Staying Cool With Raw Beet Salad

We're back in the kitchen here, for another segment of Climate Change Cookery.

For most of my adult life, I have been a passive lover of beets. Passive in the sense of eating them only when they present themselves in a prepared form--at a salad bar or in a pickle jar. I took their red color to signify the presence of important nutrients not necessarily present in other foods.

It never occurred to me to cook them myself until recently, and immediately a serious obstacle presented itself. They take a long time to cook, and in the middle of summer, in the middle of the unfolding climate change debacle, it's hard to contemplate boiling anything on the stove for long periods, or firing up the oven. Hot house, hot planet.

All of this was solved by friend Dorothy, who served a delicious raw beet salad at one of her dinners. Recipes can be found easily on the internet, but an improvised approach involves peeling and grating the beets, adding some olive oil and an acid like vinegar, lemon or orange juice, and throwing in some chopped parsley, ground nuts, and something oniony like chives. Some recipes call for goat cheese. Another friend added corn and grated carrots to expand the nutritional aspect.

Remote Control Energy Thermostat

Here's an interesting innovation that could help bring homes into the modern age. If you think about it, houses have remained stubbornly primitive in their inability to tell us about themselves. Unlike a car--a far less expensive item--a house can't tell you how much energy it's using, has no remote control features, no sensors to tell you if something's amiss, etc., etc.

I recently heard an ad for some sort of remote control feature by Schlage. An internet search yielded a link to a $150 thermostat, and some reviews at amazon.com. From reading the reviews at amazon.com, if becomes apparent that the device can be just as easily used to increase one's use of energy (e.g. turn the A/C on before you arrive home) as to reduce it. But just as people are asked to turn off their cell phones at the beginning of a concert, the concept of a room full of people being able to turn down their homes' energy use via cell phone remote control is appealing.

Savings From Composting Food Waste

A few local businesses are starting to discover how much money can be saved by recycling more of their waste stream. Priscilla Hayes of Rutgers University tells us that the Hyatt Regency of Princeton saved over $10,000 recycling food waste in 2009, its first full year of recycling. I've heard that, at McCaffery's Supermarket, they saved some $40,000 by diverting their food waste from the landfill.

A Strategy for Efficiently Lighting Your Home

Recessed lighting can be a wasteful way of lighting rooms in your house. If they are on dimmer switches, and/or use halogen lights, they can be expensive to retrofit with compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs). A friend recommends the following approach to reducing dependence on recessed lighting, while still having a pleasing light.

"My solution at home is to keep the halogens dimmed and use large CFLs in torchiere style lamps for the primary lighting in those rooms. Perhaps something like this:"

http://www.scienceclarified.com/Ga-He/Greenhouse-Effect.html

The link provides detailed info on torchiere lighting. Read down a ways to learn about torchiere lamps that use compact fluorescent bulbs rather than the potentially dangerous and less efficient halogens(they get very got and could start a fire if the lamp is knocked over).

Snow, Climate Change and National Debt

What matters a snowflake? Minute and delicate, blown this way and that, it's surely not worth a second thought. And yet, given enough of them, they can shut a city down.

Last week, the late night news reveled in the danger of snow. A tree landed on a parked bus. A falling limb nearly hit a pedestrian. The camera lingered on a roof line, supposedly imperiled by the weight of six inches of snow. Don't go out, whatever you do.

The news anchors act like they're watching out for us, but they don't seem too concerned about the other gathering storms, the depositions of CO2 and debt that will never melt away.

Numbers, like snowflakes, accumulate, each one of little import, but together transform the world we thought we knew.

A Visit to Howell History Farm

My expectations were pretty low when I tagged along on my 4th grade daughter's class trip to Mercer County's Howell History Farm. How interesting could it be to harvest corn? It turned out, however, to be a profoundly affecting experience.

Consider some of the anxieties we accumulate over time while living in town: the constant consumption of fossil fuels harmful to the planet's future, kids who stay indoors in front of computer screens and have little chance to interact with animals or witness the miracle of their birth and growth.

All of that quickly changed on the farm. After eating popcorn and delicious cornbread cooked with a wood stove, the kids soon found themselves being put to work. To my surprise, they jumped at the chance to do work with their hands.

The kids started by stripping corn kernels off the cobs.

Then it was time to grind the corn into meal with an elegant iron contraption.

Then they walked to a cornfield across the valley, to gather corn stalks into a shock so the corn could cure and dry.

On a crisp, clear day, a cornfield is a magical place of rustling leaves, promise and mystery.

As the kids twisted the ripe, dry ears of corn off the stalks and tossed them into bushel baskets, I became fascinated by the flying buttresses of roots that help hold the 12 foot stalks upright.

Some of the ears were a radiant shade of red. We were told this is dent corn, because of the dents in the kernels.

