Overwhelming

Sometimes the amount of work that remains to be done is overwhelming. I found the Zero Waste Alliance site [yesterday], just searching for "zero waste." Their goal is to transform all human activity from the linear "take, make, waste" path to a circular path that generates no waste. This is the kind of thinking that is required from today's and tomorrow's scientists and politicians to prepare us for the eventual realities of bumping up against the edges of the petri dish. It is going to take an incredible effort of education, painful social and political upheaval, and individual sacrifice to get there.

The concepts of luxury and consumption are anathema to sustainability and zero waste. Luxury is intentionally wasteful, and will not be possible at some point in the future. Taking a hot bath in potable water in the middle of the desert just doesn't make sense. Having millions of swimming pools in the desert doesn't make sense. It's very nice to take a dip in your pool when it's 115 F outside, and yes that whirlpool hot tub at the Rio is real nice. It's just not sustainable. The aviation industry makes (or loses) money by burning oil to fly people and goods from place to place. They have frequent flyer "elite" "status" "luxury" lounges and give away free seats to those who burn the most oil. That's nice, but not sustainable. I saw today that Amazon has a "green 3" program to help identify the most green products. Well, the products may be green(er), but they're still "products," and we're still expected to "consume" them.

With 6.5 billion mouths to feed, we need 10 trillion food Calories a day, or 20 exajoules (2 x 10**19 joules) of food energy per year. Photosynthesis apparently consumes about 3000 exajoules of solar energy per year. The same article says that worldwide energy consumption is 487 exajoules per year. There are good and bad sides to these numbers. On the good side, there is a tremendous amount of solar energy (3800 zettajoules, or 3,800,000 exajoules, 3.8 x 10**24 joules) added to the earth each year, so we have a great resource to use. On the bad side, to badly feed (and house, and transport, and amuse) those 6.5 billion people (How many people get 2000 Calories/day? How many get way more than that? How many get way less?), we use 25 x as much energy as the amount of energy required to feed the population.

Jeff Jacoby wrote about the coming population decline today, and I read his editorial with great interest. As usual with Jacoby, just when I think he kinda sorta almost gets it, he flips the topic on its head, and spouts ideological nonsense, providing more evidence that conservatives just stick to their ideological guns instead of evaluating evidence to form their opinion on the best way forward to meet their goals. Today, he was calling for the world, and especially the developed countries, to produce more mouths to feed. Yeah, that'll solve all our problems Jeff. Good one. He says that economic growth does not happen when population is declining, and that we need more people to keep up the growth of the economy. This is mathematical ignorance at its best. In fact, he links to an article that claims that "natural resources are not fixed, but are determined by advances in science and technology." OK, there's another good one. If we can just conjure up faster-than-light travel, we'll magically have an infinite number of perfect earths to use as feedstocks for our linear industrial processes. The fact that the earth is large compared to a human being does not mean that it is infinite. We need to deal with the fact that the earth is finite, and that everything we do as a species has to be non-consumptive, or we will use up the earth. Sure, natural processes would take over after hugely destructive wars or plagues, and rainforests and other environments would recover. However, we don't want to bump up against the edge of the petri dish -- that's where it gets uncomfortable. Population stability is a good thing, because it means that we are living in a sustainable cycle. Population decline is a good thing if it brings the species to the level of sustainability with the available technology.

We are so smart, and so good at using resources around us, that we automatically grow and consume all of the available resources. In fact, the processes that we design using our intelligence are vastly inferior to the processes that evolved in the earth's ecosystem. We have a long way to go before we can come close to a life that includes modern conveniences and comforts, but does not consume resources. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, and we will develop a hair tonic that turns our heads into phtosythesizing energy converters, and lets us multiply until we are standing each in our own hexagonal cell, covering the entire (much warmer) world, including the oceans. Won't that be fun? No. No matter what technology we develop, we need to realize the physical limits of the earth, or we will be back in the Middle Ages, except with too many people for the technology of that time (burning wood, vegetable oil, and tallow as fuel, riding horses, dying of the plague, etc.) Any technology that relies on rate of extraction that consume the resource faster than the expected lifetime of the species is inherently unsustainable, and forces the species to find another technology, perish, or revert to the evolved processes. Why not work on technology now that does not rely on extraction, and is permanently sustainable? We will be doing ourselves and all those children and great**4000-children a huge favor. If we need consuming technologies to rely on while we develop sustainable ones, that's fine, but let's recognize them for what they are: linear processes. Let's use them as crutches while we learn to walk using circular processes.

