Dodge the drafts: your semi-daily sustainability report, and hypocrisy meter

About 60 percent of annual energy use in the US goes to heating. So plug the drafts in your house. Weather-strip the doors, seal cracks in the windows, and--most importantly--go to your basement and place insulation between wooden beams above the concrete foundation (that's a HUGE energy-sucking spot).

You can reduce your heating bills by 10 percent by doing that. Over the years, that adds up to quite a bit.

HYPOCRISY METER: I'm a big hypocrite on this one, but there's a caveat. Almost a year ago, Dr. Wife, MD, and I sold our home in Vermont, and moved down to North Carolina with the kids for her residency program. We're renting a house, and I feel like I'm out of bounds investing in these types of improvements for a house someone else owns--even though I know I'll get that money back in energy savings, and I'm helping the environment.

9 degrees in Asheville this morning

The old grease-powered station wagon was none too pleased to start this morning, though it did start. I had to swear at it alot during the whole process. That seemed to help. The car was especially responsive to f-bombs, I found.

Climate change bill? Whatever.

Barbara Boxer said yesterday that a climate change bill, creating a cap and trade system for carbon emissions, could come out of the Senate within weeks. Good luck with that.

At least Rush Limbaugh is intellectually honest about the matter.

I'm for the basic stimulus plan, as heavily flawed as it is. I want to see a new energy grid, and a push toward sustainable energy sources and more fuel efficient cars.

But if I were a Republican member of congress, especially in the Senate, there's no way in hell I'd support the stimulus. I'd want to see Obama go down in flames. Country (and environment) be damned. After the New Deal pulled us out of the Depression, the Democrats remained in control of Congress for four decades. So if this ambitious and sweeping stimulus works, there's the chance that no sitting Republican member of congress will ever wield any power. Ever. No committee chairmanships, no speaker of the house, no majority leader, nothing. The lobbyists won't even kiss up to them and offer them free golfing trips to Scotland anymore. Most members of congress are power-hungry and ambitious. I don't mean this in a bad way. But they wouldn't get elected if they werent. At least Rush Limbaugh is intellectually honest about it.

That's why I can't figure out Republican senators Snowe and Collins from Maine. They're both essentially liberals. If they help the Democrats pass this bill, they might as well flush their chances at any leadership posts down the drain. But if they don't pass the bill (and Maine is hurting right now), they'll totally be acting against their liberal convictions. They might as well just become independents, caucus with the Democrats, and be done with it. They're popular enough (and Maine is turning liberal enough) that it won't hurt their reelections.

Survivors of gas station explosion mourn loss of gas

Survivors Of Gas Station Explosion Mourn Tragic Loss Of Gasoline

Step away from the Cascade! Use phosphorus-free dishwasher detergent. Your semi-daily sustainability tip.

The big-name dishwasher detergents contain high amounts of phosphates--ingredients that kill the oxygen in waterways, and promote algae growth. (A recent study by the state of Minnesota found that dish washing detergent makes up 2 percent of the phosphorus found in its waters.) Meanwhile, Consumer Reports has found that all-natural, biodegradeable dishwater detergents work just as well as the standard phosphate-filled ones.

Hypocrisy meter: I escape unscathed on this one. We use Seventh Generation all-natural dish detergent. It works great. No streaks or spots. (We buy a giant box of the stuff at Costco. As for the environmental impact of shopping at Costco, we'll save that for a later date.)

Wind turbine projects across the country halted. Industry praying for bailout bonanza.

Wind turbine projects are being put on hold just about everywhere due to the Great Recession. The renewable energy industry is just one more group of people praying for bigtime help in the Bailout. According to reports, the Senate plan being crafted is much more generous to renewable energy (about $109 billion in subsidies) than the House one.

Democrats and paying taxes

It's pretty hard to take the moral high road on not reducing taxes when your cabinet members mistakenly forget to pay theirs.

Just a thought.

Going skiing. In North Carolina.

It's my birthday, so I'm cutting out, taking the day off, forcing my six-year-old daughter to play hookie from kindergarten, and going skiing. In North Carolina. On a mountain with all human-made snow (which uses an unconscionable amount of energy to create). But if skiing with my kids on my birthday is wrong, I don't want to be right...

Hang it all! Your semi-daily sustainability tip (and hypocrisy rating).

You can reduce your electricity bills by more than 25 percent if you hang your clothes to dry, as opposed to putting them in the dryer. Your carbon footprint will also be drastically reduced.

You can even do it in the winter, by putting up a drying rack in the basement or in the bathroom.

Practice what I preach? Between June and October, we didn't use the dryer in our house at all. Our electricity bills plummeted. Much more than 25 percent. But in the winter, I've largely been using the dryer. Dr. Wife, MD, puts clothes on a drying rack (she's much more conscientious than I am), but I've been doing most of the laundry lately. I'd give myself a mild to moderate hypocrite rating on this one, given that for half the year, the dryer sits lifeless in our basement.

California discovers that green technologies create jobs. No duh.

The number of green jobs in California grew 10 percent between 2005 and 2007, a new report says. About one-fifth of those jobs were in manufacturing. (Of course, the landscape isn't quite so rosy in 2009.) The report also notes that the companies in California that were the most energy efficient were also immensely more profitable as a result of their efforts.

So let's see:

--Green technology production is rapidly creating jobs--including a sizeble number of manufacturing positions.

--The use of green technology makes companies more profitable.

The Largest US Venture Capital Investments in 2008

Here are the seven largest venture capital investments in the country last year. Notice a trend?

1) Nanosolar Inc. (San Jose, CA) $299,999,700 - Produces solar electricity through solar-cell technology.
2) Solyndra Inc. (Fremont, CA) $219,277,800 - Designs and manufactures photovoltaic technology for solar energy.
3) SolarReserve Inc. (Santa Monica, CA) $140,000,000 - Develops utility-scale renewable energy solar power plants.
4) OptiSolar Inc. (Hayward, CA) $132,000,000 - Manufactures photovoltaic modules and produces power.
5) Range Fuels Inc. (Broomfield, CO) $130,000,200 - Develops cellulosic ethanol production technology.
6) BrightSource Energy Inc. (Oakland, CA) $115,000,000 - Develops utility-scale solar power plants.
7) AVA Solar Inc. (Fort Collins, CO) $103,999,800 - Manufactures thin-film photovoltaic (PV) modules.

Get it while supplies last!

The Washington Times is selling a commemorative coffee table book on the W. presidency.

“W” is packed with gripping pictures and stories all beautifully presented in this historical keepsake presentation of all eight years of the Presidency of George W. Bush. Be the first to own this memorable book and be proud to share it with your friends and family.

They're also selling a W. commemorative cigar. No word on if there's a Clinton cigar, too.

Compost! Your semi-daily environmental tip

Compost your vegetable waste instead of throwing it in the trash (or chewing it up in the garbage disposal). One third of waste that goes to landfills could be composted (and in a landfill, it doesn't biodegrade because it's buried, and not exposed to air).

--So composting reduces trash costs, and the amount of energy (and emissions) to transport trash.
--Compost rich soil also requires less water for irrigation.
--It reduces the need for fertilizer (which requires a lot of energy--and chemicals--to produce and ship).
--It captures more carbon dioxide in the soil, keeping it from enhancing global warming.

