ecoresearchers

Yahoo has launched a website that tracks the number of compact fluorescent light bulbs sold all the way down the the ZIP code level. From what I can tell, Nielsen is providing the statistics on how many bulbs have been sold. The information can be shown in an in-line map. Not a bad idea, but I’m always kind of skeptical about this kind of “up to the minute” data. Big, confident numbers flashing across a screen basically make me assume that it’s more of a vague estimate. In order for those numbers to be correct for my ZIP code, the supermarket where I just shopped today would have to somehow accurately let Nielsen know how many CFLs they have sold. My experience today was that they couldn’t even keep their scales zeroed. The idea for the website is somewhat clever but I’m going to stand by my assessment of its overall hokiness. And, the fact that there are two major typos on the site gives it a slapped-together feel. I’ll send $5 to the first person who can email me what those typos are.

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Several cities in northern Italy banned automobile traffic today for anywhere from six to 12 hours. Not a bad idea, and great for joggers and cyclists. Doing this on a Sunday must be pretty easy to do, politically. It would be infinitely more interesting to see what would happen if they tried to do this on a weekday. The economic effect on a weekday would be harmful but what about declaring entire weekends, maybe once a month, to be car-free? Businesses may slow down at first, but people may find it liberating to take back the cities for pedestrians and decide to spend more time in the city.

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General Electric said it is working on improving the incandescent bulb to make it comparably efficient to compact fluorescents. I have to admit, this is something I had no idea was on the horizon. GE’s goal is to have a bulb that is almost as efficient as a CFL in a few years. Of course it’s not really important which technology is used, incandescents, CFLs, or LEDs, but it doesn’t seem a very lofty goal to be almost as good as something that already exists today. I won’t dismiss it as useless because there is the issue of the mercury content in CFLs, that is not toxic to individual consumers but could cause problems in landfills. On the other hand, CFLs cause an immediate reduction in pollutants from power plants. GE says this about the benefits of using its future product:

Adoption of new technology could lead to greenhouse gas emission reductions of up to 40 million tons of CO2 in the U.S. and up to 50 million tons in the EU if the entire installed base of traditional incandescent bulbs was replaced with HEI lamps.

Yes, or the greenhouse gas reduction would be even greater if CFL lamps were used today. GE also talked about its high-efficiency incandescents having the instant-on advantage over CFLs. There are still some CFLs that take a second to come on and then to get to full brightness but I must say that out of about the seven bulbs in my apartment I only have that problem with one of them so I think that is probably a mostly moot point.

An interesting point to all this talk of CFL vs. incandescent is that in a few years it’s likely that we’ll be wanting to replace CFLs with LEDs. Let’s sit tight and wait for laws decrying the wasteful CFL! Maybe GE has a point after all.

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FedEx has added four hybrid electric delivery trucks to its Denver fleet. That brings the total number of hybrid trucks in use by the shipper to 93. Hopefully FedEx is in this for the long haul and these 93 vehicles are not just for publicity. It would be nice to see FedEx come out with a medium-term plan to replace their standard delivery trucks with hybrids as they reach the end of their service lives. That kind of announcement would make good headlines and be an impetus for some healthy competition between UPS, DHL, and FedEx to be greener than each other. Considering that the shipping industry uses a heck of a lot of gas, these companies are in a position to make a real difference. For now, though, I’ll give FedEx the benefit of the doubt and assume there’s more to come.

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Well, I debated about whether to post a link to this song because it is the very definition of corny (and non-ethanol-producing corn at that). The music is terrible and the lyrics are not especially clever, but for some reason it still made me laugh. I’m imagining (hoping?) that the style of the song was tongue-in-cheek. One thing that loses me in this song, though, is the line “bone up on the sciences”. Can someone tell me what that means exactly? How does it fit into the rest of the song? Ok, enjoy. And if you don’t enjoy it, at least make fun of it.

99 Ways to Make a Difference (in 99 Seconds)

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Now, I hesitate to write so soon again about another government entity seeking to outlaw the sale of incandescent light bulbs, er…”globes” (because we’re talking about Australia here, which is not only a different country, just like California, but, for the geographically uninitiated is even its own continent). I think the next time Australia gets lip from anyone, they should just say: “Does your country cover an entire continent. No, I didn’t think so.” That should end most discussions.