Jacoby says that wealth is not a zero-sum game, and I agree. However, with our advances in technology, we don't have to accept the old economic theories any more. We can advance our standard of living while at the same time maintaining a stable population, well within the limits dictated by natural fluctuations in processes that we rely on (rains, droughts, tough winters, floods, hurricanes, pests, sunspots, movement of the earth's crust.) Old economics (and Jacoby's pals) assumes infinite resources, requires "growth," and ignores the reality that we live in a finite world. New economic theories are needed to reflect reality and push us toward sustainability. I don't have those theories at hand, but I'll be looking for them.

Greensmoke

I checked out a few minutes of the new Planet Green channel yesterday, and I saw:

1) Someone supposedly teaching a family about how to reduce their carbon footprint take TWO MOTORCYCLES "out for a ride" after informing him that his motorcycle gets much better mileage than his gigantic truck or SUV or whatever else he was driving. First, TWO people can fit on ONE MOTORCYCLE! Second, if you want to save fuel, DON'T JUST GO FOR A RIDE!

2) A dick-swinging contest between a gas (or maybe diesel, don't know) truck and a hybrid truck. The two categories I saw were a speed competition around a rocky and hilly track, and an on-ramp pickup competition. Which one would I buy? NEITHER! And I wouldn't care how fast it goes on a rocky course either, nor how fast I can go from 0-60.

c) A "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous"-esque blip about obscenely expensive handbags being available for rent. What?!

These people are just blowing green smoke up their asses. The remaining supplies of oil and gas need to be used to develop ways to make the energy industry sustainable, not "taking a ride" or "Look out! Big truck comin'" or making fashion statements. (For whatever reason, I can't find a video of that Ford ad. Maybe they removed all references to it. Or maybe it's a Chevy ad. But the customer says that line, and he's not a toddler.) How about a show where they teach us how to create a seasonal thermal store?

How about a steel plant that uses no fossil fuel? Or a glass plant that uses no fossil fuel? Apparently, the greenest glass making process still uses natural gas and oxygen to get the glass up to temperature. Without these plants, there will be no solar panel manufacturing process, and without that, all of the solar panels that will be installed over the next 20 years will eventually malfunction and stop producing electricity.

Speaking of unsustainable, our project to reduce the amount and cost of heating oil used is moving along. My wife sewed the first drape yesterday. A long, long way to go, but it's an encouraging start.

Drapes - first steps

We measured, marked, and 'membered everything for the thermal drapes in Coffee Jones' studio, which is a) the coldest place in the house, and 2) is out of sight, and so is an ideal test case. Coffee bought 12 yards of the insulating material, and a few other items, such as plastic rings, that we need for making the drapes. So far, we're in for about $30 of startup costs, and $640 in materials for the first window. That's a marginal cost of about $5.50/square foot of window. At a savings of 25 BTUs/square foot/hour (with a 40F temperature differential and $4.50/gallon heating fuel) that's a payback of 6844 hours, or 285 days. That sounds like about 3 years or so, considering that we use the heat for 7 months out of the year, and the temperature differential does not average 40 degrees.

We paid $6730 for heating oil this past season. We'll see how we do next season. Just as it was when I was growing up in New Hampshire chopping wood, there are two seasons: winter and getting ready for winter.