As we waited for the bus, having experienced corn harvest from field to kitchen, the kids discovered how fun it could be to drink water from a do-it-yourself drinking fountain. On a 1900 farm, the connections and feedback loops are simple and direct. Start pumping and water will start to flow. In town, water emerges from the faucet after a long and complicated journey from a place none of us have ever seen. On the farm, the water rises up from the ground beneath our feet.

Another opportunity a farm provides is the chance to focus our eyes on distant hills. Trees are lovely things, but I'd gladly trade some of the shade for a vista or two.

Most every goal of sustainability, every change of behavior being encouraged in town--in order to prevent our life on earth from being a flash in the pan--was a normal part of life on a 1900 farm. Living in town all this time, I had forgotten how much the country has to teach, and how much of a more satisfying future can be found in the past.

A Small Victory for Walking

It was a typical situation on a Sunday evening. My 14 year old daughter, having spent the day with her friends, called and asked for a ride home. Something in me resisted driving the car seven blocks to pick her up, but I didn't want her to walk home alone in the dark. Last time we were in this situation, I rode her bike over and jogged home with her. She rejected my offer to do that again, with that classic teenage tone of disbelief that a parent could be so unreasonable. Clearly, the easiest thing would have been to jump in the car and give her that sacred ride home.

Instead, I decided to walk over to get her, with my younger daughter and our dog, Leo, as company. To my surprise, the walk home was uncontested, even magical. A cloudy, cool evening, the still air rich with the smell of fallen leaves. My daughters walked together, hand in hand, talking of the day. None of this would have been ours, cloistered in a car.

The Power of Windows

Power windows, power wash, power steering. No, this post isn't about adding a power assist to everything in life, in the pursuit of convenience and ease. Nor is it a plug for PC's. It's more about disconnecting oneself from a grid addiction, powering down, and rediscovering in turn the power in things that don't need to be plugged in.

Windows, for instance, the timely opening and closing of which can determine whether a house gathers the day's heat and holds it through an autumn night, or needs the furnace to kick in when the cold night air sneaks through windows left open.

Habits, Muscle Memory, and Energy Consumption

Learning to play a musical instrument involves training muscles to do things automatically that are too fast for the mind to keep track of. If the muscles learn to do many things automatically, the mind can focus on larger aspects of the music, like expression. Not everyone learns to play an instrument, but we use the same process to negotiate all we do during the day. Some of the movements we do automatically help reduce our carbon footprint, others don't.

For instance, when you go to wash your hands, which hand reaches out to turn on the faucet? Reaching with the left, to turn on the hot water, consumes more energy than the opposite. For the first minute or so, water from either faucet will be cold. Even if you turn on the hot water faucet, chances are you'll have finished washing your hands before any hot water actually comes out. But a silent chain of reactions will have been set off in the house: Hot water will leave the hot water heater and head up the pipes towards your faucet. The water heater then fills itself back up with cold water, which must be heated. Meanwhile, the hot water that got pulled up through the pipes but never made it to the faucet dissipates its heat in the walls of the house, which only makes the A/C work a little harder to keep the house cool in the summer.

Simply using a couple quick doses from the cold water faucet avoids this chain of energy-consuming events, and doesn't change the brief handwashing experience in the least. To "play" a low carbon hand-washing sonata on the faucets, then, means learning to automatically reach for the cold water, get hands wet, turn the water off, soap up, then turn the cold water back on to rinse. It sounds involved, but learn the habit and the muscles will take over while you daydream about other things. Over a lifetime, that's a lot of energy saved.

Imagine if all kids in the elementary schools learned this method, to carry with them in habit and muscle memory for the rest of their lives. It should be part of every crew member's training for a life spent on spaceship earth.

Tips for More Energy Efficient Cooking

We hear more and more about how much energy is required to produce meat, particularly beef. Shifting to more poultry and vegetables is one effective way to reduce one's carbon footprint. But there are also various ways to reduce energy use in the kitchen:

Dr. Seuss might appreciate this green approach to hard boiling eggs.

1. Put raw eggs in just enough water to cover them. Cover the pot.
2. Heat to a boil.
3. Turn off the heat. Leave cover on pot.
4. Allow to sit, with no additional heat, for fifteen minutes.

How to boil "green" water (This is particularly handy in the summer, when the last thing you want to do is heat up the kitchen unnecessarily):

1. Heat only as much water as you need. If it's for tea, then use the teacup to measure the water as you put it in the teapot. Add a little extra in case some boils away as steam.
   
2. If heating water in a pot, for instance for soup, keep a lid on the pot while heating the water. This reduces heating time by preventing heat from escaping as steam while the water is being heated.
3. Set a loud timer in case you wander too far from the kitchen while the water is heating.

Use the microwave instead of the stove for cooking:

1. Sweet potatoes in the skin--easier, and no doubt much less loss of nutrients, than peeling, chopping and boiling in water.
   
2. Sweet corn (one and a half minutes per cob). I learned about this when I ran into a friend in the vegetable section at the grocery. Websites describe elaborate preparation of the corn prior to putting it in the microwave, but I find it comes out great when simply put in with husks left on. The silk comes off very easily after cooking.
   
