Category: Design & Technology

Future Car

The technology that makes this car go “weeeeeee!” is the future. Everyone and everything that stands in the way of it becoming mainstream is a domestic freakin’ terrorist. Yes, I said it, domestic freakin’ terrorist.

The Tesla Roadster is an electric car and produces one-tenth the pollution of the best sports car

While the combustion engine is responsible for a great many successes, it will also be the end of us if it isn’t replaced.

Combustion technology is wasteful, inefficient and heavily pollutive. It hasn’t evolved in 100 years and every effort that’s been made to make it better has been thwarted by the oil industry and/or the automotive industry. The need to power it has led to wars and split this country in two. Further, insistence on its preservation has created the unbelievable ignorant hype around ethanol. My brain hurts just thinking about how easy it is to change everything, in an instant.

The car in question, the Tesla, currently costs $98,000, which is obviously out of most people’s price range. Of course, this is how all new technology starts. The great thing about the car is that it’s starting to grab the attention of the large automakers.

Funny thing is that if Tesla can start making sedans for $20,000, they’d put every car maker on the planet out of business in a decade. And purely from an environmental perspective, I hope it does.

It’s so pretty!

Coal, Coal, Go Away

People all over the country are fighting the good fight against coal. According to the Associated Press:

In federal and state courtrooms across the country, environmental groups are putting coal-fueled power plants on trial in a bid to slow the industry’s biggest construction boom in decades. At least four dozen coal plants are being contested in 29 states . . . The targeted utilities include giants like Peabody Energy and American Electric Power down to small rural cooperatives.

This article, by Matthew Brown, gives these facts:

  • Coal plants provide just over 50 percent of the nation’s electricity. They also are the largest domestic source of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, emitting 2 billion tons annually, about a third of the country’s total.
  • Environmental groups cite 59 canceled, delayed or blocked plants as evidence they are turning back the “coal rush.” That stacks up against 22 new plants now under construction in 14 states — the most in more than two decades.
  • The Sierra Club spent about $1 million on such efforts in 2007 and hopes to ratchet that figure up to $10 million this year.
  • Meanwhile, coal interests are pouring even more into a promotional campaign launched by the industry group Americans for Balanced Energy Choices. It spent $15 million last year and expects to more than double that to $35 million in 2008, said the group’s director, Joe Lucas.
  • Utilities currently burn more than 1 billion tons of coal annually in more than 600 plants. Over the next two decades, the Bush administration projects coal’s share of electricity generation will increase to almost 60 percent.

I don’t believe relying on coal is the type of energy independence Americans are looking for. If we replace wars with pollution so rampant we have (another) national health crisis and (another) environmental crisis we will be no better off that we are now. Plus, we won’t be able to goad “allied” forces to die for us. We will die alone.

In the last few months of 2007, I wrote three pieces on coal:

The last piece, “Carbon Capture – Will It Work?”, was by far the most optimistic, and only because my hope is contingent on a new technology. We’ll see.

I fail to understand why major corporations keep making stupid decision after stupid decision. Perhaps the coal industry has no choice. Oil, natural gas, etc . . . have all been claimed. It’s fight or die for them too. Maybe instead of spending millions to maintain the status quo, some of that money should be spent on developing new technologies.

Take General Motors for instance. Toyota is kicking its ass, and rightfully so. Toyota is a better run organization that produces higher quality, more efficient, more attractive, more reliable vehicles. So what does GM announce? It’s going to partner with a company that produces ethanol, but we all know that ethanol wanks. Of course Toyota then announces yesterday it will sell a plug-in car starting 2010. Kudos are definitely due to GM for announcing the Chevy Volt many moons ago, but given American car companies’ tendency to destroy winning ideas (previous iterations of the electric car) I’m betting on Toyota’s plug-in.

I need to stop or I will spiral into a tangental abyss. Have a good day.

Battle of the Bees

Yesterday, I was enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon on the “Internets” and came across an article in the New York Times entitled, “Can Burt’s Bees Turn Clorox Green?“. The article traces the founding and growth of Burt’s Bees, “a niche company famous for beeswax lip balm, lotions, soaps and shampoos, as well as for its homespun packaging and feel-good, eco-friendly marketing,” and a company many of you have probably heard of. What I didn’t know was that the company was sold to Clorox two months ago.