Practice what I preach? I generally compost all organic waste. We have a ceramic jar in the kitchen, which I empty into a black composting bin in the back yard. Last week, though, it was cold outside and I didn't feel like heading outside. So for a couple of days when the jar was full, I didn't empy it and threw all of the vegetable scraps into the trash (when Dr. Wife, MD's back was turned). I'd say I'm not so much of a hypocrite on this one.

Obama allows states to self-govern on emissions

For the past several years, the Republicans (at the behest of the auto companies) have denied states--most notably California and Vermont--their rights in setting their own car emissions (and fuel efficiency) standards. Today the Obama people are going to reverse this stance. It's a big deal.

Fan mail

I got this friendly note from a (not so) big fan of the latest Outside magazine online column I wrote, about grease-car drivers not paying road taxes. I think being called a "green peace, tree-hugger" is supposed to be a bad thing here.

Hey Greg,
I just read your Greasy Rider Q&A from January 23, 2009 regarding tax evasion. I thought your high and mighty answer to a serious question was pretty crappy. I hope you don't think you'll be able to convert people over to your green ethos with an attitude like that. The only thing you're going to do is prove that green peace, tree-huggers like you have their heads in the sky and aren't properly grounded.
I though it was a legitimate question deserving of a serious answer, and instead you flippantly turned into a bashing of the people who don't agree with your beliefs. Maybe you should try again.

No fair!

Sarah Palin has hired a literary agent who's now peddling a book deal for the Alaska governor. Industry insiders estimate she could wrangle as high as a $7 million advance. First of all, I think the word "literary" probably has no business being used in the same sentence as "Sarah Palin." Second of all, $7 million? Are you kidding? That's just not fair to hard working hacks like me!

EPA chief update

The Senate will move ahead with the proposed EPA chief's nomination.

Car thought part 2

Creating a car that's as good as (or even slightly better than) a Toyota or Honda isn't going to get people to buy American anytime soon.

Instead, US auto companies have to create revolutionary products. (And ones that are so elegant and beautiful that everyone wants one.) That's what Apple does in the consumer electronics industry. It enjoyed its best quarter ever at the end of 2008.

The auto companies need a Steve Jobs-type in charge. Someone who's instinctively tapped into what Americans crave.

Car thought part 1

Imagine what US automaker sales would truly be if sales to the federal goverment, state governments, local goverments, police forces, fire departments, public works departments, highway departments, and rental car companies were taken out of the equation.

GOP senators anonymously blocking climate change action. Already.

GOP senators have put an anonymous hold on the nomination of Lisa Jackson to head the EPA. She supports taking strident action against climate change. For instance she's for allowing states to set their own auto emissions standards (something the Bush administration fought tooth and nail against in court, because Republicans apparently don't believe in states' rights on this matter). Thus the reason for the hold.

Plastic before paper? Yes. Your semi-daily sustainability tip.

Okay, you're going grocery shopping and you've forgotten that all-important reusable shopping bag at home. (You really should carry at least one extra bag in your Prius. You do drive a Prius, right?) So when the cashier asks you for paper or plastic, you automatically choose paper, because it's better for the environment. Wrong choice. Though plastic takes, like, 17 quadrillion years to biodegrade (alright, I exaggerate), here's why it's slightly less of an awful alternative: producing a plastic bag requires 20 percent of the energy that producing a paper one does; paper bag production creates 50 times more water pollutants; and it takes 91 percent less energy to recycle a plastic bag than a paper one. You can find all of the info here.

Practice what I preach? I practically bust the hypocrisy meter on this one. I now get plastic bags instead of paper when I forget to bring my reusable cloth shopping bag. But truth be told, I've never recycled a plastic bag. (In my town, I can't throw it into the recycling bin I keep by my trash can. I need to take it back to the grocery store, and stuff it into a special "plastic bag recycling bin" there.)

Should I stop eating sushi?

From my green advice column on Outside magazine's web site:

Okay, so 90 percent of the world's large fish are gone, says Sylvia Earle. Do I need to stop eating sushi? Santa Fe, New Mexico

That's a great question. At this rate, you really have two options. A) Keep savoring every last morsel of tuna in each maguro roll, and eventually watch the planet’s big fish disappear. Or B) Stop eating tuna altogether and still eventually watch the planet’s big fish disappear.

A famed marine biologist and former chief scientist for NOAA, Sylvia Earle is no alarmist—it's her facts that are alarming. Since the rise of commercial fisheries in the 1950s, stocks of large predatory fish have dropped 90 percent. Overfishing is rampant, and it's largely driven by the luxury food market and government subsidies, she points out.

Don't believe her? Then follow the money. According to a recent UN and World Bank report, the world's commercial fisheries are now losing $50 billion a year because they have to spend so much more capital to find what little is left of the oceans' vanishing fish stocks. The Japanese government gives out nearly $3 billion a year to its floundering fishing fleet, the EU gives about $1.7 billion, and the US gives $1 billion.

Earle has stopped eating fish, but neither she nor you can change the world by turning down sushi. Instead, you should follow her lead by mobilizing, enhancing awareness of the problem, and becoming politically active in the solution. (This advice could really be applied to any facet of environmentalism.) Unless governments like ours become more aggressive in tackling the problem sustainably—and do it soon—big fish will vanish, and our tax dollars will have subsidized the commercial fishing industry to its own demise.

Gray wolf gets reprieve

On inauguration day, the Obama people have blocked all pending environmental rule changes that were being implemented by the Bushies. One of the rule changes was the plan to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list.

No sense of irony

So my son and I are at the organic grocery store yesterday. I've got my reusable shopping bag in hand, and my locally produced organic food on the register conveyor belt. My cashier seems like a nice young girl, with her dreadlocked hair shoved inside a huge knitted cap atop her head. My son, who's four, grabs one of those wooden dividers that you can use on the conveyor belt, so your stuff won't get mixed up with the customer's stuff behind you. He starts playing air guitar with it. He looks pretty funny, and the cashier and I share a laugh. Then, surprisingly, he turns the stick into a gun and aims it at the cashier. My wife and I, being the pacifists that we are, don't have any toy guns at home, and we don't exactly play shooting games. I'm not sure where he learned to turn a wooden divider into an M-16, but there you have it. The cashier is totally appalled, and gives me this look that says, "I can't believe you teach your son stuff like that!"

So I turn to him and say, "No, we ever don't do that. That's not nice at all. Say you're sorry to the nice woman."

The cashier says, "No worries, it's all good." But clearly, she's really bummed out. A little more than she should be, frankly, given that my son's only four years old. (Did I mention that already?)

Then I say to my boy. "We never, ever aim guns at anyone. You got me? Unless they're Islamic terorrists of course, or communists, or immigrant thieves who have come to steal our jobs."

He doesn't know what the hell I'm talking about. But the cashier--with no sense of irony--starts not-so quietly freaking out. She can't get us out of her sight fast enough. Ah well...

Save the Planet, Damnit tip for the day.

Stop drinking bottled water. More than 38 billion plastic water bottles are thrown away by Americans each year. They can take a thousand years to biodegrade. More than 17 million barrels of oil are burned producing bottled water in the US each year, and 2.5 million tons of greenhouse gases go into the air.

Get an aluminum SIGG bottle, fill it, and carry it around with you, instead. If you don't trust the tap, put a water filtration system in your house. You'll save money over buying the bottled stuff pretty quickly.