3. Though it be a violation of tradition, for a quick cup of "green" tea, put a teabag in a cup of unheated water and heat to something approximating boiling in the microwave. Staples, which are becoming rarer on teabags, don't seem to create a problem.
   

Imagination and Water Use

One thing that will help you green your domestic habits is imagination. For instance, many people are in the habit of letting a lot of water flow from faucet to drain unused--while shaving, washing hands, dishwashing, or before taking a shower. This sort of habit might become less common if people held in their minds an image of all the rigamarole involved in 1) getting clean water into that faucet, and 2) dealing with the water after it heads down the drain.

Follow the water. Most of Princeton's drinking water is drawn from the Raritan River, just downstream of Somerville, NJ. It's run through a water purification plant, then pumped 20 miles over to Princeton. Water is pretty heavy (8 lbs/gallon), so one has to assume that it takes a lot of energy to push it hither and yon. If it slips unused from your faucet down into the drain, it quickly loses any pristine qualities as it mixes with all the rest of Princeton's sewage headed for the wastewater treatment plant on River Road on the east side of town. There, large amounts of fossil fuel energy are used to clean the sewage sufficiently so that it can be discharged into the Millstone River. Diluted in the river, it heads northward to the Raritan River, where a portion of the river water is pulled out, purified and sent once again towards our faucets.

After all that travel, cleansing and purification, how incongruous it is that our drinking water emerges from the faucet, flashes for only a split second in the light, then is immediately transformed into a civic burden as it heads once again to the sewage treatment plant, unused.

If we had to carry our water 20 miles to our homes in buckets, we'd make use of every drop. But the way the system is set up, our water flows in an endless stream from our faucets, with nothing but our imaginations to help us understand the elaborate investment of work and fossil fuel energy that goes into getting it to our homes and dealing with whatever heads down the drain.

Incentives for Consumers to Reduce Power Consumption

In a column entitled "Mother Nature's Dow", NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman describes five initiatives to help shift away from fossil fuels. According to Friedman, "The fourth is decoupling — the program begun in California that turns the utility business on its head. Under decoupling, power utilities make money by helping homeowners save energy rather than by encouraging them to consume it."

By chance, a relevant clipping I had torn from a December, '08, San Francisco Chronicle article emerged from the paper chaos on my desk. It describes how such a program works for the consumer: "PG&E offers rebates if customers can cut the amount of natural gas they use in January and February, compared with the same months a year earlier. For every percent cut in gas usage, customers receive an equal percent credit on their bill. Those who save 10 percent or more get a 20 percent credit."

Green Roofs, Green Walls

Green roofs are becoming more and more common. To see a spectacular green wall, take a look at http://princetonnaturenotes.blogspot.com/2009/03/walls-go-green-in-madrid.html.

Sustainability in Spain

One of the quandaries for parents, now that it´s clear that the use of fossil fuels is deleterious to the planet, is how to give kids the same mind-opening benefits of travel that we had at that age. Some of my most vivid and joyful childhood memories are of exploring meadows and mountain streams in Austria when I was ten, and hiking in the Andes. Are they really going to be able to manufacture enough jet fuel from farming algae, as one airline magazine article described?

So, traveling in Spain with family, feeling an ambivalence that didn´t enter in ten years ago, the least I can do is take note of sustainable practices. Bicycles in Sevilla, for instance, where they´ve added quite a few bike lanes and made bikes available for borrow. The bikes fit into docks lined up along the sidewalk, and can be borrowed and returned with the help of a plastic card that´s fed into a machine. These have proved very popular. In the historic district, in the vicinity of the cathedral, they´ve made some streets pedestrian and bike only, and reintroduced a trolley. It can feel strange at first, encountering a wide city street, no cars, no racket. Some people miss the energy and the bustle of traffic, but that´s part of the challenge in a world where the romance of motion is so dependent on fossil fuels.

Compact fluorescent light bulbs are more common, as are duel flush toilets. Recycling in the city is achieved through the clustering of large bins of different shapes here and there on sidewalks. Apartment dwellers take recyclables down to the street and toss paper, bottles, cans and trash in their respective bins. The bins for bottles look like green metal igloos that have attracted the interest of sophisticated street artists.

A friend in Caseres even separates out her food waste, which here is called organics, and takes it down to a bin on the street. What happens to it next she doesn´t know, but it sounds like some sort of process is in place.

Though Spain has the lowest birthrate in Europe, it´s also on a building spree, with more building going on here than in England and France combined. Apartment buildings are rising pell mell on the outskirts of Caceres and other cities. Who´s buying them, one might ask. People buy them as investments, apparently, and young adults may be shifting away from the tradition of living with parents well into adulthood. A system of freeways (I remember seeing them being constructed on a previous visit ten years ago) now makes intercity driving in Spain as convenient and boring as in the U.S. 

