Sustainablog

Now that Thanksgiving and Black Friday have come and gone, people and stores everywhere are gearing up for the next big holiday season: Christmas.

While kids are trying to be extra good to avoid coal in the stockings, many grown-ups are looking to deck the halls and display, in every way imaginable, that they have the spirit of the season. Thanks to technology, that expression of “spirit” nowadays means decorations that rival multi-million dollar movies in extravaganza, brilliance, complexity, dazzle…and expense.

I remember as a child my family’s annual ritual of visiting a neighborhood in which every single house and lawn (and tree and fence and shrubbery and…you get me) was covered, blanketed, buried in decorations. Lights, blinking or not, white or multicolor. Contraptions aplenty, such as the Santa with sled and reindeer troop that traveled around the roof on a track. I swear the place was so bright you could probably see it from space.

Now as an old Scrooge, I have watched with amazement and alarm how Christmas decorations have exploded in size, number, and power. Simple lights, wreaths, or even figurines in the yard have become virtually passé, too simple to be properly “spirited.” Once the weather turns cold and children’s thoughts turn to presents under the tree, you can count on seeing towering inflatable characters, animated setups, and lights so bright they blind hapless passersby.

For example, the Wal-Mart website lists this cheery array of outdoor lawn décor such as: Santa Crash in Tree, Santa Claus on Chopper [i.e., motorcycle], 7-Foot Ferris Wheel [yes, it spins], Animated Teeter-Totter–Santa and Reindeer [yes, it moves], Nativity Scene, etc., etc., etc. All inflatable, all highly bright, all under $100. Quite a steal for showing off all that holiday spirit, right?

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By Lester R. Brown

Over the last few years the nuclear industry has used concerns about climate change to argue for a nuclear revival.  Although industry representatives may have convinced some political leaders that this is a good idea, there is little evidence of private capital investing in nuclear plants in competitive electricity markets. The reason is simple: nuclear power is uneconomical.

In an excellent recent analysis, “The Nuclear Illusion,” Amory B. Lovins and Imran Sheikh put the cost of electricity from a new nuclear power plant at 14¢ per kilowatt hour and that from a wind farm at 7¢ per kilowatt hour. This comparison includes the costs of fuel, capital, operations and maintenance, and transmission and distribution. It does not include the additional costs for nuclear of disposing of waste, insuring plants against an accident, and decommissioning the plants when they wear out. Given this huge gap, the so-called nuclear revival can succeed only by unloading these costs onto taxpayers. If all the costs of generating nuclear electricity are included in the price to consumers, nuclear power is dead in the water.

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 Former Canadian municipal councilor and current building design consultant David Braden, has built himself a green home using current building techniques that doesn’t even require a furnace.

We’ll be able to heat our entire house with a common hairdryer, Dave boasts.   No furnace even in the extreme Southern Ontario weather.

Braden is not the first to promote taking one’s home off the grid, but he is trying to do it in a way that utilizes common building techniques and architectural devices (i.e. not with flushless toilets, buried geothermal lines, and other techniques that are available, but that most observers associate with “treehuggers”). According to Braden

I don’t want to be conveyed as a hippie. I want to get the message to the mainstream. People need to know that in fact there is a great solution sitting right in front of us. Read the rest of this entry »

By Lester R. Brown

As fossil fuel prices rise, as oil insecurity deepens, and as concerns about climate change cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new energy economy is emerging in the United States. The old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced by one powered by wind, solar, and geothermal energy. The transition is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined even a year ago.

Consider Texas. Long the leading oil-producing state, it is now also the leading generator of electricity from wind, having overtaken California two years ago. Texas now has nearly 6,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity online and a staggering 39,000 megawatts in the construction and planning stages. When all this is completed, Texas will have 45,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity (think 45 coal-fired power plants). This will more than satisfy the residential needs of the state’s 24 million people, enabling Texas to feed electricity to nearby states such as Louisiana and Mississippi.

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Greg Frenette, a lead engineer at Ford Motors, said last week that it may take at least 20 years before hydrogen-powered cars become widely available because obtaining the fuel is so costly and difficult. However the latest news from the Reuters Global Environment Summit is that these zero emissions cars could become a reality in California very soon. The state plans to build out “Hydrogen Cities” to support the hydrogen car industry.

How Does the Hydrogen Car Work?

Fuel cells create electricity in a chemical process that combines hydrogen and oxygen, emitting water vapor as a by-product. instead of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Since the conversion of the fuel to energy takes place via an electrochemical process rather than combustion, the process is clean and highly efficient. The hydrogen car reduces greenhouse gas emissions while also reducing dependency on crude oil. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is the 8th annual national ENERGY STAR Change a Light Day. Now, I realize that if you’re a regular reader of Sustainablog, you’ve probably already changed out many of the lightbulbs in your house from traditional bulbs to CFL’s. But keep reading, because you know many people who haven’t done so yet.

ENERGY STAR Change a Light Day recognizes the more than 1.8 million Americans (like me) who have already pledged to change at least one light in their homes to an ENERGY STAR qualified light. The “Change the World” pledge encourages “all Americans to join with millions of others and take small, individual steps that make a big difference in the fight against global warming.”

How big of a difference? Take look at these statistics provided by EPA:

• Replacing just one traditional incandescent bulb with one ENERGY STAR qualified Compact Fluorescen Light (CFL) can prevent 450 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions over its lifetime - the equivalent of more than 200 pounds of coal from being burned. Change two lights and you double those statistics. Change three and … well you know where this is going.
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By Lester R. Brown

One of the questions I am frequently asked when I am speaking in various countries is, given the environmental problems that the world is facing, can we make it? That is, can we avoid economic decline and the collapse of civilization? My answer is always the same: it depends on you and me, on what you and I do to reverse these trends. It means becoming politically active. Saving our civilization is not a spectator sport.

We have moved into this new world so fast that we have not yet fully grasped the meaning of what is happening. Traditionally, concern for our children has translated into getting them the best health care and education possible. But if we do not act quickly to reverse the earth’s environmental deterioration, eradicate poverty, and stabilize population, their world will decline economically and disintegrate politically.

The two overriding policy challenges are to restructure taxes and reorder fiscal priorities. Saving civilization means restructuring taxes to get the market to tell the ecological truth. And it means reordering fiscal priorities to get the resources needed for Plan B. Write, call, or e-mail your elected representative about the need for tax restructuring to create an honest market. Remind him or her that corporations that left costs off the books appeared to prosper in the short run, only to collapse in the long run.

Or better yet, gather some like-minded friends together to meet with your elected representatives to discuss why we need to raise environmental taxes and reduce income taxes. Before the meeting, draft a brief statement of your collective concerns and the policy initiatives needed. Feel free to download the information on tax restructuring in Chapter 13 of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization from the Earth Policy Institute Web site to use in these efforts. Read the rest of this entry »