by Eric Richard

Last week, I posted an article called “Plug Ins would reduce emissions”

Dean responded saying that the Prius is the proverbial bird in the hand. Fair point.

The good news though is that it looks like the auto manufacturers are pushing down this road to try to make this a reality rather than just a theory.

For example, Toyota has unveiled plans to test a plug-in Prius. As Dean has pointed out, plug-in mods have been available for the Prius for years now.

However, in the past, Toyota had specifically stated that they did not intend to create a plug-in version. So, it is nice to see Toyota do an about face here.

As this article points out, the real obstacle here is battery technology. I think that as battery technology improves you will see a real push from some of the auto manufacturers to make this real.

by Liz A

Monday evening, 7/30/2007, there’s a candidate’s debate on energy and the environment. The candidates are running for the US Congressional seat recently vacated by Marty Meehan. Details of the debate are as follows:

Energy and the Environment Debate
Holiday Inn, Boxborough MA
242 Adams Place (Corner of Routes 495 and 111)
Monday, July 30 2007, 7:00pm – 8:30pm

by Carl

Two quick updates for NSTAR customers. (Note: I believe NSTAR is one of two utilities that serves Sudbury, the other being National Grid. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong).

At long last, NSTAR customers have the opportunity to all their electricity from wind power. The program needs approval from regulators, and may start as early as January 1rst, according to the Globe. Here’s a summary (straight from their web site)

-You can buy half your power for an additional 1.75 cents/kw-hr, or all of it for an additional 3 cents/kw-hr. To put this in perspective, NSTAR currently sells power for around 19 cents per kw-hr (including all distribution charges). The national average is around $.10/kw-hr. (see note below). So this will raise your total electric bill a bit under 10% for the half option, and 15% for the full option.

-The power will come from 195-turbine Maple Ridge wind project near Camp Drum in upstate New York and from a 44-tower wind project now under development at Kibby Mountain in Maine expected to open by 2009. (That’s all from a financial perspective.. from a physics/engineering perspective, the power comes from various grid sources.)

-NSTAR has put this on the top center of their home page. The Globe says that that the $3bn corporation will put its full marketing muscle behind this program.

-I am extremely excited about this. Certainly, signing up for this program seems a no-brainer to me. Also, anyone with spare time should call the NSTAR ( 800-592-2000 for customer service) to thank them. Utilities do this sort of thing because they want to get good press and have a nice, green image. Positive reinforcement is likely to help.

And remember, wind is the second cleanest energy source out there– also the second cheapest, when externalities are taken into account. But it is the only one that can power your whole house.

The cheapest energy source remains Negawatts– energy conservation. And NSTAR is offering $135 SMART meters for $29.95 (price includes shipping) for one more week– until July 31st. I bought one, and have found that it is terrific– it really helps me understand how I use electricity, and thus how I can save.

Finally, I find myself quite stunned to be writing all these positive things about NSTAR (with whom neither I, nor anyone I know personally, has any financial or employment connection). They have turned out to be quite a role model for other utilities.

Remember.. every time you talk to an NSTAR person about anything (I know… probably happens once or twice a year at most) thank them for being so progressive about wind and conservation. The more positive reinforcement, the better..

Note: (As an aside, does anyone know why we pay nearly double the national average for electricity? I’ve asked lots of people, got lots of plausible answers (we use less coal, have legacy costs for nuclear projects/mergers, etc) but none that I’ve found convincing.)

by Liz A

When I was hanging around food coops, we used an acronym for many of the non-food items we sold — HABAs — for Health and Beauty Aids. These included cosmetics, soap, shampoo, hand lotion, and so on — those items that you put on your body rather than into it.

 A friend recently sent me a pointer to the Skin Deep Cosmetics Database, compiled and hosted by the Environmental Working Group. Their introduction is as follows:

Skin Deep pairs ingredients in nearly 25,000 products against 50 definitive toxicity and regulatory databases, making it the largest integrated data resource of its kind. Why did a small nonprofit take on such a big project? Because the FDA doesn’t require companies to test their own products for safety.

You can use this database to research the products you use, not just cosmetics, but also items like soap, toothpaste, and sunscreens. You can find out the ingredients, compare to other similar products, and discover the risks (and relative risks) of your favored brand over others. I can imagine using this database to either reassure yourself that the products you use have a low enough impact on your personal and larger environment OR to discover other products that you’d prefer to use in each category.

I’d be interested in any surprises you uncover as you look through the database.

by Eric Richard

One of the big questions I’ve had over the recent years is whether plug-in hybrids are an important part of the solution to our problem or really just a placebo that makes us feel better without solving any of the problem.

