Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Car-sharing service saves 1 million gallons of gas
Bay City News Service via San Jose Mercury News
Members of the Bay Area’s leading car-sharing service have saved more than 1 million gallons of gasoline since the non-profit organization was founded in 2001, organization officials announced today.
According to a University of California at Berkeley study commissioned in 2003, City CarShare members save about one-quarter of a gallon of gas every day, and with more than 4,300 members, City CarShare saves about 1,075 gallons of gas daily.
`Car sharing has proven to help reduce automobile and gas use,” City CarShare CEO Rick Hutchinson said today.
`People who own a car have a greater incentive to use it more,” Hutchinson added, `But when they have access to a car only when they need to, they get used to taking other forms of transportation.”
By saving more than 1 million gallons of gas, the car-sharing service also saved about 20 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, according to organization officials.
(11 October 2005)
Energy Conservation Is Back. What’s Your Company Doing?
Joel Makower, blog (“Sustainable business, clean technology, green marketplace”)
More than three decades after the 1970s oil embargoes, and President Jimmy Carter’s famous Sweater Speech extolling the virtues of doing less, energy conservation remains the ugly stepchild of environmental improvement. True, the White House is urging us to walk instead of drive, while others advocate shunning clothes dryers for clotheslines or swapping out incandescent light bulbs for compact fluorescents. But these are suggestions that few folks heed, since such notions suggest “doing without,” a concept unacceptable to most Americans, and to many others around the globe.
But for companies, it’s a different story. Energy efficiency (the more business-like alternative to “conservation”) has a strong foundation in a bottom-line-centric world. And there are rich resources — case studies, how-to manuals, calculators, incentive programs, technical assistance agencies, and more — to help companies manage the process. There’s also a sizeable industry that’s grown up around helping companies audit, assess, implement, and finance energy-efficiency solutions.
And yet, we’ve barely begun to harvest the low-hanging fruit, let alone sow the seeds of an economy that can continue to grow and prosper using continually less energy from oil and other polluting resources.
So, what is your company doing to ramp up its energy-efficiency efforts?
Here is a directory of my 30 or so favorite energy-efficiency resources for companies, culled from the thousands that exist.
(6 October 2005)
Recommended by David Roberts at Gristmill.
Greenpeace: EU ready to lead the way to a clean energy future
Greenpeace via Alexanders Gas & Oil
The “Greenpeace Energy Revolution Scenario”, launched by Greenpeace, shows that Europe can phase out nuclear power and, at the same time, reduce its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 30 % by 2020 to avoid catastrophic climate change.
The electricity sector in the 25 European Union nations is still dominated by large centralised power plants using fossil and nuclear fuels. As much as 80 % of Europe’s primary energy supply still comes from fossil fuels.
The “Greenpeace Energy Revolution Scenario” shows that half of Europe’s energy demand could switch to renewable energy sources and CO2 emissions could be reduced by nearly 75 % by 2050. It also shows that, if the EU fails to reform its energy sector however, CO2 emissions will increase by almost 50 % by 2050.
“This blueprint maps out how to build a future based on clean, renewable energy sources, independent of imported fossil and nuclear fuels. This will not only protect the climate, it will insulate national economies from the fluctuations of the global markets for fossil and nuclear fuels, benefit the economy and provide secure access to energy for future generations. In the short term, it could also create 700,000 jobs by 2010. Half of Europe’s total energy demand could be covered from renewable energy sources by the year 2050,” said Sven Teske, Greenpeace International energy expert.
The pathway to a clean energy future requires European governments to:
— set legally binding targets for the use of renewable energy for power, heat and transport
— implement a balanced and timely mobilisation of clean technologies, which will depend on technical potentials, actual costs and cost reduction potentials.
— give renewable energy guaranteed and priority access to the grid
— shift their investment away from fossil and nuclear fuels, starting by eliminating direct and indirect subsidies to fossil fuels and nuclear power, which would save taxpayers’ money.
“There is no quick fix when it comes to the power sector — investments and solutions are long-term. Renewable energies have slightly higher costs now, but most of them will be cheaper in less than 15 years. It is also clear that these results can only be achieved in time, if we start this drastic shift in the power sector without any delay,” said Teske.
The “Greenpeace Energy Revolution Scenario” can only be achieved if concrete and ambitious action is taken in energy efficiency measures. The exploitation of existing energy efficiency potentials such as the insulation of houses, the use of “waste-heat” from power plants for district heating instead of discharging it via cooling towers and the efficient use of electricity could reduce the current primary energy demand by more than one third (36 %) till 2050.
“We don’t have to freeze in the dark, we just have to use the produced energy as efficient and intelligent as possible,” added Teske.
According to the Greenpeace blueprint, the electricity sector will continue to be the forerunner of renewable energy:In 2050, more than 70 % of the electricity is to be produced from renewable energy sources, followed by renewables in the heating sector, which will produce more than half of the needed energy.
