Greening my House

Well, the results are officially in: we have saved money! Woo hoo!

I have analyzed my electricity bill from last year and the year previous and compared it to this year when we started trying to save electricity. Here are the results so far:

Note that we started trying to save electricity in mid-January, hence the smaller savings for the month of January. At this rate, I project that we will save about $400 this year.

And even better, we are not done! There are lots of things we could do to reduce even further. I will blog about those as we do them. (Have to leave something to blog about later!

So how about the carbon?

Well, we have saved a total of 504 kWh so far since January. At 2.095 pounds of CO2 per kWh, that comes to a savings of 1056 pounds of CO2 saved so far. Annualized, that would be about 4000 pounds … 2 tons! Not bad, eh?

Now if I project that level of savings over all Americans… assume 120 million households * 2 tons a year saved per household = 240 million tons saved. Wow. And we haven’t done anything really radical yet.

I’m hoping this will inspire someone out there to save some money, some electricity, and of course, some carbon!

Earth

Thirty-eight years ago, one of the two commonly observed Earth Day celebrations was created by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson to be celebrated on April 22, 1970. Yes, of all people it was a politician! I’m not making this up! Since that time, it has grown from a fringe, grassroots sort of celebration an almost mainstream thing. The idea behind it was to foster greater awareness of environmental issues with the general public.

So I thought if this is a green blog, I should probably post something for Earth Day. I figured, heck, what is more appropriate for Earth Day than earth itself? I write “earth” with a small “e” because I mean “dirt”, not the proper name of the planet as a whole.

What the Heck are you Going on About Now, Edwin?

Recently, I checked out the web site of my local waste management company, Allied Waste. It seemed pretty scary to me if waste got together in an alliance like that, so I had to be sure… Okay, so now I’m just being silly.

One thing I noticed on the AW web site is that they are giving away free compost. What? FREE? Yes, that’s right, it’s free. Can’t beat that. It’s the compost made from all the green waste collected from all the SF Bay Area green bins, including ours. All I had to do is prove I’m a resident, and I could pick up one free cubic yard of compost. This spring, they had two pick up dates, and the most recent was last Saturday.

Here is the compost in boxes:

Mostly Organic

Compost from a company like this is mostly organic fertilizer. I say “mostly” because you never know what sort of strange things people put into their green bins. It may include chemicals, pesticides, and other things that shouldn’t be there. For example, I found a few strings and pieces of plastic bags in my load. But, on the whole, it should be pretty much composed of just yard trimmings, and therefore mostly organic.

A study by the University of Washington in 2000 found traces of the herbacides clopyralid and picloram in municipal composts. These affect broad leaf plants, and therefore are not good to put in your garden. Clopyrid was subsequently deregistered for lawn uses, and is usually not found in compost any more. However, picloram is still a possible problem.

Another possible problem is plant diseases that survive composting at insufficient temperatures. The temperatures in a municipal compost heat may not be sufficient for heat-sterilizing the microbes, fungus, etc. Usually, however, municipal composting is done in very large heaps and there is nowhere for the heat to go, so it gets pretty hot.

I am going to try using the compost anyways. Picloram can be degraded in soil by microbes, and can be leached from the soil in water. I will let the amended soil sit for a number of days before planting my plants in hopes that any traces of nasty stuff like that might leach out first, and that beneficial bacteria and insects will find their way into the compost first.

Here’s what it looked like as I was incorporating it into the garden soil:

The compost was pretty smelly. It smelled like a combination of cigar, earth, and garbage. I am not sure it was finished composting actually, as compost I have smelled before pretty much only had the “earthy” part of the smell. Here, you can see the compost and soil mixed and set up into nice furrows. I will plant the tomatoes and basil on these furrows.

Have a happy earth day, and try to do something “green” yourself. The more of us that participate, the better!

(and ladies too!)

I am thinking there is no more green action you can do at home than growing your own garden. Assuming you live in a place with a little garden space available, you can plant all sorts of things. Even if you live in an apartment, usually you can at least grow some herbs in little pots.

Fortunately, we live in a house with a yard, so I am planting a garden again this year. In my part of California, planting season already began in mid-March.

Why Have Your Own Garden?

There are many advantages to having your own garden:

