Yes, I questioned whether or not that was the best way to get your attention.  I could have said, “Power to Our Poop” and you still would have clicked much the way you did to read this juicy log (pun intended) of news.

Sure, we see new small ways that whether in labs or on larger scales, people are taking large environmental matters into their own hands.  So, power from poop?  

Well, yes.  And on a commercial, large-scale.  You may have heard that methane gas is a major contributor to global warming, and this is one argument made against eating meat (or so much meat) because the animals (I’m thinking cow pies) release methane gas along with their excrement.  Well, we humans’ business has a similar effect, if on a, er, smaller scale. 

And the city of San Antonio is taking advantage — to the tune of capturing that methane and selling it for a profit!  The methane gas, once processed can be used at power plants as, “natural gas.”  Natural — I’ll say so!  

Read the entire story.

I picked up this article from The Daily Green that outlines the situation regarding tax credits for renewable energy.  Now, I should say, I agree with much of what is said in the article, including the four main reasons to pass the credits: High oil prices, high U.S. unemployment, the melting Arctic, and Russia’s overwhelming of Georgia.  I have a bone to pick with The Daily Green regarding this article.

I disagree with that last point on a technicality because it zeros in on a territorial dispute in the headline and ties it into the crisis too much (IMHO — yes, I know, it’s humble for a reason), when the larger point, the one that is somewhat made in the paragraph in the article, is that petrodictatorships flourish in the current environment.  That should have been the main point with perhaps Russia’s influence and ability to ignore the international community as one example of many such countries awash in oil money.  They basically did that, but their bolding of that statement (and ignoring the other facts surrounding that debacle) is reason enough for me to point this out.

But that is not my main beef with this article; rather, the way in which this information is framed is problematic.  On this first point, I’m rather quibbling over what is a main point and what is a detail, mentioning it only because it is significant to me.  Let me explain my main problem with this article.

The main paragraph that troubles me reads thus:

Congress reconvenes today to discuss, among other things, energy policy. All they’ll really be doing is posturing for their respective candidates, however, and that means that the renewable energy tax credits — which both parties and their candidates support (emphasis mine) — may well be held hostage to this battle: Republicans entrenched in support of offshore drilling, and Democrats entrenched in support of taxing oil company profits to fund more renewable energy projects.

Sounds fair, but if you know what I know, meaning, if you have followed this issue, you know that John McCain, the Republican candidate for President, and his Republican colleagues, have passed by the opportunity to extend these valuable tax credits that help to make the renewable energy industry compete on a more equal playing field.  After all, we allow huge tax breaks on the oil industry (not to mention dirty nuclear energy — yes, dirty!).

From a Thomas Friedman column,

Senator McCain did not show up for the crucial vote on July 30, and the renewable energy bill was defeated for the eighth time. In fact, John McCain has a perfect record on this renewable energy legislation. He has missed all eight votes over the last year — which effectively counts as a no vote each time. Once, he was even in the Senate and wouldn’t leave his office to vote.

Yet, in this article, the author says that both parties and their candidates suppor the tax incentives for renewable energy.  Friedman notes that Democratic Presidential Nominee, Barack Obama, also missed some votes on this issue, but they were times when he was out campaigning, and he knows that they don’t have the votes on this issue — because of Republicans and John McCain stonewalling.  

We cannot act as if both parties are in favor of this when their actions have not shown that to be the case.  If McCain were truly in favor, he would have left his Senate office to go vote.  And if he were out campaigning, he would fly his wife’s private jet, of which he has rather unfettered use, back to Washington to cast an important vote in favor of these tax credits.  I am angered that such gross misrepresentations persist.  The Republicans are behind the oil industry all the way and that includes John McCain — Mr. Drill Here, Drill Now.

Maybe McCain should follow his own advice, “Tell them to come back and get to work!”  Senator, your “Drill here!  Drill now!” mantra is old hat.  Get back to work and go vote on this measure.  It’s time to get past all of that partisanship you say you are past and work toward a green energy future.  And Mr. Obama should get back to Washington every time and cast a symbolic vote every time, even if they know they don’t have enough votes to pass the measure.  No excuses — our country needs real leadership.

