8 weeks of clean living

UPDATE: Green Wombat just posted a great article about the opportunities and challenges that Think and Tesla face in entering the global automobile market. Check it out!

A couple of nights ago I watched the 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? directed by Chris Paine. Though at times the movie threatened to degenerate into Michael Moore-esque theatrics and disingenuous editing, in general it was an entertaining glimpse into the factors behind the “failure” of electric vehicles (most notably represented by the GM EV1) in the mid-90s. The movie downplays some limitations of the EV1, such as its two passenger capacity, cost of production and charging time, but overall provides a compelling argument that there was a reasonably-sized (and sometimes fanatical) market for such a device.

Unfortunately, GM was too shortsighted to see the potential competitive advantages offered by developing EV (electric vehicle) technology, choosing instead to focus on drawbacks (for GM) such as the lack of a substantial maintenance revenue stream (EVs require almost no maintenance compared to their gasoline counterparts). Now GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner and R&D chief Larry Burns realize that the cancellation of the product was a mistake (see quotes at the bottom of the EV1’s Wikipedia entry), and GM is hard at work creating a spiritual successor to the EV1, the Chevy Volt (see below).

Other (more exciting and dynamic) car companies are also developing EVs. Tesla Motors is producing a sports car called the Tesla Roadster, which gets from zero to 60 in approximately 4 seconds while getting the equivalent of 135 MPG. The first production models should be in the hands of early adopters by the end of this year. Think Nordic is developing a more economical EV called the Think City, which will hopefully make it to the US by late 2008. Though these cars share some of the limitations of the EV1, they promise to be practical vehicles for a wide range of users.

Well I’ve reached the halfway point of this experiment, and so far things are going pretty well. Most of the changes that I’ve made haven’t been as onerous as I imagined they might be (due to the warm weather even the cold showers haven’t been that bad). Most of the compromises I’ve had to make have stemmed from the transportation side of my efforts. Several times, due to either social expediency or some form of luggage I’ve taken the car when the bus was a conceivable option. Overall though I think I’ve managed to stay reasonably consistent with my initial goals.

I’ve also learned a lot about environmentalism in general from a host of sites that have been recommended to me and that I’ve found in my online wanderings. Along with the sites listed on my blogroll to the right, I’ve been reading sites like Lighter Footstep, Green Options, No Impact Man, and The Sietch Blog. In my day-to-day life, I’ve had the chance to talk to an interesting variety of people about this project as well as environmental issues in general. It turns out that having an environmental blog helps spark environmental discussion.

During the next four weeks, I’m hoping to spend at least a week being vegan (milk and eggs have most of the same environmental problems and inefficiencies mentioned in the vegetarianism article below). I’ll also try to post some recipes and talk about vegan eating strategies. I hope you are enjoying the site, and thanks for reading!

One of the changes that I am making over these eight weeks involves practicing strict vegetarianism. In general, I’m a fairly enthusiastic meat eater, whether it be burgers at In n’ Out, sushi at Tadashi down in La Jolla (try the Honey Roll) or crab cakes up at my parents’ place. By and large, people become vegetarian for either moral or health reasons. I’m not particularly disturbed by the moral quandary that eating meat represents, and I don’t believe being vegetarian is some sort of healthful panacea either (though I’m sure those feelings are disputable). Instead, I think the environmental consequences of eating meat are so substantial and so obvious that any blogging self-proclaimed environmentalist like myself would be quite hypocritical to continue the practice.

In fact, dietary changes are probably the lowest hanging fruit for reducing one’s carbon footprint. There have been several good articles recently investigating the environmental impact of a portion of beef. Here’s some coverage from The New Scientist and Telegraph concerning a recent study showing that a kilogram of beef produces more greenhouse gas emissions than driving around for three hours with all the lights on back at home. A more general page from the Vegetarian Society (check out the PDF for references, etc.) claims that global meat production is responsible for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to 13.5% for all human transportation emissions. Considered purely from an efficiency standpoint, producing beef requires around 40 kcal of energy input in order to retrieve just 1 kcal of output in the form of animal protein, which isn’t very efficient at all when compared to plant production (click on return to article at the bottom of the linked page to check out the full article and more details).