Practice what I preach? I bought a water bottle yesterday for the kids. They were thirsty and nagging me (because I had just bought them popcorn). It was Dasani, by Coke--which is water that actually comes from the municipal Atlanta water supply, apparently, not mountain springs. (Oh the irony.) It pained me to do it, and was the first time I had bought water in a while. We have a bunch of SIGG water bottles that we carry with us everywhere.
On the hypocrite meter (the higher number, the more hypocritical) I'd give myself a 2 out of 10.

The Save the Planet Damnit tip for the day will become a regular feature.

My Mercedes no likey the cold

With temperatures in Asheville dropping down to about zero a bunch last week, we weren't burning much vegetable oil last week. In fact, the veggie car was pissed off about even having to start up in the morning. I made Dr. Wife, MD, drive it to work, because the heat takes forever to start pumping out, and I didn't want to be uncomfortable when I was carting around the kids to a couple of things last week. So I took the Highlander hybrid instead. I could toast marshmallows on the heat vents of that thing.

Trashy energy

A Massachusetts-based company has created a system for generating gas and electric power through trash. It's about the size of a tractor trailer and can be used by schools, hospitals, or large businesses. On the one hand, it saves money by creating cheap energy, while also reducing trash removal costs. It'll answer about 15 percent of a building's energy needs (depending on how many units and the size of the building).

Basically, you put the trash (without metal or glass, but just about everything else) into the contraption, it turns the trash into pellets, and then uses those pellets as fuel (using a process I'm too dumb to understand called gasification, rather than burning them).

It'll pay for itself within four years.

My computer was mauled

My computer was mauled by many nasty viruses. They even blocked me from downloading and installing software to kill them. It sent me offline for a few days, there, but everything's up and running now.

Greasy Rider excerpt, page 1

The kids have a snow day today, so instead of my usual enlightening posts, I bring you an excerpt from page one of Greasy Rider:

'Grease on earth'

I drive a 1985 Mercedes 300TD wagon. It runs on waste oil from restaurant deep-fat fryers. Like nearly all (of the many) kooky ideas that arise in my cozy Cape-style home near Burlington, Vermont, the one to convert a diesel car to burn grease came from my wife, Ann Marie. She is a devout saver of the earth. She feels guilty swatting a mosquito. She cleans and reuses Ziploc bags. She forces me to use organic toilet paper, which is far from cottony soft.

I began lobbying for a second car not long after she was accepted to medical school at the University of Vermont because our soon-to-be-crazier schedules would no longer allow us to get by on one vehicle."I want a pickup truck," I told her. "A big, old one."She shook her head. "Why would you ever need a pickup truck?" Having been married to her for seven years, I knew exactly what the question and her body language implied: (1) a pickup truck burns too much fossil fuel, so it wouldn't be cheap to drive or environmentally friendly, and (2) I, of all people, would have absolutely no use for one."What do you mean?" I asked in a defensive tone. "I could totally use one. I'd haul stuff. I'd get compost for the garden. I'd clear brush from the yard. I'd...get a snow plow."

I didn't really plan to get a snow plow. And we could borrow a friend's pickup on the extremely rare occasion when we needed to haul something or clear brush. But I yearned to feel the power of a V-8 engine, revving at the slightest touch from my leaden foot. I dreamed of shifting into four-wheel drive, and crushing a Prius beneath my fat tires. My truck would be red, its chrome bumpers gleaming so brightly they'd blind passing motorists. I looked pleadingly into Ann Marie's eyes, but her stony expression didn't soften.

She said we should buy a diesel and convert to vegetable oil. Therewas an article in one of her green living magazines about someonewho had done it. "You'll be the only guy on the block with a veggie car," she argued. I didn't care. "You're always ranting about politics. Now you can walk the walk." All right, I was listening."You'll save a lot of money." Very good point. Then came the kicker. "Dick Cheney will hate you for it." Done deal.

In many ways, I'm the yang to her yin. I only take a stand onsomething when I think I'm getting screwed, and to me, potentially paying four dollars per gallon at the pump--and watching my hard-earned money get split between already-rich oil company executives and already-richer sheikhs--is getting screwed. Burning used french-fry grease did seem intriguing. Restaurants usually pay to get it disposed of, so they're happy to give it away for free, Ann Marie told me. Yes, free. As in, 'I won't have to pay for the fuel that goes into my car.' While it's true that I did have a slightly more than passing concern for the environment, I mostly saw a veggie-powered car as my chance to stick it to The Man.

Deep thought

If the Chevy Volt really ends up costing more than $30,000, who's seriously going to buy the thing? My old Mercedes cost me about $4,000. Let's just say that at Chevy's prices, I won't be making the switch anytime soon...

Chevy Volt will create new US jobs?

GM announced yesterday that it will assemble its lithium ion batteries for the Chevy Volt in the US--creating new American jobs. They imply that they're doing it out of benevolence, but the fact is, it's cheaper for American companies to produce first-generation technologies in the US than to farm it overseas. That's why sustainable and "green" innovations hold so much promise for our economy. This is yet one more example.

Ah, the good old days of SUV tax breaks. How I miss them!

Remember when the Bushies created massive tax breaks for SUV owners? If the vehicle was huge enough (over 60000 pounds--so it had to be a Land Cruiser, or Hummer, or something like that) you could deduct $75,000 from your taxes. In other words, the federal government was encouraging people to buy (and companies to produce) the biggest, 10-mile-per-gallon behemoths on the market. That was in 2003.

Now, of course, the Bushies are pointing the (middle) finger at the auto companies for having been too reliant on big SUVs.

Like I've said before, I'm gonna miss these people.

Pirates release oil tanker! But the ransom's more about getting the crew back than the crude back

The Pirates released the Saudi supertanker (carrying the equivalent of nearly one day's production of Saudi oil) over the weekend. The payment they received: a measly $3 million. Though hijacking an oil tanker ratcheted up the world's attention (and media coverage) to their acts, apparently oil doesn't fetch much ransom--given the fact that there's plenty more of it coming out of the ground, for now. (The $3 million was probably more about getting the crew back than the crude back.)

Still I was wrong in my prediction that they wouldn't get a cent for the tanker.

Ironically, several of the tanker pirates then drowned in rough seas during their escape to land. The body of one washed ashore with $153,000 in his pocket.

Algae-fueled jet tested

On Friday, the first passenger jet partly powered by algae-based biofuel took off (and yes, landed safely) in Houston. The test was run by Continental Airlines, on a Boeing 737. The airline companies have suddenly become aggressive in their attempts to find alternative fuels. (They realize that going green could potentially save them a lot of money.)

What's interesting is that when I was working on Greasy Rider, I interviewed one of the top biofuel guys for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (the federal government's top energy research lab). In the book, I remark how NREL is totally not swinging for the fences with biofuels, sadly. In fact, during my interview, the biofuels guy told me that no airline would be interested in biofuels for jets because "no one wants to mess with jet fuel." Maybe he should have talked to the airlines, before making that assumption. Because it sounds like Continental does, and Air New Zealand, and Japan Airlines.

Best wishes W., Hello Tiger Woods guy.

Greasy Rider is nonfiction book of the week, join in the forum!

DearReader.com, an online book club connected to 3,000 public libraries across the country, has chosen Greasy Rider as its nonfiction book of the week for next week. Click here on Monday, join the club, and you'll be able to discuss the book online. I'll also be making entries there throughout the week.

The travel offset ripoff

Excerpt from my Q&A column on Outside online:

What's really happening when I offset my travel at a website or with an airline?

