Category — environment

The domain name here, metcaffeination.net, is a made-up name. When I tell people I have a blog, or that I have a site with new picture each day of my son, I need to make sure the offer the domain name in writing, because its spelling is not obvious. I decided, recently, to make up some cards with the domain name, so I could hand them out like business cards.

I chose two different styles: the first, which I ordered from eInvite, are simple: the domain name, my name, and my email address. They had sufficiently robust online design tools so that I could get the type of card I had imagined without worry that fonts wouldn’t be imbedded or that some other problem associated with emailing a PDF wouldn’t happen. And I am quite pleased with the cards.

The second ones were photo cards, to promote the Matthew Picture of the Day. I wanted full-color photos on these, with the website url. For these, I went with Moo‘s mini-cards, which seem to be the favorite of hipster digital designer types. These, too, came out well. 

I got 100 of each, which for business-size cards is a small order. But I’d like to compare the packaging that each company sent my cards in.

First, the photo mini-cards. One hundred of them, in a small box, in a modest padded envelope:

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I lamented in an earlier post that questions of scale are all too often left out of discussions of environmental solutions. To recent pieces that bring the issue up:

Michael Pollan’s Why Bother?, from last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, opens by recounting what for Pollan was the “most upsetting moment” of An Inconvenient Truth: the “immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it.” Pollan defends notions of virtue and the steps, particularly gardening, that individuals might take to reduce their individual carbon footprints, vis-à-vis other responses to the climate crisis such as hopingfor some future technology. He writes: “Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult…. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food.”

Second, the April 12th Sierra Club Radio podcast has a segment with Bob Schildgen—Mr. Green—promoting his new book, which compiles questions and answers from his column in Sierra magazine. On the question of paper vs plastic (his answer–neither; bring your own bag), he encourages listeners to put things into perspective by mentioning that you likely burn as much petroleum in one trip to the grocery store as it takes to make all the plastic bags you’d use in a whole year. I can’t find his numbers online, but using the figures I wrote about earlier: 330 bags per American per year, 200 bags per gallon, so just over one and a half gallons of oil per American devoted to plastic bags. At 20 miles per gallon, you could make a round trip to a supermarket 15 miles away. Right order of magnitude, but I think you could travel a bit farther on that amount of gas.

This exercise in scale is then thrown out the window later in the interview, when host Orli Cotel asks the heavily loaded question: “For our listners who do own cars or need cars for whatever reason, what tips can you give us, as Mr. Green, to help reduce the amount of gas that we’re using,  besides of course cutting back on car travel?” (As if there’s some secret, magic way to drive without using gas that only the hardcore enviros know about.) Mr. Green goes on to mention that Americans lose about 4 million gallons of gasoline per day because of underinflated tires. Of course, he doesn’t put this into perspective: that’s about 1% of our daily gasoline consumption; we burn through 4 million gallons of gasoline in about 15 minutes.

For someone who’s long identified himself as an environmentalist, the rise in recent years of the profile of environmental issues, particularly climate change, is heartening. Much of this attention is the result of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which concludes, as much of the more optimistic reporting on the subject does, with solutions and steps to avert the prospect of catastrophic global climate change.  An often overlooked but absolutely critical aspect of any of these “greener” ways of doing things is an investigation of the way they scale. Two questions that need to be asked of any proposed solution:

1. Is the idea feasible on a large scale?
2. If implemented on a large scale, how does the overall benefit compare with the magnitude of the problem that the solution purports to address?

We do need to constantly look for ways to lower energy use, to create less waste, to reduce the release of toxics to the environment. An abiding quest to green and re-green our lives should become a universal American value, in much the same fashion that thriftiness was admired during the depression, or that discount shopping was admired in the 1990s. But at the same time, we must be careful not to fool ourselves: there is a real prospect that, if we do not consider the scale of the problems and potential solutions, we’ll stop short, that metaphorically we’ll change a lightbulb and recycle a soda can and think we’re done.

