The Human Toll of Coal vs. Nuclear

I should preface this post with a reminder that devastation is devastation, it comes in all shapes and sizes without discrimination, and pain is universally felt. Considering the human toll of different energy sources this soon after the natural and unnatural disasters in Japan is in no way meant to diminish the sympathy we feel for every single soul over there. So it is with continued support and hope for the people and animals of Japan, as well as so many who have suffered from the toll of coal, that we suggest taking a look at the following graph courtesy of an "Electricity Generation and Health" study reported on by the Washington Post's David Brown.

Brown's accompanying article explains how the data was and continues to be gathered and reveals the following:

"History suggests that nuclear power rarely kills and causes little illness. That’s also the conclusion engineers reach when they model scenarios for thousands of potential accidents. Making electricity from nuclear power turns out to be far less damaging to human health than making it from coal, oil or even clean-burning natural gas, according to numerous analyses. That’s even more true if the predicted effects of climate change are thrown in."

Slow Season!

Warmest wishes and deepest apologies for the lack of posts lately. The holidays are a busy time of year around here! Please feel free to spend some of your Internet-browsing hours looking through old posts here on Just Saying or on the following sites/blogs/links/stories that have captured our attention lately:

Mental_Floss: 18 Fun Facts About Your Favorite Christmas TV Specials

MSN 'A Year of Mystery Meat' - Read about the experiences of a Chicago area public school employee who ate school lunch every day for a year

Green-Up Your Computer with ECO BUTTON

Recent GMO News - Bt Cotton Failures in India (also here)

Get to know The Fabulous Beekman Boys or just watch Farmer John's Goat Cam!

And if those happy Beekman goats made your heart grow three sizes, consider making an end-of-year donation to one of our favorite organizations, Heifer International, to gift a goat or a share of one. Learn more and donate here.

File Under: Ridiculous

During Sustainable Agriculture class discussions at the University of Maryland, Institute of Applied Agriculture this semester, farmer and teacher Brian Hughes often talks about the spectrum of sustainability - the idea that at this time, within developed countries, it is near impossible to run a business, farm, restaurant, school or home in a manner that could be deemed completely sustainable (unless of course you were living in an Ecovillage). Rather all fall somewhere along the spectrum. To one side we have people and communities are conscientiously operating with very little impact on the soils, people, plants, animals and economy around them. Others, well, land on the other side where this cr*p has broken the record for ridiculous. TIME Newsfeed reports on the world's most expensive house constructed in Mumbai:

India's richest man, and Forbes's fourth richest man, Mukesh Ambani, has built the world's most expensive house in Mumbai. It is estimated to be worth $1 billion. The lavish building– named Antilia, after the mythical island– has 27 stories, is 173 meters high and has 37,000 square meters of floor space — more than the Palace of Versailles. It contains a health club with a gym and dance studio, at least one swimming pool, a ballroom, guestrooms, a variety of lounges and a 50-seater cinema. There are three helicopter pads on the roof and a car park for 160 vehicles on the ground floors. It's obviously quite a job keeping all this running smoothly, so the house, if you can call it that, also boasts a staff of 600. And all this for just Ambani, his wife and their three children to enjoy.

Poodwaddle

I've been trying to embed this very cool source for startling statistics for 15 minutes and have finally waved the white flag and hyperlinked. Sorry.

http://www.poodwaddle.com/

The Big News in Baltimore

The famous blue neon wave on the south side of the National Aquarium the Inner Harbor will be replaced with an energy efficient LED. The good news is: Light Emitting Diodes will cut the wave's energy use by 70 percent. The bad news is: The original architect of the building and the aquarium's first board chairman aren't thrilled about it. The Baltimore Sun reports:

"It's a signature element of the building," said architect Peter Chermayeff of the original neon wave. "It's not a sign. It's a work of art. It's an important part of the architecture."

"It's a piece of Baltimore history, and it's easily recognized by people everywhere," said Frank Gunther Jr., the aquarium's first board chairman. When there's a nationally televised football or baseball game in Baltimore at night and the camera pans across the city skyline, he said, "you can see the wave on the side of the building and know it's the aquarium."

But aquarium representatives say the replacement wave will be the same size, shape and color as the 350-foot-long wave that has illuminated the building for nearly 29 years, and they're confident it will have a similar visual effect. If anything, they say, the new wave will be even bluer than the original. They say the LED system was selected because it looks like neon but uses less energy, and being energy-efficient is part of the aquarium's mission and message these days.

"We are well aware of and we cherish the iconic nature of this wave," said Tim Pula, senior director of capital planning and facilities for the aquarium. "It's one of the most recognizable features on the city skyline. It's good advertising for us. We're not looking to re-invent the wheel. We're just trying to change the medium that transmits the light, to make it more energy efficient…It's a repair and replacement of what is there with a new technology."