Today, the couple’s quirky enterprise is owned by the Clorox Company, a consumer products giant best known for making bleach, which bought it for $913 million in November. Clorox plans to turn Burt’s Bees into a mainstream American brand sold in big-box stores like Wal-Mart. Along the way, Clorox executives say, they plan to learn from unusual business practices at Burt’s Bees — many centered on environmental sustainability. Clorox, the company promises, is going green.

Also fascinating is the unusual relationship of the company’s two founders, Burt Shavitz and Roxanne Quimby. For more on that, see the article.

What struck me most about the piece is the effort that companies will go through to increase their environmentally-friendly practices. Clorox might have bought Burt’s Bees as a marketing ploy (to increase their “green” image) or purely for financial gain (presumably, the niche products produced by Burt’s Bees have a higher profit margin than your standard bleach). Optimistically though, Clorox bought the company for the reason it’s stated – to become green.

Striking is the fact that Clorox, a multi-billion dollar global business, isn’t able to change from the inside out. According to Yahoo! Finance, Clorox has a market capitalization of just under $9 billion dollars and pulled in just under $5 billion in revenues last year. I’m surprised some of that money couldn’t have been dedicated to launching a green line of products or to changing all of company’s products and practices. Anywho, hopefully the transfer of information and business practices is mostly in one direction, from Burt’s Bees to Clorox.

Why?

So we can more pictures like this, which shows John Replogle, C.E.O. of Burt’s Bees, tasting the company’s avocado butter hair product. And I’m sure parents would love to know that their household product won’t kill their children.

Karen Tam for the New York Times

What does the future hold?

Clorox, for one, will face plenty of skepticism. Environmentalists have long said that bleach is harmful when drained into city sewers. The disinfectant has become a stand-in for jokes about chemicals and the environment, and a new round seems to have begun this fall when the company acquired Burt’s Bees.

“Who likes Burt’s Bees now that it’s been bought by Clorox?” Alison Stewart, a host on National Public Radio, said in November. “You know, just slap some bleach on your lips, it’ll all be good.”

Clorox executives have been fighting what they call “misinformation” about bleach for years. The company says that 95 to 98 percent of its bleach breaks into salt and water and that the remaining byproduct is safe for sewer systems. And Clorox sells many products that have nothing to do with bleach — including Brita water filters, Glad trash bags and Hidden Valley salad dressings.

Still, after Clorox agreed to buy Burt’s Bees last fall, scores of customers called Burt’s Bees and accused the company of selling out. John Replogle, the chief executive of Burt’s Bees, says he personally responded to customers who left their phone numbers.

“Don’t judge Clorox as much by where they’ve been as much as where they intend to go,” Mr. Replogle says he told them.

I’m willing to heed Mr. Replogle’s advice, but with very little latitude.

Ethanol Wanks

I’ve said it a dozens times right here on this blog - the ethanol craze is mind-numbingly ill-founded and politically driven. Now there’s science (ahhhhh!) to back it up. I don’t read USA Today often, but I was traveling for work last week and lo and behold, the paper served me a fresh batch of “I freakin’ told you so” with my morning coffee. There’s nothing like getting right to the point in an article:

Anything’s better than ethanol blend E85, even ordinary gasoline, a new cost-benefit analysis of alternative fuels by researcher John Graham at the Pardee Rand Graduate School finds.

If that was too cryptic for you, in fewer words the author is saying that ethanol wanks . . . hence the title of the post.

Come on, ethanol can’t suck entirely you say . . .

Graham’s team calculated the individual and societal costs and benefits of conventional gasoline vehicles, gasoline-electric hybrids, high-tech diesels and flex-fuel vehicles burning E85 full time. Conclusion: Unless gasoline prices, averaging $3.10 a gallon now, rise above $4 and average $3.50 or more the next few years, or ethanol prices drop a lot, diesel’s the best overall solution; E85′s the worst.

At least ethanol’s the most efficient solution, right?

Ethanol has less than 70% of the energy of gasoline, so more ethanol in the blend means fewer miles per gallon.

You’re killing me James R. Healey.

Drawbacks outweigh the high marks ethanol gets for adding almost nothing to the cost of a vehicle modified to burn E85 and for energy independence, Graham’s team concluded. Ethanol is made from grain, mainly corn.