As background, the idea behind a plug in hybrid is that you have a large battery array, much like a typical hybrid, but you recharge it by plugging your car into a conventional power outlet.  For example, you drive your car to work and home and then plug in the car over night to recharge its batteries.

The fundamental notion here is that the average American drives something like 40 miles per day. So, if you could get a car that could go at least 40 miles on a single charge of electricity, then you could make a huge dent in the gasoline usage of cars.

But here’s the big question — aren’t you just getting rid of one form of dirty energy (burning gasoline) for another (potentially burning coal at a power plant)?

Well, we no longer have to ponder this theoretical question.

The Electric Power Research Institute has teamed up with the National Defense Research Council to publish a report that studies this question.

There were a couple of interesting findings here for me.

The first one is probably the most important. According to a San Francisco Chronicle article about the study:

Researchers also found that plug-in hybrids reduced greenhouse gases no matter what energy source was used to produce the electricity, whether coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind or solar.

This is a very important finding since it answers the question about whether you are just moving the problem to a different location.  The basic answer is no, you are not just shifting the problem around.  You really are solving the problem.

One of the other findings of the report is probably obvious if you think about it, but still very interesting. According to Felix Kramer, founder of CalCars.org:

Scientist have confirmed that unlike gasoline cars, plug-ins will get cleaner as they get older — because our power grid is getting cleaner.

Let’s think about that for a moment because it is a very interesting point.

If I go out and buy a traditional gasoline powered car, it is going to have some emissions profile. And over time, that profile is very unlikely to get any better. In fact, as the car ages, it is likely to get slightly worse.

However, with a plug-in hybrid, you have a very interesting situation; since the electricity source for the car is coming from outside the car, the emissions profile can actually improve over time.

If the electricity coming to your house is “greener” over time, then your car’s emissions profile is going to actually improve over time.

It’s almost like you are doubling the benefits of moving to a greener power supply; not only is your home energy getting better, but you are also reducing emissions created by your car at the same time.

Maybe this just appeals to me as a “software guy”, but I think this is a fascinating benefit of plug-in hybrids since it no longer locks your emissions profile to a point in time.  Without any change to your car, you can actually improve the performance of your car over time.

On a somewhat related note, the San Francisco Chronicle article had a very interesting comparison of a Prius vs. GM’s concept car — the Chevy Volt.

The article says that:

Hybrid cars are essentially gasoline-powered vehicles. All the electricity they use comes ultimately from the gasoline engine. But the gas engine in a hybrid vehicle is smaller, and it is turned off when the vehicle is stopped or cruising at low speeds.

In contrast it says:

The Chevrolet Volt’s gasoline engine does not drive the wheels; it only charges the batteries. The electric motor powers the car at all speeds, and the Volt can travel 40 miles on batteries alone.

What it means is that the Prius is really a gas-powered car that happens to have an electric engine and battery to help assist it while the Volt is really an electric car that happens to have a gas engine to assist it.

This may seem like a bit of a semantic difference, but I don’t really think it is; it really is the next generation in the evolution of cars. The Prius hasn’t yet solved the problem of driving at full speed or for long distances on the electric engine alone. Solving this problem will be a big leap toward much cleaner cars.

posted by Carl

In this brief post, I’d like to give a brief, annotated list of my favorite sites/blogs related to the environment, and particularly to Global Warming. I hope readers will share their own in the comments. Each of these provides its own perspective on Global Warming, and you can learn a lot by reading them all.

Daily Kos Environmentalists- Daily Kos is the world’s largest political blog, and is primarily oriented towards electing Democrats. As such, it is left of center, but not so far left as its reputation suggests. All registered users can post “diaries”, and several hundred get posted per day. A small subset (typically 5 to 20) are on environmental matters. Nearly all diaries get a few dozen comments, and the most popular can spark a discussion of several hundred comments. By subscribing to the Google Group Daily Kos Environmentalists, you can be alerted whenever an environmental diary is posted. The range of topics is extremely broad, and the quality of the best is very high. Unfortunately, the signal-to-noise isn’t so great. (As one specific example of an excellent series, people interested in learning more about CSAs might enjoy the ongoing Vegetables of Mass Destruction series.) There are quite a few high-quality, ongoing series of diaries, and other very interesting ones are posted on a daily basis.

Real Climate is a group blog written by several currently practicing climate scientists. They are also (mostly) very good writers. They typically write an in-depth essay on an aspect of climate currently in the news. Some of their posts focus on how the media report on climate, while others can be fairly technical commentaries on recent journal articles. The discussions in the comments are also quite interesting– sometimes other climate scientists show up to debate. At one time or another, they’ve covered nearly all the major issues that come up in discussions of the climate, making this the go-to site for all matters climate. For example, if you ever need to rebut pretty much any argument made by a denier, you can start by searching Real Climate; odds are, they’ve already covered it in depth. And if you want to learn more about climate science, just browse through their archives.

