Bottled Water Farce Coming to an End?
================================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/13/5817/
Bottled Water Boycotts: Back-to-the-Tap Movement Gains Momentum
by Janet Larsen
From San Francisco to New York to Paris, city governments, high-class restaurants, schools, and religious groups are ditching bottled water in favor of what comes out of the faucet. With people no longer content to pay 1,000 times as much for bottled water, a product no better than water from the tap, a backlash against bottled water is growing.1213 08
The U.S. Conference of Mayors, which represents some 1,100 American cities, discussed at its June 2007 meeting the irony of purchasing bottled water for city employees and for city functions while at the same time touting the quality of municipal water. The group passed a resolution sponsored by Mayors Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, Rocky Anderson of Salt Lake City, and R. T. Rybak of Minneapolis that called for the examination of bottled water’s environmental impact. The resolution noted that with $43 billion a year going to provide clean drinking water in cities across the country, “the United States’ municipal water systems are among the finest in the world.”
While the Mayors Conference fell short of moving to stop taxpayer money from filling the coffers of water bottlers, a growing number of cities are heading in that direction. Los Angeles, which has restricted the purchase of bottled water with city funds since 1987, now has more company. By the end of 2007, purchasing bottled water will be off-limits for San Francisco’s departments and agencies, saving a half-million dollars each year and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. St. Louis is poised to ban bottled water purchases for city employees in early 2008.
At the launch of Corporate Accountability International’s “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign in October, Mayor Anderson of Salt Lake City described the “total absurdity and irresponsibility, both economic and environmental, of purchasing and using bottled water when we have perfectly good and safe municipal sources of tap water.” He urged city government departments and restaurants to stop buying bottled water.
In November, the city council of Chicago, beleaguered by swelling landfills and a stretched budget, placed a landmark tax of 5¢ on every bottle of water sold in the city in order to discourage consumption. That same month, Illinois state agencies were banned from purchasing bottled water with government funds. With 86 percent of used water bottles in the United States ending up as garbage or litter instead of being recycled, switching from the bottle to the tap helps to alleviate the trash burden.
New York City is urging residents to drink tap water, which is naturally filtered in the protected Catskill forest region. In Kentucky, the Louisville water utility hands out free bottles for residents to fill with “Pure Tap.” Dozens of other local governments are talking up tap water and are looking into banning the bottle. (See list of other cities and initiatives.)
Tap water promotional campaigns would have seemed quaint a few decades ago, when water in bottles was a rarity. Now such endeavors are needed to counteract the pervasive marketing that has caused consumers to lose faith in the faucet. In fact, more than a quarter of bottled water is just processed tap water, including top-selling Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani. When Pepsi announced in July that it would clearly label its Aquafina water as from a “public water source,” it no doubt shocked everyone who believed that bottles with labels depicting pristine mountains or glaciers delivered a superior product.
Despite the less-frequent quality testing and sometimes commonplace origin of the product, bottled water consumption has soared. Annual consumption in the United States in 1976 was less than 2 gallons for every man, woman, and child; some 30 years later, Americans on average each now drink about 30 gallons of bottled water a year. (See data.)
All this hydration costs Americans more than $15 billion a year. The price of individual bottles of water ranges up to several dollars a gallon (and more for designer brands), while tap water is delivered directly to homes and offices for less than a penny a gallon. People complaining about $3-a-gallon gasoline may start to wonder why they are paying even more per gallon for bottled water.
With sales growing by 10 percent each year, far faster than any other beverage, bottled water now appears to be the drink of choice for many Americans-they swallow more of it than milk, juice, beer, coffee, or tea. (See data.) While some industry analysts are counting on bottled water to beat out carbonated soft drinks to top the charts in the near future, the burgeoning back-to-the-tap movement may reverse the trend.
In contrast to tap water, which is delivered through an energy-efficient infrastructure, bottled water is an incredibly wasteful product. It is usually packaged in single-serving plastic bottles made with fossil fuels. Just manufacturing the 29 billion plastic bottles used for water in the United States each year requires the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of crude oil.
After being filled, the bottles may travel far. Nearly one quarter of bottled water crosses national borders before reaching consumers, and part of the cachet of certain bottled water brands is their remote origin. Adding in the Pacific Institute’s estimates for the energy used for pumping and processing, transportation, and refrigeration, brings the annual fossil fuel footprint of bottled water consumption in the United States to over 50 million barrels of oil equivalent-enough to run 3 million cars for one year. If everyone drank as much bottled water as Americans do, the world would need the equivalent of more than 1 billion barrels of oil to produce close to 650 billion individual bottles.
Concerns about this high energy use and the associated contribution to climate change, along with worries about waste, are driving many groups back to tap water. The United Church of Canada is one of the religious groups abandoning bottled water for moral reasons. The Berkeley school district no longer offers bottled water. And after watching 3,000 empty bottles pile up each week, the Nashville law firm Bass, Berry, & Sims has stopped stocking bottled water.
Europeans have long led the world in per person consumption of bottled water. Italy tops the list worldwide, with Italians drinking 54 gallons per person in 2006. Italy is closely trailed in per capita consumption by the United Arab Emirates and Mexico, followed by France, Belgium, Germany, and Spain. (See data.)
Yet even in Western Europe the bottle is starting to lose clout. Rome, a city of many historic fountains, is promoting its tap water. Florence’s city council, schools, and other public offices offer only city water. In the United Kingdom, the Treasury and the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have ceased offering bottled water at official functions. Bottled water sales in Scandinavia are projected to fall because of growing environmental concerns.
Even France, home to Evian, is seeing a sales slowdown. During a 2005 tap water promotion campaign in Paris, the water utility handed out refillable glass carafes. Now Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë serves only tap water at official events and encourages others to do the same. Total bottled water sales in France fell in 2004 and 2005, but rebounded in 2006.
Slowing sales may be the wave of the future as the bottle boycott movement picks up speed. With more than 1 billion people around the globe still lacking access to a safe and reliable source of water, the $100 billion the world spends on bottled water every year could certainly be put to better use creating and maintaining safe public water infrastructure everywhere.
Copyright © 2007 Earth Policy Institute
Monday, December 17, 2007
Hummer versus Prius Article
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originally posted at :
http://community.gaiam.com/gaiam/p/Hybrid-vs-Hummer-Which-is-greener.html
Q. I read that hybrid cars are actually less green-friendly than even Hummers, because they have two motors and very environmentally damaging batteries. Is this true?
– Renee Sweany, Indianapolis, Ind.
A. The claim you read about was from “Dust to Dust: The Energy Cost of New Vehicles from Concept to Disposal,” a controversial study by researcher Art Spinella of Oregon-based CNW Marketing. It ranks more than 300 vehicles for their energy use over their entire lifecycles—from raw materials extraction and manufacturing, to driving and burning fuel, to the recycling and disposal of parts. What surprised even Spinella was how the Toyota Prius, the world’s most successful gasoline-electric hybrid car, stacked up against General Motors’ behemoth Hummer, the modern poster child for unsustainable transportation.
“The Hummer over the lifetime of the vehicle ends up being less of a drain of energy on society in general than does the Prius,” wrote Spinella in his report. A key-determining factor was the hybrid battery’s use of nickel extracted from a Sudbury, Ontario mine that has emitted so much sulfur dioxide that acid rain has turned a once healthy nearby forest into a bleak landscape. That mine, however, which supplies nickel for many industrial purposes and not just hybrid batteries, has cut pollution 90 percent since the 1970s.
Another common criticism of hybrids is that their batteries will be a pollution threat once they land in the junkyard. But hybrid advocates insist that the nickel-metal hydride batteries found in the Toyota Prius, Honda Insight and other hybrids contain far fewer pollutants than the lead-acid varieties used in traditional cars. And initial worries that hybrid batteries would need replacement every few years have not borne out; Toyota says the batteries should go for 150,000 miles, which they predict to be the car’s life expectancy.
Spinella pegs the life of the typical Prius bought new today at only 100,000 miles, and contrasts that against a predicted 300,000 for Hummers—meaning that, though Hummers burn more gas and emit more pollutants, they will last much longer. Additionally, Spinella factors in the added production costs of including two separate engines in the Prius—one that runs on gas and the other on electricity.
Most environmentalists challenge Spinella’s conclusions. Jim Kliesch, research analyst with the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), which publishes a yearly rating of the “Greenest and Meanest” cars, says the CNW study contradicts many other studies, including those conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon, Argonne National Labs, the Union of Concerned Scientists and others that place the green-friendliness of the Prius and other hybrids head and shoulders above many other vehicles and certainly the Hummer.
Spinella is “way off the mark,” says Kliesch, and scolds CNW for not having “Dust to Dust” peer-reviewed for accuracy. “If you do some back-of-the-envelope calculations on their claims,” he says, “you’ll find that it takes about $286,500 in energy to produce and assemble a Prius, [which is] absurd.”
Toyota itself also disputes CNW’s findings. In a short rebuttal published in the Washington Post, Toyota vice-president Irv Miller said that the increased energy requirement to build a hybrid with two engines under the hood “is overwhelmingly made up for in the driving stage.”
================================================================================
originally posted at :
http://community.gaiam.com/gaiam/p/Hybrid-vs-Hummer-Which-is-greener.html
Q. I read that hybrid cars are actually less green-friendly than even Hummers, because they have two motors and very environmentally damaging batteries. Is this true?
– Renee Sweany, Indianapolis, Ind.
A. The claim you read about was from “Dust to Dust: The Energy Cost of New Vehicles from Concept to Disposal,” a controversial study by researcher Art Spinella of Oregon-based CNW Marketing. It ranks more than 300 vehicles for their energy use over their entire lifecycles—from raw materials extraction and manufacturing, to driving and burning fuel, to the recycling and disposal of parts. What surprised even Spinella was how the Toyota Prius, the world’s most successful gasoline-electric hybrid car, stacked up against General Motors’ behemoth Hummer, the modern poster child for unsustainable transportation.
“The Hummer over the lifetime of the vehicle ends up being less of a drain of energy on society in general than does the Prius,” wrote Spinella in his report. A key-determining factor was the hybrid battery’s use of nickel extracted from a Sudbury, Ontario mine that has emitted so much sulfur dioxide that acid rain has turned a once healthy nearby forest into a bleak landscape. That mine, however, which supplies nickel for many industrial purposes and not just hybrid batteries, has cut pollution 90 percent since the 1970s.
Another common criticism of hybrids is that their batteries will be a pollution threat once they land in the junkyard. But hybrid advocates insist that the nickel-metal hydride batteries found in the Toyota Prius, Honda Insight and other hybrids contain far fewer pollutants than the lead-acid varieties used in traditional cars. And initial worries that hybrid batteries would need replacement every few years have not borne out; Toyota says the batteries should go for 150,000 miles, which they predict to be the car’s life expectancy.
Spinella pegs the life of the typical Prius bought new today at only 100,000 miles, and contrasts that against a predicted 300,000 for Hummers—meaning that, though Hummers burn more gas and emit more pollutants, they will last much longer. Additionally, Spinella factors in the added production costs of including two separate engines in the Prius—one that runs on gas and the other on electricity.
Most environmentalists challenge Spinella’s conclusions. Jim Kliesch, research analyst with the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), which publishes a yearly rating of the “Greenest and Meanest” cars, says the CNW study contradicts many other studies, including those conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon, Argonne National Labs, the Union of Concerned Scientists and others that place the green-friendliness of the Prius and other hybrids head and shoulders above many other vehicles and certainly the Hummer.
Spinella is “way off the mark,” says Kliesch, and scolds CNW for not having “Dust to Dust” peer-reviewed for accuracy. “If you do some back-of-the-envelope calculations on their claims,” he says, “you’ll find that it takes about $286,500 in energy to produce and assemble a Prius, [which is] absurd.”
Toyota itself also disputes CNW’s findings. In a short rebuttal published in the Washington Post, Toyota vice-president Irv Miller said that the increased energy requirement to build a hybrid with two engines under the hood “is overwhelmingly made up for in the driving stage.”
Monday, November 26, 2007
Sea Turbines - Is the Ocean the Answer?
==============================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/4/204621/501
Is the Ocean the Answer?
by tecampbellhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
After participating in a discussion in Plutonium Page's excellent Front Page diary Non-Treehuggers Criticize the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership I started doing a bit more research on a rarely spoken of renewable energy solution: sea turbines. (see also http://www.guardian.co.uk/renewable/Story/0,2763,892292,00.html)
The more I researched the more I realized the tremendous potential of the oceans as a sustainable energy resource.
There are now numerous competing technologies for using the ocean as a resource, from above water buoys and planes, to below surface turbines like the one mentioned above, to ocean thermal energy conversion, to shoreline devices which harness the motion of waves as they push an air pocket up and down behind a breakwater. A very good overview of the available technologies can be found here. (http://peswiki.com/energy/Directory:Ocean_Wave_Energy)
According to one study, wave power alone could produce as much electricity as coal:
According to a report released in January, 2005, the total wave power along the coastlines of the U.S. is approximately 2,100 terrawatt hours per year, nearly as much as all of the electricity produced by coal and roughly 10 times the total energy produced by all of the country's hydroelectric plants.
Why aren't these systems being implemented in the US? Apparently, the federal government is the issue:
Bedard says that wave energy systems requires smaller investments than offshore wind energy systems because the equipment is much lighter, but the private sector has been wary to invest because the expense for setting up demonstrations is high, and obtaining federal permits can take many years.
Instead, Bedard says the federal government should step in with funding to help the technology succeed.
"Very simply, new energy sources have always been funded by the federal government," Bedard says. However, "(t)he Department of Energy does not have an ocean energy program.".
The Department of Energy had a program for ocean energy, but it was discontinued, according to spokesman Tom Welch.
The UK, South Africa, and Israel all have instituted or are moving forward with programs using ocean energy. But the Energy Department under Bush/Cheney has nuked the program?
This country needs to move forward on all available renewable energy resources. The investment by the federal government in wind power and solar power also has declined proportionally to that of fossil fuel and nuclear production. Clearly these technologies must be part of the solution to fighting global warming and dealing with diminishing resources.
Perhaps Congressional involvement is in order? Apparently it is moving forward, but it may be an uphill fight to get it past the Bush administration. Call or write your Congresspersons/Senators for support.
==============================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/4/204621/501
Is the Ocean the Answer?
by tecampbellhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
After participating in a discussion in Plutonium Page's excellent Front Page diary Non-Treehuggers Criticize the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership I started doing a bit more research on a rarely spoken of renewable energy solution: sea turbines. (see also http://www.guardian.co.uk/renewable/Story/0,2763,892292,00.html)
The more I researched the more I realized the tremendous potential of the oceans as a sustainable energy resource.
There are now numerous competing technologies for using the ocean as a resource, from above water buoys and planes, to below surface turbines like the one mentioned above, to ocean thermal energy conversion, to shoreline devices which harness the motion of waves as they push an air pocket up and down behind a breakwater. A very good overview of the available technologies can be found here. (http://peswiki.com/energy/Directory:Ocean_Wave_Energy)
According to one study, wave power alone could produce as much electricity as coal:
According to a report released in January, 2005, the total wave power along the coastlines of the U.S. is approximately 2,100 terrawatt hours per year, nearly as much as all of the electricity produced by coal and roughly 10 times the total energy produced by all of the country's hydroelectric plants.
Why aren't these systems being implemented in the US? Apparently, the federal government is the issue:
Bedard says that wave energy systems requires smaller investments than offshore wind energy systems because the equipment is much lighter, but the private sector has been wary to invest because the expense for setting up demonstrations is high, and obtaining federal permits can take many years.
Instead, Bedard says the federal government should step in with funding to help the technology succeed.
