Thursday, February 14, 2008

Want an Air Car?

No not flying cars just yet, but the Midi air car is a vehicle that runs on compressed air. Now of course the energy used to compress the air to begin with must be considered, but when I spoke with the owner of the company about 6 months back for an article I wrote about it, he mentioned that his eventual hope was that they would sell solar charging stations making it an extremely clean vehicle. And now, it looks like they may start selling the fist models in India within the year. Pretty cool (pun intended).


Live Sustainably

Dave



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VD (no not that one)

I was just listening to the radio in the shower and heard a statistic that today, Valentines Day, $17 billion will be spent on flowers, cards, chocolates and little tiny stuffed bears. The piece went on to talk about the chocolate market, which gets cocoa beans from places in Africa like the Ivory Coast, where the majority of the workers are underaged minors. Kind of amazing to think that a greeting card company has somehow convinced us that on a certain day of the year, it is imperative that we buy gifts made by children in order to convince our significant others that we care about them. Does anyone else think this is nuts? $17 Billion? Imagine if that money went into schools, or solar research, or feeding the poor (preferably not minor produced chocolate though). I know that's naive because it doesn't really work that way, but talk about waste.


Now to the cards and gifts and flowers. Here in the US, most of the country is not in flower growing season, so most of the flowers purchased have probably come from fairly far away requiring a tremendous amount of energy to transport them to us. They probably come in a plastic and paper wrapper which in most cases will be thrown away. Most of the cards that are bought are going to be looked at once and thrown away, if not recycled, but most won't be. The store that sold the card most likely gave it to the buyer in a small plastic bag that most people will probably throw out when they get home. And I'm not even going to get started on the waste from those chocolate boxes.

I don't mean to be all bah humbug on romance by the way, I'm all for it (as much as someone who keeps his trash in the basement can be anyway). I'm just bummed out that the concept has been hijacked and turned into something involving consumption.

So what''s my suggestion? If you want to celebrate today, why not do something that doesn't involve simple consumption - make dinner, draw a picture, sing a song, show up at work and serenade someone, call out of the blue and simply tell them that you were thinking of them and couldn't wait until the end of the day to let them know, the list is endless. Just use your imagination and don't let the corporations tell you how you have to show your emotions. And better than all of these, do nothing today, but do something else 4 other times of the year and let your partner know that these "surprises" are in place of Vday because you don't need someone else to remind you when to act romantic.

Off to make a lovely bouquet of garbage for the missus.

Live Sustainably

Dave

P.S. And don't shoot the messenger, I was just passing along what I heard

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Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The Compact

I had heard of this before, but didn't know much about it until last week. The Compact is a group of citizens that originated in San Fran about a year and a half ago, who pledged to buy nothing new for a year except food and items related to personal hygiene and safety - brake fluid, underwear (is that safety or hygiene?), toilet paper, etc.

I think this is a really fantastic idea and it seems to have caught on quite a bit. I'm now a member of their yahoo group and the amount of posts they generate are simply staggering. These people mean business. And the great thing is that since they are all in it together, they share ideas on how to get around purchasing problems.


Now for those of you who are thinking uggh, a year without buying anything, think again. They are just not buying anything new. I personally check craigslist for just about everything before I buy something new, simply to avoid all of the packaging and to take myself out of the production cycle. So they're not living frugal lives necessarily, just thinking more about their purchases and considering what's important.

Here's a great list i saw posted by one of the groups members. It was actually printed ona little credit card holder and was intended to make you think before pulling it out. This is waht was printed on the holder:


I want my money to support the environment.

* Is this purchase something I need?
* Do I already own something that will serve the same purpose?
* Can I borrow one instead of buying new?
* Can I make something that will serve the same purpose?
* Can I buy a used one?
* Would someone be willing to split the cost and share this with me?
* Can I buy or commission one made locally?
* Can I buy one that was made with environmentally responsible
materials?
* Can I buy one that serves more than one purpose?
* Can I get something human powered instead of gas or electric?
* Can I compost or recycle it when I'm done with it?
* Have I considered the impact on the environment of the full
lifecycle of it - did the manufacture or disposal of it damage
the environment?


Great questions and a really good list to go through before making a purchase.

Dave

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Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Worm Composting - The video


For those of you who want to learn a bit more about vermicomposting, better known as worm composting.


Live Sustainably

Dave


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Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Every Little Bit Helps

My friend Duane just sent me an email that made me smile. It seems that his wife Rebecca was working at their kids school book fair, I'm assuming at the area where you purchase the books.

"She noticed everyone asking for bags to carry their (usually) single book back to their SUV so they could drive the 2 blocks home and then leave the book in the car until later. This annoyed said wife, who started asking, "Would you like a bag with that, or would you like to save some of the planet for our children?"

Apparently some still took bags, but many did not. I love this because basically what she did was ask people to consider the reality behind the choices that they were about to make. My thing is always - if you want to take a plastic bag, go ahead, just make sure you are being honest about what you are doing first. Also I should note that Duane tends to be a bit acerbic so my guess is that Rebecca was a bit nicer in how she put it (but part of me hopes she wasn't).

Huzzah Rebecca, thanks for fighting the good fight!

Live Sustainably

Dave

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Monday, February 4, 2008

What Are Green Cars Anyway?

