eco-badge of pride

On the left sidebar, you'll see a new little badge for the 350 challenge, a collaboration between Brighter Planet (whose credit card I've mentioned before), and 350.org, who is trying to highlight 350 ppm CO2 as a target for humanity.

By posting this one badge, Brighter Planet will offset 350 lbs of CO2. The goal is to hit up 350 bloggers, totaling 61.25 tons - a.k.a. powering down Washington DC off for 5 minutes (which might be nice for other reasons too). I think they can hit that mighty quick.

So, dews us a favor and pimp your blog - it takes about 1 minute.

One small step for your blog, one giant leap toward raising awareness.

hybrids starting to pay off

For the last few years, buying a Toyota Prius was for many a form of environmental conspicuous consumption, certainly not a way to save money. While petrol hovered around $2 / gal, fuel economy was not much of an issue. For the 2008 Prius, the starting MSRP is $21,100, and it's only upward from there with warranties, taxes, and add-ons.

But now more and more people have been crunching the numbers with the new gas prices - breaking $4 / gal in many places - and the results are encouraging. At current prices, which more and more people are predicting will be the norm, hybrids are starting to make economic as well as environemental sense. For the soccer mom driving 15,000 annual miles in her 20 mpg minivan, making the switch to the 45 mpg Prius saves $1,666 a year, or $4.50 a day.

Toyota has dominated the hybrid arena and shows no sign of stopping. They just flew past the 1 million sold mark, now making up 2.3% of the American fleet. Shoot, I even found one parked on Boots street, right in the thick of the Marion 'hood. Toyota's president recently announced a goal of having plug-in hybrids available to government fleets and corporations by 2010. One hundred miles per gallon is not far off. And though these will put additional strain on an already carbon-intensive electric grid, electricity is cheaper and more efficient at converting energy than our liquid power. In many places electric rates are also lowest at nighttime, when you sleep and your car recharges. Charging at night, we can draw more kilowatts from the same capacity, meaning fewer new power plants than one would expect.

I think this highlights the importance of having the right price on destructive yet useful products. We can't expect to cut CO2 emissions or stop the wars to control energy resources unless we communicate with consumers in the medium they care care most about - prices. Which makes McCain & Clinton's suggestion of a tax holiday on gasoline so absurd. We can't possible expect to make progress in our oil-addiction recovery if politicians are willing to pander to populist panic at the first sign of pain. Why not, as Al Gore and others have suggested, put a tax on carbon and make it revenue neutral (no net tax increase) by lowering payroll taxes. After all, shouldn't we be taxing bad things like pollution, not good things like human labor (a.k.a. jobs)?

However this all eventually shakes out, I think it's a good time to be Toyota.

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In other news, I heard Indiana gasoline sales were down 3% year-to-date.

speaking of cell phones

I just started watching a round-table discussion on evangelical politics, hosted by NPR's Speaking of Faith, featuring Shane Claiborne, Greg Boyd, and Chuck Colson.

The discussion began with the moderator doing what all moderators must do in our information age - reminding everyone to turn off their cell phones. As Greg reached in his coat pocket and Chuck powered down his Razr, Shane smiled slyly and playfully reached in his pocket, turning off the phone that wasn't there and probably never has been.

Funny, and encouraging.

direct flights: peering through the green haze

Most enviros (and anyone else, these days) will tell you that it's better for the planet to take direct plane flights vs. indirect ones. It's like driving a car - it takes a lot of energy to stop & go instead of using cruise control. They tell you this so that you'll be environmentally virtuous and pay for a direct flight even when it is more expensive. You'll be so green that you'll pay green just to prove it.

I have a theory. I think they're wrong.

Last year, I read an article in National Geographic about swarm theory. Like everything else in NatGeo, it was absolutely fascinating. This selection is worth the read:

That's how swarm intelligence works: simple creatures following simple rules, each one acting on local information. No ant sees the big picture...

Inspired by the elegance of this idea, Marco Dorigo, a computer scientist at the Université Libre in Brussels, used his knowledge of ant behavior in 1991 to create mathematical procedures for solving particularly complex human problems, such as routing trucks, scheduling airlines, or guiding military robots.

In Houston, for example, a company named American Air Liquide has been using an ant-based strategy to manage a complex business problem. The company produces industrial and medical gases, mostly nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, at about a hundred locations in the United States and delivers them to 6,000 sites, using pipelines, railcars, and 400 trucks. Deregulated power markets in some regions (the price of electricity changes every 15 minutes in parts of Texas) add yet another layer of complexity...

Air Liquide developed a computer model based on algorithms inspired by the foraging behavior of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), a species that deposits chemical substances called pheromones.

"When these ants bring food back to the nest, they lay a pheromone trail that tells other ants to go get more food," Harper explains. "The pheromone trail gets reinforced every time an ant goes out and comes back, kind of like when you wear a trail in the forest to collect wood. So we developed a program that sends out billions of software ants to find out where the pheromone trails are strongest for our truck routes."

