How much energy does it take to keep that old refrigerator running? Probably more than when you bought it, and an energy monitor will tell you just how much.
There are two basic types of energy monitors: Those for a single appliance and those that measure your entire home’s energy use. The best way to figure out which option works best for you is to decide what level of energy monitoring you want to achieve, how much you want to spend, and how much you want to save.
My guest blogger, Glenn Hurowitz, is Washington Director of Avoided Deforestation Partners. This post is excerpted from a piece first published here.
One of the little-known ingredients of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, H.R. 2454 is a breakthrough agreement on ending tropical deforestation, which is responsible for about 20 percent of global climate pollution—more than the emissions from all the cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world combined.
The Waxman-Markey legislation contains two primary tropical forest provisions that, combined, help meet the bill’s goals for reducing pollution in a way cost effective enough to win the support it needs to pass. First, it sets aside 5 percent of the bill’s pollution allowances to fund tropical forest conservation. Second, it allows emitters to get credit for investing in tropical forest conservation subject to a set of strict requirements.
Set-aside funding. The revenue from the 5 percent set aside can be used for a variety of purposes, including:
Cultivating your own herbs — like parsely (above) — allows you to produce only what you need, as discussed in this post from the Center for American Progress.
You can add value and beauty to your home by maintaining a garden, but you may end up wasting time and money if you aren’t careful. Try these seven tips for keeping a garden that’s manageable and uses resources wisely.
Plant only what you can maintain. Overplanting will give you a headache and squander water, money, and other resources. To avoid this problem plant only what you can realistically maintain and look for plants that thrive on neglect if you aren’t around much to take care of them. If you are new to gardening, start small and work your way up. You can always add more, but getting rid of existing plants is both wasteful and frustrating.
Also, be sure to check the appropriate time to add new plantings to your garden. Adding plants out of season can require you to use harmful fertilizers and unnecessary amounts of water to keep them alive that you wouldn’t need if they were planted in season.
Compost your waste. Composting prevents yard trimmings, food scraps, and other household waste from entering landfills and reduces the need for watering by improving your soil’s water retention. It also enriches soil fertility and improves texture. You can use compost in garden beds, under shrubs, or as a potting soil for outdoor plants. Starting your own heap is easy and maintenance is minimal. For more information on what you should add to your compost, take our quiz.
UPDATE: My Salon piece, “One brief shining moment for clean energy” is up. We do need to savor moments like these, since, as I note in that article, given modern conservative ideology, which is 100% anti-conservation, “the country can only contemplate serious environmental legislation when we have the unique constellation of a Democratic president and [large] Democratic majorities in both houses, an occurrence far rarer than a total eclipse of the sun.”
Every journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step — including stopping human-caused global warming at “safe levels,” as close as possible to 2°C.
This bill makes possible an international deal in Copenhagen this December — as well as a bilateral deal with China, hopefully sooner. Had the bill failed, the chance of humanity avoiding catastrophic climate change would be all but eliminated. As Nobelist Gore wrote earlier today, there was no “backup plan” to Waxman-Markey. In this post, I will revise and extend the post I wrote after the bill passed the Energy and Commerce Committee (see “House committee approves landmark (bipartisan!) clean energy and climate bill — political realists rejoice, climate science realists demand more“).
For climate-politics realists, the vote today is a staggering achievement. Today was the first time the U.S. House of Representatives has ever voted on climate legislation. This country hasn’t enacted a major economy-wide clean air bill since the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. And that bill had a cap-and-trade system where 97% of the permits were given to polluters. And it focused on direct, obvious, short-term health threats to Americans. And that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, when the entire Republican establishment wasn’t dead set against any government led effort to reduce pollution.
Yet Waxman-Markey did get 8 Republican votes, which is 8 more than the stimulus bill got! This bill needed Republican votes, which will also be true in the Senate. The closeness of the House vote — with 44 Dems voting No — makes clear that the really hard work is yet to come.
And for those who say this doesn’t do enough — I agree 100%. But then the original Clean Air Act didn’t do enough. And the 1987 Montréal protocol would not have stopped concentrations of ozone depleting substances from rising and thus would not have saved the ozone layer. But it began a process and established a framework that, like the CAA, could be strengthened over time as the science warranted. The painful reality of climate change is going to become increasingly obvious in the coming years, and strengthening is inevitable.