• Things taste better. Vine ripened tomatoes for example are a world of difference compared to store-bought tomatoes. The reason is that they pick the store bought ones while still green so that they are firm and can handle the rigours of transportation to your local supermarket and then to your home. They make these green tomatoes look red by exposing them to ethylene gas for a while. Yes, ethylene gas is naturally produced by various fruits, but still the tomato is firm, mealy, and has disappointing flavour compared to the sweet, flavourful ones you can get fresh off your own vines. Of all the things you can grow in your garden, tomatoes are the thing that makes the most sense to grow for the flavour alone.
• Healthier (possibly) because you can grow them organically. Of course, this means you will need to do a number of extra things to stay green, like practicing crop rotation and soil solarization, using mulches, soil covers, nitrogen fixing bacteria, and organic fertilizer, and also using natural pest killers like ladybugs and other beneficial insects. It’s a lot of work, but the benefits are potentially huge. Officially, the jury is still out on the long term health effects of eating organic food over non-organic. But, I can’t see how it would be a bad thing, especially considering how well documented it is that farm workers exposed to pesticides have various problems as a result.
• It can be cheaper. Red bell peppers and various hot peppers are $4.00 a pound where I live, but I can grow them for less than that. You have to factor in the cost of the fertilizer, soil amendments, and water you use to grow them, but overall, it is still cheaper. My green bean plants for example produce so many beans for so cheap that I have to give some away or they will be wasted! Some type of veggies are not cheaper than in the store, though, because the farm can produce them in such mass quantities that you just can’t compete.
• Convenient. When I need some herbs such as parsley or thyme, I just go outside with some kitchen shears and cut some. My herbs are never wilted because they are always harvested moments before they are used. It doesn’t get any fresher than that!
• Gives you a place to put your compost. In a previous posting, I talked about composting kitty litter. I’m still not doing that for the litter yet, but soon I will be composting the kitchen wastes and some garden wastes so that I can use it as fertilizer in my garden next year. Otherwise, where would all this nice, fertile compost go?
• There are also a few intangible benefits. First off, there is tremendous satisfaction in seeing your garden reach maturity and eating from it. (Thanks to Jeff for reminding me of that!). Also, whenever we have people over for dinner and tell them they are eating food from our own garden, they are usually very impressed. Well, most of them are impressed. Some of them call us Mrs. and Mrs. Martha Stewart. Haha.
• If you have kids, it is a great way to teach them where our food comes from and how the cycles of nature work. Part of the reason that I plant my garden now is that my parents always had a garden growing up, and I remember the fresh, sweet strawberries and tart red and black currants from the bushes. Back then I didn’t care for the veggies too much, but I’ve grown up now and do eat my broccoli.
• Finally, the reason that I wrote this posting: they help cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. Why? Well, on average food travels 1500 miles before it gets to your dinner plate. That means someone drove it, flew it, or sailed it that distance most likely using fossil fuels. That means the food on your plate represents a part of your carbon footprint and you haven’t even eaten it yet! This is a good segue to my next topic, eating locally to help reduce your carbon footprint.

Eating Locally

Back in 2005, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon from Vancouver, British Columbia, decided to do a little experiment that they called the 100 Mile Diet. They noticed that the average American meal shipped from the average 1500 miles away uses up to 17 times more petroleum products, and increases carbon dioxide emissions by the same amount, compared to an entirely local meal. (Yes, they’re in Canada, but the average Canadian meal is similar to the average American one.) They decided that for one whole year they would attempt to eat only food that was grown within 100 miles of where they live, and then blog about it as they went along. Well, they survived the experiment, but of course sorely missed some things, especially things like fruit during the winter.

But, they learned some things too. First, it is possible to survive like that and eat well. You can find substitutes like honey instead of sugar. Second, they found you can reduce your carbon footprint if you eat more local, fresh foods.

Now this experiment was pretty radical of course, but if we all attempt to eat more locally where possible, we can at least reduce our carbon footprint. Given a choice at the supermarket, what I have been trying to do is choose foods produced locally in California instead of from other states. Of course, lots of things are grown here in California, so I don’t really have to give up much. However, we still buy bananas, coffee, and chocolate of course (who can live without chocolate?!?), even though they are not grown locally. In fact, you can’t grow them locally because of the environmental conditions, so we’re stuck there. But, when given the choice between local California soy beans and ones grown in Texas or Ohio, I’ll choose the local ones.

The ultimate local food, of course, comes from our own garden. Very little fossil fuel is used to grow it, and pretty much none is used to transport it. There is still a little carbon footprint because the water we use for irrigation is being pumped using electricity generated from fossil fuels, and we had to drive to the nursery to buy the seeds and soil and planting pots, etc. But, this is much smaller footprint than if the food came from 1500 miles away.

What I’m Planting

This year, I’m planting a little bit of a lot of different things:

• tomatoes of course. 3 different types: big boys, romas, and heirlooms
• grapes - maybe I can make a little wine out of my new Zinfandel vines?
• green beans - we even have a few volunteers from last year’s beans
• carrots
• onions. 3 different types: white, red, and spring
• garlic
• potato
• radish
• cumin
• basil. 2 types: italian and thai
• cilantro - hmm, can you say “fresh salsa” ?
• lemon. Just planted a new dwarf Meyer lemon tree.
• lime. Also a dwarf tree.

Also left over and still growing strong from last year:

• strawberries
• oregano
• thyme
• parsley
• rosemary
• mint
• peppers: 4 different types: serrano, jalapeno, bell, and poblanos. (Again, fresh salsa, hmm hmm!)
• quince. We found out after we bought the house that we have a medium sized quince tree in the back yard!
• white pomegranate. Same thing here. I didn’t know they were pomegranates until the first fall when the fruits fell off the bush and started to rot and crack open. Then, I recognized them!

Many of these herbs are pretty weedy. The oregano is threatening to take over for example. I have to cut it back severely every year. The strawberries are going nuts too, which is great. I love strawberries.

More Pictures

There are lots more pictures of the garden as it is now on my flickr account. I’ll post more later when things really start to grow.

Okay, so this posting has nothing to do with St. Paddy’s day, but hey I had to throw that in there.

Well, Margaret got a new job a few weeks ago, and though it isn’t really about greening the house specifically, it is related to being green at home in a round-about sort of way.
Why?