Consumption of energy is the biggest part of greenhouse gas emissions, which is the biggest environmental problem facing us today. Almost universally, in the popular press, there is a widespread lack of awareness of scale involved, which is both understandable and frustrating. It is frustrating because figures on overall energy consumption are unambiguous and readily available from the Department of Energy, yet understandable because the numbers involved are so huge. Large scale energy consumption is measured in quads, or quadrillion BTUs. The United States consumes roughly 100 quads, or 100,000,000,000,000,000 BTUs, of energy per year. The outline of the flow of this energy is brilliantly presented in this graph from the DOE. On average, this amount of energy consumption is equivalent to a power consumption of 3.3 trillion watts.

As a very crude¹ (but illuminating) approximation, suppose that every American, all 300 million of us, turns off a lightbulb and reduces our power consumption by 100 watts. In this approximation, we imagine a bulb which had been on 24/7/365 to now be off. All total, we’d save 30 billion watts. Sounds like a large number, doesn’t it? It’s the output of 30 Gigawatt-sized power plants. Certainly admirable. But it’s just 1% of our overall 3 Terawatt power consumption.

Petroleum constitutes roughly 40% of our energy consumption, to the tune of 865 million gallons per day.²³ This turns out to be 10000 gallons per second;  it takes our country about a minute and 40 seconds to burn through a million gallons of oil. Keep this scale in mind the next time you hear about a great way for our country to save a million gallons of oil: wonderful, but hardly the whole solution.

Of this oil, each day we burn 388 million gallons of gasoline and 175 million gallons of diesel fuel.⁴⁵ It is contemplating these figures that lead us into question 1 above: how feasible are any of the alternate fuels touted as replacements for gasoline?

For the moment, I will just address biodiesel. To make biodiesel, vegetable oil is combined with an alcohol and a strong base to produce a liquid that is similar to petroleum-based diesel fuel. There are serious questions as to the energy efficiency of this whole process, which I will not address in this post. As a reasonable approximation, suppose one gallon of vegetable oil can be turned into one gallon of biodiesel.

The entire annual US production of vegetable oil is about 2.9 billion gallons.⁶  If all the vegetable oil produced over the course of a whole year were converted into biodiesel, it would displace about 5 days of gasoline and petro-diesel use.

I’ve seen (but can’t find at the moment) a figure that roughly 10% of our vegetable oil production ends up as waste vegetable oil. So if we converted an entire year’s supply of  used french-fry oil, etc., to biodiesel, we’d keep our country motoring for about 12 hours and 22 minutes.

This is why I’m more than a little skeptical when conversion to bio-diesel is taken as evidence that someone or some organization has “gone green.”  To replace all our motoring fuel with bio-diesel, we’d have to scale up production by a factor of 70. Even if we set a more modest target of replacing a quarter of our motor fuel with biodiesel, we’d need to produce 18 times as much vegetable oil as we do today. In this context, discussion about whether one method of producing biodiesel is, say, 20% more efficient than another method, or whether one type of biodiesel-burning engine is, say, 30% more efficient than another is really irrelevant. What’s relevant is the scale.

I’ll close with one final calculation that puts the scale in perspective. Just looking at gasoline, 388 million gallons per day is equivalent to 1.3 gallons per person per day. We can see that it makes sense: it’s what you get if everyone drives 30 miles per day. We tend not to think of the volume of gasoline that we consume because we don’t see it: it goes from a tank underground through a hose to a tank under our car. But aside from water, there’s nothing for which each and every one of us consumes that’s on that scale. For a family of four, 1.3 gallons per day is 36 gallons per week: imagine this volume of vegetable oil, every week. Sound absurd? That’s what the bio-diesel solution would be.

1. Crude because it mixes primary energy–like coal and gas–with electricity, which is good for order of magnitude, but keep in mind that only a third of the heat value of the primary energy makes it into electricity. [↩]
2. 1 barrel is 42 gallons [↩]
3. Equivalent to the volume of Lipsette Lake every two days. [↩]
4. distillate fuel oil=diesel [↩]
5. plus 68 million gallons of jet fuel [↩]
6. See Table 6 of any of the reports. Note that production of oilseed and production of vegetable oil are different things; only part of the weight of the oilseed is oil. Here I use a specific gravity of 0.9 to convert from metric tons to gallons, so about 7 pounds per gallon. [↩]

There are three books that form the foundation for my urban Weltanschauung, and I hope to write of each. The first of these, for me, was James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, a polemic examination of the state of our built environment. Written before global warming or peak oil commanded the attention they do today, Kunstler focused on the dehumanizing aesthetics of postwar development, particularly suburbia.

