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?

So far, so good. We’ve not had any real issues sticking to the plan. And after a week, we’ve pretty much given up on shopping at Whole Foods. They are well out of our way, their store is insanely crowded and narrow and about the only thing that we get there that we can’t easily get anywhere is the grass fed beef (and Gorilla Munch cereal). The local farms don’t offer the beef yet and we’ve not quite made the transition to going completely seasonal. It’s going to take us some time to get adjusted meal plan wise. So we’ve moved to Harris Teeter, where they are offering milk and eggs from local farms, which is about all we need for food that we don’t get from the farmer’s market and our CSA.

Joy and I have also been working on making sure we both get at least 8 hours sleep a night, and so this week, I think I’ve felt the best that I have in a while. Which is awesome. We’re traveling to my mom’s house this weekend, so we’ll be off the plan slightly for the weekend - that doesn’t mean we’re going to go crazy on fast food, but I doubt my mom has a huge investment in non-processed foods, so we’ll adapt and come back to the plan after Memorial Day.

Enjoy the long weekend, all.

When we went to Whole Foods to shop, my daughter surprised me by saying she wanted the Gorilla Munch cereal on the lower shelf. She normally only eats Princess themed cereal. Turns out Joy’s dad eats the cereal because it is gluten free and Aurora had tried some at his place and loved it. Made by EnviroKidz, the cereal:

• is certified organic
• comes in a box that is made from 100% recycled paperboard
• Has fun gorilla facts and games on the back of the box
• donates 1% of all sales to endangered species, habitat conservation, and environmental education for kids

So Aurora gets a cereal that she likes and is good for her and we get to subtly do something for the environment. Excellent. Check out their website at www.envirokidz.com.

So Joy and I are getting ready to sell the house (which is why my posts have not been as frequent as I would like). In case you’ve never had to do this, the procedure basically involves making the house look like nobody actually lives there by cleaning it constantly and removing everything from counters, rooms, etc. You’re basically trying to make it easy for the person buying your house to imagine themselves living in it. This is a long and involved process that is going to take us another week or two.

For me, the move has a nice frugality effect. As we pack up DVDs and books and other knick knacks, we ask ourselves, “Do we really need this?” If we don’t, it leaves the house. We’re making good use of environmentally friendly options like the free section of Craigslist and Freecycle.org to give things away to people who want them rather than throwing them away in the dump. We’re also using the Clorox Green Works products I mentioned previously, and they are working very well, although we haven’t gotten to the serious test of bathroom cleaning yet.

Besides the frugality effect, I think the move also helps me out environmentally. This decluttering/pruning effect is good for me. Training myself to use and need less stuff helps me get out of the consumer cycle. That has to be good for me producing less waste. Plus, we’re trying to move closer to work, which will mean less driving, less gas spent, less pollution from my car, etc. Raleigh/Durham does not have a robust mass transit system, so cutting my driving distance is one of the few things I can do in this sprawled out town.

When we get closer to actually looking for a house, I want to blog some on what kind of environmentally friendly factors I’m looking for in the house itself - but right now, I’m so busy cleaning, I haven’t even had time to think about it. This will definitely be the last move I make for a long, long time.

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.

Part of changing my habits is also working on changing the family’s habits. My wife is, thankfully, cheerfully on board and willing to help in whatever fashion she can. My five year old daughter (actually, she doesn’t turn 5 until Groundhog Day, but I feel ok fudging the numbers here), on the other hand is a bit of a harder sell. Not because she’s not willing, mind you. Mostly because it can be hard to explain to her why we should do certain things.

For example, she understands pretty well why we need to conserve water - if we use too much, then we’ll run out. But then she wants to apply that logic across the board.

“So, Daddy, if we waste electricity, then we’ll run out of power and I won’t be able to play my computer, right?”

Then I explain that electricity, for the most part, comes from coal burning plants which put pollution in the air, which makes it hard for us to breathe. And she generally gets that. And she understands that throwing stuff away means it gets put in a big pile which keeps growing bigger (“Do the garbage men take the garbage to the big pile? Woowwww. . .”). But even when she understands, she’s 5. And that means she easily forgets because she’s so busy. So she’ll be in the shower and spending forever getting her hair wet. Or she’ll leave her room light on along with her music when she rushes to the living room to do something else. And that’s ok - I don’t expect her to be a tiny little environmentalist, especially when I’m at the beginning of the learning process myself. But I do hope she’s learning a little bit with me that will stick with her as she grows up.