Posted by Kelly Smith on Thu, Jul 29, 2010
Demand for sustainable products and services worldwide continues to expand. Green businesses are thinking in new ways about how to protect the planet and satisfy their customers at the same time. UPS began a carbon neutral shipping program last fall to serve customers who wish to pay a little extra to offset the carbon dioxide emissions from shipping their packages. UPS was the first package delivery service to offer this kind of green shipping option.
This popular program has now expanded to UPS locations across the United States, online, and around the world. For only 75 cents, a customer can ship a package carbon free from the United States to any international location. Domestically, the optional surcharge is as low as five cents for customers to ship their packages without pollution or guilt. In 2010, customer purchases of offsets will go twice as far, since UPS will match their investments.
UPS currently purchases carbon offets from the Garcia River Forest Climate Action Project. This organization is overseen by The Nature Conservancy and The Conservation Fund to ensure its validity as a provider of reliable carbon offsets. It is important for businesses and consumers to purchase offsets or renewable energy credits that are certified or verified. UPS also plans to support other offset projects worldwide.
Offering a simple and inexpensive way for customers to feel better about the sustainability of their purchases is an excellent idea for any business to increase business and improve customer satisfaction.
Photo via Justinls
Posted by Kelly Smith on Wed, Jun 02, 2010
Britain's former Prime Minister Gordon Brown stepped down in early May when his Labour government did not win a majority of seats in Parliament in the May 6 election. For the first time since World War II, no party won an outright majority, so a coalition was formed by the two leading parties. Britain's new government is a coalition government formed by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberal Democrat deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
The UK's governmental shift comes just as the news has been released by Cambridge Econometrics that although Britain is set to meet preliminary carbon dioxide reduction targets due to the economic downturn and a switch from coal power to nuclear power, it is going to fall short of its goal to reduce carbon emissions 34 percent by 2020 if nothing changes. Carbon emissions in the UK are decreasing, but they are decreasing by a smaller percentage as the economy improves.
In order to meet its 2020 carbon budget, the UK's new coalition government will need to continue to invest in both energy efficiency and renewable energy in many sectors of the economy. In the meantime, Chancellor George Osborne has begun to outline the financial budget cuts which the new government finds necessary to chip away at the British deficit. Spending cuts worth 6.2 billion British pounds are proposed. It is unclear whether the new government is committed to investment in green power innovations or whether the government will follow through on the Labour government's green investment bank. Some experts believe that the government can reach climate change targets without cuts if they focus investment in and regulations on the transportation industry and the heating industry.
Posted by Kelly Smith on Wed, May 12, 2010
“Clean coal” is a term used to describe technologies that will reduce carbon dioxide emissions while still using coal as a fuel. The most common technique described as a clean coal technology is carbon sequestration, which condenses carbon dioxide gas and stores it underground to keep it out of the atmosphere. Another clean coal technology involves converting coal into a gaseous form before burning it to produce a cleaner burn with fewer carbon emissions.
On the downside, clean coal technology will take years to be fully developed, and it is uncertain whether carbon storage will be successful in the long term. Currently, about half of the energy in the United States comes from coal power plants, but the shift to clean coal is expensive. Old coal power plants will not support the new technology, so brand new coal power plants need to be built. This uses energy and emits carbon dioxide starting from the construction stage. Clean coal technology also does not solve any of the problems associated with coal mining.
Mississippi recently brought proposals to build a new clean coal plant to a halt. Officials decided that the costs and risks were too high and the technologies were too uncertain to make the project feasible without a long list of conditions. Mississippi Power thinks that the conditions imposed by state regulators make the project impossible. Similar project proposals have been shut down all over the country in the last few years for many of the same reasons.