"Very simply, new energy sources have always been funded by the federal government," Bedard says. However, "(t)he Department of Energy does not have an ocean energy program.".
The Department of Energy had a program for ocean energy, but it was discontinued, according to spokesman Tom Welch.
The UK, South Africa, and Israel all have instituted or are moving forward with programs using ocean energy. But the Energy Department under Bush/Cheney has nuked the program?
This country needs to move forward on all available renewable energy resources. The investment by the federal government in wind power and solar power also has declined proportionally to that of fossil fuel and nuclear production. Clearly these technologies must be part of the solution to fighting global warming and dealing with diminishing resources.
Perhaps Congressional involvement is in order? Apparently it is moving forward, but it may be an uphill fight to get it past the Bush administration. Call or write your Congresspersons/Senators for support.
Problems with E-Waste Recycling
==============================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.computertakeback.com/the_problem/index.cfm
(ORIGINAL SOURCE HAS LINKS TO MORE DETAILS)
The Problem
The problem of outdated, unwanted electronics is huge -- and growing still.
In the US, we scrap about 400 million units per year of consumer electronics, according to recycling industry experts. Discarded computers, monitors, televisions, and other consumer electronics (so called e-waste) are the fastest growing portion of our waste stream -- growing by almost 8% from 2004 to 2005, even though our overall municipal waste stream volume is declining, according to the EPA.
Rapid advances in technology mean that electronic products are becoming obsolete more quickly. This, coupled with explosive sales in consumer electronics, means that more products are being disposed of, finding their way into landfills and incinerators. To make matters worse, the FCC mandated transition to digital television (like HDTV) in February 2009, will only speed up the pace, as consumers will soon be dumping large numbers of old TVs that can't receive the new digital-only signals.
Discarded computers and electronics are toxic hazardous waste.
Monitors and televisions made with tubes (not flat panels) have between 4 and 8 pounds of lead in them. Most of the flat panel monitors and TV's contain less lead, but more mercury, from their mercury lamps. About 40% of the heavy metals, including lead, mercury and cadmium, in landfills come from electronic equipment discards. The health effects of lead are well known; just 1/70th of a teaspoon of mercury can contaminate 20 acres of a lake, making the fish unfit to eat.
Recycling computers isn't like recycling old cardboard.
The EPA estimates that in 2005, the US generated 2.63 million TONS of e-waste. But only 12.5% of that was collected for recycling. The other 87.5% went to landfills and incinerators, despite the fact that hazardous chemicals in them can leach out of landfills into groundwater and streams, or that burning the plastics in electronics can emit dioxin.
These numbers don't include the millions of stockpiled computers, monitors and TV - which are stored in basements, garages, offices, closets and homes awaiting a decision.
Industry Plagued by "Sham" Recycling
And what about the 12% that are supposedly recycled? Some discarded equipment is handled by firms that operate under strict environmental controls and high worker safety protections. But many other firms do not operate under strict controls, or act responsibly. They remove the valuable metals from the equipment and send the remaining scrap to landfills or incinerators. Without adequate protections, workers dismantling discarded electronic equipment are exposed to many chemical compounds with known and suspected negative health effects.
50 to 80% Exported
Considerably more equipment -- one estimate sets the figure as high as 50 to 80% of e-waste that is collected for recycling-- is shipped overseas for dismantling under horrific conditions, poisoning the people, land, air, and water in China, other Asian nations, and possibly Mexico as well.
Prison Recycling
Electronic recycling operations are increasingly active within America's prison systems. Inmate laborers are not automatically afforded the same degree of worker health and safety protections as are people employed on the outside, nor are they paid comparable wages. Moreover, reliance on high tech chain gangs may frustrate development of the free market infrastructure necessary to safely manage our mountains of e-waste. Prisons are also taxpayer-supported institutions.
Corporate practice and public policy have failed to address the problems. At present, the cost of managing discarded computers and electronics falls on taxpayers and local governments. Local governments, private agencies, and individual consumers have been handed the most responsibility for responding to the e-waste crisis, but have the least power to compel manufacturers to do anything about it. Brand owners and manufacturers in the U.S. have dodged their responsibility for management of products at the end of their useful life, while public policy has failed to promote producer take back, clean design, and clean production. Taxpayers are paying dearly for the consequences of manufacturing choices they did not make and over which they have little control.
==============================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.computertakeback.com/the_problem/index.cfm
(ORIGINAL SOURCE HAS LINKS TO MORE DETAILS)
The Problem
The problem of outdated, unwanted electronics is huge -- and growing still.
In the US, we scrap about 400 million units per year of consumer electronics, according to recycling industry experts. Discarded computers, monitors, televisions, and other consumer electronics (so called e-waste) are the fastest growing portion of our waste stream -- growing by almost 8% from 2004 to 2005, even though our overall municipal waste stream volume is declining, according to the EPA.
Rapid advances in technology mean that electronic products are becoming obsolete more quickly. This, coupled with explosive sales in consumer electronics, means that more products are being disposed of, finding their way into landfills and incinerators. To make matters worse, the FCC mandated transition to digital television (like HDTV) in February 2009, will only speed up the pace, as consumers will soon be dumping large numbers of old TVs that can't receive the new digital-only signals.
Discarded computers and electronics are toxic hazardous waste.
Monitors and televisions made with tubes (not flat panels) have between 4 and 8 pounds of lead in them. Most of the flat panel monitors and TV's contain less lead, but more mercury, from their mercury lamps. About 40% of the heavy metals, including lead, mercury and cadmium, in landfills come from electronic equipment discards. The health effects of lead are well known; just 1/70th of a teaspoon of mercury can contaminate 20 acres of a lake, making the fish unfit to eat.
Recycling computers isn't like recycling old cardboard.
The EPA estimates that in 2005, the US generated 2.63 million TONS of e-waste. But only 12.5% of that was collected for recycling. The other 87.5% went to landfills and incinerators, despite the fact that hazardous chemicals in them can leach out of landfills into groundwater and streams, or that burning the plastics in electronics can emit dioxin.
These numbers don't include the millions of stockpiled computers, monitors and TV - which are stored in basements, garages, offices, closets and homes awaiting a decision.
Industry Plagued by "Sham" Recycling
And what about the 12% that are supposedly recycled? Some discarded equipment is handled by firms that operate under strict environmental controls and high worker safety protections. But many other firms do not operate under strict controls, or act responsibly. They remove the valuable metals from the equipment and send the remaining scrap to landfills or incinerators. Without adequate protections, workers dismantling discarded electronic equipment are exposed to many chemical compounds with known and suspected negative health effects.
50 to 80% Exported
Considerably more equipment -- one estimate sets the figure as high as 50 to 80% of e-waste that is collected for recycling-- is shipped overseas for dismantling under horrific conditions, poisoning the people, land, air, and water in China, other Asian nations, and possibly Mexico as well.
Prison Recycling
Electronic recycling operations are increasingly active within America's prison systems. Inmate laborers are not automatically afforded the same degree of worker health and safety protections as are people employed on the outside, nor are they paid comparable wages. Moreover, reliance on high tech chain gangs may frustrate development of the free market infrastructure necessary to safely manage our mountains of e-waste. Prisons are also taxpayer-supported institutions.
Corporate practice and public policy have failed to address the problems. At present, the cost of managing discarded computers and electronics falls on taxpayers and local governments. Local governments, private agencies, and individual consumers have been handed the most responsibility for responding to the e-waste crisis, but have the least power to compel manufacturers to do anything about it. Brand owners and manufacturers in the U.S. have dodged their responsibility for management of products at the end of their useful life, while public policy has failed to promote producer take back, clean design, and clean production. Taxpayers are paying dearly for the consequences of manufacturing choices they did not make and over which they have little control.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Little Green Lies
=======================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_44/b4056001.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily
Little Green Lies
By Ben Elgin
The sweet notion that making a company environmentally friendly can be not just cost-effective but profitable is going up in smoke. Meet the man wielding the torch
podcast
COVER STORY PODCAST
Auden Schendler learned about corporate environmentalism directly from the prophet of the movement. In the late 1990s, Schendler was working as a junior researcher at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank in Aspen led by Amory Lovins, legendary author of the idea that by "going green," companies can increase profits while saving the planet. As Lovins often told Schendler and others at the institute, boosting energy efficiency and reducing harmful emissions constitute not just a free lunch but "a lunch you're paid to eat."
Slide Show >>
Inspired by this marvelous promise, Schendler took a job in 1999 at Aspen Skiing Co., becoming one of the first of a new breed: the in-house "corporate sustainability" advocate. Eight years later, it takes him six hours crisscrossing the Aspen region by car and foot to show a visitor some of the ways he has helped the posh, 800-employee resort blunt its contribution to global warming. Schendler, 37, a tanned and muscular mountain climber, clambers atop a storage shed to point out sleek solar panels on an employee-housing rooftop. He hikes down a stony slope for a view of the resort's miniature power plant, fueled by the rushing waters of a mountain creek. The company features its environmental credentials in its marketing and has decorated its headquarters with green trophies and plaques. Last year Time honored Schendler as a "Climate Crusader" in an article accompanied by a half-page photo of the jut-jawed executive standing amid snow-covered evergreens.
But at the end of this arid late-summer afternoon, Schendler is feeling anything but triumphant. He pulls a company sedan to the side of a dirt road and turns off the motor. "Who are we kidding?" he says, finally. Despite all his exertions, the resort's greenhouse-gas emissions continue to creep up year after year. More vacationers mean larger lodgings burning more power. Warmer winters require tons of additional artificial snow, another energy drain. "I've succeeded in doing a lot of sexy projects yet utterly failed in what I set out to do," Schendler says. "How do you really green your company? It's almost f------ impossible."
Barely a day goes by without a prominent corporation loudly announcing its latest green accomplishments: retailers retrofitting stores to cut energy consumption, utilities developing pristine wind power, major banks investing billions in clean energy. No matter what Al Gore's critics might say, there's no denying that the Nobel Prize winner's message has hit home. With rising consumer anxiety over global warming, businesses want to show that they're part of the solution, says Chris Hunter, a former energy manager at Johnson & Johnson (JNJ ) who works for the environmental consulting firm GreenOrder. "Ten years ago, companies would call up and say I need a digital strategy.' Now, it's I need a green strategy.'"
Environmental stewardship has become a centerpiece of corporate image-crafting. General Electric (GE ) says it is spending nearly all of its multimillion-dollar corporate advertising budget on "Ecomagination," its collection of environmentally friendly products, even though they make up only 8% of the conglomerate's sales. Yahoo! (YHOO ) and Google (GOOG ) have proclaimed that by 2008 their offices and computer centers will become "carbon neutral." Fueling the public relations frenzy is the notion that preserving the climate is better than cost-effective. But Schendler, who only a few years ago considered himself a leading proponent of this theory, now offers a searing refutation of the belief that green corporate practices beget green of the pecuniary variety.
EMPTY BOASTING
Charismatic and well-connected among environmental executives, he has begun saying out loud what some whisper in private: Companies continue to assess most green initiatives with the same return-on-investment analysis they would use with any other capital project. And while some environmental advances pay for themselves in time, returns often aren't as swift or large as competing uses of corporate cash. That leads to green projects quietly withering on the vine. More important, and contrary to the alluring Lovins thesis, many major initiatives simply aren't money-savers. They come with daunting price tags that undercut the conviction that environmental salvation can be had on the cheap.
Schendler explains his confessional mood as the result of cumulative frustration: with foot-dragging colleagues, with himself for compromising, and with the entire green movement frothily sweeping through corporations in America and Europe. So far his candor hasn't cost him his job, though rival resorts have groused about Schendler to his bosses. His colleagues tolerate him with a combination of personal affection and periodic annoyance. "We have a very self-critical culture," says Mike Kaplan, Aspen Skiing's chief executive. "We wouldn't have Auden any other way." The company, Kaplan adds, has led its industry on the environmental front.
Schendler grits his teeth over the failure of modest proposals, such as his plan last year to refurbish one of the resort's oldest lodges to use less energy. He estimated the $100,000 project would have paid for itself in seven years through lower utility bills. But the money went for new ski lifts, snowmobiles, and other conventional purchases. "The availability of capital is not infinite," says Donald Schuster, vice-president for real estate.
Beaten back frequently, the environmental executive concedes that he made a mistake last year when he pushed the resort to make audacious green claims based on the purchase of "renewable energy credits." RECs are a type of financial arrangement that companies increasingly use to justify assertions that they have reduced their net contribution to global warming. But the most commonly used RECs, which are supposed to result in a third party's developing pollution-free power, turn out to be highly dubious (BW—Mar. 26). Aspen Skiing relied on RECs in declaring it had "offset 100% of our electricity use." Schendler now concedes the boast was empty.
Aspen Skiing is far from alone in making suspect claims of green virtue. Setting aside questionable renewable energy credits would wipe out the climate-saving assertions of dozens of major corporations celebrated for their environmental leadership. Office products retailer Staples (SPLS ) has used RECs to turn a 19% spike in emissions since 2001 into what it claims to be a 15% decline, the company's sustainability reports show. PepsiCo (PEP ) and Whole Foods Market have employed the credits to make declarations that every bit of pollution from electricity they use is negated. Johnson & Johnson has proclaimed a 17% reduction in carbon emissions since 1990, based largely on RECs. Without the credits, the pharmaceutical giant has seen a 24% increase, J&J executives acknowledge. "Recent corporate moves by J&J and others are pushing in the right direction, but it is still window dressing compared to the problem at hand," says Hunter, the former J&J manager.
Amid the overheated claims, some corporations have made legitimate environmental gains. Wal-Mart Stores (WMT ) helped spark the market for energy-saving fluorescent bulbs by giving them top billing, even though incandescent bulbs are more profitable. Office Depot overhauled lighting and energy in more than 600 stores, contributing to the company's real 10% decline in releases of heat-trapping gases. Dow Chemical (DOW ) and DuPont (DD ) have significantly trimmed their actual emission levels. But there is still reason to worry about long-term commitment. Dow says it invested $1 billion to help achieve reductions of 19% between 1994 and 2005. Because of technological challenges and costs, however, Dow predicts that additional cuts won't occur until 2025, 18 years from now.
Much corporate environmentalism boils down to misleading statistics and hype. To make real progress, genuine accomplishments will have to be sorted out from feel-good gestures. Schendler no longer views business as capable of the dramatic change he thought possible eight years ago, the sort of change that corporations have grown accustomed to boasting about. His own employer is "a perfect example of why this won't work," he says. "We've had a chance to cherry-pick 50 projects and get them done. But even if every ski company could do what we did, we'd still be nowhere."
`TRENCH WARFARE'
Auden Schendler felt nature's pull at the age of 14, when his uncle took him on a backpacking trip through the rugged Bob Marshall Wilderness in northwest Montana. Growing up in the scruffy New Jersey city of Hackensack, he always felt cramped and out of place. He escaped up the Atlantic coast to Maine, where he majored in environmental studies at Bowdoin College. "I became the person I wanted to be: a mountaineer, an outdoorsman." During this period he scaled Alaska's 20,300-foot Mount McKinley and made several trips up treacherous Mount Rainier in central Washington. On another adventure, he trekked alone on skis for nine days across a wintry Yosemite, sleeping in hand-carved snow caves. "I am at my happiest on a fall morning, in a high-mountain campsite, maybe 12,000 feet," he says. "The air is crisp and chilly, and some coffee is brewing on the campfire. What is better than that?"
After college he moved to Aspen and taught skiing and high school math. The state of Colorado provided his first paid environmental job, weatherizing the trailers of poor families to help them save energy. This involved crawling beneath flimsy homes, where he sometimes encountered the decomposing carcasses of raccoons. "It was gritty work," he says, "the trench warfare of climate change."
