Current Savers Blog

Soaring petrol prices and worries about global warming have convinced many motorists that now is the time to go green.

But if our heads have been won over, our hearts may take a little longer, to judge from a visit this week to the British International Motor Show in London.

    One stand, the Electric Vehicle Village, was devoted to, well, electric vehicles, designed to glide silently through city streets without emitting any polluting fumes. People were staring dutifully at the little plastic buggies on display.

    One of them was painted all over with green leaves, just to make the point. “A nasty little car”, was the verdict of one man.

    A short distance across the hall, the Range Rover stand was playing host to a much more excited crowd. Visitors were scrambling all over the big SUVs and sitting contentedly in their plush driving seats.

    If these people were worried by the hefty amounts of CO2 that these “Chelsea tractors” emit, they weren’t showing it.

    Are we ready to go green? The case has been made on sensible economic and environmental grounds, but who really believes that our love affair with the car is ever rational?

Soaring petrol prices and worries about global warming have convinced many motorists that now is the time to go green.

But if our heads have been won over, our hearts may take a little longer, to judge from a visit this week to the British International Motor Show in London.

    One stand, the Electric Vehicle Village, was devoted to, well, electric vehicles, designed to glide silently through city streets without emitting any polluting fumes. People were staring dutifully at the little plastic buggies on display.

    One of them was painted all over with green leaves, just to make the point. “A nasty little car”, was the verdict of one man.

    A short distance across the hall, the Range Rover stand was playing host to a much more excited crowd. Visitors were scrambling all over the big SUVs and sitting contentedly in their plush driving seats.

    If these people were worried by the hefty amounts of CO2 that these “Chelsea tractors” emit, they weren’t showing it.

    Are we ready to go green? The case has been made on sensible economic and environmental grounds, but who really believes that our love affair with the car is ever rational?

 Are gasoline and energy prices too high? What’s high enough? 

It may be a distinct miniority opinion, but if you were to ask me, I’d say I think they’re not high enough — and I sincerely hope they keep rising. It may be the only way the world wakes up to the perils of climate change — hitting people in their pocketbooks where it hurts most.
 
The higher energy costs are truly a blessing in disguise for anyone concerned about climate change and worried about the inability of world leaders to take any tough measures to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions. With the growing scientific evidence that global warming has been happening, there’s no excuse for this generation’s inaction.

And with the WTO talks ending in abject failure, who could possibly be optimistic about the world ever agreeing on taking the costly, pain-inducing steps necessary to at least slow global warming in our time?
 
So it is the soaring energy prices are filling the void the cowardly political leaders have left. Rising prices for petrol, natural gas and electricity are causing pain and leading to conservation — and reduced emissions of carbon dioxide It’s a good thing.

 Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, pointed out in his excellent book “The Age of Turbulence” that as honourable as the fight against climate change was, he didn’t think there would be any significant reductions until economics figured into the equation. “I fear that a more likely response to global warming will be to quibble until the dangers it poses to national economies become more apparent,” Greenspan wrote. He was criticised by some for that but those “dangers” to economies are now now happening faster than anyone could have imagined. And it’s a good thing.
 
Those who don’t see the light need to feel the heat. The finance minister in Berlin, Thilo Sarazzin, has been criticised this week for his suggestion that people turn down their thermostats and put on sweaters in the winter if they feel cold in their apartments. He said room temperatures of 15 or 16 degrees — with a sweater on — would be the best answer to rising energy prices rather than introducing a new government energy subsidy for low-income households as some other political leaders were clamouring for. Sarazzin has been getting bashed in the German media for his suggestion — but he’s right.   
 
In Britain, the announcement this week that natural gas and electricity prices would be raised sharply in the months ahead got a lot of people upset. But what better way to promote conservation and spur the development of renewable energy — which becomes increasingly attractive with every increase in the price of fossil fuels. In the United States, by far the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, fuel tax revenues are down sharply this year — because people are using less fuel. That’s a good thing.
 
Unfortunately, I’m not sure if the prices are high enough yet to really make a difference. A recent German news broadcast found several motorists who said the higher fuel prices would not change their driving habits and they said they hoped the higher prices would nevertheless force other drivers off the road so the streets would be less congested. So I do hope they keep rising — to the point those smug motorists will think twice about their driving patterns.
 