Despite the substantial contribution of meat production to several environmental problems, one does not often hear about vegetarianism as a quick and easy way of reducing one’s carbon footprint and being more environmentally friendly in general. I can only speculate that this is due to the quasi-religious status that many people seem to assign to their dietary choices—it’s a touchy subject and no one wants to rock the boat. From an outside perspective, it seems like the pragmatic thing for one to do would be to simply eat as cheaply and healthfully as possible while being environmentally sound, which would probably involving eating very little meat. Nevertheless, there are many myths, such as the myth that a vegetarian diet does not give one all the nutrients one needs, as well as a substantial amount of enculturation around the world that conspire to prevent this from being a more salient option than reducing one’s driving, for example.

After my eight weeks are up, I suppose that I am likely to go back to eating a certain amount of meat in one form or another. In order to mitigate the environmental impact of my diet, I’ll try to seek out organic, grass-fed beef and MSC certified fish, and I’ll try to reduce my meat consumption in general. Unlike in the moral case, environmental vegetarianism can be a question of degree, not absolutes. One can avoid eating meat a couple of days a week and still make a difference, without swearing off the practice entirely.

Here’s another great guest article from my friend Lauren. I think it’s very appropriate given that I worried, with my last post, whether the tone was too preachy or normative. Enjoy!

I recently watched an interesting, if simplistic, video of a man outlining his view of global warming and what should be done about it. At the end, the man urges his viewers to do their part by sharing his video with others and spreading the word about what individuals can do to help slow global warming. His message started me thinking, yet again, about how to balance my desire to spread the word and my desire not to perpetuate the unfortunate stereotype of the self-righteous, superior environmentalist.

These days, I spend a very large proportion of my time thinking about the environmentally-friendliness of my actions. I feel good about some of the things I make an effort to do, like drying clothes on a rack and eating CSA food, and guilty about things I have a hard time stopping, like using hot water and producing garbage. Many of my closest friends feel as concerned about environmental issues as I do, so around them I don’t have to bite my tongue. But I have many times watched friends and roommates and co-workers throw paper and glass bottles in the trash, or leave the water running for ages, and I don’t know what I should do.

I feel very strongly that the man in the video is right. I can make various eco-friendly changes in my life and feel good about it, but if I am one of very few who do so, relative to the population, what effect can it possibly have? Without major changes in public policy (which I strongly believe can and must happen, but that will undoubtedly take years), it is going to require many individuals choosing to make personal changes to produce any positive effect on various environmental issues. Therefore, isn’t it my responsibility, if I feel strongly about these issues, to try to increase that population?

Somehow, despite my conscious knowledge of this responsibility, it still feels just wrong to reprimand someone in their home or office for doing something eco-unfriendly. Or even to suggest that they do it another way. The meager solution I’ve found so far is that I can only try to suggest changes when I judge that the person will likely respond positively, or at least neutrally. I of course end up leaving some situations feeling sad that I can’t comfortably do more to help others understand the consequences of their actions, but if I hope to prevent resentment and loss of friends I don’t really see another solution. Any ideas?

A couple of days ago, I took the MTS Route 30 down to La Jolla and went for a pleasant snorkeling trip at the La Jolla Underwater Park Ecological Preserve. The Preserve has a bunch of really cool fish, including tons of large phlegmatic orange ones, and accordingly there are many people in the water at any one time, so it’s also a fairly safe place to swim around.

The trip made me think about the environmental impact of how we entertain ourselves. It seems to me that activities appropriate and unique to one’s region can have a smaller environmental footprint (and cost less) than those activities that attempt to be as general as possible. For example, movies are the quintessential generalizable entertainment experience. No matter where one is or which theater one sees a movie in, the content and overall experience are essentially the same. On the other hand, going for a walk or a swim can take on vastly different dimensions depending on one’s location. In order to create a movie experience, gobs of energy and resources must be used in the production and the subsequent display of a film. In contrast, going snorkeling or bodyboarding or taking a hike in the mountains has no real energy cost outside of transportation, and if one lives nearby there really is no substantial energy cost to the activity (except for the up front costs of fabricating a snorkel, bodyboard or backpack).