Because she got a job working at Sunpower, a leading maker of solar panels! Woo hoo!

Her new job is to sell large installations of solar photovoltaic cells to large retail store customers. I can’t tell you which customers they are until the deals are closed, but these are large box stores you would find at a mall. They have lots of unused roof space where the panels can be colocated.

An interesting new twist on solar panel sales is the new approach that Sunpower and its competitors are now taking. The panels are installed on the roof, but the retail store does not own them. Instead, they simply buy the power they generate. Sunpower sells the panels to a holding company that is created for the deal, which a 3rd party company finances. Typically, the 3rd party is a large investment firm that sees it an an investment opportunity. The holding company will buy the panels, install them on the roof, then sell the power to the retail store in a sort of power purchasing agreement. With the tax incentives provided to companies that invest in solar panels, the holding company can offer the electricity to the retail store at a rate that is competitive with “brown power” (their word for traditional utility-generated power that produces carbon and other wastes).

Filling the roof with panels often provides up to 30% of the energy usage for that retail store during the day. With net metering, electricity is sold back to the utility company during the day when the panels are going strong and there is more than enough electricity to run the store. At night or during the morning or evening when there is not enough light to power the store, the utility provides energy back to the retail store.

This is not a 100% solution, but at least it’s a start and it shows that the retail stores are doing something.

Another idea would be to fit solar panels over parking lots as well. This has two advantages: the extra power of course, and at the same time, customer’s cars are shaded from the heat of the sun. Often, parking lots are larger than the actual roof space of the store itself, so this has the potential to generate even more electricity. However, there is the complication that the parking lot and building are most often not owned by the retail stores, but by some landlord instead, so they would have to be brought in on the deal as well.

In any case, her new job is a 45 minute drive away from our house, which balloons to 1 hour 20 minutes during commute hours. She really wanted a car that has the carpool lane stickers on it so that she did not have to sit in traffic for such a long time. This presented me with a perfect opportunity to advocate buying the Prius that I’ve always wanted.

So we did! We bought a 2-year old pre-owned Prius with all the bells and whistles, and of course, the stickers.

It’s a cool eco-toy for techno-weenies like myself, but also has some real advantages. One tankful of gas is about 8.5 to 9 gallons. At today’s gas rate of $3.68 a gallon at the stations near us, that represents a $31 to $33 or so fill-up. Our other car (a BMW) typically fills up with 16 gallons but gets a similar range. This is saving us $27 a fill-up, once a week, which is about $1400 a year. It would take only 5 years to pay off the added cost of a Prius with stickers over buying another regular-fuel vehicle, and many many more years to actually pay for the vehicle itself over not buying anything. But, we would have needed a new vehicle soon anyways, as both of our other cars are over 110K miles already.

We intended to keep all 3 cars and run them into the ground: the Prius for saving gas and money, the BMW for comfort or when the Prius is already used by the other spouse, and the 4Runner for hauling stuff, towing stuff, or for runs to stores to buy mass quantities of food or supplies.

The carbon savings would look like this. First, let’s calculate how far we drive to work each year.

Margaret: 40 miles each way * 2 trips per day * 264 working days per year = about 21,000 miles per year
Edwin: 23 miles each way * 2 trips per day * 264 working days per year = about 12,000 miles per year

Before we bought the Prius, Margaret drove the BMW to work, and I drove the 4Runner (the longer trip gets the more efficient vehicle) , we would get the following carbon usage (using a figure of 20 pounds of CO2 produced per gallon of gasoline):

BMW: 21,000 miles / 24 mpg = 955 gallons = about 19,100 pounds of CO2
4Runner: 12,000 miles / 16 mpg (!) = 750 gallons = about 15,000 pounds of CO2
Total: 34,100 pounds of CO2

Now, with Margaret driving the Prius the longer distance to work, the BMW is freed up for me to drive to work instead.

Prius: 21,000 / 48 mpg = 438 gallons = about 8750 pounds of CO2
BMW: 12,000 / 22 mpg = 545 gallons = 10,900 pounds of CO2
Total: 19,650 pounds of CO2

Savings: 14,450 pounds of CO2, or about 42%.

Notes:

Yes, the Prius is supposed to get better than 48 mpg, but there are some inaccuracies in the way the EPA measures fuel efficiency. Basically, they don’t run the car on a tank of gas and see how far it goes. Instead, they measure the tail pipe emmissions, which are pretty much zero during the times when the Prius is running on the battery, which skews the results. The EPA (and Toyota of course!) claim 55 mpg. However, the reality is closer to 48 mpg based on how much gas is used to drive the miles we drive.

Note that we saved more fuel, money, and carbon than expected because I could also drive a more fuel efficient vehicle to work as well. (Well, more fuel-efficient than the one I was driving before!)

Anyways, buying the Prius probably didn’t make much economic sense. However, we had to buy a new car sometime soon as the 4Runner has 190K miles on it and is starting to need lots of repairs. Plus, Margaret feels better pulling up to work in the Prius when all the other employees are green activists as well. It will be especially useful when talking to her potential customers, showing that she walks the green walk as well as talking the green talk!