In 1997, he took a job at the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) just outside Aspen, which Lovins had co-founded 15 years earlier. Lovins, a physicist by training, was collaborating with his then-wife, L. Hunter Lovins, and businessman Paul Hawken on a book called Natural Capitalism, which became a best-seller. By rethinking their operations and choosing materials wisely, the book argued, companies could produce far less pollution and earn more. "Auden is terrific," Lovins recalls of his "vigorous, smart, and dedicated" former employee, who did research for Natural Capitalism. An obsession with efficiency pervaded the institute: Schendler recalls being chastised for boiling water in the kitchen without a lid on the kettle. He idolized Lovins and went jogging with Hawken. "Instead of going to graduate school, I went to RMI," he says.
He heard in 1999 that Aspen Skiing, a complex of hotels and ski runs popular with wealthy vacationers, was looking for an environmental director. The job seemed a perfect fit. "When I left RMI, I felt that government was powerful but businesses were nimble enough and motivated enough by profit to make changes that we need," he says. "I was indoctrinated." The ski industry, which gorges on energy to create a fantasy of always-plentiful powdered snow and cozy alpine hideaways, offered an ideal place to put these abstractions into practice.
RESISTANCE FROM WITHIN
Aspen Skiing, privately owned by the Crown family of Chicago, which made billions on its stake in military contractor General Dynamics (GD ) and other enterprises, exudes an earnest concern about nature—not least because its business would melt away if temperatures rose just a few degrees. "My kids say: God, Dad, are we going to ski when we're your age?'" says Kaplan, the CEO. "I have to tell them: I don't know.'"
Then 29, Schendler received a genial welcome at Aspen Skiing's wood-paneled headquarters near the county airport. "Auden came with some great athletic credentials," recalls John Norton, then the chief operating officer. "He's a terrific kayaker and skier, and that's a guaranteed ice-breaker in a ski company." But when it came to spending the company's money, things became complicated.
He first took aim at the 90-room Little Nell Hotel. The luxurious lodge nestled at the base of Aspen Mountain devours so much electricity that Schendler assumed it would be simple to find efficiencies. He told its then-manager, Eric Calderon, he wanted to put fluorescent lightbulbs in all guest rooms. The new bulbs would last 10 times as long, use 75% less power, and pay for themselves in only two years. The answer was no. Calderon, who favors dapper blue blazers and chinos, worried that fluorescent light would suggest a waiting-room ambience, jeopardizing the establishment's five-star rating. "There's always a question of balance between environmental concerns and satisfying expectations of the clientele," he says.
Thwarted on guest rooms, Schendler switched to Little Nell's underground garage. Guests never saw it because valets park all cars. For $20,000, Schendler said he could replace energy-gobbling 175-watt incandescent light fixtures with fluorescent bulbs and save $10,000 a year. Unimpressed, Calderon again balked. If he had $20,000 extra, he would rather spend it on items guests would notice: fine Corinthian leather furniture or shiny new bathroom fixtures.
At the company's next senior management meeting, Schendler brought an unusual display to make his case for new garage lights. He had wired a stationary bicycle to show how much less energy fluorescent bulbs consume. Thirty managers watched as Schendler challenged a burly executive to hop on the bike. Sure enough, it took much more sweat to make several incandescent bulbs glow. But Schuster, the real estate chief, didn't believe the new lights would save money. "I was skeptical on the ROI [return on investment] calculations Auden had presented for the retrofit," Schuster recalls. "One of my concerns was that we were committing capital based on theoretical returns without any real opportunity for a look back on the actual returns."
It took Schendler two years to overcome resistance to the garage-light replacement, and then only after he secured a $5,000 grant from a local nonprofit. He acknowledges the strangeness of a corporation with annual revenue of about $200 million, according to industry veterans (the company declines to provide a figure), seeking charity to reduce its electricity use. With a hint of sarcasm, he notes: "This is the sort of radical action that's needed to get people over ROI thresholds."
WHEN BREAK-EVEN WON'T DO
Larger-scale versions of his lightbulb struggle are playing out at numerous other companies. Hailed as an environmental pioneer, FedEx (FDX ) says on its Web site that it is "committed to the use of innovations and technologies to minimize greenhouse gases." With 70,000 ground vehicles and 670 planes burning fuel, the world's largest shipper is a huge producer of heat-trapping gases. Back in 2003, FedEx announced that it would soon begin deploying clean-burning hybrid trucks at a rate of 3,000 a year, eventually sparing the atmosphere 250,000 tons of greenhouse gases annually from diesel-engine vehicles. "This program has the potential to replace the company's 30,000 medium-duty trucks over the next 10 years," FedEx announced at the time. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded the effort a Clean Air Excellence prize in 2004.
Four years later, FedEx has purchased fewer than 100 hybrid trucks, or less than one-third of one percent of its fleet. At $70,000 and up, the hybrids cost at least 75% more than conventional trucks, although fuel savings should pay for the difference over the 10-year lifespan of the vehicles. FedEx, which reported record profits of $2 billion for the fiscal year that ended May 31, decided that breaking even over a decade wasn't the best use of company capital. "We do have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders," says environmental director Mitch Jackson. "We can't subsidize the development of this technology for our competitors."
Schendler faces the return-on-investment challenge on almost every proposal he makes. Earlier this year, he pushed his employer to bankroll a $1 million solar-energy farm on the outskirts of Aspen. Like most electricity consumers in the Rockies, Aspen Skiing's power comes primarily from coal-fired plants, which emit large amounts of carbon dioxide. With federal tax breaks aimed at encouraging clean energy, the football-field-size solar array might generate a paltry 6.5% return, meaning it would pay for itself in 15 years. It barely got approved, says Chief Financial Officer Matt Jones. "We put this together with duct tape and chewing gum."
Schendler's persistence eventually won him admirers even among executives who didn't agree with his entire agenda. "We were trying to run a very complex set of businesses—four ski areas, three hotels, two athletic complexes, and a golf course—but Auden never let us forget that he belonged in the family portrait," says Norton, the former COO and the man Schendler recruited for the bike-powered lightbulb demonstration. "Usually he elbowed in with good humor, but also sometimes with the grim single-mindedness that's the mantle of a true believer."
`I WAS GETTING KILLED'
Schendler, who is married and has two young children, ranks below top managers at Aspen Skiing but attends most of their important meetings. The company zealously guards salary amounts, and he won't reveal his, but a person familiar with Aspen Skiing estimates that he earns about $100,000 a year. Perpetually on the move, Schendler gets his hands into everything, fiddling with a boiler knob and inquiring why a building's lights were on the previous night. He sometimes seems self-conscious about his East Coast, elite-college pedigree, compensating with gestures like helping rewire a lodge's electrical circuits. Teasing follows him everywhere, he says. "I can't tell you how many times I've heard, Hey, Auden, I recycled a can today.'"
One of his proudest victories is the small hydro-power plant the company spent $150,000 in 2003 to install on one of its ski slopes. It's fed two months of the year by a stream that turns into a roaring creek when the snow melts. The other 10 months it's dormant. Inside the small hut containing the plant's steel turbine, he animatedly describes the hurdles overcome during construction: "We hit an underground gas line. I was over budget. I was getting killed." But it got done.
For all his hard work, however, Schendler began to feel a creeping disappointment. Combined, the hydro and solar projects eventually will generate less than 1% of the company's power needs. His colleagues felt they were stretching to accommodate him, but Schendler knew he was coming up short. Seeking to make an industry-leading gesture, he decided in 2005 to explore renewable energy credits.
Introduced at the beginning of the decade, RECs are supposed to marshal market forces behind wind and solar power. Developers of clean energy sell RECs, usually measured in megawatt hours of electricity, to buyers that want to counterbalance their pollution by funding environmentally friendly power. But often the REC trade seems like little more than the buying and selling of bragging rights, rather than incentives that lead to the construction of wind turbines or solar panels.
Schendler knew that RECs and similar financial transactions were swiftly growing in popularity, as more companies sought green credibility and REC brokers proliferated. He persuaded his superiors in 2006 to spend $42,000 a year, a 2% premium on the company's energy costs, to buy RECs at roughly $2 a megawatt hour. According to commonly accepted REC principles, this investment, less than a third of what it took to build the hydro plant, permitted Aspen Skiing to claim that it had offset all of its use of coal-burning energy.
Colleagues heaped praise on Schendler. In a press release, Pat O'Donnell, then the company's CEO, said: "This purchase represents our guiding principles in action." Accolades arrived from the EPA; local newspapers reported the feat. "It was seen as one of my biggest wins ever," Schendler says.
He spent hours thinking about how to describe the purchase of RECs for marketing purposes. The formulation he came up with was that Aspen Skiing had offset "100% of our electricity use with wind energy credits, keeping a million pounds of pollution out of the air." This wording was plastered on ski lifts, advertising brochures, and countless company e-mails.
But even as he helped launch this campaign, Schendler had a queasy feeling. At some level, he suspected the credits weren't causing any new windmills to be built. They weren't literally offsetting anything. He felt torn. "I'm well aware of what is right and what works and what matters," he says. "I'm also aware of brand positioning. Part of my job is to maintain [Aspen Skiing's] leadership." His industry "was going to do this in a big way. One small resort in California already had, and we needed to move. My solace was the educational value of the move. The discussions it would cause would be valuable, even if the RECs were not."
His prediction proved accurate. In the year and a half since his RECs purchase, more than 50 other ski resorts have made similar buys. No fewer than 28 claim to be "100% wind powered." Enticed by inexpensive green claims, companies in other industries have been equally enthusiastic. The top 25 REC purchasers have bought the equivalent of 6 million megawatt hours this year, nearly quadruple the volume from 2005, the EPA says.
Rather than enjoying his role as an REC pioneer, Schendler felt increasingly anxious. In private, he pushed REC brokers for hard evidence that new wind capacity was being built. Their evasiveness gnawed at him. He asked veterans in the renewable energy field whether his marketing message was legitimate. "They laughed at me," he says.
The trouble stems from the basic economics of RECs. Credits purchased at $2 a megawatt hour, the price Aspen Skiing and many other corporations pay, logically can't have much effect. Wind developers receive about $51 per megawatt hour for the electricity they sell to utilities. They get another $20 in federal tax breaks, and the equivalent of up to $20 more in accelerated depreciation of their capital equipment. Even many wind-power developers that stand to profit from RECs concede that producers making $91 a megawatt hour aren't going to expand production for another $2. "At this price, they're not very meaningful for the developer," says John Calaway, chief development officer for U.S. wind power at Babcock & Brown, an investment bank that funds new wind projects. "It doesn't support building something that wouldn't otherwise be built."
BAFFLEMENT AND IRRITATION
Schendler isn't the only environmental executive aware of the problem. In 2006, Johnson & Johnson spent $1 million on credits it says are equivalent to 400,000 tons of emissions. Based on this purchase, the company claimed to have shrunk its contribution to global warming by 17% since 1990. The World Wildlife Fund and other environmental groups have praised J&J, and the EPA gave the company a Green Power award in 2006. Asked about the doubts surrounding RECs, Dennis Canavan, the company's senior director of global energy, concedes that the credits "aren't ideal." They don't really reduce J&J's pollution, he says, and he hopes the company eventually abandons them. Still, he insists that "somewhere along the line, RECs do encourage new projects." He adds: "For the time being, this is the system available to us to offset CO2."
However, some companies employ more direct methods, like building substantial clean energy capacity themselves. In August, Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in Hancock, Mass., turned on a new wind turbine standing 386 feet tall and capable of providing half of the resort's electricity. The project took three years to complete and cost $4 million.
Many larger corporations, however, defend their lower-cost approach. Mark Buckley, vice-president of environmental affairs at Staples, defends RECs, saying they "have clearly sent the right signal to the market." His counterpart at PepsiCo (PEP ), Rob Schasel, agrees, adding, "Absolutely, we're changing what's going into the atmosphere." Whole Foods Market (WFMI ) declined to comment.
This spring Schendler concluded that he had to reverse course, persuade his employer to back away from the renewable energy credits he had endorsed just months earlier, and favor more meaningful green projects. His colleagues reacted with bafflement and irritation. "Auden, you are the most confusing human being I have ever encountered," senior marketing manager Steve Metcalf wrote in an e-mail in April. "You have placed on us the responsibility of getting the environment message out—your message—as a company-wide endeavor. We have responded to your bidding and environmental passion with a gusto on the verge of maniacal. As mentioned, you are confusing to the point of complete exhaustion."
Schendler replied: "Relax, brah. I enormously appreciate all the support.... We're on the edge of this thing, figuring it out. If it were simple and easy, someone would have done it already."
THE CONFLICTED CRITIC
The company will continue to buy RECs through at least 2008, when its current contract expires. Executives say they're reluctant to stop any sooner, because they don't want to appear to be backsliding on the environment when competitors claim to be entirely wind powered. The company still touts its RECs purchases in some marketing material.
Schendler, meanwhile, has become a prominent critic of RECs, a potentially confusing role, since his employer buys them. In an April letter to the Center for Resource Solutions, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that certifies credits, he said that RECs have as much effect on the development of new renewable-energy projects as would trading "rocks, IOUs, or pinecones." That statement, which inevitably whizzed around the Internet, stung some in the ski industry who interpreted it as an attack. Schendler's immediate boss, General Counsel Dave Bellack, has heard from competitors asking that he stifle Schendler. Bellack has declined.
Now simultaneously an insider and an outsider in corporate environmental circles, Schendler relishes the notoriety. "I don't think I'm seen as a team player in this industry," he says, "but I don't care. This issue is so much bigger than just the ski industry." In March he told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources that companies won't make serious progress without regulation of carbon emissions—a departure from his earlier faith that abundant, profitable green projects will transform the way business operate.
His former mentor Lovins says Schendler could find further cost-saving energy efficiencies with more support from his superiors. But this mind-set, Schendler warns, could influence companies to pursue exclusively projects with quick payoffs: "The idea that green is fun, it's easy, and it's profitable is dangerous. This is hard work. It's messy. It's not always profitable. And companies have to get off the mark and start actually doing stuff."
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Little Green Lies
By Ben Elgin
The sweet notion that making a company environmentally friendly can be not just cost-effective but profitable is going up in smoke. Meet the man wielding the torch
podcast
COVER STORY PODCAST
Auden Schendler learned about corporate environmentalism directly from the prophet of the movement. In the late 1990s, Schendler was working as a junior researcher at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank in Aspen led by Amory Lovins, legendary author of the idea that by "going green," companies can increase profits while saving the planet. As Lovins often told Schendler and others at the institute, boosting energy efficiency and reducing harmful emissions constitute not just a free lunch but "a lunch you're paid to eat."
Slide Show >>
Inspired by this marvelous promise, Schendler took a job in 1999 at Aspen Skiing Co., becoming one of the first of a new breed: the in-house "corporate sustainability" advocate. Eight years later, it takes him six hours crisscrossing the Aspen region by car and foot to show a visitor some of the ways he has helped the posh, 800-employee resort blunt its contribution to global warming. Schendler, 37, a tanned and muscular mountain climber, clambers atop a storage shed to point out sleek solar panels on an employee-housing rooftop. He hikes down a stony slope for a view of the resort's miniature power plant, fueled by the rushing waters of a mountain creek. The company features its environmental credentials in its marketing and has decorated its headquarters with green trophies and plaques. Last year Time honored Schendler as a "Climate Crusader" in an article accompanied by a half-page photo of the jut-jawed executive standing amid snow-covered evergreens.
But at the end of this arid late-summer afternoon, Schendler is feeling anything but triumphant. He pulls a company sedan to the side of a dirt road and turns off the motor. "Who are we kidding?" he says, finally. Despite all his exertions, the resort's greenhouse-gas emissions continue to creep up year after year. More vacationers mean larger lodgings burning more power. Warmer winters require tons of additional artificial snow, another energy drain. "I've succeeded in doing a lot of sexy projects yet utterly failed in what I set out to do," Schendler says. "How do you really green your company? It's almost f------ impossible."