This is an email I sent to friend who had asked about the concept of green cars and expressed concerns about batteries in electric vehicles. Based on his response, I thought others might find it of interest.

Live Sustainably

Dave

For starters, let's get one thing straight, anything that calls itself a "green" car (other than the Gremlin of course) is an absolute fabrication. The very nature of an automobile is the antithesis of everything that "green" has come to stand for. Most people don't realize that more greenhouse gases are released from the making of a vehicle than from driving it, so it's very existence is worse than it's operation. Along those lines, i think the whole "green" thing has been co-opted for business purposes which the Detroit auto show has done a great job of doing. Want a truly green car? Park it out back, smash the windows, fill it with manure and topsoil, and plant some flowers in it.

Now having said that, perhaps on to something of substance. As we know, Fossil fuels are the big problem out there as a) they are running out and b)they release massive amounts of CO2 which as Mr. Gore has pointed out, are not so good for the folks on mothership earth. Both points can of course be argued, but bottom line, fossil fuels are finite so if we are not presently at peak oil we will be, we are fighting wars (both known and unknown) all over the globe for oil rights, and even if you want to argue against the IPCC and say we are not causing Global Warming, I can come up with 30 other environmental and societal reasons why petroleum is bad.

Two-thirds of all the petroleum brought into this country is used for transportation, much of it in the trucking industry, so obviously, transpo is a place we need to look at. First off before we hit up "alternatives" (I italicize that because in 1900 Diesel invented his engine to run on peanut oil and Fords dream was for all his T's to run on ethanol....so which is alternative petroleum or biofuels?) let's look at efficiency. According to the UCS, if we were today to pass a law stating that by 2015 all cars would need to have 40 mpg minimum consumption ratings, we'd save more oil than will ever be pumped out of ANWAR and then the savings would continue. Pretty much all the car companies agree that 40 mpg by 2015 is doable. In Europe you can buy an off the shelf VW Lupo 3 cyclinder diesel that gets 83 mpg and has been proven to get as high as 116 mpg. So while we need to "green" our cars by going "alternative", most of which are not around the corner due to infrastructure (ethanol, biodiesel and the myth of hydrogen that we are being sold) and customer acceptibility (electric), there's a whole mess of things we can do right now using off the shelf technology that should be explored first.

Moving towards "alternatives", I drive a veggie car simply because it is the best solution available right now, barring not driving, which I do quite a bit. That said, food should be for eating, not dragging stuff and us from one place to the next. Biodiesel, if made from waste veggie oil is a great thing, but there isn't nearly enough to make a dent in the overall picture. Due to demand for bioD, huge swaths of rainforest are being cut down to cheaply grow soybeans. Just like us to take something good and figure out how to make it bad. Ethanol is a scam. Problems range from cellulosic ethanol (the one that works) not being achievable on a large scale, to massive problems with storage and transportation of the stuff due to water content. Most people talk about Brazil, which is great, but they use sugar cane which grows like a weed, and are having massive rust problems due to the water content in the fuel.

Hydrogen makes no sense due to the fact that it has no energy. It's an energy carrier so it all comes down to how are you compressing the hydrogen. Right now it takes roughly four times as much petroleum to move a mile on hydrogen than it does on petroleum. Also, an entirely new infrastructure will need to be built which is insanity. Hydrogen vehicles are essentially electric vehicles that get their energy from a fuel cell. Every time you take a form of energy and transfer it from one state to the next, you lose roughly 10%. So let's say you are using the sun to compress hydrogen. Great clean source right? In compressing the hydrogen you lose 10% of the energy you've amassed. It heads into the fuel cell and gets turned into electricity and you lose another 10%. So why not just have an EV where you don't lose that 20% energy?

EVs are the only solution. First of all, the technology is here, and it's improving at a remarkable rate. It's a heck of a lot easier to clean up the grid than it is a thousand tailpipes so for that reason EVs make sense. They require less maintenance, are better cars to begin with (I've driven hydrogen vehicles and they are nothing to scream about) and don't require a new infrastructure. As far as electricity goes, The Northwest Energy Labs Study a while back is just one of many that illustrates that if 70-80% of all cars and light trucks in the US were EVs today, we would need no new power. That's because they would be charging at night when an amazing amount of energy is dumped off the grid due to the fact that you can't turn power stations on and off as you need. So power wise, we're good right now. We need to improve, but there is time.

The batteries are a problem but they are getting better. Smart companies like Tesla have the price of recycling built into the battery and the future, which is right around the corner, are ultra capacitors. These things are half as light, half as expensive, completely recyclable, and will fuel EVs to come. EEstore is the company in the lead right now and their recent deal with Lockeed Martin suggests that they may be closer than anyone thought to a working prototype.

Finally, here's a link to a really good well to wheels program. If you play around with the configurations, you'll see that an EV charged by the sun is the cleanest way to go.

That said, you're car as a flower pot is even greener.

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Where do the Candidates stand on the environment

Brief no doubt, but this gives you a little bit of an overview of where the candidates stand and what's important to them. You can also click the links to hear them talk about their views. Rhetoric of course, but when that's all you've got, at least it's something. For those of you in voting States in the US good luck on Super Tuesday.



Live Sustainably

Dave



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