Week in Review - May 17th-23rd 2010

What a week in green lifestyle topics! There are so many things to share, that it was hard to narrow down the list to a handful, but here goes.

Deforestation Victory! Nestlé Will Stop Using Rainforest-Destroying Palm Oil

With a lot of pressure, you really can change the behavior of giants in the food industry. Nestle has agreed after much pressure from Greenpeace and others to stop sourcing their palm oil from suppliers that have connections to deforestation and other non-sustainable practices. As Nestle is one of the worlds largest consumers of palm oil, this is a big deal.

TreeHugger: Pesticide Exposure Linked to Increased Risk of ADHD

I heard this on the local radio as well.  If the general health for our kids and families isn't enough to push towards organics, maybe the results from this new study linking the exposure to organophosphate pesticides as kids to the development of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.  Be sure to wash your fruits and vegetables and move towards those grown without pesticides such as organics.

Technology Review: Using Ice to Cool Down the Grid

I've heard of this approach before, make ice when electric is cheap at night and use it instead of chillers during peak time during the day to save money and shave off the peak load on the utility company.  I'm excited to see this being explored at a grander scale than a single company using it for their own buildings. The potential is to save 30 percent on utility fuel consumption (and therefore emissions too) and avoid (or at least delay) the need for constructing new power plants until we have even more efficient and renewable technology available.

TreeHugger: NASA Captures First Photos of Massive 'Arm' of Oil Slick (Hundreds of Miles Long)

Photo: NASA, public domain
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the extent to which BP's Gulf Oil leak is impacting the world.  Numerous attempts to reduce the leak seemed to have failed and oil has reached landed and will have a devastating impact on the local environments, the seafood trade and numerous other industries.  The oil slick is starting to head to Florida in the Gulf Loop Current - Uh Oh!

Tesla Motors and Toyota Motor Corporation Intend to Work Jointly on EV Development, TMC to Invest in Tesla

Photo courtesy of Tesla Motors

I can't wait to see what you get when you take two of the most exciting green car companies and put them together. 
Tesla Roadster (or Model-S) + Prius = ?Awesome?
And even better the cars will be made in the USA.  I have hope that I may actually see the day when I can afford an all electric car that would fit my family and be fun to drive. Also check out the Tesla Motors press release.

Other ones that didn't make the list this week:

• Fish-Inspired Wind Farms Are 10x More Powerful
• Solar Powered Trash Can Texts When Full (Video)
• Explained: The Carnot Limit 

Happy Greening!
Jon & Alicia

Brownies! Healthier, Dairy-free, Box-mix-like and Super Yummy!

I've been reading a lot about healthy, cheaper and environmentally friendly eating.  If you want to focus exclusively on any one of these items, to take it to an extreme, you really have to forgo the others.  However, I have been trying to find a reasonable balance between all three that I can live with for me and my family.

Because of the baby I have cut out all dairy & soy proteins.  For health and environmental reasons we're trying to cut high fructose corn syrup out of our diet.  For health reasons I'm trying to cut down on random preservatives and refined/white flour, sugar & rice.  All of this suggests more home cooking and less packaged foods - which is also good for the environment, because factories that process all that food use a lot of energy and water and result in a lot of waste.

Here's my dilemma.  I LOVE box-mix brownies.  I'm KNOWN for my brownies,  which until now, have all been based on box mixes.  I put out the word on Facebook that I needed a good recipe and my friends pointed me to Smitten Kitchen.   If you love to cook or if you love to read about food, her blog is addictive.   Her brownie recipe is also good, and it has beautiful pictures to go with it, as do all her recipes.

I decided to go healthier and dairy free and a larger batch.  I'm not sure she'll be able to recognize her base recipe, but I want to acknowledge it.  I took my brownies to a party and got multiple requests for the recipe, so I knew I had a hit.  Moist, chewy, delicious!

I changed butter to Crisco for the dairy issue.  I suspect that a butter substitute would work as well.    I cut down the amount of sugar, added bananas, substituted whole wheat flour for 2/3 of the four and added chocolate chips. These brownies rock!

Chewy, moist, dairy-free, healthier box-mix-like brownies:

1 cup crisco butter flavored shortening
1 3/4  cups sugar
1 2/3 cup cocoa
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
2 banana
3 large eggs
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup white flour
1 cup chocolate chips (Bakers, Ghiradelli & Guittard semi-sweet chips are dairy free as of this writing - always check the labels though!)