We have two cute little kittens, Kinnie and Cali, a brother and sister team from the same litter. Well, they are not so little any more. They are 6 months old at this point and have grown like crazy. They are also getting very bratty, so maybe they are not so cute as they used to be, but heck, they have stolen our hearts anyways!

Kinnie is the orange tabby, and Cali is the calico.

As you may have already guessed from the title, the reason I’m writing this particular blog post is because pets produce waste. Lots of it. In fact, according to the book “In Defense of Garbage” by Judd Alexander, American cats produce over 2 million tons of kitty litter each year! (And that was in 1993… who knows what it is now?)

Of course, we have a litter box in our garage and a little cat door so they can get from the house to the garage. The litter box was filled with the clumping clay type of litter which works really well with the type of lifting sifter box we have. I estimate that 5 to 15% of our garbage is kitty litter based on a visual inspection of the volume of the garbage bin taken up by litter and garbage bags.

Okay, So There’s Waste. Big Deal. What’s the Problem?

There are a number of problems with traditional clumping litters:

1. Clumping kitty litter is typically made out of sodium bentonite. This is essentially clay. It works really well at absorbing liquids and clumping, but it has to be mined out of the ground to be produced. These mines are not particularly “green” — many are open cast mines.
2. Sodium bentonite is very dusty, and when cats follow their natural “burying instinct” after they are done, they kick up a lot of this dust. And then they breath it in. Not good.
3. Some cats ingest this litter, causing clumps and in rare cases even blockages in their digestive tracts when the bentonite soaks up all the usable moisture.
4. The used litter is non-compostable and non-reusable. So all you can really do is throw it out. It then finds its way into landfills. This biological material should be reused and recycled back into the ecosystem to help combat soil erosion, but instead it is sent out of the ecosystem for good.
5. Clay can get in between kitten’s toes and get stuck there, and if they have any injuries, it can get into the wound, clump, and then get infected. Vets recommend against clumping clay for cats with recent surgeries and for kittens.
6. Clumping litters often contain other rather-nasty chemicals in order to trap smells or otherwise neutralize odors. Some of these chemicals are toxic if ingested.

Basically, clumping clay is not sustainable. We mine it, use it, then throw it out. One day, we’ll run out of it. (Then the cats will start using your carpets or your flower beds for their litter box instead. Ew.)

Okay, So What to Do About it?

Well fortunately, there are biodegradable kitty litters out there. Usually they are based on one of these:

• pine wood pellets
• non-food grade wheat or wheat bran
• paper pellets
• sawdust
• corn cobs

All of these are sustainable, because we can just grown more and we can compost it when it’s done. The compost can then be used in gardens or other soils.

Composting? Well What About All those Nasty Bacteria?

That’s a very good point. Cat feces sometimes contains many types of fecal coliform bacteria such as the dreaded E. Coli, and also a very nasty bug called taxoplasma gondii which can survive in soils and eventually get into food growing in that soil. This particular taxoplasma bacteria is very nasty for pregnant women and their babies, and for that reason pregnant women should never be “doing the litter”. Unfortunately, us guys need to sign up for that household chore. (I was going to make a quip about “always dealing with the crap” but I realized my wife will probably read this posting!

Composting does get rid of a lot of bacteria, especially if you do worm composting (vermicomposting). But it does not get all of it. The safest thing to do if you are composting your litter is to use the resulting worm casting on non-food plants only, such as trees, shrubs, flowers, ornamentals, etc.

You can also sterilize the soil by essentially “cooking” it to kill off all the bacteria. This can be done in a green fashion via solarization. Solarization is a technique where you spread a thin layer of soil (or in this case, worm castings) out on a black surface and cover it with a transparent cover such as a thick plastic sheet. Then, you leave that out in the sun to “cook”. In sunny climes, this technique can raise the temperature of the casting up to as much as 140 to 150F. If this is left in the sun for a few weeks, pretty much all bacteria, fungus, weeds, and seeds will be sterilized. Also be very careful — the temperature must be above 140F for a few hours to ensure that the bacteria are all killed off. If you are not sure about it, don’t use this compost on your food crops. See the USDA web site for more details about killing off harmful bacteria in foods, some of which applies to killing bacteria in compost.

Alternately, you can cook the castings in the oven at 200F for 20 minutes to do the same thing. (Don’t worry, the worms have removed anything smelly!) This is what companies do to chicken and cow manure that you buy in those huge packs at your home and garden megastore.

The only problem is that cooking it in the oven probably uses electricity that causes carbon emissions. Solarization is the preferred “green” method if it gets warm enough where you live to raise the temperature sufficiently.

But there is a problem with cooking. Even the beneficial bacteria can be eliminated. All of its mojo is gone, baby!

So, the idea is that you would keep 2 compost heaps: one for kitchen wastes, and one for worm composting the kitty litter. When a batch of the worm compost is done, and then appropriately solarized or sterilized, then it goes directly into the kitchen compost heap to get its mojo back. The castings will pick up beneficial bacteria and also provide food and materials to help the bacteria break down the food wastes as well. The result should be usable on food gardens.

So What are You Doing, Edwin?