Harnessing the Energy of Exercise

Have you ever been at your local fitness facility with your uncharged iPod and looked around at all the people alongside you on treadmills and bikes and got to thinking: "How strange is this? I mean, really... all the electricity required to run these machines and all this human energy gone to waste? There's got to be some room for greenprovement here, no?"

Well I have. All the time actually. And apparently the masterminds behind a new system at the Copenhagen Crowne Plaza Hotel have too. They've connected exercise bikes to a generator that harnesses approximately 10 watt-hours of electricity per 15 minute ride. Not only to the riders get some cardio and a little reduction in their carbon footprint - the hotel even offers a meal voucher in exchange for their efforts. Read more about the system here.

So how much longer until all gyms are powered by generators charged by patrons' exercise? And why stop at buildings? How about electronics? Researchers at MIT are leading the pack in this technology. Meet the Copenhagen Wheel:

Precycle

File under: Good for you - good for the environment.

For a one-time payment of $43 bucks you can stop delivery on a ton of junk (snail) mail, receive two energy-efficient light bulbs, get an easily transported reusable bag, and reduce the energy costs of recycling! Did I mention that they will also plant five trees?! Love it. Visit Planet Green to sign up for the Precycle Package.

PopSci's Green Guide

Looking for 99 ways to save energy and money this summer? Check out the all-digital Green Home Guide available for free and easy browsing on the Popular Science website. You will need to provide a name and email address but that's it.

Browse through it. Save money. Kill some time at the office. Reduce your footprint on this great planet. Everybody wins.

I think it's worth a shot....

Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently suggested and rather obvious low-tech idea to slow global warming: changing the reflectivity of roofs by painting them white. Why not, right? The Washington Post reports:

White roofs work because of the physics of sunlight. Dark roofs absorb and hold more than 80 percent of solar energy, while white ones can reflect 75 percent of it away. That makes a white-roofed building cooler and cheaper to air-condition.

Because of that energy savings, California has since 2005 required most flat-roofed buildings to have white tops, and Walmart has installed them on about 75 percent of its U.S. stores. In January, the District will require new flat roofs on commercial buildings to be covered in vegetation or a reflective material.

Now scientists are wondering whether white roofs might keep the world cooler, too.

In his talk, Chu cited new research from his former laboratory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, which imagined the result of painting about 63 percent of the roofs white in 100 large cities in tropical and temperate areas worldwide.

It estimated that would provide about the same climate benefits as taking all the world's cars off the road for 10 years.

Zenvironment

Another image from the weekend:

The pier in St. Mary's County Maryland upon which I enjoyed early morning yoga, late evening sunsets, a fun photo shoot with family members near and dear to me, and an absolutely priceless sense of peace.

(thnx Carter fam)

gotta start somewhere...

An excellent feature written by Liza Mundy, Can One Household Save the Planet? that appeared in Sunday's Washington Post Magazine examined the significance of small household changes, like energy-efficient light bulbs, in our nation's quest towards sustainability. Mundy not only pulled together some high-impact statistics, shared about the limitations her lifestyle (working mother of two) has had on her ability to green her habits, and identified the core issues contributing to climate change - she did so with a great candor and she covered a lot of ground. One of my favorite lines:

"The fact that the bulb will last for years and years is not necessarily and asset when you've bought one you regret... And you can't just toss it in the trash..."

Also, I love her description about checkout infrastructure:

"Since I am the main grocery shopper, I could and did switch to reusable shopping bags, once I got over my fear of disrupting the express lane with a bag that didn't fit the infrastructure."

I had forgotten about the bewilderment on the faces of cashiers when I offer up reusable bags or attempt to pack them myself, hoping to intercept the use of additional plastic bags they put around dish soap, something cold or something made of paper or on a hanger. Have you ever experienced it? It's pretty funny. It's near impossible to get a reusable bag on the radar of a cashier. Considering the flood of reusable bags available at all the major retail chains you'd think they'd be expecting this, no?

Anywho... I could go on and on pointing out passages but should probably just urge you to read the article. So the last passage I'll point out, which will likely be the topic of a future post, touches on a new-to-me aspect of a topic particularly close to my heart: eating local. Mundy writes:

"Many environmental groups, for example, recommend eating locally grown, seasonal foods to cut down on the emissions associated with food transportation. The thing is, as Michael Specter pointed out in the New Yorker last year, fruits and vegetables grown in friendly climates without the need for lots of chemical fertilizers are sometimes greener than food grown locally; nor is it necessarily true that "local" produce trucked 100 miles from Pennsylvania in an old gas-guzzling pickup is greener than produce shipped from afar by rail or container ship."

