365 Days Of Trash

This Holiday Season, Give Kiva Instead!

2011-12-15T03:46:00.000-08:00

Ahhh, the holiday season is upon us with all the usual hustle and bustle it involves. Assuming you survived Black Friday by opting out completely you are probably prepping for the mad gift giving that will soon be upon us. While many people may be waffling between the automated turnip twaddler and the latest iProduct that the late Steve Jobs has instructed us we need, I'd like to mention a third alternative. Why not give the gift of Kiva.

For those of your new to Kiva, it's pretty simple (a couple of clicks), environmentally less invasive (no wrapping required) and a great way to help others. Kiva is a micro lending organization that helps people all over the globe. Basically what happens is a stall owner in Jakarta wants to grow her business and help herself, her family, and her community. She doesn't have access to cash to get it going so she contacts Kiva who then vets her and puts her request online. Then regular Joes and Janes like us loan money (in $25 increments) and when the loan is funded, the borrower gets her money and she's off to the races. Over time (generally within a year and with an astounding 90 something percent completion rate) she pays off the loan and you get your money back. Simple, cool, and highly effective.

So how does this help with your gift giving choices? Well, Kiva has gift certificates that you can buy and print, email, Facebook, or have sent as a card to that special person in your life. How cool is that? Instead of some new gizmo that will end in a landfill, or an iTunes gift card (that will end in a landfill by the way) you can give the gift of giving. But it doesn't stop there my friends!

Consider this. You give your little niece a $25 gift loan. She heads on line and is empowered by perusing the loan applicants, reading about them, deciding on who to fund, and then helping them better their lives. The loan is paid back to her, she gets an email, and then gets to re-loan that same amount to someone else. Your gift keeps giving until who knows when? So it's much more than a one time gift and your niece thinks of you every time she heads onto the Kiva site or gets an update. And as an added bonus, she's so blown away by all of this, that she gives up her dreams of becoming a corporate overlord and instead decides to devote her life to helping others, creates a non-profit that builds houses for the poor and wins the Nobel Prize!! And all that for $25! Wow!

But yeah, she'll probably like that iTunes gift card just as much so i could see this being a toss up.

Happy Happy (and check out Kiva!)

Dave

UCS Resource For Alternative Vehicles

2011-09-19T06:17:00.000-07:00

I've always been a fan of the Union of Concerned Scientists because they are scientists and they are concerned, so how bad can they be right? (By the way, if anyone mentions that I believe in science I'll deny it, what with the witch hunts and cultural revolution coming down the pike). Here's a link to a great resource on electric vehicles of all sorts and the (gulp) scientific information that should be considered with this new technology. As always it's worth mentioning that public transport and bicycles are a far better choice than anything. Enjoy.

Dave

Don't Throw Out Those Old Cellphones!

2011-09-19T03:48:00.000-07:00

If you are like many Americans you get a new cell phone every year or so. I won't even go into the need/reasoning behind this, but if you do, there is still a need for your old cell phones. Check out 10 Places To Donate an Old Cellphone for more than a few ideas and re-use, re-use, re-use!

Dave

MIT Students Create Printable Solar Panels

2011-07-21T07:59:00.000-07:00

I've always said that technology alone won't save us but that it will be part of the solution. Well here's an amazing example. Solar panels that can essentially be printed up and used to generate power. Brilliant.

Great Kids Video About Mountaintop Removal

2011-05-25T06:33:00.001-07:00

Are Climate Change and the Recent Tornados Connected?

2011-05-25T05:12:00.000-07:00

Bill Mckibben nails it squarely on the head.

A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!

By Bill McKibben, Published: May 23

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.

It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas — fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they’ve ever been — the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they’re somehow connected.

If you did wonder, you see, you would also have to wonder about whether this year’s record snowfalls and rainfalls across the Midwest — resulting in record flooding along the Mississippi — could somehow be related. And then you might find your thoughts wandering to, oh, global warming, and to the fact that climatologists have been predicting for years that as we flood the atmosphere with carbon we will also start both drying and flooding the planet, since warm air holds more water vapor than cold air.

It’s far smarter to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change. There have been tornadoes before, and floods — that’s the important thing. Just be careful to make sure you don’t let yourself wonder why all these record-breaking events are happening in such proximity — that is, why there have been unprecedented megafloods in Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan in the past year. Why it’s just now that the Arctic has melted for the first time in thousands of years. No, better to focus on the immediate casualties, watch the videotape from the store cameras as the shelves are blown over. Look at the news anchorman standing in his waders in the rising river as the water approaches his chest.

Because if you asked yourself what it meant that the Amazon has just come through its second hundred-year drought in the past five years, or that the pine forests across the western part of this continent have been obliterated by a beetle in the past decade — well, you might have to ask other questions. Such as: Should President Obama really just have opened a huge swath of Wyoming to new coal mining? Should Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sign a permit this summer allowing a huge new pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta? You might also have to ask yourself: Do we have a bigger problem than $4-a-gallon gasoline?

Better to join with the U.S. House of Representatives, which voted 240 to 184 this spring to defeat a resolution saying simply that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” Propose your own physics; ignore physics altogether. Just don’t start asking yourself whether there might be some relation among last year’s failed grain harvest from the Russian heat wave, and Queensland’s failed grain harvest from its record flood, and France’s and Germany’s current drought-related crop failures, and the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, and the inability of Midwestern farmers to get corn planted in their sodden fields. Surely the record food prices are just freak outliers, not signs of anything systemic.

It’s very important to stay calm. If you got upset about any of this, you might forget how important it is not to disrupt the record profits of our fossil fuel companies. If worst ever did come to worst, it’s reassuring to remember what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told the Environmental Protection Agency in a recent filing: that there’s no need to worry because “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” I’m pretty sure that’s what residents are telling themselves in Joplin today.

Bill McKibben is founder of the global climate campaign 350.org and a distinguished scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Chicago Prepares For Climate Change

2011-05-24T03:54:00.000-07:00

Wild article in the New York Times about how Chicago is preparing for the coming storm. In 50 years the weather there is expected to be more like New Orleans than Chicago, so they are beginning to change sidewalks, roadways, and the types of trees they plant. It's hard to know if this is smart or not, but it seems like embracing what is happening (and trying to slow it at the same time) is the thing that makes the most sense. Check it out here.

9 out of 10 Climate Denier Scientists Linked To Exxon

2011-05-13T11:20:00.000-07:00

The title alone should be enough proof for most of us at this point, but if you need a little more, check out the full article here.

How Meat Impacts The Environment

2011-05-11T04:02:00.000-07:00

A great little graph (and more here) from Scientific American about the problems with eating meat. OF course they are talking about industrialized meat production but it's pretty alarming. Click on the pic to enlarge it.

Can white roofs save the world?

2011-05-06T08:41:00.000-07:00

Probably not, but check out the cool info (pun intended) at White Roof Alliance. The simple explanation is this: much of the worlds industrial (and personal) roofing is black as are our roadways. Black surfaces trap heat, warm up, and create heat islands. And it's not only black roofs! So the idea is to change the color of our rooftops and road surfaces and thereby cool things down. Of course they explain it much better than I do, along with the science, but it makes a lot of sense me thinks.

According to the site permanently changing the worlds rooftops would have the same effect as cutting out a full year of man made CO2 (in decreased cooling and heating costs). Cool.

Check it out.

Dave

Helping make the global warming argument

2011-05-04T17:38:00.000-07:00

Time and again I find myself getting asked about Global Warming or, as it should more accurately be called, Global Climate Change. It's a tough one because it's so political and so large, but when you look at the science (oh dear, did I say science) it's actually quite simple. I generally try to convince people why they need to change using logic as it seems to cut through all of the left/right stuff that this topic brings up.

Having said all of that though, check out Skeptical Science, a very cool site that has a list of the generally raised "beliefs" about climate change and the science that refutes these claims. They even have a free iphone app that has the same info, so you can argue on the go! How cool (pun intended).

Dave

Fantastic Speech By Bill Mckibben

2011-05-01T17:21:00.000-07:00

Can a "normal" American family achieve zero waste? Practically.

2011-01-10T06:29:00.000-08:00

Great story on a Northern California home of 4 people who have taken their waste stream down to a small amount of recycling and compost. Something we can all aspire to!

Cute Ban Plastic Bag Video

2010-12-20T07:10:00.001-08:00

2010-11-04T05:32:00.000-07:00

Crude: Texaco and Ecuador Contamination

2010-05-09T06:12:00.000-07:00

This is a clip from the film Crude about what Texaco left behind in Ecuador after they pulled out. Harrowing stuff.

Dave

Too funny

2010-04-09T18:48:00.000-07:00

Did this about a year ago. The Disney execs son heard me on the radio and thought I was funny so they called and asked me to do the voice. Originally there were supposed to be 12 small videos about the environment which I was supposed to help shape so I figured it was a good way to get a message out to a larger audience. Once I signed on, the economy tanked and they shrunk it down quite a bit, but it's still fun and gets the idea of electric vehicles into kids heads.

Kind of cool, even if they do have me wearing shoes.

Dave

Potato or Tomato?

2010-04-08T14:01:00.001-07:00

Castle Made Out Of Plastic Bottles

2010-02-24T15:35:00.000-08:00

Maybe they're not all bad afterall (I kid).

Check it out.

Dave

Help for Haiti

2010-02-23T10:23:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the long absence. I was in Haiti for two weeks and came back about a week and a half ago. For obvious reasons updating here was a little lower on the priority list. You can check out about the trip here and here are some specific things you can do right now.

Back at ya as soon as I get caught up on life.

Dave

How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away a Little Plastic Bottle Be?

2010-01-21T13:56:00.000-08:00

The Onion, brilliant as usual.

A Day Without Pay

2010-01-20T13:47:00.001-08:00

How about giving up one days pay to help those less fortunate? Check out A Day Without Pay.

Dave

How To Talk To Global Warming Skeptics

2010-01-20T13:46:00.001-08:00

A great article from Grist about how to answer global warming skeptics. Personally, I don't think it makes a stick of difference if it can be proven (at least whether or not we are causing it) because it's a question of acceptable risk, but some people need proof. Here's a good way to engage them.

Check it out.

Dave

The Only Climate Change Video You'll Ever Need To See

2010-01-12T15:12:00.000-08:00

There's a fair amount of argument about climate change as I'm sure you know. The thing that always amazes me is that everyone is arguing about the wrong things. It's not about whether we are causing it or not (something which neither side can prve with 100% certainty), but whether or not we are willing to take the risks associated with being wrong. This video represents that argument perfectly and the answer is quite clear.

James Hansen on Why He's Happy Copenhagen Didn't Go Well

2010-01-11T15:18:00.001-08:00

Renault EV Commercial

2010-01-06T06:40:00.000-08:00

These kinds of things will start popping up more and more and the fact that they are, to me at least, is testament to the idea that we are going to start seeing EVs in earnest soon. It's a well made piece, perhaps a bit over reaching (I don't know how comfortable I am with the idea that mass producing anything is going to help the climate) but I think its meant to engage and make us think, which is always a good thing.

My friend Paul, who first posted this, pointed out that leaf in the last 10 seconds or so, a subtle nod to the companies sister, Nissan, which is bringing the Leaf EV to market.

Enjoy.