Barely a day goes by without a prominent corporation loudly announcing its latest green accomplishments: retailers retrofitting stores to cut energy consumption, utilities developing pristine wind power, major banks investing billions in clean energy. No matter what Al Gore's critics might say, there's no denying that the Nobel Prize winner's message has hit home. With rising consumer anxiety over global warming, businesses want to show that they're part of the solution, says Chris Hunter, a former energy manager at Johnson & Johnson (JNJ ) who works for the environmental consulting firm GreenOrder. "Ten years ago, companies would call up and say I need a digital strategy.' Now, it's I need a green strategy.'"
Environmental stewardship has become a centerpiece of corporate image-crafting. General Electric (GE ) says it is spending nearly all of its multimillion-dollar corporate advertising budget on "Ecomagination," its collection of environmentally friendly products, even though they make up only 8% of the conglomerate's sales. Yahoo! (YHOO ) and Google (GOOG ) have proclaimed that by 2008 their offices and computer centers will become "carbon neutral." Fueling the public relations frenzy is the notion that preserving the climate is better than cost-effective. But Schendler, who only a few years ago considered himself a leading proponent of this theory, now offers a searing refutation of the belief that green corporate practices beget green of the pecuniary variety.
EMPTY BOASTING
Charismatic and well-connected among environmental executives, he has begun saying out loud what some whisper in private: Companies continue to assess most green initiatives with the same return-on-investment analysis they would use with any other capital project. And while some environmental advances pay for themselves in time, returns often aren't as swift or large as competing uses of corporate cash. That leads to green projects quietly withering on the vine. More important, and contrary to the alluring Lovins thesis, many major initiatives simply aren't money-savers. They come with daunting price tags that undercut the conviction that environmental salvation can be had on the cheap.
Schendler explains his confessional mood as the result of cumulative frustration: with foot-dragging colleagues, with himself for compromising, and with the entire green movement frothily sweeping through corporations in America and Europe. So far his candor hasn't cost him his job, though rival resorts have groused about Schendler to his bosses. His colleagues tolerate him with a combination of personal affection and periodic annoyance. "We have a very self-critical culture," says Mike Kaplan, Aspen Skiing's chief executive. "We wouldn't have Auden any other way." The company, Kaplan adds, has led its industry on the environmental front.
Schendler grits his teeth over the failure of modest proposals, such as his plan last year to refurbish one of the resort's oldest lodges to use less energy. He estimated the $100,000 project would have paid for itself in seven years through lower utility bills. But the money went for new ski lifts, snowmobiles, and other conventional purchases. "The availability of capital is not infinite," says Donald Schuster, vice-president for real estate.
Beaten back frequently, the environmental executive concedes that he made a mistake last year when he pushed the resort to make audacious green claims based on the purchase of "renewable energy credits." RECs are a type of financial arrangement that companies increasingly use to justify assertions that they have reduced their net contribution to global warming. But the most commonly used RECs, which are supposed to result in a third party's developing pollution-free power, turn out to be highly dubious (BW—Mar. 26). Aspen Skiing relied on RECs in declaring it had "offset 100% of our electricity use." Schendler now concedes the boast was empty.
Aspen Skiing is far from alone in making suspect claims of green virtue. Setting aside questionable renewable energy credits would wipe out the climate-saving assertions of dozens of major corporations celebrated for their environmental leadership. Office products retailer Staples (SPLS ) has used RECs to turn a 19% spike in emissions since 2001 into what it claims to be a 15% decline, the company's sustainability reports show. PepsiCo (PEP ) and Whole Foods Market have employed the credits to make declarations that every bit of pollution from electricity they use is negated. Johnson & Johnson has proclaimed a 17% reduction in carbon emissions since 1990, based largely on RECs. Without the credits, the pharmaceutical giant has seen a 24% increase, J&J executives acknowledge. "Recent corporate moves by J&J and others are pushing in the right direction, but it is still window dressing compared to the problem at hand," says Hunter, the former J&J manager.
Amid the overheated claims, some corporations have made legitimate environmental gains. Wal-Mart Stores (WMT ) helped spark the market for energy-saving fluorescent bulbs by giving them top billing, even though incandescent bulbs are more profitable. Office Depot overhauled lighting and energy in more than 600 stores, contributing to the company's real 10% decline in releases of heat-trapping gases. Dow Chemical (DOW ) and DuPont (DD ) have significantly trimmed their actual emission levels. But there is still reason to worry about long-term commitment. Dow says it invested $1 billion to help achieve reductions of 19% between 1994 and 2005. Because of technological challenges and costs, however, Dow predicts that additional cuts won't occur until 2025, 18 years from now.
Much corporate environmentalism boils down to misleading statistics and hype. To make real progress, genuine accomplishments will have to be sorted out from feel-good gestures. Schendler no longer views business as capable of the dramatic change he thought possible eight years ago, the sort of change that corporations have grown accustomed to boasting about. His own employer is "a perfect example of why this won't work," he says. "We've had a chance to cherry-pick 50 projects and get them done. But even if every ski company could do what we did, we'd still be nowhere."
`TRENCH WARFARE'
Auden Schendler felt nature's pull at the age of 14, when his uncle took him on a backpacking trip through the rugged Bob Marshall Wilderness in northwest Montana. Growing up in the scruffy New Jersey city of Hackensack, he always felt cramped and out of place. He escaped up the Atlantic coast to Maine, where he majored in environmental studies at Bowdoin College. "I became the person I wanted to be: a mountaineer, an outdoorsman." During this period he scaled Alaska's 20,300-foot Mount McKinley and made several trips up treacherous Mount Rainier in central Washington. On another adventure, he trekked alone on skis for nine days across a wintry Yosemite, sleeping in hand-carved snow caves. "I am at my happiest on a fall morning, in a high-mountain campsite, maybe 12,000 feet," he says. "The air is crisp and chilly, and some coffee is brewing on the campfire. What is better than that?"
After college he moved to Aspen and taught skiing and high school math. The state of Colorado provided his first paid environmental job, weatherizing the trailers of poor families to help them save energy. This involved crawling beneath flimsy homes, where he sometimes encountered the decomposing carcasses of raccoons. "It was gritty work," he says, "the trench warfare of climate change."
In 1997, he took a job at the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) just outside Aspen, which Lovins had co-founded 15 years earlier. Lovins, a physicist by training, was collaborating with his then-wife, L. Hunter Lovins, and businessman Paul Hawken on a book called Natural Capitalism, which became a best-seller. By rethinking their operations and choosing materials wisely, the book argued, companies could produce far less pollution and earn more. "Auden is terrific," Lovins recalls of his "vigorous, smart, and dedicated" former employee, who did research for Natural Capitalism. An obsession with efficiency pervaded the institute: Schendler recalls being chastised for boiling water in the kitchen without a lid on the kettle. He idolized Lovins and went jogging with Hawken. "Instead of going to graduate school, I went to RMI," he says.
He heard in 1999 that Aspen Skiing, a complex of hotels and ski runs popular with wealthy vacationers, was looking for an environmental director. The job seemed a perfect fit. "When I left RMI, I felt that government was powerful but businesses were nimble enough and motivated enough by profit to make changes that we need," he says. "I was indoctrinated." The ski industry, which gorges on energy to create a fantasy of always-plentiful powdered snow and cozy alpine hideaways, offered an ideal place to put these abstractions into practice.
RESISTANCE FROM WITHIN
Aspen Skiing, privately owned by the Crown family of Chicago, which made billions on its stake in military contractor General Dynamics (GD ) and other enterprises, exudes an earnest concern about nature—not least because its business would melt away if temperatures rose just a few degrees. "My kids say: God, Dad, are we going to ski when we're your age?'" says Kaplan, the CEO. "I have to tell them: I don't know.'"
Then 29, Schendler received a genial welcome at Aspen Skiing's wood-paneled headquarters near the county airport. "Auden came with some great athletic credentials," recalls John Norton, then the chief operating officer. "He's a terrific kayaker and skier, and that's a guaranteed ice-breaker in a ski company." But when it came to spending the company's money, things became complicated.
He first took aim at the 90-room Little Nell Hotel. The luxurious lodge nestled at the base of Aspen Mountain devours so much electricity that Schendler assumed it would be simple to find efficiencies. He told its then-manager, Eric Calderon, he wanted to put fluorescent lightbulbs in all guest rooms. The new bulbs would last 10 times as long, use 75% less power, and pay for themselves in only two years. The answer was no. Calderon, who favors dapper blue blazers and chinos, worried that fluorescent light would suggest a waiting-room ambience, jeopardizing the establishment's five-star rating. "There's always a question of balance between environmental concerns and satisfying expectations of the clientele," he says.
Thwarted on guest rooms, Schendler switched to Little Nell's underground garage. Guests never saw it because valets park all cars. For $20,000, Schendler said he could replace energy-gobbling 175-watt incandescent light fixtures with fluorescent bulbs and save $10,000 a year. Unimpressed, Calderon again balked. If he had $20,000 extra, he would rather spend it on items guests would notice: fine Corinthian leather furniture or shiny new bathroom fixtures.
At the company's next senior management meeting, Schendler brought an unusual display to make his case for new garage lights. He had wired a stationary bicycle to show how much less energy fluorescent bulbs consume. Thirty managers watched as Schendler challenged a burly executive to hop on the bike. Sure enough, it took much more sweat to make several incandescent bulbs glow. But Schuster, the real estate chief, didn't believe the new lights would save money. "I was skeptical on the ROI [return on investment] calculations Auden had presented for the retrofit," Schuster recalls. "One of my concerns was that we were committing capital based on theoretical returns without any real opportunity for a look back on the actual returns."
It took Schendler two years to overcome resistance to the garage-light replacement, and then only after he secured a $5,000 grant from a local nonprofit. He acknowledges the strangeness of a corporation with annual revenue of about $200 million, according to industry veterans (the company declines to provide a figure), seeking charity to reduce its electricity use. With a hint of sarcasm, he notes: "This is the sort of radical action that's needed to get people over ROI thresholds."
WHEN BREAK-EVEN WON'T DO
Larger-scale versions of his lightbulb struggle are playing out at numerous other companies. Hailed as an environmental pioneer, FedEx (FDX ) says on its Web site that it is "committed to the use of innovations and technologies to minimize greenhouse gases." With 70,000 ground vehicles and 670 planes burning fuel, the world's largest shipper is a huge producer of heat-trapping gases. Back in 2003, FedEx announced that it would soon begin deploying clean-burning hybrid trucks at a rate of 3,000 a year, eventually sparing the atmosphere 250,000 tons of greenhouse gases annually from diesel-engine vehicles. "This program has the potential to replace the company's 30,000 medium-duty trucks over the next 10 years," FedEx announced at the time. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded the effort a Clean Air Excellence prize in 2004.
Four years later, FedEx has purchased fewer than 100 hybrid trucks, or less than one-third of one percent of its fleet. At $70,000 and up, the hybrids cost at least 75% more than conventional trucks, although fuel savings should pay for the difference over the 10-year lifespan of the vehicles. FedEx, which reported record profits of $2 billion for the fiscal year that ended May 31, decided that breaking even over a decade wasn't the best use of company capital. "We do have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders," says environmental director Mitch Jackson. "We can't subsidize the development of this technology for our competitors."
Schendler faces the return-on-investment challenge on almost every proposal he makes. Earlier this year, he pushed his employer to bankroll a $1 million solar-energy farm on the outskirts of Aspen. Like most electricity consumers in the Rockies, Aspen Skiing's power comes primarily from coal-fired plants, which emit large amounts of carbon dioxide. With federal tax breaks aimed at encouraging clean energy, the football-field-size solar array might generate a paltry 6.5% return, meaning it would pay for itself in 15 years. It barely got approved, says Chief Financial Officer Matt Jones. "We put this together with duct tape and chewing gum."
Schendler's persistence eventually won him admirers even among executives who didn't agree with his entire agenda. "We were trying to run a very complex set of businesses—four ski areas, three hotels, two athletic complexes, and a golf course—but Auden never let us forget that he belonged in the family portrait," says Norton, the former COO and the man Schendler recruited for the bike-powered lightbulb demonstration. "Usually he elbowed in with good humor, but also sometimes with the grim single-mindedness that's the mantle of a true believer."
`I WAS GETTING KILLED'
Schendler, who is married and has two young children, ranks below top managers at Aspen Skiing but attends most of their important meetings. The company zealously guards salary amounts, and he won't reveal his, but a person familiar with Aspen Skiing estimates that he earns about $100,000 a year. Perpetually on the move, Schendler gets his hands into everything, fiddling with a boiler knob and inquiring why a building's lights were on the previous night. He sometimes seems self-conscious about his East Coast, elite-college pedigree, compensating with gestures like helping rewire a lodge's electrical circuits. Teasing follows him everywhere, he says. "I can't tell you how many times I've heard, Hey, Auden, I recycled a can today.'"
One of his proudest victories is the small hydro-power plant the company spent $150,000 in 2003 to install on one of its ski slopes. It's fed two months of the year by a stream that turns into a roaring creek when the snow melts. The other 10 months it's dormant. Inside the small hut containing the plant's steel turbine, he animatedly describes the hurdles overcome during construction: "We hit an underground gas line. I was over budget. I was getting killed." But it got done.
For all his hard work, however, Schendler began to feel a creeping disappointment. Combined, the hydro and solar projects eventually will generate less than 1% of the company's power needs. His colleagues felt they were stretching to accommodate him, but Schendler knew he was coming up short. Seeking to make an industry-leading gesture, he decided in 2005 to explore renewable energy credits.
Introduced at the beginning of the decade, RECs are supposed to marshal market forces behind wind and solar power. Developers of clean energy sell RECs, usually measured in megawatt hours of electricity, to buyers that want to counterbalance their pollution by funding environmentally friendly power. But often the REC trade seems like little more than the buying and selling of bragging rights, rather than incentives that lead to the construction of wind turbines or solar panels.
Schendler knew that RECs and similar financial transactions were swiftly growing in popularity, as more companies sought green credibility and REC brokers proliferated. He persuaded his superiors in 2006 to spend $42,000 a year, a 2% premium on the company's energy costs, to buy RECs at roughly $2 a megawatt hour. According to commonly accepted REC principles, this investment, less than a third of what it took to build the hydro plant, permitted Aspen Skiing to claim that it had offset all of its use of coal-burning energy.
Colleagues heaped praise on Schendler. In a press release, Pat O'Donnell, then the company's CEO, said: "This purchase represents our guiding principles in action." Accolades arrived from the EPA; local newspapers reported the feat. "It was seen as one of my biggest wins ever," Schendler says.
He spent hours thinking about how to describe the purchase of RECs for marketing purposes. The formulation he came up with was that Aspen Skiing had offset "100% of our electricity use with wind energy credits, keeping a million pounds of pollution out of the air." This wording was plastered on ski lifts, advertising brochures, and countless company e-mails.
But even as he helped launch this campaign, Schendler had a queasy feeling. At some level, he suspected the credits weren't causing any new windmills to be built. They weren't literally offsetting anything. He felt torn. "I'm well aware of what is right and what works and what matters," he says. "I'm also aware of brand positioning. Part of my job is to maintain [Aspen Skiing's] leadership." His industry "was going to do this in a big way. One small resort in California already had, and we needed to move. My solace was the educational value of the move. The discussions it would cause would be valuable, even if the RECs were not."