And there’s the rub. The United States is hell-bent on making ethanol as inefficiently as possible, which is to make it from plants like corn and hawk it as E85 – our savior! Corn is not cellulosic, meaning it doesn’t hold near the potential energy as do cellulosic sources, like sugarcane, switch grass and other biomass. Since very few cellulosic crops are grown in the U.S., American farmer’s object to using imported sources for fuel, arguing it’s no different than importing oil. If by the same they mean different – you know, because countries that grow cellulosic plants or make cellulosic ethanol usually don’t harbor terrorists and goad us into ridonkulous wars - then I agree wholeheartedly. The good news is that ethanol projects are stalling all over the country. The bad news is that I have little hope that even a Democratic president can save us from this stupidity.

MLS Listings Going Green

A little good news in an otherwise gloom and doom real estate market – the local Multiple Listing Service (MLS) that’s used by realtors to list and search for houses, is going green.

“Before this there was no way to specifically search for a green home at all,” said Jason Stone, a principal in Creve Coeur-based Sage Home Builders, which exclusively builds green houses. “There is a small but definite audience of people who know what green is and are out there looking for green homes.”

The number of buyers asking for green features is growing, said Jay Swoboda, principal in Eco­Urban Homes, based in St. Louis.

Swoboda, whose company builds modular, certified green houses, was a key force behind the change.

Under the system, the listing for each house has a series of categories, such as number of rooms, heating and cooling systems, flooring, available appliances and type of construction. Within each category are 15 to 20 specific features.

Getting green homes listed seemed to be a concerted effort, led by Mid America Regional Information Systems Inc., the company that administers the MLS system in the St. Louis area. Also, involved was the U.S. Green Building Council’s St. Louis Chapter, which certifies homes and other builds under their Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system. The MLS system will not only allow you to search for LEED-certified homes, but those certified by other rating agencies as well.

Worst come to worst, if you don’t care about the environment and just your pocketbook, know this: “Green houses generally appraise higher than comparable traditionally built ones, said Stone, but the lack of a green designation in the Multiple Listing Service means there are no definitive records.”

And St. Louis, which isn’t always a bastion of progressive action, is among the leaders in this area. Already hosting a disproportionately large share of the country’s LEED-certified buildings, the City is only the third in the nation to incorporate “green” into its MLS system.

Both Sage Homebuilders and EcoUrban Homes are listed in green | rising’s Green Directory.

St. Louis Green Guide and Modular Homes

I trust everyone had a great Columbus Day weekend! Hey, if the dude didn’t get lost . . . someone else would have run into the western world a few years later. Two-parter today . . .

1. Over the weekend, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a green guide, which can be found here. The guide, called Go Green, was provided as a 40-page insert in the paper’s Sunday edition, and was printed on 100% recycled newsprint and with soy ink. Yeah! The paper actually did a fairly nice job, and I’m going to keep the section handy as a reference. Nothing in the guide is earth-shattering but the insert provides a handy summary of the various facets of green-osity. Also, it isn’t St. Louis-specific so everyone can enjoy the publication.

2. My friends over at EcoUrban Homes sent me a few articles I’d like to share with you.

The articles provide great evidence that prefabricated homes are just as high in quality and standards as homes fabricated on site. And because they’re built in a controlled environment, they can be built faster, cheaper and with less waste. Many of the greenest homes around the world are built this way to protect the integrity of the homes’ green features. Also, modular construction helps offset the marginally higher, but ever shrinking costs of building green.

America’s Corn-Based Idiocy

Please remain calm and in a single-file line or we’ll Taser you until you wet yourself. I’d like to share with you an editorial from the International Herald Tribune, a New York Times outfit but still a decent clear-headed international voice in a time of extreme ignorance and jingoism. As those who rely on science, and not politics, to make sound decisions have repeatedly pointed out, corn-based ethanol is a veritable Trojan horse. On the outside, a beautiful steed, marketed as America’s release from the grips of evil oil-based terrorists (Bush/Cheney?); a gorgeous maize-colored coat blowing in the wind, out-dramatized by only a giant, waving Stars-and-Stripes. Inside, a siphon of reason and cheap food and subsidies, wasting water and polluting on mind-blowing scales. For more on this:

Powering America, One Corn Flake At A Time

Six of One, Half Dozen of Another

Making the Right Ethanol Decision

If corn-based ethanol is the new American energy of choice, it’s in for a world of hurt.