Water bill

The water bill just arrived for the last 7-1/2 months, and it is clear that we have plenty of work to do in this area. The main problem is that the pipes in our house have frozen in past winters, and the town tells us to run a faucet at a pencil-diameter stream from December through March. This keeps the water moving from the main into our line, and prevents freezing at that junction. They then adjust the bill for that usage. This mitigation has been going on since about 1980 or so. Apparently, it is cheaper for the town to do this than it is for them to dig up the street when the pipes freeze out at the street. So, we ran the water during the winter, and I couldn't really come up with a workable idea for using the water. We do have a large Finnish soaking tub where we could store a few hundred gallons, but, according to the town, we used 6800 cubic feet, which is 51000 gallons. We would have to fill and empty the giant tub at least once a day, and what to do with the water? Make a skating rink the size of Boston Garden? Buy 6 tanker trucks, and use the water to fill the community pool in the spring? Somehow run it down to the local farm for springtime irrigation? Disobey the town and let the pipes freeze? It makes me ill.

The second problem is that the town calculated our household's usage at 4200 cubic feet, or 31500 gallons, or 3-1/2 tanker trucks' full. Over 220 days, that's 143 gallons a day -- way too much. As a check, I just looked the water meter, and we've used 1215 cubic feet -- one tanker truck -- since April 1. That's 174 gallons a day -- we're getting worse! Or, possibly, the town uses a standard allowance for the winter offset, and we poured less than 51000 gallons down the drain last winter. If they use 450 gallons a day as the standard, that would make sense.

While I'm trying to think of ideas for using all of that wasted water, I might as well gather the low-hanging fruit of savings in our daily usage. We take an average of 4 showers a day, using probably 85 gallons. We do an average of a load of laundry a day, using about 15 gallons. We run the dishwasher once a day, using say 10 gallons. OK, that leaves toilet flushing, hand washing, and "rinsing". If we say 70 gallons are for flushing, then we could cut that down to 22 gallons, but only by replacing 4 toilets. At our marginal water/sewer rate of $13.88/100 cubic feet, we would save about $325/year (and almost two tanker trucks per year). But the savings would also bring our marginal rate down to $8.72/100 cubic feet, giving savings of about $210/year. So it would take several years to pay for itself. However, we have some pending repair costs for our existing antique modern toilets, so if I count those costs as saved, the payback time is shorter.

Oil bill

The heating oil truck pulled up early this morning, for the last time until September or October. I looked at our oil tanks the other day, and both were below half. So this will be at least $1000. We have radiant heat in the first and second floors of our house, on two separate zones, and we keep those thermostats at about 64 F all winter. On another zone, we have two spaces, a basement studio with a Thermolier blower and an uninsulated addition with baseboard heat around the outside walls. The thermostat for that zone is in the basement, near the thermostat. There is a staircase going down to the basement from the addition, with a door at the bottom of the stairs. We use the studio during the day, and keep that thermostat at64 during the day and 59 or 60 at night, and we keep the door closed, with the blower enabled. This combination makes it very cold in the uninsulated addition, which is the entry way and kids' playroom. Keeping the blower enabled keeps the thermostat warm enough so that we lose the minimum heat with this awful configuration.

This was our first winter in this house, and the users of the studio and playroom were cold and miserable, to the point where we bought a space heater for the studio to help my wife warm up when she's working. Even then, on the colder days, she would have to retreat to the main part of the house with her laptop. Here's our first step in improving our situation. A friend from work installed homemade thermal drapes last year, and forwarded us the link for the supplier. We have huge floor to ceiling plate glass windows and sliders in the studio and playroom and three rooms on the main floor. We will start with the studio as our test area, building insulated drapes for approximately 25 by 8 feet of glass. The frame on the studio slider is aluminum, with no thermal break, so heat just gets sucked out through the frame, in addition to the massive loss through the glass itself.

My wife says that it will cost us around $500 per room to make the drapes ourselves. For the studio, a rough calculation gives us an improvement from about 6000 BTUs per hour lost through the glass wall to 1000 BTUs per hour, given an external temperature of 20 F, and an internal temperature of 60 F. A gallon of diesel is about 140,000 BTUs, so the drape will save us one gallon of diesel for every 28 hours in those conditions. That's payback in just a couple of years. If we can do 1000 square feet of glass before next winter, we will be looking at over $10/day in savings for the entire winter. I'll tot up our actual gallons and dollars for this past winter, and post a more accurate estimate as we work through the project.