In a way, these thoughts remind me of the native gardening trend, where only native plants are used in one’s garden in order to reduce water and pesticide use. By exploiting the properties of one’s region, one saves time, energy and effort while creating something unique compared to more idealized (and generalized) cookie-cutter lawns and gardens.

For these reasons, over the next few weeks I will continue to explore entertainment possibilities that are low-environmental-impact and appropriate to the San Diego area. I’ll mark them under the “Local” and “Entertainment” categories along the right hand side of this page.

Recently I reported on the idle energy use of the various components that make up my small entertainment center. Over the past few days I’ve kept the Kill A Watt plugged into the power strip that supplies electricity to all of my entertainment devices to see how much energy they consume under normal use. Over 164 hours of testing, the devices in question consumed 7.3 kWh of electricity. By my calculations this is equivalent to approximately 32.5 kWh per month or 390 kWh per year. In other words, about a month and a half’s worth of my electricity consumption per year is used solely for my entertainment devices. As before, these devices included my TV, Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 2 and DVR/cable box. Additionally, I use the power strip for charging my MacBook from time to time and powering a Klipsh 2.1 speaker sound system.

This is only tangentially related, but I recently canceled my cable service for a few reasons. First, my DVR/cable box was a prime suspect for substantial and necessary idle energy consumption. Second, the value proposition for cable seems to be getting weaker. In order to get cable internet, HD, HBO and DVR I was paying approximately $135 per month. For comparison, now I am getting 3.0 Mbps DSL for $35 per month, Netflix for $18 per month and buying TV shows as needed (and à la carte) off of iTunes for two dollars apiece or around $30 a season. The only real losses are HBO and live sports. Not having HBO on cable essentially introduces a time lag until the shows appear on Netflix. Live sports are harder to replace, but services like MLB.TV for baseball might be a good replacement (or, especially for baseball, listening to live shows on the radio). Finally (and this is a super fringe benefit) I now have enough room in my TV stand to integrate the power strip and make its on/off switch easier to access (see bottom-leftmost device below), allowing me to more frequently prevent idle power consumption. Now that I’ve made this change, I might do another round of power consumption testing to see what kind of impact better idle power management and no cable makes on my entertainment center energy use.

UPDATE: Green Options has a nice piece on a similar topic with some more tips for hosting green gatherings.

A couple of days ago I took the NCTD 101 up to Solana Beach to visit one of my favorite spots in North County, Pizza Port. Besides having great pizza, Pizza Port is an excellent local brewery with a wide variety of beers to choose from (my favorites include Old Viscosity and Hop-Through-It IPA). Unfortunately, the traditional six pack of longnecks is a somewhat wasteful packaging for beer (though the box and bottles are certainly recyclable), especially if one is enjoying it with a few friends and intends to finish it. Luckily, an alternative and reusable beer transportation device exists: the growler.

Growlers hold 64 ounces of beer in a completely reusable glass container. Besides reducing packaging waste, growlers encourage one to seek out local craft breweries and save the energy required to transport the beer. (Of course if one is driving to the brewery the savings might not be that substantial depending on how far away it is compared to one’s local grocery store.) Also near UCSD (just a few miles east on La Jolla Village Drive/Miramar Rd), we have one of the top craft breweries in the world, AleSmith, with three beers in RateBeer.com’s Top 50. Unfortunately, unlike Pizza Port, AleSmith is very difficult to get to by bus so driving is required. Cheers!

In an earlier post, I talked about my plan to drive the speed limit for a long road trip from Southern California to Northern California. The experiment went pretty well, as I was able to stay near 70 for practically all of the trip. Additionally, the car I drove on the way back had a really easy to use cruise control function, which I used extensively and supposedly increased my fuel efficiency a little bit.