His prediction proved accurate. In the year and a half since his RECs purchase, more than 50 other ski resorts have made similar buys. No fewer than 28 claim to be "100% wind powered." Enticed by inexpensive green claims, companies in other industries have been equally enthusiastic. The top 25 REC purchasers have bought the equivalent of 6 million megawatt hours this year, nearly quadruple the volume from 2005, the EPA says.
Rather than enjoying his role as an REC pioneer, Schendler felt increasingly anxious. In private, he pushed REC brokers for hard evidence that new wind capacity was being built. Their evasiveness gnawed at him. He asked veterans in the renewable energy field whether his marketing message was legitimate. "They laughed at me," he says.
The trouble stems from the basic economics of RECs. Credits purchased at $2 a megawatt hour, the price Aspen Skiing and many other corporations pay, logically can't have much effect. Wind developers receive about $51 per megawatt hour for the electricity they sell to utilities. They get another $20 in federal tax breaks, and the equivalent of up to $20 more in accelerated depreciation of their capital equipment. Even many wind-power developers that stand to profit from RECs concede that producers making $91 a megawatt hour aren't going to expand production for another $2. "At this price, they're not very meaningful for the developer," says John Calaway, chief development officer for U.S. wind power at Babcock & Brown, an investment bank that funds new wind projects. "It doesn't support building something that wouldn't otherwise be built."
BAFFLEMENT AND IRRITATION
Schendler isn't the only environmental executive aware of the problem. In 2006, Johnson & Johnson spent $1 million on credits it says are equivalent to 400,000 tons of emissions. Based on this purchase, the company claimed to have shrunk its contribution to global warming by 17% since 1990. The World Wildlife Fund and other environmental groups have praised J&J, and the EPA gave the company a Green Power award in 2006. Asked about the doubts surrounding RECs, Dennis Canavan, the company's senior director of global energy, concedes that the credits "aren't ideal." They don't really reduce J&J's pollution, he says, and he hopes the company eventually abandons them. Still, he insists that "somewhere along the line, RECs do encourage new projects." He adds: "For the time being, this is the system available to us to offset CO2."
However, some companies employ more direct methods, like building substantial clean energy capacity themselves. In August, Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in Hancock, Mass., turned on a new wind turbine standing 386 feet tall and capable of providing half of the resort's electricity. The project took three years to complete and cost $4 million.
Many larger corporations, however, defend their lower-cost approach. Mark Buckley, vice-president of environmental affairs at Staples, defends RECs, saying they "have clearly sent the right signal to the market." His counterpart at PepsiCo (PEP ), Rob Schasel, agrees, adding, "Absolutely, we're changing what's going into the atmosphere." Whole Foods Market (WFMI ) declined to comment.
This spring Schendler concluded that he had to reverse course, persuade his employer to back away from the renewable energy credits he had endorsed just months earlier, and favor more meaningful green projects. His colleagues reacted with bafflement and irritation. "Auden, you are the most confusing human being I have ever encountered," senior marketing manager Steve Metcalf wrote in an e-mail in April. "You have placed on us the responsibility of getting the environment message out—your message—as a company-wide endeavor. We have responded to your bidding and environmental passion with a gusto on the verge of maniacal. As mentioned, you are confusing to the point of complete exhaustion."
Schendler replied: "Relax, brah. I enormously appreciate all the support.... We're on the edge of this thing, figuring it out. If it were simple and easy, someone would have done it already."
THE CONFLICTED CRITIC
The company will continue to buy RECs through at least 2008, when its current contract expires. Executives say they're reluctant to stop any sooner, because they don't want to appear to be backsliding on the environment when competitors claim to be entirely wind powered. The company still touts its RECs purchases in some marketing material.
Schendler, meanwhile, has become a prominent critic of RECs, a potentially confusing role, since his employer buys them. In an April letter to the Center for Resource Solutions, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that certifies credits, he said that RECs have as much effect on the development of new renewable-energy projects as would trading "rocks, IOUs, or pinecones." That statement, which inevitably whizzed around the Internet, stung some in the ski industry who interpreted it as an attack. Schendler's immediate boss, General Counsel Dave Bellack, has heard from competitors asking that he stifle Schendler. Bellack has declined.
Now simultaneously an insider and an outsider in corporate environmental circles, Schendler relishes the notoriety. "I don't think I'm seen as a team player in this industry," he says, "but I don't care. This issue is so much bigger than just the ski industry." In March he told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources that companies won't make serious progress without regulation of carbon emissions—a departure from his earlier faith that abundant, profitable green projects will transform the way business operate.
His former mentor Lovins says Schendler could find further cost-saving energy efficiencies with more support from his superiors. But this mind-set, Schendler warns, could influence companies to pursue exclusively projects with quick payoffs: "The idea that green is fun, it's easy, and it's profitable is dangerous. This is hard work. It's messy. It's not always profitable. And companies have to get off the mark and start actually doing stuff."
Military Deploys Solar, Wind and Biomass Power
============================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/magazine/15-11/st_nellis
Olive Drab Goes Green: The Military Deploys Solar, Wind and Biomass Power
By Amanda Griscom Little
The Pentagon developed the Internet, created GPS, and supercharged the markets for microchips and jets. Next target: renewable energy. In December, the Department of Defense will complete the 15-megawatt solar installation shown here — the nation's largest — at Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. Operated by a computerized tracking system that follows the sun's path, the sprawling array of 70,000 crystalline silicon solar panels will generate up to 30 percent of the electricity needed by the 12,000-person facility. And solar is only one front in the military's green campaign. One of the world's largest geothermal installations, which turns Earth's heat into electricity via 166 wells bored as far down as 10,000 feet below the surface, can be found at China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station in California. Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba derives up to a quarter of its power from wind turbines — one of about a dozen wind-powered US military bases worldwide. And Dyess Air Force Base in Texas is powered completely by biomass fuel generated from paper industry byproducts, making it one of the largest single-site consumers of green electricity in the world. Charge!
============================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/magazine/15-11/st_nellis
Olive Drab Goes Green: The Military Deploys Solar, Wind and Biomass Power
By Amanda Griscom Little
The Pentagon developed the Internet, created GPS, and supercharged the markets for microchips and jets. Next target: renewable energy. In December, the Department of Defense will complete the 15-megawatt solar installation shown here — the nation's largest — at Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. Operated by a computerized tracking system that follows the sun's path, the sprawling array of 70,000 crystalline silicon solar panels will generate up to 30 percent of the electricity needed by the 12,000-person facility. And solar is only one front in the military's green campaign. One of the world's largest geothermal installations, which turns Earth's heat into electricity via 166 wells bored as far down as 10,000 feet below the surface, can be found at China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station in California. Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba derives up to a quarter of its power from wind turbines — one of about a dozen wind-powered US military bases worldwide. And Dyess Air Force Base in Texas is powered completely by biomass fuel generated from paper industry byproducts, making it one of the largest single-site consumers of green electricity in the world. Charge!
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Trees Make Us Better, Not Just the World
============================================================================
Originally posted at:
http://www.knee1.com/news/mainstory.cfm/326
Trees Sweeten the World
While the nation's parks and recreation spaces are a focal point for Healthy People 2010, Richard Killingsworth, MPH, director of the Active Living by Design and associate research professor in the Department of Health and Behavior and Health Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wants us to think more in terms of our every day lives: how we might get more activity in just by going about our business.
"Unfortunately, physical activity has been engineered out of our daily lives," Killingsworth told the Trust for Public Land. In our haste to pave paradise when we were moving from the farm to town in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we got a bit overzealous.
Kathleen Wolf, PhD, a research social scientist in urban forest environment and behavior at the University of Washington (UW), talked to us about the problem. "With all the concern about obesity and physical activity, the transportation industry is having to rethink how streets are designed because people want to walk to get physical activity," she said. "So the research is starting to come out on how streets with trees on them affect this.
"The walk-ability of a community depends on the density of service nodes in a block, but it seems that the tree factor is part of that as well," said Wolf. "Studies at the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M found that parents who have school-age children are more inclined to encourage the kids to walk to school if the route is lined with trees.
"Also a team of graduate students at UW looked at residential neighborhoods that had grocery stores in walking distance. They compared streets that were tree-lined to those that were not and found that residents perceived that that distance was less if there was greening. So people may be more inclined to walk if they think it's not as far."
Plant a Street Tree?
If you're inspired and want to be part of increasing what's known as the urban canopy, there are a number of national and local organizations that offer help. The National Arbor Day Foundation promotes the planting and maintenance of urban forests at www.arborday.org. Also, most cities and towns have various groups that will assist homeowners and communities interested in adding the joys of the urban canopy to their environs.
============================================================================
Originally posted at:
http://www.knee1.com/news/mainstory.cfm/326
Trees Sweeten the World
While the nation's parks and recreation spaces are a focal point for Healthy People 2010, Richard Killingsworth, MPH, director of the Active Living by Design and associate research professor in the Department of Health and Behavior and Health Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wants us to think more in terms of our every day lives: how we might get more activity in just by going about our business.
"Unfortunately, physical activity has been engineered out of our daily lives," Killingsworth told the Trust for Public Land. In our haste to pave paradise when we were moving from the farm to town in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we got a bit overzealous.
Kathleen Wolf, PhD, a research social scientist in urban forest environment and behavior at the University of Washington (UW), talked to us about the problem. "With all the concern about obesity and physical activity, the transportation industry is having to rethink how streets are designed because people want to walk to get physical activity," she said. "So the research is starting to come out on how streets with trees on them affect this.
"The walk-ability of a community depends on the density of service nodes in a block, but it seems that the tree factor is part of that as well," said Wolf. "Studies at the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M found that parents who have school-age children are more inclined to encourage the kids to walk to school if the route is lined with trees.
"Also a team of graduate students at UW looked at residential neighborhoods that had grocery stores in walking distance. They compared streets that were tree-lined to those that were not and found that residents perceived that that distance was less if there was greening. So people may be more inclined to walk if they think it's not as far."
Plant a Street Tree?
If you're inspired and want to be part of increasing what's known as the urban canopy, there are a number of national and local organizations that offer help. The National Arbor Day Foundation promotes the planting and maintenance of urban forests at www.arborday.org. Also, most cities and towns have various groups that will assist homeowners and communities interested in adding the joys of the urban canopy to their environs.
Why Energy Technology is Off to a Slow Start
============================================================================
originally posted at:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/45098-why-energy-efficiency-is-a-difficult-sell
Seeking Alpha
Why Energy Efficiency Is A Difficult Sell
Monday August 20, 5:32 pm ET
Tom Konrad (AltEnergyStocks) submits: Two months ago, I was talking to an experienced entrepreneur who was exploring business models to provide geothermal heat pumps to households.
At first blush, it seems like a great idea. Geothermal heat pumps often have payback periods of under five years, which translates into internal rates or return in excess of 20% over the 30 year life of the system. With plenty of room for a business to recoup its cost of capital and leave some money on the table for the consumer, it's amazing that there isn't a company in every jurisdiction already active in the market.
In fact, sellers of geothermal heat pumps are few and far between. Google searches for "buy geothermal heat pump" and "buy geoexchange" (an alternate name) drew less than 300,000 hits combined, while searches for "buy furnace" and "buy air conditioner" drew over 2,500,000 hits each. Why is that?
Barriers to Energy Efficiency
When I spoke to the same prospective geothermal heat pump entrepreneur again a month later, he told me he couldn't figure out how to make money on the deal. Nor can I. The economics work best with new construction, but builders have no incentive to save their customers money on their utility bills. In a case study from Delta-Montrose Rural Electric Association [DMEA], a progressive Colorado electric cooperative, they identified purchase cost as the main barrier to adoption. DMEA was able to overcome that by financing the systems for their members (customers) with a payment on their monthly utility bill, something they are in a unique position to do, because they are also the electric utility.
Most utilities will not support energy efficiency programs without regulatory intervention. Since energy efficiency programs reduce the total electricity sold, and electric rates are set by regulators, without decoupling, energy efficiency measures reduce the utilities profits. A utility helping its customers reduce their usage would be like General Motors encouraging people to carpool so they could buy fewer cars.
Utility rate decoupling can fix this disincentive for a utility to work with consumers to reduce their usage, but a mental shift is also necessary for utilities to take on the challenge of working with customers to help them reduce their rates. After all, DMEA is one of a very few rural electric cooperatives with an aggressive energy efficiency program. Despite the fact that the co-ops are owned by their members, and so, unlike investor owned utilities, they should be more interested in their customers' welfare, some investor owned utilities (usually spurred on by regulators -- coops, because of their mutual structure, are mostly unregulated), as wells as municipally owned utilities, which are much more likely to embrace energy efficiency programs.
Eric Hirst of Oak Ridge National Laboratory identifies these barriers to energy efficiency improvements:
Click to Enlarge
Barriers to Improving US Energy Efficiency
For investor owned utilities (IOUs), the problems are mostly those of misplaced incentives, and attitudes. When the state regulator changes the incentives, a well run IOU will quickly change its attitude. IOUs are in business to make money, and so they respond to incentives. For a rural cooperative, I believe the main barriers are attitudes, awareness, limited ability to obtain an process information, and possibly perceived riskiness. Since co-ops are responsible only to their members, and their customers are typically even less educated about the potential for improved efficiency to increase their well being than the utility that serves them, there is no reason for the coop to change its way of doing business. Co-op boards' main incentive is to keep their members happy. Often the simplest way to do that is my keeping them ignorant.
Barriers for Business
The landscape for a traditional business to make money for energy efficiency is different. The main barriers confronting a business, such as an entrepreneur wanting to sell geothermal heat pumps, will be problems of misplaced incentives and the attitudes, awareness, perceptions, and general level of knowledge of their potential consumers.
Continuing with the heat pump example, if an entrepreneur tries to sell the ground source heat pumps to homebuilders, who would be able to install it most cheaply and thus achieve the highest rates of return, he is confronted by misplaced incentives. The builder will not be able pay the future utility costs of the house he is building, and so does not have any incentive to pay extra for a system from which he will not receive the benefit. If the entrepreneur attempts to sell the heat pump to the homeowner, he is confronted with the difficulties of drilling holes for the geoexchange loops next to an existing home, which will greatly increase the price of the system and lower the effective rate of return. If, despite this, the system still has an attractive rate of return, he will still be confronted by the homeowner's limited access to capital or, if he finances the purchase for the customer, there will be the inconvenience and added cost of billing the customer on a regular basis (an inconvenience that DMEA was able to avoid by including the costs in their electric bill.)
There are Opportunities
This is not to say that businesses will never be successful at selling energy efficiency measures to consumers, only that it takes more sophisticated business models and an understanding of the barriers to adoption for the business to succeed. One type of business that has been successfully overcoming these barriers for a long time are performance contracting companies, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. By providing its members with comfortable homes rather than simply electricity, DMEA is in some sense following the performance contracting model.
For investors, it is important to understand that a product has to be more than just financially compelling to be successful in the marketplace. I think the compact fluorescent light bulb [CFL] is an excellent example of how compelling economics are not enough to ensure the adoption of a product. For CFLs, the economics are clear; the energy savings for a 14 watt bulb used just two hours a day amount to around $3 a year, which is more than the current price of a bulb which will last a decade or more. Even in the late 1990s, when such a bulb cost three times as much, the internal rate of return for the investment exceeded 30% per annum, which is comparable to the returns that were captivating investors in tech stocks at the time.
Despite these economics, and countless endorsements from Al Gore, Oprah Winfrey, and the US Department of Energy, CFLs currently only have around 5% of the US market. You'd think that endorsements as powerful as those would have people rushing out to buy them.