Preheat the oven to 325°F.  Grease 9x13 baking pan

Start to melt Crisco in heavy duty sauce pan, at least 2.5 quarts, carefully.  Add  sugar, cocoa, and salt.   Stir until butter is melted and mixture is smooth and fairly hot - not boiling! Take the bananas in your hands and mush them up with the skin still on.  This is easier and faster than trying to mash them with a fork, and works for very yellow bananas too (overripe is better), peel and dump into the pan.  Mix thoroughly.  Let it cool down a little.

It's pretty grainy, but it will get smooth once the eggs and flour are added.  Stir in the vanilla then the eggs, stirring each one until blended.  When the batter looks thick, shiny, and well blended, add the flour and stir until you cannot see it any longer.   Add the chocolate chips Spread evenly in the greased pan.

Bake about 30-35 minutes, until the batter is set.  I find that if the toothpick comes out dry you have probably over-baked them, so really the only good way to tell is to giggle the pan, if the batter starts to ooze to one side,  bake another 5 minutes, then check again.

Do I have to tell you to let it cool?  It's best to cool on the counter until room temperature, and then some people find them easier to cut if you put in the fridge or freezer.

When you put hot items in the fridge or freezer your appliances have to work harder (using more electricity) than if you let nature cool the food to room temperature first.  Of course, in this case I needed them immediately for a party, so I stuck them in the freezer to get them cool enough to cut quickly.  Bad EcoMommy!

Do you have a healthier, more environmentally friendly recipe to share with us?  Leave the URL in the comments!

Happy Eating and Happy Greening!   
Alicia

My first Organic Cotton Shirt

I have historically approached living green from the energy perspective, but now as I learn more about how interrelated all the various components are, like transportation, food, textiles, & energy, and how they contribute substantially to the green house effect and climate change, I have started to look beyond energy.  It also helps having done so much to save energy, like cutting our primary consumption in half,  additional reductions in energy use are hard and/or expensive.  Don't take that to mean we've given up, but rather are focusing our limited time and money on making improvements in other areas of greening our life.  Think of it as having picked all the low hanging fruit from the apple tree and then moving to pick the low hanging pears from the pear tree rather than getting the ladder to get all of the apples.  Today's fruit is sustainable clothing.

I'll start my story a few weeks back when I desperately needed to replace my blue jeans as my current pairs all had holes in inappropriate places.  Rather than just getting my standard replacement Levis 560 Loose Fit, I started looking for environmentally friendly jeans.  My philosophy is use what you have until it needs to be replaced and then replace it with something better (some exceptions for things that consume energy as improved efficiency can justify early replacement).  My search led me to places like H&M, recoJeans, and EVO (apparently now defunct).  H&M sells organic cotton jeans, but only in tight fit and since I'm a big man, I needed my loose fit jeans. RecoJeans selld recycled denim jeans, made from commercial scraps of denim, but the price tag was over $100 per pair.  As I browsed through retailers at EVO as well, I kept coming back to the same thing, a pair of environmentally friendly jeans was going to cost me over $100.  I've never spent more than $40 on a pair of pants in my life.  Another alternative I considered was buying used jeans from a thrift store, but given how time constrained we are and how few jeans actually fit my legs, I passed on that idea.  I wish there was an online source for used clothing that would be able to provide specific used clothes, like a Levis 560 in my size, but I just don't see that business model being profitable yet.

After a few hours of frustrating research on the topic, and since buying a single pant leg (the amount I was prepared to spend was about $50) wasn't useful, I made up my mind to save money and get my standard not so ecofriendly Levi jeans.  I got two pairs for $75 including shipping and some guilt. I had pretty much given up for now on owning environmentally friendly clothes.

Then I got lucky :-) 

I entered a giveaway at greenLAgirl to win one of these really cool organic cotton t-shirts and I won.  Now I am the proud wearer of this cool organic cotton wind turbine t-shirt from bgreenapparel.  I still feel that organic cotton and other sustainable fabric clothing are too expensive for most folks, when compared to basic (not designer) jeans or clothes, but am hopeful that the prices will come down and I will continue to check in on the market as I slowly need to replace my wardrobe.

