.

Sounds good, no? It certainly does give one hope, but I hold a few skepticisms. First, spokespeople making predictions certainly have motive to exaggerate the quickness of innovation timelines. Second, it would be good to see a substantial revamping of our energy system sooner than five years from now. That's asking a lot, true. This is a message of hope, indeed.

Carbon Tax vs. Cap-and-Trade

So we should do something about all this carbon we're burning into the atmosphere, yes? That seems to be a general consensus. With the proliferation of concepts such as "carbon neutrality", "carbon footprint", "zero-carbon" products, and all the rest, I think it's pretty safe to say a lot of people care about this.

So how do we stem our voracious carbon addiction, institutionally? It seems there are two major proposals: a Carbon Tax or a Cap-and-Trade system.

The way I understand it, the Carbon Tax would just put a straight tax on activities that burn CO2-producing stuff. So that means, oil and coal primarily, which means gasoline (and thus transportation), and electricity (and thus heat, frequently) would be the places where the tax would have the biggest effect on most people.

The main difference with the Cap-and-Trade system, it appears, is that organizations would have a maximum amount of CO2 they can emit, but there would be a credit system by which a low-emitting organization could sell their credits (obtained by emitting less) to people who needed to pollute more. Thus, low-polluters would make money directly from high-polluters.

I have only a rudimentary understanding of this, and I may be somewhat wrong, but here: in Gristmill there was a brief piece a few days back from a conversation with Steve Hayward from the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative thinktank) about the two. It's interesting to hear the worthy perspective of someone whose #1 concern isn't environmental issues.

Oh, he favors the Tax over the Cap-and-Trade system, basically because with the latter, there are too many complexities for loopholes to hide in. I think.

Green Questions reborn

So, I've started reading environmental news again, and I just decided I feel like posting here. So guess what? Green Questions is back up and running!

It doesn't really help get us out of the mess we're in, merely reading about the extent of the problem we face from climate change. It's much more useful and heartening reading about the things we can do to solve this seemingly gargantuan puzzle. So, that's what I'm going to seek out and post for you here. Also, I feel really bad about my previous posting in that I would frequently just read the summary of an article and post the link based on that. So I'm not going to do that anymore. If I don't have the time or patience to read the article, I won't post the link.

Anyways, what I wanted to post about were these few posts on Gristmill.

This one is about ways to reduce the transportation part of your carbon footprint, even if your area doesn't have good public transport and you don't have money for a hybrid. That applies to the vast majority of rural and suburban Americans, probably, so I think it's worth a read.

This one is from my idol, David Roberts, and is lambasting the "proto-conventional wisdom" about climate change: that there's nothing we can do about it. Such fatalism is not helpful, just ask the coach of any less-than-stellar sports team, then watch any one of those inspirational sports movies (Little Giants? Mighty Ducks? Not a big fan of that kind of movie myself, but roll with the analogy). With such an enormous challenge facing us, if we want to even have a chance of overcoming it, we need to think about solutions, not just give up. And in that article, Roberts cites several different sources of solutions that would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 (which is what we need to do in order to not break our planet beyond repair...and we can't really return it to the store in exchange for a new one). All of these solutions also centrally consider the global economy, and provide ways of maintaining, even strengthening it. So you see, Eeyore? There really is something to be done.

We can do this, people. If you want to know what you can do, just look around the internet via your favorite search engine for a couple minutes, there's sure to be a nice list somewhere. Here, I did one search via Google, "personal action global warming" and came up with some good stuff in the first page: Union of Concerned Scientists, Al, a whole blog about it, and Wikipedia. And that's just in the first page!

If we all do as much as we can, we can kick this problem without breaking a sweat. Go for it!

Apology for Lack of Posts

Keeping up a blog takes time. As I'm busily at college now, I don't have a lot of time to spend sifting through my blogroll. I hope to continue posting at some point, but for the moment, I'm afraid that's not going to be happening. If you want to keep up with stuff, though, I suggest watching some of my favorite blogs: Treehugger, Gristmill, WorldChanging, and Hugg. They should provide you with a good overview of interesting things that are going on. Ciao for now.

Incinerating Florida!!

Or at least their waste. If you follow the eco-news much at all, you probably heard of this already, but they're going to make an incineration plant in southern Florida where they can vaporize 3000 tons of trash every day. That's a lot of waste going away. And apparently the only biproducts are:

1. Synthetic gas - used to generate 120 Megawatts a day
2. Slag for road construction
3. Steam - used for another nearby factory

And that's it. It will cost $425 million. Critics say that other similar projects have failed to meet expectations for such amazing sustainability. Perhaps that's true. But it's certainly an innovative project. Also see Wired News' article about it.

Coffee Mugs

Triple Pundit's new series, "Ask Pablo", kicks off with a great post about what kind of coffee mug is the best for the environment. He compares stainless steel mugs, ceramic mugs, and styrofoam cups. His conclusion is that due to the material-intensive processing of stainless steel, mugs made of it are only more ecological than styrofoam if you use them more than 369 times. Then there's ceramic, which is better than styrofoam after only 46 uses. Unfortunately, ceramic mugs are less portable and more fragile. So, if you're on the go, best use that stainless steel mug for a long time.

Another week...

...Another This Week in Sustainable Mobility from WorldChanging.

PlugInAmerica

Speaking of plugs, there's another site that I found tonight called PlugInAmerica which, according to its description, "advocates the use of plug-in cars, trucks, and SUVs powered by cleaner, cheaper, domestic electricity to reduce our nation's dependence on petroleum and improve the global environment." Sounds like a worthy goal to me.

Carpool Crew

There's a new site that's been all over the enviroblogs today (Saturday; I'm up late) that's for organization of carpools. It's called Carpool Crew and it looks like it could be really useful and good for the environment, but only if a lot of people use it. So get on it and make the world a little greener!

Stuff you can Compost

There's really not enough composting going on. Lots of stuff that could go to make high-quality natural fertilizer for growing things goes instead to fill up polluting landfills, which there's not enough space for anyway.

So, here's a list from PlanTea.com of 163 Things You Can Compost. I must try to get some more composting in action at my school.

Totally Tankless

At my house we have a solar hot water heater on our roof, so this doesn't apply directly to us, but there's a review for a Tankless Water Heater at Goto Reviews. It's cheaper than heating up a whole tank of water, and it uses loads less energy.

Sustainable Mobility 9/3/06

Another week, another "The Week in Sustainable Mobility" from WorldChanging.

Desalination/Agriculture

Treehugger has a post about this innovative "Seawater Greenhouse" that enables cultivation of crops in arid coastal regions quite efficiently. Great concept, really cool. Don't know that it'll solve any major environmental problems, but how much can we really ask of any one project?