Dave

Medical Waste - More Than Landfill Filler

2010-01-01T21:00:00.000-08:00

Fantastic radio piece about medical waste and orgs that gather usable items and ship them abroad. Really makes you think.

Check it out here

Elizabeth McLellan has been a nurse for more than 30 years. But she has never been able to get over how many perfectly good medical supplies — millions of dollars' worth — get thrown out each year by U.S. hospitals.

So she started a nonprofit group, called Partners for World Health, that collects leftover supplies from hospitals in the Portland, Maine, area and ships them to clinics in developing countries.

After she and other nurses pick up the supplies, McLellan stores them in her home while shipments are prepared.

Bags are crammed in her dining room, hallway and cellar. They are stuffed with sterile syringes, diabetic syringes, insulin syringes, gloves and alcohol swabs, most of them in their original packaging — "everything you could possibly imagine," McLellan says.

Where Excess Supplies Come From

McLellan says hospitals ditch items that were once in a patient's room because of strict rules about infection control.

Other times, hospitals throw out supplies that have never even left the supply cabinet.

Don Hancock, a vice president for Premier, a company that negotiates bulk purchases for hospitals, says supplies become outdated before hospitals get a chance to use them.

"Maybe you have invested in some inventory with a physician who no longer is with you, or maybe there is a new procedure that came out that can supersede an old procedure, and you no longer need the supplies for that old procedure," Hancock says.

An unopened pack of sutures is far more preferable to dipping gauze in alcohol, pulling the string out and turning it into sutures.

- Danielle Butin, director of Afya, a nonprofit that ships medical supplies to Africa

Dr. William Rosenblatt of the Yale School of Medicine says the waste is also a result of being cautious during medical procedures.

Surgeons order up enough drapes, sutures and gloves for worst-case scenarios. But Rosenblatt says there are always leftover items, up to a hundred dollars' worth per surgery. He doubts patients would have it any other way.

"If I was a patient in the operating room," Rosenblatt says, "I would want to know that the surgeon has immediately available not just what is going to be needed for my procedure, but also materials that are there just in case."

'Far' Better Than The Alternative

In the early 1990s, Rosenblatt formed one of the first medical supply recovery programs in the country, called REMEDY. Dozens of groups have cropped up since.

Occupational therapist Danielle Butin leads a group called Afya that ships supplies to Africa.

"An unopened pack of sutures is far more preferable to dipping gauze in alcohol, pulling the string out and turning it into sutures, which is a strategy that's employed in many developing nations," Butin says.

Back in Maine, volunteers move bags of supplies out of McLellan's house to her driveway, where they are being measured on a giant scale.

The final tally is about 10,000 pounds of supplies that will end up in countries such as Haiti and Cambodia.

There is potential for McLellan and others to collect much more. It's estimated that only 10 percent of hospitals around the country have arrangements to donate unused supplies.

Recycling For Charities

2009-12-13T06:50:00.000-08:00

Been meaning to post this for a while now. It's an interview I did for a pretty cool company called Recycling For Charities that raises money by recycling used electronics. Check it out.

Dave

Can Consumers Affect Climate Change?

2009-12-09T21:04:00.000-08:00

Oil Rigs in The Heart of LA? You Bet.

2009-11-19T21:29:00.001-08:00

Found this on LA Green Girls Blog. Oil Derricks in Beverly Hills? Wild.

The Gyre As It Looks On Midway

2009-11-10T23:02:00.001-08:00

Return to the Gyre

2009-11-10T21:58:00.000-08:00

For anyone interested in an update on the North Pacific Gyre, the plastic floating mass of garbage in the middle of the pacific, my friend Lyndsay just returned from a month at sea and had an article in the New York Times today. She told me that Captain Moore, who was back out with her, said that it has grown quite a bit since he was last there.

Can't Afford Solar? Lease Them Instead of Buying

2009-10-18T20:35:00.001-07:00

Watch CBS News Videos Online

$200K Worth of Cow Poop?

2009-10-02T02:00:00.000-07:00

Off The Grid

2009-09-30T13:04:00.001-07:00

Les Stroud shows how he achieved a lifestyle off the grid.

Whole Foods and Sigg Bottles

2009-09-25T14:44:00.000-07:00

Check with your local Whole Foods, but many of them are taking the older Sigg Bottles and offering replacements.

Dave

Jane Goodall

2009-09-24T13:28:00.001-07:00

Can Organic Farming Be Profitable?

2009-09-24T13:18:00.001-07:00

Blind Spot

2009-09-24T09:35:00.000-07:00

Check out this preview from the web site that sells this film about the perils of peak oil. It's a bit of a depressing film but an important one nonetheless, and, most importantly, very accessible.

Dave

Walmart going renewable

2009-09-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

I'm not a fan of Walmarts for a lot of reasons, but I think credit needs to be given where it's due. Check out this story about their stated goal to use only renewable energy in all of their stores. Of course it may just be hype, but seeing as they are already among the top 50 green power purchases in the US, there may be something to this. Hopefully other corps will take note.

Dave

Some new news from the North Pacific Gyre

2009-09-23T10:56:00.001-07:00

http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_13258216?source=most_emailed

Inspirational Kennedy Quote

2009-09-21T10:01:00.001-07:00

"But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

Great Fair Trade Video

2009-09-18T16:00:00.000-07:00

Go see The Age Of Stupid

2009-09-16T19:53:00.000-07:00

A very cool looking movie that will hopefully make folks think a bit. A man in 2055 looks back at the year 2008 through video clips and asks the question : Why didn't they do anything when they had the chance?

Monday Sept 21, the makers of the film are holding a worldwide premiere in order to get it in the Guinness Book Of World Records and get some attention. To be a part of it check out the site.

Full Length Story Of Stuff Finally Online

2009-09-15T22:26:00.001-07:00

MIT Tracking Seattle Trash

2009-09-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

A very cool story about a group of MIT students who are electronically tracking trash right from the source. They have been tagging garbage that is leaving peoples homes and will then have an exhibit up at the Seattle library that show where everything ends up. A very cool idea that will hopefully impress on everyday folks what the impact of their purchasing decisions is!

Check Out Veggie Trader for local produce

2009-09-15T09:32:00.000-07:00

OK, so your dream is to be a farmer, but just like Eva Gabor you can't give up the city life. Fear not though because Veggie Trader is here. Basically set up like craigslist, but for fresh produce, it's a way to barter/sell your extra backyard or windowsill crop and find something that you may need. How cool is this? But be careful, if this takes off, pretty soon we'll have enough fresh local vegetables for everyone and then who knows what that will bring.

Check it out.

Dave

Container City

2009-09-13T21:21:00.000-07:00

Container Homes!

2009-09-13T21:06:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt that shipping containers are tough.

Built tough from weathering corrugated steel, these incredible tough building blocks of international trade are designed to withstand stacking, stuffing and strapping and are reused over and over again. There is an estimate of over 18 million of these containers floating, riding and flying around the earth today, but the most recent sustainable design trend has found these containers revamped to contain a more delicate cargo: People.

More Here

The Future of Transportation!

2009-09-13T20:15:00.000-07:00

I Love This!

The Conference Bike

The Cove

2009-09-03T00:57:00.000-07:00

It's one thing to find a great documentary. It's another to find one that enlightens and inspires. And it's still another to find one that is so well made, that you'd swear it was scripted.

The Cove is just that and more. Check out the trailer below and then go see it with all your friends. Then call everyone else and tell them to see it.

Why you ask?

Because this illustrates how powerful one man can be, and moreso, has actually had an effect. To date, the annual dolphin slaughter that takes place in Taiji, Japan, has not begun. Will it eventually? Not if enough people see this film it won't.

If you've ever said "i'm just one person, what can I do", run out and see this film!

Oh yeah, and one final note. If you don't want to see the film because you think it'll be too graphic, fear not. I won't lie to you, there's a tough 2 minutes of film towards the end of the movie, but it's not nearly as bad as what you probably think you'll see, and what these filmakers probably saw. Check it out, you'll be glad you did.

City Chicken

2009-09-02T18:48:00.000-07:00

Want to raise chickens in the city but don't know how? Sure you do. So what are you waiting for? Check out The City Chicken.

Dave

Sigg contains BPA afterall

2009-09-02T13:04:00.000-07:00

As many of you may have already read, information came out the other day that Sigg bottles have contained BPA. Much different than what they have said in the past.

There are people out there who say that BPA isn't a problem, and as far as I'm concerned, it's academic in this case. The bottom line to me is that they were not honest about their product with consumers.

I used to carry a Sigg bottle and even talked with some folks at the company back in February of last year. But after some research, I decided that i'd be happier with a stainless steel bottle than an aluminum one with the coating. While Sigg states that they have extensively tested these coatings, my thought has always been "Why take a chance?".

According to the president of the company, Steve Wasik, the bottles in question are pre 2008 and you can figure out if you have one and see a list of FAQ here. In addition, if you want to email Steve himself, he can be reached at steve.wasik.ceo(at)sigg.com.

Supposedly they are accepting returns of BPA bottles but I can't find any info. I'll post it up when I do.

Dave

Update: The Sigg Bottle Return Site is http://mysigg.com/bulletin/exchange_program.html. You ahve to get your bottles in by 10/31 and you are required to pay to ship it to them.

The Seven Deadly Plastics

2009-09-02T08:52:00.000-07:00

Fantastic little song that will help you remember what's what in the recycling world.

The Daily Ocean

2009-08-31T12:29:00.000-07:00

Finaly getting around to posting this. A reader sent in a link to her cool blog called The Daily Ocean. For 365 days she is picking up all trash she finds on the beach and cataloging it. Talk about an eye opener! Very cool.

dave

Dirt

2009-08-31T12:23:00.000-07:00

Another great doc, this one on the importance of topsoil and the problems we are facing in losing it.

Tapped

2009-08-31T11:53:00.001-07:00

Another movie that everyone should see.

It's Over: 5 Reasons Why The Electric Car Wins

2009-08-31T10:17:00.000-07:00

Original post at TriplePundit

It could take ten years or more to become apparent, but I’ll call it now: the electric car will replace the internal combustion engine.

A caveat: I am not an automotive industry expert. Which is why I’m right. I’m not mired in the details, the past failures, the what ifs or the buts. All I see are the big, obvious things. When it comes to sea change in human behavior, though, obvious matters.

So, since no prediction is worth its salt without an accompanying list, the following are five overlapping reasons why our children will all be driving electric cars.

(By the way, these all assume that business as usual; that is, running cars on gasoline derived from (imported, finite, polluting) oil is unsustainable. If you disagree, you’re at the wrong website.)

1. Momentum, aka, Forget Tesla. “Automotive start-up” may be an oxymoron, but it doesn’t matter. Even if electric car company Tesla and its little buddies don’t succeed, the fact is the big car companies are all developing EVs, or hybrid plug-ins, where the emphasis will increasingly be on the electric part, not the gasoline part.

Meanwhile, a zillion companies, plus many national governments, are furiously developing batteries that are powerful, quick to charge, and inexpensive. It’s practically a new arms race.
And then there’s the burgeoning smart-grid industry, which will make charging those cars even cheaper. “Smartness” will also make managing when and where to charge your car much easier.

2. People get it. I read an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that predicted the healthcare bill would fail because, unlike Social Security or Medicare, it’s too complicated. People just don’t get it. And while I personally believe in universal healthcare (I’m a freelance writer), I understand the point.