Well, step 1 is already complete: we have switched from the clumping clay litter to Swheat Scoop wheat litter. The cats didn’t seem to mind at all. The only thing I have noticed is that there is an ammonia smell when I change the litter that I didn’t smell before with the clay. Currently, we are still throwing the litter out in the garbage. (You can’t put it in the green bin for the same bacteria reasons listed above.) Also, the price seems to be competitive with the clay clumping litter. We pay perhaps a dollar more (that’s about 10%) to get this biodegradable stuff.

Step 2 is to get a 2 composting bins, one for food and one for litter. Then, we’ll use the food compost for the food garden, and the litter compost for the non-food parts of the garden.

Step 3 is to build or buy a solarization tray so that we can sterilize the litter compost with a high enough heat that we can use it for the food parts of the garden.

I’ll blog again when we have done parts 2 and 3.

I figured it would be a while before our house is carbon neutral, if indeed we can even get to that state at all without spending too much money. So, I started looking into carbon offsets. What are they? How much do they cost? Will it really help eliminate my carbon emissions and thereby reduce global warming?

The answer I found was surprising. I came to the conclusion that they are basically BS. They do not eliminate carbon emissions, and may even help produce more of them!

What are Carbon Offsets?

The basic idea behind carbon offsets is that you pay someone else to either reduce their emissions or to recapture carbon from the atmosphere so that it will offset the emissions caused by whatever it is you are doing. For example, when you book a trip on a plane with Travelocity, you can buy carbon offsets from a non-profit company called The Conservation Fund to offset the carbon emissions from burning all that jet fuel. The fund then uses the money for various environmental projects that will better the environment.

What do They Cost?

The actual amount depends on which company or organization you are buying offsets from. It can range from a dollar and change for that flight you booked, to a few tens of dollars.

Will it Really Help Eliminate my Carbon Emissions?

The answers is NO. You are still taking that flight, aren’t you? That flight is on a jet powered by kerosene, which is derived from crude oil, and therefore a fossil fuel. You are still contributing that carbon to the atmosphere. Yes, the organization will be funding green energy projects elsewhere, but that does not mean your carbon emissions are removed.

Well, What are the Problems With it Then?

You may be thinking why is Edwin arguing against funding green energy projects elsewhere? Well, I’m not. I’m advocating against you thinking that buying an offset will reduce your carbon guilt!

Here are the problems with offsets:

First and foremost, the name. Wiktionary defines the word “offset” as

“Anything that acts as counterbalance; a compensating equivalent.”

A carbon offset does not counterbalance your carbon emission. If you produce 2 units of CO2, and you pay someone to produce zero units by let’s say funding a wind farm, then on average the two of you have produced 1 unit of CO2 each. Even worse, 2 new units of CO2 have been contributed to the atmosphere that weren’t there before. ie. this is “business as usual”.

The second problem is that the offsets do not remove carbon from the ecosystem, as the word “offset” would imply.

Some of these organizations plant trees or plants to capture carbon and turn it into plant matter via photosynthesis. The problem is that you haven’t removed the carbon from the ecosystem. When the plant dies or gets eaten or some human kills it, the carbon is returned to the atmosphere again. Animals or micro-organisms eat the plant matter (ie. it decays) and the whole cycle starts again. All you are doing by growing new plants is moving the carbon from one place to another. Well, this shell game doesn’t work! The new carbon is still there!

The idea can be understood in the context of biofuels. Carbon is captured from the atmosphere by plants using sunlight to power the reactions. Then later when the plant is turned into a biofuel and I burn that fuel in my car or boat, all I am doing is releasing the same carbon back into the air again. I am not adding any extra. It is just being recycled again and again.

Alternately, let’s say the organization decides to fund a wind farm. This wind farm produces no carbon and electricity consumers can then purchase this clean energy to avoid burning fossil fuels. Net effect: zero carbon emissions… and zero carbon capture as well.

But isn’t funding these sort of projects a good thing? Yes, it is, but this brings us to the third problem. The problem is “guilt”. When you take that flight you booked earlier, you are producing carbon emissions. ‘But,’ you reason, ‘It’s okay because I bought carbon offsets.’

Carbon offsets are a way to prey on people’s feelings of guilt about producing carbon emissions. All they end up doing is encouraging people to continue behaving the way they were behaving before because their guilt is assuaged by buying offsets. Some people will now feel free to emit EVEN MORE carbon because all they have to do is buy offsets to make it okay.

Well, guess what. It’s not okay.

We all have to stop these emissions, and it starts at home and with your own behaviours.

Another aspect of this is that it takes the focus away from making stricter laws and/or governmental subsidies for encouraging green projects. Carbon offsets are not “pay as you go” because only those people that feel guilty about it are buying offsets. The worst offenders are not. We need to mandate that everyone reduces their emissions, and encourage better behaviour via tax incentives and rebates for green technologies and projects. The government will see this money back again later because the coming boom in green companies is going to produce lots of new tax revenues.

This brings me to the fourth problem, which is financial. When I buy an offset, I don’t really get anything out of it except to feel better about myself. So offsets are basically charitable contributions to organizations that does good things with them. Except, it’s not a real charitable contribution. You don’t get a receipt and you can’t write them off on your income tax.

‘Hey wait a minute! Why can’t I write them off?’ you think.

The reason is that many of these organizations are for-profit companies, and others are non-profits that are not registered charities. To me, this seems deceptive.