While CFLs are not suitable for some applications (outdoors in cold climates, and places where they will experience a lot of vibration such as ceiling fans, which leads to premature breakage), these weaknesses do not account for our slowness to adopt them. Instead, I believe the barriers to adopt them are Hirst's behavioral barriers. For a $2-3 bulb, access to capital is clearly not the problem, but perceived riskiness is definitely part of it: CFL's mercury content has earned them much bad press; (they actually contain less mercury than they save by reducing usage of coal plants), despite the fact that the mercury content is much lower than traditional fluorescent bulbs about which I have never heard a complaint regarding mercury... except from people who don't want to got to the trouble of disposing them properly.
There are often also complaints about light quality, which was indeed a problem with early bulbs. Recent ones, however, uniformly out scored an incandescent bulb in a blind test by Popular Mechanics in several measures of light quality. In my mind, I feel the real motivation for consumer resistance is fear of change. While the returns are gigantic when phrased in terms of a return on investment, in absolute terms the gains from using compact fluorescents are fairly small, just a few dollars a year per bulb. For that amount of money, most people are not willing to go to the mental effort required to change an ingrained way of doing things, and so they latch on to any "reason" not to change they find, and use it to justify it to themselves.
It's cynical, but I believe that your average person would rather waste hundreds of dollars rather than change his habit and learn something new.
Energy Efficiency Success Stories
If I am right that the slow progress of CFLs is really resistance to change, we can use that information to figure out which energy efficient technologies will be most successful: not the ones that have the best economics, but the ones that require nothing of the people who purchase them to do nothing more than provide the cash. Performance contractors and DMEA's heat pump program have been relative successes because they ask so little of customers. It's interesting to note that DMEA includes a "Geoexchange Comfort Club" or social aspect to their program. I wonder how many people joined the program just to get a free dinner.
This, I believe, is the secret behind the runaway success of the Prius. Although Toyota is lambasted for it today, the early ads for the Prius emphasized that, unlike the doomed EV1, it never had to be plugged in. But on the financial side, there is much debate about how much money they save you, if any. When stacked against hybrids, comparable diesels get similar mileage for lower upfront cost,, and for serious global warming fanatics like myself, they have the advantage of being able to burn biodiesel without any modification. Yet people look at me strangely when I tell them I have a Jeep Liberty diesel, but they're impressed that I bought a Prius in 2001.
Another example of convenience trumping cents is solar power. Solar domestic hot water [SHW] has been around since the '70s, and the financial rate of return varies from 5% to 20%, depending on a wide variety of factors. Solar Photovoltaics [PV], on the other hand, has a financial return of between 1 and 5%, depending mainly on rebates (these are all my calculations; your results may vary, but there is a strong consensus that SHW is a better financial bet than PV.) Yet again, PV is popular, and SHW is a "hidden gem" pushed by earnest environmentalists.
Yet people are used to complex electronics in their lives, but the plumbing is something they only see when there is a leak and they have to call a plumber. So while PV is much higher tech than SHW, electronics are something people are used to, while plumbing (NYSE: SHW - News) is something they only associate with inconvenience.
The Bottom Line: It's Not the Bottom Line
When it comes to selling energy efficiency to consumers, businesses need to remember that the financial and environmental outcomes are only a tiny part of most consumers decisions. Recent evolutionary psychology research implies that people do good deeds as a strategy to attract mates, and so they want to be seen doing those good deeds.
Businesses that realize that the good energy efficiency does for the environment is a better selling point will succeed where businesses peddling economics will fail. Why was the Accord Hybrid discontinued and Hybrid SUVs are struggling while Prius sales hit records? I believe it's because they are not conspicuously green. People want to be seen to be green a lot more than they want to save a few dollars on gas. The Japanese who buy fake solar panels don't ask about the payback period. Many PV installers have already realized this, and they have learned to counter arguments about the economics of PV by asking, "What is the payback period of granite countertops?"
This lesson can also be turned on its head. By making energy efficiency an item for display, just like a Terrapass window decal, energy efficiency can become something people aspire to. When our utility bills are on the internet for everyone to see, that's when we'll see geothermal heat pumps and Built Green and Energy Star homes take off. Even infrared images of homes posted on Google Street View might do the trick. Efficiency needs to be conspicuous to sell well.
============================================================================
originally posted at:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/45098-why-energy-efficiency-is-a-difficult-sell
Seeking Alpha
Why Energy Efficiency Is A Difficult Sell
Monday August 20, 5:32 pm ET
Tom Konrad (AltEnergyStocks) submits: Two months ago, I was talking to an experienced entrepreneur who was exploring business models to provide geothermal heat pumps to households.
At first blush, it seems like a great idea. Geothermal heat pumps often have payback periods of under five years, which translates into internal rates or return in excess of 20% over the 30 year life of the system. With plenty of room for a business to recoup its cost of capital and leave some money on the table for the consumer, it's amazing that there isn't a company in every jurisdiction already active in the market.
In fact, sellers of geothermal heat pumps are few and far between. Google searches for "buy geothermal heat pump" and "buy geoexchange" (an alternate name) drew less than 300,000 hits combined, while searches for "buy furnace" and "buy air conditioner" drew over 2,500,000 hits each. Why is that?
Barriers to Energy Efficiency
When I spoke to the same prospective geothermal heat pump entrepreneur again a month later, he told me he couldn't figure out how to make money on the deal. Nor can I. The economics work best with new construction, but builders have no incentive to save their customers money on their utility bills. In a case study from Delta-Montrose Rural Electric Association [DMEA], a progressive Colorado electric cooperative, they identified purchase cost as the main barrier to adoption. DMEA was able to overcome that by financing the systems for their members (customers) with a payment on their monthly utility bill, something they are in a unique position to do, because they are also the electric utility.
Most utilities will not support energy efficiency programs without regulatory intervention. Since energy efficiency programs reduce the total electricity sold, and electric rates are set by regulators, without decoupling, energy efficiency measures reduce the utilities profits. A utility helping its customers reduce their usage would be like General Motors encouraging people to carpool so they could buy fewer cars.
Utility rate decoupling can fix this disincentive for a utility to work with consumers to reduce their usage, but a mental shift is also necessary for utilities to take on the challenge of working with customers to help them reduce their rates. After all, DMEA is one of a very few rural electric cooperatives with an aggressive energy efficiency program. Despite the fact that the co-ops are owned by their members, and so, unlike investor owned utilities, they should be more interested in their customers' welfare, some investor owned utilities (usually spurred on by regulators -- coops, because of their mutual structure, are mostly unregulated), as wells as municipally owned utilities, which are much more likely to embrace energy efficiency programs.
Eric Hirst of Oak Ridge National Laboratory identifies these barriers to energy efficiency improvements:
Click to Enlarge
Barriers to Improving US Energy Efficiency
For investor owned utilities (IOUs), the problems are mostly those of misplaced incentives, and attitudes. When the state regulator changes the incentives, a well run IOU will quickly change its attitude. IOUs are in business to make money, and so they respond to incentives. For a rural cooperative, I believe the main barriers are attitudes, awareness, limited ability to obtain an process information, and possibly perceived riskiness. Since co-ops are responsible only to their members, and their customers are typically even less educated about the potential for improved efficiency to increase their well being than the utility that serves them, there is no reason for the coop to change its way of doing business. Co-op boards' main incentive is to keep their members happy. Often the simplest way to do that is my keeping them ignorant.
Barriers for Business
The landscape for a traditional business to make money for energy efficiency is different. The main barriers confronting a business, such as an entrepreneur wanting to sell geothermal heat pumps, will be problems of misplaced incentives and the attitudes, awareness, perceptions, and general level of knowledge of their potential consumers.
Continuing with the heat pump example, if an entrepreneur tries to sell the ground source heat pumps to homebuilders, who would be able to install it most cheaply and thus achieve the highest rates of return, he is confronted by misplaced incentives. The builder will not be able pay the future utility costs of the house he is building, and so does not have any incentive to pay extra for a system from which he will not receive the benefit. If the entrepreneur attempts to sell the heat pump to the homeowner, he is confronted with the difficulties of drilling holes for the geoexchange loops next to an existing home, which will greatly increase the price of the system and lower the effective rate of return. If, despite this, the system still has an attractive rate of return, he will still be confronted by the homeowner's limited access to capital or, if he finances the purchase for the customer, there will be the inconvenience and added cost of billing the customer on a regular basis (an inconvenience that DMEA was able to avoid by including the costs in their electric bill.)
There are Opportunities
This is not to say that businesses will never be successful at selling energy efficiency measures to consumers, only that it takes more sophisticated business models and an understanding of the barriers to adoption for the business to succeed. One type of business that has been successfully overcoming these barriers for a long time are performance contracting companies, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. By providing its members with comfortable homes rather than simply electricity, DMEA is in some sense following the performance contracting model.
For investors, it is important to understand that a product has to be more than just financially compelling to be successful in the marketplace. I think the compact fluorescent light bulb [CFL] is an excellent example of how compelling economics are not enough to ensure the adoption of a product. For CFLs, the economics are clear; the energy savings for a 14 watt bulb used just two hours a day amount to around $3 a year, which is more than the current price of a bulb which will last a decade or more. Even in the late 1990s, when such a bulb cost three times as much, the internal rate of return for the investment exceeded 30% per annum, which is comparable to the returns that were captivating investors in tech stocks at the time.
Despite these economics, and countless endorsements from Al Gore, Oprah Winfrey, and the US Department of Energy, CFLs currently only have around 5% of the US market. You'd think that endorsements as powerful as those would have people rushing out to buy them.
While CFLs are not suitable for some applications (outdoors in cold climates, and places where they will experience a lot of vibration such as ceiling fans, which leads to premature breakage), these weaknesses do not account for our slowness to adopt them. Instead, I believe the barriers to adopt them are Hirst's behavioral barriers. For a $2-3 bulb, access to capital is clearly not the problem, but perceived riskiness is definitely part of it: CFL's mercury content has earned them much bad press; (they actually contain less mercury than they save by reducing usage of coal plants), despite the fact that the mercury content is much lower than traditional fluorescent bulbs about which I have never heard a complaint regarding mercury... except from people who don't want to got to the trouble of disposing them properly.
There are often also complaints about light quality, which was indeed a problem with early bulbs. Recent ones, however, uniformly out scored an incandescent bulb in a blind test by Popular Mechanics in several measures of light quality. In my mind, I feel the real motivation for consumer resistance is fear of change. While the returns are gigantic when phrased in terms of a return on investment, in absolute terms the gains from using compact fluorescents are fairly small, just a few dollars a year per bulb. For that amount of money, most people are not willing to go to the mental effort required to change an ingrained way of doing things, and so they latch on to any "reason" not to change they find, and use it to justify it to themselves.
It's cynical, but I believe that your average person would rather waste hundreds of dollars rather than change his habit and learn something new.
Energy Efficiency Success Stories
If I am right that the slow progress of CFLs is really resistance to change, we can use that information to figure out which energy efficient technologies will be most successful: not the ones that have the best economics, but the ones that require nothing of the people who purchase them to do nothing more than provide the cash. Performance contractors and DMEA's heat pump program have been relative successes because they ask so little of customers. It's interesting to note that DMEA includes a "Geoexchange Comfort Club" or social aspect to their program. I wonder how many people joined the program just to get a free dinner.
This, I believe, is the secret behind the runaway success of the Prius. Although Toyota is lambasted for it today, the early ads for the Prius emphasized that, unlike the doomed EV1, it never had to be plugged in. But on the financial side, there is much debate about how much money they save you, if any. When stacked against hybrids, comparable diesels get similar mileage for lower upfront cost,, and for serious global warming fanatics like myself, they have the advantage of being able to burn biodiesel without any modification. Yet people look at me strangely when I tell them I have a Jeep Liberty diesel, but they're impressed that I bought a Prius in 2001.
Another example of convenience trumping cents is solar power. Solar domestic hot water [SHW] has been around since the '70s, and the financial rate of return varies from 5% to 20%, depending on a wide variety of factors. Solar Photovoltaics [PV], on the other hand, has a financial return of between 1 and 5%, depending mainly on rebates (these are all my calculations; your results may vary, but there is a strong consensus that SHW is a better financial bet than PV.) Yet again, PV is popular, and SHW is a "hidden gem" pushed by earnest environmentalists.
Yet people are used to complex electronics in their lives, but the plumbing is something they only see when there is a leak and they have to call a plumber. So while PV is much higher tech than SHW, electronics are something people are used to, while plumbing (NYSE: SHW - News) is something they only associate with inconvenience.
The Bottom Line: It's Not the Bottom Line
When it comes to selling energy efficiency to consumers, businesses need to remember that the financial and environmental outcomes are only a tiny part of most consumers decisions. Recent evolutionary psychology research implies that people do good deeds as a strategy to attract mates, and so they want to be seen doing those good deeds.
Businesses that realize that the good energy efficiency does for the environment is a better selling point will succeed where businesses peddling economics will fail. Why was the Accord Hybrid discontinued and Hybrid SUVs are struggling while Prius sales hit records? I believe it's because they are not conspicuously green. People want to be seen to be green a lot more than they want to save a few dollars on gas. The Japanese who buy fake solar panels don't ask about the payback period. Many PV installers have already realized this, and they have learned to counter arguments about the economics of PV by asking, "What is the payback period of granite countertops?"
This lesson can also be turned on its head. By making energy efficiency an item for display, just like a Terrapass window decal, energy efficiency can become something people aspire to. When our utility bills are on the internet for everyone to see, that's when we'll see geothermal heat pumps and Built Green and Energy Star homes take off. Even infrared images of homes posted on Google Street View might do the trick. Efficiency needs to be conspicuous to sell well.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Chicago sewer treatment plant fosters fish
===================================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.chicagowildernessmag.org/issues/fall2007/sponges.html
New Life in East Chicago
By Craig Vetter
In 1989, Peter Baranyai began seeing strange things in the wastewater treatment plant he runs. Today, his plant not only cleans water — it raises wild fish.
Thirty-five years ago, Peter Baranyai took what he thought would be a temporary job at the East Chicago Sanitary District Wastewater Treatment Plant. He’d grown up in East Chicago, Indiana, a swath of nine square miles on Lake Michigan’s southern shore that, to this day, is dominated by sprawling rust-colored steel mills, oil refineries, and the tank farms that surround them.
At age 58, Baranyai, whose father worked in the mills, now runs the wastewater plant. A tall, thin, soft-spoken man with receding gray hair, he knows every pipe, pump, and tank in this state-of-the-art facility. His job is to ensure that 15 million gallons a day of wastewater from East Chicago residents and industries get clean enough to be returned, through a long, straight channel, into the Grand Calumet River. When his plant is done with it, the water is “very clean, top notch, class A,” according to Roger Klocek, senior biologist for the Shedd Aquarium.
But Baranyai isn’t what you might expect a wastewater plant manager to be, some strict pragmatist devoted to absolute sterility and shining, clean surfaces. When nature invited itself into his plant, not only did he let it be, he let it change his whole philosophy about what it means to run the place. By his own admission, he now thinks of himself as a naturalist first and a wastewater plant manager second.
Sponges and salmon video
Flash Player 8 or greater is required for this video. Download Flash Player for free.
Baranyai’s shift began in 1989, a year and a half after the East Chicago plant had changed its final disinfection process. The water district had invested $19 million to overhaul the plant, to comply with federal Clean Water Act standards. Instead of adding chlorine to kill bacteria, which it had done for years, the plant started using long racks of powerful ultraviolet lights
“I was touring some grade school kids around the plant that October,” he says, “and we were looking into the effluent channel, where the water had drastically changed from a murky beige to crystal clear since the new treatment plant and the ultraviolet system had been in use. I looked down, and saw this 30-inch fish, and I was amazed. After it died, we had it identified. It was a Chinook salmon.”
It would be another two years before the full surprise of what was happening would hit Baranyai and the biologists he invited to investigate.
“I was looking into this disinfection contact chamber right here,” Baranyai said, standing above three rectangular tanks that hold the UV lights, the last chamber before the water reaches the channel. “I noticed this weird material among the aquatic plants on the walls and floors of the chambers.”