Offshore drilling cannot and will not address America’s energy or climate crises now, in three years, five years, or ten.  We have about 3% of the world’s reserves of oil and use about 25%.  Go ahead and argue with that reality.  Feel the wind and sun on your face and realize the solution is smacking you in the face every time you go outside.  Wind and solar are the energy of now.  Today.  Blow here!  Shine now!  

The Daily Green, thanks for highlighting this important issue.  But we have to call out those who are dragging their feet forward — or, in the Republicans’ case on this issue, pulling the country down into an almost dry oil well — and tell it like it is.  Don’t be afraid to call Regressives by name.  John McCain is a Regressive.  The Republicans are not even close to being on equal footing with Democrats on what is best for the country regarding this issue.  We gain nothing by throwing them a bone — and that’s the bone I’ve picked with you!

Lloyd Alter discussed in a recent article that as oil prices have increased (yes, of course, they have dipped down slightly recently) China has exported less steel to the U.S.  Check out his article or keep reading:

Lloyd talks about some of the political and economic implications of such a shift, but let’s look at the environmental effects.

Here, again, because of rising costs of fossil fuels, we see decreased consumption.  Suddenly, the difference in the cost of labor between the U.S. and Chinese markets, is eaten up by high oil costs.  From the article:

Rubin continues: “Shipping a standard 40-foot container from Shanghai to the US Eastern seaboard now costs $8,000. In 2000, when oil prices were $20 per barrel, it only cost $3,000 to ship the container. But at $200 per barrel, it will soon cost $15,000 in transport costs to ship from China to the US Eastern seaboard.”

Wow!  What a difference!  I had no idea it was that high of a cost to move something across the ocean (though I suppose I never had given the financial costs much thought).  This just goes to show that increased fossil fuel consumption and costs can force people to rethink the way that they act — and this is probably truer for companies moving many tons of heavy stuff (such as steel).

Let’s just hope that not only does this spark a large green energy industry, but also perhaps some manufacturing jobs of yesteryear return to the U.S. as well.

One other note: with the cost of iron ore also increasing, perhaps recycling rates and more importantly, required recycling programs, will increase as a manner of combating that high cost.  The environmental effects of mining for more ore and processing it versus recycling are high and extensive.

How are increased fuel costs affecting the way that you behave?

Last week, Wesley wrote an article about using the upcoming cold weather of winter for some of your refrigeration needs.  But what about during the dog days of summer when the weather is anything but winter?

Well, thanks to Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigera, you have free refrigeration that uses zero energy!  Bah Abba is the adward-winning inventor of the Pot-in-Pot system for refrigeration.  The invention was born out of the need for increasing the life of fresh produce that spoils quickly in the intense African heat.

How does it work? Basically, his design involves a small clay pot within a larger one.  The smaller pot is separated from the large one with wet sand and covered with a wet towel or cover.  Now, as the water evaporates from the sand between the posts, the temperature within the small pot decreases due to the law of thermodynamics (evaporation is a cooling process).  

Bah Abba was awarded the Rolex Award for Enterprise and is featured on their site:  Rolex Awards for Enterprise.  They have a great site which explains everything much better than I could here.  Anyways, I guess my point for posting this is to ask, “How can we take this concept and apply it to our modern lives?”

EHI There!  Tell us how you’d use Bah Abba’s ideas to reduce your carbon footprint!

If you’re trying to follow the envirohuman movement, you should definitely pick up these news stories:

Pickens’ Plan to Profit Off of Public Water

I did not know that Pickens’ plan, which includes a large project of transmission lines to move electricity generated from wind power from rural areas to urban ones, seems to double as a way to move water from what arguably should be considered a public resource.  The water, from a vast underground reservoir, would use the same transmission pathway as the electricity.  Seems we should be careful of what we wish for; even though so many environmentalists, capitalists, and government officials all seem to be in favor of this plan, is it fair for an individual or company to take so much of what belong to the public an make such huge profits off of it?  The same could be asked of oil companies drilling for and profiting off of oil under public lands.