Happy Greening!
Jon

Week in Review - May 10th-16th 2010

This week I'm skipping the elephant in the room, given that there is so much coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill.  For some sadly humorous takes on the issue, I recommend the recent Daily Show clip There Will Be Blame. 

Now to the exciting and thought provoking recap of last week with an eye toward green.

CNET Green Tech: IBM liquid-cooled supercomputer heats building

Credit: IBM Research

Computers generate a lot of heat (every Watt of electricity that goes in comes out as heat in the end) so the ability to take that heat, concentrate it and do something useful with it is awesome.  Liquid cooled computers are not a new concept, but re-purposing the "waste heat" is not something that has been done at the chip level as far as I know.  Read on to see how this can reduce the energy consumption by 40% and the overall carbon footprint by an estimated 85%.

TreeHugger: Solar Panels vs Caulk: When Does the Techno-Fix Make Sense?
This article hit home as we are in the process of going forward with a large residential solar PV project ourselves.  Thankfully, we've done the efficiency stuff like air-sealing and insulating and reduced consumption by about 40-50%, so the next step for us is renewable energy.

TreeHugger: Renovation Turn Old House Into Green Healthy House With Near Zero Heating Bills

Image by Lloyd Alter

Contrary to the title of this article, it is actually about comparing two identical houses where on one the basic stuff was done for a modest investment of $25K and comparing that to the no holds barred approach on the house next door to get to zero energy.  It is awesome to see a side by side comparison that can help illuminate the value for the different approaches.  I can't wait to see where this is in a couple years.

MIT: Cementing Success
Given the huge environmental impact of cement production (10% of greenhouse gas production) combined with the unbelievable quantities that are produced everyday, it is awesome to see ideas like this to make a cement with half the impact.

MIT: New water-splitting catalyst found
Professor Daniel Nocera and his graduate students are at it again, finding a second catalyst, this one made from much more abundant materials, that can efficiently and sustainably be the electrode on the oxygen side of electrolysis. There is a lot more research to be done, but this could be the basis of a scalable and efficient energy storage in our homes of the future.

All in all a pretty exciting week.  What things caught your eye in the realm of green?

Happy Greening,
Jon

EcoMonday Week in Review, May 3rd-9th 2010

We are going to start a new thing.  We hope to review the previous week for the top news articles that tickled our green fancy and share them with you our readers.  If you have an article that you think is really interesting or relevant, please let us know.


Planet Green: Composting: It's Easy, Awesome for the Environment, and Doesn't Have to Be Smelly

Our tabletop composter
from Reducing the Ick Factor

We are huge fans of composting.  We use two bins to compost all of our vegetable scraps from the kitchen and yard waster (except weeds).  This article has tips for getting started, ways to make your compost smell less and some suggestions for unlikely things for the compost like dryer lint.  We have a number of our own articles involving composting as well.


TreeHugger: Utility Aggrees to Buy Cape Wind Energy, Another Step For Nation's First Offshore Windfarm

This article is particularly relevant for us as National Grid customers in Massachusetts. I excited to see this type of forward thinking coming from my utility company. In the near term it will mean that we will pay a dollar or so more per month on our electric bill, but in the long term as fossil fuel prices rise, it will provide a better price for electricity. Unfortunately, the 50% of the Cape Wind's expected output is only expected to cover 3% of National Grid's needs.


BP Oil Leak - Google News Search

Looks pretty from space, but not up close
image courtesy of NASA

No single article stands out, so this is more to just recognize the horrible environmental disaster ongoing in the Gulf of Mexico.  The containment dome failed because it clogged with hydrates (frozen methane) as they were lowering it into place.  Now BP is working on Plan B (or is it C, D, E, F, G on so forth?).  The oil spill provides a stark contrast to all of the NIMBY objections to the Cape Wind Project for Nantucket Sound.  What is the aesthetic impact of millions of barrels of oil along the Louisiana coast line compared to wind turbines the size of a quarter at arms length on the horizon?  Personally, we love the look of wind turbines spinning.

Please let us know what things you thought were of note last week by posting them in the comments.

