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Blogs Eric Reads
Are You an EcoDriver?
Click the widget to play the EcoDriving game. It’s educational, fun, and you can kill a couple hours pretty easily if you aren’t paying attention.
Turn Off Your Screen Saver!
I just did. Apparently, screen savers are not only outdated but bad for the environment to boot:
Whenever I crank out a list of helpful hints, one of the first items I include is this obvious but often overlooked gem of advice: Kill your stupid screen saver. In the good old days of tube monitors, screen savers such as those unforgettable flying toasters were invented to prevent burn-in, a permanent shadow branded into the phosphors of your monitor by a static image of, say, a spreadsheet that you left on your screen all weekend.
Well, flat-screen LCD monitors don’t burn in, so if you still have flying toasters or an endlessly looping slide show of your adorable niece and nephew, you’re behind the times. When you’re not sitting in front of your monitor it should be off off off.
There’s your interesting environmental factoid of the day. Won’t you disable your screen saver and help the environment?
(via Show Me Progress)
Google Turns Out the Lights for Earth Hour
If you head over to Google today, you might notice that things look a little bit different.
Google is turning out the lights today to promote environmental awareness.
Google users in the United States will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don’t do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.
On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.
Given our company’s commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Earth Hour campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful global event.
I’ll be participating in Earth Hour this evening. Will you join me?
USAF Pushes for Liquid Coal
The U.S. Air Force is redefining alternative energy. In an attempt to wean itself off of foreign oil, the Air Force wants the next generation of jets to run off of synthetic fuel derived from liquid coal.
The Air Force wants to build at its Malmstrom base in central Montana the first piece of what it hopes will be a nationwide network of facilities that would convert domestic coal into cleaner-burning synthetic fuel.
Air Force officials said the plants could help neutralize a national security threat by tapping into the country’s abundant coal reserves. And by offering itself as a partner in the Malmstrom plant, the Air Force hopes to prod Wall Street investors - nervous over coal’s role in climate change - to sink money into similar plants nationwide.
“We’re going to be burning fossil fuels for a long time, and there’s three times as much coal in the ground as there are oil reserves,” said Air Force Assistant Secretary William Anderson. “Guess what? We’re going to burn coal.”
The real winner in all this is Big Coal, which suffered a huge setback after the Senate stripped liquid coal measures from the 2007 energy bill. Unfortunately for all of us, the loser here is our planet.
1) Liquid Coal is Not the Answer to Lower Emissions: Coal-based fuel would nearly double global warming pollution per gallon as compared with the petroleum-based fuels we use today. For example, using coal-based fuel in a Honda Civic would double that vehicle’s carbon dioxide emissions, making it equivalent to a Hummer H3 running on conventional gasoline.
2) Liquid Coal Production Could Destroy Ecosystems and Communities: Substituting 10 percent of our current oil use with liquid coal would mean 40 percent more coal mining. We already know the destructive effects of surface coal strip mining, include polluted air and water, as well ravaged landscapes. The most damaging is mountaintop removal coal mining that has already resulted in the destruction of hundreds of mountains and buried or polluted thousands of streams in Appalachia. Additionally, just producing liquid coal requires an inordinate amount of water — a resource especially scarce in the Western part of the country.
3) Liquid Coal is a Poor Investment: Just one liquid coal plant costs $7 billion dollars to build — and the American people could foot most the bill! Moreover, every public or private dollar invested in liquid coal is one less dollar available for investment in efficient vehicles, improved transportation systems, smart growth, and sustainably-made renewable fuels.
Compared to other proposed alternative energy sources, liquid coal just doesn’t stack up:
“We need to wean ourselves off oil, but we should replace it with the cleanest alternatives possible,” said Patrician Monahan, author of the report and deputy director of UCS’s Clean Vehicles Program. “Let’s not trade one bad habit for another.”
Liquid coal, for example, can release 80 percent more global warming pollution than gasoline, the report found. Corn ethanol, conversely, could be either more polluting or less than gasoline, depending on how the corn is grown and the ethanol is produced. On average, corn ethanol can reduce emissions about 20 percent, though there is uncertainty due to differing land use practices. The cleanest alternative, cellulosic ethanol from grasses or wood chips, could reduce emissions by more than 85 percent.
“Biofuels have a Jekyll and Hyde reputation depending on what study you read and what assumptions you make,” Monahan said. “But liquid coal is a loser no matter how you look at it. We need to set standards so farmers know the right way to produce cleaner fuels.”
For the more visual thinkers among us, this chart makes the case against liquid coal:
The Air Force’s official press release on liquid coal is here. You can leave a comment encouraging the Air Force to support environmentally safe energy here or send an email to the Air Force’s Energy, Environment, Safety and Occupational Health division.
Save the Whales! (From George W. Bush)
I’m starting to think that there might be some truth to National Treasure because there are just so many things written between the lines of the Constitution. Like, for example, the part where the president can overrule federal law, state governments, and federal courts through sheer willpower.
Under the Coastal Zone Management Act, a decision of the California Coastal Commission (a state agency), and a federal court judge’s ruling, the U.S. Navy must:
create a 12-nautical-mile, no-sonar zone along the California coast and to post trained lookouts to watch for marine mammals before and during exercises. Sonar would have to be shut down when mammals are spotted within 2,200 yards, under the order.
This isn’t an unreasonable order, since evidence from a number of groups show that sonar hurts whales. But George Bush doesn’t like it. The Navy needs to do exercises at this exact place, regardless of the presence of marine life in the area, or the terrorists win. So the government is using the courts in the way they were designed by appealing the federal judge’s ruling.
The court system is old-fashioned, though, and too slow–after all, we’re fighting a war, and the Navy needs to train now, whales be damned! That’s why President Bush today did with the Coastal Zone Management Act, the California Coastal Commission, and a federal judge the same thing he does with any laws he doesn’t like: ignore them.
President Bush exempted the Navy from an environmental law so it can continue using sonar in its anti-submarine warfare training off the California coast — a practice critics say is harmful to whales and other marine mammals.
The White House announced Wednesday that Bush had signed the exemption Tuesday while traveling in the Middle East.
The Navy training exercises, including the use of sonar, “are in the paramount interest of the United States” and its national security, Bush said in a memorandum.
“This exemption will enable the Navy to train effectively and to certify carrier and expeditionary strike groups for deployment in support of worldwide operational and combat activities, which are essential to national security,” the memo said.
And just like that, everything he doesn’t like disappears.
There is no longer a Constitution, no longer the rule of law in the United States. George W. Bush must be removed from office before the damage he has done to our beloved democracy is beyond repair. January 20, 2009, cannot come soon enough.