Dear question-asker,
Thank you for lobbing this softball right into my rhetorical wheelhouse. The quick answer to your question is that I haven't the foggiest clue what's really happening when you offset your travel and—problematically—pretty much no one else does, either. So next time you consider the purchase of carbon credits, keep these three words in mind: Don't do it. Nothing annoys me more than to see some fancy event like the Academy Awards boast that it’s completely carbon neutral because its organizers bought carbon offsets for everyone there. Who are they kidding? In my book Greasy Rider I even take the prophet Al Gore to task for claiming he leads a carbon neutral life because he buys offsets to cancel out his private-jet travel and immense energy consumption. Some critics—me included—compare this system to medieval indulgences, when rich sinners were absolved from bad deeds by paying others to perform good works. Except in this case, the so called "good works" are dubious.

The largest of many problems with carbon offsets is that there's no regulatory agency in the US overseeing where your money goes. If you spend $5 to plant a tree, how much of that money is going to the actual tree planting? Is the company actually planting a tree? Was the land cleared by a gas-guzzling bulldozer before the tree was planted? What kind of tree was planted? Was there a bunch of carbon dioxide in the soil that was unwittingly released during the planting?

The Tufts Climate Initiative at Tufts University found that half of offset companies operate for profit, and some allocate up to 75 percent of revenue on overhead. There are no set rates for what should be paid to offset, say, someone's flight from New York to Los Angeles. And it's not unheard of for an offset company to direct its funds to the cleanup of a dump that was already required by law to be cleaned by its owners, or the construction of a wind farm that was already going to be built, anyway.

Anja Kollmuss, one of the Tufts report's authors told me, "If I could give advice to people, I would say, do offsets as a last resort because they cost you money. There are so many ways you can reduce your emissions that will save you money, like by buying an energy-efficient refrigerator, or insulating your home better." Well said.

Why the pirates do what they do

There's an interview in this week's Newsweek with a Somali pirate leader. It provides some pretty good insight into the motivations behind these guys.

The pirate leader (should we call him a pirate captain?) said that all of his gang were once fishermen, and that they originally only targeted foreign fishing vessels (which have nearly depleted the waters off Somalia). Then they realized they could make more money by boarding bigger boats.

His final comment is on the captured oil tanker. They've threatened to empty it of oil if they don't get their ransom:

And we know the risk of spilling the oil shipment. But when evil is the only solution, you do evil. That is why we are doing piracy. I know it is evil, but it is a solution.

Like I've said before, consider this a preview of things to come. As resources dwindle (whether it's fish or fresh water or, some day, oil) people will resort to doing bad stuff to survive. "When evil is the only solution, you do evil."

Bushies heart vast swaths of ocean.

It's great that the president moved this week to protect huge swaths of the Pacific. (Places that aren't especially in peril, where there are no corporate interests in fishing or fossil fuel extraction. Hey, it's great that this is being done, but it won't change the abysmal Bushie environmental legacy, or even make for a convincing talking point in his defense.

Oh Montana!

The outgoing presidential administration has just flipped the bird at Montanans with both hands. That's quite a feat. The first bird-flip is a new last-minute change to Forest Service policy that will make it easier for developers to turn forest land into housing subdivisions. The new rule is specifically designed to let Plum Creek Timber in Montana to pave 900 miles of roads through Forest Service land, which will open huge swaths of land owned by the company to luxury home development. (Think of the ecological carnage of cutting the trees for the roads, clearing the land for the homes, and the fuel burned by the people driving their Land Rovers out to these homes.) Bottom line, too, is that the people of Montana don't want it.

The second bird-flip is the administration's new decision to allow 18,000 natural gas wells to be drilled on 1.5 million acres of federall owned land in southwestern Montana.

"The Powder River Basin holds a type of natural gas known as coal-bed methane, which companies can extract only after pumping vast quantities of water from underground aquifers that trap the gas. That's the same water ranchers in the arid region depend on to irrigate fields and fill stock ponds."

Bushies to ranchers: sorry. Ooops, no we're not!

Will your town stop taking your recycling soon?

For quite a while, recycling programs have been money-makers for municipalities. Old newspapers, plastic, and glass were mostly shipped to China, who had a huge appetite for the stuff. With the rotten economy, the bottom has officially fallen out of the recycling market. There's no demand now, and city trash collection agencies are losing money by picking up your recycling. It shouldn't be too soon, now, before recycling programs are phased out by some municipalities...

US Government: climate change happening faster than anticipated

Those darn scientists at that super-liberal group known as The United States Government. Once again, they're letting a little thing like science get in the way of politics and ideology. How dare they?

The USGA has determined that climate change might be occuring more quickly than anticipated. Sea levels could rise by as much as four feet within the next century. The American Southwest, which has been under an incredible drought for the past decade, will get drier.

I'm just glad that I won't be around for the worst of this climate change stuff. It'll be my kids' problem. Good luck to them.

Arsenic and mercury-filled coal sludge inundates Tennessee town. Feds say everything is okay. Nothing to see here.

Here's the background: a TVA-run coal-fired power plant in the eatern Tennessee town of Kingston was depositing their coal ash waste into a giant retaining lake. The earthen dam holding it together gave way, and the sludge poured out (more than a billion gallons of it), covering an immense swath of land (and draining into the Emory and Tennessee rivers). The sludge contains mercury, lead, and arsenic. But the EPA says there's nothing to worry about. The locals are at no risk. And their drinking water is fine. And the Tennessee Valley Authority is arresting people taking pictures of the site.

I just love that clean coal technology!

Say it ain't so! Oil drops below $40 a barrel.

Oil has dropped below $40 a barrel. My friends at OPEC and Exxon Mobil are freaking out, no doubt. I'm freaking out, too. With every penny that the price of gas drops at the pump, I get a little less smug as I'm driving around in my station wagon that's powered by waste grease I get for free from a local restaurant. Who cares if I'm radically reducing my carbon footprint?

China sending three warships to battle the Pirates

Yes, China is conducting the largest mission of the People's Liberation Army Navy abroad ever by sending three warships off the coast of Somalia. This extension of Chinese military power has to be sending a shiver down the spines of some folks at the Pentagon.

It's about China protecting its ships. It's not about the oil, which isn't even mentioned in this Associated Press article. It's never about the oil.

For some context yet again. Most of the pirates are former fishermen, who looked for other work after the big fish disappeared off the coast of Somalia, thanks to foreign commercial fisheries. About 90 percent of the world's big fish have vanished in the last 50 years--any fisherman can pretty much confirm this for you.

I'm not condoning the acts of the pirates. But this is a tiny example of what happens when resources become depleted...

Yes, we've sunk that low

How sad is it that people are excited simply because Obama's new cabinet members are experienced and competent at what they do.

Especially when it's inconvenient.

“The truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources—it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient—especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us."

Land speculation, anyone?

If the sea levels rise a couple of feet over the next few decades, where can I buy cheap property that's inland now, but will be awesome oceanfront property sometime in the near future?

New science advisor understands that the sky actually is falling

Obama's new science advisor is John Holdren, the director of Woods Hole Research Center, and director of the Program on Science, Technology and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He's one of the world's leading global warming experts. Judging by the president-elect's staffing choices, he's as aware--and unnerved--by the potential of global warming as anyone. And his advisors aren't going to let him do nothing, or they won't be around for long.

Here's an op-ed Holdren wrote for the Boston Globe this summer, called "Convincing the Climate Change Skeptics."