(thnx LM and David)

Fridge-Free Living

This seems to be one of the more extreme measures members of the uber-energy-efficient camp can take. After reading this article in the NY Times though, I got to thinking... how important is my refrigerator to me? Like one of the women mentioned in the article, it mostly comes down to dairy. Yogurt, soy milk, feta, and gorgonzola are regular parts of my daily diet. So is ice cream - although I hate to admit it. Do I need a whole entire fridge for those items though? I mean, sure there is some juice in there now and then and it's nice that I can keep fresh veggies crisp for more than a week. There's some condiments that have collected over the past few months and probably a container of leftovers but truth be told, I could probably get by with a mini fridge. I suppose, once again, ignorance was bliss.

What do you think? Are these folks taking it too far or are they pioneers in rethinking energy consumption?

Is the blogosphere energy-efficient?

Slate's Green Lantern took on an interesting question in today's post, Green My Blog. Jacob Leibenluft clearly has a better handle on gigabyte to energy to carbon footprint conversion than I do but I'll do my best to break it down for you.

Direct pollution from a blog is pretty small. WordPress reported transferring about 161,100 gigabytes of data in 2008 across 3,132,606 blogs - adding up to a small amount per blog per year: 51 megabytes of data to be exact. Bandwidth increases on blogs with lots of traffic, videos or large images but even the largest ones would only be responsible for a few hundred kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, which according to the Lantern, "would put even one of those larger blogs somewhere in the range of the average household's microwave." Doesn't sound too bad to me, especially if the posts on the blog inspire readers to reduce their footprint elsewhere (hint, hint).

There is a camp saying that suggests information technology accounts for a larger carbon footprint than the airline industry. Sure if you add up all of the equipment necessary: rooms full of servers and network equipment, energy to keep those rooms cool, desktops, laptops, wireless routers, and so forth it does sound like an awful lot of energy - but you have to think about the alternative. Compare downloading an album to burning gas on your drive to the air conditioned or heated mall, purchasing the manufactured CD from a store to which it was shipped, the plastic in which it is packaged...

I'm not going to beat myself up too much about Just Saying's energy consumption, but I do predict a post about how I'm offsetting its footprint in the near future.

passive houses

One of the original Passive Houses in Darmstadt, Germany

They are the latest buzz in energy-efficient living. There are about 15,000 of them around the world with the majority in German speaking countries or Scandinavia. They are called "a revolution in building design," but what are they?

A recent article in the NY Times attempts to explain them as "...homes as get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies."

Still confused? Me too. Let me clarify. The whole point is for the structures to allow, or rather create, a temperature comfortable space without the use of a radiator or furnace. It's all about sustainability. The buildings are designed using passive solar building design techniques, which means:

- They are compact - about 500 square feet of living space per occupant

- Triple-pane, insulated windows are oriented towards the equator

- A wide range of thermal insulation materials are use

- Special attention is given to eliminating thermal bridges
- They're hermetically sealed (airtight)

- The walls are the same temperature of the floor, which is the same temperature as the air, which is the same in each room

Although it's credibility is considered questionable by many, Wikipedia actually offers quite a bit of info on these structures. I grabbed the following diagrams from their passive house page.

Diagram of passive solar design techniques

Thermogram showing the heat escaping a traditional building (left) versus the containment in the passive house (right)

(thnx Jonathan)

Dubai = Not Sustainable

From TimesOnline.co.uk:

"Versace, the renowned fashion house, is to create the world’s first refrigerated beach so that hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days. The beach will be next to the the new Palazzo Versace hotel which is being built in Dubai where summer temperatures average 40C and can reach 50C. The beach will have a network of pipes beneath the sand containing a coolant that will absorb heat from the surface. The swimming pool will be refrigerated and there are also proposals to install giant blowers to waft a gentle breeze over the beach. The scheme is likely to infuriate environmentalists. The revelation comes as more than 11,000 politicians, green campaigners and others are gathered in Poznan, Poland, for the latest talks on cutting greenhouse gas emissions....

...Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace, said he believed it is possible to design a refrigerated beach and make it sustainable. 'We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on,' he said. 'This is the kind of luxury that top people want.' "

You know, the kind of luxury "top people" want. Like indoor ski slopes in the middle of the desert. Good grief. In honor of her recent departure from SNL, I have to quote Amy Poehler on Weekend Updates and say, "Really?!?!? I mean, REALLY?!?!"

Read all about it here.

