Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

Dose of Reality: Happy New Year

“The science is beyond dispute… Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”

I never thought I’d see the day when the President of the USA would be considered “more green” than the prime minister of Canada. I’m happy to say, that I truly believe Obama is just that. (Although…to be fair – being “more green” then the Canadian government isn’t super hard right now.)

The future looks mostly friendly with Obama on leading the way. Originally there was some skepticism over his support for “clean coal” support – but won the environmentalists back with his incredibly aggressive and undeniably ambitious plan for climate change and renewable energies. This plan focuses on an attempt to reduce 80 % emissions from 1990 levels by 2050 along side auctioning 100 % of the pollution permits. If he holds true to his plan it will also include a $150 billion investment for green jobs and clean energies.

He is calling for 30% of all the government’s electricity to come from renewable energy within the next 11 years, and 25% of ALL U.S.A electricity to come from sustainable/renewable sources by 2025. All “new buildings” would be carbon neutral by 2030 and U.S oil consumption would drop by at least 35%. He opposes oil drilling in the Arctic, supports Nuclear energy (although doesn’t want it stuck under Yucca - but did accept $159 800 in contributions from Exelon) and supports labeling foods for GMOs and country-of-origin.

So it looks as though that America is rolling into a new year with some bright light ahead of them. To the east Spain is putting forth intense efforts to start a competition for the biggest and baddest solar energy device this world can offer. They’re not even going to keep it to themselves, but have said that they will export the technology to places such as Algeria and Morocco.

The 20MW solar tower is also a forerunner for an even more ambitious idea, one that Abascal [Abengoa’s CTO] hopes will become a standard for CSP plants in future — a 50MW version that could generate electricity around the clock. “During the day, you’d use 50% of your electricity to produce electricity and 50% to heat molten salt. During the night you use the molten salt to produce electricity.”

Molten salt technology is in its early stages but Abengoa is testing the idea at a power plant in Granada. So far the company has demonstrated that it is possible to store up to eight hours of solar energy by heating tanks containing 28,000 tonnes of salt to more than 220C. “This will make it possible to have almost constant production or at least it will be able to produce energy for most of the day,” said Abascal.

India is doing it’s part by introducing such technology as the solar rickshaw!

The solar version reaches a pretty impressive speed of about 15 kilometres per hour and, fully-charged, the battery can keep going for 50-70 kilometres. The goal is to develop the current four Soleckshaws into more advanced models in time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi.

Hopefully these sorts of technologies will only keep going so that the everyday rickshaw driver can afford one. But for less costly environmental efforts we can turn to Japan where they’re using recycled bottles to save people’s lives.

All over the world there are people devoting their lives, or simply just doing their best to help save the environment. I look forward to this new year, when I suspect that we’ll see many changes in America, Canada and all over the world. Although some of the governments may not have the best plans, at least they’re starting to have plans at all. And it’s going to take the effort, passion and devotion of every single person to see some major changes starting to take place.

So Happy New Year! I hope this coming year brings you lots of green-filled surprises and cool new technologies for us all to try out. Throughout the year I’ll keep you updated on coral reefs, endangered species, deforestation, pollution and the hardships that people are facing because of global warming and other environmental disasters.

“We are not acting as good stewards of God’s Earth when our bottom line puts the size of our profits before the future of our planet.”
— Obama Oct. 14, 2007, in a speech at an interfaith forum on climate change

WIRED Magazine's "Environmentalism"

“Attention Environmentalists: Keep your SUVs. Forget organics. Go nuclear. Screw the spotted owl.” Wow, if that is not an attention getting headline I don’t know what is. Well that is what is stated on the cover of the June issue of WIRED magazine. The headline continues “If you’re serious about global warming only one thing matters: Cutting Carbon. That means facing some inconvenient truths.”

So what is this all about? Yes our climate crisis is important but forget organics, drive an SUV… huh? According to WIRED magazine, “The war on greenhouse gasses is too important to be left to the environmentalist” and we need to push everything aside and just focus on our reducing our CO2 emission. Forget about everything else? Our health, cleaning up toxic areas, erosion, our culture and work only on global warming?

This single minded way of looking at the environment is split up into “10 tenets” of what WIRED magazine calls “the new environmental apostasy.”

Here’s what WIRED says:

(1) Live in Cities. WIRED posits that urban dwellers emit less greenhouse gases than those living in suburban sprawl. Well this is true. As reported by Reuters on May 30th in a story entitled Big US Carbon Footprint Lie East of the Mississippi, “metropolitan areas, where people drive shorter distances and use less electricity in their homes, are greener. On average, an urban dweller’s carbon footprint was 86 percent of a suburban or rural resident’s.” So we should all move to cities? Is this realistic? Cram everyone into NY, LA, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and Denver? LA where you can only see the surrounding mountains when it rains and the smog settles? What about health issues? Also, “green” goes beyond just CO2 emissions. Cities can’t sustain themselves. Central Park isn’t a farm, and Staten Island isn’t used as a giant diary. So yes, urban areas may emit less greenhouse gasses per person, but they are still massive heat islands, net consumers of food, oil and other things that are generated by the generation of CO2, NO2 and SO2.