I’d long felt an uneasiness about the suburbs: I’d had a general notion that total reliance on cars must be bad for the environment, and I also knew that the suburbs appeared dull and boring at best, but I could never quite put a finger on precisely what was wrong with them. Kunstler’s book was a clarion illumination of the problems of suburbia; he put into amusingly acerbic words precisely what I had felt.

Kunstler wrote two more books about the built form: Home from Nowhere, and The City in Mind, and he maintains a curmudgeonly website, with his delightful eyesore of the month. Kunstler is, by trade, a writer, and so his work is generally very well crafted. In the past few years he has mostly been concerned with Peak Oil and the complete catastrophe it could be for the American Way of Life, and his book on the subject, The Long Emergency, isn’t quite as captivating as his other works: in large part because the depth of research and analysis that went into his other books just isn’t there.

As someone who listens to several podcasts, I was excited to learn that he is now doing a weekly podcast of his own: Kunstlercast. The first episode concerns (chain) drugstores, and their proliferation. It’s worth listening to.

I can’t quite decide what to make of the Save the Planet Protest: if it weren’t for the fact that there have been full-page ads, featuring the same text as from the webpage, in Express (the free tabloid version of the Washington Post that’s given away at Metro stops), it’d be easy to say that it’s just a joke, and it would probably be so inconsequential that I wouldn’t blog about it. But there on page 17 of the Express is the ad, and I can’t quite tell whether it is high snark, an over-the-top practical joke, or misguided sincerity.

The idea is (but you miss so much without reading the original wording): A guy named Lee is organizing a protest in front of the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, MD, 12 hours a day (9am–9pm), for 9 days (15–23 February), because their environmental-themed programming isn’t working. That is, environmental problems are still getting worse, and the text is ambiguous as to whether he means that the failure of the environment to improve even after Discovery Channel programming is evidence that Discovery Channel programming is defective, or that Discovery Channel environmental programming is misguided and focused on ineffective and insufficient initiatives.

There are legitimate points that could be made here: that the Discovery Channel tries to market itself as green, with a LEED-Silver certified headquarters and a new PlanetGreen channel, but is in fact offering only feel-good greenwash programming and continues to produce anti-environmental programming, like Future Weapons. I don’t watch the Discovery Channel, but I’m in general sympathetic to the viewpoint that mass media portrayals of environmental issues overemphasize the inconsequential. Heck, even non-profit environmental groups are guilty of this.

Of course, if he is sincere, Lee’s tactics are way off the mark.

It’s easy to poke fun at Lee’s writing style, although if this is a joke, then it’s a very well-crafted parody of vacuous sincerity. But I also have a bit of admiration for the writing, because writing something like that would be very difficult for me. I am a slow writer, and am often astonished when I go back and look at my blog posts and realize how short they really are, compared with the time it took me to write them. If you ever watch me try to write (although I hope you don’t–I don’t consider writing to be a spectator sport), you’ll notice that typing only comes in short bursts. I remember using the computer labs at college, watching the people around me type furiously and continuously as they wrote up their papers, and wondering how they could get the words to flow so quickly. There have been times when I wished I could have just sat down and dashed off a repetitive, rambling, semi-coherent piece that filled up some space. Sometimes quantity has a quality of its own.

Perhaps the best reason to listen to Sierra Club Radio is to hear the fascinating guests that come on the show, who often manage to say something insightful despite host Orli Cotel’s bubbly demeanor and loaded questions. But one theme has come up in two recent programs–indeed, you hear it often from the Sierra Club–that really gets to me: the notion that the answer to the problem of our nation’s oil consumption is to “go farther on a gallon of gas” by raising fuel economy standards. Since raising fuel economy standards is just about the only progressive thing left in the energy bill that made it through Congress, much has been made of this phrase of late.

It seems simple enough: increase the fuel economy, and our fuel use goes down. But there’s a really big if here: that’s if the number of miles driven doesn’t go up. I will argue in this post that there’s no evidence to support the notion that the amount of driving will stay fixed. This is the problem with the phrase: “going farther” implies more driving, by using the same amount, “a gallon,” of gas.