Bloomberg Skyscraper Windmill Plan

I had always wondered about the high altitude created by, among other surfaces, skyscrapers, as points of interest for wind turbines.  Obviously, in the middle of a city, the power generated has more than enough available users, but also, cities have huge overall electricity needs, but relatively little open spaces to put windmills.  Or, do they?  It seems this may be a viable plan for reducing the need for fossil fuel-burning power plants for cities and the transmission lines it might take to move power from open plains into urban areas.

Sunken Ship as Habitat

This is a very interesting concept for me, because while yes, much of this ship is made up of recyclable metals, it also includes some plastics that have concerned scientists familiar with the project for the negative effects of introducing chemicals associated with such plastics into the food chain.  This reminds me of a project that the New York Times detailed months ago, regarding the sinking of spent subway cars into harbors, also for the purpose of becoming marine habitat.  Again in that case, there was concern over the asbestos used in the subway cars, and how it escaping into the ocean might have a negative effect.  Still, the sunken vessel and the subway cars have made for great marine habitat.

Use the outside air to refrigerate our foods?

We hear it all the time about how much energy our refrigerators use, especially if using an older model.  But little attention seems to be given to the fact that we put refrigerators into buildings that, in the winter time, are heated, even though there is free cold air outside.  Some climates even have cold temperatures year round and could really take advantage of the cold air.

No, I’m not saying that we should store our cold items outside during cold months: much of it would freeze that is supposed to stay at refrigerator temperatures (aside from myriad other complications that need not be listed here).  But I am suggesting that we can and should take advantage of cold temperatures nationwide.

How do we do that?

Well, somewhere, whether built into a wall, a cabinet, or in a basement or utility closet area, an insulated chamber would be allowed to monitor and draw cold air from outside as needed.  The air could be pumped into the unit with a fan, filtered as it enters the home, mixed with indoor air or slowly released into the refrigerator or freezer in small quantities (the air would be piped into the unit) with the use of a thermostat controlling temperature so as to make sure correct optimal temperatures are maintained.

A thermostat would also be set to stop accepting air from the outside when it would be detrimental (meaning, too high of a temperature) to the operation of the refrigerator or freezer.  The refrigerator or freezer unit’s compressor could then seamlessly kick back into gear to keep the temperature optimal.  In this way, users would not have to watch for unexpectedly warm days or for change-of-season days with large temperature swings.

“But no one is going to go to that much trouble to save a few bucks on refrigerator operating expenses…”

Oh no?  What about icemakers in our freezers?  Those have grown to the point that the plumbing now comes almost standard in most homes, because it saves people so much time from filling and emptying ice cube trays and the frustrations of running out of ice.  The convenience is great!  But how much of a niche product and plumbing offering was that when it first launched?  Yeah, and now it’s pretty much standard.

If you tell people that for a few hundred dollars they can greatly increase the efficiency of their refrigerators and improve their envirohuman impacts, some certainly would do so.  It would become even cheaper as these units and the necessary infrastructure could be built into new and renovated homes.   Refrigerators could come standard with plugged openings that could be employed for such uses, much as they now do with ice maker capabilities.

It was not so long ago that refrigerators did not have ice maker potential built into the units and slowly it became the norm because homeowners had the ability built into their homes.  Many come with the ability to add an icemaker unit, and the same type of “add-it-if-you-want” option could be used initially for this technology.

Just imagine how cheap the feature could be if the refrigerators had a small chamber added onto the unit near the bottom or on the back of the unit for such operation.  All you would need is a pipe nearby that had access to the outside with a built-in fan and filter, and you would be in business.

Homeowners choose such options all the time: think about not only the ice makers most people now use, but also units to remove radon gas from basements.  They are increasingly choosing solar electric or water heating systems, as well as other greener options, that are often costly upfront but eventually payoff both financially and environmentally.  Wind turbines are becoming more common on peoples’ roofs and properties, and a box on the back of a refrigerator would seem like nothing to that type of consumer.