He writes: "The extent of unfounded skepticism about the disruption of global climate by human-produced greenhouse gases is not just regrettable, it is dangerous. It has delayed - and continues to delay - the development of the political consensus that will be needed if society is to embrace remedies commensurate with the challenge. The science of climate change is telling us that we need to get going."

This just in: low-flow shower head revelation!

I've made a great new discovery about my low-flow shower head: my showers can be twice as long before I run out of hot water from my 50-gallon hot water heater. So instead of taking 15-minute-long showers, like I did with the old shower head, I now take 30-minute-long ones before the water runs cold! Brilliant!

Joe the solar panel installer

The basic philosophy of the upcoming stimulus package goes something like this: our old-school manufacturing base, born at the turn of the 20th century, is dead. The model T isn't coming through that door again, folks. USS Steel ain't gonna be ramping up jobs in Pittsburgh--and as far as the textile industry goes, I think even "Made in America" tags are now stitched in China.

We're a country that buys more than it produces. (In this global market, that's almost like a household constantly spending more than it makes. Hmmm...) Now this system is imploding, because the false wealth of real estate is gone.

So government investment will focus on infrastructure, to make us more productive--so we can create goods more cheaply, competitively, and efficiently. And it'll push forward (through incentives, and research dollars) an agenda to make us less dependent on foreign fuel (to reduce the trade deficit, among other things) and put us in the lead in manufacturing and creating green technologies. Maybe America's Model T of this century is the solar panel. Or the wind turbine. Or some other technology not yet even created. The people behind the upcoming stimulus are hoping to kick-start American manufacturing dominance for a new "green" world.

For an example of the green economy's potential, here's an article from the jobs section of the Times, talking about all of the new work being created by the solar industry. It says that even during this recession, business is booming for solar panel makers and installers.

But here's the big, troubling question: Is it possible for a government to be able to kick-start a new manufacturing industry in a country? Has it ever succesfully happened before? Or does such a process have to happen naturally and organically, through market-driven means? (Meaning, if times are tough enough, American entrepreneurs will bootstrap themselves up to dominance through their own ingenuity--and not through government stimulus and intervention.) Is the artificial creation of a green economy kind of a Soviet-lite philosopy? Or, given the situation--both economic, and in terms of the looming environmental catastrophe--do we have no choice but to follow this route?

We Americans often think we can change the world just by exerting our will--whether it's about democracy and human rights around the world, or even economically (home and abroad). But change and growth comes through a natural process. You can throw fertilizer on a seedling in a flower garden to make it flourish more quickly, but you can't put a gun to it and say "Bloom now! Or else!" The last eight years should have taught us that.

Ouch, this all makes my head hurt. I make a promise to all 16 of you regular readers (hi mom and dad): only low-calorie posts from now on.

The Story of Stuff

Have you seen this yet? It's called "The Story of Stuff." An amazing video of the environmental impact that goes into the stuff we consume and then throw out. The system is called the materials economy. The narrator follows our stuff from extraction, to production, to distribution, to consumption, to disposal. Be forewarned: it's 20 minutes long.

Shaping young minds

Today I'll be videoconferencing with 71 students enrolled in the "Literature and the Environment" course taught by Richard Kentz at Union Mine High School near Placerville, California. Mr. Kentz actually assigned them to read "Greasy Rider." Unfortunately for his students, there's no Cliff's Notes for Greasy Rider. At least not yet.

That's right, I'm shaping young minds (although in fairness, it should be pointed out that the book is far from being classified as "literature").

Not to be alarmist, but...

Enough water has melted from the Arctic, Antarctic, and Greenland since 2003 to fill the Chesapeake 21 times. That equates to trillions--with a 't'--of gallons of water.

Stunning.

But all of this is reversible down the road if we use ingenious ways to block out the sun, and create global cooling, right? Surely we can control nature if we really, really want to. Let's wait until there's a huge crisis and see...

What would Michael Pollan think?

Tom Vilsack from Iowa named as Obama's agriculture nominee. That's good for corn-based ethanol. (If corn-based ethanol is your thing.) As for corn subsidies and the prevalence of high-fructose corn syrup--which could be linked to the obesity epidemic in America--that's probably not going anywhere, either.

How can you reduce water consumption? Eat more fiber.

Another entry from the Greasy Rider column on Outside magazine's web site:

Q: What one equipment change can I make in my home to reduce my water usage most?

A: For the average American, it's throwing out the sprinkler. There's no doubt a special place in eco-hell for the guy with the greenest lawn in Las Vegas, probably in a spot next to the designer of the Bellagio's Dancing Waters (though I do so love watching those 1,200 fountains ejaculating spray hundreds of feet above that 22-million-gallon, eight-acre man-made lake in the middle of the desert). A study by the AWWA Research Foundation tells us that 58 percent of household water consumption in America goes to irrigating our yards.

If you insist on a green lawn, look into a graywater system, which recycles from sinks, bathtubs, showers, and the washing machine to irrigate the yard and garden. The installation cost usually runs from $1,000 to $5,000, but like so many other environmental measures, it'll eventually pay for itself in savings.

Inside the home, it's the toilet. About one-quarter of the water we use is flushed down the drain, which amounts to about 18.5 gallons per person a day. A low-flow toilet slashes that number. For those of you who complain that you usually have to flush twice with low-flows—thus negating the water savings—I’ve got two suggestions: 1) eat more fiber, and 2) look at the AWWA survey. It found that homes with low-flow toilets barely flushed more times per day than homes with regular ones, and consumed half as much toilet water.

Pirates, we'll get that oil tanker back!

Riding high from its many successful armed interventions with other failed states around the world in the past seven years, the current US administration has suggested conducting military raids into Somalia to stop the pirates.

Condi is going to try to put together a Coalition of the Willing for it. Good luck with that one.

Remember: it's about the safety of ships, it's not about the oil. It's never about the oil.

What? The Interior Department cooked the books on endangered species? That can't be possible!

I know it sounds incredible, but it's true: a top Bushie official violated ethics codes (if not the law) to cook the books on environmental information to meet the administration's political agenda. Yes, shocking. This time it's regarding endangered species, according to the Interior Department's own inspector general. The official, Julie McDonald, had no background in natural science, yet the Associated Press says she...

"...did pervasive harm to the department's morale and integrity and may have risked the well-being of species with her agenda, Interior Inspector General Earl Devaney said in his report out Monday.
The Interior Department last year reversed seven rulings that denied endangered species increased protection, after an investigation found that MacDonald had applied political pressure in those cases. The new report looked at nearly two dozen other endangered species decisions not examined in the earlier report. It found MacDonald directly interfered with at least 13 decisions and indirectly affected at least two more."

Apparently, her name has turned into a verb at her office. If you're a senior career worker in the Interior Department, and she comes down hard on you to lie or withhold information, you've been "McDonalded."

Devaney said "MacDonald's zeal to advance her agenda has caused considerable harm to the integrity of the Endangered Species Act program and to the morale and reputation" of the Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as potential harm to animals under the Endangered Species Act.
"Her heavy-handedness has cast doubt on nearly every ESA decision issued during her tenure," from 2002 until 2007, the report said.

In a way, I'm really going to miss these people. The polar bears aren't, though.

The "green dream team"

Obama's set to announce his environmental "dream team" of cabinet nominees today. Here's my concern with B.O.'s top officials so far: yes, they're all immensely smart, passionate and skilled. But do they know how to be managers? That'll be the key to whether or not they can really do a heckuva job. Has any of them, say, been the Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association--or something similarly challenging?