In the earlier post, I discussed the myriad forces lined up against serious climate action. I won’t repeat that here, but instead want to excerpt something that David Corn wrote for Mother Jones, which states the climate-politics realist position very well — a position you might not associate with Corn and MJ:
GRAND JUNCTION, CO – You can see it in the faces of those gathered to hear the latest news on the natural gas industry: Anxiety. Anger. Fear of losing everything they have. Frustration that there seems nothing anyone can do.
The rigs are down. Here in Western Colorado and nationwide, the drilling rigs that employed thousands in well paying jobs are down. Where just a year ago this region was bustling with new drilling activity, rig counts are now down 74%. Across the nation the story is the same: 74% down in W. Texas/NM; 68% down in Green River Basin (WY); 50% down in Arkoma Basin; 49% down in E. Texas/N. La. The gas resources are still there, but new drilling activity is being curtailed.
Local Economy is Hurting. When the rigs go down, so goes the local economy of a gas-producing region. In Western Colorado, $3.2 - $3.5 Billion less investment by the natural gas industry is expected in 2009 versus 2008. Housing prices are down and unemployment is rising. Retail sales have fallen drastically, stressing merchants and local governments. The flow of dollars coming from elsewhere into the local economy has dropped off a cliff. When natural gas — a domestic energy resource — goes down, it is not Saudi oil sheiks but American gas workers and the communities where they live that feel the impacts.
Natural Gas Was High Priced & Unreliable. Just a year ago, in June 2008, the average U.S. wellhead price for natural gas was $10.82 per thousand cubic feet, (about $10.50 per Million BTU, or MMBTU). Electric utilities, concerned about the volatility of natural gas prices and worried about its reliability of supply, were beginning to explore high priced alternatives to natural gas, even considering reviving a nuclear power industry that had been dead for over 30 years.
Then, everything changed almost overnight.
39% Increase in Total U.S. Natural Gas Resources. High natural gas prices, together with relatively new “fracturing” technologies to free gas from shale deposits, prompted massive gas exploration efforts nationwide. These resulted in discoveries of major new natural gas resources, which became apparent before the end of 2008:
While the climate title in Waxman-Markey is certainly unnecessarily weak as is the renewable energy standard, the bill has many other terrific provisions (see “The triumph of energy efficiency” and “Toolbox Assessment” of Waxman-Markey“). One of those is the Clean Energy Deployment Administration. The Center for American Progress, long a champion of such a clean energy bank, has a primer I am reposting.
The Green Bank, or Clean Energy Deployment Administration, is a key element of proposed clean-energy policies. The Green Bank would provide more favorable terms to companies—including lower interest rates and a lower cost of debt—to offset the high cost of financing new renewable energy projects through the private sector. This new financing system will spark the clean-energy transformation and accelerate the cost-effective, large-scale deployment of renewable energies. It would help fund the transition to a clean-energy economy while making renewable energy production competitive with current electricity prices and keeping consumer prices low by facilitating the flow of private capital into renewable energy and efficiency projects. Most importantly, the Green Bank will use its partnerships with the private sector to provide the capital investment and financial security that is critical to the long-term viability of the clean-energy economy.
Why do we need a Green Bank?
The Green Bank would address the following issues:
It’s summer BBQ season again, and 60 million households are expected to fire up the grill over every holiday weekend this summer. Together, they’re expected to release about 225,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. As large as this number is, it doesn’t take into account the fact that lots of us will be taking advantage of sunny weather throughout the summer and grilling on other occasions, too.
These six simple tips will help make your own cook out a little bit greener and healthier this summer. So invite your friends, fire up the grill, and enjoy some delicious food and beverages.
Personally, I’m keeping cool with a weekend trip to Newport, RI for a wedding (which is why I didn’t blog much today). But traveling to keep cool may not be the greenest way to go. Following the eighth warmest winter on record, the summer of 2009 is looking to be a hot one (see Breaking: NOAA puts out “El Niño Watch,” so record temperatures are coming and this will be the hottest decade on record). Constantly using your air conditioning to keep cool can consume a great deal of energy and release greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases into the atmosphere, but you can maximize your energy efficiency by following these six tips that will help you stay cool (from a post first published here):
Consider other options before cranking up the AC. Save energy and money by using ceiling fans or portable fans, which can make a room feel six or seven degrees cooler. On milder days, fans alone may keep you cool enough, but on particularly hot days, try setting the AC to 80 degrees and letting the ceiling fan to do the rest of work. Remember, though, fans cool you, not the room, so running them when you aren’t in the room is just a waste of energy. Before holing up inside your home and turning on the AC, you could also consider going somewhere that already has it. After all, businesses and public buildings run their AC whether you are there or not. Libraries, movie theatres, and coffee shops are just a few places you could go to keep cool and entertained.