Tired/Wired

I read Wired's hype-generating article on how to save humanity (main point: reduce carbon dioxide emissions to reverse climate change), and while I agree with many of their points, I think they miss the wholistic view of the world. Wired has always been good for long-term vision and big-picture thinking, but they completely ignore three huge areas that are at least as important as climate change: population growth, pollution, and water.

Treehugger pointed me to Ecogeek, who had a point-by-point review up in record time. I spent the weekend pulling up garlic mustard and dandelions, going to baseball games, and taking care of the kids, so I didn't even get Friday or Saturday's mail until Sunday, when my wife and her mother got home from their trips to NYC. They had separately made plans to go down for the weekend, and altered their plans somewhat to save gas.

Back to the Wired article. If we have a perfect balance between energy added to Earth and energy radiated by Earth to space, but we have 30 billion humans eating Soylent Green laced with toxins, and drinking water distilled from the poisonous oceans, have we achieved success? No. We have only achieved one part of the balance. Wired claims that organics are bogus, and use more energy than so-called conventional farming. Possibly true, but it fails to take into account the effect on the water table, the ability of the soil to produce food in 10, 50 or 1000 years, or the effect of runoff on rivers, lakes and oceans.

Wired says that China is the solution, and that may be true. However, India and other overpopulated countries will have to participate, and stop their population growth. We are at the edge of the petri dish here, and the nutrient drip is going to disappear. No matter what efficiencies we achieve with engineered foods, there is a physical limit that we will eventually reach. however, at that physical limit, life will be miserable for all humans, and evolution will take hold. We need to stave off that physical limit by setting a lower limit where people can have an enjoyable quality of life. The U.S., Europe, Japan, and Russia are all already doing this (not including immigration). But poorer countries still have birth rates that are far too high, and it has to change. It is changing, and it will change, as the standard of living goes up in India and China, and comes down or stays stable in the U.S. and Europe. Why should Indians be denied air conditioning while people in the suburbs of Silicon Valley drive an hour each way to work in their BMW's, one per car? Why should Americans be granted a child tax credit for bringing another mouth to feed into the world, another consumer who will buy 7, 10, 15 cars in his lifetime. We shouldn't. But, if we want to keep our extremely comfortable lifestyle, we need to ensure that we do not come anywhere close to those petri dish borders. Our evolution so far has been based on a limitless bath of sustaining nutrients, and we need to maintain that bath. Since we have a limited planet, we need to limit the number of people. Wired ignores this aspect.

Welcome to Green Chutney

I will be connecting with the green blogosphere, voicing my opinion on politics, and documenting my family's efforts to reduce our carbon footprint, energy bills, and waste. The ultimate goal for humanity has to be to live off of the energy that we receive from the sun, plus the use of natural resources as catalysts. Global warming is providing a kick to the green movement, as is the current price of gasoline in the U.S. I've been greener than most for most of my life, but not always by choice.

When I was a kid, we were poor, vegetarian, had a composting toilet or outhouse, and burned wood for heat. Of course, I later learned that wood produces more CO2 than oil by an order of magnitude, so although it is a renewable resource, it may be contributing more to the problem than helping it at this point. We demonstrated against the Seabrook nuclear power plant, and knew many who arrested at one large demonstration. Now I think that nuclear power can be part of a short term fix, while renewable energy systems ramp up. I'll definitely talk more about that in another post. Back then, we had a cool solar shower, with a tank on the roof and a hose coming down through the skylight in the bathroom. Now I have $1000/mo. oil bills -- not so green there, am I?

We will be working on reducing that huge bill, and our huge carbon footprint over the coming months and years, and I will do whatever I can to further the awareness and promote meaningful change toward true sustainability. It has to start here in the U.S., in Europe, in China and in India, in Brazil, Congo, and Borneo. It will take huge societal changes, not just from those that care about sustainability, but from those who don't care, and who actively hate environmentalists, and who say "good" when people say open space is disappearing, or the rainforest is dying, or polar bears will become extinct. Overcoming such attitudes among the U.S. population will be a big challenge. I agree with Al Gore that this generation and the next several can put the world on the right track, and be remembered thousands of years from now as the pivotal. But it will take commitment, hard work, lots of hard science, and political will.