People get electric cars. People get where the fuel comes from: the wall socket – the same place you plug in your toaster or your TV (cars are increasingly appliance-like anyway). People get how electric cars move, too. Most people are at least familiar with the concept of an electric motor, and they’ve seen a Prius in action, if they don’t already own one.
And what people already get, people are more willing to a) fund development of, b) support through government, and c) buy.

3. Biofuel is foreign oil. And so is natural gas. Not literally, of course; but to an economy dangerously dependent on imported fossil fuels, they might as well be. And that’s bad news for these main competitors to electric powered cars.

Without going into the details, it would take a long time for biofuel to replace foreign oil as a source of our automobile fuel. Meanwhile, the price of oil will continue to climb, pushing the price of biofuel up with it. The public, seeing no relief from gas prices, will turn to non-oil alternatives, e.g., EVs.

So the chief selling point of biofuel, that it is a cheap domestic source of gasoline for our cars, is wrong in the short term and moot in the long term. Sure, we might be using biofuel in our hybrids, but those hybrids will be getting 200+ miles to the gallon, and eventually infinity/mpg.

Meanwhile, recent discoveries have pegged domestic reserves of natural gas at 2000 trillion cubic feet, enough to last us 100 years at current rates of consumption. If we use natural gas to power all our cars, however, we will run out a lot quicker. And it’s still a dirty fossil fuel with a limited supply and a wildly fluctuating price related to – you guessed it – oil.

Oh, and by the way: fuel cells are dead.

4. It’s electricity, stupid. Critics of EVs point out that anyone who lives in an apartment building or parks on the street, or ever wants to drive more than 100 miles at a time, can’t have an electric car, because without a recharge it will die.

Good point. But let’s put it another way:
Which would you rather pay for? New infrastructure to develop, extract and/or grow and then pump and/or truck the heavy, expensive “carbon fuel of the future” to gas stations…

…or longer extension cords?

Providing public places for electric cars to charge will not happen overnight, or for free, but the technology is here, it’s simple and it’s easily scalable. The problem of range will be solved either through quick charging batteries, battery-swapping, or an extended reliance on hybrids, until people feel confident they will always find a place to charge.

5. Dawning Obsolescence. Using gasoline to power your car is the 21st century equivalent of heating your home with firewood. I love gathering and chopping wood for a nice cozy fire on a winter night, but if I had to do it all winter, every winter, I would be eager to find a replacement technology.

In the future, people will look back on our once or twice weekly ritual of driving to a gas station and pouring a noxious, flammable and very expensive liquid into our loud, dirty vehicle and wonder what “life back then” must have been like.
By “dirty” I don’t just mean polluting, I mean actually dirty, the dirt that accompanies any vehicle that moves by means of burning things: rocket ships, steam locomotives, Corollas, whatever.

Next time you’re at a gas station, think about it. Is it really so hard to imagine the rubber pumps and hoses, and the smell of gasoline and oil as just so…19th century?

Resistance is Futile.

The EV revolution will not happen overnight. Stakeholders in various competing technologies will not allow their ventures to die without a fight. While problems of range and charging persist, consumers will be hesitant to switch, even as they are squeezed by gas prices. And of course, the shift from gasoline to electric can only happen one car at a time.

But my guess is that the shift to electric cars will happen sooner than we think. Change happens very slowly, and then, all of a sudden, very fast. Think of VHS to DVD, or the road from vinyl records to iTunes – four different technologies in less than 30 years (five, if you count eight-tracks).

The automotive industry is a whole lot bigger than the record business, but that also means there’s more incentive to make the switch to the leading technology. It also means once that technology is in place, there’s more incentive to support it. That technology is electric.

Buy It, Use It, Break It, Junk It

2009-08-22T18:41:00.000-07:00

Food Inc

2009-07-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

Simply put, everyone in America should see this movie.

And A Little Town Shall Lead Them

2009-07-29T22:15:00.000-07:00

Did you hear the news? Finally, a government led by the people has stood up and said “no” to plastic water bottles and the environmental degradation they cause. And may I say, it’s about time.

The small town of Bundanoon in New South Wales Australia voted last week to officially ban the sale of plastic water bottles from within the cities limits. The 350 residents who turned out to vote (a record by some accounts) agreed almost unanimously with two residents voting no; a gentlemen worried that the ban would increase soda usage, and another resident who just so happens to be a member of the plastic water bottle industry (shocking, no?).

This is huge. Not because of all the “As Bundanoon goes so goes the world” bumper stickers that everyone has seen all these years. And not because this, as a single act, will impact the water bottle industry all that much. But simply because this small group of people stood up and said, this isn’t ok with us anymore, and we’re not going to put up with it. It’s a huge start and as an indication, the town has been inundated by reporters and tourists seeking more information, and perhaps wanting to be a part of the start of the end.

OK. I just read back on all of that and I’m all over the place, so I’m grabbing a glass of tap water (dear lord, not tap water), taking a few deep breaths and I’ll be back in a minute.

There we go, and my apologies, it’s just that I’ve been waiting for this to happen for a while and am so psyched that it has occurred in a town such a Bundanoon. You see, contrary to what you might think, it’s not a town of Uber Hippies looking to drop out, but of ordinary every day citizens who got upset when a Sydney based beverage company announced plans to tap an underground aquifer, siphon off their water, bottle it, and then potentially sell it back to them down the road.

The great thing is that they didn’t just do this and hope everybody was ok with it. Instead, they looked at the establishments in town that would lose revenue and came up with a solution. Instead of selling bottled water, they’d sell reusable containers that can be filled up around town for free or for a small fee, at filtered stations in certain stores. So essentially, they had everything to gain, and not much to lose.

While Bundanoon is a small example of what needs to be done, we can look at them and realize that we are all in the same boat. Is someone tapping the water you are paying 1000 times more than tap water for and then selling it back to you? Most likely not, but having said that, they are tapping someone’s water somewhere and that makes you responsible. Not only for the plastic and all the problems associated with the bottles, but for depleting someone else’s water source so you can buy something that for a good many of us reading this, comes into our house practically free and clean. Today it’s Fiji, tomorrow it’s Pittsburgh.

As always, I’ll head a few folks off at the pass and point out that I am only speaking to those of us who live in residences that have clean running water. If you are looking at this piece on your computer, chances are better than not that this means you.

So is it going to take a multinational corporation buying up our water rights for us to stand up and say enough? Or should we all stand up now, join in with Bundanoon and just say no. I know where I stand.

Finally, if you think this won’t have an impact, the government of New South Wales has just announced their own plans to stem the sale of plastic water bottles. Let the ripples begin.

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the life of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and those ripples, crossing each other from a million different centers of energy, build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” Senator Robert F. Kennedy

Carbon Offset Guide

2009-07-20T09:29:00.000-07:00

For anyone interested, Greenopia has put together a list of their top ten Carbon Offset Companies. Carbon Offsets are a way of taking responsibility for your footprint. They have caused a lot of controversy because many people feel that they are being used by rich people to buy their way out of changing their habits, and the truth is, in some instances, they have.

Having said that, if you have changed what you can and are struggling with the next steps to take, CO's offer a chance to make things a little better. By using their calculator you can figure out what your offset needs to be and give them some money to help offset the cost of renewable energy, plant a tree, or invest in renewable energy technology. Bottom line is it's a way of doing a little more than you already are, if you have the funds. I dn't think it means you have any less responsibility to change than anyone else, but it does help speed the process and may make you feel a little better at the same time.

Dave

XS Projects

2009-07-13T07:06:00.000-07:00

A great clip about one woman's idea on how to help the poor of Indonesia support themselves while alleviating the trash problem as well. Check them out at XS Projects.

Nissan's Big Bet: Mass Market For EVs

2009-07-12T21:50:00.000-07:00

According To Paul

We'll finally get to see the new Nissan August 2nd (that's Tokyo time, it'll still be the 1st here). I assume they'll have the name finalized by then, too. I'm kind of excited to see this car, having tested the drivetrain in the Nissan Cube. The drivability was similar to my RAV, but quicker. Since the Cube is 200 lbs heavier than the final body of the EV, it should be a bit quicker still.

The best thing about the Nissan is the expected price range of $25K-$34K. This is before the $7,500 federal tax credit.

Some think Nissan is taking a gamble by rapidly moving into mass marketing of EVs. They compare Toyota and Honda's approach of "wait and see how the market materializes for EVs, then jump in". I think it's Toyota and Honda that are gambling. They own the hybrid market and are doing quite well, thank you, so why adopt a whole new technology that's untried on a large scale? The gamble is that Nissan grabs the EV market and dominates it till BYD (China) enters the U.S. in 2012.

Those who make the decisions to forgo battery EVs in favor of plug-in hybrids only, ignore a sizable market. I can only assume they have not spent any appreciable time in a well made EV. The benefits overwhelm the perceived problem of range. Once several thousand people get the opportunity to buy a well made EV the likes of Nissan's, the demand from the early adopter's friends and family will expand exponentially. Of this I am certain.

Of course, we need millions of plug-in hybrids, too, so more power to everyone contributing to that market. It's interesting to speculate as to the relative market share the EV will have to the PHEV. I'm guessing close to 50/50. It'll be mostly driven by the cost of gas, that's a given.

All I can think is that Carlos Ghosn (Nissan CEO) has driven an EV, maybe the RAV itself, and this is why he's positioning his company to be the leader in EVs. He knows how good it feels to drive a quiet, powerful car that doesn't pollute. One that only uses domestic energy. He knows that if given the choice, millions of people would choose that over a car that poisons the air and uses mostly foreign energy.

Paul

*******

Nissan's big bet: Mass market for EVs

Hans Greimel
Automotive News
July 6, 2009 - 12:01 am ET

YOKOHAMA, Japan -- Nissan Motor Co. CEO Carlos Ghosn is spending big money to make electric vehicles in high volumes -- and soon.

On Aug. 2, Ghosn will unveil the first of three electric models in three vehicle segments that he plans to sell by 2013. The vehicles will be made in the United States, Japan and Europe.

"We have a different strategy from other car manufacturers," Ghosn says. "We are the only ones investing for mass marketing, which is a risk, yes. But we think it is a bet in the right direction."

That bet takes shape at a new lithium ion battery plant and at an electric-vehicle assembly line that Nissan will build at its Smyrna, Tenn., manufacturing complex. A $1.6 billion low-interest loan from the U.S. government will cover some of the costs. Analysts question the payoff.

Nissan is not alone in going electric.

-- In June, Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd., maker of Subaru cars, began leasing electric cars in Japan. Mitsubishi Motors Corp. follows later this month.

-- Toyota Motor Corp. will sell a plug-in Toyota Prius after 2010, taking on the Chevrolet Volt, which goes on sale in November 2010.

-- BMW AG's Mini brand is testing a plug-in model in the United States.

-- Tesla Motors Inc., owned 10 percent by Daimler AG, received a $465 million government loan to help bring its $57,400 Model S electric sedan to market.

'Go for mass market'

But rivals see initial volume in the hundreds or thousands. Ghosn wants hundreds of thousands. "If you go for EV, you should go for mass market," he says.

Analysts warn of hype. Battery-powered cars may be the wave of the future, but costs are high; the recharging infrastructure isn't there, and hefty government subsidies are needed to make electric vehicles competitive.

Nissan sees the technology as its best chance to eclipse Toyota and Honda Motor Co., which beat Nissan in introducing hybrid vehicles.