How about commercial refrigeration?

Yes, think about all of the meatpacking and cold products industries, not to mention restaurants and grocery stores, that use huge industrial refrigeration units for keeping large quantities of foods cold.  Wow, what a savings for both the country and those businesses, in terms of pollution, energy, and cost savings!  Yes, it depends upon the climate and the time of year, but for many businesses, this may be yet another way to cut costs by improving their envirohuman impacts.

Now, if we could just get a major appliance manufacturer to put the same genius marketing behind that which launched that time-saving icemaker found in so many homes.

“Baby, it don’t matter if you’re black or white” – The Prince of Pop

Debate has raged on (seemingly for years now) as to whether or not switching to websites utilizing black backgrounds makes a real and significant difference in power consumption of computer monitors.  Proponents such as Blackle claim that if everyone switched to a black version of Google, we could save upwards of 750 Megawatt-hours per year.

So what’s the truth? Do black background websites really make a difference in power consumption?  Well, according to an article and research on Techlogg, the difference is somewhat disappointing.  Basically, they ran a pretty extensive test of 27 different computer monitors of various sizes and brands (including 23 LCD monitors) and found that in most cases, the power consumption difference was pretty negligible (some monitors even consumed more power using the black background Blackle!).

Now in all fairness, when testing standard CRT (Cathode Ray Tube or big, bulky, old tube-television style monitor that takes up my entire desk) monitors, they found that consumption was lowered but by closer to half (7-8 watts) of the 15 watts claimed by Blackle and its sources.

How about a little perspective? Did you know that LCD computer monitors now dominate the world marketplace for computer monitors at over 75%?  If your math is a little shaky, that means that less than 25% of computers worldwide are still using CRT monitors, which means that the 7-8 saved watts of blackness is less significant everyday that someone upgrades to a new LCD monitor.  The results of the Techlogg study were not necessarily surprising to me or probably anyone familiar with how an LCD TV or computer monitor works.

According to Webopedia:

“Short for liquid crystal display, LCD is a type of display that uses two sheets of polarizing material with a liquid crystal solution between them. An electric current passed through the liquid causes the crystals to align so that light cannot pass through them. Each crystal, therefore, is like a shutter, either allowing light to pass through or blocking the light.”

So in other words, when you visit a site with a black background on an LCD monitor, the backlight is still turned on but the “shutters” are closed and screen now black.  I suppose if you still own a CRT monitor you could relish in your 8 watt savings OR you could go out an purchase an LCD monitor and save upwards of 50 watts at all times the monitor is turned on.  That’s right, LCD’s consume about half the energy in the first place compared to CRT monitors!

So the bottom line? If you’re using a CRT monitor, you are saving a pretty small amount of energy on black background sites; however, if you’d upgrade to an LCD monitor, you could be saving between 5-7 times the energy at all times when your monitor is turned on.

How do you make an LCD monitor even more eco-friendly? Try this free and simple method that will tell you just how much power and money you’ll save each year using it!

Since we’re discussing the environment, it’s important to step back and take a look at some of the aspects of our daily lives that might receive little attention, yet potential changes abound that could have a huge positive envirohuman impact.

So, standardized reusable shipping containers?  Yes.  At your place of work, you likely see hundreds of boxes come in the door, get unpacked, broken down, and sent off as garbage, or, hopefully, shipped out for recycling (or maybe you don’t see them, but they’re there).

Let’s take, boxes of printer paper, for example.  We all likely do some printing or copying in our everyday lives, or at least use paper that someone has printed information onto in our meetings and correspondence.  Billions if not trillions of sheets are printed daily.  Boxes, like those at the left, are used to ship that paper to our place of work, and, once unpacked, most of them make their way to the dock of the building in which we work, again, hopefully at least for recycling.

Recycling is a good way to continue the lifecycle of usable material, but it is highly energy- and cost-intensive for the very reasons of shipping, water use, and chemical, manual, and mechancial processes that all go into continuing the cycle of that product material, like the paper fibers used in cardboard boxes.  A better recycling process is one in which the material is reused again and again, hundreds, if not thousands of times before it gets sent off for recycling in which it gets broken down into its raw materials for future reproduction of new materials and goods.

