Energy

We’ve working to understand and measure our carbon footprint and develop a plan to offset our contributions to global warming. This is obviously a good and necessary thing, but an article in today’s U.K. Telegraph points out some of the potential speed bumps we’re likely to encounter as we rush down this particular road to climate change prevention.

As global warming finally seeps into the public consciousness, carbon offsets are fast becoming the next hot new thing (no pun intended). People love them because they let you buy your way out of your carbon impacts. Write a check and erase your guilt. And I’ve always been a little troubled by this and by the whole idea of carbon offsets themselves.

As promised, my 1983 Mercedes diesel station wagon is now powered by pure vegetable oil. What’s so amazing is that you’d never know it. If anything my car now runs better than before. And even buying new vegetable oil I’m saving about a dollar a gallon over diesel. We’re still working on setting up the filtering system that will allow me to run on recycled (i.e. used) oil. At 30 miles to the gallon it emits about 25% of the CO2 of a Prius.

The average American drives 12,100 miles per year. By switching from a car that burns gasoline and gets 22 mpg to one that burns vegetable oil (directly), a driver would save 550 gallons of gasoline, and avoid releasing 6,500 pounds (3.2 tons) of carbon dioxide into the air!

I actually feel proud every time I sit behind the wheel.

The conversion was done by Gilead Garage in Randolph, Vermont at a cost of about $1,700 including parts and labor. They did an amazing job and I recommend them highly!

Sir Nicholas Stern, the U.K. government’s advisor on economics and climate change has delivered a 600-page report that outlines a simple fact: the cost to stop global warming is a fraction of what it will cost if we allow climate change to occur.

But even with the efforts underway, we’re not doing nearly enough. Recently, George Monbiot, author of the new book
Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning laid out a plan to dramatically accelerate our progress in reducing CO2 emissions. It’s creative, daring, and just the kind of out of the box thinking we desperately need. His thoughts
appeared in the Guardian, UK’s famously progressive paper. Check it out! With the Democrats now controlling the House and the Senate, let’s hope these ideas and others like them get the attention they deserve and that our nation begins to take the lead on most important issue of this or any other age.

Random objects of actionable reflection are careening in large number across my perennially cluttered plane of existence this fine morning. All you have to do is reach out with a net and see what you catch. Here’s a few I just reeled in:

If I could say it any better I would. But Thomas Friedman’s 9/20/06 column in the New York Times on taxing ethanol imports highlights the political and structural obstacles to common sense.

Friedman writes:

Thanks to pressure from Midwest farmers and agribusinesses, who want to protect the U.S. corn ethanol industry from competition from Brazilian sugar ethanol, we have imposed a stiff tariff to keep it out. We do this even though Brazilian sugar ethanol provides eight times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it, while American corn ethanol provides only 1.3 times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it. We do this even though sugar ethanol reduces greenhouses gases more than corn ethanol. And we do this even though sugar cane ethanol can easily be grown in poor tropical countries in Africa or the Caribbean, and could actually help alleviate their poverty. Yes, you read all this right. We tax imported sugar ethanol, which could finance our poor friends, but we don’t tax imported crude oil, which definitely finances our rich enemies. We’d rather power anti-Americans with our energy purchases than promote antipoverty.

The question is what do we do to change this ridiculous situation? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

This Labor Day weekend Bill McKibben with the help of Greenpeace, Middlebury College, and Vermont activists organized a five-day walk from Robert Frost's old writing cabin in Ripton, Vermont to the Burlington waterfront. John Murphy (our senior sales sage) and I joined the event Sunday evening at Shelburne Farms, where we camped for the night before walking the last eight miles into Burlington yesterday.

Now if someone asked me to walk that far for almost any other reason I probably would have said no. But this walk, filled with delightful non-stop converstion with a wonderful community of caring Vermonters, was a delight. The event positively and hopefully addressed the most important issue of our time.

Here I am with Middlebury College Student and ChangeIt participant Meg

Well, the first leg of the journey is complete. I recently purchased a 1983 Mercedes Diesel station Wagon with somewhere over 128,000 miles on it.

While the next step is the biofuel conversion, just the change to this car has been pretty significant. When you sit in the driver’s seat you feel as if you’re slipping into an antique arm chair. You sink into the depth of something that someone else has been sitting in for much of their life.

I’ve always respected Thomas Friedman. He's smart as a whip, but he's recently become too conservative for my taste. When he says all trade is good trade, and he’d support any free trade agreement without even reading it, he’s gone too far for my tastes. But he’s also a big advocate for alternative energy and a huge critic of the White House inaction on global warming.

Over the weekend, on the Tim Russert show, he went so far as to say that “green” is the new red, white and blue, and the most patriotic thing anyone can do.”

I guess I need to be a fan again. For a price, you can check out his New York Times columns here.

He's also hosting a good documentary on the Discovery channel called Addicted to Oil. It will be rebroadcast on August 14th at 8:00 and 11:00 pm and on August 20th at 7:00 am.

I got back last night from a week in Portugal. It was our annual immediate family-only trip. Every year, Chiara, Alexander, Meika, my wife, and myself take a week alone somewhere to get reaquainted. It’s amazing what happens when we spend two hours having dinner rather than 2 minutes, and talk about world events rather than who’s going out tonight and what time they have to be home.

Life is so full of habits and distractions – rushing to do things that probably don’t really matter, or failing to see things because we think we already saw them – that almost anything that forces us out of our daily pattern can produce wonderful and unexpected results. We observed how different graffiti was in Portugal than in the U.S. (more often than not, it’s almost art or something actually better than most art), what our country looks like when viewed by others, which we did by reading the British newspapers (the Guardian has always been a favorite of mine), and what it’s like to be in a culture where there are more farmer’s markets than supermarkets.

I also noticed the beauty of their windmills and how they discourage people from driving cars. (An hour on their toll road costs $20 and three-quarters of a tank of diesel fuel for our mini-van cost $90 while a 3-hour express train ride about the distance from Washington DC to New York cost less than $40.) Food is served slowly. Almost all stores close from 1pm to 4pm. Tips seem deeply appreciated, and most newsstands seemed to have at least 5 to 7 local papers.

Arriving back at JFK airport in New York City last night was a shock to the senses even for someone who was born in New York. I missed the visual pleasure of being surrounded by a more thoughtfully designed architectual landscape, the slower pace, the absence of chain stores and getting into a 20 year-old Mercedes taxi!

Time once again to get down and get funky with the latest word from the front lines of the battle for a better world. Today we’re fueling the debate on gas prices, talking up taxes that are taxing only if you’re taxing earth’s resources; wondering about an EPA that’s MIA; and (batting clean-up) washing our hands of a story on certain soaps that are dirtying up the world. Prepare, dear friends, to be stunned and amazed…