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Run your big appliances at night
Don’t make your air conditioner battle your washing machine.Another tip for keeping your house cool in the summer: run your washing machine, dishwasher, and drier at night. These big appliances throw off a lot of heat, and during the day you’re just going to make your air conditioner work overtime to keep the house cool. Another benefit of using your big appliances at night is that you reduce strain on the electrical grid during peak hours. How this helps Using appliances when the ambient air is cooler reduces strain on your air conditioner. Avoiding peak power times can also cut your electric bills and spare the air. More information
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More names please!
We’re still looking for name suggestions from you (yes, you) for our blog.Last week, I told you that we are looking for a new name for our blog. A big “thank you” to everyone who has already submitted a suggestion (an even bigger “THANK YOU” to those who have submitted multiple suggestions). We’ve received over 160 name suggestions in total. But we want more! Submit your new name now, and you could win a Trevor Baylis Eco Media MP3 Player or a TerraPass gift certificate. Already submitted a name? No problem. You can submit as many suggestions as you want. There’s no numerical limit to your creativity. Here are our style suggestions from last week:
What are you waiting for? Submit your new name now! The full rules are available in last week’s post. Image by Flickr user hashmil.
Latest ad from the We campaign
“Give us 100% clean electricity in ten years”I continue to like these. A lot of people criticized the previous campaign on the grounds that it “legitimized” people with less-than-sterling environmental records like Newt Gingrich, but that seems to me to be missing the point. The ad was meant to legitimize climate change as an important issue among the 50% of the population that didn’t vote for Al Gore. I don’t know whether it worked, but certainly this is a worthwhile goal. The new ad rallies people around Gore’s call for 100% clean electricity in ten years. Again, I like the optics here. Cutting carbon makes for such a dreary slogan, particularly as we keep blowing past previous emissions records. 100% clean electricity — that’s something folks can get behind. (And, no, I don’t think it much matters that this goal is not likely achievable. Any significant progress on this front would be huge.)
Clean energy on the move
More solar, more geothermal: Renewable energy is a small but booming part of the energy mix.Lots of renewable energy in the news lately: One: California is building two massive solar photovoltaic power plants, together big enough to generate 800 megawatts of power. To get a sense of the scale, consider that the current biggest PV installation in the U.S. has a capacity of 14 megawatts, and the biggest one in the world is a 23-megawatt Spanish installation. The new plant will roughly double the amount of solar PV in the U.S. Two: Big box stores and grocery chains are getting in on the act. Hurrying to take advantage of tax incentives that expire at the end of the year, retailers like Wal-Mart, Safeway, and Whole Foods are decorating their rooftops with solar panels. Cumulatively, these efforts add up. Wal-Mart’s rooftop acreage roughly matches the size of Manhattan. Joe Romm notes that the Times biffed this story a bit by implying that solar energy carries a high cost for retailers. In fact, the installations compare favorably with the retail electricity they displace. Another small complaint: the article notes that retailers are combining solar panels with “other rooftop technologies like skylights and solar water heaters.” It’d be nice if these technologies got more than a one-sentence aside. Using the sun directly for heat and light can be a far more efficient than using it to generate electricity. These solutions deserve their chance to, ahem, shine. Three: Speaking of technologies that deserve more attention, who doesn’t love a good heat pump? The Times takes a close look at a dead simple technology that can slash energy costs for buildings. Consisting of little more than some pipes run into the ground, geothermal heat exchanges provide warmth in the winter and cold in the summer, baseload power that is most available when it is most needed. No surprise that geothermal systems are a booming business right now. Equipment manufacturers can’t keep up with demand, and the industry is hurting for trained installation personnel. Given the massive energy demands of building heating and cooling, it’s hard to imagine that geothermal energy won’t become an increasingly important part of the energy mix. Four: Then there’s the big fancy kind of geothermal energy. Google has funded two companies working on “enhanched geothermal systems” that tap into super-hot rocks deep below the earth’s surface. Fun fact for the day: an MIT study estimates that “just 2% of the sub-surface heat in the U.S. at reasonable drilling depths would provide 2,500 times the country’s total annual energy use.” Image by Steve Marcus/Reuters.