Ants had evolved an efficient method to find the best routes in their neighborhoods. Why not follow their example? So Air Liquide combined the ant approach with other artificial intelligence techniques to consider every permutation of plant scheduling, weather, and truck routing—millions of possible decisions and outcomes a day. Every night, forecasts of customer demand and manufacturing costs are fed into the model.

"It takes four hours to run, even with the biggest computers we have," Harper says. "But at six o'clock every morning we get a solution that says how we're going to manage our day."

For truck drivers, the new system took some getting used to. Instead of delivering gas from the plant closest to a customer, as they used to do, drivers were now asked to pick up shipments from whichever plant was making gas at the lowest delivered price, even if it was farther away.

"You want me to drive a hundred miles? To the drivers, it wasn't intuitive," Harper says. But for the company, the savings have been impressive. "It's huge. It's actually huge."

I imagine that swarm theory also applies to direct & indirect flights. Even though making a layover in Denver seems wasteful to the eco-conscious human (ant), it'd probably require more planes & petrol if he demanded to go straight to Seattle.

There is a reason why indirect flight are often listed cheaper - they cost less for the business to provide. In other words, they use less human and natural resources. The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices points out that when deciding how to spend money, lower prices generally mean less impact. Resource consumption and environmental footprints generally rise with increased income - this is as simple as comparing nations or neighborhoods.

If only our problems were so obvious... a lesson today in humility and a cry for wisdom in our complex world.

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Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on this. Honestly, this is an original thought. It could be a such HUGE World Wide Web breakthrough if I'm right ;)

Bike to Work Day (this Friday)

The concept is... pretty obvious. And with rising gas prices putting all kinds of bikes back on the road, this year should have a pretty good turn-out. That means that a lot of the population will need to get caught up on bike safety and bike laws.

To see if anything is happening in your neck of the woods, head over to the League of American Bicyclists. For Hoosiers, check the Indiana Bicycle Coalition.

"Fighting With Forks: The Food Crisis Battle"

I did a heavy overhaul of last week's post on the food crisis - I think it's much improved and is full of fun links.

It just got published over at the Jesus Manifesto webzine. Those folks are beginning to grow on me...

http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/2008/05/12/fighting-with-forks-the-food-crisis-battle/

household budget

For the nerds and the nosy (and for my future reference), here's our household expense breakdown for the first year post-college. This excludes debt servicing, donations, and savings; we also managed to get by without any major expenses - new computer, car payments, or hospital bills. So... we sneaked by this year.

31% - Household (Rent, Electric, Other)
16% - Health care
14% - Grocery
14% - Transportation
8% - Recreation
7% - Classroom Supplies for 1st Grade
5% - Communication / Personal Education
5% - Friend / Family Gifts
1% - Clothing

Gas City taxpayers can thank us - we covered almost $1,000 of classroom expenses for their first graders :)

All in all, Marion is about as cheap as it gets. Even so, us spoiled Millennials are pretty shocked at how expensive our lifestyles are once we leave the nest and start gathering our own food.

waste not, want not - a call to global citizenship

How far we've come...

Now, my home growing up was never poor and certainly no model of one-planet living, but we were taught to finish everything on our plate & to wait months and months for shiny new toys. Our middle-class household brought home no game system unless it was won at a free raffle or paid for with allowance money ($0.25 per year-old, per week). The worst of this upbringing surfaces in me as greed and closed-handedness, but sometimes the best surfaces as appreciation for provision and a desire to see others thrive. In the land of waste, it's hard to appreciate each spoonful of food, but we seemed to do pretty well.

This conservation compulsion reared its head again recently. My brother recounted to me a deep-freezer purge that resulted in historic finds of ancient grains - "SWEET CORN 2007" "SWEET CORN 2006". The numbers kept ticking backward. "2005"... "2004". He must have wondered if he'd have to do carbon dating. Finally, even "2003". And not a mite went to the compost heap. Instead, a jolly old pot of stone soup was at hand.

There are crises today that are arguably as potent and urgent (or more so) as World War II. Doubling and tripling of key grain prices in recent years have yielded protests around the world (NPR, The One Campaign). While Americans return to our favorite pastime - complaining about gas prices - most will make only modest lifestyle changes and forward a few senseless e-mails during this "crisis" (which may eventually have some teeth to it). For the global poor, lifestyle changes mean going from 3 meals per day to 2... then to 1, then waiting to die. Some say this could wipe out a decade or more of advances in material living for the world's poor.

One issue that is bite-sized, immediate, accessible in our day-to-day lives and touches both our ecological and agricultural crises is consumption of meat. Roughly half the American corn harvest goes toward feeding animals, making a circuitous path to humans and wasting a lot of grain along the way, using some 5-20 lbs to produce 1 lb of meat. Now, I've went semi-vegetarian before, but I've loosened up a little since. I missed meat.

