Things I Can Do.

Earth Hour this year, in Atlanta, GA was March 30 at 8 PM.  My parents unplugged everything in the house (except the freezer) and read by candle-light in observence of one hour a year when people come together and switch everything off, in order to be more thankful that we can switch it back on again. Read the rest of this entry »

A blogger has proposed (and the wall-street journal has disputed) an energy savings of 3000 Megawatt hours per year (10 high output nuclear power plants operating for about three hours, $75,000 per day) if Google were to publish its front page with a black background as opposed to a white one. Google’s search page is the most visited non-pornographic site on the internet as far as I know, so this sounds like a great idea! The basic physics of the situation propose that displaying a white (100% brightness, 74 watts) pixel costs more energy than displaying a black (0% brightness, 59 watts) one.

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The indy pop rockers Guster were green before it was cool. In addition to being “carbon neutral” by buying renewable energy offsets and driving a bio-diesel tour bus, they have canned food drives at every show, raise bio-awareness through Campus Consciousness tour dates, in addition to merch made with organic cotton and post-consumer recycled paper products.
How cool is that?

A couple of websites that Guster recommends include this website that plants trees for you AND stops junk snailmail. And to be carbon neutral, you can buy energy offsets here. It has calculators to show you how much energy you use doing normal stuff, like driving your car or heating/cooling your home.

Eco-conscious and rockin’, Guster makes going green look easy. Check out all their green deeds on the band’s website, and listen to a little music while you’re there, too. They’re good.

What follows is a journey of discovery, and will result in at least one project oriented how-to article (as promised so long ago).

Effecting change in your everyday household energy menu is tough if you don’t know what you’re currently using. With that in mind, let me introduce:

The Kill-a-watt

The kill-a-watt is a handy little device that can be picked up for as little as $30. There are more sophisticated devices on the market, but this one is a quick, cheap energy sleuth and is easily found on the internet, and in brick&mortar stores.

I borrowed mine from a good friend who uses it to gauge the energy usage of his server farms.
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Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio announced that the Academy Awards this year was the first “green” production in the history of the awards ceremony. With so many celebrities thumping a dogma of greener living, it is good to hear that their expensive awards show is taking consideration of the environment. However, little proof of this announcement was evident. You can read about how to make your lifestyle more earth-friendly on the oscar’s go green page.

Little specifics can be discerned in reading that page other than the following:

This year, the Academy, the Oscar telecast producer Laura Ziskin and the entire production team endeavored to select supplies and services with a sensitivity toward reducing the threats we face from global warming, species extinction, deforestation, toxic waste, and hazardous chemicals in our water and food. With guidance and assistance from the Natural Resources Defense Council, a non-partisan environmental and advocacy organization, we learned that it was easy (and often cost effective) to make simple changes to reduce Oscar’s ecological footprint. Here are a few of the things we learned (with help from the NRDC website www.nrdc.org):

So at least it’s a step in the right direction.  If nothing else, a mainstream, highly publicised event has made a statement with their wallet, instead of just their opinions.

In other news, I found “organic” frosted mini wheats for sale in a local supermarket.  Having found  an “organic” frozen pizza the month before, I’m not sure what to think about this, but at least I’m not surprised.  The point I’m trying to make is, just because someone labels their product or event with an eco-positive tag doesn’t really mean much without discolsure.  For instance, “All-natural 7-up”, which contains high fructose corn syrup, a notoriously industrialized food additive.

The Australian Government is taking steps towards lowering energy consumption by switching from traditional incandescent light bulbs to more efficient compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). New Zealand is expected to follow suit. To understand why this means anything to you or me, we need to understand a couple of things.

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If you have mac OS X 10.4.3, then you can download and try out an alpha version of the RSS widget for this site. I reccomend seting the article length to the minimum setting, so that you will be alerted of new articles, and it won’t be too cluttered. (It’s kinda hard to read a blog inside of a widget…)

RSS Widget (148 KB dmg) OS X Only.

Of course, you can use any RSS reader you’d like using the feed links at the bottom of the page.

Let’s talk about the carbon cycle, shall we?

The earth is a big carefully balanced, symbiotic relationship.

Plants breathe (well, absorb) Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They store the carbon in the form of yummy carbohydrates. They then expel oxygen gas as a waste product. Eventually the plant dies, and is reincorporated into the earth by smaller organisms known as decomposer. I like to call the little critters composters.

Human beings (along with all other known life-forms on the planet) are made up of five major elements: Carbon, oxygen, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen. There are a few others required for us to metabolize and otherwise be alive, but we’re mostly built out of hydrocarbon chains (polymers). When we eat, (plants and other animals), we consume carbon, and when we breathe in, we consume oxygen. When we breathe out, we release water and carbon dioxide. In between, energy is transferred through a complicated process, from chemical bonds, into ATP, a sort of body-energy-currency.

Factories that produce compact discs (and other products) also release carbon dioxide. Lots of it. So much in fact, that there are national and international regulations to stem overproduction of the gas.

Which brings us back to symbiosis: We need plants for oxygen, they need us for CO2.

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According to “Bikeleague.org“, May is National Bike Month, May 15-19 is National Bike to work week, and May 20th is National Bike To Work Day.

Regardless of what the league of incredible biker gentlemen may say, you can start biking to work tomorrow, and every day of the year!

There are a few reasons you might start riding your bike to work

1. To look cooler than everyone else
2. To smell better than everyone else
3. Elitist self-gratification

These are the wrong reasons.
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