Investing a lot of money in an uncertain technology that continues to use a problematic fossil fuel doesn’t seem very smart, especially since coal is not a renewable resource and will not be a viable long-term energy source. Finding a marginally cleaner way to use fossil fuels does not eliminate all of the problems associated with the use of fossil fuels. From the mining to the burning, there is not very much that is clean about coal. It makes far more sense to invest money in new renewable energy projects. We have the technology to harness more green power, so our focus should be on making green energy a more abundant and cost-effective option to power our future and counteract climate change.
Posted by Kelly Smith on Mon, Apr 19, 2010
Carbon dioxide is no longer just a greenhouse gas which contributes to global climate change. A professor of chemistry at Ontario's
Queen's University has discovered an innovative use for carbon dioxide: extraction of cooking oils. Professor Philip Jessop holds the Canada Research Chair in Green Chemistry. Jessop and his research team are working on projects that will actually use carbon dioxide to improve the environment.
Using carbon dioxide to produce cooking oil in a more environmentally friendly fashion is doubly beneficial. First, it puts climate-change causing carbon dioxide to a positive use. Second, it eliminates the use of the solvent hexane, which is a flammable, smog-creating neurotoxin. Hexane is currently the solvent used by manufacturers to extract oils from soybeans. Not only is hexane toxic, but the hexane method of cooking oil extraction also involves energy-intensive distillation techniques, making it even less eco-friendly.
Jessop and his research team have developed a new method to extract oils using a solvent which just needs to mix with soybeans and carbonated water (carbon dioxide mixed into water) in order to extract oil with fewer chemicals and less energy. This solvent is a "switchable" solvent which can switch from hydrophilic (loving water) to hydrophobic (hating water) and back as carbon dioxide is added or taken away from the water. This switchable nature means that these ingredients can be recycled to continue to make cooking oil.
Cooking oil companies are already interested in this new research. Hexane is very cheap to use, but Jessop hopes to figure out how to make his new carbon dioxide-based process economically feasible and competitive on a large scale so that businesses can make the choice to produce greener cooking oils and consumers can make the choice to purchase more sustainable cooking oils.
Posted by Kelly Smith on Thu, Apr 01, 2010
There is something missing as politicians debate climate change policy in the U.S. Liberals and conservatives are framing climate change solely as an environmental issue or an economic issue. While these certainly are very relevant to global warming, a commonly disregarded aspect is the effect of global warming on public health. It is not clear why, as online journalist Richard Graves put it, "President Obama and congressional leaders have made health-care reform and tackling global warming their top priorities this year, yet little to no analysis has been made on what a climate policy that shuts down carbon-spewing smokestacks and tailpipes would mean to the health-care sector." This connection between climate change and healthcare seems like an important area to probe.
According to Dr. Matthew Nisbet at Washington D.C.'s American University, several reputable scientific journals, such as the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet, have published articles discussing health issues tied to global warming. For whatever reason, this research has not really come to light through the political arena or the mainstream U.S. media.
Reducing carbon emissions and pollutants entering the atmosphere could certainly have a positive effect on respiratory diseases, an area of health that is otherwise predicted to grow worse as the climate grows warmer. A warming climate could also cause problems with farming, through droughts, floods, severe weather events, and changing climate patterns. This could negatively affect food supplies worldwide. Global warming could also cause heat-related illnesses and extend the range of insects that carry infectious diseases.
Fortunately, the U.S. Center for Disease Control is preparing to respond to these and other possible public health consequences of global warming, using methods similar to its preparations for flu outbreaks or other large-scale health crises in the U.S. In Europe, the E.U. has already foreseen the potential healthcare savings resulting from a reduction in carbon emissions.
Photo via sarawestermark
Posted by Rahul Chitrapu on Thu, Feb 11, 2010
As a rule of thumb, government intervention into free markets is a bad idea. But it is also true that government help is needed to jumpstart new markets. What do you think? Is it a good idea for government to intervene and set mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions? Or should the free market decide what is best since
consumers want companies to adopt sustainable practices anyway?