He called Tim Early of Purdue University’s Aquatic Resource Center, who braved the final disinfection chamber wearing air-tight scuba gear. He identified thousands of freshwater lake sponges, Ephydatia muelleri, in colonies 10 to 20 times larger than those normally found in Lake Michigan.
“Nobody thought the water could be clean enough to support the sponges,” says Baranyai, “but the walls were just encrusted.”
Watching the salmon dart and ferry
Watching the salmon dart and ferry, one can forget that this is
an urban effluent channel, not a country stream.
Photo: Peter Baranyaii
The sponges — actually colonies of small, primitive animals — were flourishing on the microscopic dead bodies of the billions of bacteria being sterilized by the UV lights and washing down the channel. A sponge the size of a little finger can pass 30 liters of water a day through its body, pulling organic material and certain metals from the water and extracting the chemicals it needs for growth.
On his dive, Early, who has since passed away, investigated the tank walls, which by this time approximated a coral reef, complete with clouds of small fish two to three inches long. These fingerlings were more Chinook salmon, an introduced species, one of the most highly prized game fish in the Great Lakes.
Salmon, of course, return to their birthplace to spawn. Since the fingerlings were genetically related and the same age, the biologists concluded that they had been born to parents that had migrated 6.2 miles from Lake Michigan, up the effluent stream, and into a 200-foot exit pipe against a swift flow. The salmon then had to jump a four-foot waterfall into the contact chamber, which became the nursery for their young.
“They’ve been back every October and November since then,” Baranyai told me with a quiet pride as we stood on the verdant edge of the effluent stream. “Last year we had over 200 salmon.” No one knows for sure why the salmon come here. Speculation is that smell and water temperature attract them, along with their tendency to search out the smallest part of a stream in order to protect their spawn from predators.
Some 18 years since the switch to UV, the now annual salmon run is only part of the story. Perhaps a more important sign of the river’s road to recovery is the appearance, according to surveys by the Aquatic Resource Center and Klocek, of white sucker, smallmouth bass, pumpkinseed, and rock bass, all native Illinois fish. Especially promising is the spawning of state-threatened river redhorse, which requires clear, clean water for survival. Recent surveys have also found daphnia, a small, shrimplike crustacean dependent on good water quality, in the water filters for seven months in a row. It isn’t known whether the daphnia’s presence is the result of the sponge colonies.
Sponges help keep things clean
Despite their looks, lake sponges actually help keep things
clean by pulling organic materials and metals from the water.
Photo: Peter Baranyai
The surrounding land has changed too. “These banks were just an arid stretch with nothing growing before we stopped using the chlorine and went to ultraviolet,” says Baranyai. “Now we have 95 species of birds out here, deer, snapping turtles, a colony of beavers, even coyotes. This ecosystem was unimaginable when I was a kid. To me, it means that the Clean Air and Water Acts have brought government, industry, and environmentalists together in a way that is really beginning to show some results. It’s great that our plant is a part of that.”
Forty feet wide and 700 feet long, the effluent channel today looks more like a small stream. Even the occasional exposed wall of concrete appears more like a rock cliff than the industrial structure it is. It’s easy to see how this plant has changed Baranyai’s perspective on what and where nature can be. These days he’s regularly out photographing and observing the animals. He’s excited to play such a large role in this natural process and believes it can be replicated in other treatment plants.
“Do you give the fish names?” I ask Baranyai.
He smiles. “No,” he says, “but I am very protective of the fish. Not long ago we had this government inspector out here, an avid fisherman, who asked me if he could go fishing in the effluent channel. I told him absolutely not.”
===================================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.chicagowildernessmag.org/issues/fall2007/sponges.html
New Life in East Chicago
By Craig Vetter
In 1989, Peter Baranyai began seeing strange things in the wastewater treatment plant he runs. Today, his plant not only cleans water — it raises wild fish.
Thirty-five years ago, Peter Baranyai took what he thought would be a temporary job at the East Chicago Sanitary District Wastewater Treatment Plant. He’d grown up in East Chicago, Indiana, a swath of nine square miles on Lake Michigan’s southern shore that, to this day, is dominated by sprawling rust-colored steel mills, oil refineries, and the tank farms that surround them.
At age 58, Baranyai, whose father worked in the mills, now runs the wastewater plant. A tall, thin, soft-spoken man with receding gray hair, he knows every pipe, pump, and tank in this state-of-the-art facility. His job is to ensure that 15 million gallons a day of wastewater from East Chicago residents and industries get clean enough to be returned, through a long, straight channel, into the Grand Calumet River. When his plant is done with it, the water is “very clean, top notch, class A,” according to Roger Klocek, senior biologist for the Shedd Aquarium.
But Baranyai isn’t what you might expect a wastewater plant manager to be, some strict pragmatist devoted to absolute sterility and shining, clean surfaces. When nature invited itself into his plant, not only did he let it be, he let it change his whole philosophy about what it means to run the place. By his own admission, he now thinks of himself as a naturalist first and a wastewater plant manager second.
Sponges and salmon video
Flash Player 8 or greater is required for this video. Download Flash Player for free.
Baranyai’s shift began in 1989, a year and a half after the East Chicago plant had changed its final disinfection process. The water district had invested $19 million to overhaul the plant, to comply with federal Clean Water Act standards. Instead of adding chlorine to kill bacteria, which it had done for years, the plant started using long racks of powerful ultraviolet lights
“I was touring some grade school kids around the plant that October,” he says, “and we were looking into the effluent channel, where the water had drastically changed from a murky beige to crystal clear since the new treatment plant and the ultraviolet system had been in use. I looked down, and saw this 30-inch fish, and I was amazed. After it died, we had it identified. It was a Chinook salmon.”
It would be another two years before the full surprise of what was happening would hit Baranyai and the biologists he invited to investigate.
“I was looking into this disinfection contact chamber right here,” Baranyai said, standing above three rectangular tanks that hold the UV lights, the last chamber before the water reaches the channel. “I noticed this weird material among the aquatic plants on the walls and floors of the chambers.”
He called Tim Early of Purdue University’s Aquatic Resource Center, who braved the final disinfection chamber wearing air-tight scuba gear. He identified thousands of freshwater lake sponges, Ephydatia muelleri, in colonies 10 to 20 times larger than those normally found in Lake Michigan.
“Nobody thought the water could be clean enough to support the sponges,” says Baranyai, “but the walls were just encrusted.”
Watching the salmon dart and ferry
Watching the salmon dart and ferry, one can forget that this is
an urban effluent channel, not a country stream.
Photo: Peter Baranyaii
The sponges — actually colonies of small, primitive animals — were flourishing on the microscopic dead bodies of the billions of bacteria being sterilized by the UV lights and washing down the channel. A sponge the size of a little finger can pass 30 liters of water a day through its body, pulling organic material and certain metals from the water and extracting the chemicals it needs for growth.
On his dive, Early, who has since passed away, investigated the tank walls, which by this time approximated a coral reef, complete with clouds of small fish two to three inches long. These fingerlings were more Chinook salmon, an introduced species, one of the most highly prized game fish in the Great Lakes.
Salmon, of course, return to their birthplace to spawn. Since the fingerlings were genetically related and the same age, the biologists concluded that they had been born to parents that had migrated 6.2 miles from Lake Michigan, up the effluent stream, and into a 200-foot exit pipe against a swift flow. The salmon then had to jump a four-foot waterfall into the contact chamber, which became the nursery for their young.
“They’ve been back every October and November since then,” Baranyai told me with a quiet pride as we stood on the verdant edge of the effluent stream. “Last year we had over 200 salmon.” No one knows for sure why the salmon come here. Speculation is that smell and water temperature attract them, along with their tendency to search out the smallest part of a stream in order to protect their spawn from predators.
Some 18 years since the switch to UV, the now annual salmon run is only part of the story. Perhaps a more important sign of the river’s road to recovery is the appearance, according to surveys by the Aquatic Resource Center and Klocek, of white sucker, smallmouth bass, pumpkinseed, and rock bass, all native Illinois fish. Especially promising is the spawning of state-threatened river redhorse, which requires clear, clean water for survival. Recent surveys have also found daphnia, a small, shrimplike crustacean dependent on good water quality, in the water filters for seven months in a row. It isn’t known whether the daphnia’s presence is the result of the sponge colonies.
Sponges help keep things clean
Despite their looks, lake sponges actually help keep things
clean by pulling organic materials and metals from the water.
Photo: Peter Baranyai
The surrounding land has changed too. “These banks were just an arid stretch with nothing growing before we stopped using the chlorine and went to ultraviolet,” says Baranyai. “Now we have 95 species of birds out here, deer, snapping turtles, a colony of beavers, even coyotes. This ecosystem was unimaginable when I was a kid. To me, it means that the Clean Air and Water Acts have brought government, industry, and environmentalists together in a way that is really beginning to show some results. It’s great that our plant is a part of that.”
Forty feet wide and 700 feet long, the effluent channel today looks more like a small stream. Even the occasional exposed wall of concrete appears more like a rock cliff than the industrial structure it is. It’s easy to see how this plant has changed Baranyai’s perspective on what and where nature can be. These days he’s regularly out photographing and observing the animals. He’s excited to play such a large role in this natural process and believes it can be replicated in other treatment plants.
“Do you give the fish names?” I ask Baranyai.
He smiles. “No,” he says, “but I am very protective of the fish. Not long ago we had this government inspector out here, an avid fisherman, who asked me if he could go fishing in the effluent channel. I told him absolutely not.”
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Bio-Hope, Bio Hype
==========================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200709/bio.asp
Bio-Hope, Bio-Hype
A users' guide to biofuels
By Frances Cerra Whittelsey
September/October 2007
Chart: Comparing Biofuels
Editor's note: The chart in Sierra's print version stated that vehicles using B99/100 biodiesel require special modifications. Unless the car is using 100 percent waste vegetable oil, the only modification necessary is to replace natural rubber fuel hoses on older vehicles. Modern diesel vehicles can use biodiesel with no modifications. The chart has been corrected.
IN OUR BEAUTIFUL BIOFUEL FUTURE, cars and trucks are powered by wood chips, prairie grass, wheat straw, fast-food grease, garbage, and even algae--whichever material is most plentiful locally and least damaging environmentally. With cars getting 40 miles a gallon or better, greenhouse-gas emissions plummet. The biofuel revolution sparks an economic boom by keeping U.S. dollars at home instead of sending them to Middle Eastern sheikhs.
Biofuels can be made from nearly any organic material. By essentially recycling carbon from living things (as opposed to the ancient biomass in coal and petroleum), biofuels help fight global warming. But some could also add to our environmental problems: In an equally possible but less rosy future, governments and agribusiness clear rainforests and wetlands for vast plantations of biofuel crops like oil palms. With arable land increasingly devoted to fuel production, food prices push higher. The roads clog with biofuel SUVs that still get lousy mileage. Global warming slows insignificantly, if at all.
Which future is ours? It depends on choices being made today. At present, for example, corn is the source of 95 percent of the United States' ethanol. Although politically popular in farm states, corn is a problematic source of fuel: It requires good land and petroleum-intensive cultivation and fertilization, and it can also readily feed both humans and livestock. (Food prices are already increasing because of competition with ethanol.) If the mill processing the corn is powered by coal, ethanol produces more net greenhouse gases than gasoline does. "It's easier to do bad than good in this area," warns Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. "But there's also potential to make the production of fuel more decentralized and more democratic." The chart below lays out the pros and cons of the major biofuels; now it's up to us to get the right mix.
Virtue Rewarded
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has boosted bioenergy by ordering that the carbon content of all fuels sold in the state be cut by 10 percent by 2020. Each fuel will get a life-cycle carbon analysis, showing how much greenhouse gas it emits from origin to tailpipe. Fuel suppliers will need to blend ingredients to meet their reduction targets, which should increase demand for cleaner options like cellulosic ethanol.
The Urge to Splurge
Putting a dent in global warming requires conservation as well as biofuels. A 3 percent increase in fuel-economy standards for vehicles, for example, would save more gas than the entire 2006 production of corn ethanol. Sadly, we've been driving in reverse: For the past five years, U.S. gasoline consumption has increased by 1.4 percent annually, and diesel by 3.6 percent.
Conserving Critters Too
The rush to biofuels is putting the squeeze on wildlife. Nearly 40 million acres of farmland are currently idled under the federal Conservation Reserve Program, which seeks to reduce soil erosion, improve water quality, and provide habitat. The Bush administration has proposed that land set aside under the program be converted to fuel production. The proposal is part of the 2007 Farm Bill, which is likely to be voted on this fall.
Best-Case Scenario
The best sources of biomass for fuel are waste products and native perennial grasses, which provide more usable energy per acre than corn ethanol or soybean diesel. In fact, says a report by the University of Minnesota, fuels made from native plants can actually be "carbon negative," because they store excess carbon dioxide in their roots and the surrounding soil, reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Crying in Your Biodiesel
Here's where some get off the biofuel bus: It's raising the price of beer. In Germany, subsidies for corn and rapeseed production are squeezing production of barley--an important ingredient in the national beverage. The effects of higher barley prices are starting to appear at the tap. The price of a liter mug of beer at this year's Oktoberfest, for example, will be up by 5.5 percent.
==========================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200709/bio.asp
Bio-Hope, Bio-Hype
A users' guide to biofuels
By Frances Cerra Whittelsey
September/October 2007
Chart: Comparing Biofuels
Editor's note: The chart in Sierra's print version stated that vehicles using B99/100 biodiesel require special modifications. Unless the car is using 100 percent waste vegetable oil, the only modification necessary is to replace natural rubber fuel hoses on older vehicles. Modern diesel vehicles can use biodiesel with no modifications. The chart has been corrected.
IN OUR BEAUTIFUL BIOFUEL FUTURE, cars and trucks are powered by wood chips, prairie grass, wheat straw, fast-food grease, garbage, and even algae--whichever material is most plentiful locally and least damaging environmentally. With cars getting 40 miles a gallon or better, greenhouse-gas emissions plummet. The biofuel revolution sparks an economic boom by keeping U.S. dollars at home instead of sending them to Middle Eastern sheikhs.
Biofuels can be made from nearly any organic material. By essentially recycling carbon from living things (as opposed to the ancient biomass in coal and petroleum), biofuels help fight global warming. But some could also add to our environmental problems: In an equally possible but less rosy future, governments and agribusiness clear rainforests and wetlands for vast plantations of biofuel crops like oil palms. With arable land increasingly devoted to fuel production, food prices push higher. The roads clog with biofuel SUVs that still get lousy mileage. Global warming slows insignificantly, if at all.
Which future is ours? It depends on choices being made today. At present, for example, corn is the source of 95 percent of the United States' ethanol. Although politically popular in farm states, corn is a problematic source of fuel: It requires good land and petroleum-intensive cultivation and fertilization, and it can also readily feed both humans and livestock. (Food prices are already increasing because of competition with ethanol.) If the mill processing the corn is powered by coal, ethanol produces more net greenhouse gases than gasoline does. "It's easier to do bad than good in this area," warns Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. "But there's also potential to make the production of fuel more decentralized and more democratic." The chart below lays out the pros and cons of the major biofuels; now it's up to us to get the right mix.
Virtue Rewarded
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has boosted bioenergy by ordering that the carbon content of all fuels sold in the state be cut by 10 percent by 2020. Each fuel will get a life-cycle carbon analysis, showing how much greenhouse gas it emits from origin to tailpipe. Fuel suppliers will need to blend ingredients to meet their reduction targets, which should increase demand for cleaner options like cellulosic ethanol.
