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Environment.MyTriState.us
Welcome to our blog on the environment clean air, clean water, pollution, land fills, earth day, global warming and climate change!
Times Square New Year's Eve ball drop powered by Power Rovers
Check out the Engadget post about the Times Square New Year's Eve ball drop being powered by Power Rovers. Power Rovers are these stationary bikes by Duracell that produce clean energy as the user pedals - Duracell stores the power and will use it to New Year's Eve ball drop. Nice. Get peddling, gangstas!
Return on Investment for weatherizing your home
Greenandsave.com has a great Return on Investment for weatherizing your home chart on their site, explaining how a green upgrade (like a Programmable Thermostat) how many years the upgrade will take to recoup the initial cost, about how much the upgrade will cost, about how much you'll save per year and about how much you'll save over the first ten years for installing said upgrade. Pretty awesome, right? Get your green on!
Past and present thinkers note climate change
Ben Gelber has a piece in the NY Times that quoted Thomas Jefferson as writing that, “both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged,” and “Our cold is much moderated since the opening and clearing of our woods, and the winds do not blow roughly as in the days of our fathers, when water, cast up into the air, would commonly be turned into ice before it came to the ground,” in his writings, “Notes on Virginia.” Thomas Jefferson was, for the most part, forming hypothesis from personal accounts and his own observations, but Ben Franklin (as usual) took things to the next level. Franklin figured out that, "cleared land absorbs more heat and melts snow quicker,” and also that 'the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland in June 1783, and was possibly the source for the exceptional chill experienced in the winter of 1783-84 in the new United States.'
How Franklin and Jefferson figured these things out, we can't say - lets just leave it at 'they were smarter than us,' (which we all knew anyway) but its always fun when they prove it. Now, a new generation of thinker in the person of Pat Brown, is making a another observation, as written about by Mattew Herper on Forbes.com. Brown, a Stanford University biochemist who already has made his mark in the genetics/DNA field, is talking about the effect animal farming is having on climate change. The most compelling quotes from the article are: 'while livestock accounts for only 9% of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, it accounts for 37% of human-caused methane (most of it emanating from the animals' digestive systems) and 65% of human-caused nitrous oxide, according to the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Both are far better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, meaning that cows, chickens and their ilk have a larger greenhouse effect than all the cars, trucks and planes in the world.' and the startling milk fact that 'It takes 1,000 liters of water to produce a liter of milk.' Wow - that's a lot of water... and since we can't live without water but CAN live without milk, it seems like something we shouldn't waste on that kind of scale. Brown's quest to either end or drastically reduce animal farming for the sake of the environment would be a huge win for both 'dirty hippy environmentalists' and animal rights conscious folks alike. Its not going to be easy and the opposition will be epic, but like Franklin and Jefferson, Brown is smarter than us, so we have confidence in him. Maybe folks should get nostalgic for the end of the eighteenth century, when we left the nation building, the building of our own US of A, to our brightest: guys like John Adams, Jefferson and Franklin, or even our bravest, like George Washington, and let the folks without the PHDs in science get out of the way of the scientists...
Cheetahs are the fastest mammals on earth
FYI, Cheetahs are the fastest mammals on earth. Also, please note that they're endangered. That seems ironic... Check out the video at Yahoo buzz to see a big kitty running like you've never seen anybody run before. It should be pointed out that while Sarah is the title holder for the fastest mammal on earth, Usain Bolt only has two legs. Sarah is prettier, though!
Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Have you ever heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Probably not. Well, lets get right to it - the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a floating pile of garbage the size of Texas. TEXAS! If you've never been to Texas (or have never seen it on map), Texas is big - it's really big. Texas is 268,820 square miles, as compared to say, New Jersey, which is 8,729 square miles. Isn't it incredible that you didn't know that a pile of garbage the size of Texas is chilling in the Pacific Ocean? It's true - how did we not know about this? It's insane. Find more information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch
Congressman John Shimkus and the Energy and Environment Subcommittee
Congressman John Shimkus, a Republican from Illinois, is actually quoting scripture as an introduction to a hearing of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee. Seriously. We don't just want this guy off the committee, we want him out of congress - and we think most Americans would be behind us if he'd opened the Koran and started reading. So lets send Charlie Church back to Illinois and let someone who cares about science sit on a committee about science. Sound good? Check out the YouTube below. Sorry about the on screen comments, but the YouTube user eequalsfb makes a good point.
Can cap-and-trade really save the environment?
President Obama supports the cap-and-trade idea - this is part of a huge bill put forth by House Democrats on energy and climate. Essentially, it'll create an auction system for emission output and the subsequent trading of emission permits. Sounds complicated? We think so - and they'll be a ton of bureaucracy involved with the monitoring and regulating. Instead, we like the idea of a economy-wide carbon tax. We do understand people don't like to use that ugly tax word, but, in either scenario, that's what it is, a tax. Once you say certain buzz words that get people all excited, like tax, climate change and global warming, you're in a tough spot and laws get harder to pass. Since it is a tax, we might as well call it one and not try anything fancy, but we can leave the climate change and global warming discourse off the table and just call it what it is, because its pretty simple:
1. Fossil fuels are nonrenewable; eventually we'll run out or get to a point like where we were a few months ago when gas and oil were crazy expensive (this is going to keep happening, by the way)
2. Fossil fuels are dirty - dirty is bad, remember? i think we can all get behind the idea that we don't want trash all over the highway, which is why we have cops give out littering tickets. We also don't want crap in our skies, which probably ends up in the rain and makes its way into our water
Isn't that a lot simpler? So lets just tax people who make a mess until they either stop or can't afford to anymore and start yelling, "You're getting my water dirty, A-Hole!"
Bloomberg's street closing initiatives can have positive environmental impact
Mayor Bloomberg's plans to close streets near Broadway around Times Square and Herald Square can have an environmental impact that goes a long way. Our ultimate hope is that this will discourage people from driving into the city, which will reduce air pollution, the green house effect, so on. Sure, money might be lost on tolls, but it'll be saved on road repairs and made up in some way by mass transit. This is the way to go. Some might say that these closures are direct retaliation for Bloomberg's failed measure for a congestion tax, and they're probably right, but that doesn't make it a bad idea. We admire Bloomberg's tenacity; its clear he wants to get cars out of midtown, and this might be the only way to do it. We hope that the proposed $2 toll for East River bridges goes through, another measure in the fight against people driving into Manhattan and making life miserable. Daily commuting via cars into Manhattan's day has passed - its time for everyone to get on board with that reality.
Easy Energy Saving Tips
You might have seen an article in today's New York Times that referenced how rising gas prices had given way to higher ridership on mass transit (here). So we thought we'd work on our own list of easy ways to save energy and money. Read more...
CatalogChoice.org helps stop unwanted mail
Check out CatalogChoice.org and put a stop to Pottery Barn (or whoever Kramer was complaining about).
We heard a report on WNYC and a spokesperson for the LLBean Catalog said they do their own house keeping - meaning, if you don't order, they stop mailing catalogs to you. That sounds nice - but does everyone do that? And, as someone mentioned, getting a new catalog might spark renewed interest. Maybe we can compromise on a postcard that redirects customers to an online pdf catalog.