So the government (the same government that didn’t ratify the Kyoto Protocol) of this powerful country that covers an entire continent has decreed that by 2010 the sale of incandescent light bulbs will be outlawed within its watery borders. Wow! A whole continent banning the sale of an energy waster. Take that, California! California with its insignificant 37 million people is always thinking it’s so important and such a trendsetter. Oh, lookie here, our Austrian governor drives a Hummer that runs on hydrogen - see how practical we are? Well, in 2010, none of Australia’s 20.6 million residents will be able to legally purchase an incandescent bulb. Um…what? That raft of a country only has 20.6 million people living in it? Well, no matter: all that empty land can be used to set up secret light bulb black markets in the Outback. I’m sure the energy police can’t cover every square kilometer - and imagine the fuel they would waste if they tried. I’m sure New Zealand’s smuggling community is already licking their collective lips, too, and outfitting their fast, fuel slurping boats to handle the fragile cargo.

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Sixteen percent of the corn grown in the United States is not used to produce edibles (delicious items such as corn dogs and candy corn) but rather used to make ethanol. Even though that’s a heck of lot of corn, it only ends up supplying less than one percent of the liquid fuel needs in the US. If every last ear of corn were turned into ethanol, we would be able to displace 4 to 5 percent of other liquid fuels. In a way, that’s kind of scary and it tells us that corn-based ethanol is not going to replace oil. It has done an admirable job as a fuel additive gradually replacing MTBE and, especially in the Midwest like here in Minnesota, there are a lot of filling stations that sell gasoline mixed with 10% ethanol. Not many people right now can fill their tanks, however, with E85 before we run out of ethanol.

Two MIT professors have gone on record saying that ethanol could have a bright future. The road to that future is more a complicated maize (pun intended) than a straight road, however. The energy-efficient ethanol of the future will come from things like agricultural wastes and grasses and not from energy- and resource-intensive corn production. The MIT researchers estimate that it will be between 10 and 15 years before we can get back to enjoying tortillas without bringing our transportation system to its knees. By the way, the conflict between eating and fueling is not far fetched - in fact it’s already happening in Mexico. Don’t drive your flex-fuel vehicle into Mexico unless you want it keyed.

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This from the “things you may not have known” files. Beginning March 2007, German cities have the option to designate environmental areas (Umweltzonen) in which only cars with the appropriate sticker: green, yellow, or red can drive. Which sticker a car qualifies for is based on a two-digit code in its registration papers. Cities are not required to designate environmental zones but many are planning to do so. The city of Munich has decided to go ahead with plans for an environmental zone beginning October 31, 2007. In related news, the Munich police have announced they will be cutting down trees at the edges of the zone to make room for banks of highly sensitive cameras to check whether cars entering have the correct sticker. The camera banks will be powered by diesel generators, whose exhaust will be pointed away from the environmental zone.

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The European Commission has “proposed binding rules” requiring automakers to reduce the average carbon dioxide emissions across their models from a current maximum of 163 grams down to 130 grams per kilometer. For readers unfamiliar with the lawmaking process in the European Union, “proposing a binding rule” is step 22 in a 41-step process and falls right between “debating endlessly in 37 languages” and “packing up our things to drive to Strasbourg for no good reason“.

The original idea was to limit CO₂ emissions to 120 grams per kilometer but a compromise had to be reached because of boisterous German opposition. You see, Germans are known for making luxury cars like the Mercedes S-Class or sportscars like the Porsche 911, both of which are concerned more with getting you somewhere really fast more than with doing so with a small ecological footprint, or tiretrack as it were. Making simply sufficient cars is something best left to the French or Italians, who are wussies anyway because they have speed limits on their autoroutes and autostradas. As much as it is enjoyable to make fun, it is understandable that the German auto industry fears for its dominant position if some of its models are no longer street-legal. Bavaria’s Minister for Economic Affairs showed off his silliness skills, though, in saying that he didn’t want Germans “reduced to a country of compact car drivers“.