There is a ton of online guidance concerning all the ways one can increase the fuel efficiency of one’s car (for example here, here and here [pdf]) both mechanically and behaviorally. I’m primarily interested in the behavioral modifications that lead to increased fuel efficiency. In terms of behavioral suggestions, I think there is one central heuristic that encompasses all of them: a complete and total aversion to touching the brakes. When I drive, I’m essentially playing a mental videogame (in some cars, like the Prius, this videogame can be surprisingly literal) where I gain points for coasting and lose points for heavy acceleration and especially braking. In this way, I expect to lose as little fuel as possible to inefficient low gears and necessary stops.

Needless to say, there’s a little bit of tension between legality, safety and efficiency. Obviously safety should come first, but oftentimes legality, in the form of full and complete stops at stop signs for example, might be justifiably set aside for efficiency. If I’m going up a hill I’ll try to time things just right in order to coast to a very low speed at a stop sign and then accelerate away from it without ever having touched the brakes. Another trick is to touch one’s brakes extremely lightly so that the brake lights come on and it looks like one is stopping when really one is simply coasting then accelerating. So far I haven’t gotten a ticket, and if I do I imagine it might change my behavior.

Despite the fact that avoiding substantial acceleration and braking is in general safer and more economical, many drivers I see on the road act like they’re in some sort of pitiful race where everyone is continually stymied by traffic laws. The maneuver that annoys me the most proceeds as follows: I see that there is a red light 200 feet ahead and immediately take my foot off of the accelerator. The person behind me, unsatisfied with my resulting speed, floors it and passes me to the left. Said person then slams on their brakes at the light while I am still coasting towards it. When the light turns green, they are at a complete stop and I’m still going 20 mph, at which point I accelerate through the light and pass them. End result: I’ve used less fuel and caused less wear and tear on my car to end up well ahead of the person that passed me.

The only difference between me and this other driver is our driving mentality. How to change one’s driving mentality from “go as fast as possible at all times” to “slower can actually be faster and save me money (and never touch the brakes!)” is not quite clear to me, but given enough reflection it seems like an obvious choice.

I saw over on AutoblogGreen that the city of Ann Arbor is now banning the sale of bottled water at city events. Based on our previous coverage of this topic, I’d say that this is a good thing. Whether it’s the government’s place to tell people what they can buy is certainly debatable though. I’d lean towards heavily taxing bottled water at city events and providing reusable bottles and tap water (which they are doing now) as a much less expensive alternative. In any event, Ann Arbor is protecting its citizens from an expensive, unhealthy and environmentally damaging product.

I put my Kill A Watt to use in order to find out how much electricity my home entertainment devices were drawing while idle. To measure them all at once, I connected them all to a power strip, then connected the power strip to the Kill A Watt. I have four devices (pictured below) that continually draw power in an idle state: a Samsung 32 inch LCD television, a Nintendo Wii, a Sony PlayStation 2 and a cable box/DVR. Over the course of 15.3 hours of testing (during which the devices were not turned on) these devices used .34 kWh of electricity. By my calculations this equates to approximately 195 kWh of electricity use per year. On a monthly basis, I use approximately 270 kWh of electricity, which means that almost 1 month’s worth of electricity is used up every year simply by leaving my electronics on idle.

One easy way to cut down on idle power consumption is to connect all of one’s home entertainment electronics to a single power strip which can easily be turned on and off. I use an APC power strip similar to this one. If I ever leave for a couple days, or otherwise know that I am not going to use my TV, I can just flick the power strip off and save a little energy. One cool feature of my power strip is that it includes “always on” plugs. These plugs continue to operate even if the power strip is switched off. I have my DVR attached to one of these ports so that I don’t miss taping a show just because I’ve shut off power to my other electronics.

I’m continuing this investigation by leaving my power strip plugged into the Kill A Watt for a couple of days under normal use. In this way, I hope to gain some insight into the hidden cost of entertaining myself with TV and video games.