(2) A/C is OK. According to WIRED it takes more energy to raise the thermostat in New England to 70 degrees when it is zero outside then it takes to lower the temperature in Phoenix to 70 degrees when it is 110 degrees outside. Therefore using the A/C emits less greenhouse gases in heating a house in winter. Well how about all the greenhouse gases emitted from shipping all the food that does not growing 110 degree weather to feed those people using the A/C or all the water that needs to be pumped into the swimming pools to cool down those sweating people in Arizona.

(3) Organics are not the answer. WIRED magazine’s argument here is organic dairies do not produce as much milk as industrial dailies. Organically fed animals take longer to fatten up before going to market. More time breathing means more time to burp, fart and poop emitting more greenhouse gases e.g. methane. Organic farmers do not produce as much produce per acre as industrial farmers. Even so, organic farming has become big business delivering “wholesome” food to moms like me across many thousands of miles; think grapes from Chile or Strawberries from California. Well this is one that rips my heart out. Don’t eat organic? Are they kidding? First, don’t we need to be healthy and alive to save the environment? Organic produce and meats are significantly more nutritious than industrial foods. (To read more about the nutritional difference of organic over industrial produce read my past post “Another Point of the Organic Industry!“) The pesticides and fertilizers that are used on industrial farms are ALL made out of fossil fuels, degrading the land and polluting the water from runoff. And the same trucks and planes that are hauling the organic foods are also hauling their industrial counterparts. So organic or industrial? Go organic. Now I will agree with WIRED on one point. Buy local. But local industrial is worse than shipped organic. WIRED’s reporters would have us eat the pesticide laden lettuces grown locally. Yuck! Not for me and my family.

More »

Wind Farms: Beauty or the Beast

I took this photo of the wind turbines in Palm Springs, CA

I’ve heard the two windiest spots on our planet are the Coachella Valley of California and South Africa. The wind in California has prompted the installation of thousands of windmills in the Coachella Valley, which generate electricity for nearby Palm Springs and areas spreading toward the Los Angeles basin.

Standing majestically, like some invasive alien lifeform or uniform militia, the windmills have now become the major landmark of the Palm Springs region. Assembled in the desert like something out of a Pink Floyd movie, with towers as high as 150 feet and turbines as wide as the wings of a 747, the windmills are striking.

The American Wind Energy Association calculates there is enough available land in the Midwest or in just 100 square miles of Nevada’s windiest regions, to house enough wind farms to supply the energy needed to power the United States. The U.S. has been slow to move into wind power, although it is now picking up significantly. In the early years of development, windmills were simply too expensive to produce, install, and maintain. However, over the last ten years, the expense of windmill power has dropped over 80%. Following in the footsteps of progressive countries, such as Denmark, where over 10% of energy is windmill generated, the U.S. has finally been increasing wind energy production.

There are three main arguments against wind farms:
-the environmental impact of the windmills
-energy used to produce and store energy
-the usual NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome.

As far as the environmental impact goes, massive turbines can disrupt local ecosystems and wildlife. For example, flight patterns of migratory birds have been altered and birds have died due to collisions. A solution to this is that wind farmers and scientists are working together to avoid placing windmills along flight and migration paths, while also working to avoid endangered plant and animal territory.

The production of the windmills is not without the depletion of non-renewable resources. The storage of the energy harnessed requires battery use, which means toxic waste. The windmills can be massive, which requires large transportation services as well as the use of raw materials to build them.

As for NIMBY, the windmills can cause a fair amount of noise pollution. Besides noise, some people consider windmill farms eyesores. Some people think these problems can be avoided through decentralization of power generation. By going ‘off the grid’ and building homes in windy areas, people can have their own windmills right in their back yard. (RITBY?) Excess energy can be sold to local utilities, which makes the turbines a good long-term investment.

In this time of climate crisis, utility companies need to be willing to participate in a metering program in order for this to happen and right now, the U.S. still has a far way to go before this works as well as it could. Energy utilities generally only pay 35-40% of the retail rate (due to government energy subsidies.) This could be interpreted as a way to dissuade individuals from pursuing this type of self-sufficiency. Wind certainly seems to be a better option, in comparison to coal, oil or nuclear energy.

Nuclear Is No Option

A few months ago, I posted here a compendium of reasons why I live in Germany. Though I’d intended the post as an answer to all those who’ve asked in the past, writing it also helped me to see through the myths I’d taken too seriously (i.e. all Germans are green) and helped me better understand myself in the political landscape here. Because like it or not, politics are a necessity in getting environmentalism to have the greatest impact.