If the proposed rule is eventually approved by member countries, I hope that all automakers (including the struggling US automakers who sell cars in Europe) will stop expending energy explaining how hard it will be and start working on ways to make it happen. I’m guessing that the Mercedes S500 (current CO2 emissions: 279 g/km) would be comfortable and fun to drive even if it had a clean diesel hybrid and didn’t go an unnecessarily fast 250 km/h (155 mph).

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California Assemblymember (say that three times fast) Lloyd Levine is introducing legislation to ban the sale of incandescent light bulbs in in the state by 2012. It really is amazing that compact fluorescent and LED light bulbs face such stiff competition from a technology that hasn’t been improved upon in about a hundred years, but that is the sad truth. I think a lot of people find it hard to believe that incandescents really are that wasteful of the energy they use. Incandescent bulbs served their noble purpose for many years but are now the poster child for inefficiency. Look at this from the US Department of Energy’s Kid’s Page:

As a nation, we spend about one-quarter of our electricity on lighting, at a cost of more than $37 billion annually. Much of this energy is wasted using inefficient incandescent light bulbs. Only 10 percent of the energy used by an incandescent bulb produces light; the rest is given off as heat.

Ten percent is an abysmal number.

Click on the light bulb on the left if you hate bunnies and dolphins. Click on the light bulb on the right if you have any sense of decency and/or live in California where it will soon be illegal to click anywhere else.

A special thanks to Rocketboom for calling my attention to the California story!

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I bet you don’t know what MIFSLA means. I sure didn’t. It stands for “mix first and separate later”. And I bet you thought you were doing the environment a favor by having a 1.6 gallon toilet in your house. Well, I’m here to tell you that that’s just not enough and you’re going to have to go back to remedial treehugging and bandanna-tying classes. Apparently, it’s no good to mix feces and urine and flush it all down the same drain because they have to be separated again in order to be disposed of properly without poisoning fish and probably causing all kinds of other nasty events. I’m not going to go into an explanation of how this all works because, frankly, it’s kind of a yucky (but oddly interesting) topic. The only thing you need to know is that the knight in shining porcelain is called a no mix toilet. One word of warning to men - for no mix toilets to work properly, everyone needs to sit down. Some men have the strange idea that it is a sign of weakness to sit and pee, but they’re going to have to get over that if we’re ever to keep the world from going down the drain, um…from going to pot, oh forget it - you know what I mean.

Here are a couple links for self study.

<–Click to flush!

MIFSLA

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A recent article on the University of Minnesota Alumni Association’s website entitled Five Reasons Corn Ethanol Won’t Save the Planet makes some sobering claims about corn-derived ethanol. I’m not going to retype the article but will let you read it for yourself (that’s what links are for) but basically the article goes on for several paragraphs about the environmental damage caused by using corn to make ethanol and makes the claim that soy-based biodiesel beats out ethanol by a wide margin in overall environmental impact. The claims are quoted from a December 2006 Science article.

If soy-based diesel is so much better than corn-based ethanol as a vehicle fuel, why is there so much more excitement in America about ethanol than about biodiesel? One possible reason could be that Americans aren’t exposed to many diesel passenger vehicles in the first place. Fewer than 5% of new cars sold in the US run on diesel whereas about 50% of cars sold in Europe use diesel; that discrepancy alone could help account for the lack of biodiesel awareness in the US market. US manufacturers more or less abandoned diesel engines in the 1980s and left it to the Europeans to refine (no pun intended) the technology. Beginning in 2008 Mercedes, Volkswagen, and Audi will offer diesel vehicles for the US market that meet emissions standards in all 50 states. Perhaps this marketing push will increase the awareness of pure biodiesel and biodiesel blends as alternatives to gasoline.

Related links:

National Biodiesel Board

American Coalition for Ethanol

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Welcome to ecoresearchers.com! Since I like to keep up on developments in all kinds of ecological and environmental issues I decided to start ecoresearchers.com to share with others what I’m reading and what I think it all means. As this website matures, you’ll see postings on energy efficiency, ethanol, biodiesel, conservation, global warming, and all kinds of other green topics. Let me know what you think of the articles posted here and the topics covered. If you have suggestions on topics or articles, I’d love to hear them!

Rick

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