Happy Greening!
Jon & Alicia

Evils of Cut Flowers Revisited for Mothers Day

We've written about the environmental evils of cut flowers before around Valentines Day in our post Roses are Red, Not Green - Give Chocolate Instead. I am horrified by all the radio and TV ads for giving Mom flowers this Mothers Day.  Even my 5 y.o. twins came to me begging to buy mommy flowers for Mothers Day because they has seen a commercial during one of their TV shows.

Don't get me wrong, I love flowers and am not opposed to cut flowers under two conditions, they are sourced locally and grown in a sustainable manner.  Fortunately, now that it is spring time, getting local flowers is much easier than in the middle of winter for Valentines Day.  Before purchasing flowers from your local florist, ask them where they get their flowers and if they can't tell you or it is from outside the country, say thank you and take your money elsewhere.  If enough people start voting with their dollars, then the florists will start to pay attention and do the right thing.

Do NOT under any circumstances forget to do something for the mothers in your life on Mothers Day, but remember they would most likely prefer something done for them rather than bought for them.  In our house, gifts that the kids make are treasured over what can be acquired at a store.  If you must buy something for your mothers, consider a potted plant that will go on being beautiful for years to come, not just a week or two.  For other sweet gift ideas, see Roses are Red, Not Green - Give Chocolate Instead.

Happy Greening & Happy Mothers Day to all the mothers out there!
Jon

Going For Solar - Dreaming (Step 1)

Ever since I was a kid learning about solar photovoltaics (PV) from Paul Maycock I have dreamed of having solar PV installed on my house.  In the past few years while reading Steven Strong's book, The Solar Electric House, I learned that Paul was/is one of the pioneers of the field of photovoltaics.

Before any hard core energy folks point it out, I'll admit it, solar thermal has a much higher efficiency and lower cost for installation than PV. However the heat energy generated is not as useful unless you have other systems in your building that are designed to use it such as radiant floor heating or a pool or hot tub.  We have forced hot water with baseboard radiators, so in order to leverage a solar thermal installation, we would have to generate some really hot water, well over typical flat plate solar thermal collector capabilities, which means a heat pump or special collectors.

Back to my dream of installing solar.  We've explored it several times in the past.  MIT had a program several years ago in combination with the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC), now the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, to install a few turnkey systems on homes at a great discount.  Unfortunately, after crunching the numbers and looking closely at our roof, we would never have qualified and the price was still very high.

When the Commonwealth Solar Rebate Program (which was $2.00-5.50/Watt installed) was announced, I looked at PV again for our house. The rebate provided by this program could have been as high as $5.50/Watt installed (ours would have been $3.50/Watt) depending on the qualifications, and there were also federal and state tax incentives, which all taken together made the price and payback look pretty good.  Unfortunately, solar was (and to a lesser extent still is) expensive.  After crunching the numbers the payback was still longer than 15 years.  Sadly, the dream went back on the shelf.

Since then, we have focused on reducing our energy usage through behavior changes and efficiency improvements like taking shorter showers, installing CFL light bulbs, purchasing a high efficiency condensing boiler, air sealing our home and having attic and wall insulation installed.  Home Energy Experts (Energy Auditors) will tell you that efficiency improvements are important to do before investing in renewable energy because the costs are far less and the payback is much shorter, most are on the order of 2-3 years and some are even less.  You can read how we have achieved 40% reductions in our energy usage over the past 5 years in our previous article Where do you use the most energy? and we'll cover more about efficiency improvements in the next segment of this series of Going for Solar.



Earlier this year the Commonwealth Solar II Rebates were announced for Massachusetts. Around the same time we got our tax return which included the Federal Energy Efficiency tax incentive for doing the high efficiency boiler replacement.   I decided to see yet again if we could make my dream of solar a reality and I contacted someone I knew in the residential solar business and started talking.  I learned all about the amazing MA Solar Renewable Energy Credit (SREC) program.  An upcoming post will explain this program and why we think now is the right time for us to install solar on our home.   After that we will describe what happens on a solar site survey in our another post of this series: Going for Solar - Solar Site Survey (Step 3).


Happy Greening!
Jon

Check out the other steps in Green Lifestyle Consulting's Going for Solar Series including photos throughout the construction.

We'll discuss how to use this tool (Solar Pathfinder) to
determine shading all year long for a PV installation
in the piece about our Solar Site Survey