Posted by Rahul Chitrapu on Tue, Jan 19, 2010
Bell Labs, a research arm of telecom giant Alcatel-Lucent, has launched a global effort to overhaul the internet to make it a 1,000 times greener by 2015. It is working with 15 other members from industry, academia and NGOs including AT&T, China Mobile, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics to make this happen. This consortium is being called "Green Touch."
How much energy do the internet and other communication networks use? They emit about the same amount of greenhouse gas pollution as 50 million cars - 300 million tons each year.
This consortium is looking to make daily emissions in 2015 a few times less than what the current yearly emissions are.
Via Solve Climate
Photo via www.opte.org/maps/
Posted by Rahul Chitrapu on Wed, Jan 13, 2010
BYD, short for Build Your Dreams, is planning to launch Chinese-built electric cars in the U.S in the later part of 2010.
BYD has a very interesting story. Its founder, Wang Chuan-Fu, was described as a combination of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch by Charlie Munger around the time when Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's legendary company, made an investment in BYD. Wang started BYD in 1995 with $300,000 and set out to manufacture cellphone batteries to compete with Sony and Sanyo. Within 5 years, BYD was the world leader in cellphone batteries. Having known the automotive business very little, Wang entered it in 2003 and started churning out cars that became best sellers in China.
BYD plans to introduce an electric plug-in called e6 into the US this year. A large part of the plug-in's success will depend on BYD's lithium-ion ferrous phosphate battery technology. e6 is a five passenger car that can travel upwards of 200 miles on a single charge.
But how helpful will electric cars be in reducing carbon emissions if the electricity required to charge them comes from fossil fuels? Instead of burning gasoline in a car engine, coal or natural gas is burnt in a power plant. The emissions, though less in magnitude, will still be released. But, what if the electricity required to charge the car came from green energy sources instead? Now, that would make a much bigger difference.
Posted by Rahul Chitrapu on Mon, Jan 11, 2010
I have talked with numerous people who are passionate about the environment and who do their best to protect the environment. One of the activities they are most proud of is recycling. When I tell them about how green power is another great way to protect the environment, they simply give me a nod and say that it is true but not so much as recycling. (Disclaimer: EcoElectrons sells green power, but only to corporations and not households). This frustrates me to a great extent. So here is a post that quantifies the environmental impacts that each activity can have. If you feel that I have overlooked anything or if you do not quite agree with the analysis, feel free to leave a comment and we can continue the conversation.
Recycling in a household
There are different types of wastes produced in a household. Metallic (think aluminum cans), glass, plastic (like Coke bottles) and paper are some examples. About 130 billion cans of aluminum are produced in United States each year. This would amount to 1100 cans per household per year. Recycling one can saves about 0.6 lbs of CO2. If a household recycled all the cans it used, about 700 lbs of CO2 would have been avoided from entering the atmosphere.
There is another kind of waste called Municipal Solid Waste or MSW. MSW is composed of all types of solid waste – paper, metal, plastic, glass, foodwaste and so on. Check out the national average composition of MSW on Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) website. Around 4,250 pounds of MSW are produced by each household each year and since recycling 1 pound of MSW saves 2.5 pounds of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, 11,000 pounds of CO2 would be saved if all MSW produced in a household is recycled. There you have it. If a household recycled all the waste it produced, 11,000 pounds of CO2 would have been avoided from entering the atmosphere each year. This is of course wishful thinking. Only a third to a half of all MSW can be recycled with today's technology.
Green Power in a household
An average household consumes 10,000 KWh of electricity each year. Greening 1 KWh avoid 1.6 pounds of CO2 as per the EPA. And greening 10,000 KWh would avoid 16,000 pounds of CO2 from entering the atmosphere each year.
Recycling and Green Power together make the biggest difference
I am not suggesting that you switch to green power and stop recycling since green power is at least twice as effective as recycling in terms of CO2 emissions. Recycling has other great benefits in addition to emissions reduction like reduction of landfills and conservation of natural resources that cannot be easily quantified. But, please recognize that green power also makes a significant difference.