The trains here are a beautiful thing to behold. The Ave train ("wing" in spanish) we took traveled at 230 kilometers per hour. It´s as quiet and smooth as a plane, and faster when one takes into account all the airport rigamarole that´s avoided. One nice touch: the escalators at the train station turn off automatically when not in use. 

Grocery Bags and Good Intentions

I have consolidated all our cloth grocery bag holdings, which have maintained their size and number despite the shrinking stock market. Seven, all told, with rumors of others floating around--acquired by various family members with good intentions to stem the flow of disposable plastic bags through our hands and into the landfill. Next step is to redistribute the bags to strategic locations--the back seat of the car, the hallway closet--where they stand half a chance of being remembered for the next trip to the grocery store.

They work great, I must say, accommodating the groceries nicely, and it feels good to be holding something of quality on the walk back to the car, rather than a flimsy plastic bag that begins its useful life with one foot in the landfill.

Funny, though. I've used them only once, otherwise managing to think of them only when I arrive at the checkout counter, when it's too late.

It's an appealing idea for the world's greatest consumer nation: save the world by buying more stuff. But the world will only be saved when we change our behavior, and despite our reputation as a highly adaptable species, that seems the hardest task of all.

One alternative approach: Stick a few disposable plastic bags in your pocket before going to the grocery store, not to recycle but to reuse, with their final use being as a liner for the trash can under the kitchen sink.

Minimizing A/C Use

In the summer heat, there are many ways a house conspires to make itself even hotter. Here are some ways to cut back on the house's heat production and reduce the need for the A/C. Most of these are minor, but their effect can add up, and they include savings of their own. I claim no expertise, only some experience and a willingness to experiment.

• Lower the temperature of your water heater (see 1/13/08 post) to a temperature that, when you turn on the hot water for a shower, there isn't any need to dilute it with water from the cold tap. This simplifies showering as well as reduces the work your water heater needs to do.
• Turn off the heating element in your refrigerator that heats the door (supposedly to reduce condensation on the door). If your frig has one, the button should be inside near the back, where the light bulb is.
  
• Use as low-wattage a light bulb in the frig as you can. Our older frig had an incandescent bulb inside that gets searing hot during prolonged open door meditations on what to eat. This is a perfect spot for a LED light, which would not emit much heat, but they aren't available as far as I can tell.
• Minimize the use of incandescent and halogen light bulbs, which get very hot. Many of these can be replaced with fluorescents (see 1/2/08 post) without sacrificing the quality of light.
  
• When boiling water for tea, boil only as much water as you need, so that less heating is needed and unused hot water doesn't sit on the stove, heating the room. Or heat the water in a microwave with the bag inside. (Hope microwaving isn't insulting to tea afficionados.)
  
• We usually associate attic insulation with keeping heat in during the winter, but attics can turn into cauldrons in the summer, and abundant insulation helps keep that heat from seeping into living spaces.
• What does your yard's topography have to do with energy bills? Basement dehumidifiers use 600 watts when running, and often run the majority of the time in the summer. If the ground is sloping towards your house, rain is more likely to seep in next to your foundation and add humidity to the basement, causing the dehumidifier to run longer. Within four to six feet of the foundation, the ground should slope away. My house inspector told me it's okay to pile dirt against bricks, but not against wood siding.
  
• Whole house fans: Very helpful, but ours is overpowered, which means it overwhelms the vents in the attic. The resultant high pressure actually pushes attic air down into 2nd story rooms. Not good, so having attic ventilation and fan power balanced is important. One thing that has worked well is to have a window fan that runs overnight, progressively cooling the house. Closing up in the morning as the day starts to heat up keeps the cool air inside.
• I can't explain why, but we wash our dishes by hand. Maybe a bit of hand labor is relaxing; maybe the older dishwasher's noise and slowness is bothersome; maybe it's stubborn habit. It's been reported that handwashing can be more wasteful than using a newer model dishwasher, but so much depends on style. My wife uses the Niagra Falls method, in which hot water streams out of the faucet constantly until she's done. I use cold water in bursts, soaking the dishes first to soften the dirt and minimize the work. No outbreaks of the plague have been reported due to my cold water method. Even if a little more water is used in handwashing, bypassing a dishwasher saves a lot of energy and heat production.
  
• Air dry clothes.
  

Biking in the Mist

One of my moments of environmental awakening came as I found myself driving my car four blocks to a town meeting on sustainability. The irony of the situation struck two blocks into the drive. Why was I using a car to transport myself four blocks to a meeting whose main purpose is to figure out how we can become less dependent on fossil fuels? As it happened, I was running late, and there was a light mist that could turn into rain--two factors that make me instinctively grab the car keys. I immediately parked the car and walked the rest of the way. To my surprise, the precipitation did not penetrate my clothes.

Since then, I have gradually expanded my tolerance for biking in mist, or drizzle, or even sometimes rain. This morning, for instance, a misty moisty morning, I taxied my daughter to school on the trailer bike, and found the mist to be even enjoyable. Another time, when the mist turned to rain while heading home, we experienced an unexpected euphoria. There can be a certain laboriousness to riding a bike, but it can also bring a sense of awakening, of being more alive.