New projects: coast to coast
Projects #16 and #17 are a Washington dairy and a Maryland landfill. Get your comments in!The TerraPass project team is excited to bring you two more projects for public comment. The New Beulah Landfill methane capture and control project in Dorchester County, MD is a brand new project which isn’t even under construction yet. New Beulah is one of the smallest landfills in Maryland, and TerraPass purchases would help fund the immediate installation of a landfill gas collection system and enclosed flare to destroy the methane. Though engineering estimates predict the landfill won’t generate enough gas to make electricity generation economic in the immediate future, the project developer is committed to installing generation capacity as soon as there’s enough gas to run one. George DeRuyter and Sons Dairy is a relatively new digester project in the state of Washington. In November, 2006 a dairy digester replaced the open lagoon management system for the dairy’s manure, effectively destroying the methane generated by the manure while also producing both electricity and heat for on-farm use. Excess electricity is sent to the regional electricity grid. If you’re interested, you can check out the project details for New Beulah or George DeRuyter and Sons, and send any comments or questions to projects@terrapass.com. The comment period closes September 18th for New Beulah and September 12 for DeRuyter. Also as a reminder, the comment period for LP Gill will close on Aug 21st.
Greenwashing: innocent or guilty?
UK company gets unfairly slapped around by green activists.For those days when the weather’s warm back in London (and yes, there are quite a few of them) I do enjoy a smoothie. If it can’t be made fresh, then there’s a good alternative in the drinks made by Innocent Smoothies. Innocent has a great story. It was founded by three twenty-something guys who spent a weekend selling fruit smoothies from a stall at a music festival. They put up a sign asking their customers if they should give up their jobs to make the smoothies full-time. The fact that I’m writing this ten years later about what is now a $200m company will give you a clue about the answer they received. Last week Innocent made headline news in the UK, accused of “greenwashing” because of a misleading marketing claim that incorrectly stated that all their drinks were made in the UK and that all fruit was transported by rail or by boat, rather than on more fuel-hungry trucks. The Daily Telegraph (hardly Fox News, but about as conservative as you can get in the UK) gleefully reported that Innocent in fact mixes its drinks in Amsterdam and then ships them in tankers to be bottled in the UK. The Telegraph reporters called Rising Tide, an activist environmental group that claims to be “taking action on the root causes of climate change.” That and liberally labeling companies as “greenwashing” on demand. The Telegraph quotes a spokesperson: We are drowning in a sea of corporate greenwash. Even companies which are supposed to have the highest ethical standards are at it now and the major problem is that it encourages consumers to believe they do not have to make the changes that are necessary to combat global warming. Here’s the thing about Innocent. This is not a company that screams “green” at you. If you visit their website, you won’t find grandiose claims on the homepage. In fact, you have to dig down into its page on company ethics before you can understand why this company is regarded by many moderate environmentalists as a shining light in sustainability. You can see for yourself on Innocent’s website or read on Treehugger about the work they were doing even in 2006. So what happened here? Innocent claim this was just a mistake and that their website wasn’t updated when they changed their production method. One of the company’s founders, Richard Reed, told the Telegraph: We are attempting to get the best quality drinks to our customers while generating the least amount of carbon…While it might sound strange, Rotterdam is the port which all the fruit comes into, so it makes sense to blend our drinks there. We’ll return to this issue in later posts, but I do want to highlight what happened here. A company with an essentially great environmental pedigree has been caught making a mistake. A newspaper with traditionally high standards of journalism has called an extreme environmental organization and got exactly the quote it needed, containing the magic word “greenwashing” and is therefore able to report that environmentalists themselves have condemned Innocent’s actions. I’m still not certain of exactly what greenwashing actually means, and we should perhaps take some time on this blog to explore the question more fully. But whatever it is, Innocent isn’t doing it. And no right-thinking environmentalist would think the opposite… just a fringe activist group and a right-wing newspaper. Let’s all be a little more careful about how we use the word?
Our blog by any other name
We’re looking for a new name for our blog, and we need your help.First, let me introduce myself. I’m Andy, the TerraPass summer intern. I’ve spent the last eight weeks here at TerraPass headquarters in San Francisco, working to improve all aspects of the consumer experience. Second, I’d like your help with one of my projects: renaming this blog. It should be a fun thing for our readers, and it offers the chance of prizes and even internet immortality. As you know, the TerraPass blog is not really just another company blog. Sure, it includes news about TerraPass, but it also delivers conservation tips, climate change information, product reviews (you can catch a glimpse of me in our video review of the Vortex hand-crank blender), and a lot more, all delivered in our, ahem, unique style. We think there’s an opportunity to come up with a name that captures its essence. We also think there’s no better group to help us than our current readers. For the next two weeks, we’re asking you to tell us what the web service soon-to-be-formerly-known as the “TerraPass blog” should be called. Send us your names here, and submit as many entries as you like. After we get your submissions, we’ll select a few finalists and ask readers to vote on their favorite. The person who submits the winning name will get a Trevor Baylis Eco Media MP3 Player. The other finalists will each win a $10 TerraPass gift certificate. As an added bonus, we’ll select one person at random who votes for the winning name and award him or her a $30 TerraPass gift certificate. (Full rules and fine print below.) Let your creative juices flow. Your names can reference climate change and carbon directly, or they can be more on the poetic side. Incorporate our company name or leave it out. The only stylistic suggestion I’ll offer here is that, this being the web, shorter is often better. Suggestions longer than 25 letters are unlikely to get selected as finalists. What are you waiting for? Submit your new name now. Image by Flickr user mskogly.