The Cost of Energy (Lou Grinzo). Lou Grinzo is a former software writer who was subsequently trained as an economist and acquired a strong interest in energy and the environment. He writes a few posts a day, in which he discusses current energy & environmental news from the perspective of an economist. His writing is sharp, insightful and generally optimistic.

The Oil Drum is another group blog, primarily devoted to discussions about oil supply (as the name suggests). It is a good place to start to learn about just how serious these issues are. However, the site also focusses on global warming and other environmental issues. There are several contributors/editors, each with their own distinct perspective. My favorite is Stuart Staniford, who has written some brilliant, highly quantitative analyses. Also, a daily “drumbeat” posts links and a brief excerpt to thirty to fifty energy/environmental articles. Because of the site architecture, commenters play a more prominent role than other sites (except perhaps Daily Kos). Most commentators are distinguished either by their extraordinarily detailed of the oil buiness, or by their extreme pessimism about the future prospects of the US– particularly suburbia. I don’t mean to endorse this perspective, but it is important to hear all sides.

The Energy Blog focuses on scientific/engineering aspects related to energy and the environment. There are usually a few posts every few days. Typically, the author describes a recent development and gives his own perspective.

So that’s my list. I would strong recommend that anyone who wants to learn more about climate or energy issues should read these as time permits (I doubt anyone has time to read all of these every day). But be sure to read more than one, since multiple perspectives are essential.

I hope people will share their own favorite sites or sources of information in the comments.

by Eric Richard

So, we are now into our fourth week of the distributions and wanted to take a step back and try to summarize some of the thoughts to date.

At a very high level, I think this has been a very interesting experience. We went into this not really knowing what to expect so, it has been a bit of a ride the entire way along.

Here are some of my observations about the experiences so far:

There is absolutely no question that we are eating better than we did before.

There has been a big shift from eating in restaurants to eating home cooked food. In fact, I think both my wife and I have found ourselves having restaurant cravings because we were so used to going out every night.

So far, we have been able to keep up with the food distributions without too much of a stretch. We are trying to cook dinner about 3-4 times a week and maybe have 1-2 lunches from this food. However, it looks like Week 4 is going to be our first failure; we will have to freeze some food in order to get rid of everything before Week 5’s distribution.

We are currently on track to pretty much break even in terms of the the cost of joining the CSA. We’re about 20% of the way through the season and so far we have received about $125 in food. If we project forward, that will mean we’ll get about $600 over the season which was almost exactly what we paid. It will be interesting to see if the value stays steady or if the value shoots up as we get to larger distributions and more berries.

I have not yet done an formal analysis of whether we are saving money compared to what we would have otherwise spent, but my suspicion is that we definitely are. As mentioned above, we are definitely displacing many restaurant meals. We are doing a lot more grocery shopping, but my feel is that we are definitely saving money.

There is an odd discipline that this puts on you that can really help drive forward food-related decisions. It used to be that our nightly conversation would go something like this, “What do you want to have for dinner?” “I don’t know. What do you want?” “I don’t know.” And then we would stumble into something which probably involved a restaurant. However, now there is a very real constraint — we have a whole bunch of very specific food sitting in our refrigerator. This changes the entire discussion since now we know exactly what the starting point is. Now the conversation is more like, “Do you want the lettuce, the cabbage, or the peas?”

In a very similar way, this has really helped us expand our cooking skills, but in a constrained and focused manner. In some sense the freedom of being able to cook anything is a bit daunting. Whereas, this has lead us to cook all sorts of new recipes that we probably never would have tried before because we had a type of food in front of us and we had to find something to do with it.

There is some downside to these constraints. I am definitely getting a little bit overwhelmed by the amount of lettuce and lettuce related products we are getting and I am definitely looking forward to moving into more fruits, tomatoes, potatoes, etc.

On the whole, I am definitely happy with the experience to date. We’ll see how it continues!

by Eric Richard

Here was the distribution for the week:

• 2 (2 lb) summer squash
• 2 (2.5 lb) zucchini
• 1 bunch (1 lb) radish
• 1 head (1/4 lb) raddichio
• 1 bunch (3 oz.) of basil
• 1/4 lb. of garlic scape
• 1/4 lb. of lettuce mix (a mix of different lettuce leaves like you get in the pre-mixed salad bags)
• 1 head (1 lb.) of escarole
• 1 head (2.5 lbs) of chinese cabbage (choice of chinese cabbage, kale, cabbage, chard)
• 1 head (1.5 lbs.) of green cabbage (choice of chinese cabbage, kale, cabbage, chard)
• 2 heads (2 lbs.) of green leaf lettuce
• 1 qt. (1 lb.) of sugar snap peas (choice of sugar snap or shell peas)
• 1/2 cup of blueberries

by Eric Richard

I know I am behind here, so trying to catch up.