Hit the Road

A Greener Asphalt BaseA few days ago, a friend of mine forwarded me an article entitled, “Engineered Soil Greens Up Parking Lots“. And boy does it! I won’t go on my rant about intentionally low road construction standards in this country but let’s just say elsewhere roads have to last a lot longer, and they do. Grrrr. From the article:

‘Paved areas pollute. They harbor exhaust-spewing cars, absorb and radiate heat, and collect contaminants that are eventually washed into the ground through rainwater runoff.

But a new kind of engineered soil could curb pavement pollution. Made with natural and locally available materials, the aggregate can filter storm water as well as provide a better soil bed for trees, which offer shade, scrub the air of emissions, reduce ambient temperatures, and intercept rainfall.  

“Paved surfaces account for up for 20 to 40 percent of a city’s surface,” said Greg McPherson, director for the U.S. Forest Service’s Center for Urban Forest Research, which is located on the campus of the University of California, Davis. “How do we green up these impervious surfaces?”‘

I think in the ol’ Lou we’re closer to 40% than we are to 20%. Either number is ridiculous. The City itself is doing okay, though there’s still more examples than I can count of piss-poor urban planning; much of it is chronicled on this great site. I really hope this technology takes off. The “aspholes” who design and build these disgusting asphalt big box national retail chain strip center jungles for Anywhere, USA will at least be doing the country a service by using engineered soil. Now if only they would stop building them on flood plains. The humanity . . .

I’m Green!

Well not me, I’m kind of mocha-ish. The blog wrote the subject line, and it wasn’t lying. I’m (blog again) now being hosted on DreamHost, a super-duper green web hosting company. From their site:

“DreamHost is carbon neutral. We’ve calculated the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use – paper in the office, electricity for our servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office – leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.

When we learned that running DreamHost generated as much carbon dioxide as 545 average-size homes we realized we had to do something to neutralize our emissions.

With a bit of research we found the most effective approach begins with resource conservation: turning off the lights, reducing travel, printing on both sides of the page. Efforts are being ramped up here daily to do what we do with less. The next step is to use clean, renewable energy. Without the option to put up solar panels or connect with a green power utility for us this means purchasing Renewable Energy Credits. Finally, to neutralize those unavoidable emissions we’ve invested in Emission Reduction Credits (a.k.a. “offsets”) which guarantee our remaining impact is effectively erased. A third-party-certification? Never fear. The credits we use to green our energy consumption and neutralize the rest of our emissions meet the highest standards in the industry.”

There’s more information here.

I’m back; me, the author. The transfer was a pain in the rear – for someone who doesn’t know a lot about web servers – but totally worth it. I’m happy to know that while I’m not wasting paper with my rants, the dirty energy being used to host my site is now being offset by Renewable Energy Credits (RECs).

Powering a Paperless World

This article on STLtoday.com details a few real estate acquisitions that just closed in the St. Louis market but doesn’t speak to the unique nature of the acquirer. The company who bought the three buildings, Digital Realty Trust, specializes in technology and datacenter-related real estate. Nothing special on the sustainability front here, except that this investment signals that St. Louis is doing well in grabbing the attention of West Coast companies (my previous post, Pure Power, highlighted the same). Finding the company’s specialty interesting, I did some digging on their website and found a heartening paragraph:

Our Green Datacenter Vision
Digital Realty Trust is committed to developing practical standards that reduce datacenter power requirements and negative by-products while increasing their operational effectiveness. Our datacenter facilities are designed to LEEDs (U.S.A.) and BREEAM (Europe) certification standards. Digital Realty Trust is a voting member of the Green Grid consortium.

Turn-KeyWhat people often forget is that when they go digital, consumption of paper is replaced by the consumption of electricity. The Internet only works because gazillions of megawatts of power keep server farms from going dark and shutting down your access to videos of kittens playing with yarn (I know, so cute!). And those suckers run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year. I’m not sure what level of energy use essentially negates the elimination of a ream of paper, but you can see where I’m going with this. In the digital age, waste isn’t localized in your recycling bin (or trash can if you suck), but focused where power – dirty power at that – produced. This makes ignoring the environmental effects of reading something on the Internet easier to ignore than reading something on paper. I’m encouraged that companies like Digital Realty Trust are making an effort to green their business, especially when there’s no ostensible negative effect on the environment from their operations. One’s motivation is completely different when his coal plant is being picketed. The company’s decision signals heightened social conscience and corporate responsibility. I’d love to get my hands on some data that shows how their greening efforts have reduced power consumption, but either way, kudos.