Current Savers Blog

The U.S.  is out to create a clean-air zone around its coastlines, targeting diesel ships that look pretty dirty from shore. The cost will be only a penny per pair of sneakers, the EPA advises. Of course the cost of shoes can sneak up on you — the total is $3.2 billion per year by 2020. Health savings will more than compensate for costs, they say.

The idea of who should pay for carbon in the course of trade is getting a bit hazier, it seems. China only a couple of weeks ago said importers should pay for the carbon costs of goods they buy which are produced in China. The thinking largely has been you-make-it-you-pay-for-the-carbon, but maybe it will become you-bought-it-you-bought-the-carbon. It’s all up for grabs as nations talk about what to do once the Kyoto protocol runs out in 2012. At least the U.S. and China are making nice noises at each other as discussions in Germany get under way.

BTW — to be fair that Reuters pic is of a cruise ship’s laundry room on fire.  Perhaps another issue to debate is how many changes of clothes should be allowed in international waters.

The Las Vegas strip (below) and other global icons went dark on Saturday for Earth Hour.

McDonald’s powered down in Chicago. Twitter was alight with Earth Hour tweets.

The annual event, launched in 2007 by the World Wildlife Fund, aims to encourage people to cut energy use and curb greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.

World emissions have risen by about 70 percent since the 1970s. China has recently overtaken the United States as the top emitter, ahead of the European Union, Russia and India.

 What did you do, if anything, to switch off?

(Photos: Reuters\Mario Anzuoni, McDonald’s)

Everyone knows bleach makes things cleaner, but until now its active ingredient, chlorine, has made the environment dirtier. Two companies have come up with a bleach that has no chlorine and boasts other environmental benefits as well.

The new bleach is not for home use, but for cotton on its way from field to cloth, as well as for other materials. Oils and waxes must be removed from cotton and it needs to be bleached white before it is dyed.

Huntsman, one of the world’s largest chemical companies, and Genencor, a division of Denmark’s Danisco, say the bleach uses less water and works at lower temperatures — 65 degrees centigrade (150 degrees f) instead of near boiling — than chlorine bleach. That helps save energy and makes it cheaper than chlorinated bleach.

The companies have quietly introduced the product as “Gentle Power Bleach” and will go on a marketing offensive next month at an industry conference in Hong Kong. They have already convinced one tough audience that what they have is real — the U.S. cotton trade association, Cotton Incorporated.

“This is a breakthrough in technology,” said Mary Ankeny, the engineer who leads Cotton Incorporated’s dyeing research.

Enzymes speed up chemical reactions to work and when they finish disappear harmlessly into the environment. By contrast, chlorine bleach is classified by some governments as “hazardous waste” and can be a headache to get rid of.

Genencor’s Silicon Valley facility, which looks at developing enzymes for use in many different areas, developed the enzyme for bleach. Huntsman is scaling up the process and selling it.

(PHOTO: A textile worker handles cotton cloth at the TEXTASA factory in Guatemala City June 8, 2006. REUTERS/Daniel LeClair)

Has it come to this in California? Is the Golden State really banning black cars from its famous freeways, as reported in various auto industry blogs – and even The Washington Post – on the grounds that they require more air conditioning to cool?

The answer, a slightly exasperated spokesman for air quality regulator the California Air Resources Board tells Reuters, is an emphatic “NO.”

CARB spokesman Stanley Young calls the story a “very unfortunate case of misinformation from the blogosphere” stemming from proposed draft regulations that have since been put on the back burner by the agency.  But even those draft regulations, he says, never contemplated a ban on black cars.

Young says the report being circulated on the Internet was released in February as the board mulled over proposals for reducing greenhouse emissions from vehicles, including one that automakers make their cars more reflective — with the goal of reducing the amount of air conditioning used by drivers and passengers and, in turn, the amount of fuel consumed and greenhouse gases produced.

He says the draft regulations would have required a more reflective glazing on car windows and paints with a higher “reflectivity.” But he adds, flatly:  “This regulation did not propose banning or restricting any colors.”

“We wanted to see if the principle of reflective paints, which are now used on homes and buildings, could be applied to cars,” Young says. “We did some extensive research and examined all the possibilities and in the end we discovered that darker colors presented a problem.  And because at this point we didn’t have a solution that was cost-effective and technologically feasible, in this round we’ve decided to focus instead on the windows. We’ll address paints down the road.”

Young says the board may bring back car paint proposals in the next few years, perhaps when technology improves.

And that should come as a relief to all those limo-loving movie stars in Hollywood …

(PHOTOS: REUTERS)

An environmental group this week issued a report saying oil and gas companies have enjoyed exemptions to common sense anti-pollution federal rules that govern companies in other industries. This has led, the Environmental Working Group claims, to fouled groundwater, creeks and acres and acres of formerly pristine land in the U.S. West.

The report, “Free Pass for Oil and Gas in the American West,” contains county-by-county maps of what it says are examples of mismanagement of the oil and gas industry.

“Drilling companies regularly complain that environmental standards deny them access to sites where they’d like to drill,” the EWG said. “But the cratered landscape tells a different story.”