Global Warming and the Silent Scream

I'm always amazed at those who study climate change. How congenial and patient they are as they tell us of the catastrophic direction we are taking the earth. They are messengers who, like most messengers through history, are being roundly ignored by most of humanity. They must go home at night, after yet another long day of throwing compelling data at the global wall of indifference, and scream into the dark.

The Scream is a famous painting by Edvard Munch. I think of it now, and learn from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream) that its inspiration came one evening when the sky suddenly turned blood red, and he "sensed an infinite scream passing through nature." "The person in the foreground may be the artist himself, not screaming but protecting himself or itself from the scream of Nature."

That is the scream that some of us hear right now, as humanity goes about its business of slurping and shoveling fossil carbon out of the ground and spewing it from tailpipes and chimneys. How fitting that, as industrialization gained speed in the late 1800s, the source of Munch's scream was the sky, whose disturbing color may have been caused by the eruption of Krakatoa a half a world away.

Munch wrote that he was walking with two friends at the time, and that they "walked on", apparently unaffected by the scene whose visual power left Munch physically stricken. And so today we are left to ask, why do so few see and react to the emergency we face? Why do so few of us hear the scream?

Notes From a David Suzuki Talk

For those who missed the talk by David Suzuki at Princeton University on Feb. 12, here's a writeup. Suzuki is the eminent Canadian scientist perhaps best known for his many television documentaries.

Dr. Suzuki described humanity's long arc, beginning 150,000 years ago, when we were a minor species in Africa, our numbers dwarfed by the spectacular fauna that dominated the world at that time. What was it about us back then that would eventually make us the most numerous mammalian species on the planet, more common than rats, rabbits or mice, dominating the planet as no other species has ever done? We were equipped with a brain able to process and hold more information than any other species. With that extraordinary mind, we invented the future. Our foresight allowed us to anticipate future circumstances in ways no other species could.

Suzuki sees this as the defining characteristic that allowed us incomparable success as a species--and yet we are now ignoring those who offer the best insight into the future. In 1992, half of all nobel prize winners signed a document warning that humanity had only one or a few decades to act before our future as a species would be irreparably diminished. He read some compelling excerpts from the document, which was ignored by the news media. You'd think, he said, that if half of the most celebrated scientists in the world speak out in unison on a pressing problem, the world would take notice, but no.

As an example of what happens when society ignores scientists, he offered up Hurricane Katrina, whose catastrophic consequences confirmed everything scientists had been saying for 30 years.

After 8 years studying at U.S. universities, Suzuki returned to Canada to begin his professional career in 1962. As chance would have it, that was the year that Silent Spring was published. He described the huge impact that book had on him and on the world. Silent Spring showed him that what he could learn from test tube experiments in a lab was only a minute part of reality, since anything being studied in a lab enters into tremendously complex interactions when put back into the environment.

He was in Vancouver, involved in various early environmental battles, when Greenpeace was born, in a fight to stop nuclear underground testing off the coast of Canada. Human beings, he realized, were "taking too much stuff out of the natural world, and putting too many toxics back in." And those toxics accumulate at each trophic level, as they move up the food chain. There is no place in the world that is free of manmade pollutants. Some scientists studying toxics in breastmilk in urban Canada needed a control group of mothers who had not been exposed to PCBs. They tested eskimos in the far north, and to their horror found the highest concentrations of PCBs ever recorded.

In the 1970, Suzuki felt despair at how little we knew about the environment and what we were doing to it. He sought out the ancient wisdom of what he calls the "1st nations", the tribal cultures, from whom he learned that humans are composed of the four sacred elements: earth, air, water and fire. He believes science has confirmed this view, that we essentially are the environment--there is no separation.

He then described each element, beginning with air. With each breath, we draw air into extraordinary intimacy with the interior of our bodies. He described the special membranes in our lungs that allow the air to become essentially one with our tissues, as the gases become attached to blood cells and carried throughout our circulatory system. He told a magnificent story of how the inert argon atoms we breath in each breath, some 30,000,000,000,000,000,000, include atoms that were breathed, let me say without too much exageration, by everyone and everything that ever lived. (The full story can be found at http://www.sacredbalance.com/web/arg.html.) In other words, he said, there is no line between the inner and outer worlds. We ARE air. "I am you. You are me."

That 15% of Canadians have asthma speaks to the consequences that all we put into the environment has on the inside environment of people.

He then suggested that with each of the other sacred elements there is a similar intimacy and universal sharing. Fire is the solar energy that we take in through our food to power our systems.

Other notes from the talk:

Reductionism--the study of pieces to understand the whole--doesn't work.

Emulate nature (biomimicry) rather than try to overwhelm it.

There is too much information today, which people use to defend any position. The dilemma is how to navigate through the information.