My personal answer to rising prices? I’m driving a lot less (one 60 litre tank now lasts six weeks instead of three weeks about two years ago), I use wood rather than natural gas for heat as much as possible, have taken a number of energy-saving measures on my house, commute by bicycle and have converted my monthly electric bill into a monthly windfall profit with the help of solar panels. I’m unfortunately still far from zero emissions. But that’s the goal — and an increasingly rewarding one.
 
So no, if you ask me, energy prices are not high enough. And I hope they keep rising.

…What do you think? 
 

When you think of sharks, do you hear the theme music to the 1970s horror flick “Jaws”?

If so, try diving with hundreds of them off South Africa’s east coast. My wife and I did so earlier this month and it was truly a mind-blowing experience.

Every year during the southern hemisphere winter, ragged-tooth sharks gather on the sub-tropical reefs of South Africa’s Aliwal Shoal to breed.

My wife and I did two dives in these shark-infested waters and encountered “raggies” by the dozen. Most were about 1.5 to two meters (4.5 to 6.5 feet) long I reckon but some were larger (the females tend to be bigger than the males).

The visibility was not great so I have no idea how many were really out there. Scores or possibly hundreds I suppose.

Divers are not supposed to go within five meters of the sharks but the sharks don’t follow the same guidelines and sometimes swim right past you, a permanent ragged-tooth “smile” etched in their faces.

Did they look sinister? Of course! But they did not strike me as aggressive in the least (though I have to confess that I would have been less comfortable around great whites). 

And after about 30 minutes of constant shark sightings our group drifted over the “cathedral”, which is sort of an open cavern where dozens of raggies swim slowly in circles.

I saw it as I started my gradual ascent to the surface (I was getting low on air) and it was a thrill to realise that so many sharks were circling below me.

The folks at Aliwal Dive Center, the outfit we took the plunge with, said this year has been the best for raggie diving in at least a decade. And they see such close encounters with sharks as good for conservation as they help to dispell man-eater myths.

“Sharks have had such bad press,” said Aliwal manager Nigel Pickering.

There have been concerns in some conservation circles that divers have contributed to declines in the number of sharks coming to the area in recent years — perhaps the animals are shy of odd creatures spewing bubbles — but the numbers this season suggest the reasons behind this state of affairs are probably more complex.

Shark numbers globally are in decline in part because of the unsustainable harvesting of shark fins for soup, a coveted delicacy in Asia and elsewhere. So any sign of a recovery such as the raggie numbers this year off South Africa is good news. 

Against this backdrop, it certainly seems to me that diving with raggies can do no harm. Scuba diving done properly is not an intrusive or disruptive outdoor activity.

And like many other eco-tourist pursuits it can’t hurt to make it commercially valuable to see the animals up close. This gives people a vested interest in protecting rather than eating them. 

And it shows that sharks don’t always want to eat us either.    

(For a linked video, click here ) 

Buenos Aires, Argentina, is on the iron-flat edge of a large river. It rains, but not that much. Winters are mild. The body-conscious people of this metropolitan area of 13 million people are generally fit and into sports. Lots of people can’t afford cars and squish into the cheap and overloaded buses, subways and trains. It should be bike-commuter heaven.
 
So why is biking to work so unpopular, dangerous and frustrating?
Like most big cities in Latin America, there is not much of a bike-commuting culture. People don’t often think of modifying their lifestyle or consumer practices to protect the environment. Riding a bike to work is viewed as something poor people have to do, though I do see evidence of a bike counterculture among the young and the pierced.

The city government barely keeps roads repaired, let alone support bikers with bike lanes or bike paths. The diesel-fume-spewing buses are a menace and the taxi-drivers are aggressive and downright mean to bikers, deliberately cutting them off. Drivers have an attitude to bikers that is more like “drive them off the road” than “share the road,” as the U.S. motorist education program encourages people to do. When I moved here in 2006 I rented a house in the suburbs and figured I was way too far out for bicycling and that the crazy traffic would make it impossible.
 
Nevertheless, when an acquaintance (now a friend and regular bike commuting buddy) told me that the bike commute from my office to my home neighborhood takes only an hour — the same time as walking to the train station, buying a ticket, waiting for the train, riding the train and walking home from the station — I knew I had to try it.

How can you beat getting your work-out during your commute, staying off the jam-packed train and doing your tiny bit to save the planet? I soon got addicted to doing it a few times a month, despite the frustrations with the traffic and the bumpy roads and the occasional “you must be a foreigner” exclamation from an observer.
 