"This is an opportunity to go into a whole new technology and own that space," says Andy Palmer, head of Nissan's electric-vehicle program. "Hybrid vehicles compete with the internal combustion engine. But EVs are a segment all their own."

Nissan's consumer research shows that "there are definitely more than 100,000 in the United States who want" their next car to be an electric, Palmer says.

Dealers excited

"We can't get them soon enough," says Bill Newton, owner of Newton Nissan in Gallatin, Tenn. "Customers have already been asking about the cars since the news broke about Nissan's plans to build the car here in Tennessee."

In California, Nissan of Elk Grove owner John Driebe thinks Nissan has identified a powerful new market segment. "A lot of Americans really want to stop using imported oil," he says. "We're excited about being able to market a car that will never use a drop of gasoline."

Driebe's market near Sacramento is home to about 80,000 California state employees, many of whom are worried about the state's current budget crisis. Driebe sees commuting state employees as an ideal demographic group for the car.

"By the time the electric car comes on line in 2012, the economy in California will be in a better place," says Driebe, the 2006 chairman of the Nissan Dealer Advisory Board. "Nissan is really committing to this idea, and I think they're going to be proven right."

The Tennessee factories will have capacity for 150,000 vehicles and 200,000 battery packs a year. Production begins in late 2012.

Nissan also will build electric vehicles at its Oppama assembly plant south of Tokyo, starting next fall with a capacity of 50,000. It also plans an electric-vehicle plant for Europe and is studying a plant for China.

The first Japan-built car goes on sale in the United States and Japan next year to fleet customers such as corporations and local governments. It will be a four-door hatchback seating five people -- about the size of the Nissan Cube or Versa -- with a range of 100 miles per charge. Pricing isn't set.

Oil vs. electrons

Batteries are expensive. But Ghosn thinks rising oil prices will tilt the economics in favor of electrons. If crude oil rises above $80 a barrel, Nissan's electric vehicles will be cheaper to own and operate than gasoline-powered cars, he says.

Crude trades for around $70 a barrel today. Analysts say that will rise as the global economy recovers.

Ghosn aims for Nissan's electric cars, minus the battery, to cost as much as a standard car. Consumers will lease the battery at a cost that, including charging, will match what they would have paid for gasoline.

Chris Richter, an analyst with CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, says, "If they can make good on Ghosn's promise of a price comparable to a normal car, I think people will lap these up."

Nissan hasn't said how much it is spending on its electric ambitions. The first of the three models costs as much to develop as three normal cars, a person familiar with the situation says. The total investment in battery and car assembly at Smyrna is expected to exceed Nissan's $1.6 billion loan from Washington, he says.

The machinery needed to make 50,000 batteries a year costs more than $300 million, he said. Add in other costs, and the price tag just for battery plants in the United States, Japan and Europe -- which together will make more than 300,000 battery packs a year -- could total about $1.5 billion.

Analysts ask whether Nissan's bid to take an early lead in electrics is worth the cost. Kurt Sanger, an auto analyst with Deutsche Securities Inc., says, "If the competition just sits back to see if it works and then uses its brand credibility to enter the market, there's no need to be first."

But Ghosn sees his bet as positioning Nissan for the future, not just beating rivals to market with a single model.

"It's a complete new lineup. Big cars, small cars, vans, light commercial vehicles, entry-level cars," Ghosn says. "It's a complete new way of looking at our industry."

The Governor's School of North Carolina

2009-07-08T13:27:00.000-07:00

I spoke last night (and am speaking again tonight) to the best and brightest students in North Carolina who are attending a state funded summer program on two North Carolina campuses. To say that the experience has been (and I'm assuming will continue to be) overwhelming is a complete understatement. The reception that I received, their open minded approach and the intelligence I saw in these students gives me great hope. The Governor's School is truly shaping tomorrows leaders and I just wanted to throw a shout out to the incredible minds that I have been encountering and continue to encounter while here.

While the students have impressed me to no end, the faculty is equally if not more impressive! In the short time that I have been here I have seen a level of commitment that is fairly unparalleled. These are the bright minds that should be molding our future and it is my hope that they continue to do what they are doing for a long time coming. These are the folks that are doing it right!

Every state should have a program like this and every young mind should be challenged the way these kids are being challenged - to think, to explore, and to continue learning and evolving.

Thank you to everyone who has made my experience memorable.....you inspire me.

Dave

P.S. Ironically, the reason that I am here in the first place is because of Katherine T., a teacher who asked me come to speak to her class in California last year. One of her students who heard me speak sent me one of the greatest letter I have ever received, so I'm glad I was able to return the favor.

The Secret Life of T-shirts

2009-07-05T23:40:00.000-07:00

I found this really good write up about what goes into the making of an average t-shirt at emagazine.com. It's quite the eye opener.

Dave

COMMENTARY: The Secret Life of T-Shirts
The Toxic Legacy of Conventional Cotton Clothing, and Why You Should Seek Alternatives

By Brian Clark Howard

The conventional cotton in most T-shirts is responsible for 25% of the world’s pesticide use.

Whether you got it at a rock show, thrift store, vacation spot or trendy boutique, chances are you own a favorite, well-worn T-shirt. Soft, comfortable and cool, the tee is the ultimate laid-back attire, but can just as easily be dressed up with a sports coat or simple skirt and accessories. But there’s more to the T-shirt than wearability—the wardrobe staple leaves behind a serious environmental impact.

Toxic Fields

Most T-shirts are made of cotton, or at least a cotton blend. Unfortunately, the fabric of our lives has a huge impact on the environment and workers' health. Conventionally grown cotton occupies only 3% of the world's farmland, but uses 25% of the world's chemical pesticides. In the U.S., which produces cotton on 1% of agricultural land, 10% of all agricultural chemicals are used on the crop. A 2000 U.S. Department of Agriculture study found that eighty-four million pounds of pesticides were sprayed on cotton in the U.S., ranking it second behind corn. Seven of the top 15 pesticides used on cotton are considered "likely" or "known" human carcinogens by the Environmental Protection Agency.

And it's not just pesticides. Conventional cotton farmers also use heavy inputs of synthetic, petroleum-derived fertilizers, soil additives, defoliants and other substances, which affect soil, water, air and living things for years to come. Further, 75% of the conventional cotton grown is now genetically modified, a fact that worries critics of the technology, who fear it could contaminate natural organisms and lead to super pests.

Processing

After harvesting, cotton is often treated with chlorine bleach to whiten it. Not only is chlorine toxic at acute doses, but it can also be a skin and lung irritant at lower concentrations. The fabric is also frequently treated with formaldehyde resins—often to render it "easy care”—another highly toxic chemical.
Traditionally, colors are created with dyes that may contain heavy metals, such as chromium copper. Even some so-called “natural dyes” can be mixed with heavy metals to prolong their color.

Printing

If you made T-shirts in art class, chances are you used screen printing. Although there are less-toxic screen printing techniques available today, most major operations rely on the old methods—including an ink called plastisol, a variation of the toxic-to-produce polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

Discharge printing is faster and produces more vibrant colors, but often uses toxic chemicals as well. For example, zinc formaldehyde sulfoxylate (ZFP) is often used to print light colors onto a dark shirt. But again that includes formaldehyde, a known carcinogen. Some people have even gone so far as to suggest that it might not be a good idea to wear such shirts to sleep or while working out.

Shipping

Our economy is global, and so are our T-shirts. Much of today's cotton is grown in the Middle East and India, yet garments are most commonly made in East Asia. Finished products are typically shipped from China and elsewhere to North America and other markets. That results in a substantial use of fuel (often the very dirty stuff burned by container ships), not to mention release of greenhouse gases, particulates and other pollutants.

Plus, it's not uncommon for shipping companies to spray fabrics with insecticides in transit.

Buy Local, Buy Organic

You can help decrease the footprint of your wardrobe, and still look great, by buying locally produced goods, especially stuff made from fibers sourced in your region. Yes, it can help to buy American, although as the above notes sometimes only part of the entire process happens domestically.

It's always a good idea to buy used clothes, or swap things with friends, family or even strangers (swap meets can also be a lot of fun). Used clothes already exist—they don’t consume energy during growing, production and distribution like new clothes—so their overall carbon footprint is a lot less.

You can also find an increasing selection of clothes made from organic cotton, or alternative fibers like bamboo, hemp or recycled materials. These greener goods keep coming down in price, and in many cases are cost competitive with all but the very cheapest, low-quality duds.

Organic cotton, in particular, is grown without synthetic pesticides and herbicides, using techniques that replenish and maintain soil fertility and biodiversity. By buying third-party certified organic, you have greater assurance that the product is produced with genuine sustainability in mind. In the U.S., no genetically engineered materials are allowed in organic products.

The good news is that the farming of organic cotton has been on the rise. That segment increased 152% during the 2007-2008 crop year, according to the Organic Cotton Farm and Fiber Report 2008 by Organic Exchange. Next time you’re shopping for a new favorite tee, look for the organic label.

BRIAN CLARK HOWARD is the Home and Eco Tips editor for The Daily Green

Chocolate Powered Cars?

2009-07-05T23:19:00.000-07:00

Very Cool.

Where Can I Recycle.....?

2009-06-25T18:41:00.001-07:00

Just type in what you need to recycle and where you are and voila, instant answers. It's just that simple.

Recycling and Composting in San Francisco Now The Law!

2009-06-25T17:17:00.000-07:00

Mayor Gavin Newsom just made SF the first place in the country to make recycling and composting mandatory. This is a huge step forward and one I hope other cities will follow. Check out the writeup here.

DOE Money Heading Towards Electric Vehicles!

2009-06-24T05:50:00.000-07:00

According To Paul

We've been waiting for several months to hear this good news. Three EV pioneers, Tesla, Nissan and Ford, are receiving loans from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program. Totaling $8 billion, the funds will be used to manufacture efficient vehicles and electric drive components.

In Tesla's case, they'll receive a total of $465 million to set up their factory in Southern California for the production of their hot Model S. This car has generated a lot of interest given its superb styling, performance and efficiency. The price point of $57K makes it affordable for a large segment of the population. Part of the money will be used to set up a production line for their battery packs and electric drive trains to be sold to other manufacturers such as their new partner, Daimler.

Nissan will receive $1.6 billion to build EV and battery factories in Tennessee. Having experienced the drive train for their new EV, I am very pleased that this will enable them to ramp up quickly to 150,000 EVs annually. This car will appeal to a larger segment of the population given its price of around $30K.

Ford is the big surprise for me. They're getting the lion's share of the money at $5.9 billion. They'll use it to increase the efficiency of several of their cars and trucks. I assume some will go toward building their new EV with the help of Canadian parts supplier, Magna.

This announcement assures that large numbers of electric vehicles will be available to U.S. customers starting late next year and growing rapidly soon after. Additionally, tens of thousands of jobs will be created.

There will more announcements to come. I'm betting that Bright Automotive in Indiana will be on the next list of recipients. They sure deserve to be.

Paul
******

In House Sewage Treatment Coming To An Office Near You

2009-06-17T16:30:00.001-07:00

From Wired Magazine.