"News shatters the world" into two minute segments devoid of context, that fail to tell us why we should care about this or that happening in the world.

From 1900 to 2000, we went from being farming animals to city dwellers, in the process losing touch with the world that sustains us. He has found that many kids don't know where their food, water and other basic things come from. Many don't know that hamburgers and hotdogs come from animals.

If we don't know what nature provides, then we think the economy is the source of all things. We've elevated economy above ecology. He quoted someone as saying that "conventional economics is a form of brain damage," in which basic ecological services are categorized as "externalities". Conventional economics externalizes the world that keeps us alive. All the services provided by a living tree, for instance, are viewed as externalities. It only gains economic value when someone either buys it or cuts it down.
GDP, or gross domestic product, is a strange concept. It only adds, never subtracts. It views any exchange of money as good. Ice storms, car crashes--all increase GDP.

Fundamental questions to ask: "Am I happier?", "How much is enough?"

Clinging to steady economic growth is suicidal.

Suzuki described the efforts he's been involved in to bring about change. He collaborated with the Union of Concerned Scientists to come up with ten things people could do to improve the planetary situation, centering around what we eat, how we move, and where we live. It's difficult, because "people don't want to be fundamentally deflected towards a different way of doing things." But he sees the slow food movement as promising, a good place to start.

One thing that has worked for him is to create a vision--a target to reach in a generation. If one creates a vision, he finds that most people will be drawn in, will agree it's a worthy goal. Then it becomes a positive discussion of how do we get there.

One such vision is "Sustainability Within a Generation", which can be found at davidsuzuki.org.

The Human Generator

For those who are of a practical sort, not apt to suffer unnecessary effort gladly, the concept of venturing onto a treadmill or a stairmaster remains an alien one. Perhaps there are primordial ancestors whispering through our genes, telling us to rest up for the big hunt, saying that exercise must have meaning and purpose beyond achieving a lively heart rate.

Needing motivation beyond simple longevity, I seek exercise in riding a bike to get where I need to go, or chopping wood, or cutting down invasive shrubs. This is all well and good, as far as it goes, but it rarely gives the sense of having tested the limit, of cleansing the pores, of flushing out the stagnant byways of the circulatory system.

To that end, I propose that someone of a mechanical bent devise an exercise bike that generates electricity. Domestic heroes, ready to take on global warming feet first, will trod down into the basement and spend a half hour generating an evening's worth of electricity for the family, and at the same time get that dose of intense exercise that a practical nature would otherwise deprive them of.

Of course, someone already has, as a "bike generator" web search will instantly show. One fellow produced 90 watt hours this very morning on his homemade bike generator, enough to run a laptop for three hours.

In this vein, below is an article encountered in the NY Times, about a way to generate electricity simply by taking a walk around the block. It attaches to the knee, and generates a steady flow of 5 watts. The article also mentions an invention that utilizes the jiggling of a backpack to generate 20 watts, more than enough to power whatever gizmos are standard equipment for hikes into the wild these days.

Embedded in the text is a stunning statistic: A person's body fat stores as much energy as a ton of batteries. Hope turns up in the most unlikely quarters. Given its reputation, the nation may be sitting on the key to its energy independence. No matter how dazzling the mechanical skin we wrap ourselves in, the solar-powered self remains the greatest marvel, now apparently with sophisticated battery power second to none.

Taking People Power to a New Level (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/us/08knees.html?ref=science)

Curious NY Times article on Fluorescent Lights

A NY Times article entitled "Any Other Bright Ideas?", on the pros and cons of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), appeared in their House&Home section on 1/10. It had a lot of useful information, and provided interesting perspectives by various families that have tried the bulbs. Unfortunately, the article gave greatest prominence to the negative aspects of some bulbs, and at one point was completely contradictory. What the consumer needs is information on which bulbs produce pleasing light, yet this information was buried deep in the article, likely to be missed by all but the most thorough readers.

The kind of bulb that lights my workspace, a n:vision TCP, is described as harsh and hospital-like in one spot in the article, then as warm and pleasant in another. CFLs I've purchased in recent years don't buzz, flicker, or delay in turning on, so it was surprising to see these qualities given a high profile in the article. The stated price of the bulbs, too, was much higher than what they are being sold for locally. (see post on 1/2/08)

The n:vision bulbs are available at Home Depot, and perhaps other locations. They come in different warmths of light, so look for the color-coding on the package to find a bulb with more yellow and less of that "daylight" blue. Those with the green-colored packaging are the most pleasant indoors.

As I found out while helping a friend convert her office to fluorescents, the compact variety still take a minute or so to reach full brightness. When first turning on a 100 watt equivalent CFL, you're likely to think you got a raw deal, since it appears considerably dimmer than the 100 watt incandescent bulb it's supposed to replace. Give it a minute, though, and it will glow as brightly as the incandescent did, and use only a quarter of the energy. The 60 watt n:vision, however, instantly generates a bright light, so essentially imitates an incandescent bulb.