If you book your flight with Expedia, for example, you can contribute to a company called Terrapass. Terrapass’ web site has carbon offsets for sale right there on its home page and even implies that it will “reduce and balance your impact”. “Reduce” maybe by averaging your impact and theirs together, but “balance”? That’s deceptive because they are not removing carbon from the air.

Another problem, according to this USA Today article, is that Terrapass declines to disclose its finances, including its profits, citing competition. What? What kind of non-profit is this that does not have such transparency… oh wait… I see. It’s a for-profit company. Who knows how much of this carbon offset money I just paid goes to lining executive’s pockets and how much actually goes to green projects? They won’t tell us.

So where does that leave us? Well, that carbon offsets don’t offset your emissions and may even encourage more emissions. They are often purveyed by deceptive companies. You don’t make any financial gain from them. And worst of all, they don’t solve the problem they are trying to solve, which is global warming.

So to me, this means they are BS. I would not recommend buying them.

Now, the thing is that green projects should still be funded. It just shouldn’t be via this deceptive means. If an organization said I could make a charitable contribution to help fund green projects without attaching any “offset” idea to it, that would at least be more honest.

I personally would rather invest in a company doing green projects rather than contributing something to a deceitful organization that is doing unknown things with that money. This way, I see some of that money back. In fact, I can even make lots of money on it! Heck, someone is going to… why not me?

I bought shares of First Solar and Sunpower a few ago, and both have done very well up until this recent mortgage crisis thing. I have already seen the returns on those shares, and I am helping these companies with their green projects by funding them. I will be looking for more such green companies in which to invest in the future… but that is a topic for another blog post.

Now if some company does come up with viable carbon sequestration, which is the act of capturing CO2 out of the air and storing it somewhere permanently outside of the ecosystem, then I will be golden. I could buy offsets that are really and truly offsets.

On second thought… nah. I’ll just going to try to not emit the carbon in the first place.

Well, I’ve done a little research and found out that the desktop computer system with which I am currently typing to you was using up a lot of electricity that it does not have to use.

The biggest culprits were:

• Leaving it on when we’re not using it
• The monitor
• The printer

Leaving it on when we’re not using it

By far, the biggest usage of energy stems from leaving the system on when we are not using it. We usually leave the system on because we frequently access it at random times during the day, and booting our Windows machine from scratch just takes too darn long when all you want to do is a quick check to see if you have any new emails or check the weather. (Booting, logging in, and waiting for the network to get an IP address over a minute on our computer!)

But one thing I hadn’t tried before is standby mode. I thought of that only in the context of laptops where you are trying to save battery life, but I was surprised to learn it works on desktops too. Not only that, it works well!

My Dell Dimension 4550 (yeah, I know, it’s old, but it still works fine for checking the emails) goes into standby mode in approximately 3 or 4 seconds. When I touch any key on the keyboard, it wakes up again and reconnects to the network in about 5 or 6 seconds. That’s fast enough for me, and certainly much faster than the 90 or so seconds it takes to boot from scratch.

But how much does it save? Well, a running computer that is not doing anything will use about 60 to 150 watts depending on the beefiness of the configuration you have. A full-on latest-and-greatest gaming machine will be on the 150 watts end of the spectrum, and your basic email checking system like I have will be closer to the 60 watt end of the spectrum. Either way, if you put your system in standby mode, the usage drops to range of 1 to 5 watts or so.

Let’s say we use our desktop 3 hours a day (yes, I am a nerd!). The other 21 hours a day, it is idle. Also, let me figure that the difference between running the computer with the screen saver and standby mode is approximately 80 watts (= 0.08 kilowatts). Also, the marginal rate for our electricity is $0.22 per kilowatt hour because we are “over 200% of our baseline.” I don’t know where PG&E gets that baseline from, but it is pretty low if I have to scrimp and save in order to meet it. In any case, the point is that any kilowatt-hour we save will save us $0.22

Let’s calculate that for a year:

21 idle hours * 365 days a year = 7665 idle hours per year
7665 idle hours * 0.08 kilowatts = 613.2 kilowatt-hours
613.2 kilowatt-hours * $0.22 per kilowatt-hour = $134.90 a year

That means we are saving $135 a year without spending a dime to do it! Not bad, eh?

Even better, in the Windows Power Options settings, you can set your computer to go into standby mode automatically if there is no user activity for a period of time. I have ours set to 1/2 hour in case we forget to put it in standby mode manually.

The Monitor

We had 2 CRT monitors from back in the dark ages. (ie. the 1990s). One was a 19″ Komodo monster, and the other a small 15″ one that I used for my Linux machine whenever I run that. The 19″ monitor was physically HUGE, but had a gorgeous display that could do 1600×1200. It consumed about 80 watts while it was on, and about 1.5 watts in sleep mode.

My wife’s company was moving and did not need some of their Sony LCD monitors any more, so we acquired two of them for very cheap to replace our CRTs. Instead of throwing out the CRTs, we placed them on Craig’s List, and they were taken pretty quickly. Getting used monitors and selling used monitors — reusing older equipment is better than recycling! No landfills got any bigger as a result of our transactions.

In any case, I calculated that the new LCD monitor uses about 35 watts when it is in use, and about 0.6 watts in sleep mode. That means it saves about 45 watts in regular use, and 0.9 watts in sleep mode.