Here’s the week 3 distribution:

• 1 bunch (2 lb.) of bok choy (had choice of cabbage, summer turnip, scallions, bok choy, arugula, lettuce, kale, broccoli)
• 1 bunch (1/2 lb.) of kale (had choice of cabbage, summer turnip, scallions, bok choy, arugula, lettuce, kale, broccoli)
• 1 head (1/2 lb.) of lettuce
• 1 qt. (1 lb) of peas
• 12 strips (1/4 lb.) of garlic snape
• 1/4 lb of mesclun greens
• 1 bunch (1 lb) of radish
• 1 bunch (1/8 lb.) of cilantro
• 2 sprigs (1 oz.) of basil
• As much as you want of oregano, golden thyme, and sage (we took about 1 oz. of each)

Sadly no strawberries this week. =(

by Liz A 

Our harnessing of the sun to provide some of the juice that runs our household has attracted the attention of more than just our neighbors.

Our long-time and well-respected congresscritter, Marty Meehan, has resigned, ostensibly to take a new job but, rumor has it, really to spend more time with his family (what a concept). This has generated a rather heated special election for his seat, including one contender, Niki Tsongas. Ms. Tsongas was the wife of Paul Tsongas, who was once our senator and then presidential aspirant.

Ms. T has already garnered an endorsement from Barney Frank (”an old friend”) and Emily’s list. She’s been speaking out against the war in Iraq and for marriage equality. This week, she announced a theme of energy independence during Independence week. As part of that effort, she and our solar hot water installer (along with three of her staff members and one of his) visited the house for a quick tour of the installation.

The visit was a delight, and she’s just as charming and gracious as I’d hoped. The group stayed about 45 minutes and we talked about alternative energy, CSAs, Ms. Tsongas’ daughter’s environmental work, and how there’s a lot of important work to do in Washington.

In a later phone call, she said that she was inspired by the visit and woke up in the middle of the night thinking about where she could put solar panels on her own house.

You can read more about Ms. Tsongas’ platform on global warming here: http://www.nikitsongas.com/global_warming.php. Her Press Release page (http://www.nikitsongas.com/press/070207.pdf ) says more about the “week of independence” theme.

I recognize that everyone has to make up their own mind about whom to vote for, but thought that this update would be of especial interest to readers of this blog.

– liz

So, 7/7/07 has arrived and, as part of it, the 24-hour “Concerts for a Climate in Crisis” called Live Earth has started. It was kicked off in Australia and will proceed on to Shanghai, Hamburg, London, Johannesburg, New York, Tokyo, and finally Rio De Janeiro.

Interestingly, they just added a show in Washington, D.C. Anyone who was following this concert might know that Gore was alwas hoping to have a venue in D.C., but was blocked at every turn by Republicans in Congress who wouldn’t let him do it.  It looks like Gore got the last laugh and pulled off a bit of a coup here, surprising people with this last minute announcement.

For those looking to watch or listen to parts of the concert, you can find the programming schedule online.   It looks like the main program in the U.S. will be on NBC from 8 pm - 11 pm EST and MSNBC will have programming on pretty much all day from 8 am - 4 pm.   It also looks like XM Radio will be broadcasting from many of the venues.  Their “main” station will be channel 40, but they will also provide complete coverage from each venue on channels 41-46.

One item that seems to have come in vogue recently is to criticize the concerts as being harmful to the environment because of all of the artists and people traveling to the venues.

It seems to me that this is such a strawman article.  No sane environmentalist is telling people that they can’t travel, they can’t hold concerts, they can’t go to entertainment events, etc.  All they are suggesting is that when you do any of these things you do them in environmentally conscious ways.

To that end, Gore’s team worked with many environmental groups to invent a brand new set of guidelines for hosting green events.   If other people would simply follow these rules that Gore’s team helped create (and of course are following themselves), that is all people are asking.

I really get sick of the folks taking potshots at folks like this who are trying to make a difference and are probably doing much, much more than your average person to try to be green.  But, because they aren’t perfect or because they aren’t living a zero-energy lifestyle people feel like they can criticize them,

I think that four-time Grammy nominee Angelique Kidjo probably had the best response to this whole attitude saying, “Criticism is easy. … What the hell are you doing to change the world? Get your butt out there. Do something.”

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what sort of coverage the event gets over the  next 24 hours.  I have heard that they expect to have an audience as large as 2 billion people.  That’s a whole lot of people!