Living the American Green

Can someone spot me about $700,000?

Cause I would love to get me one of these.

That is about 1200 sq feet of amazing green efficiency: all sorts of energy efficient appliances, all sorts of reclaimed building materials, and all sorts of sweet Brooklyn locations.  Called Green on Dean, this is conspicuous consumption and luxury that is truly LtAG endorsed.

I don’t know that people are in the position to pay for that kind of luxury right now, and I would be willing to wager that the people who put this thing together wish they hadn’t had to go to market this month… but if I had that cash on hand you would be hard pressed to keep me away.  The best thing for me: buying into a co-op like that probably means that you can make choices about how the building is run (solar panels on the roof?) and how the 1000 sq ft garden on the roof is put together.

Sort of the LtAG ideal, really… loaded with American luxury, but as green as it can be within the confines of the good life.  All in all, the exorbitant cost of this kind of thing is something that I almost feel ok paying a premium for, if only to encourage this sort of development in the future.  As if I had the cash.  Ha.

After many many minutes of trying to figure out how to embed this cool flash map on LtAG, I’m throwing in the towel and just linking to it.

Check out this groovy NPR map (screen shot here) revisualizing what our energy grid can look like.  Pay special attention to the places with ample opportunity to create and harness Solar and Wind energy, plus the grid pieces that would be necessary to get that energy to population areas.  South West and Midwest seem to be the production points, but the grid to get that stuff to the West Coast, let alone to east of the Mississippi seem woefully lacking.

It’s basically the hopeful and optimistic counter to this delightful nugget from Slate.  For extra credit, overlay these two maps and try and figure out how much of the job loses from map two can be offset by the building that needs to happen for Map one to be realized.  Again, it looks like there will be jobs to be had in the South West and Midwest of this country, but it looks like the East Coast — where the losses are the most insane — are still going to get screwed.

Shower Curtain of Doom!

Lots of weird news today.  Arlen Specter.  Swine Flu.  the apocalypse might well be nigh.  Which seems to me to be a good reason for a little fal-de-ral silliness, brought to you this week by our friend CC over at Spam Carnival.

For those of you who want to cut down on water use, but have this thing where you just looove the long warm luxury of hot showers… do we have a product for you!*

This Lady's Shower Lasted Too Long

From the site of Elisabeth Buecher, design maven: “This shower curtain slowly inflates around you while you shower. It leaves you only a few minutes to take your shower before trapping you.”  How’s that for raising consciousness?  It’s like, Elisabeth writes, an alarm clock: sure, you hate it, but it does what you need it to do!

We often joke about design porn, but this is my first chance to link a naked women being slowly constricted by a swelling piece of rubber.  I feel like I am writing a spam carnival entry.  This is weird.  I feel dirty.  I need to go shower off.

*By which we mean: we have a product that will kill you.  FYI, LtAG does not endorse this product.  LtAG loves hot showers.  LtAG is not sorry about that at all.

Danger: Profanity laced rant coming below.

Bad Blue Dogs! BAAAAD!!

DEAR DEMOCRATS:

Get your shit together.  You guys really think the best way to take advantage of a huge majority in two of the three branches of power is to stand up to Obama on the environmental issue?   Really?  You want to use your new-found political clout to protect the segments of our national economy that are putting out the most carbon?  If I see another headline like this one, I think I’m going to lose my mind.

On Friday, former Energy and Commerce Chairman John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) – the man Waxman dethroned to takeover the committee – referred to the cap-and-trade system as “a great big” tax.

“Nobody in this country realizes that cap-and-trade is a tax, and it’s a great big one,” Dingell said at a committee hearing last week. The former chairman backs some form of a direct carbon tax that other moderates prefer over the market-based system.