Let’s calculate:

Regular usage

3 hours a day of usage * 365 days a year = 1095 hours a year
45 watts saved in regular mode * 1095 hours a year = 49.275 kilowatt-hours
49.275 kilowatt-hours * $0.22 per kilowatt-hour = $10.84 a year

Sleep mode

21 idle hours * 365 days a year = 7665 idle hours per year
7665 idle hours * 0.9 watts = 6.9 kilowatt-hours
6.9 kilowatt-hours * $0.22 per kilowatt-hour = $1.52 a year

That means the monitors will save us a total of $12.36 a year each, which means they will pay for themselves in terms of electricity alone pretty quickly. (Plus we sold the CRTs for a little money, so that offset of the costs too.)

The Printer

We don’t print things very often, but the printer stayed on all the time in case we did. Our HP color inkjet printer would use 12 watts while printing, 5 watts when it was idle but in ready mode, and surprisingly, about 4 watts when the thing was turned completely off! The usage of energy when it is turned off is what is referred to as “vampire energy”. I’ll talk about that in a subsequent blog post, as many devices in your home like TVs, DVD players, cell phone chargers, etc. use this vampire energy and there are ways to combat that as well.

We probably printed on average for about 3 minutes a day, which is 0.05 hours of usage a day and 23.95 hours of idle time a day.

To solve this problem, I got a spare power strip and plugged a few of the non-essential things like the printer into it. When the power strip, you can flip the power button on the whole strip and any devices plugged into it will use no electricity at all. Plus, the power strip has the advantage of giving surge protection. No when we want to print, we flip the switch on the power strip, hit the power button on the printer, and we’re ready to go in about 15 seconds.

Let’s calculate:

23.95 idle hours per day * 365 days a year = 8741.75 idle hours per year
8741.75 idle hours * 5 watts idle mode = 43.71 kilowatt-hours
43.71 kilowatt-hours * $0.22 per kilowatt-hour = $9.62 a year

Total

With a few simple changes and a few smart transactions, we will save:

$134.90 putting the computer in standby mode
$12.36 switching to LCD monitors
$9.62 putting the printer on a power strip and turning it off
——-
$156.88

Not too shabby!

Ooo, I almost forgot. The total kilowatt-hours we will save is:

613.2
49.275
6.9
43.71
——
713.085

If each kilowatt-hour is generated from a fossil fuel like coal or natural gas and represents 2.095 pounds of CO2, that means our savings represent a total of 1494 pounds of CO2 not released into the atmosphere. That’s where the real savings are!

According to wikipedia, a typical American home uses 44% of its energy for space heating. For our house approximately 50% of our gas usage goes towards space heating. That represents about $350 a year.

We have done a few things to save on our heating bill. First, we have installed a programmable thermostat, we have closed the heating vents in those rooms we don’t use, and we close curtains/shutters at night to keep the heat in.

The programmable thermostat is a simple device that replaces your regular thermostat. It allows you to program when you want the house to be at particular temperatures.

The one we bought at the home megamart has different settings each day and 4 time blocks per day. During the day time block when we’re at work, we have it set to 60F (~16C). In the evening around 6pm or so when we come home from work, it warms up to a more comfortable 67F (~19C). Later in the evening, we have it set to go back down to 62F (17C) for sleeping. Finally, we have it set to 67F (~19C) again for a half hour in the morning when Margaret gets up for work.

The second thing we have done is close the heating vents in those rooms we don’t use, like the guest bedroom. This means those rooms become rather cold, but there is nothing in there that would have a problem with the temperature. (Yes, we do open them up again when people come to stay!) It also means that the heater doesn’t have to work as hard to heat up the rest of the house to the set temperature.

Finally, we close the drapes/curtains/shutters at night. This helps keep the warmth in the house. A large percentage of the heat escapes the house via the windows rather than through the walls.

Together, these things have saved us roughly 8% or so on our gas bill in the winter months, and nothing in the summer of course. That represents about 30 therms of gas, 360 lbs of CO2, and $42 for all of 2007. The thermostat itself cost us $50, so it has paid for itself in 2 winters.

Things we still need to do:

• Insulate the ductwork where-ever we can. The US Department of Energy estimates that as much as 20 to 40% of heat generated by a heater could be dissipated in the duct work and never reaches its final destination. That should probably be a cheap fix — imagine using duct tape for what it was actually intended for!
• Get a new high-efficiency gas furnace. The furnace we have right now looks like it is from the 80’s. It has service labels on it from before 1996, so know it is at the very least 12 years old, but it looks much older than that. A furnace’s efficiency is measured with an annual fuel-utilization-efficiency (AFUE) rating. Furnaces from the 80’s typically have ratings around 65%, which means that 65% of the energy in the burning natural gas is used to heat your home. The other part is waste that is heating up the air above the chimney pipe outside your home. Today’s furnaces by US law have to have at least 78% efficiency, but many are even more efficient than that, with some even at 97% efficiency. A new furnace has the potential to save us $114 a year on the heating bill, not to mention saving 82 therms of gas or 984 pounds of CO2.
• If we really get intrepid, we can install heating “zones” in the house. That is, we install various thermostats that control the opening or closing of vents to regulate which parts of the house get heated at which times. That helps efficiency by only heating those parts of the house where we are located. For example, we could put the rest of the house at 50F and our bedroom at 62F when we are sleeping. I am not sure how much a system like that might cost though…

Okay, as I said in an earlier posting, I said I would be listing the few things we have done already to be more green. In this posting: Compact Fluorescent Bulbs

CF light bulbs use about 1/4 of the energy of regular incandescent bulbs.

