One Geek, One Earth

So, per one of my commenters (thanks, Drake!), I took a look at Wired’s article detailing out 10 ideas that are heresies in the current environmental movement that we should all be taking a look anyway. So, always the slave to the Man telling me what to do (even when he’s telling me what to do about what not to do), I read the article. My brief thoughts on each of the 10:

1. Live in Cities: Urban Living Is Kinder to the Planet Than the Suburban Lifestyle

This actually doesn’t surprise me at all - the suburban lifestyle requires a lot of automobile driving, a lot of factors to bring in food in. It is just less efficient. But don’t confuse “rural” with suburban. I think rural life is probably even better, but it just isn’t efficient enough for the size of our population.

2. A/C Is OK: Air-Conditioning Actually Emits Less C0₂ Than Heating

Ummm, ok? I’m not sure what the point of this was. We should all move to Arizona? It may take more energy to run the heat, but water usage in the hot areas has its own environmental concern.

3. Organics Are Not the Answer: Surprise! Conventional Agriculture Can Be Easier on the Planet

2 valid points here: Eating less meat is more environmentally friendly and eating local is better than eating Big Organics. But using these two points to extrapolate to the Abandon Organics In Favor of Conventional Agriculture seems silly.

4. Farm the Forests: Old-Growth Forests Can Actually Contribute to Global Warming

I’ve got no problem with this one - manage the forests as appropriate. You don’t have to deforest them, just prune them. And those forests which are monuments of nature, like the Sequoias? Leave those be.

5. China Is the Solution: The People’s Republic Leads the Way in Alternative-Energy Hardware

Another one that is not particularly shocking. China has the most people in the world and so they have, for a variety of reasons, some of the biggest reasons to be creating green energy solutions. The question is: Will China export all these solutions only and turn China into freeways and cars? If so, the advantage of all this green technology coming out of China would be nullified by the CO2 from a billion people hitting the highway.

6. Accept Genetic Engineering: Superefficient Frankencrops Could Put a Real Dent in Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The Law of Unintended Consequences bother me here. We don’t really understand food - how it affects us and deciding that we can make super crops to solve our problems seems like it might end up backfiring on us in the future.

7. Carbon Trading Doesn’t Work: Carbon Credits Were a Great Idea, But the Benefits Are Illusory

This one is just plain silly. I don’t know whether carbon credits are a fantastic idea or not, but I do know that it is way too early in the process to have any idea whether the system is working. Yeah, a bunch of celebrities abuse the idea to make themselves feel better, but it doesn’t mean it can’t work. We have a professor who is joint at Fuqua and the Nicholas School of the Environment and his focus is going to be on emerging carbon markets. We’re just getting started, folks.

8. Embrace Nuclear Power: Face It. Nukes Are the Most Climate-Friendly Industrial-Scale Form of Energy

I’ve got no real problems with nuclear power. I don’t want to abandon pouring lots of new resources into solar, wind, geothermal, and other extremely clean power sources, but it doesn’t hurt to look at nuclear power to replace some coal fired power plants. Nuclear’s biggest concern is potential terrorist attacks - nuclear plants have a much bigger target on them. Also, random thought: why don’t we just launch spent nuclear waste and material into the sun every so often? Seriously, what are the factors that keep that from happening?

9. Used Cars — Not Hybrids:Don’t Buy That New Prius! Test-Drive a Used Car Instead

One of the comments on this article pointed to a Sierra Club article that exposed a lot of the flaws in the information that the Wired article uses to make this comparison. And yes, a used car will oftentimes get almost as good mileage as a Hybrid…but it is also putting out a lot more pollution. A Hybrid gives you the benefit of using less gas and of putting out less emissions both.

10. Prepare for the Worst: Climate Change Is Inevitable. Get Used to It

This has some points - using technology to help us adapt to the changes that are surely coming is a good idea. It needs to be in conjunction with doing what we can to slow things down as well though. We can’t just expect technology to be our Deus Ex Machina. Well, maybe Wired does, after all, that is their purview.

Summary:

All in all, most of these short little pieces were lazy writing with very few solid points. Mostly, overall, the articles fail to take the complexity of the issues in hand. “Pastured cows take more to produce the same amount of meat and produce more methane, therefore corn fed cows are the correct solution!” I just felt that it was overall way too focused on climate change, which is obviously the elephant in the room - that doesn’t mean that we should be ignoring all other environmental issues on the way to correcting our poor carbon emitting habits.

What do you folks think? Is climate change big enough to push other issues aside?