Low-flow shower update

I'm getting used to it now. I'm now waiting for the water cost savings to start leaving me flush with cash. I think I'll buy an Escalade with the money.

What's greener, a fake Christmas tree or a real one?

Get the real deal. Fake trees are made with PVC, which doesn't biodegrade. They also often contain lead. Real trees do biodegrade, and new trees are then planted in their place, soaking up carbon dioxide.

Though cutting down one of those 200-year-old spruces to plop into Rockefeller Center is truly a sin.

Consider the refrigerator

There's a great New Yorker story on Obama's next energy secretary (who happens to be a Nobel prize winning physicist). Over the summer he gave a talk on energy efficiency and related a story about the refrigerator. It consumes 15 percent of household electricity. In the 70s, California raised efficiency standards, and the fridge makers got pissed off. They said it couldn't be done, and it would hurt the consumer. Soon, standards were set nationwide. Then, as he says, the job was passed "to the engineers from the lobbyists, and this is what you get:"

The size of the average American refrigerator has increased by more than ten per cent, while the price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has been cut in half. Meanwhile, energy use has dropped by two-thirds.
The transition to more efficient fridges, Chu pointed out, has saved the equivalent of all the energy generated in the United States by wind turbines and solar cells. “I cannot impress upon you how important energy efficiency is,” he said.

Efficiency.

Here's the video of the talk he gave. It's interesting stuff. He'll be the first energy secretary who recognizes the dire urgency of combatting climate change--from an economic, security, and humanitarian perspective. He also understands the immense economic opportunities we can reap from carbon-friendly technologies.

Lost Greasy Rider video footage discovered!

Here's the long lost footage of Iggy and me finally reaching the BioFuel Oasis in California in the wagon, after begging for oil across the country, only to find it closed. (Iggy is the one riding shotgun.) Pardon the ripe language at the very end.

Auto bailout dead? We'll see

The car companies say they need $25 billion in loans--or about 3 percent of what Congress is dropping in the laps of the financial industry, with almost no strings attached.

One in ten jobs in this country is connected to the auto industry.

The veggie car is flooding!

We've had about two inches of rain over the last day, with another inch or two expected to fall. And for some reason, water is flooding around the floor mats. Enough so that the kids need to wear rain boots in the car, and they keep dropping pencils on the floor to see if they float. (To answer your question: we now know that pencils do float.) I'm at a loss for a solution.

Are you planning to buy a GM car anytime soon? Didn't think so.

You get the feeling that the big loan to GM is more about preventing a panic in the markets at this critical time than actually bailing out the company? The GM we know right now is a goner.

I've covered the auto industry a little in various capacities. It takes years and years for car companies to build owner loyalty. (And car owners by nature tend to be loyal to one or two brands. This is a fact of the business that the companies constantly obsess over.) It takes years and years for car companies to lose owner loyalty, too. (In the case of GM, it took decades.) Even if they started making amazing cars (not SUVs or trucks, but cars), it would take a very long time before consumers bought into them (or bought them) on a mass scale. (Let alone the fact that people aren't buying cars right now.)

GM will either need to file for bankruptcy, or find a way to reorganize completely without the government officially calling it bankruptcy (this new bailout plan does nothing of the sort). This is inevitable. In the meantime, we'll be dishing the company more bridge loans to nowhere until the rest of the economy starts to turn around.

Do you really see any other course for this wreck? Happy 100th Birthday General Motors.

The truth

The Green Commando

A guy (or woman) broke into the most highly guarded power plant in the UK and shut it down--in the process, he reduced Britain's carbon footprint by 2 percent. The power plant is coal fired. It was back up running after four hours. The person left a card saying "no new coal." No one knows who did it, but he's being called Climate Man.

What do you call this? Eco terrorism? Civil disobedience? Both?

It underscores just how nasty coal-fired plants are for the atmosphere. It's also a scary reminder of just how vulnerable even Great Britain's infrastructure is.

I guess it means less shoveling, though

New England is losing 8.9 snow-covered winter days per decade right now, according to a study just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Think about it: that's nearly one less snow-covered day per year. What a breathtaking (and scary) statistic.

Green humor

Mr. Obama, meet the last Democrat to win the presidential popular vote

Al Gore met with Obama yesterday in Chicago, to talk about climate change. Personally, I think Obama's already aware of it. No word on whether the two discussed whose mansion sucks more energy: Gore's or the White House.

Also no word on what transportation Gore used to get to Chicago for the meeting. Maybe he took his biodiesel-powered yacht.

The Skeeter Beater

Taken from my Greasy Rider column for Outside magazine's web site:

Q: Is there a DEET alternative I can really trust when I go hiking in the Costa Rican jungle?

A: I can't speak for Costa Rican insects, but I can tell you what the mosquitoes and no see 'ems in my back yard don't like—and my back yard happens to hold the unofficial title as Buggiest in Asheville, North Carolina. Last summer, whenever I let my five-year-old daughter and four-year-old son run out the back door for more than five minutes without bug spray on them, they'd come back inside covered with welts. Forget DEET, I was ready to dip them head-first into a pool of DDT—like the baby Achilles in a chemical River Styx—if it meant that their arms and legs would no longer make them look like smallpox victims. But Dr. Wife, MD, is much heavier into the whole "organic" thing, and wants our kids' DNA to remain relatively humanoid, so she instructed me to find a natural alternative.

The National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides—not a fan of DEET—recommends an herbal repellent like All Terrain’s pleasantly scented Herbal Armor, which is sold at many natural food stores. It employs citronella, peppermint, soybean oil, and lemongrass to scare off bugs. On the other hand, the Centers for Disease Control approves of only one natural remedy for mosquitoes: oil of lemon eucalyptus, like what’s found in the pungent and aptly named Repel Lemon Eucalyptus. (The CDC recommends that kids under three years old shouldn’t be exposed to Lemon Eucalyptus, though.)

After buying these two products, my logical next step was to perform a controlled test on the kids. So I sprayed one arm and leg on each of them with Herbal Armor and the other arm and leg with Repel. (Neither had any idea what was going on. Kids are so trusting.) The results: After a half hour of solid protection, the bugs began devouring the Herbal Armor-covered side like entrants in a Coney Island hot dog eating contest, while nearly three hours passed before Repel began losing its potency. When Dr. Wife, MD, came home that evening, she was mystified to see that the kids were suffering from bug bites over only half of their bodies. ("You’re right, honey, that's awfully strange. I have no idea why that happened.") As a result, my anecdotal conclusion is that a lemon eucalyptus-based solution like Repel will probably be effective for you in Costa Rica, as long as you’re more than three years old, and you reapply after a couple of hours. Though to be safe, I'd carry along a something with DEET in it as well.

The latest on those pirates

Yesterday, the EU placed an armada of military ships off Somalia to combat the pirates--so the pirates have moved their operations further south, expanding their base of operations, and giving the armada a nearly impossible amount of sea to protect.

One of the biggest ironies of this whole piracy thing is that there's an environmental angle: Many of the pirates are former tuna fishermen who say they had to find another line of work because all of the tuna stocks off the Somali coast have been depleted. (Nearly 90 percent of the world's big fish have disappeared over the past 50 years from overfishing. This isn't alarmism. Any honest commercial fisherman will acknowledge this. They want a sustainable solution for this problem as much as anyone.)

It's an age-old formula: a depletion of natural resources leads to war, violence, and crime. That's why the federal government believes perhaps the biggest threat to our national security in the long-run is climate change.

