Coal Emissions MUST be Cut

Treehugger does a nice job mentioning something that felt missing in a Wall Street Journal article which cites a new study from MIT. I want to take that one step further.

It's been validated by expert after expert and study after study and now MIT's - CO2 emissions reduction for existing coal power plants...we will not get our CO2 problem under control without cutting back our coal carbon emissions.

Treehugger goes on to state, "The WSJ very much correctly nails the urgency with which this has to happen: Now, not at some point in the future." But the focus on cleaning up coal emissions as the main point led them to discuss the prudent concept of spending some of that money on renewable energy in order to stop the building of new coal power plants and ultimately phase out coal entirely.

I couldn't agree more and in light if the immediacy of the problem, I think this should all be taken into the context of differences we can make very literally, today.

We are fully behind renewable energy and also want to mention inexpensive things that can be done right now to help through reducing our consumption. Three of the big potential areas in our everyday household lives are: heating and cooling, lighting and phantom power. We'll continue to cover these topics but to keep this post brief, look at what can be done with a simple dimmer switch...

Dimming your lights by 25% saves 20% of the energy used and extends bulb life by 10 times. Automated systems can set lights to come on at any %, saving energy every time they're turned on.

According to Dr. Ian Rowbottom, it costs about $7.75 to generate one watt through solar power but a mere 35 cents to conserve one watt with a dimmer at only 15% routine dimming. It's 4 times more for coal and wind and 8 times for nuclear.

If every switch in every US home were replaced with a dimmer, the savings would be 421 billion kilowatt hours per year or the equivalent of 52 large coal-fired power plants.

It's probably more than you expected and it's nowhere near what can be accomplished when you tie a lighting, heating/cooling and overall power control system into your home security system as at a little extra cost, you can add the security system's awareness of your presence to create a truly automated energy saving system.

An Acre or Two for Dad?

Really liked this idea so I thought I'd share.

Conservation International offers a program where you can donate money to help save an acre of tropical forest for a year and it's only $15 per acre.

This is far more than one of those things that just sounds nice and green. They claim that "the burning and clearing of forests pours at least 20 percent of climate-changing greenhouse gases into our atmosphere -- more than all the world’s cars, trucks, and airplanes combined." That should get you attention.

To make it even better, they are promoting this right now as a great Father's Day gift and have specially designed ecards to announce the gift in his name.

Check it out here... http://tinyurl.com/mkxpcr

Tree for an email

We launched something this past weekend at the USGBC Green Remodeling Fair that I think we'll continue where we promised to plant a tree for every new sign-up for our e-newsletter. No selling of email addresses. A hopefully educational and/or fun email about once a month. Not a huge commitment. Lots of smiles generated and lots of sign ups. Lots of trees to plant!

We also offered the choice over the purpose of the tree's life...equatorial for global warming reduction and carbon sequestration; humanitarian to help reduce hunger, thirst and malnutrition; species preservation and fire damage reforestation. It was interesting to watch everyone's reaction. Many were unable to commit as they are all good causes. For those, we divided them evenly. The rest overwhelmingly picked a humanitarian purpose followed by fire reforestation and equatorial with a small percentage toward species preservation. Not a wrong answer among them, turned into an accidental but interesting social experiment.

Thanks to all that stopped by and signed up. The trees will be planted soon.