If I were to meet a random married couple on the street and ask them if they have differences about how hot or cold the house is, I’d be willing to bet that they do because the odds would definitely be in my favor. Joy and I are no different. I’m pretty temperature insensitive. It needs to be really hot or really cold for me to notice. Joy, on the other hand, tends to get cold easier. So that means that in the wintertime, we would prefer to have the house at different temperatures. So juggling the thermostat comes into play several ways:

1. Setting the overall thermostat temperature. We have a heat pump and I must admit to occasionally getting confused by the non-digital thermostat. If the switch is set to heat and the temperature is set to 80, why does the house only heat to 70? I feel embarrassed at being defeated by a basic piece of equipment, but it is true. I never feel like I know how to set the temperature gauge to get the house temperature where I want it. So Joy ends up being the one to set the temperature, which means she gets to set it higher than I would prefer, both in comfort level and in energy saving level. That’s the benefit of not being an equipment moron, I guess.
2. Lack of an automatic thermostat. The lack of an automatic thermostat hampers some potential energy saving techniques. Joy got an electric blanket for Christmas, Aurora has a heavy winter blanket, and I sleep better when it is colder at night. In theory, it would be nice to have the thermostat turn down a half hour before bedtime and turn back up again a half hour before wake up time so that we won’t freeze when we take a shower (especially since the warm water gets turned off and on in the middle of the shower). But the electric thermostat we bought a couple years wasn’t compatible with the heat pump (I think) and I was a little too worried about electrocuting myself to try it. Now that we’re going to move in 6-8 months, there’s not a lot of point in changing it out. It’ll be something to worry about for the new house.
3. Turning it off when not in use. The new thing we’re going to try is shutting the thermostat off if we’re going to be gone during the day. If we had an automatic thermostat, we could let that handle it, but instead we’re just going to try and remember to shut it off ourselves. We’re out of the house 8am-5pm on Tuesday, 8am-12pm on Wednesday, and 12pm-12am on Friday, so that adds up to 25 hours a week that we could be saving electricity - like having a 6 day week. It is rarely cold enough here in the Triangle that we have to worry about freezing pipes and ours are insulated inside anyway. The hard part will be remembering to do it, since all 3 times, we’re juggling Aurora plus multiple other things as we leave the house. But like any good habit, it will just take repetition.

I’m hoping we’ll see some decent savings out of this and when we move to a new house, we’re going to make sure to get an automatic thermostat in place.

I forgot to mention that I also have changed my general power consumption habits. In addition to just generally turning off lights and using said lights less frequently (I tend to brush my teeth without the lights on because the habit is so strong I don’t need the lights to be able to know what I’m doing), but I’m also turning off my computer, monitor, and printer when not in use. I grew up thinking that it was better for the life of the computer to leave it on. Now I know that isn’t true, so I make sure it is off whenever I’m not using it and I keep the power saving features on high settings. Combined with the CFLs, it seems to be paying off - on average, I’m saving 10-20 KW per day, which is resulting in a substantially lower energy bill and more importantly, much less energy used.

I can’t claim to have done a whole lot for the environment up to this point in my life. I guess for the purposes of this blog, that’s probably a good thing, since I wouldn’t have anything to write about otherwise. But for the purposes of the environment, not so good.

Lightbulbs

I have replaced most of the lightbulbs in my house with compact fluorescents. There are a few that I haven’t managed to get yet, namely the two outside lights (front porch, back deck) and the lights in the main bathroom. The shower light and bath light are both traditional fluorescents, but the lights over the sink are 8 large spherical 60W incandescents. Since I haven’t had the money to replace those, I just try not to use the sink overheads unless absolutely necessary; the bath light plus frosted window usually provides enough unless it is pitch dark.

Recycling

We do a minimal amount of recycling. I get the daily paper, which is one of my small pleasures. I like the physicality of the newspaper, much like I prefer a real book over an e-book. We recycle the newspaper and we recycle corrugated cardboard. We don’t drink soda, so no aluminum cans to recycle. I recycle white paper at work but I tend to slack here at home.

Water Conservation

I’m in North Carolina (specifically the Raleigh-Durham area), which is in the middle of the worst drought since the weather folks started keeping records. I have to drive over a section of Falls Lake every day and it has been basically a dry plain for months. It’s a shallow section, but still. All the cities are down to shockingly small amounts of water. I live in Granville County, so I’m not technically under any water restrictions like the city residents are, but I’m doing my best to keep water usage down. We’re following the old “If it’s yellow, let it mellow” routine to keep our toilet water usage minimal. I’m also taking showers by getting wet, turning off the water, shampooing my hair, turning on the water and rinsing, off with the water again while I soap up, and then a final quick burst. Not my favorite way to take a shower, but such is life in the midst of a drought. My wife and I were never big lawn waterers, so we don’t have to worry about that.

Driving

I’ve changed my driving habits so as not to accelerate and brake so quickly and generally try and keep a smoother rate of speed transition. This has paid off in improved gas mileage from about 24-25 mpg to 26-28mpg (I drive a Mazda 626, 4 cylinder). Unfortunately, for my weekend gaming, I have to make a 45 min drive there and back again. I end up using a full tank of gas every week. One of the major disadvantages of where we live is that while we’re a 15 min jaunt down the interstate to where the wife and I work, we tend to be 30 min+ away from everything else. We’re 15 mins away from the first decent grocery store, and unfortunately none of that is going to change until we move, which will hopefully happen sometime this year. We’re planning to move somewhere closer to a good grocery story and to our friends, cutting into all the time we end up spending in the car.

Next up, what’s the first step on the trip to eco-friendliness?