So, a few years ago, I replaced all the bulbs in our house (and outside sockets!) with compact fluorescent bulbs, except the ones on dimmers, 3-way switches, and touch lamps. The electricity portion of our utility bill went from $60 to $52 a month. That’s a real savings of 13%. Yearly, that means $96 in our pockets. I spent $8 a bulb (approximately) and there were about 10 of those bulbs for a total of $80. That means these bulbs paid for themselves in less than a year! Woo hoo!

Since that time, some companies have started shipping 3-way and dimmable CF bulbs. We will buy some of those in the future for those lamps fixtures that need them, and I’ll report back to you how the eletricity bill changes.

But Edwin, aren’t the regular bulbs so much cheaper that CF isn’t even worth it?

Well, a regular 100w incandescent bulb costs anywhere from $1.00 on special to $1.50, and the equivalent 23w CF bulb costs about $8, so it seems like it may be true. (A 23w CF bulb puts out about the same amount of light as a 100w regular bulb.)

However, the cool part about these CF bulbs is that their lifespan is typically longer than those of regular incandescent bulbs. A CF bulb can last anywhere from 6 to 15 times as long as an incandescent bulb, depending on its usage pattern. So now multiply the cost of a regular bulb by 6 to calculate how much you have to spend on regular bulbs during the lifespan of a CF bulb, and now you see that the regular bulbs now cost anywhere from $6 to $9… But wait a sec, that’s practically the same price as a CF bulb!

The question is, is that true? Do they really last longer. Well, I can tell you that of the 10 CF bulbs, I’ve had to replace 3 of them so far. They may have been faulty, and we may have switched them on and off too often or left them on for too short a time. The other ones are 5 years old now and are still working normally.

So, same price, but much less electricity usage and therefore money in our pockets. Sounds like a winner to me. Everyone should switch to CF bulbs where-ever possible.

More about CF bulbs:

http://green.yahoo.com/blog/greenpicks/94/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-cfls-but-were-afraid-to-ask.html
http://18seconds.org/18seconds/

Now the next step after CF bulbs is LED bulbs. However, they are much more expensive per usage hour than CF bulbs are, even factoring in that they use only 90% less energy than regular incandescent bulbs and 60% less energy than even CF bulbs and last 5 to 10 times longer than CF bulbs and about 30 to 150 times longer than regular incandescent bulbs.

Right now, the replacement for a regular 100w bulb still costs about $98. Multiply the cost of a regular bulb ($1.50) by 30 and you get $45. That means it is still cheaper to put in incandescents than LED bulbs, let alone the CF bulbs.

However, the prices are coming down. I think in a few years, it will reach the “tipping point” where it will be more economical to put in long lasting LEDs than to put in CF bulbs. That point just hasn’t been reached yet.

One thing I have started doing that costs us nothing is “navy showers“.

Edwin, what do you mean by that exactly? Are you only taking showers on boats?

Haha, no, I don’t mean that. What I mean is that I only turn the water while rinsing. Basically, I turn on the water at the beginning of the shower to get it nice and hot, then wet myself, and turn the water off again. Then, soap and shampoo up, then turn on the water again, rinse, turn it off again. (Lather, rinse, repeat until you’re clean.)

A typical shower uses about 40 gallons (150 L) of fresh water from the tap, or if you are being especially luxurious, up to 60 or 70 gallons (225 to 260 L) of water. A navy shower can use as little as 3 gallons (11 L). I think I probably don’t use that little. More like 5 to 10 gallons, especially in the winter when the initial hot water feels so good when it is cold in the house.

Why is This a Green Thing to Do?

Water must be pumped through pipes to get to your house. It is estimated that about 6% of all electricity used in California today is used to pump water. So, if you save water, you save electricity, and that’s many tons of carbon not going into the air as a result of burning the coal necessary to generate the electricity to pump the water.

Also, water is scarce here in California. Saving water is just generally a good idea to make sure we all have enough of it.

In a typical house, about 18.5% of the fresh water is used by baths and showers. If you reduce your water consumption for showers to 1/4 of the original amount, this means you are saving almost 14% of your total water usage for the whole house. That doesn’t sound like much, but it doesn’t really cost you anything to do it, and it won’t be the only thing we will be doing to reduce our water usage.

The savings don’t stop there, though. Most of the water used in a shower is hot water that came from your boiler. Using less hot water means you will need less energy to heat up that water. Approximately 13% of the energy your home uses goes to water heating, typically done with natural gas, and a majority of that goes towards showers. If you reduce that by three quarters, that is 5 to 10% of your total gas bill saved right there.

Later, if we can afford it, we will put in tankless water heaters which will save even more on the gas bill. A dream would be to put in solar heating as well, but that sounds very expensive. We’ll see.

So not bad, eh? Try it yourself and see.

I’ll look closely at my next quarter’s utility bill and see what affect I have had and report back later in another blog posting.