Picture the lobby atrium of a new, green building, one filled with leafy plants and trees. Now imagine that those trees are growing in waste collected from the building's toilets.
If that idea has the whiff of failure about it, well, sniff again. Increasingly, building designers are managing sewage in-house—really in-house. The Port of Portland, for example, is integrating waste management into the lobby of its new headquarters under construction. The Living Machine uses soil and bacteria to filter out pathogens, essentially turning wastewater into nonpotable water. But the signature element of the system is the plant life that grows up and out of it—right into the lobby. "It's going to provide a kind of greenhouse feel," says Greg Sparks, engineering design manager for the port. "It'll soften the hard edges of the typical office building."
Everybody likes trees, but (aesthetics aside) sending poop from the bathroom to the lobby may seem sort of icky. In environmental terms, though, it's a solid choice. Just as photovoltaics can help take a building off the power grid, living machines take strain off the pipes and municipal wastewater facilities on the "sewage grid." They also show that being green means thinking more creatively about our brown and yellow.

1 Wastewater from the entire building flows into a holding tank where solids settle, like in a septic tank. The reclaimed liquid up top gets pumped to the lobby.

2 Garden-like "wetland cells" layered with plants, soil, and rocks collect the water and capture biological compounds and pathogens.

3 On its way out of the garden, the water is further sterilized by ultraviolet light in the pipes. Then it's recycled back into the plumbing system.

The Lazy Environmentalist

2009-06-16T09:52:00.001-07:00

For anyone who gets the Sundance Channel, the Lazy Environmentalist premieres tonight and I am one of the experts in the opening show. Not sure how it came out as i haven't seen it, but we don't get Sundance so if anyone catches it, let me know.

Thanks

Dave

Student Creates A Paper Bottle

2009-06-13T21:00:00.001-07:00

PIA's Plug-In Vehicle Tracker

2009-06-13T20:44:00.000-07:00

Want to know who'e coming out with what electric vehicle and when? Plug In America has put together an awesome page that tracks pretty much everything you want to know about new EVs in the works and when to expect them.

Check it out.

Dave

Energy Secretary Chu At CalTech

2009-06-12T17:49:00.000-07:00

According To Paul

Full Speech Here

I heard that Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, was giving the commencement address at CalTech this morning, so I jumped in our solar-powered RAV and drove over to Pasadena to hear what he had to say.

Pasadena is a beautiful city, and the section of town where CalTech is located is old and very wealthy. Walking through the leafy campus, Jacarandas in full bloom, I admired the buildings that for decades housed some of the smartest students our country ever produced as well as a sizable number of foreign kids intent on getting the best education possible in their chosen fields of mathematics, science and engineering. My anticipation over Dr. Chu's speech grew with each step.

He did not disappoint.

Those of us in the EV movement were overjoyed when Obama picked Dr. Chu to head the Energy Department. An actual Nobel-winning PhD in physics who has a deep understanding of our predicament regarding energy and climate change in charge of the Energy Department. A true breath of fresh air!

He broke the ice by defining the term, nerd, using the Wikipedia definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerd), since most in his audience proudly considered themselves as such. I think it's actually on the form when you apply to CalTech.

Having dispensed with the obligatory humorous start, he got down to business by reminding the audience that, in the early 70's, scientists solved the pressing need to grow more food in order to keep millions from starvation and expressed that our problems today are every bit as important if not more so. He implored the students to take seriously the need to act fast in solving these problems and to not allow those who prefer faith over reason to interfere with the task at hand.

As one would expect, he talked about energy mostly, but my ears pricked up when he said we needed to prepare for the "inevitable transition to electricity as the energy for our personal transportation". While most may have missed the importance of this comment, it meant everything to me. Those at the top of the Obama administration understand the need to move from dirty fossil fuels to renewable electricity, and their efforts so far show they are serious.

Chu's defunding, at the federal level, of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle means he knows we need to put our efforts toward solutions that are ready now, not some expensive, inefficient technology that requires us to continue buying our energy from oil companies.

As the speech ended and I started to go, the strains of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 "Ode to Joy" flowed out of the loud speakers and I walked through the beautiful purple flowering Jacarandas happier than I've been for a while. Maybe these scientists, engineers and mathematicians can indeed help us to ward off the worst of what will come.

Paul
******

Air France Search Hindered by Garbage

2009-06-12T15:09:00.000-07:00

I was wondering if this would be a problem and indeed, it looks like it is going to be. Apparently, the searchers for the Air France flight that went down the week before last are having problems telling what's plane debris and what's trash.

Now let's take a look at this for a moment. Middle of the ocean and a plane that has hit the water. Other than depth and visibility, there should be no problem locating this stuff if you could figure out where it was. The idea that they are finding stuff, only to rule it out as garbage and not from the plane is absolute insanity. It just goes to show how bad things have gotten and it's sad that it takes a tragedy to bring it to light.

Dave

Food Inc. The Movie

2009-06-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

I saw the filmmakers speaking about this movie back in February. It looks to be a really amazing film that has important info that everyone in the industrialized world needs to see. Food and they way we consume it is at the heart of the problems at hand and I truly believe that the way to start a change is by educating people as to what they are a part of.

Dave

Port of Long Beach goes electric!

2009-06-05T05:58:00.000-07:00

According To Paul

It's been a long time coming, but we have finally achieved the first "cold ironing" of a tanker in the Port of Long Beach. Cold Ironing is the term for plugging a ship's electrical system into the on-shore grid to supply power so that the ship's giant diesel engine can be turned off while it's docked. Normally, these engines crank out massive amounts of pollution, equal to "a day's worth of driving by 187,000 cars", according to estimates by the Port of Long Beach.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) initiated suits against the ports over 7 years ago to make this happen, and it was a long difficult fight, but the NRDC's attorneys persevered and eventually won. This event marks the first of what we hope will be the electrification of all the tanker and cargo ships while docked in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. For too long, the people living downwind of the ports have suffered the ill effects of this pollution with heart and lung disease, cancers and asthma rates that are significantly higher than average.

An earlier post of mine highlighted the hybridization of the tugboats that guide these massive ships into berth, further extending the benefits of electrifying what had been exclusively internal combustion-powered vehicles. Every kilowatt hour used to replace the burning of petroleum helps us to clean our environment, saves us money and reduces the need to fight wars over oil.

Paul

*******

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-green-ports4-2009jun04,0,7934525.story

Port of Long Beach takes 'giant step' toward pollution reduction

Port officials unveil what is billed as the world's first electrical shore-side power system for tankers, which are notorious fuel guzzlers and air polluters.

By Ronald D. White
June 4, 2009

Docked in Long Beach on Wednesday with a fresh load of oil from Valdez, the Alaskan Navigator didn't look like much of a trailblazer.

The massive tanker sat silently, with a few thin cables draping down to some gray metal boxes. Missing was the incessant rumble of diesel engines, which on an average cargo ship would be running constantly to keep electrical systems going -- burning quite a bit of diesel fuel and generating a significant amount of pollution.
But the 941-foot Navigator, anchored at the BP oil terminal's Pier T on the Long Beach port's main channel, isn't average. The vessel, owned by Alaska Tanker Co. of Portland, Ore., was plugged into what is billed as the world's first shore-side electrical grid.

Only the Navigator's sister ship, the Frontier, is similarly equipped. Oil tankers are notorious fuel guzzlers and air polluters because of the power that's needed to pump vast amounts of crude out of a ship. It's the rough energy equivalent of a day's worth of driving by 187,000 cars, according to the Port of Long Beach.

At a ceremony formally unveiling the port's dockside power system, port Executive Director Dick Steinke described it as "another giant step" toward cleaning up the air.

The project cost $23.7 million and took three years to complete, port officials said. The port contributed about $17.5 million to the project and BP paid the rest.

Roger Brown, regional vice president of BP, said the emissions reductions amounted to 50% even when factoring in pollution created by power plants in generating the electricity.

ron.white@latimes.com

Lighting Up the Darkness in Rural Africa

2009-06-03T15:27:00.000-07:00

Check out this very cool article from the NY Times about a solar powered LED lantern that Phillips is using to change lives in Ghana.

Dave

Farm To School Programs

2009-06-03T12:18:00.000-07:00

A friend turned me on to this article on connecting school lunch programs with local farms. What a concept? Better nutrition and supporting local farms which decreases food miles as well as helping to bolster the local economy.

Check it out.

Dave

Farm to School Programs: a lesson in win-win relationships

May 28th, 2009 by LeeAnn Smith MPH, RD

This September the federal Child Nutrition bills which cover the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs, will be up for evaluation and amendment during the reauthorization process. This window of opportunity arises every five years for lawmakers to improve upon child nutrition programs. The nation’s burgeoning childhood obesity epidemic is forcing health leaders and politicians alike to prioritize childhood nutrition. This is an opportune time to position school food as a key factor in improving health and nutrition of American children who, on average, receive 35 to 40 percent of their daily calories from school meals.

School food services are fighting a difficult battle to provide healthy food today, due to rising costs, tight budgets and competition from fast food chains. Major changes are crucial, and this is why farm to school (FTS) programs, supported by the National Farm to School network are a vital part of improving the current situation. Furthermore, they are sustainable.

FTS programs help schools procure seasonal produce and other food from local farmers. In addition to getting better quality food into schools, the programs help support local economies by supporting family farms across the country.

Currently children in over 2,000 school districts in 40 states are benefiting from farm to school programs, which have resulted in greater consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables and numerous other positive outcomes outlined in the publication Nourishing the Nation One Tray at a Time. The National Farm to School Program was established in 2004 as part of the Child Nutrition Act reauthorization. Although the program was authorized, the funds for it were never appropriated and efforts to date have been privately funded. A reliable stream of public funding is essential to ensure the growth and success of FTS programs across the country.

New York City schools recently signed a $4 million contract to receive apples from upstate New York farms. In Colorado, local grass-fed beef is used in tacos in some school districts. A cost-analysis for Colorado’s Missoula County Public School District found that buying local seasonal produce was either less expensive or comparable in price to purchasing similar items from wholesale suppliers. Creative grassroots FTS programs are popping up all over, increasing the quality of school food while supporting the livelihood of farmers.

On May 15th, the National School to Farm Network and other school health and nutrition experts presented at a special hearing on the “Benefits of Farm to School Projects, Healthy Eating and Physical Activity for School Children,” convened by the United States Senate’s Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee in Atlanta, GA. Those in attendance included Senators Tom Harkin (D-Ia) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), and representatives from theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention and the United States Department of Agriculture. Glyen Holmes, of the New North Florida Cooperative Association and the South Regional Lead Agency Coordinator for the National Farm to School Network testified, “Every child deserves the opportunity to eat food in school that ensures their health and well-being, and Farm to School programs are one solution to incorporating healthier foods into school meals.” He called funding farm to school programs a top priority in the efforts needed to improve child nutrition in the United States.

In addition to allocating necessary funding to FTS programs, the network recommends amendments to ensure that the benefits of FTS reach all children, including increasing reimbursement rates for all child nutrition programs, improving standards for school meals, encouraging procurement of local produce, and an educational component focused on agriculture and food.

So what is the first step in getting a program going in your community? “Passion and interest is all it takes to start a farm to school program,” explained Debra Eschmeyer, Program Media & Marketing Director of the Farm to School Network. Free tools and resources, including a communications guide, surveys, downloadable curricula and brochures, and valuable information about existing state and county school programs are readily available to get your own local program off the ground. The Farm to School Network, its eight regional offices, and partnering organizations are invaluable resources for both start-up and existing programs. The excitement of FTS lies in the grassroots approach, which involves a wide variety of community stakeholders in creating programs that meet the needs of students and schools, while tapping into the resources of local agriculture. It truly is a win-win relationship.