I know the boom-bust cycle of the global economy is matched by the boom-bust roller coaster of the social justice overdrive or spiritual renewal treadmill, but I think it's a risk worth taking.

To share in the earth's provision of food, to feel just a bit the suffering of millions, and to claim citizenship and solidarity with the world's poor, please leave a comment below and commit yourself to a time of change - a week, a month, a year - of choosing chicken instead of pork, of 4 oz. instead of 12, of beans and rice instead of hamburgers, of water instead of corn syrup, and to a few less gallons of ethanol. Maybe we could even scrap up some donations with the money saved. If you're not the commenting type, I hope you can carry these words in your heart and to your plate and tell others of what so many are facing.

A few generations ago, millions of Americans changed their lifestyles, their jobs, and their fates to fight Hitler. Factories were reconfigured, gardens were planted, and Sunday drives were outlawed. If we can unite for so long, so severely to bend our economy towards war, surely bending it towards satisfying the most modest of humans needs is possible.

who said it? .069. quantifying success

Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. . . . Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

- Robert F. Kennedy, 3/18/68 -
(watch the video here)



Knowledge is more valuable than riches.
- Cameroonian Proverb -

steps toward sustainability 10: follow the flush

Kudos to Marion Utilities for being brutally honest. With the latest water bill, they tucked in a Stormwater & Sewer Overflow Update (click on the newsletter below to get a very readable sized image, or see even more detail on their website). To summarize, Marion has a combined storm water & sewage system that was put in place long, long ago. In addition to regular sewage, all the drains along our roads feed into the treatment center, which has a given volume capacity. What this means during heavy rains is that when capacity is reached, the combined overflow - sewage & wastewater alike - goes straight into the Mississinewa River. Yes, when you flush the toilet during a storm there's a chance that your excrement goes straight into the local waterway. Before our plant was built in 1940, this is how all of Marion's wastewater was handled - dump it and let nature break it down. Overflows now occur 40-50 times a year in Marion.

waterway for 2-3 miles north of downtown. I run the trail often. At one in-floMarion has a great riverwalk that traces ourw, I've been recently seeing a distinctly alien-green mixture trickling into the very muddy-brown Mississinewa. After I consulted the map in the update to confirm the location, I now suspect that it is sewage overflows that I keep seeing.

The implications of this are fairly obvious. I can't imagine anybody thinking that filling our county's main water ecosystem with poo is a good idea, whether for reasons of aquatic recreation, public health, or wildlife communities.


Hundreds of American communities like ours face this problem. Replacing this infrastructure is extremely costly and can only be phased in over decades. In the meantime, I think this gives some reason for water conservation in our area. Conservation just to save water supplies is simply not an environmental priority in the water-rich Great Lakes region, at least for now.

There are dozens of ways to conserve water and you can find them readily on the 'net. I might mention a few in time. But this unique ecological problem might require unique solutions.

For example, this chart shows a typical waterflow rate at any wastewater treatment plant. Peak rates do a lot in determining the needed capacity of plants; this is why in some areas electricity rates are higher during the day. Charging electric cars at night, when demand is lower, would put much less strain on the grid than the average kilowatt-hour (more affordable). Less plants need to be built. The chart shows that between 9 am - 5 pm, flow rates are roughly 60-100% higher than the lowest flow point.

What does this mean for the day-to-day? If it's all the same to you, wash your laundry after dinner or first thing in the morning. And if you're in the middle of a decent rainfall, consider putting off water use - let it mellow, do two loads later, or run the dishwasher the next morning. Instead of paying for a car wash, put on a bathing suit and wash in the rain with water that's going to be treated anyhow. Unless, of course, you need a shower afterwards.

Then again, I'm not sure how much of a difference changing the timing would actually make, and home usage is just part of the total flow. When the Thomson plant closed in Marion five years ago, our flow rate of 8 million gals / day dropped 25%, just from that one facility (I think).

This particular challenge might be more corporate than individual, though I can't help but think that individuals could help. This is where I tend to part ways with the anti-regulation, hyper-libertarian crowd. In an economics class years ago, my professor passed out an article entitled "The Regulators in Your Shower," lamenting the woes of the government-mandated low-flow shower head. I understand the frustrations with regulation, but I disagree here. I don't have a Thada river that I pour all my pollutants down. Grant County shares the Mississinewa together and corporate action is needed to ensure it thrives, for our own sake as as it's own. Doing our part as households and communities is simply a part of loving ourwell neighbors downstream. What we send them reflects how we truly feel.

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I took these pics this morning... after a brief downpour.


A good idea for more natural (and cheaper) wastewater treatment, if one has the space:
"Georgia Wetlands Offer Cure for Drought" (NPR, 3:47)