Drive a green car
In money terms, emitting carbon dioxide gives you a lot of bang for the buck. But why not turn this around, and not emit some large mass of carbon dioxide for only a little bit of buck? This is the idea behind carbon offsets.
Here's a place where you can buy a carbon offset that will turn your car into a carbon neutral vehicle. To quote the late great
Chef Tell,
Very simple, very easy. These people achieve the carbon offsets through clean energy, landfill gas capture and farm power.
Makes a great Christmas gift!
Labels: energy
Biking update
My New Year's Promise for 2008 was to ride my bikes farther than I drive our car.
Mileage totals, 30 November:Biking, 4608 km, 2864 miles
Driving, 6080 km, 3779 miles
This doesn't look so good. In order to reach my goal I'd need to bike 50 km a day every day up to the end of the year and not use the car at all -- to pick up a Christmas tree or buy food or bring a carload of equipment to the electron storage ring for a study.
Even so, its been an interesting year. I started taking bike maintenance seriously -- it's a lot more fun to ride when your bike's in shape. I discovered that you can do without a car pretty well most of the time. The kids bike to school and we bike to work, and most of the trips to get groceries are by bike.
There are times when it is hard to do without a car though. We visit my wife's Aunt a few times a year, she's in her 80s and lives alone. We drove up to Stockholm to see my wife's parents this summer, and that one trip was 25% of our annual use. And sometimes I can't avoid driving to work -- doing this once is worth two weeks of biking, since most of the distance of the commute is by train.
In fact, most of the time when I drive I am not alone in the car. Like we were four to Stockholm, so I should subtract 1500 km * (1 - 0.25) = 1125 km. Similar trips to see Aunt give credit of 500 km. If I wanted to I could add some bike miles since I've noticed that most of the time I am biking into the wind, not to mention bonus kilometers for heavy driving mist, frozen slush and full body splashes from light duty trucks.
Adjusted mileage totals, 30 November:Biking, 4608 km, 2864 miles
Driving, 4455 km, 2769 miles
Not half bad?
Labels: bikes, energy
Recycling
Here's part of a newspaper article from last week:
After having spent several summers in Sweden together with his Swedish wife and two sons, Will Ferrell knows what his favorite thing is to do in Sweden. 'It's going to sound crazy, but my favorite thing is going to the recycling station. Swedes have the best recycling I've ever seen. Like, 'Old shoes, please place them here.' I love to fill the car and empty it at the recycling station.'Will I am with you 100% and in fact just today I filled the car and emptied it at a Swedish recycling station. Here is my photo-essay:
The main goal was to get rid of this ratty old couch. It was tossed into the 'burnable waste' container. It will go to the incinerator and be turned into electricity.
The recycling center takes folks yard waste and composts it, turning it into topsoil that they sell:
All of the 'white goods' are arranged carefully in the corner-- fridges mostly, and some water heaters
They accept all kinds of hazardous waste. The labels on these bins say 'cleaning agents', 'acids', 'bases', 'insecticides', 'mercury thermometers' and so on.
They also have a place for home mechanics to put used motor oil. This is great. It reminds me of a college housemate who changed the oil in his station wagon and dumped it in the middle of my vegetable garden in the backyard.
This friendly gent is there to help you find the right resting place for your junk. He told me that last week he got his picture taken by a busload of Chinese tourists.
Labels: energy
Energy use to rival greenhouse gases
Energy allows organized systems to exist.
Stars and galaxies use 0.0001 to 0.01 Watts per kilogram of energy to maintain their form. Plants like grass and sugarcane require 0.05 W/kg to live. Hunter-gatherers use about 1 W/kg and primitive farmers, 10 W/kg. An organized society requires energy. On average, humans in the world today use 50W/kg, and in the US, 250 W/kg.
The average 40 year old American white man weighs 183 lb, which corresponds to a power consumption of 20 kilowatts. Putting this in
everyday terms, on an energy basis today's American society represents either one pre-1967
VW bug running at full power, or about 20 toasters, waffle irons and/or
Makita cut-off saws, running full on all the time, for each one of us.
Here's the
energy flow through the U. S. today.
Civilization needs energy, and energy use worldwide is compounding at 2% annually (1% per year in the developed world, 5% per year in the developing). There is a point where the climate will change simply because of the amount of energy we are using. Already now the streets of Tokyo are 4 F warmer than they would be otherwise due to energy use. By the end of the century the use of non-solar energy will compete with sunlight to the degree that it will noticeably warm the average surface temperature of the planet -- on top of whatever warming greenhouse gases may be giving. Compounding energy at 2% per year, the IPCC climate 'tipping point' of a 3.5 F increase will be reached by use of non-solar energy alone in about 280 years.
Labels: energy
Fossil Reserves
Here is the figure of fossil fuel reserves we were shown Friday. The units are 'bnboe', billions of barrels of oil equivalent. Taking oil for example, if you divide how much we know we have (reserves) by the current rate of use (production), we will run out of oil in 41 years. Unless we find some more. Econophiles will point out that the price will go up before we run out slowing the rate of use and leading us to look for unconventional oil and shifting consumption to other alternatives. Nobody knows how much oil and gas there is that has not been found, but the rate of discovery has been declining since around 1970. Nobody has ever had to look for coal, and so nobody knows really how much more might be out there.
This figure shows how much oil there is from different sources (x-axis) against the price of production (y-axis). As the price of oil goes up it becomes profitable to produce it in unconventional ways. The length of the red box ('cumulative needs to 2030') shows what the world requires for the next 22 years.