I did a lot of bike commuting on the other side of the Andes in Santiago, Chile, from 2003-2006. But Santiago is a rarity among Latin American capitals: car drivers are polite and the city has excellent bike paths thanks to effective bike-commuting activists including the Movement of Furious Cyclists  who run a massive monthly bike ride through downtown to demand bike paths and respect for bicyclists. The movement is similar in some ways to San Francisco’s Critical Mass.
 
Buenos Aires does have one advantage over Santiago. I can take my bike in to work on the train, and then pedal home.

There is a path, of sorts, along part of my commute and pedestrians don’t get too angry when I join them on the sidewalk in other parts.

My biking friend and I have made improvements to our route, though I fear there is a trade off: the route where I feel safest from buses seems the most vulnerable to muggings.
 
 

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

Often when seeing anti-environmental commentary about global warming in the media, I feel like the first question I would like to ask these commentators is: “Why do you deny that carbon dioxide (CO₂), which is increasing in a major way in the atmosphere, is a greenhouse gas?”

If they were to start their answer: “I don’t deny it …” I would think “Good, we’ve made some progress.”  However, as I think would often be the case, if they start their answer: “Because …” we should be ready to pounce on the ensuing nonsense.

Here’s a key example of such nonsense from a former weatherman:

“Now allow me to talk a little about the science behind the global warming frenzy. I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories. Here’s the bottom line: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. They don’t have any other issue. Carbon Dioxide, that’s it.

Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. I  estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000, only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t”. 

This might be funny if it weren’t for the fact that editorial pages like the Wall Street Journal and conservative news sources such as Fox News  treat such individuals as scientific authorities on climate change.

Leaving aside the fact that it is the molecular structure of CO₂ that is the basis for its greenhouse effect with respect to absorbing heat radiation from the Earth’s surface and warming the climate, or that with no CO₂ in the atmosphere our planet would freeze over, the numbers argument above is just unforgivable. The current and future higher concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere are precisely accounted for in climate models that simulate present and future warming.A seemingly small concentration of a gas in the atmosphere is not a measure of its potential environmental or health impact. Indeed, if anything, the more trace level a gas is in the natural atmosphere, the more powerful its environmental impact is likely to be.

For example, I would ask any reader that accepts the above argument, with all its hubris (“…that’s all there is to it …” !!) to consider this: Would you mind if there were just 38 molecules of carbon monoxide (CO) out of 100,000 molecules of atmosphere in ‘front of your face’? If you don’t mind, you should know that, after a few hours of exposure, you would probably be dead.

Similarly weather reporters surely should know that dangerous air pollution levels of gases like ozone (O₃) are measured in very low concentrations of 100 molecules per billion molecules of atmosphere! After all, ozone levels are a routine part of weather forecasts today.

It took Barack Obama a mere nine minutes into his first speech in Europe to tackle the issue of climate change — and end eight years of frustration about U.S. foot-dragging on global warming by the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gases.

The U.S. presidential candidate got right to the point in Berlin when he said climate change is a threat to the future of the world. He said it was vital for nations to work together with a spirit of unity similar to the one that brought down the Berlin Wall 19 years ago.

It was all music to the ears of the 200,000 spectators in Berlin after hearing the years of doubts about global warming and then resistance to any meaningful agreement on cutting emissions from George W. Bush and his administration — and the cheers for his lines about fighting climate change in a country where angst about that topic runs high were among the loudest on the warm summer evening.

“The fall of the Berlin Wall brought new hope,” Obama said. “But that very closeness has given rise to new dangers — dangers that cannot be contained within the borders of a country or by the distance of an ocean.”

Obama, who has in the past gone out of his way to praise Germany’s pioneering laws that promote renewable energies, put global warming up there alongside stability in Afghanistan and nuclear proliferation as the “new peril” facing the world. His strong language won the hearts of the crowd in Berlin:

“As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya. This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.”

Obama also praised Germany for its leadership on reducing carbon dixoide emissions, down nearly 20 percent since 1990. (The United States’ CO2 emissions have gone up 14 percent since 1990).

“Let us resolve that all nations — including my own — will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere,” said Obama, who wants to cut U.S. CO2 back to 1990 levels by 2020. “This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one.”

But if he’s elected in November, will Obama really be able to stand up against the powerful U.S. interests opposed to any deep emission cuts? Will he really be able to help the United States get off its “addiction” to oil? How will Americans react when the price of gas rises to $8 per gallon (like Europeans pay) when they already get so worked up over the $4 gallon?

