Frugaline.org

I have shifted some of these posts over to frugaline.org, which explores specific ways to reduce energy use and better conceptualize climate change and its likely consequences.

Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization--A Review

This documentary about Lester Brown was broadcast recently on the PBS program Journey to Planet Earth, with Matt Damon as host. Brown's online bio says he started out growing tomatoes in south Jersey, got a degree from Rutgers, founded the Worldwatch Institute, and has had a hand in writing 50 books.
     
The documentary follows Brown around the globe, as he speaks in various countries and contemplates the chain of events that could lead to civilization's collapse catalyzed by changing climate. I resisted liking the documentary at first, being tired of environmental documentaries that depend for movement on the protagonist traveling around in a car or plane, all the while telling us to stop consuming fossil fuels. Long, lingering shots of a jet flying gracefully above the clouds seems to send the wrong message somehow. And the film doesn't deal with the large percentage of people whose underlying religious and/or ideological beliefs prevent them from engaging in this subject.
    
But for an audience that already understands that climate change is a big problem, and understands the prophet's need to speed round the world to spread the word, the film offers a compelling case for ramping up the level of concern. Brown believes an 80% reduction in greenhouse emissions is necessary not by 2050 but by 2020, if we are to have a chance of saving the Himalayan glaciers that sustain four major river systems in Asia. The film is particularly good at showing hidden cause and effect. Lost glaciers lead to water shortages, which leads to food shortages in China and elsewhere, which leads to Asia competing aggressively for food grown in the U.S. and other countries, which leads to higher food prices for everyone.
     
Brown had initially rejected the idea that food could be the weak link in early 21st century civilization, but now believes that climate change will likely lead to the sorts of food shortages that caused past civilizations to collapse. Climate change is a "threat multiplier for instability", which has led Brown to track the "failing state" phenomenon around the globe, as more and more states lose control of their territory through violent unrest. "How many failed states before we have a failing civilization?", he asks.
     
Common in collapses of past civilizations was the failure of leaders to see early warning signs. A recurrent theme in the film is the suddenness with which events can spiral out of control, and how an imminent collapse can be hidden behind the facade of normality. Enron, for instance, at one point ranked 7th in total global worth, yet was proven to be worthless. Like Enron, we're leaving costs off the books, through such practices as not factoring the atmospheric dumping of CO2 into the cost of a commodity.
    
Some climate models are now showing that a 2.5 degree increase in global temperature may lead to drought and massive dieback in the Amazon basin, with 1 billion acres of forest and 20% of global biodiversity at risk of going up in flames. Brown puts forth the concept of problems developing geometrically, so that a situation can seem only half bad the day before it becomes all bad (google The 29th Day).
     
The film does offer a plan at the end, Plan B, which has four interdependent parts and is delivered in a frank and thankfully subdued way, avoiding the cheerleading tone of some other documentaries. My notes are incomplete, but the plan includes reducing the income tax combined with raising the fuel tax, restoring habitats like the ocean, curbing population growth by eradicating poverty and investing in people, particularly in the education and empowerment of women, tapping wind, solar and geothermal energy, and such. Nuclear energy is too expensive; carbon sequestration is not ready.
     
To give some wisp of hope to this venture, World War II is offered as an example of how the U.S. economy was radically retooled in a matter of months. No cars were built for 2 1/2 years as the factories produced armaments instead. Substitute wind generators and solar cells for armaments, and the general outline becomes clear. The participation of everyone is needed ("Saving civilization is not a spectator sport."), and along with averting calamity we will also gain a stronger sense of community.
     
Left unmentioned is the host of powerful economic interests and ideologies that are deeply antagonistic towards environmentalism and government, and stand ready to sabotage any movement towards coherent, unified response. That's the companion documentary that needs to be found.
     

Legislative Agenda Item: Make Plastics Out of Safe, Renewable Materials

On the topic of squeezing fossil fuels out of our lives, this from an opinion piece by Susan Freinkel, author of the forthcoming “Plastic: A Toxic Love Story.”

"Yet we can’t hope to achieve plastic’s promise for the 21st century if we stick with wasteful 20th-century habits of plastic production and consumption. We have the technology to make better, safer plastics — forged from renewable sources, rather than finite fossil fuels, using chemicals that inflict minimal or no harm on the planet and our health. We have the public policy tools to build better recycling systems and to hold businesses accountable for the products they put into the market. And we can also take a cue from the plastic purgers about how to cut wasteful plastic out of our daily lives."

Putting the Squeeze On Climate Change

(This can also be found in the "Squeeze Concept" page) Lots of numbers and good intentions have been thrown at the looming beast called climate change. Goals like 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 were meant to spur action, but clearly something is missing. The image below is a simple rendering to help visualize what needs to be done, essentially a "squeezing" of fossil fuels out of the economy and out of our lifestyles.

The vertical axis represents the nation's energy needs. The space in the graph above the year 2010 is mostly red, representing the current dependency on fossil fuels. As time travels to the right, people steadily "squeeze" fossil fuel out of their lives, by learning to use less of it (energy conservation) and installing more renewable energies like wind and solar.

Arctic Cold Hits NJ While the Planet Heats

Arctic air has been spilling down into New Jersey, bringing single digit temperatures and some puzzlement about how we could be experiencing such frigid weather if the planet is heating up. Part of the answer is that some areas of Canada and Greenland, meanwhile, are experiencing temperatures 20 degrees higher than normal. An article in the NY Times describes how changes in atmospheric pressure have allowed more arctic air than usual to spill down into the northeastern U.S., and how these changes may be driven in part by the substantial reduction in arctic sea ice over the past thirty years.