The report claims that 270,000 oil and natural gas wells have been drilled since 1980, and 120,000 of them since 2000.  Most of those wells are for natural gas.

The EWG says that these well have been drilled with waivers to federal environmental laws including the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act.

Tesla Motors unveiled the Model S, its newest all-electric car, at a media event outside Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon. Billed as the first mass market highway-ready electric vehicle, the Model S can seat five adults and two children and can go for up to 300 miles on one charge. And, it costs a lot less than Tesla’s Roadster sports car, starting just shy of $50,000 (including a government tax credit). Check out our full story about the Model S unveiling here.

At the event, executives drove the prototype vehicle around the parking lot and into the surrounding neighborhood to show it off. We shot video of some of that, and here it is (forgive us for the guy walking into our shot!). Let us know what you think. Would you buy this car?

Billionaire T. Boone Pickens is spending $2 billion on a bunch of windmills and so far has no way to get the electricity they will produce to market. Last December he said he was a touch anxious, but on Wednesday he didn’t seem worried at all.

Pickens is pretty sure President Barack Obama will get some new power lines built to those plains in the Texas panhandle, but if need be, the oil-man-turned-renewable-energy-advocate will take his toys elsewhere.

“I’m not going to end up with 687 turbines in my garage. They are going to be sticking up spinning someplace,” he said at a San Francisco stop on his latest tour to drum up support for his plan to use wind power and natural gas-fueled vehicles to wean the Unites States from imported oil.

Pickens expects the price of a barrel of oil to hit $75 by the end of the year as OPEC cuts production, and between that and the desire for energy independence he sees Obama finding a way to get transmission lines built from Texas to markets that need electricity – like California.

One person at the event asked him if he could end up being the “czar” of transmission, production, and more. “Yeah, I’d love it,” the old independent “wildcat” oilman said.

But Pickens is not planning to build transmission lines himself, in part because of financing. “If you’re gonna be the czar of all those things you mentioned there, you’ve got to have a hell of a lot more money than Boone Pickens has got,” he said.

 When I attended a talk by Al Gore about global warming in Oslo in March 2007, I noticed that one of the people clapping loudest — about two rows in front of me — was the head of the committee that awards the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ole Danbolt Mjoes also joined in a minute-long standing ovation for the former U.S. vice president. “A very important message,” was all Mjoes would tell me of Gore’s speech afterwards when I went up and asked him if Gore had a chance of winning.

Gore of course went on to share the prize in December with the U.N. Climate Panel. The photo above shows Mjoes (left), handing the award to Gore in Oslo City Hall.

Gore said on Tuesday he will write a new book, “Our Choice”, for release on November 3 to follow up from his bestselling ”An Inconvenient Truth”. For a story, click here.

“It is time for a comprehensive global plan that actually solves the climate crisis. ‘Our Choice’ will answer that call,” Gore said.

Will it sell?

The timing is good because it will be issued a month before a U.N. conference in Copenhagen is meant to come up with a new global treaty to combat climate change.

But in 2007, Gore’s climate crusade stood out partly because former President George W. Bush was so out of step with his industrial allies by refusing caps on greenhouse gas emissions. (The Clinton administration, in which Gore was vice president, signed up for the carbon-capping 1997 Kyoto Protocol but never submitted it to the Senate for ratification). 

Now President Barack Obama favours cuts in emissions and every government in the world is coming up with plans. So will a new book by Gore about solutions to global warming stand out enough to have a big impact?

Mjoes will probably be among the readers of “Our Choice”.

Are you likely to read it?

Home electric bills could rise as much as 30 percent under a U.S. cap-and-trade plan to address carbon dioxide emissions, Moody’s estimates.

The tough part for households is that Moody’s expects industrial users to figure out a way to duck the cost with special rates, meaning residential electric customers will carry “the vast majority” of the cost burden. Check out our story here.

If Moody’s is right, and if the cap-and-trade plan slows global warming, is the price right?

California Senator Dianne Feinstein is fuming over a federal plan to use some Mojave desert lands to develop solar power plants and wind farms.

In a letter to Dept. of the InteriorSecretary Ken Salazar, Feinstein said she planned to introduce legislation that would protect the former railroad lands, thereby preventing the federal government from leasing them to renewable energy project developers. The 600,000 acres in question were acquired by and donated to the government’s Bureau of Land Management between 1999 and 2004 for the purpose of conservation.

“I have been informed that the BLM now considers these areas open for all types of use except mining.  This is unacceptable!” Feinstein wrote in a March 3 letter made public last week.

Feinstein, a supporter of renewable energy, said many of the desert lands being considered for solar and wind development are unsuitable.

“It is critical that these projects move forward on public and private lands well suited for that purpose,” Feinstein wrote.  “Unfortunately, many of the sites now being considered for leases are completely inappropriate and will lead to the wholesale destruction of some of the most pristine areas in the desert.”

Earlier this month, the U.S. Interior Department said it would identify zones on public lands where the department can act rapidly to create large-scale production of solar, wind, geothermal and biomass energy. Building and consuming more clean, renewable energy is a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s energy and economic policies.