Keep your air conditioner free of gunk
A clean machine runs better.Last week we suggested easing up on the A/C during summer months to conserve energy. But whatever temp you choose, it makes sense to keep your cooling system running as efficiently as possible. Take a few minutes to give it a proper cleaning. You’ll save energy and extend its life. How this helps Air conditioners suck up a lot of dust and gunk, cutting down their cooling ability. Whether you have a window-mounted unit our a central unit, a quick cleaning will lower your energy bills and improve its performance. More information
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More Parking!
Chicago discovers their curbsides are lined with gold.San Francisco may have the most technologically nifty new parking system in the U.S., but Chicago wins big points for the mercenary genius of their approach: the city expects to raise over a billion dollars by auctioning a 50-year concession on their entire parking system. Private vendors are willing to pay so much for the right to manage the city’s 36,000 parking spaces because they know the real estate is presently underpriced. The winning bidder will be required to install “state-of-the-art parking meters that monitor parking space availability and adjust rates to ensure an open space on every block.” The new system should reduce congestion, lower greenhouse gas emissions, improve air quality, and generally make the city more livable. It will also mint a good deal of cash for both the vendor and the city government. Such public-private partnerships can be controversial. Some object to the very idea of public goods in private hands. Others worry that corporations suffer from a lack of accountability to voters. Which, in some ways, is the point. Drivers are a powerful voting bloc, and city officials have generally been unwilling to cross them. Particularly if some of that billion-dollar windfall finds its way to public transit projects, the deal will likely work out well for Chicagoans. Originally posted at Worldchanging. Image by Flickr user Thomashawk.
Cities are for people: The limits of localism
Mass transit and energy-efficient buildings are needed more than exotic schemes for green cities.I reworked my vertical farm piece for Worldchanging, and by the time I was done, it was an entirely different article. So if you can stand one last entry about vertical farms, this one offers a somewhat more thoughtful look at some of the principles behind sustainable development. Columbia Professor Dickson Despommier has generated a fair amount of attention with his concept for “vertical farms,” stacked, self-contained urban biosystems that would — theoretically — supply fresh produce for city residents year round. The New York Times showcased outlandish artists’ conceptions of what such farms might look like. Colbert did his shtick. Twelve pilot projects are supposedly under consideration, in locations as far-flung as China and Dubai. The concept has captured the imagination of at least the sliver of the public, who laments the enormous resource demands of our food production system and yearns for something easier on the land, easier on our aquifers, and less demanding of fossil fuels. Vertical farms seem to promise all that. Promising, of course, is different than delivering. Construction requires a lot of energy. Keeping vegetables warm in winter requires a lot of energy. Recycling water requires a lot of energy. Generating artificial sunlight requires a lot of energy. In other words, the secret ingredient that makes vertical farms work (assuming they work at all) is boatloads of energy. No one seems to have actually done the math on the monetary and environmental costs of such a scheme, but they would no doubt be considerable. Image by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The future of flight
Looking to engineers to save our climate — and our vacations.We don’t devote a ton of ink here to environmental technofixes, but there is one area where technofixes are urgently needed: airline travel. Plane flight is both hard on the environment and also really wonderful for people, so let’s hope some of the futuristic fuel-efficient designs featured in National Geographic pan out: 
Image by Georgia Tech/Courtesy NASA The proposed planes come with whizzy features like retractable propellers and electric drive trains for runway taxiing that should cut down on fuel use, reduce noise, and allow for shorter runways. 
Image by University of Miami/Courtesy NASA NatGeo also recently profiled Richard Branson’s new commercial space flight outfit, Virgin Galactic. 
Photograph by Stefano Paltera/AP Branson is (to put it mildly) an interesting guy, deeply engaged on the issue of climate change while also pushing ahead with new energy-hungry business ventures. Two hour flights from New York to Australia? Yes, please. Again, let’s keep our fingers crossed for progress here, because the likely alternative is that flying gets way more expensive, and way less frequent.