Longwood Gardens Embraces LEDs

Since my first visit to Longwood Gardens back in 2003, I have been nagging friends and family to take the trip up there. Now, it seems that my efforts may have to intensify as I just read that they've have switched 80 percent of their holiday lights to LEDs and that, my friends, means the pros are embracing the eco-friendly so we've got to be supportive!

Growing up with a father who is a pioneer in the field of florescence, I had the luxury of learning about light emitting diodes long before they hit the flashlight key chain market. What I didn't always know though, is how energy efficient they are - using only a fraction of the electricity of that of incandescent lights. In the past few years, the safer, longer lasting, eco-friendly LED holiday lights are flying off the shelves - even though they are a tad pricier.

Read all about them in this article, originally from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Thomas Friedman on The Daily Show

C-c-c-c-c-c-c-conservation!

Last night, Thomas L. Friedman, author of The World is Flat and most recently Hot, Flat and Crowded, talked to Jon Stewart about the future of energy. He addresses an important question when discussing how government funding of a large number of jobs could lead us to the green Microsoft or green Google. Jon Stewart asks: Microsoft wasn't government funded? Why aren't there people 'working in their garage' to find some solutions now? To which Friedman replies that the cheaper and more convenient alternative is too vast for a new, green idea to really catch on - that the playing field needs to be leveled. Obviously he can explain it best. Check it out:

Green jobs not necessarily an easy fix

Interesting article in The Economist about the possibility of governments investing heavily in green technology, therefore boosting the demand for jobs (and the economy) while transforming the energy business. Interesting in that it reminds us that, "the easy notion that there is a single solution to the world’s economic and climatic problems is, thus, a dangerous one."

Green Collar Jobs to Revive the Economy?

The Wall Street Journal reports:

President-elect Barack Obama and his energy advisers have been making the case that a multibillion-dollar government investment in everything from wind turbines to a "smart" electrical grid is just what's needed to help revive the economy. The lure is millions of government-subsidized "green jobs."

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama argued that spending $150 billion over the next decade to boost energy efficiency would help create five million jobs. The jobs would include insulation installers, to make houses more energy-efficient, wind-turbine builders, to displace coal-fired electricity, and construction workers, to build greener buildings and upgrade the electrical grid.

Read the entire article here.

And on a similar note, I've been looking for a reason to post a link to Dayo Olopade's piece in The New Republic about the division of liberals along class lines due to the environmental movement. A few excerpts from Olopade's piece:

Class distinctions were bred into the green movement from the beginning, as elite families like the Roosevelts and Rockefellers backed early conservation efforts that generally privileged aesthetics over economics. The Sierra Club itself was at first a social organization that arranged outdoor adventures for its leisured members. In 1962, Rachel Carson (who grew up along the Allegheny River just north of Pittsburgh) published Silent Spring to expose the role of chemicals and industrial pollutants in the production cycle, promoting the defense-of-nature model that animates groups like the National Wildlife Federation, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Sierra Club to this day. But, although Silent Spring talks extensively about factories, the seminal text makes virtually no mention of the people working inside them.

Labor groups in industries like logging or car manufacturing have spent years fighting the conservation agenda and blaming green victories like the Endangered Species Act for draining jobs in construction and development. By 1997, the AFL-CIO saw fit to campaign against U.S. adoption of the Kyoto Protocols, which it regarded as an economic albatross, and, in 2002, the Teamsters sided with conservative Republicans to push for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Of course, both groups have consistently endorsed and campaigned for Democrats throughout this period, and there have been occasional moments of synergy, as when greens and blues teamed up to push the Clean Air and the Occupational Health and Safety acts in the 1970s. But "it was easier to do that when the economy was booming," says Les Leopold, a labor historian and co-founder of the Public Health Institute. Since the rust belt began to tighten in the '80s, the character of the relationship has overwhelmingly been one of mutual mistrust and rivalry, with the greens viewed as hostile to the problems everyday people face.

Now green-collar jobs are providing an obvious incentive for compromise. The idea is to bring about the greening of the United States while restocking the beleaguered labor movement with good positions--in both traditional fields (such as building the storkish steel turbines that now dot Pennsylvanian hills) and new ones (like energy audits, efficiency retrofitting, and biofuel production).

Energy-Efficiency Good for Economy

A study conducted at the Center for Energy, Resources and Economic Sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley by economist David Roland-Holst found that:

"...while the state’s policies lowered employee compensation in the electric power industry by an estimated $1.6 billion over that period, it improved compensation in the state over all by $44.6 billion."

Furthermore:

"California's energy-efficiency policies created nearly 1.5 million jobs from 1977 to 2007, while eliminating fewer than 25,000, according to a study to be released Monday."

Read more here.