When Americans think about cutting their carbon footprint, they change their light bulbs, turn down their thermostats and maybe leave their cars in the garage. But a new study says there’s another energy-gobbling gremlin on the domestic front and it’s probably scarfing down a junk-food cheeseburger right now. It’s the meat-rich, over-caloried, highly processed American diet.

By eating less, and eating less food that takes lots of energy to produce, people in the United States could cut climate-warming fossil fuel use in the food system by as much as 50 percent, Cornell University scientists reported in the journal Human Ecology.

The average American eats 3,747 calories a day, the scientists said, some 1,200 to 1,700 calories over what’s recommended. Many of those calories come from meat and processed foods, which use more energy getting to the table than lower-calorie staples like potatoes, rice, fruit and vegetables. So the first step is, eat less. And if you have to keep eating all those calories, veggies may be the way to go — a vegetarian diet uses about 33 percent less fossil fuel.

The researchers also suggested energy savings could come from using more traditional organic farming methods, and getting away from energy-intensive conventional meat and dairy production. In farm fields, cutting back on pesticides, increasing the use of manure as fertilizer, planting cover crops and rotating crops would also improve energy efficiency, the authors wrote.

Changes to food processing, packaging and distribution could also reduce fuel consumption, but the researchers said individual responsibility would have the biggest impact. The most dramatic reduction in energy used in food processing would happen if consumers cut their demand for highly processed foods. This would also cut down on so-called the food miles, the distance food travels from where it’s produced to where it’s eaten — a major consideration, since U.S. food travels an average of 1,090 miles (2,400 km) on its way to American stomachs.

But come on: if you’re already bicycling to work, turning off your electronic gear, sweltering through a hot summer without air conditioning, would you be willing to do without junk food — or at least stop eating so much of it — in the name of the environment? What do you think?

Could cow manure curb global warming?

A study by scientists in Texas reckons that cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and other farm animals excrete enough waste to generate electricity for millions of homes, helping reduce reliance on coal-fired power plants and so cut greenhouse gas emissions released by burning fossil fuels.

Left to decompose naturally, manure emits the powerful greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide. If trapped by a devoted workforce (people with an impaired sense of smell encouraged to apply) the gases could used to drive microturbines to generate electricity. That works by the manure being “anaerobically digested” — a process a bit like making compost — to release energy-rich biogas which would be burnt to drive the microturbines.

The calculations, the scientists say they are the first to outline a procedure for quantifying amounts of energy and greenhouse gases linked to national herds, suggest that farm animals in the United States alone could generate about 2.4 percent of U.S. electricity and avert about 3.9 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Dung is widely burnt in the Third World as a fuel; why not exploit it elsewhere?

The study doesn’t look into the uncertainties about the economics of sucking up manure, transport, building specialised power plants, etc (with oil at almost $130 a barrel, what would you pay for a barrel of manure?) 

So, if you live in the countryside and your eco-minded neighbour tells you sometime in future: “We switched our electricity supplier from coal to get it from the local wind farm” you can go one better and say:

“See Daisy the cow over there in the field? We get ours from her”.

Is there a future for manure?

Today, Reuters ran a story about the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports’ aggressive plan to slash pollutants — mostly exhaust from diesel engines — that have harmed air quality and contributed to health concerns in the local communities.  In implementing the plan, the ports have butted heads with some of the industries that they do business with, such as shippers, railroads and truckers.

Nevertheless, the plan is moving full steam ahead, so to speak.

During the course of reporting this story, we visited both ports to get an up-close view of some of the measures they are taking. The two videos below demonstrate two of those efforts, one at each port.

The first, from the Port of Long Beach, shows a technology to cap and collect emissions from a ship’s engines using a 2,500-pound “bonnet” made by Advanced Cleanup Technologies Inc. The bonnet is lifted about 150 feet in the air to collect the exhaust from the ship’s auxiliary engines, which is then vaccuumed into a treatment system to remove the pollutants. The video first shows the bonnet affixed to the top of the ship, and later shows it being removed, allowing the dirty black smoke to escape into the atmosphere.

The next video shows a heavy-duty no-emissions electric truck at the Port of Los Angeles. The truck, made by Balqon Corporation, runs on batteries and is used to haul containers around the port. Michael Fluegal, who drives the truck, is interviewed inside the trucks’ cab about how this vehicle is different from the diesel-engine trucks he is used to. The port has ordered 20 more of these trucks and five on-road electric trucks.

– Additional reporting by Syantani Chatterjee