Some people are hesitant to use fluorescents, citing the dangers of the mercury they contain. There are various arguments against letting such a concern rule your decision: The amount of mercury they contain is minute and is sequestered in the bulb. Trace amounts of mercury are already present in our environment. Using fluorescents reduces the amount of mercury released from power plants. Anyone who has a manual thermostat or a non-digital thermometer in the house is already sequestering far more mercury than a household's worth of CFLs.
For more detail on mercury in CFLs, try http://www.slate.com/id/2183606/ and http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/change_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf.

Compost Bucket Recommendation

When I was looking for a compost bucket to buy, I was glad for a friend's recommendation of a comparatively inexpensive, stainless steel model available from www.leevalley.com. They still have it, in two sizes, for around $17. (http://www.leevalley.com/garden/page.aspx?c=2&p=10025&cat=2,33140)

Can-Do Water Heater Adjustment

Of all the houses I've lived in, this is the first in which it occurred to me to change the temperature control on the hot water heater. They're so quiet and unassuming, tucked away somewhere in a closet or the basement. If by rare chance you encounter it during daily domestic ramblings, it's not likely to give off that "Come and adjust me" kind of vibe.

Turning the water heater back on after a long vacation, I happened to adjust the temperature control so that the hot water for the shower was consistently just right. No cold water needed. Just turn on the hot.

Through this chance discovery, the hot water heater now burns less gas, and there's no longer a need to fiddle with the cold and hot water knobs before and during the shower.

Not to say this will work in all homes. Serendipity may be playing a role here, involving the rhythm of hot water use in the house, but for the sake of some simplicity and economy, it's worth a try.

Partial Retrofits with Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs

Compact fluorescents have come a long way, but they work better in some spots than others.

Start with outdoor lighting that is on for long periods, and utility areas. I've been impressed with the fluorescent spotlights (though less advantageous for motion sensor lights, since the light is only on for brief periods), and have put the regular CFLs (Compact fluorescent lights) in enclosed outdoor fixtures without problems.

For indoors, the light they give off is much improved, and can be softened further by using them in lamps, where the glass or lampshade will add yellow to their glow.

For rooms with recessed or track lighting, or where dimmer switches make fluorescents problematic, it may work better to simply create a fluorescent alternative in those rooms rather than replacing the more wasteful bulbs. That way, when the room isn't being used but one wants some sort of light on, a lamp or overhead with a florescent can be turned on, with the other lighting reserved for times when you want additional or more ornate light.

Some people wait until an incandescent bulb burns out before replacing it with a compact florescent. My thinking is: Don't wait. Start reducing energy consumption now, and if you don't want to throw out a still-functional incandescent, then store it away, as a backup for those few spots where incandescents are more appropriate, for instance where a light is only used for a few minutes at a time.

Compact fluorescents are cheaper than most articles say. Recently, I found both 60 and 75 watt equivalents selling individually for 75 cents each at Walmart (strangely, packages of multiple bulbs in another display in the same store were more expensive per bulb) (On a subsequent visit, the bargain display had disappeared--a "one time deal" according to one of the employees). The big box hardware stores usually have 60 watt equivalents for $1 each these days (As of 1/16, they are more like 3 for $5).

Spiders--The Energy Detectives

Here's a post for all those seeking validation for having delayed deep cleaning of the house, thereby increasing home biodiversity and allowing some unexpected species to join your Domestic Energy Reduction Team.

Websites like (EnergyStar and ThisOldHouse) tell you that houses lose a lot of energy through leaks in the top floor ceiling. Light fixtures, ceiling fans, attic fan louvres, smoke detectors that run off house current rather than batteries--all can provide small openings for your heated air to escape into the attic. I've tried using incense to find these leaks (the smoke would supposedly show where the air is escaping), but the smoke is hard to see. An unexpected ally in a less than perfectly cleaned home turns out to be spiders. They seem only to build webs where there's airflow. Ceiling fixtures that are tight don't have them; ceiling fixtures that are leaking air into the attic do. Once you find the leaks, you can follow the directions on the websites to plug them up.

Energy Consumption of Various Appliances

If you’re trying to reduce energy use at home or at the office, one of the handiest aids is a Kill-a-Watt. There are other similar devices on the market, but this is the most widely known. You can use it to measure how many watts most any plug-in device is using in your home. Since electricity makes no sound, most people are in the dark about what is consuming electricity in the house at any particular time. Though not available in retail stores for some reason, the device can be purchased via the internet for about $25.

Plug your computer, toaster, various power strips, TV and so forth into it and you’ll undoubtedly find some unexpected energy drains. If you leave the appliance plugged into the Kill a Watt for a couple weeks, it will give you the total energy consumed in that time period, which will provide a good sense of how much the appliance uses per year.

Here’s what I learned by using it:

NEW ELECTRONICS OFTEN CONSUME MORE THAN OLD ONES

My thin-screen computer and All-in-1 printer use much more energy than the ones they replaced. In other words, as the need to reduce our carbon footprints becomes ever more pressing, many of us are unwittingly switching to the electronic equivalents of SUVs.