One has to be cautious about attributing unusual weather directly to climate change, but climate models have long predicted increases in extreme weather events, as overall warming magnifies instability.

Bag It -- A Documentary on Plastic

Star Date 1.22.11: The community room at Princeton Public Library was packed again, last night, for a showing of Bag It, a comprehensive and entertaining expose on the cumulative consequences of our use of plastics. That legacy can be found in the widening gyres of plastic debris in the oceans and in chemicals like bisphenol A and phthalates in our bodies.

The film's devastating critique is made palatable by a sense of humor. Lest the plastic-filled guts of dead marine birds and whales prove too wrenching, other scenes offer a fluffy and frolicking abominable snowman made of white plastic bags, and tragicomic encounters with plastic overload in the aisles of the local supermarket.

What does Princeton have to do with all this? Consider the destiny of a plastic bottle tossed onto Harrison Street. It disappears down a storm drain, gets washed through a pipe into Harry's Brook, flows to Carnegie Lake, where it may float about until storm waters push it over the dam and down the Millstone and Raritan Rivers to the ocean. The Atlantic, like the Pacific, has two gyres of accumulating plastic--one in the north and one in the south. Over a period of years, the plastic bottle and billions of other bits of plastic eventually find their way out to the gyre, slowly breaking down into smaller and smaller bits that fish, sea turtles and whales can mistake for food. The plastic bits also absorb toxic chemicals in the water, which would be a good thing if the fish weren't eating the plastic, absorbing the toxics, and passing the toxics up a food chain that can include humans.

Documentaries are meant to change your mind, or at least convey reality so vividly that one can no longer ignore what one already knew. The mind is admirably and exasperatingly well armored against all these attempts--understandable given the potential grief involved in letting go of a belief one has invested years or decades adhering to and defending.

Despite this, the film forced me to abandon one long-held skepticism: the notion that stream cleanups are merely a feel-good activity that serve our aesthetics but do little for the watershed. Paper litter may break down, and wildlife may find cover in a stray rusty pipe, but the plastics are likely as not to be swept downstream and out into the ocean, where they provide one more hazard for marine life already on the edge.

Of all the wonderfully presented scenes, interviews, and graphics in the movie, one that lingers is the man who is storing all his family's trash in his basement for a year. He's apparently able to avoid a huge mess by composting food waste, reusing containers, and avoiding products with throwaway packaging.

The positive message of the movie is that taking steps to withdraw from the culture of consumption can lead to a richer life that focuses more on human interactions and resourcefulness. Sharon Roe, who spoke afterwards about her company, which makes reuseable ecobags, spoke of the environmental journey of discovery and understanding that we all are on.

In many ways, it seems to be a journey both forwards into new, less harmful technologies and backwards to forgotten pleasures and values, to extract ourselves from the seductively convenient yet terribly warped and destructive world cheap fossil fuel energy has led us into.

Bikes and Style

Nice writeup in the NY Times about women making bicycle riding stylish. This may seem like a bit of gloss, but for bikes to become widely adopted as a primary mode of transportation, they have to go beyond being merely utilitarian and green and become part of people's identity. Cars are advertised for their style and associated in commercials with character traits having nothing to do with the car itself. The more that bicycles can compete with cars on that level, the better.

E/Z on the A/C

The first thing to know about central air conditioning is that turning the thermostat way down doesn't make the house cool down faster. The thermostat is not like a throttle or an accelerator pedal in a car, but instead simply turns the A/C on or off. It matters to know this, because the tendency otherwise may be to turn the thermostat way down in an effort to cool the house quickly, then forget to adjust it later on. The A/C ends up running and running, attempting to cool the house to a temperature lower than you actually want or need. The best thing to do is set the thermostat at the temperature you want. The house will cool just as quickly.

A central A/C unit typically draws a whopping 3500 watts of energy while on. I've come to associate the hum of the A/C with the blowing up of mountaintops in West Virginia, which may be the source of coal used to generate those watts. Most people are oblivious to such dramas hidden behind the facade of everyday domestic life.

The second thing to know is that ceiling or floor fans, which only use 20 or 30 watts of electricity while running, can help you cut back on A/C use. What we've found, as we progressively try to trim the use of A/C in the house, is that it's possible to gain enough comfort on hot days by using a mix of ceiling fans and A/C, with the A/C on just enough to lower the humidity in the house. Of course, when the A/C is running, all the windows have to be closed. Otherwise the heat and humidity from outside just pours right back in.

Our central A/C system, while not the worst, is not exactly state of the art. It pushes coolish air through a labyrinthine system of ducts, and sometimes labors to bring the house temperature down below a certain point. With the thermostat set at 81 on a 95 degree day, it cuts the humidity nicely, then turns off. The fans do the rest. Set it at 78 and it may lumber on for long periods without achieving much gain in comfort. Some may think 81 sounds a tad high, but fans are said to make it feel 4 degrees cooler, and over time our bodies have grown accustomed to a broader range of temperatures. A little bit of adaptation now could save a lot of adaptation later on.

A couple degrees adjustment of the thermostat, then, can make a big difference in how much the A/C runs. If it's running constantly, try nudging the thermostat upwards to give the A/C, and the planet, some relief. Wear shorts and t-shirt, or something similarly light, and let the fans do the rest. Stimulate the local economy by spending the energy savings at the ice cream store.

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."