Clean Power Supplies For The Future?

2009-06-02T14:35:00.000-07:00

This is a pretty good post from Edmunds.com about an article in Energy and Environmental Science on the dangers of cellulosic ethanol as an answer to our energy needs. I've often felt that biofuels are not a long term solution (although in reality I don't think there will be a silver bullet solution but a hodge podge of different ones) and the findings in this study are interesting to see. According to the study, wind powered battery electric vehicles are the least environmentally damaging solution to our transportation needs. Interesting reading and worth checking out.

Dave

Cellulosic ethanol, which people from President-elect Barack Obama to struggling farmers from his home state view a promising biofuel, is actually worse than much-criticized corn ethanol because cellulosic ethanol results in more air pollution, requires more land to produce and causes more harm to wildlife, a major study has found.

The energy alternatives "that are good are not the ones that people have been talking about the most. And some options that have been proposed are just downright awful," said Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, in a paper that reviewed and ranked major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air-pollution mortality and energy security.

"Ethanol-based biofuels will actually cause more harm to human health, wildlife, water supply and land use than current fossil fuels," he said, adding that ethanol may also emit more global-warming pollutants than fossil fuels, according to the latest scientific studies.

Jacobson has conducted the first quantitative, scientific evaluation of the proposed major energy-related solutions by assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability and sustainability.

His findings indicate that the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options. His findings were published in this month's issue of Energy & Environmental Science.

The Most Promising

The raw energy sources that Jacobson found to be the most promising are, in order: wind, concentrated solar (the use of mirrors to heat a fluid), geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar panels), wave and hydroelectric.

Jacobson, who is also director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford, recommended against nuclear, coal with carbon capture and sequestration, corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol made from prairie grass. Granted, cellulosic ethanol can be made from other sources and those were not studied.

To place the various alternatives on an equal footing, Jacobson first made his comparisons among the energy sources by calculating the impacts as if each alternative alone were used to power all the vehicles in the U.S., assuming only "new-technology" vehicles were being used.

Such vehicles include battery electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs) and "flex-fuel" vehicles that could run on E85 -- a blend that's 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.

Wind was by far the most promising, Jacobson said, owing to a better-than 99 percent reduction in carbon and air pollution emissions; the consumption of less than 3 square kilometers of land for the turbine footprints to run the entire U.S. vehicle fleet (given the fleet is composed of battery-electric vehicles); the saving of about 15,000 lives per year from premature air-pollution-related deaths from vehicle exhaust in the U.S.; and virtually no water consumption.

The Least Promising

By contrast, corn and cellulosic ethanol will continue to cause more than 15,000 air pollution-related deaths in the country per year, Jacobson asserted.

Because the wind turbines would require a modest amount of spacing between them to allow room for the blades to spin, wind farms would occupy about 0.5 percent of all U.S. land, but this amount is more than 30 times less than that required for growing corn or grasses for ethanol. Land between turbines on wind farms would be simultaneously available as farmland or pasture or could be left as open space.

Indeed, a battery-powered U.S. vehicle fleet could be charged by 73,000 to 144,000 5-megawatt wind turbines -- fewer than the 300,000 airplanes the U.S. produced during World War II and far easier to build. Additional turbines could provide electricity for other energy needs.

"There is a lot of talk among politicians that we need a massive jobs program to pull the economy out of the current recession," Jacobson said. "Well, putting people to work building wind turbines, solar plants, geothermal plants, electric vehicles and transmission lines would not only create jobs but would also reduce costs due to health care, crop damage and climate damage from current vehicle and electric power pollution, as well as provide the world with a truly unlimited supply of clean power."

Jacobson said that while some people are under the impression that wind and wave power are too variable to provide steady amounts of electricity, his research group has already shown in previous research that by properly coordinating the energy output from wind farms in different locations, the potential problem with variability can be overcome and a steady supply of baseline power delivered to users.

The Most Damaging

He described biofuels as "the most damaging choice we could make in our efforts to move away from using fossil fuels." He said the money going into biofuels would be better spent promoting energy technologies that cause significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and air-pollution mortality, "not technologies that have either marginal benefits or no benefits at all."

During the recent presidential campaign, nuclear power and "clean coal" were often touted as energy solutions that should be pursued, but nuclear power and coal with carbon capture and sequestration were Jacobson's lowest-ranked choices after biofuels.

"Coal with carbon sequestration emits 60- to 110-times more carbon and air pollution than wind energy, and nuclear emits about 25-times more carbon and air pollution than wind energy," Jacobson said. Although carbon-capture equipment reduces 85 percent to 90 percent of the carbon exhaust from a coal-fired power plant, it has no impact on the carbon resulting from the mining or transport of the coal or on the exhaust of other air pollutants.

In fact, because carbon capture requires a roughly 25-percent increase in energy from the coal plant, about 25 percent more coal is needed, increasing mountaintop removal and increasing non-carbon air pollution from power plants, he said.

Nuclear power poses other risks. Jacobson said it is likely that if the U.S. were to move more heavily into nuclear power, then other nations would demand to be able to use that option.

"Once you have a nuclear energy facility, it's straightforward to start refining uranium in that facility, which is what Iran is doing and Venezuela is planning to do," Jacobson said. "The potential for terrorists to obtain a nuclear weapon or for states to develop nuclear weapons that could be used in limited regional wars will certainly increase with an increase in the number of nuclear energy facilities worldwide."

EWG's Bottled Water Study

2009-06-02T13:36:00.000-07:00

The Envirnmental Working Group just released a study of major bottled water brands that is worth a look.

Check it out.

Dave

"Unlike tap water, where consumers are provided with test results every year, the bottled water industry does not disclose the results of any contaminant testing that it conducts. Instead, the industry hides behind the claim that bottled water is held to the same safety standards as tap water. But with promotional campaigns saturated with images of mountain springs, and prices 1,900 times the price of tap water, consumers are clearly led to believe that they are buying a product that has been purified to a level beyond the water that comes out of the garden hose.

To the contrary, our tests strongly indicate that the purity of bottled water cannot be trusted. Given the industry's refusal to make available data to support their claims of superiority, consumer confidence in the purity of bottled water is simply not justified."

Vote For Me?

2009-06-02T13:18:00.000-07:00

Someone sent me this link where my blog is part of a best local blogs contest. I never really thought of it as being local, but I guess it is on some level since I live in LA. Anyway, if you feel so compelled, please drop in and drop me a vote.

Thanks

Dave

What's the deal with Tetra-Paks?

2009-06-02T09:19:00.000-07:00

Reprinted from Triple Pundit.

Tetra Pak Promotes Packaged Sustainability, Part I

Tetra Pak is a 60-year-old Swiss packaging and food processing company. It's likely that Tetra Pak wrapped up many of the products sitting in your kitchen cupboards right now. One of its flagship packaging products is the rugged, paper-based cartons that are widely used for selling soy milk, soups and other liquid food and beverages. Last week I participated in a twitter conference that Tetra Pak hosted in order to spread a message of sustainability around this packaging type, also called aseptic paper packaging.

I should add that after I signed up to participate in the twittercon, TetraPak sent me two sample products packaged in the aseptic Tetra Pak: a bottle (or rather, carton) of wine and a carton of chicken broth. (I'm a vegetarian, so I'm looking for a home for the chicken broth. I also think they could have sent a product that is less energy-intensive than chicken broth. But I digress.)

Along with this product, the company sent along some printed information about these Tetra Pak cartons. They are made of 74 percent paper. They are lightweight and make up a smaller packaging-to-product ratio than other packaging forms. On other words, glass and plastic weigh more, which means they require more energy to transport. The square dimension of the cartons make them efficient in terms of load space—you can often load more cartons on a pallet than cans and bottles, for example.

And then there's the wow factor: Tetra Pak packaging is shelf-stable, meaning the products (yep, milk) do not need to be refrigerated until the air-tight packaging is opened. So this means perishable items such as milk can be stored for more than a year without refrigeration, and that a lot less energy required for storage.

All in all, Tetra Pak figures that its packaging has a smaller carbon footprint than polyethylene terephthalate (PET), high density polyethylene (HDPE) or glass. A 32-ounce beverage container made by Tetra Pak represents 126 kg of CO2, while glass packaging for the same size drink represents 238 kg CO2, according to the company (and backed up, it says, by third party tests).

Great. So far, so sustainable. But the end of a Tetra Pak's life isn't always very green. The blame here doesn’t totally hang on Tetra Pak, however.

First off, I was a bit surprised to even learn that the aseptic packaging can be recycled, since it is comprised of three materials—74 percent paper, with aluminum (the liner) and low density polyethylene film (the lid) accounting for the rest. Recycling packaging that is comprised of multiple materials is often harder and more expensive than recycling pure stock. For this reason, as I have often been told by folks in the packaging industry, mixed materials are sometimes not recyclable.

In fact, I can't recycle Tetra Pak cartons here in lovely, "green" San Francisco. That doesn't mean they are not recyclable. It means that for various economic or infrastructure-based reasons, San Francisco has chosen not to collect the material for recycling.

Tetra Pak's aseptic paper packaging is collected for recycling in many California communities—and in towns and cities in 25 other states across the country. I asked Tetra Pak what it would take to get more municipalities to recycle the cartons. I've not yet received an answer. I also asked what percentage of the 22 billion Tetra Pak cartons that are sold annually are collected and recycled, and how many are land-filled. The Tetra Pak reps on the twittercon said they didn't have that data at hand. That's a shame. And it's also odd; seems like the kind of info they should have had at hand for a conference on sustainability.

Now, unlike glass, old Tetra Pak cartons do not get recycled into new Tetra Pak cartons. When material is recycled, its three constituents are separated. The paper is reused in different paper and tissue products and the aluminum and PE are used either for fuel stock or are recycled into other types of products. There are hundreds of plants around the world that recycle the packaging.

In some parts of the world, recycling rates for aseptic paper are high. This is especially true in parts of Europe, where government mandates comprehensive recycling. The United States does not have that kind of regulation. So does that mean that Tetra Pak's cartons are less sustainable here than they are in other parts of the world? Perhaps.

But more important is that major cities in the United States aren't recycling their share of the 22 billion Tetra Paks that their citizens consume each year. What are the barriers to making Tetra Pak recycling more widely available?

I'll try to find answers to that question in part two of this carton confab series. In the meantime, chime in with your own opinions.

Goodbye GM

2009-06-02T00:22:00.001-07:00

I try to keep politics out of this blog as much as I can but i really can't overlook this one. I'm the first to say that there are things I don't agree with about Michael Moore, but when he's right, he's right. Check out his ideas for what we, the new owners of GM, should be doing with our new company now that they've filed for bankruptcy protection.

Dave

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Goodbye, GM

by Michael Moore

I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.

As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?

It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.

So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with -- dare I say it -- joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.

But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know -- who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let's be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?

Thus, as GM is "reorganized" by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:

1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.

We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.

The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn't give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true -- that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.

President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.

2. Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.

3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.

4. Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.

5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.

6. For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we're going to have automobiles, let's have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories -- that simply isn't true).

7. Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.

8. Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.

9. To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.

Well, that's a start. Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.