Yes, it is a tax, if you want to look at it like that.  Here is another way to think about it: Don’t pollute so goddamn much, and you won’t get taxed.  It’s not like you have seen this coming for a bunch of years, and have been studiously ignoring the issue so that, when a cap and trade program arrived, you could whine and complain about the unfair economic burden being put on you by the government, is it?   ‘Cause it sure feels like that from where I am sitting.  The theory of bottom line business was all well and good, and it made a lot of people very rich.  But, for whatever reason (greed), the invisible hand of the market has been giving the earth the finger for years and years.  The point here is not to TAX to raise income, but to incentivize people to care about something that they have ignored — to the detriment of the rest of us.

I can’t get the GM’s of the world to stop putting out SUV’s, and I can’t avoid my tax dollars going to bail out the motherfuckers who ran a bad business.  But can I at least get a representative government that protects me from the people who I, apparently, don’t rank high enough to be able to protect myself from?

And, why is it ok to directly tax carbon producing things like Coal, but not ok to set up an offset program?  That doesn’t even make sense!  That just cuts off a few of the big pollution problem areas, and does nothing to collectivize reduction, so that the same set of issues comes down the pike again later when people figure out something else to burn.  What possible reason is there to piecemeal tax things you don’t like?  Make everyone play by the same set of rules!

It’s absurd and disingenuous to imagine that “the market” could continue to exist in a vacuum that ignored the earth.  It’s impossible.  It can’t happen.  The business minds that realized that something was going to have to be done and started building in some semblance of a triple bottom line — these companies are going to be ok.  The rest of you guys: you reap what you sow.  I hope all the cash that you made in the 90’s was invested with for-sight and… wait, what?  It’s all gone?  Oh man!   Then what DID you get out of all that shit?

Why shouldn’t business models that create huge amounts of pollution and damaging amounts of C02 output be regulated to the trash heap of progressive business?   It’s not even like the cap and trade program is unreasonable.  It is certainly more lax then the one I would like, and it gives businesses every opportunity to scale down their pollution going forward as the cap comes lower.   None if it even comes into effect for years, meaning anyone with a head on their shoulders can avoid the brunt of the tax with a modicum of intelligent investment in their business structure.  The only people who are really worried about this are the folks that are running a business model that studiously ignores reality.  To you, I say: welcome to the brave new world where your customer realizes the real costs of what you are selling.  If you have to charge more for your products because you have been producing too much carbon, maybe that means that you were under-charging before!  Or maybe it means that people will decide they no longer really need what you are pushing.

So why in gods name, centrist democrats, are you carrying the water for people who would rather get theirs then build something intelligent and sustainable?  I expect this from the defunct republican party, that crew who continue to belabor the “tax” point as they grow ever shriller and our country grows ever shittier around them.  But you!  I had thought better of you!  Is the 6 month plan really that important to you?  Can’t you see beyond the end of your next (hopefully last) term?  Is it too much to ask for you to think about the ramifications of NOT putting a carbon cap and trade program into place?

At what point does a complete economic collapse become and indictment of the previous way of doing business?  Is it a good plan to rebuild using the same rules that we were playing by before?  If we are already re-building, shouldn’t we rebuild in a way that makes sense for more then the next year?

You’ve had 8 years of being out of power to think about these issues and these problems.  You are also proposing a tax, but somehow you are managing to rail against the cap and trade program as a hidden tax.  You do not make sense.  You are like Chewbacca.

Love

LtAG

Hello campers!  Earth week cranks onwards, though this year with a dramatic difference in comparison to earth days in the past.  Seriously, check out what is going on in the news: it’s not just about personal conservationism or saving the polar bears, we are talking environmentalism in all sorts of aspects of our society.   We all have to admit that previous earth days have been mostly run by a specific offset of what we now consider the larger environmental movement: the Sierra Club types.   Now, I don’t want to declare victory for the environmental movement or anything, but looking around the Internet it feels at least like the movement has arrived and might be hear to stay.

Clean Coal is a huge lobby right now.  Seriously.  Huge.