Set your thermostat to 78 degrees
Keep comfortable, but you don’t need to see your breath indoors.It’s been too long since we posted some nuts-and-bolts conservation tips. So without further ado… It’s hot out there. But it doesn’t need to be quite so cool inside. Set your thermostat to turn on the air conditioning at a temperature no lower than 78° F (25° C). How this helps It simply doesn’t need to be that cold inside. This is an easy way to save energy and money. Pro: You’ll save up to 3% of your annual energy bill per degree fahrenheit raised. Con: You might have to take your sweater off when you’re indoors. More information
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Survey says: TerraPass customers (still) really do care
People that buy offsets do plenty to reduce their impact on the environment.For the second year running we asked TerraPass customers to tell us a little more about themselves and what else they do to reduce their environmental impact. The real news here is that little has changed since our first TerraPass customer survey one year ago (for the stats-inclined among you, there was no statistically significant variation): TerraPass customers continue to be a green-minded group who do plenty to help the environment in addition to purchasing offsets. “Indulgence myth still dead” might be an appropriate headline for this post. Once again we’ve laid out the major points from the survey in a one-page pdf. But I’ll list a few of the highlights here:
And, appropriately for an election year, the number of you claiming to have contacted a government representative about climate change amazes us — 47%. Here we have further proof that our customers are an active, engaged group that use TerraPass energy-saving products and carbon offsets as part of a broad array of actions for the environment.
Even better than vertical farms
As energy costs rise, supply chains go local.Two articles you should read if you’re interested in eating local, growing local, building local, buying local, or any of the other ways that geography, economy, and environment intersect:
Both articles provide as good an excuse as any to make an obvious point: prices matter. If you’ve got a problem with a lot of moving parts, price is often the best way to push change through a complex system. Maybe you think that, say, vertical farms could be a great solution to various environmental problems. But you worry that vertical farms come with their own environmental costs (construction, heating, lighting, etc.), and you also know that other solutions might just be cheaper or more technically feasible. So rather than trying to figure out how to “fix” the food production system, you should just favor a global carbon price. Then the difficult environmental math will neatly resolve into easy financial math. Like the catfish farmers, furniture makers, appliance manufacturers, and everyone else, growers will figure out the best way to get produce to market, whether by vertical farm, zeppelin, dune buggy, or whatever. (Carbon is not, of course, the only environmental problem, but let’s keep this somewhat simple.) It’s easy to despair over the sheer complexity of choices in a globally integrated world. Is pasture-raised New Zealand beef better or worse than factory-farmed American burgers? How do locally grown hothouse tomatoes stack up against the field-ripened varieties from farther away? To a decent approximation, carbon pricing really is the universal acid that dissolves these questions away. Image by Flickr user mawel.
California climate skirmish — a taste of things to come
Los Angeles utility starts to squawk as it stares down a $700 million carbon bill.Regulators have won praise for speed and thoughtfulness with which they have laid the groundwork for implementation of AB 32, the landmark bill that aims to bring California’s greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020. But even within a single state, climate change legislation creates winners and losers, and regional tensions are starting to show. California’s climate plan consists of a slew of new efficiency standards, regulations, and reduction measures — as well as a cap-and-trade system to place a lid on total emissions. It’s the cap-and-trade system that is part of the present pushback. At issue in particular are the long-term contracts that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) has entered into for coal-based electricity. Although coal has kept LA’s electricity some of the cheapest in the state, the utility will have to pay enormous sums for carbon allowances under the new law. It’s always instructive to unpack some of the distortions that surround the politics of climate change legislation. Officials from LA seem to be trying out three different angles in their resistance to the bill. The first is that the steep cost of the allowances will divert money away from their own energy efficiency and renewable energy programs.
The implication is that the fines will actually harm the environment by siphoning money from all the great green work DWP is doing. The logic here is flawed in at least three different ways:
The second line of attack is to pretend that cap-and-trade is a form of accounting trickery that won’t bring about “real” reductions:
But of course, a cap is a mandated reduction. The only way “nuts and bolts” proposals for enforcing specific technologies will work out better for DPW is if the regulations result in fewer greenhouse gas reductions than would take place under cap-and-trade (otherwise there’d be no issue — DPW could just choose to implement the technologies to meet its obligations under the cap). Put more simply: this is a roundabout way of asking for a weaker bill. The third line of attack is basically the equivalent of yelling boo: making vague insinuations about market manipulators, Enron, rolling blackouts, “untested financial schemes,” etc. One has to imagine that this sort of thing is remarkably effective in California. But hopefully not too effective. California’s experience will be important for the nation as a whole, and regulators are moving swiftly in the right direction. Image by Flickr user kla4067.
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