100 years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long. We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front -- and the back -- seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window down Hwy. 1. And now it's over. It's a new day and a new century. The President -- and the UAW -- must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.

Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.

So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.

Yours,
Michael Moore

Wisdom

2009-06-01T21:15:00.001-07:00

Newlygreens Interview

2009-06-01T14:53:00.001-07:00

This is an interview I did back in February for a show called Newlygreens. It's a bit long but I figured I'd throw it up anyway.

The "Why Should I" Series for Kids

2009-06-01T14:50:00.000-07:00

The "Why Should I" series for kids includes books on Nature, Energy and Water as well as Recycling. This is a great (and affordable) series of books that will introduce your kids to the concepts that are going to make their futures more liveable. We at SustainableDave feel that educating children is a huge part of tackling the problems that we face and the "Why Should I" series is a great way to start the process.

Available at Amazon.com and your local library.

Kind of Cool Visual Reminder

2009-06-01T14:46:00.000-07:00

Inspiration

2009-05-31T18:36:00.001-07:00

Wow. All i can say is if these deaf kids from China can do this, kicking your plastic bag habit really shouldn't seem like such a challenge.

Enjoy.

Dave

Blue Vinyl

2009-05-27T21:11:00.000-07:00

Directed by Judith Helfand & Daniel B. Gold

Available at MyHouseIsYourHouse.org

Chelsea Sexton Test Drives The Volt

2009-05-26T11:08:00.000-07:00

According To Paul

Those of you who know Chelsea Sexton (the red head from "Who Killed the Electric Car?"), know she's a wealth of information on all things having to do with plug-in vehicles. Given her position as a senior advisor to VantagePoint Venture Partners, Plug In America's initial Executive Director and a consulting producer on Chris Paine's upcoming "Revenge of the Electric Car", she is privy to lots of the action happening with the various OEMs' plug-in vehicle programs.

Her history with GM's EV1 is legend, so when she was asked to test drive the Volt, she jumped at the chance. I've been bugging her to blog on her activities so we can get some of this great info out to those who crave the latest. Also, Chelsea always seems to be able to articulate things in a way that clarifies the reality without all the PR baggage the car makers or battery manufacturers bring to the table. So, today is the inauguration of Chelsea Sexton's blog.

Chris Paine and crew traveled to Detroit with her to record the event.

Chelsea writes, "Next to the car was Frank Weber, looking more proud and hopeful than I’ve ever seen. Self-described with the statement “I am German, I am an engineer- I do not feel”, Frank has always seemed pessimistic to me against the aspirational backdrop of the Volt team- but even he couldn’t completely disguise his thrill at finally having something functional to show after two years of talking. I’d had enough of the talking, myself- so with little fanfare, I was pointed toward the track and let loose. After the first few of many laps, Jim, “the Voltkeeper” who tended the car all day from a technical standpoint, asked if might stop smiling anytime soon. I think Frank just wondered if all EV people drive that fast…"

And for the naysayers who claim the Volt has problems with the range extender mode, Chelsea has this to say, "I also failed to talk the guys into letting me drive the Volt in range-extended mode- I’d really been hoping to put to rest all the conjecture that because no one’s been allowed to drive it that way, there must be something wrong with it. Alas, Frank was typically insistent that it just wasn’t ready. I persisted, assuring him I’m familiar with pre-production systems, but he remained stoic, until I finally pinned him- “what is so wrong with this car that you won’t let anyone drive it with the engine on?” He paused, and admitted almost sheepishly, “well, when the engine comes on, you can hear it.” I kept waiting for more, but that was it-the big mystery… you can hear the engine. I started to note how that would be, oh, I don’t know, standard for an internal combustion engine in any car and that some people prefer it that way, but I was chastened by my own admiration for the position he took. While there’s absolutely a point where you have to stop engineering and start building, Frank’s statement is indicative of the attention to detail being paid to the Volt."

And finally, she touches on the attitude of GM and their engineers, contrasting that with the horrible mistake of letting Bob Lutz get on the Letterman show last week and once again lie (my words) about the EV1 program: "Driving the Volt was a mix of experiences- it was a fun day, and it’s great to see spots of hope in Detroit from folks who are excited to be working on “something cool again” (their words). And let’s face it, it was also a relief- there were certainly some years there when I wasn’t sure they’d ever get even this far on a plug-in car again. But in the end, building the car won’t be their biggest challenge- it never has been. Whether they can get behind it effectively as it hits showrooms remains to be seen. And I remain repeatedly frustrated at watching them struggle to tell their own story, or when they allow, say, Bob Lutz to go on national television. I think they’re learning, but I wonder often if the wisdom will come fast enough- and at what cost.
I still don’t know that they entirely understand the nuances of passion people have for electric cars- but I do think that they understand just what’s at stake for this one. It is the end of the poker game for GM, and they’re all in.

There's lots more, see it here:

http://evchels.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/poker-faces/

Paul
*****

Russian TV

2009-05-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

Someone sent me this, whihc is cool because i had completely forgotten about this interview. A film crew from Russia (via LA) came out to interview me towards the end of last year. As always, I cautioned them about coming down the stairs because of the bottles, but either the cameraman didn't care or didn't understand, because there it is, caught on tape as the bottles come tumbling down. Shockingly nothing was broken and it actually looks as if I started the avalanche, but I swear it was him. Well, that's my story anyway and I'm sticking to it.

Dave

Why We Never Need To Build A New Power Plant

2009-05-25T23:23:00.000-07:00

Check out this very cool article by Joseph Romm from Salon.com. He lays out very simply and with great examples how the US can cut energy use simply through efficiency and halting energy leaks in the grid. Sighting California as an example, he writes

"In the past three decades, electricity consumption per capita grew 60 percent in the rest of the nation, while it stayed flat in high-tech, fast-growing California. If all Americans had the same per capita electricity demand as Californians currently do, we would cut electricity consumption 40 percent. If the entire nation had California's much cleaner electric grid, we would cut total U.S. global-warming pollution by more than a quarter without raising American electric bills. And if all of America adopted the same energy-efficiency policies that California is now putting in place, the country would never have to build another polluting power plant."

Check it out, it's a quick read.

Dave

Why we never need to build another polluting power plant

Coal? Natural gas? Nuke? We can wipe them all off the drawing board by using current energy more efficiently. Are you listening, Washington?
By Joseph Romm

Jul. 28, 2008 | Suppose I paid you for every pound of pollution you generated and punished you for every pound you reduced. You would probably spend most of your time trying to figure out how to generate more pollution. And suppose that if you generated enough pollution, I had to pay you to build a new plant, no matter what the cost, and no matter how much cheaper it might be to not pollute in the first place.

Well, that's pretty much how we have run the U.S. electric grid for nearly a century. The more electricity a utility sells, the more money it makes. If it's able to boost electricity demand enough, the utility is allowed to build a new power plant with a guaranteed profit. The only way a typical utility can lose money is if demand drops. So the last thing most utilities want to do is seriously push strategies that save energy, strategies that do not pollute in the first place.

America is the Saudi Arabia of energy waste. A 2007 report from the international consulting firm McKinsey and Co. found that improving energy efficiency in buildings, appliances and factories could offset almost all of the projected demand for electricity in 2030 and largely negate the need for new coal-fired power plants. McKinsey estimates that one-third of the U.S. greenhouse gas reductions by 2030 could come from electricity efficiency and be achieved at negative marginal costs. In short, the cost of the efficient equipment would quickly pay for itself in energy savings.

While a few states have energy-efficiency strategies, none matches what California has done. In the past three decades, electricity consumption per capita grew 60 percent in the rest of the nation, while it stayed flat in high-tech, fast-growing California. If all Americans had the same per capita electricity demand as Californians currently do, we would cut electricity consumption 40 percent. If the entire nation had California's much cleaner electric grid, we would cut total U.S. global-warming pollution by more than a quarter without raising American electric bills. And if all of America adopted the same energy-efficiency policies that California is now putting in place, the country would never have to build another polluting power plant.

How did California do it? In part, a smart California Energy Commission has promoted strong building standards and the aggressive deployment of energy-efficient technologies and strategies -- and has done so with support of both Democratic and Republican leadership over three decades.

Many of the strategies are obvious: better insulation, energy-efficient lighting, heating and cooling. But some of the strategies were unexpected. The state found that the average residential air duct leaked 20 to 30 percent of the heated and cooled air it carried. It then required leakage rates below 6 percent, and every seventh new house is inspected. The state found that in outdoor lighting for parking lots and streets, about 15 percent of the light was directed up, illuminating nothing but the sky. The state required new outdoor lighting to cut that to below 6 percent. Flat roofs on commercial buildings must be white, which reflects the sunlight and keeps the buildings cooler, reducing air-conditioning energy demands. The state subsidized high-efficiency LED traffic lights for cities that lacked the money, ultimately converting the entire state.

Significantly, California adopted regulations so that utility company profits are not tied to how much electricity they sell. This is called "decoupling." It also allowed utilities to take a share of any energy savings they help consumers and businesses achieve. The bottom line is that California utilities can make money when their customers save money. That puts energy-efficiency investments on the same competitive playing field as generation from new power plants.

The cost of efficiency programs has averaged 2 to 3 cents per avoided kilowatt hour, which is about one-fifth the cost of electricity generated from new nuclear, coal and natural gas-fired plants. And, of course, energy efficiency does not require new power lines and does not generate greenhouse-gas emissions or long-lived radioactive waste. While California is far more efficient than the rest of the country, the state still thinks that with an even more aggressive effort, it can achieve as much additional electricity savings by 2020 as it has in the past three decades.

Serious energy efficiency is not a one-shot resource, where you pick the low-hanging fruit and you're done. In fact, the fruit grows back. The efficiency resource never gets exhausted because technology keeps improving and knowledge spreads to more people.

The best corporate example is Dow Chemical's Louisiana division, consisting of more than 20 plants. In 1982, the division's energy manager, Ken Nelson, began a yearly contest to identify and fund energy-saving projects. Some of the projects were simple, like more efficient compressors and motors, or better insulation for steam lines. Some involved more sophisticated thermodynamic "pinch" analysis, which allows engineers to figure out where to place heat exchangers to capture heat emitted in one part of a chemical process and transfer it to a different part of the process where heat is needed. His success was nothing short of astonishing.

The first year of the contest had 27 winners requiring a total capital investment of $1.7 million with an average annual return on investment of 173 percent. Many at Dow felt that there couldn't be others with such high returns. The skeptics were wrong. The 1983 contest had 32 winners requiring a total capital investment of $2.2 million and a 340 percent return -- a savings of $7.5 million in the first year and every year after that. Even as fuel prices declined in the mid-1980s, the savings kept growing. The average return to the 1989 contest was the highest ever, an astounding 470 percent in 1989 -- a payback of 11 weeks that saved the company $37 million a year.

You might think that after 10 years, and nearly 700 projects, the 2,000 Dow employees would be tapped out of ideas. Yet the contest in 1991, 1992 and 1993 each had in excess of 120 winners with an average return on investment of 300 percent. Total savings to Dow from just those projects exceeded $75 million a year.

When I worked at the Department of Energy in the mid-1990s, we hired Nelson, who had recently retired from Dow, to run a "return on investment" contest to reduce DOE's pollution. As they were at Dow, many DOE employees were skeptical such opportunities existed. Yet the first two contest rounds identified and funded 18 projects that cost $4.6 million and provided the department $10 million in savings every year, while avoiding more than 100 tons of low-level radioactive pollution and other kinds of waste. The DOE's regional operating officers ended up funding 260 projects costing $20 million that have been estimated to achieve annual savings of $90 million a year.