....we have plenty of energy, plenty of energy, take all you want....there's not that much we can do about greenhouse gases anyway...your eyes are getting heavy...Labels: energy
'I live in a world of infinite money'
This figure shows that as countries get richer, they almost always use more energy.I invited a speaker for the institute seminar series to give a talk about energy; yesterday was the big day. The speaker is the chief scientist at the world's second largest independent oil company and is responsible for their research programs, and advises their executives. He started his lecture by saying that he wasn't going to talk about the world they way he would like it to be but rather how it is and where it is going. It was sobering.
--Oil production is tremendously profitable. In the middle east it costs $5 to $7 per barrel to pump out of the ground, and can be sold for around $125. There is lots of oil out there, including deep ocean deposits, tar sands and so on. He pointed out that 'as the ice cap thins for whatever reason', it will become possible to drill for oil in the Arctic ocean.
--He discussed controlling atmospheric CO2 levels, 'an enormous, complex challenge', in part because energy is at the heart of economic activity (unlike the CFCs).
--There will be a doubling in the demand for energy by the end of the century and at the same time we must have a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions to stabilize the atmospheric concentration, requiring an improvement in efficiency by a factor of four.
--CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time, roughly a thousand years, which is an infinite time from our perspective. The atmosphere integrates all emissions. This means that if you would like to say pump CO2 into old oil fields or salt domes you have to monitor it and keep it out of the atmosphere for at least a thousand years. Who is going to be responsible? The companies and political institutions we have today most likely won't be around that long. The only global institution with that kind of lifetime is the Vatican.
--The developing world is developing, rapidly, and a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions in the industrialised world is counteracted by 4 years of growth in the developing world.
--It should be possible to produce 10 to 15% of electricity worldwide using windmills, but this represents only a 4 year delay in reaching the CO2 concentration in a world without wind power.
--
It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuels is equivalent to a diminished consumption. -
William Stanley Jevons, 1865. Jevons was concerned that the world might run out of coal. There are many examples where improving efficiency increases consumption. 1) Refrigerators today use about 1/4 the energy they did in 1970. People have responded by buying more and larger refrigerators. Many homes in the U.S. have several. 2) Cars today produce more power using less fuel, a 23% improvement from 1990 to 2000. People responded by buying really big powerful vehicles.
--History has shown that the surest way to induce conservation is through price or policy; both are politically difficult.
--If car ownership in China went from today's 1% to 10%, this would be about the same number of cars as America has.
--In the US there are 250 million cars, and about half a million hybrids. It will take time to change the vehicle fleet to more efficient models.
--Liquid hydrocarbons can't be beat as fuels for transportation because they carry a lot of energy using a small mass. The best batteries today have only 2% of the energy density of liquid hydrocarbon fuel.
--He recommended that the world make a concerted effort to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations using a combination of conservation and decarbonation of the energy supply, but even so, 'safe' levels may be exceeded, and the CO2 will remain in the atmosphere for centuries. Therefore we need a plan B, a response beyond conservation and decarbonization. There are two parts to the response, the first is adaptation: Hardening of infrastructure (insulation, dams, seawalls, aqueducts), shifts in agriculture and population, etc. The second is geoengineering. If the planet's reflectivity could be changed from 30% to 31%, it would counteract the greenhouse gases. This change could be affected in space (orbiting nanomirrors), in the atmosphere (stratospheric aerosol shield) or at the surface (paint buildings white).
--It is rare that I have heard a talk this good.
--I said the university would be happy to pay for any expenses, his flights, taxi, food and so on and he politely declined. It is my job to talk to people, he said, and I live in a world of infinite money.
--During lunch he told a story. 'I went to dinner at Buckingham Palace last Tuesday and
Prince Philip asked me a question. The Prince likes gardening, and he said, if I increase the thinkness of the glass in my greenhouse, it doesn't get any warmer. How can it be that more CO2 in the atmosphere makes the planet warmer?'
Labels: energy
Energy
One thing I like about biking is that it puts you right in the middle of energy efficiency. I just put a speedometer on my bike and you can see it right there on the display. On a little hill I might reach 20 mph, and on a good hill, 25 or more. Against the wind on my way home uphill I am fighting to keep my speed at 8 mph. Sometimes when the light turns green I will sprint out ahead of a car and see how long I can hold it. If things go well, maybe about half a block, but the cars always win. Me, on a featherweight cycle held up on 1/16" spokes, gets beat by a superheavyweight automobile belching yards and sections of exhaust. There's a lot of talk about environmentally friendly cars, and about how you can change your driving style to save fuel, but the basic fact is that the fuel economy of vehicles is dirt-poor. Today's Ford F150 pickup truck gets the same mileage as a Model T, and if you drive green (avoid jackrabbit starts!), it doesn't change the fact that it takes a lot of fuel to roll around in that huge metal box.
Just ran across this graph showing the price of coal.
Labels: bikes, energy
Back to the land
I keep daydreaming about how I would build the farm if I was a pioneer like my great grandad Peter Johanson. I'd be way ahead of my time:
-I'd put a well in the basement. The water from the well would be 38 degrees, year-round. A windmill would pump this water over a galvanized steel box we'd use as a refrigerator.
-We'd be the only farm in the county with an indoor flush toilet, septic tank and drainage field.
-We'd need good insulation just about a row of straw-bales wide. The siding could be lifted off the house to replace the straw every few years.
-I'd plant windbreaks (OK, Peter did this too) around the farmyard and barn, and around the garden plot. Open to the south to admit sunlight. The windbreaks would be multilevel-- high cottonwoods, medium ash, low level cedars. Also an orchard with apple, pear, plum and cherry trees.
-Sheep would keep the lawn cut and we'd have fresh eggs from the chickens.
-I would make heavy duty leather boots with felt linings and turn them into frontier Sorels by dipping them in molten beeswax.
Labels: CGS, energy
A Barrel
Labels: energy