As I reread the post, I realized that many of the things I wrote about had more to do with Germany’s social democracy and less with its green principles – which for an American like me seemed like two sides of the same coin but which for Germans are two very very different political stances. Up until three years ago, however, the two political parties (the Greens and the Social Democrats) were ruling bedfellows, maintaining control of the parliament and pushing through some of the legislation that appealed to me most, including the requirement that all nuclear power plants go off-line by 2020. It was, by most accounts, a Green party measure. But it also benefited the social democrats’ legislative ideas in many ways; most notably, it allowed them to battle long-time unemployment through the creation of thousands of “green collar jobs”.

In the comments to the post, however, someone named Richard said, “I was loving everything you were saying up until you rejoiced at the fact that nuclear power plants were being taken offline. That told me you hadn’t actually done your homework.” In fact I had, and I responded to that, but still, the comment got me wondering: since when did environmentalists start agreeing with nuclear? And then this article, “Atomic Dreams” from The Earth Island Journal fell into my lap:

According to a 2005 ABC News survey, only one-third of Americans approved of “building more nuclear plants at this time.” Nuclear proponents needed a way of convincing people that atomic energy deserved a second shot. Enter climate change. While nuclear power generation isn’t entirely carbon neutral—uranium mining and enrichment require vast amounts of fossil fuel energy—atomic plants are cleaner from a carbon standpoint than natural gas or coal-fired power stations. Posing nuclear energy as a response to global warming seemed a useful way to reintroduce nuclear power to a public that hadn’t been forced to think about it for years.

It’s an interesting read, especially for those interested in learning how a cause du jour can sway public opinion, for better and for worse.

How Green is Your Vote?

One of our readers pointed out a lack of political discourse on environmental issues. Earthlab has compiled a breakdown of what the candidates wish to accomplish with regard to the environment. Alex, thanks for bringing this up and for the link from earthlab!

2008 Presidential Candidates – Environment

Top Democrat Positions

Hillary Clinton
Clinton’s plans to tackle global warming revolve around her Strategic Energy Fund. She states that, “As a nation, it is time we take the giant leap in energy innovation we desperately need and that is exactly what the Strategic Energy Fund will do.” The fund sketches out a plan to inject $50 billion into research and development of renewable energy, clean coal technology, energy efficiency, ethanol and other “homegrown” biofuels. The fund draws revenue by eliminating oil companies’ tax breaks, making sure they pay their fair share for drilling operations on public lands, and encouraging them to either invest in renewable energy or pay into the fund directly. “By pursuing these opportunities, we can grow the economy and shrink our dependence on foreign oil. We can slow global warming and speed the creation of good new jobs. We can protect our security and protect our environment.”

Barack Obama
Obama’s proposal to reduce global warming involves the implementation of an economy-wide, market-based cap-and-trade system. “No business will be allowed to emit any greenhouse gases for free,” Obama states. “Businesses don’t own the sky, the public does, and if we want them to stop polluting it, we have to put a price on all pollution.” This ambitious cap-and-trade system will auction off 100 percent of emissions permits, making polluters pay for the CO2 they emit. The system also mandates the reduction of emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Obama plans on investing $150 billion in “climate friendly” energy supplies, such as ethanol, over the next ten years, while simultaneously maintaining and protecting the existing manufacturing base. “My general view is that we should experiment with all sorts of potential energy sources,” says Obama. “Don’t prejudge what works and what doesn’t, but insist that we have very strict standards in terms of where we want to end up, and enforce those standards vigorously.”

Top Republican Positions

Mitt Romney
When asked what he plans on doing about the global climate crisis, Romney’s answer is concise; “We’re going to get ourselves off foreign oil. And to do that it’s going to take nuclear power, clean coal, more efficient vehicles, and then we’re going to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gasses.” Romney emphasizes a push toward clean coal, alternative energy, and a greatly expanded nuclear power plan. “Instead of sweeping mandates, we must use America’s power of innovation to develop alternative sources of energy and new technology that use energy more efficiently.” Romney articulates that this technology includes the use of ethanol, but not exclusively. He plans to continue development of multiple energy sources within the U.S., including biodiesel, liquefied coal, offshore drilling, and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,

John McCain
McCain believes that America’s economic and environmental interests are not “mutually exclusive, but rather inextricably linked.” His approach to global warming involves limiting carbon emissions by bringing nuclear energy to the forefront of the market, which will reduce America’s dependence on foreign supplies of energy. These concepts are outlined in his Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act, along with his plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions substantially enough to forestall catastrophic global warming. Implementing these reductions involves setting mandatory greenhouse gas pollution reductions in all major sectors of the U.S. economy, using free-market incentives to lower costs, and providing support for technology innovations. “Americans solve problems. We don’t run from them,” states McCain on the environmental page of his Web site. “Most, if not all of the ways that we can address this issue are through profit motive, free-enterprise-system-driven green technologies.”

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