[JR: I have six (!) ceiling fans in my home! We also have a retractable awning, a popular feature in Europe, but hasn't quite caught on in the U.S. -- yet. And don't forget that white/reflective roof (see "What is geo-engineering and adaptation and CO2 mitigation all in one?"]
Using fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen from zero-carbon sources such as renewable power or nuclear energy has a cost of avoided carbon dioxide of more than $600 a metric ton, which is more than a factor of ten higher than most other strategies being considered today….
So I wrote in a 2005 journal article, “The car and fuel of the future,” which was the “hottest article” in Energy Policy from July 2006 through March 2007 (and still #8 as recently as September 2008).
So after the Bush administration squandered some $2 billion on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, it was welcome news that our Nobel-prize-winning Energy Secretary Steven Chu submitted a budget that sharply scaled back the hydrogen fuel cell program and shifted it away from a focus on transportation (see “Hydrogen car R.I.P. Secretary Chu agrees with Climate Progress and slashes hydrogen budget“).
Now some hydrogen advocates — and even some environmental groups! — are trying to restore the money, which is much more urgently needed helping to develop and deploy clean technologies that could save energy and reduce pollution in the near-and medium-term. I’ll blog on that effort later.
First, however, I wanted to once and for all lay out the case against hydrogen as a transport fuel, starting with an excerpt of almost my entire Energy Policy piece. I think it is worthwhile reading for anyone interested in understanding the challenges facing alternative fuels.
Abstract
This paper is based on a review of the technical literature on alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) and discussions with experts in vehicle technology and energy analysis. It is derived from analysis provided to the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy.
The urgent need to reverse the business-as-usual growth path in global warming pollution in the next two decades to avoid serious if not catastrophic climate change necessitates action to make our vehicles far less polluting.
In the near-term, by far the most cost-effective strategy for reducing emissions and fuel use is efficiency. The car of the near future is the hybrid gasoline–electric vehicle, because it can reduce gasoline consumption and greenhouse gas emissions 30 to 50% with no change in vehicle class and hence no loss of jobs or compromise on safety or performance. It will likely become the dominant vehicle platform by the year 2020.
Ultimately, we will need to replace gasoline with a zero-carbon fuel. All AFV pathways require technology advances and strong government action to succeed. Hydrogen is the most challenging of all alternative fuels, particularly because of the enormous effort needed to change our existing gasoline infrastructure.
The most promising AFV pathway is a hybrid that can be connected to the electric grid. These so-called plug-in hybrids will likely travel three to four times as far on a kilowatt-hour of renewable electricity as fuel cell vehicles…. (more…)
In Part 1: Is there a lot more natural gas than previously thought? I asserted it now appears likely that, thanks to unconventional supplies, natural gas alone could meet a great deal of the Waxman-Markey CO2 target for 2020 — without requiring gobs of new power plants to be sited and built or thousands of miles of new transmission lines. In this post I will explain the two key reasons why.
First, today, dirty coal plants are being “dispatched” (or utilized) to provide electricity by grid operators first, while natural gas plants that could provide electricity with far lower emissions of carbon dioxide remain unutilized or underutilized — even though their electricity costs are only slightly higher. This is occurring in at least two regions of the country, according to a major under-reported May study by the Energy Information Administration, “The Implications of Lower Natural Gas Prices for Electric Generators in the Southest.” A cap on CO2 emissions and even a low price of CO2 will switch the dispatch order, generating large emissions savings at low cost (if the gas is available, as now seems likely).
Second, the fundamental flaw in Waxman-Markey is that the 2020 target is too weak both from the perspective of what climate science says is needed (see “The U.S. needs a tougher 2020 GHG emissions target“) and from the perspective of what straightforward energy analysis suggests can be done at $15 a ton of CO2 or less.
Then we have Waxman-Markey itself. It achieves huge energy efficiency savings. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) projects “such savings will avoid about 293 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2020” (see “Waxman-Markey could save $3,900 per household“). That’s another 5% drop.
So far we are maybe 9% below 2005 levels in 2020. I’m going to skip the large low-cost savings potential from conservation — although I think by 2020 that the painful reality of global warming will be so obvious to all that a large fraction of the public and businesses will want to pitch in to avert Hell and High Water (but then, I’m an optimist or is that a pessimist?).
Now we have to meet the remaining 8% cut with some combination of low-cost renewables, natural gas, and offsets. How will that break out by cost?