Got some extra cash?

If you're among the few who actually has money to invest in the stock market's (hopefully) rock bottom prices--the best bet in the renewable energy industry is said to be First Solar.

Here's what Forbes says:

For now, almost everyone's favourite pick remains First Solar (nasdaq: FSLR - news - people ), which has everything going for it except perhaps valuation, they say. The company is often compared to Intel Corp (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) , on which it has modelled its manufacturing strategy for making solar cells.
First Solar produces solar cells used to form photovoltaic panels at a cost approaching $1.00 per watt compared to the $2.50/watt industry average, analysts say. Gross margins remain intact around 50 percent while other players face compression.
"If you want to play one stock in the U.S., Europe or China, it has to be First Solar," says Mark Bachman of Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon.
Valuation has long been First Solar's thorn. But the stock, which traded above $300 earlier this year and at a valuation as high as 140 times forward forecasts, has seen its valuation sink to 17.5 times next year's consensus profit forecast.

What global warming?

I understand the motivation of many climate change skeptics. There are the oil people. There are the scientists paid by the oil people. There are the car company CEOs, who thought that making fuel-efficient vehicles would somehow put them out of business. (Whoops, their bad.) There are the people at Fox News and on the Wall Street Journal editorial page who'd be out of a job if they weren't climate change skeptics. I understand these people.

The ones I don't understand are the run-of-the-mill media hacks across the country who spread this nonsense. What's in it for them? They're not getting a piece of the Exxon-Mobil profits (I don't think). No one is specifically paying them to be knuckleheads (I don't think). Meanwhile, two American cities have been completely wiped out by hurricanes in the last five years. The Great Lakes are being drained because they're not freezing nearly as much in the winter. Droughts have plagued island countries (more affected by changes in ocean temperatures) from Ireland, to Cyprus, to Australia. The desert has crept into Spain. African insects are now flourishing in southern Italy. European ski resorts at lower elevations in the Alps now have to make snow to survive.

Can someone explain this to me? Are they all trying to audition for Fox or the Wall Street Journal? What's going on here? Why is it a liberal versus conservative thing to admit the obvious, here? Even China acknowledges the causes of climate change. They just don't care to do much about it. To me that's a much more intellectually honest approach.

Good news and bad news

The good news is that in 2008, public transportation saw the largest increase in ridership in a quarter century. And despite plummeting gas prices, people are still riding buses and trains.

The bad news. The freefalling economy has ruined the demand for recycled materials. Bigtime. (For instance, a ton of tin is worth $5 now. It was worth $327 earlier in the year.) The fear is that if cities and towns aren't making money off their recycling programs, some could stop offering them. Can we blame George Bush for this too? Please?

'Greasy Rider' praised in the New York Times Book Review!

The exact quote was "An entertaining combination of 'On the Road' and 'An Inconvenient Truth.'”

Yes, I had to look up the word "pedantic."

Remember the Saturn!

It's really not that tough to mandate that American cars be the most fuel-efficient in the world. It's quite a bit harder to ensure that we make un-crappy cars that capture people's attention and imagination the way Toyota and Honda do.

Big news! I took a shower!

Against my better judgement, I took a shower this morning. Dr. Wife, MD, forced me to do it. She gave me some nonsense about "proper" hygiene, and made some not-so-veiled threats about the guest bedroom. Well, at least the shower gave me the opportunity to test out the new, eco-friendly low-flow shower head.

For background: I installed a Waterpik Ecoflow shower head earlier this week. (Or was it last week?) Of course, it was made in China, and it came in one of those giant plastic bubble containers that are almost impossible to open without a chainsaw. (Millions of years from now, long after the human race has perished, the vast populations of intelligent, highly evolved cockroaches that rule the earth will send out their archaeologists, and I'm sure one will find this Ecoflow container, completely unbiodegraded.)

For the sake of my sustainable argument, lets overlook the carbon imprint of my driving to Home Depot to buy the new shower head, and the greenhouse gases produced by Waterpik to manufacture, package, and ship it. (Environmentalists are so good at casting a blind eye--or two--at such trifles.) Instead, I'll highlight its benefits. The output of a standard shower head is 5 to 8 gallons of water per minute. The Ecoflow puts out about 2 gallons a minute. That should save my house about $75 a year on water bills, and $50 a year on water heating bills.

In other words, the shower head should easily pay for itself within six months, and then rack up hundreds of dollars in energy and water bill savings in the next few years. On top of that, I'll be conserving more than 7,000 gallons of water a year, and untold amounts of energy.

So how did it work, you ask? Well, it didn't exactly feel like a fire hose. More like a gentle but steady rain shower overhead. It took me no more time to, say, rinse shampoo from my hair (which, by the way, I've begun to notice is vanishing at an alarming rate) than with a normal shower head, but the lower output was noticeable. People who would rather get pummeled with a Swedish massage-type spray in the shower every morning than save the earth from extinction will be disappointed. People who actually want a better life for their kids and grandkids won't think it's so bad (if they overlook the whole packaging, shipping, and manufacturing thing, of course).

Deep thought part 2

You're gonna have a hard time attracting the nation's best and brightest to take the helm of (and turn around) any troubled companies if the compensation is $1 a year.

Deep thought

Bill Gates' net worth today is about $56 billion. The net value of the Big Three auto companies combined is about $12 billion.

Chalk one up for the tree huggers (or in this case, rock huggers)

After an onslaught of negative publicity, the Bushies have pulled back their last-minute plans to allow oil and gas drilling in Nine Mile Canyon in Utah. For background, this place is nicknamed the "longest art gallery in the world" because of its thousands of rock art panels and relics left by the Anasazi.

To quote a great man named Donald Rumsfeld, "Is it possible there were really that many vases?"

Low-flow shower head update

Still haven't tested it out yet. Not sure if I'll get around to bathing until Sunday--whether I need it or not. Very French of me, isn't it?

A head-scratcher

Obama has quietly dropped plans for instituting a windfall profits tax on oil companies on his policy web site, change.org.

Cynics, insert your comments now.

Rest easy ship owners

Blackwater, everyone's favorite merry band of mercenaries, says it's willing to take care of the Somali pirates. For a price, of course. I'm not sure which group this flag would represent in that battle.

Thanks for nothing, Dr. Wife, MD

In yet another effort to get us to reduce our footprint, Dr. Wife, MD has forced me to install a low-flow shower head in our bathroom. This is probably TMI, but one of my few vices in life is a long, water- and energy-hogging shower. The shower head, pictured here, cost about $50, and is supposed to pay for itself in water savings in about four months. It had better work, though. And work well. Or else this green living stuff might finally break me. You'll receive an honest appraisal tomorrow. (That is, if I take a shower today. I usually only bathe on Sundays. Oops, is that TMI again?)

Pirates update, part 23.

The Somali pirates just released a Yemeni ship without ransom. The wise and all-knowing Greasy Rider Blog has predicted from the start that they'll eventually release the big Saudi oil tanker without ransom. Could this facilitate that? Maybe they're trying to save face by releasing this ship first--and then say something like how they're not going to hold any boats owned by Muslim countries. If that's their game, they'll also be saving their lives in the process.

It's not about the oil, though. It never is.

Cape wind to be approved?