This, from Politico, is all about the ACCCE lobby: a $45 million dollar collaboration on capitol hill that is just celebrating it’s first birthday.  Since the coal mining, energy production and rail road industries are all figuring out that there is a real awareness settling in amongst the American people that carbon (and therefor coal) might be a problem, they are spending a whole big chunk of cash to get in on the green action.

ACCCE’s impact will be on display starting Tuesday as House Energy and Commerce Committee hearings start on a draft climate bill penned by panel Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Energy and the Environment Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.). Just a year ago, Waxman and Markey backed a moratorium on new coal-fired electricity plants. But their new draft would allow new coal plants through 2015, if they are retrofitted to cut carbon dioxide output 40 percent to 60 percent within another decade. The technology to do that does not yet exist, but the new measure would set up a $1 billion-a-year clean coal research fund to help.

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Not…that we’ve ever had one of these “daily” tips before. But no matter! Today is Earth Day and it’s a great to start (and realistically, finish) such an initiative.

Tip: For huge water savings over the long term (the next big thing, remember?), a phenomenally easy thing we can do is boil less water while cooking pasta. Some statistics for whcih I did virtually no fact checking suggest that Americans consumed 4.5 billion pounds of dry pasta and 500 million pounds of frozen or fresh pasta in 2000 alone. I personally probably consumed about 300 million of those pounds (I love me some pasta). And on those pasta packages, the recommended amount of water is 6-8 quarts per pound. Meaning….30-40 billion quarts of water used in 2000 to cook pasta in the USA.

i miss my italian family

Now. I’ve been trying a little experiment in the weeks leading up to Earth Day. Every time I cook pasta (which is, as a bachelor on a budget, frequently), I have been using incrementally less water, to try to find a sweet spot where the water savings are big without yielding sticky or undercooked pasta. And such a sweet spot exists, at about 3-4 quarts of water. Half of the recommended amount. And we’re not talking about sacrificing quality, here – I still end up pouring some down the sink when I drain it, and with just a little bit of oil the pasta doesn’t cling any more than usual.

But the water? A full 50% saved. On a national scale, this little experiment would save 15-20 billion quarts of water annually. And even though we don’t (yet) have to ration water this way, why not volunteer a bit of metaphorical belt-tightening? Doesn’t hurt the food, but it helps the lilies of the field (or something).

See kids? Math is fun! That or guilt inducing. Or fun!

While scatter shooting around Earthday, and wondering how many more times I can hear about cool ideas that are “coming sometime soon” before my head explodes…

This is actually a time when public action matters.  Dems and Reps alike are wiffling and waffling on supporting the current Clean Energy Bill put forward by Rep. Waxman and Rep. Markey.  They have introduced a really good bill that will jump start the U.S. government regulating things it should have been regulating long ago.   I don’t usually subscribe to people pushing out contact your representative requests, but this one is a big deal to me, and it should be a big deal to you.  So.  Read up on the bill.  (or, if you are feeling super motivated, read the actual bill.  I like OpenCongress.com for that)  Then, click the link below.

Actually, I don’t care that it says it’s from Al Gore, and if you would rather go directly to your congress person that would be even better, but We Can Solve It is a good advocacy group that can use your voice.

This.  Legislation.  Matters.

Right now, Congress is debating clean energy legislation that will jumpstart our economy and help solve the climate crisis. I’ve joined with Vice President Al Gore and millions of others to show my support — will you?

Please click here to sign our petition in support of this crucial clean energy legislation: http://www.repoweramerica.org/earthday

Assuming that our solar panel continues to work under long exposure to actual sunlight, assuming our wiring doesn’t fall apart when someone breaths funny, and assuming that we can attach the damn thing to a battery long enough to matter, we now should have the ability to charge a 12 volt, at least somewhat, during the non-rainy days.  (whew.  I am exhausted from all those qualifiers.)

But how to spend our ill begotten gains?  The tricky part is getting the power being taken back out of the 12 volt battery into a format that your friendly neighborhood three pronged plug in can recognize.