From the standpoint of an individual, many environmentally-minded folks buy high fuel economy cars in order to achieve “guilt-free” driving. When faced with a transportation decision: whether to travel, and if so, which mode to choose, the fact that one has a car with higher than average fuel economy certainly makes it easier to choose to drive. This is actually a well-known phenomenon known as the Jevons paradox: improvements in efficiency of consumption of some good leads to a larger overall rate of consumption of that good, because use of that good becomes feasible for more uses as the efficiency grows. It’s the same reason you spend more time online when you have a faster Internet connection. Overall, America’s gasoline consumption is analogous to a (faltering) dieter who eats a whole box of fat-free cookies because they’re “healthy.”

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It’s 6am; I’ve overslept! I should have been in line at the mall three hours ago!

I’m not a strict BND observer, but considering how you can’t separate the environmental damage caused by manufacturing, by mining and refining raw materials for manufacture, by transportation of goods and materials, and by disposal of packaging and worn-out junk from the purchase of new goods, BND does seem to be one of the more useful spiritual holidays around. There’s a reason that “reduce” is the first keyword in the “reduce, reuse, repair, recycle” mantra.

Many argue that stuff not bought today will be bought some other day, so it’s understood that BND is not a cure for consumerism, but rather a time to reflect on the future of a consumer society in the age of global warming and Peak Oil. We should question the underlying assumption of that argument, though, that there’s some fixed amount of stuff that we’re going to buy. Rather, we need to keep the Jevons paradox in mind, and consider whether the ease with which we can purchase something plays a role in our decision to purchase it in the first place.

If you’re going to make any observation of BND today, I’d say the first priority is to avoid products that are explicitly marketed as “green.” One of the softer, and IMHO more unreasonably optimistic environmental notions out there is that we can save the world simply buy buying the right stuff. A much larger fraction of the Green Living blog and its companion piece on Sierra Club Radio are devoted to buying less damaging products, instead of reducing, reusing or repairing. So today, instead of buying a shirt made from organic cotton, ask yourself instead whether you really need another shirt in the first place.

I did look through all the sale flyers that came with Yesterday’s Washington Post. Among the things advertised, without which I think that that, on balance, the world would be a better place: electric martini makers, “Latte” makers (ironically, from a company called “Back to Basics”), and Margarita makers. And scented candles.

Americans throw out 100,000,000,000 plastic shopping bags each year. This is the figure given in Katharine Mieszkowski’s article about plastic bags in Salon.com, which I first heard about when Sierra Club Radio Interviewed her.

I won’t repeat what’s in the article: that’s what links are for. Suffice it to say that plastic bags wreak havoc on the environment. But let’s explore the numbers.

As I write this, the Census bureau estimates the US population at 303,384,903: that means that, on average, each American throws away about 330 plastic bags each year, or just one bag per day most days of the year. Five bags of groceries plus two other purchases a week would do it; this tells us there’s no reason to doubt the 100 billion figure. In fact, thinking about all the double-bagging that goes on at supermarkets, and not to mention all the other shopping that’s going on all the time, the figure seems a bit low. And unfortunately, there isn’t one evil industrial polluter to which we can assign the blame: what seems like a normal number of plastic bags times a whole lot of us means a whole lot of bags.

Producing the 100,000,000,000 plastic bags apparently takes 12 million barrels of oil. One barrel of oil is 42 gallons, so you can make about 200 bags from a gallon of oil, or about 2/3 fluid ounce of oil per bag.

According to the US Department of Energy, the US uses 20.7 million barrels of oil per day, or 7.6 billion barrels of oil per year. Of this, roughly 3/4 goes to transportation fuels. So if we took all the oil that presently goes into plastic-bag production, and used it instead for moving around, it would last about 19 hours.

Which means: plastic bags are awful for wildlife, and very ugly when they’re littered around, but they’re not really a significant part of our dependence on foreign oil. If someone comes up with a scheme to recycle plastic bags into an alternative fuel for cars, then perhaps it will be clever, but it won’t really be anything like a solution.