What the heck am I talking about?  At your place of work, you likely receive a good deal of mail, which, hopefully gets recycled when you’re finished reading it.  But have you noticed the bins that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), the United Parcel Service (UPS), and Federal Express (FedEx) use to bring your mail?  It’s usually a plastic-, angle-sided, open-ended container with metal reinforcements, that make these containers so reusable.

You might also receive beverages, like bottled water and sodas, that might be shipped in reusable hard plastic trays, like those here from Pepsi-Cola, that also can be reused many times before needed to be broken down again for recycling.  Although I recommend you choose a better beverage option: water, served from a reusable water bottle, these trays prove that shipping materials can be made to withstand repeated use, abuse, sliding and slamming all over the country (and world!) and that disposable, one-use shipping containers need to become a rarity.

Inter-office mail systems often reuse envelopes within a building several times before discarding them, which goes to show that there are many ways in which we have built the idea of “reusability” into our daily habits.  That’s something we need to take to the next level and push toward doing on an even larger scale.

On and off of postal and parcel trucks, beverage trucks, and others, we receive shipments of items from both reusable and those deemed throwaway, one-use packages.  But back to those boxes of printer paper.

Printer paper typically is packaged in reams of 500 pages, wrapped in paper, and placed ten to a box.  Because large businesses (and small ones, too) use so much paper, this results in millions of boxes being used for the purpose of packaging paper (only one of very many items packaged in this way) and then being tossed shortly thereafter.  Why not mimmick the boxes used by our postal deliverers?

We could have plastic ones made from recycled plastic product with straight sides, metal reinforcements, and a corresponding lid that would cover the box (just like the cardboard ones have).  In this manner, the boxes could be picked back up by those delivering the paper, be it OfficeMax or others.  The point is that reusable packaging for such industrial products, where the packaging does not even matter to the consumer, are a great place to start with reusable packaging.  USPS and Pepsi are already doing it, now how about others?

Certainly, the boxes may weight slightly more than the cardboard, however the fact that they are reusable will be a net monetary savings to the companies using them, and a net savings to the environment as our methods of shipping move toward clean, renewable fuel sources of the next decade or two.  Also, the fact that less paper will be used on packaging boxes would be even more helpful.

So you’re making a quick dinner of it with a pot of pasta and a jar of your favourite prepared sauce.  Great!

How are you heating the sauce?  The microwave?  A saucepan?  I recommend a different approach.

If you have a double boiler, you’re in good shape, but even if you don’t, you probably can pull this off just fine.  As your pasta boils, get ready for heating your sauce by emptying the contents of the jar into the inner container of the double boiler.  Go ahead and add your spices or balsamic vinegar — whatever your routine for a jar of sauce — if you’re like me, you do so just to feel as if you made it (somewhat) your own.  If you do not have a double boiler, directions are found below.

Once the pasta is al dente, strain it so that enough of the water ends up in the bottom part of the double boiler to heat the inner container of sauce.  Place the container with the sauce into the double boiler.  If you’re patient, there’s likely enough of a heat transfer from the boiling hot pasta water to heat your sauce to a pleasant temperature within about five to ten minutes.  Spend that time finishing draining the pasta, stirring your favourite olive oil throughout, serving drinks, maybe enjoying a first glass of wine.  After a few minutes, check to see the progress of the sauce’s temperature.  Use the stove’s heat only if it’s not quite hot enough, just to finish getting it up to the correct temperature.

If you do not have a true double boiler…

…Make one! You can do so with a larger- and a medium- sized stainless steel bowl, ones that have about a two-inch diameter difference.  Pour the water into the bigger bowl as described above and place the sauce into the smaller bowl, heating it as described above.

How is this greener?

Simply put, you are not using a stove or microwave for the amount of time it would have taken for those appliances to heat the sauce.  You’re taking advantage of the already boiling hot pasta water to transfer its now unneeded heat to the sauce.