Computers:
Dell PC (newer, with thin screen): 150 watts total

Dell PC (older, with big bloated screen): 35 watts total (50 watts when booting or with certain websites)

Mac Desktop (2003): 50 watts

Printers:

Old HP printer: Zero watts when on but not in use

Newer All-in-One HP printer/scanner/fax/copier: 19 watts when on but not in use, 8 watts when turned off.

Television

Old TV: 45 watts

New TV: Holding off on that one, but likely to be a big increase. A thin screen similar in size to our old 19" TV uses a similar amount of energy, so the new models are slim in looks only.

I HAVE A 600 WATT GORILLA LIVING IN THE BASEMENT

It's called a dehumidifier, and it runs and runs. Mine is an Energy Star model, but that doesn't keep it from drawing what averages out to a constant draw of three or four hundred watts during the summer, and that's with it's thermostat set at the highest (70%) humidity level. A lower setting would cause it to run even more. Multiply that consumption rate by all the houses with basements in NJ, and you have a major contributor to energy demand, and therefore global warming. It may be worth looking into whether a ventilation system using fans would achieve adequate results, simultaneously helping to reduce any risk of radon accumulation. Another measure is to make sure the ground slopes away from the house, and that downspouts discharge well away from the foundation, to reduce the amount of moisture seeping through the basement walls from the soil.

INSIDIOUS, SILENT CONSUMPTION

My refrigerator uses 170 watts when the motor is running. To my surprise, it can occasionally use far more when it is dead silent. Whenever the defroster kicks in, its energy consumption jumps to 630 watts. Not much to be done about that, except to minimize the time the door is open, and maybe check the settings to make sure it's not running colder than it needs to. One thing to look for inside the frig is the switch that "reduces exterior moisture". This is a heating element that's supposed to keep the door from sweating. I turned it off, didn't notice any sweating, and thereby avoided the constant draw of 7 watts. The light bulb in the frig also produces considerable heat when the door is open.

The DSL modem and router draw 9 watts combined. The TV/DVD/VCR draw 5 watts combined when not in use. Plugging these, along with printer and other computer peripherals into power strips that can be turned off reduces overnight consumption by about 30 watts. You can buy power strips that turn off peripherals automatically when the computer is turned off. I saw these on amazon.com, but have yet to try them.

LIKE USING PERRIER TO WATER YOUR LAWN

That's what they say about how comparatively expensive it is to heat anything with electricity. That little toaster oven on the kitchen counter, for instance, uses 1400 watts when on, nearly half of what the central air conditioner uses when it's cooling the whole house. Fortunately, toast is a quick operation. The hairdryer uses between 400 and 1500 watts, depending on the setting. The Kill-A-Watt wouldn't measure the electric clothes dryer's energy use, which turned out to be a mind-altering 3700 watts when measured with a whole house energy monitor called T.E.D. For comparison, a fluorescent light bulb uses 15 watts.

MICROWAVE OVEN

The Kill-a-Watt has its limitations. It would not measure the microwave oven, which apparently uses more electricity than the Kill-a-Watt is designed to handle. As it turns out, the microwave uses 1900 watts, not bad considering how quickly it heats things.

MISCELLANEOUS

Vacuum cleaner: 1000

3-Way Lamp: 50-150 (quickly replaced with a one-way switch and a 23 watt flourescent)

Old stereo: 30-60, depending on volume

Measuring Your Home Energy Use

Any effort to cut back on home energy use quickly runs into a problem: our homes are designed to keep us in the dark about the consequences of our energy consumption habits.

Though foods are labeled for caloric content, you'll have a hard time finding any label on your computer, dishwasher, water heater, or any other household item that will tell you how much energy it uses.

Go on a diet, and you can get instant feedback on your progress by standing on a scale. Newer cars will tell you how many miles/gallon you're getting at any moment. But in a house, the most expensive item you're ever likely to own, feedback on energy use comes in tiny print, once a month in the mail. The electric meter is outside somewhere in the bushes, the gas meter is in a cramped corner of the basement, and their dials are hard to make any sense of.

For the highly motivated, it's possible to track down devices to measure energy consumption on the internet. To measure my own use, I bought a Kill-a-Watt, which is a $25 handheld device that will tell you what most plug-in appliances in your home are consuming at any moment or over a period of time. It's very helpful, but not for measuring the big consumers, like the central A/C, the dishwasher and clothes dryer. For those, I had to buy a $150 device that tells me how many watts my whole house is consuming at any moment. Though a number of home energy monitors are available on the internet, I ended up buying The Energy Detective--TED for short. Now I can turn on the dryer or any other item and see immediately how much my energy use jumps.

I'm surprised how many people shrug at the notion that this sort of knowledge and instant feedback could have any impact on behavior. It certainly has changed mine, as another post will describe.