Smart Energy

KJ and I are on the return leg of a week exploring the wilds of Washington and British Columbia. On the first day out, driving west along the back roads of eastern Washington, we stumbled upon this field. The truck here really is bogged down in dried mud. I’ve no idea what the story is, but the image was irresistible.

Don't get bogged down with meth. Photo by Brian Charles Clark somewhere in eastern Washington, summer 2009

I keep meaning to mention that fact that I love Your Logo Makes Me Barf.

A logo from today’s update doesn’t make me barf, though; it makes me wonder if the pilots flying in and out of this airport really have to crash into the mountain in order to land and take off. Or is their logo just barfy?

Look out for that tree, George!

Cindy over at the agribiz-subsidized blog Corn Commentary popped some widgets over my post about her yellow pseudo-journalistic post on the film Food, Inc. Being a corporate PR hack, she of course completely and deliberately (I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt; she might just be dumb) missed my point, the point of the film review she critiqued, and the point of Food, Inc. But let’s let bygones be begones. (Although I should point out that Corny calls me “yellow,” but it is she who has closed comments on her post. Now there’s a good way to start a conversation….)

My main point in re Corny Cindy is that she ain’t doing her job. She continues to navel-gaze and assume that her audience knows WTF she’s talking about. Rule number one in being a corporate PR hack: explain your position in short simple sentences. Instead, Corny erects strawmen and duly knocks them down: the amount of corn grown, the types of corn grown, etc. The simple case she needs to make, but can’t because it just isn’t there to be made, is that corporate ag cares about consumer and environmental health more than it does the economic bottom line.

At least Cindy looked up “yellow journalism” is Wikipedia. Now if she and the industry she flacks for would only look in the mirror.

Have some fun with Translation Party and bounce between English and Japanese. Try entering “This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York highlands.“

The New York Times recently ran a piece asking Eric Corey Freed for simple tips to make a home greener. Not all of his tips are sensible, though.

1. Track down all the “vampire” energy sources in your home — and stab them with a wooden stake. Vampire sources are things like DVD players, etc. — anything with a ready light. Plug ‘em into a power strip, he says — and then turn the strip off when not in use.
2. Get a low-flow shower head to reduce water consumption.
3. Install a gray-water system that diverts soapy water to the toilet.
4. Install programmable thermostats.

But one of his main tips won’t work, says Smart Energy Advisor contributor Karen Adams. Freed advises folks to

Take an empty two-liter soda bottle, wash it out, fill it with water, screw the lid on tightly and set it into your toilet tank, as far away from the flapper valve as possible. This prevents two liters of water from being used every time you flush.

“It’s fine to cut back the volume some for many old high volume flush toilets,” Adams said.But it’s not clear from the Times article that Freed is talking about old, seven-gallon flushers; indeed, it’s pretty clear he’s talking about reducing low-flow toilets even further, as he adds that “you can always flush twice for those rare occasions when it’s truly needed.”

The new toilets do have to use 1.6 gallons or less. Some of them do not work very well, so cutting their flush volume by putting something in the tank is not a great idea. The other catch is that aside from flushing the toilet, you need enough water to transport chunky waste down your sewer line to the main line. The house line is built at an angle for moving waste with a certain range of water volume. As you can imagine, if the angle is too steep, the water runs too fast and leaves the chunkies behind. If the angle is too low, the chunkies are not transported quickly enough and settle out. What is too low or too steep depends partly on what the water volume is.

Indeed, friends of ours have said that their experiences with American-made low-flow toilets has been, well, stinky. We recently talked with a couple who use a dual-flush toilet imported from Australia, and they’re very happy with it. It’s perhaps not surprising that the Aussies would get it right: they live in a water-scarce environment and, unlike Yanks, aren’t by nature wasteful.

“It’s true that structures that incorporate “green” design elements are inherently inventive, since they often utilize state-of-the-art technologies in order to have minimum impact on the environment,” writes Meghan Ahearn in Woman’s Day:

However, there are some buildings that go above and beyond even green conventions in order to meet Gold- or even Platinum-level LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) building certification standards. From a water facility with a 30,000-square-foot green roof to a nonprofit center with a 42-gallon water tank that stores rainwater for reuse, these eight award-winning architectural superstars are truly green trailblazers.

Gish Family Apartments in San Jose, California

A new report from McKinsey & Company shows that the U.S. economy has the potential to reduce annual non-transportation energy consumption by roughly 23 percent by 2020, eliminating more than $1.2 trillion in waste – well beyond the $520 billion upfront investment (not including program costs) that would be required.

The residential sector, the report says, accounts for 35 percent of potential energy savings. “Our houses leak, our light bulbs produce more heat than illumination, our big screen TV sets draw power when they are turned off, and that’s just the start of it,” comments GreenerBuildings contributor Mark Guenther on on the report.

There’s a vast network of small things that need to be done, all requiring investment, not only financial but educational, as well. As the report says,

the efficiency opportunity is fragmented across literally millions of locations and billions of devices and most opportunities require an initial investment that pays back over time.

Gunther comments on this point,

Americans waste energy for many… reasons, all, in a sense, market failures. Owners of apartment buildings have little incentive to make the air-conditioning more efficient in tenants pay the bills. Buyers of new homes neglect to ask about the insulation’s R-value. Working class people strapped for cash won’t pay extra for a more efficient clothes dryer, even if it saves money in the long run. There’s a vast lack of knowledge, even in business, about how and where energy is consumed.

Saffron Burrows has a crush on a red Stratocaster

Mel Wilder (Saffron Burrows) has one, maybe two months to live. She also has a fistful of high-limit credit cards. It’s a frail skeleton to hang a story on and, in the end, there’s not much meat on these bones. We do, however, learn an important lesson from The Guitar: when dealing with the American medical establishment, always get a second opinion.

The Guitar has been called The Bucket List for the art mob, but that ain’t it. It’s really Sex and the Single Girl writ small and particular. In Helen Gurley Brown’s classic self-help book, the “mouseburger” single female is cajoled and instructed to use men to her advantage and for her pleasure; turnabout is fair play. In The Guitar, mouseburger Mel is pricked into action by a death sentence. Implausibly, as she comes into work late the next morning, she’s fired by her overbearing boss with whom she can’t even squeeze in a 140-character tweet. A few minutes later, it’s her boyfriend who runs her over with his emotional needs; he breaks up with her.

All the while, the soundtrack is overburdened by Mel’s disease, which makes her wheeze. It’s a strange congruence, Mel being overrun by males while we hear heavy breathing as the boys speak. It adds up to a weird, unintentional, and distracting Freudian slip. Read more on Curled Up With A Good DVD…

As the housing market craters, homeowners may be taking a longer view. That, at least, is one possible interpretation of what might otherwise seem a counterintuitive finding reported today in The Daily Green:

the San Francisco Chronicle has discovered that many homeowners are spending considerable amounts of money on their places. Much of the new investment is in green building features, such as energy efficiency upgrades and non-toxic products.

“The design market is thriving, and I think that has to do with the shift in the economy,” Kelly Keiser, who runs Splendid Interiors in San Francisco, told the Chronicle. “People are staying in homes longer, rather than flipping houses. And I feel my clients are now investing in their houses and buying bigger-ticket items.”

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