What you are looking at here is our Tempest™ Battery and our plug’n'play power inverter (that you can get from most reasonable rest-stops or Radio Shacks® you might stumble into.  Mine cost, I think, $14.99, though I quoted it in the last post at $13.99. On the other hand, I have had it for more then five years…). (more…)

Solar Panel part Two: the experimentation!

After a week and a half of waiting for the mail, and then another 4 days due to communal negligence, I am glad to report that we managed to get back on the Do It Yourself Solar Power bandwagon.  This corresponds nicely with day one of our LtAG tip-o-the-hat to Earth Week (remember when it was just earth DAY, and you could feel good about turning out our lights once in a while and leave it at that?  Those were the days…)

You might remember that we left our research phase having ordered 1 x 12-volt battery 8 x single solar cells pictured below.

Front and Back of one Solar Cell 60MM x 60MM

Since Gerrit already had a multimeter to measure the electricities, all we needed to do was figure out how to connect the pieces together to get solar gain and then how to connect the pieces together to use a 12 volt battery for something… useful.

Using our amazing resourcefulness and Gerrit’s knowledge of all thing’s electrical, we discovered that a plastic crate that we were going to use as a work table was actually the perfect size to fit our 60 millimeter square cells.

We then gang pressed into service 1 x an-old-car-plug-in-that-Alan-had-that-converted-from-the-12-volts-in-a-car-and-outputs-at-120-volts ($13.99 at a rest-stop) and we stripped some old co-axial cable that we found on the street for it’s outer coating of fine wire mesh.

It turns out that, on testing the solar cells on the roof, each one was drawing between three and four volts.  Since Sunday was a day of tests, we didn’t want to lock ourselves into anything too permanent.  This meant a simple connection of contact points between cells, which were then set into the slots on the crate.  Because I don’t know much about electric circuits, and because I hope other people can follow along with this who also don’t know much about circuits: please bear with me if the following explanation is unwieldy.

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Ok, after this I’m going to let my little Dyson Freedman obsession slide.  But everyone should, if they have a moment, check out this back and forth on last week’s On The Media that tackles the NY times article that I’ve linked to a few times.

You can listen to all of Bob Garfield’s interview, both with the author of the article and with Joe Romm, a writer for The Climate Progress blog, here:

On the surface, it seems like I should be in Romm’s corner.  I agree with a lot of the rabble-rousing that goes on at Climate Progress (a great site that I don’t remember to check enough) and usually agree that big name press for global warming deniers is sort of deadly.  It just adds more obfuscation, etc. to something that pretty much needs to be acted on now to get anything done.  And yet… I can’t quite get fired up about it like Romm is.  The Times can stand on a pretty long record of good reporting on the realities of Global Warming, and they can stand on a pretty good record of not crushing any opinions out there just to crush opinions.  It didn’t seem to me like the Times was endorsing the points Dyson was making (though it was a personally sympathetic article).

I do find myself sympathetic with Joe’s point that

“This is worse than a needless distraction. This is just parceling out bad information with good information and hoping that the public is smart enough to distinguish the two.”

But for some reason, I’ve wasted days on end thinking about Dyson, what he means, and how much it should affect my (staunch) feelings about Global Warming.   Which, I think, is why I still find myself agreeing with this quote from the author of the article, Nicholas Dawidoff.  And why I’ve written many more then 1000 words on the subject.

I’m just interested in how he thinks and the depth and the singularity of his point of view. He’s a completely original person, and a brilliant and an unusual and an accomplished person, and an unpredictable person, and that’s what attracts me to him. I just think that he is so worth listening to, whether you agree with him or not. And I certainly don’t agree with everything that he says, but I’m interested in everything that he says. And there are not that many people in this world about who you can say, “I’m interested in everything that he says.”

For me, that’s what came through in the article: that Dyson was the kind of person I could spend all day sitting around listening to, simply because he is fascinating.  I don’t know how many people like that I can name, so even when these sage few do come up with a view that I find nigh on heretical, I’m still down to let ‘em talk it out.  They earned it, right?