Economic models greatly overestimate the cost of carbon mitigation because economists simply don't believe that the economy has lots of high-return energy-efficiency opportunities. In their theory, the economy is always operating near efficiency. Reality is very different than economic models.

In my five years at DOE, working with companies to develop and deploy efficient and renewable technologies, and then in nearly a decade of consulting with companies in the private sector, I never saw a building or factory that couldn't cut electricity consumption or greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent to 50 percent with rapid payback (under four years). My 1999 book, "Cool Companies," detailed some 100 case studies of companies that have done just that and made a great deal of money.

There are many reasons that most companies don't match what the best companies do. Until recently, saving energy has been a low priority for most of them. Most utilities, as noted, have little or no incentive to help companies save energy. Funding for government programs to help companies adopt energy-saving strategies has been cut under the Bush administration.

Government has a very important role in enabling energy savings. The office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy has lots of (underfunded) programs that deliver savings every day. Consider, for instance, Chrysler's St. Louis complex, which recently received a DOE Save Energy Now energy assessment. Using DOE software, Chrysler identified a variety of energy-saving measures and saved the company $627,000 a year in energy costs -- for an upfront implementation cost of only $125,000.

The key point for policymakers now is that we have more than two decades of experience with successful state and federal energy-efficiency programs. We know what works. As California energy commissioner Art Rosenfeld -- a former DOE colleague and the godfather of energy efficiency -- put it in a recent conversation, "A lot of technology and strategies that are tried and true in California are waiting to be adopted by the rest of country."

So how do we overcome barriers and tap our nearly limitless efficiency resource? Obviously, the first thing would be to get all the states to embrace smarter utility regulations, which is a core strategy of Barack Obama's plan to reduce greenhouse gases. But how does the federal government get all the states to embrace efficiency?

We should establish a federal matching program to co-fund state-based efficiency programs, with a special incentive to encourage states without an efficiency program to start one. This was a key recommendation of the End-Use Efficiency Working Group to the Energy Future Coalition, a bipartisan effort to develop consensus policies, in which I participated. The first year should offer $1 billion in federal matching funds, then $2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion, and finally stabilizing at $5 billion. This will give every state time to change their regulations and establish a learning curve for energy efficiency.

This program would cost $15 billion in the first five years, but save several times that amount in lower energy bills and reduced pollution. Since the next president will put in place a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases, the revenues from auctioning the emissions permits can ultimately be used to pay for the program.

We should restore a federal focus on the energy-intensive industries, such as pulp and paper, steel, aluminum, petroleum refining and chemicals. They account for 80 percent of energy consumed by U.S. manufacturers and 90 percent of the hazardous waste. They represent the best chance for increasing efficiency while cutting pollution. Many are major emitters of greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide. A 1993 analysis for the DOE found that a 10 to 20 percent reduction in waste by American industry would generate a cumulative increase of $2 trillion in the gross domestic product from 1996 to 2010. By 2010, the improvements would be generating 2 million new jobs.

For these reasons, in the 1990s, the Energy Department began forming partnerships with energy-intensive industries to develop clean technologies. We worked with scientists and engineers to identify areas of joint research into technologies that would simultaneously save energy, reduce pollution and increase productivity. The Bush administration slashed funding for this program by 50 percent -- and keeps trying to shut it down entirely.

Indeed, conservatives in general have cut the funding or shut down entirely almost all federal programs aimed at deploying energy-efficient technologies. Conservatives simply have a blind spot when it comes to energy efficiency and conservation, seeing them as inconsequential "Jimmy Carter programs."

I recently testified at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on nuclear power and spoke about how alternative technologies, particularly energy efficiency, were a much better bet for the country. Senator George Voinovich (R-Ohio) said this was "poppycock," and then asked all the pro-nuclear witnesses to address the question, "If nuclear power is so uncompetitive, why are so many utilities building reactors?"

Voinovich apparently has forgotten about the massive subsidies he himself voted to give the nuclear industry in 2005. He seems to be unaware that states like Florida allow utilities to sharply raise electric rates years in advance of a nuclear plant delivering even a single electron to customers. If you could do that same forward-pricing with energy efficiency, we would never need to build another polluting plant.

Although he is a senior member of the Senate and a powerful voice on energy and climate issues, Voinovich doesn't seem to know the first thing about the electricity business; namely, that a great many utilities have a huge profit incentive to build even the most expensive power plants, since they can pass all costs on to consumers while retaining a guaranteed profit. But they have a strong disincentive from investing in much less costly efforts to reduce electricity demand, since that would eat into their profits.

The next president must challenge the public service commission in every state to allow utilities to receive the same return on energy efficiency as they are allowed to receive on generation. That single step could lead the country the furthest in solving our ever-worsening climate and energy problems.

-- By Joseph Romm

Could River Currents Power The Planet?

2009-05-25T23:12:00.000-07:00

According to this article in the UK Telegraph they can. A new system can be installed in water moving as slowly as 1 mile an hour. This makes the ability to generate power off of waves/currents much more viable. Here's a link to some more info on the subject as well.

If this works like they say, it could be a pretty impressive breakthrough. There's energy everywhere, we just need to learn how to harnas it.

Dave

In Defense OF The Electric Car

2009-05-25T10:08:00.000-07:00

According To Paul

This story popped up on my Google alert. The author of this piece is Adam Hasner. He's a Republican state rep from Boca Raton and is the majority leader of the Florida House of Representatives. He is a conservative.

When I read the essay, I was very impressed that a conservative Republican wrote such a beautifully articulated and balanced EV piece. I was thinking of forwarding it to my list with some comments, and then I looked closer at the site I was on.

Oh my!

I Knew I was in a strange land when I read the comments. I decided to respond to some since they were so hilariously wrong. If you have some free time, and want a laugh, read through the comments.

Also, do read Rep. Hasner's piece. It's quite good.

Paul

******

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/04/in_defense_of_the_electric_veh.html

April 13, 2009

In Defense of the Electric Vehicle

Adam Hasner
In his recent article titled "Would You Buy an Electric Car?", Isaac Martin appears to be suffering from a misconception that electric vehicle technology is intended as a petroleum replacement for long-distance (250-300+ mile) highway driving. That, or he is intent on creating a fallacious straw-man argument that he can easily knock down in a cynical attempt to discredit the benefits of electric vehicles (EV).

While I share Martin's critical view of President Obama on issues too numerous to count, on this matter, it is Martin's cul-de-sac mentality that needs to be addressed.

While it is no secret that I am charged up about the possibilities that EVs offer in transforming our nation's transportation sector, I also understand that they are only a part of our overall energy security solution. No serious EV advocate would ever suggest that current electric vehicle technology offers the best solution for long-distance highway driving. That's an inappropriate misapplication of the technology that would make about as much sense as trying to use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail or a microwave oven to cook the Thanksgiving turkey.

Advances in lithium battery technology over the past several years has made driving longer highway distances in all-electric cars more feasible and future developments will only increase the mileage per charge capabilities of EVs. But Mr. Martin's criticism of mileage "discrepancy" in the Tesla completely misses the point of the potential benefits of EVs since approximately 80% of Americans drive less than 40 miles a day. It is satisfying these more typical everyday mobility needs that will drive us in the direction of mass consumption EVs and plug-in EVs to replace most of the petroleum we use for daily driving, as opposed to the occasional long distance trip.

While cost decreases in lithium batteries will likely continue in the coming years, their current price compared to the current price of gasoline represents enough of an upfront cost premium that it only really makes economic sense at the present time to install enough onboard battery capacity to provide adequate electric range for the typical person's daily driving needs. The remaining small fraction of distance driving will eventually be powered by liquid petroleum or biofuels in a fuel/electric hybrid vehicle. It is this compelling economic logic currently driving automakers' plans to produce 40-mile (initial electric range) plug-in hybrids as the sweet spot of the market.

Consensus market forecasts predict that these plug-in hybrids will represent the lion's share (around 80-85%) of the total market for electric vehicles over the next decade, while "pure" all-electric cars will represent the remainder of the market. A 40-mile range plug-in hybrid (dubbed PHEV-40 by the engineers) will allow 80% of Americans to power between 75% and 95% of their daily driving with grid-generated or self-generated electricity (increasingly renewable energy), with the remaining balance of their daily driving powered by liquid fuels.

So what does this mean to you and me? A net average fuel efficiency of 120+ miles per gallon from an affordably priced car. This would reduce our national petroleum consumption by up to two-thirds which coincidentally is the proportion that the U.S. now imports from overseas. Imagine a steep reduction in energy dependence from nations hostile to us that would result in a new paradigm of energy security and national security.

Beyond this, consider the stimulating effect on our economic security by redirecting the several hundred billion dollars a year we currently spend on foreign oil purchases to investments in "Made in America" electrons. The result will be the creation of innovative high paying jobs, economic stabilization and revitalized energy and automotive sectors.

The best part? When you want to take the family (or your gambling buddies) on that 300-mile weekend trip to Vegas, you can do so in that same PHEV-40, driving 70 mph the entire way and not have to worry about charging along the way. Just jump in and go. The simplicity of plug-in hybrids is that they combine the best of both worlds: electric power for daily driving and petroleum/biofuels power for longer-distances in a single, affordable vehicle.

The economics are fundamental. At today's prices, the fuel cost of petroleum-powered propulsion is currently over 3 times that of electrically-powered propulsion. At last summer's $4.30/gallon, it was 6 times more expensive to drive on gas than on electricity.

I know a little bit about this subject since during the final months of last year's election, I drove a 2002 Toyota RAV4-EV production all-electric SUV every day as part of my campaign. With a 120 mile range to easily enable daily travel throughout my coastal district, it also covered some longer-distance highway trips to events in West Palm Beach and Ft. Lauderdale. There were no stops to get gas since all I had to do was plug it in every night and the next day it was ready to hit the trail.

Electric Vehicles are not some distant dream far out on the horizon. EV's are here today, and they are going to forever change the way we think about transportation while having the profound impact of making our nation stronger and more secure.

So to answer Mr. Isaac's question. Yes, I would buy an Electric Car - and you can bet the White House teleprompter on it.

State Representative Adam Hasner (R-Boca Raton) is the Majority Leader of the Florida House of Representatives. He currently drives a hybrid vehicle and this year is sponsoring HB 879 which will provide state tax incentives for electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids and charging infrastructure. Adam can be contacted at adamhasner@hasner.org

Tired of chemical laden pools? Try a swimming hole

2009-05-24T21:04:00.001-07:00

Check this site out for 1000's of natural swimming holes in the US and Canada. How cool is that?

Dave

Garbage Warrior

2009-05-24T08:54:00.000-07:00

A film by Oliver Hodge.

Available here.

Earthships

2009-05-24T08:46:00.001-07:00

If you have never heard of Earthships, they are worth checking out. The brainchild of Michael Reyonolds they are off grid structures, built using recycled and repurposed materials (including car tires and cans) and are not only cool, but affordable and sustainable. Even if you never have the option of living in something like this, they are worth checking out for their ingenuity alone.

Severn Suzuki at UN Earth Summit '92

2009-05-23T22:01:00.001-07:00