The Cape Cod wind project might be given a big stamp of approval from the federal government this week. That'll no doubt piss off people like Bobby Kennedy, Jr., who's been against it from the start. (He's all for saving the planet as long as no efforts hurt the property values--or views--from the Kennedy Kompound out there.) Mind you, even the Audubon Society in Massachusetts is for this thing, so that lame argument about protecting sea birds can be thrown out the window. The Audubon Society! And this guy is lobbying to become the EPA chief.

The turbines will be placed about five miles offshore, so it's true that they will be clearly visible from shore quite often. The picture above is a rendition of what it'll look like. To be honest, if I lived on the Cape or the Vineyard, I wouldn't want to see this every day, either. And I sure as heck wouldn't want to see the value of my multi-million dollar property potentially drop because of it. But if I'm a diehard environmentalist, I've got to suck it up for the greater good. Hypocrisy hurts the cause.

Grease Power Power

Whole Foods uses 1,200 gallons of canola oil a week in its commissary, to fry the prepared foods that go to 43 stores in the Northeast. It's now recycling that grease to generate all of the commissary's electricity (enough power for 200 homes).

So let me get this straight: Whole Foods is generating electricity for this building from a free fuel source, and reducing their waste by 18 tons a month. Those darn tree-hugging hippies at Whole Foods, using their liberal spotted-owl-saving ways to...um...radically improve their bottom line.

The Supreme Court will be killing us for years to come

So there's this federal law, created by Congress of course, that says power plants have to upgrade to minimize their damage to fish and aquatic life. (Consider that power plants use 214 billion gallons of water a day for cooling in the US. Yes, 214 billion.) The Bush administration and utility companies have sued to exempt old power plants from this law. (And basically, only the old power plants are the ones threatening fish. The new ones are actually fairly eco-friendly with their water use.) Their stance is that it's too cost-prohibitive. (They're saying they shouldn't have to make changes if the cost of the upgrade is greater than the environmental benefits.) The Supreme Court hears arguments on the case today.

There's more to this case than just protecting our waterways from an ecological catastrophe. If the Bush administration wins, it means that environmental laws will become immensely harder to enforce. (Think of factories that don't want to adhere to clean air standards, for one example.)

Let me guess how judicial activists--um, I mean defenders of the Constitution--Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas will vote on this one. Sorry speckled trout, you don't stand a chance.

The answer man

The first batch of advice from the weekly Greasy Rider eco-advice column on Outside magazine's web site...

Q: Why do you drive a grease-powered car, and should I do it too?

A: Before you read the next sentence, please follow this one simple instruction: go jump off a bridge. Okay, it appears that most of you aren't taking my words as direct commands. That's unfortunate. (To those of you who actually did just jump off a bridge, I hope it was a low one, and I offer you my sincere thanks as I try to live up to my role as your eco-messiah.)
I originally thought that converting an old diesel to run on vegetable oil was some hippy-dippy thing that only young trustafarians did when they weren't too busy making their clothes out of hemp. My wife Ann Marie—who just graduated from medical school and I shall respectfully call Dr. Wife, MD, from this point forward—told me otherwise. She said the process was fairly simple and it would save us money. She made the point that many restaurants pay for someone to dispose of the dregs from their deep-fat fryers, so they're happy to unload the stuff on grease-powered drivers for free.

Suddenly a lightbulb (a compact fluourescent, no doubt) illuminated over my head: Ha! The chance to get free gas and flip the bird at the oil companies. Sign me up! Dr. Wife, MD, was actually more gung-ho about the potential environmental benefits, which are immense. Consider that biodiesel made from virgin vegetable oil reduces NREL life-cycle carbon emissions—all the emissions it takes to produce a product—by 78 percent compared to dino-diesel, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. And then take into account that french fry grease is a waste product.

So the two of us bought an old, half-dead Mercedes, fixed it up, ordered a kit from greasecar.com, and paid someone to install it. I thought of trying to install the kit myself, but Dr. Wife, MD, said no. She pointed out—correctly—that I'd mess everything up and would ultimately have to pay someone to install it anyway, so I might as well skip that first time-consuming step. The kit and installation cost a little more than $2,000, and I've easily made that money back in gas savings over the past couple of years.

Now to answer the second half of the question: Should you do it too? Before deciding to convert an old diesel, find a good grease supplier. Someone who's willing to set the stuff aside each week in sealed jugs, so it's not exposed to the elements and so you don't have to suck it from a dumpster in the restaurant's back parking lot. Given the growing demand for grease across the country, securing a reliable supply is harder than you might think. Here in Asheville, North Carolina, I get my stash from the Early Girl Eatery, one of the best restaurants in town. They use high-quality oil, and since they don't fry many meats in it, it's high-test stuff without a lot of impurities to filter out.

I'd also recommend that you have a garage where you can store the grease and filter the particles out of it. (For me the filtering process involves heating the grease under the sun in a black gas can, and pouring it through a felt sock filter.) No matter how meticulous you are, grease is messy, and you need to have a designated area where you can contain it.
If you can meet these criteria, and if you're willing to set aside the 45 minutes a week—give or take—for gathering the oil and filtering it, by all means go for it. Though I'm skeptical that you'll heed my advice, seeing how you didn't jump off that bridge.

Utterly predictable Kristol: US should declare war on piracy

Political shill William Kristol declares that we should go to war against the pirates. (The man apparently doesn't realize what a caricature he's become.)

Let's go through the chrology of events, as we've so diligently followed them here.

--Somali pirates hijack ships for several years, without drawing extensive media coverage.
--A couple of weeks ago, Somali pirates sieze a Saudi oil supertanker. GREASY RIDER BLOG then sagely predicts world outrage, media coverage, and threats of military action. GREASY RIDER BLOG also sagely predicts that oil will barely be mentioned, if at all. It's never about oil. It's always about freedom.
--GREASY RIDER BLOG, so aware of his own knowlege and wisdom, then wonders aloud why he's not running the world, or at least given some powerful job in the government.
--India's Navy then says that it has sunk a Somali pirate mother ship, and unfortunately no survivors are found. (But it turns out that there actually was one survivor, who clung to a metal barrel for several days at sea before being rescued. And he and his shipmates actually weren't pirates. They were fishermen from Thailand. Ah well.)
--Rhetoric and media coverage ratchet up on piracy, and Kenya prepares for the inevitable ecological catastrophe that will come when the oil tanker is siezed back from the pirates by special forces and tons of black gold spill into the sea.
--Political hack William Kristol, starts the drumbeat for American military action against Somali pirates in a Weekly Standard Column. Oil is never mentioned. It never is.

Kristol's words:
"Perhaps (President Bush) could tell various admirals to stop moaning about how difficult it would be to deal with the pirates off the coast of Somalia (isn't keeping the shipping lanes open a core mission of the Navy?) and order the Navy to clobber them. If need be, the Marines would no doubt be glad to recapitulate their origins and join in by going ashore in Africa to destroy the pirates' safe havens."

The Marines would be glad? Is he sure? Maybe he should talk to a Marine general about that. (Yet one more reason why Bill Kristol's relevance and influence as a political thinker has sunk to somewhere just below Geraldo Rivera's.)

Check back here for future pirate updates...

Son of Kyoto

The two-week UN-sponsored meeting to create the successor to the Kyoto Protocol has begun. Not much is expected to come from it, although you'll be hearing all sorts of dire predictions pouring out. Instead, the world is waiting to see what Obama's actions will be once he takes office. That's right, the world is waiting--and praying--for the US to lead on climate change (just as it has for the past decade).

People will say that given the economic climate, now isn't the time to worry about carbon emissions. But what's that saying about "an ounce of prevention?"