Greenpeace is an independent campaigning organisation that uses non-violent, creative confrontation to expose global environmental problems and to force solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future.
(27 September 2005)
Learn ’em right
“avoiding diapers is organic”
Jon S., Peak Energy (Seattle)
In the referenced article in the previous post, it was noted among other shortages that plastic diaper liners will be in short supply.
Will the result be a carpet apocalypse, with piles of malformed infant poo strewn across the houses of America from sea to shining sea?
Nah.
Ancient, occult wisdom of our elders will shortly be revealed. No Koolaid required.
Dare to Bare [NY Times]
As an anthropologist, I know that this idea is nothing new. Most babies and toddlers around the world, and throughout human history, have never worn diapers. For instance, in places like China, India and Kenya, children wear split pants or run around naked from the waist down. When it’s clear that they have to go, they can squat or be held over the right hole in a matter of seconds.
Parents and caretakers in these cultures see diapers as not the best, but the worst alternative. Why bind bulky cloth around a small child? Why use a disposable diaper that keeps buckets of urine next to tender skin?
The trick is that infants in these cultures are always physically entwined with a parent or someone else, and “elimination communication” is the norm. With bare bottoms, they ride on the hip or back and it’s easy to feel when they need to go. The result is no diaper rash, no washing cloth diapers, no clogging the landfill with disposables, no frustrating struggle in the bathroom with a furious 2-year-old.
Our future is shaping up to require more care and effort by people to live within their environment in a sustainable way. Less thoughtless consumerism, more work. But in some cases, more work up front means a way, way less down the road.
The biggest short term obstacle to something like this gaining acceptance in my country (U.S.A.) is puritan cracker culture, also known as the “mainstream”.
Let it not be unsaid — avoiding diapers is organic.
(12 October 2005)
Eternally Yours: Time in Design
Dawn Danby, WorldChanging
My first design teachers were a small group of New England toolmakers and woodworkers (plaid-dressed elder craftsmen with strong yankee accents) who would insist that the best things improved with wear and age. It was always difficult to find examples of this idea that hadn’t been hand-tooled in metal or wood, so the ethic has skipped at least a generation or two, and is one that barely applies to most of the things that we use or make.
Still, durability and endurance create interesting enough challenges that they preoccupied the Eternally Yours Foundation for eight years, and Eternally Yours: Time in Design is the result: a luxurious, rarified little publication aimed at a particular sphere of geekdom
(12 October 2005)
Don’t be duped by bottled water
Patricia Lynn, MinuteManMedia.org via Common Dreams
In recent trips to my local grocery store, I have become increasingly aware of the volume of bottled water that people in my neighborhood buy. Almost an entire aisle is dedicated to it, and people are buying by the case. The phenomenon is a little odd. Boston’s tap water seems fine to me.
Recently, the head of the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority took the Pepsi challenge. He and a panel of tasters, including a local wine expert and a local beer brewer, did a taste test with Boston water, Pepsi’s Aquafina, and a few other bottled water brands. Not only did the entire panel agree that the five water samples tasted roughly the same, lab tests showed that there were no significant differences between the quality of Pepsi’s bottled water and tap water.
Greater Boston spends 1,364 times the cost of perfectly good public water for Aquafina, despite indistinguishable differences, and Bostonians are not alone. Similar patterns repeat themselves across the United States.
Other scientific studies show that bottled water is no safer than public water, and often less safe, sometimes with high concentrations of toxins like arsenic and mercury. Food and Drug Administration rules for bottled water quality are quite poor compared to Environmental Protection Agency rules for tap water. But if bottled water is not necessarily cleaner or safer than public water, why have bottled water sales doubled in the United States over the past decade? And why do one of six people in the United States only drink bottled water?
The industry, led by Pepsi, Nestlé, and Coke is trying to dupe us. Misleading advertising is fueling the explosive growth of this industry. According to the most recent statistics available, in 2002 bottled water corporations spent $93.8 million to portray their products as “pure,” “safe,” “clean,” “healthy” and superior to tap water.
They position bottled water as healthy, when in reality it threatens our health and our ecosystems, costs thousands of times what tap water costs, and undermines local democratic control over a common resource.
Water bottling, is a fast-growing $55 billion a year business. Corporations take water from underground springs and municipal sources without regard to scarcity or human rights, and are setting out to replace our public water with a high-priced, aggressively marketed product.
Patricia Lynn is the campaign director for Corporate Accountability International—formerly Infact—a nonpartisan membership organization that protects people by waging campaigns challenging irresponsible and dangerous corporate actions around the world. For more information visit stopcorporateabuse.org.
(12 October 2005)
Climbing Half Dome in Yosemite this past week, I was struck by the number of hikers carrying bottled water. I guess even environmentally conscious outdoors people are vulnerable to the advertising. -BA