The Urge to Splurge
Putting a dent in global warming requires conservation as well as biofuels. A 3 percent increase in fuel-economy standards for vehicles, for example, would save more gas than the entire 2006 production of corn ethanol. Sadly, we've been driving in reverse: For the past five years, U.S. gasoline consumption has increased by 1.4 percent annually, and diesel by 3.6 percent.
Conserving Critters Too
The rush to biofuels is putting the squeeze on wildlife. Nearly 40 million acres of farmland are currently idled under the federal Conservation Reserve Program, which seeks to reduce soil erosion, improve water quality, and provide habitat. The Bush administration has proposed that land set aside under the program be converted to fuel production. The proposal is part of the 2007 Farm Bill, which is likely to be voted on this fall.
Best-Case Scenario
The best sources of biomass for fuel are waste products and native perennial grasses, which provide more usable energy per acre than corn ethanol or soybean diesel. In fact, says a report by the University of Minnesota, fuels made from native plants can actually be "carbon negative," because they store excess carbon dioxide in their roots and the surrounding soil, reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Crying in Your Biodiesel
Here's where some get off the biofuel bus: It's raising the price of beer. In Germany, subsidies for corn and rapeseed production are squeezing production of barley--an important ingredient in the national beverage. The effects of higher barley prices are starting to appear at the tap. The price of a liter mug of beer at this year's Oktoberfest, for example, will be up by 5.5 percent.
China plans to mine Helium-3 for fusion power
===================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/10/moon_helium/
China to map 'every inch' of the moon
There's Helium-3 in them thar hills
By Lucy Sherriff → More by this author
Published Friday 10th August 2007 12:20 GMT
China has announced plans to map "every inch" of the surface of the Moon as part of its ambitious space-exploration programme.
The NSA (National Space Administration) also made no bones about China's commercial interest in space, telling reporters that the Moon holds the key to future generation of energy.
Ouyang Ziyuan, head of the first phase of lunar exploration, is quoted on government-sanctioned news site ChinaNews.com describing plans to collect three dimensional images of the Moon. He also outlined plans to exploit the vast quantities of Helium-3 thought to lie buried in lunar rock.
"There are altogether 15 tons of helium-3 on Earth, while on the Moon, the total amount of Helium-3 can reach one to five million tons," he said.
"Helium-3 is considered as a long-term, stable, safe, clean and cheap material for human beings to get nuclear energy through controllable nuclear fusion experiments. If we human beings can finally use such energy material to generate electricity, then China might need 10 tons of helium-3 every year and in the world, about 100 tons of helium-3 will be needed every year."
The country's space programme is split into three phases - the first is "circling the Moon", the second "landing on the Moon", and the third "returning to Earth".
Earlier this year, the Chinese space agency outlined plans to launch the first probe in the second half of 2007. It has now also given a few more details of its plans for phase two, which will see an unmanned rover land on the lunar surface in 2010 and "meticulously" survey the area in which it lands. A sample-return mission is slated for 2012.
===================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/10/moon_helium/
China to map 'every inch' of the moon
There's Helium-3 in them thar hills
By Lucy Sherriff → More by this author
Published Friday 10th August 2007 12:20 GMT
China has announced plans to map "every inch" of the surface of the Moon as part of its ambitious space-exploration programme.
The NSA (National Space Administration) also made no bones about China's commercial interest in space, telling reporters that the Moon holds the key to future generation of energy.
Ouyang Ziyuan, head of the first phase of lunar exploration, is quoted on government-sanctioned news site ChinaNews.com describing plans to collect three dimensional images of the Moon. He also outlined plans to exploit the vast quantities of Helium-3 thought to lie buried in lunar rock.
"There are altogether 15 tons of helium-3 on Earth, while on the Moon, the total amount of Helium-3 can reach one to five million tons," he said.
"Helium-3 is considered as a long-term, stable, safe, clean and cheap material for human beings to get nuclear energy through controllable nuclear fusion experiments. If we human beings can finally use such energy material to generate electricity, then China might need 10 tons of helium-3 every year and in the world, about 100 tons of helium-3 will be needed every year."
The country's space programme is split into three phases - the first is "circling the Moon", the second "landing on the Moon", and the third "returning to Earth".
Earlier this year, the Chinese space agency outlined plans to launch the first probe in the second half of 2007. It has now also given a few more details of its plans for phase two, which will see an unmanned rover land on the lunar surface in 2010 and "meticulously" survey the area in which it lands. A sample-return mission is slated for 2012.
The Carpetbagger Report explains the stubborn, groundless doubt about global warming
=============================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/12703.html#more-12703
A new entry for the WSJ contest
Posted August 29th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Share This | Spotlight | Permalink
A few weeks ago, I noticed a few bloggers debating which Wall Street Journal editorial was the most fundamentally dishonest. There are almost too many pieces to choose from, but I’d argue that today’s gem on global warming is at least as bad as anything I’ve ever seen the paper run.
You know the story: NASA slightly revised its record of average annual temperatures in the United States since 2000 after a Canadian blogger and global warming skeptic found a small computer error. The glitch altered the overall global mean temperatures by one-one-thousandth of a degree, NASA corrected its charts, and the agency gave the person who noticed full credit for the catch. The trends remain the same, and scientists’ understanding of climate change is entirely unaffected.
Limbaugh, Fox News, and conservative blogs threw a fit, but their whining had no basis in reality. Once the right’s claims had been thoroughly debunked, conservatives moved on — and today the Wall Street Journal editorial board moved in.
The new data undermine another frightful talking point from environmentalists, which is that six of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1990. Wrong. NASA now says six of the 10 warmest years were in the 1930s and 1940s, and that was before the bulk of industrial CO2 emissions were released into the atmosphere.
Look, this is just silly. The minor computer error was entirely inconsequential. As Brad Plumer recently explained, “The global temperate record, in which 2005 is still the hottest year and Al Gore’s claim that nine of the ten hottest years in history have occurred since 1995 is still operative…. Nothing’s really changed. All told, it’s a tempest that deserves a very tiny teapot.” But the Journal keeps hacking away.
If nothing else, the snafu calls into question how much faith to put in climate change models. In the 1990s, virtually all climate models predicted warming from 2000-2010, but the new data confirm that so far there has been no warming trend in this decade for the U.S. Whoops.
It’s hard not to appreciate the WSJ’s use of the phrase “calls into question.” The point is to just blur the line and create confusion, so that the audience will throw up its arms in frustration and look at this as a he-said/she-said controversy. That’s the m.o. global-warming deniers have been using for quite while now.
The Journal’s claims are just wrong. Worse, the paper must realize it’s wrong, but it’s making the claims anyway.
Kevin posted a very helpful chart a couple of weeks ago showing the global warming trend, accounting for the corrected glitch. It’s unmistakable — and easy enough to read that even a WSJ editor can understand it.
The Journal added this fascinating observation in its editorial:
So far this year NASA has issued at least five press releases that could be described as alarming on the pace of climate change. But the correction of its overestimate of global warming was merely posted on the agency’s Web site.
Got that? The Wall Street Journal is disappointed that NASA didn’t issue a press release to highlight a statistically-insignificant change to a computer model that continues to show the same global warming trend that existed before.
The Journal’s editors better enjoy this now, because once Rupert Murdoch takes over, there’s no way he’ll tolerate sloppy, uninformed, breathtakingly dishonest editorials like this one. Oh wait….
=============================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/12703.html#more-12703
A new entry for the WSJ contest
Posted August 29th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Share This | Spotlight | Permalink
A few weeks ago, I noticed a few bloggers debating which Wall Street Journal editorial was the most fundamentally dishonest. There are almost too many pieces to choose from, but I’d argue that today’s gem on global warming is at least as bad as anything I’ve ever seen the paper run.
You know the story: NASA slightly revised its record of average annual temperatures in the United States since 2000 after a Canadian blogger and global warming skeptic found a small computer error. The glitch altered the overall global mean temperatures by one-one-thousandth of a degree, NASA corrected its charts, and the agency gave the person who noticed full credit for the catch. The trends remain the same, and scientists’ understanding of climate change is entirely unaffected.
Limbaugh, Fox News, and conservative blogs threw a fit, but their whining had no basis in reality. Once the right’s claims had been thoroughly debunked, conservatives moved on — and today the Wall Street Journal editorial board moved in.
The new data undermine another frightful talking point from environmentalists, which is that six of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1990. Wrong. NASA now says six of the 10 warmest years were in the 1930s and 1940s, and that was before the bulk of industrial CO2 emissions were released into the atmosphere.
Look, this is just silly. The minor computer error was entirely inconsequential. As Brad Plumer recently explained, “The global temperate record, in which 2005 is still the hottest year and Al Gore’s claim that nine of the ten hottest years in history have occurred since 1995 is still operative…. Nothing’s really changed. All told, it’s a tempest that deserves a very tiny teapot.” But the Journal keeps hacking away.
If nothing else, the snafu calls into question how much faith to put in climate change models. In the 1990s, virtually all climate models predicted warming from 2000-2010, but the new data confirm that so far there has been no warming trend in this decade for the U.S. Whoops.
It’s hard not to appreciate the WSJ’s use of the phrase “calls into question.” The point is to just blur the line and create confusion, so that the audience will throw up its arms in frustration and look at this as a he-said/she-said controversy. That’s the m.o. global-warming deniers have been using for quite while now.
The Journal’s claims are just wrong. Worse, the paper must realize it’s wrong, but it’s making the claims anyway.
Kevin posted a very helpful chart a couple of weeks ago showing the global warming trend, accounting for the corrected glitch. It’s unmistakable — and easy enough to read that even a WSJ editor can understand it.
The Journal added this fascinating observation in its editorial:
So far this year NASA has issued at least five press releases that could be described as alarming on the pace of climate change. But the correction of its overestimate of global warming was merely posted on the agency’s Web site.
Got that? The Wall Street Journal is disappointed that NASA didn’t issue a press release to highlight a statistically-insignificant change to a computer model that continues to show the same global warming trend that existed before.
The Journal’s editors better enjoy this now, because once Rupert Murdoch takes over, there’s no way he’ll tolerate sloppy, uninformed, breathtakingly dishonest editorials like this one. Oh wait….
Marc Elrich - It is time for Montgomery County to enact a growth policy that makes sense.
==========================================================
originally posted at :
http://www.gazette.net/stories/091207/montcol201233_32359.shtml
It is time for Montgomery County to enact a growth policy that makes sense.
For too long, development proceeded in a way that packed our roads and schools and over-taxed our fire and rescue, police, recreation and social services. This hurt our quality of life and our ability to meet our children’s educational needs, while straining public safety resources and damaging the environment.
We got in this mess by allowing growth that did not pay its way, leaving average taxpayers with the bill. Growth proponents like to say that the county failed to build the roads and schools, ignoring the reality that the county didn’t have the money to build these things precisely because it didn’t collect adequate development fees and was politically unwilling to impose the massive tax increases on residents that would have been required to support growth. The problems we face are the legacy of county policies.
The county cannot afford to adopt a growth policy that pretends that there are no problems or fails to take the steps necessary to address them. We need rules, guidelines and development fees that are permanent, fair and adequate to meet our needs. We need policies that allow development only when and where the infrastructure is truly adequate, not policies that trade away our quality of life.
Stricter policies wouldn’t stop growth or hurt the economy. They will have little impact on the current cycle because there are already 28,000 houses and commercial space for more than 100,000 jobs approved that will not be affected by changes to growth policy — construction that won’t pay the true cost of the necessary infrastructure, adding to our problems. The housing alone represents seven to 12 years of on-going construction. The steps we take today are to prepare for the future. Most importantly, whatever the state of the economy and the building market, new development requires new infrastructure that has to be paid for by somebody.
The Planning Board recently forwarded a set of recommendations on growth to the County Council. It had good proposals such as development impact fees that for the first time generally reflect the true cost of providing the needed roads and schools. It was the welcome start to paying attention to long-term facility, fiscal, economic, environmental and social sustainability.
Unfortunately, those proposals fall short when addressing growth management. They essentially say that we have adequate transportation capacity because there are buses and therefore development can proceed unchecked. They recommend allowing entire school clusters to go as high as 135 percent of capacity. Ignoring congestion and school over-crowding is not acceptable.
For all the talk about Montgomery County being the ‘‘model” of good planning, the reality is that other jurisdictions are often more deliberate and more creative in struggling with the same challenges that we face.
We must recognize that a continuation of urban sprawl and over-reliance on single occupancy vehicles is counter to everything we know has to happen in order to fight global warming. Our design and planning has to address that by building transportation infrastructure that meets public needs, but for most commuters, the public transportation system is simply inadequate — too slow, too infrequent and too unreliable — to meet their needs.
We can’t ask future development to pay for past mistakes, but we can avoid making those same mistakes again. There are more creative ways to do this than we’ve employed and we should explore them. As a general principle, growth should be focused where the infrastructure can support it, kept out of areas where it can’t, and occur in a way that benefits our community.
Too many proposals, like some of the transportation ideas the council has seen, aren’t really about improving things, but about allowing things to get worse while narrowly avoiding the worst-case scenario. I don’t accept that worse is either acceptable or inevitable. I challenge all of us to think about what kind of community we want and to boldly go about creating it.
A sound growth policy should lead us to a place we want to be, not ask us to accept a continuing decline in our quality of life.
Marc Elrich, a Democrat from Takoma Park, is an at-large member of the County Council. His e-mail address is Councilmember.Elrich@ MontgomeryCountyMD.gov
==========================================================
originally posted at :
http://www.gazette.net/stories/091207/montcol201233_32359.shtml
It is time for Montgomery County to enact a growth policy that makes sense.
For too long, development proceeded in a way that packed our roads and schools and over-taxed our fire and rescue, police, recreation and social services. This hurt our quality of life and our ability to meet our children’s educational needs, while straining public safety resources and damaging the environment.
We got in this mess by allowing growth that did not pay its way, leaving average taxpayers with the bill. Growth proponents like to say that the county failed to build the roads and schools, ignoring the reality that the county didn’t have the money to build these things precisely because it didn’t collect adequate development fees and was politically unwilling to impose the massive tax increases on residents that would have been required to support growth. The problems we face are the legacy of county policies.
The county cannot afford to adopt a growth policy that pretends that there are no problems or fails to take the steps necessary to address them. We need rules, guidelines and development fees that are permanent, fair and adequate to meet our needs. We need policies that allow development only when and where the infrastructure is truly adequate, not policies that trade away our quality of life.
Stricter policies wouldn’t stop growth or hurt the economy. They will have little impact on the current cycle because there are already 28,000 houses and commercial space for more than 100,000 jobs approved that will not be affected by changes to growth policy — construction that won’t pay the true cost of the necessary infrastructure, adding to our problems. The housing alone represents seven to 12 years of on-going construction. The steps we take today are to prepare for the future. Most importantly, whatever the state of the economy and the building market, new development requires new infrastructure that has to be paid for by somebody.
The Planning Board recently forwarded a set of recommendations on growth to the County Council. It had good proposals such as development impact fees that for the first time generally reflect the true cost of providing the needed roads and schools. It was the welcome start to paying attention to long-term facility, fiscal, economic, environmental and social sustainability.
Unfortunately, those proposals fall short when addressing growth management. They essentially say that we have adequate transportation capacity because there are buses and therefore development can proceed unchecked. They recommend allowing entire school clusters to go as high as 135 percent of capacity. Ignoring congestion and school over-crowding is not acceptable.
For all the talk about Montgomery County being the ‘‘model” of good planning, the reality is that other jurisdictions are often more deliberate and more creative in struggling with the same challenges that we face.
We must recognize that a continuation of urban sprawl and over-reliance on single occupancy vehicles is counter to everything we know has to happen in order to fight global warming. Our design and planning has to address that by building transportation infrastructure that meets public needs, but for most commuters, the public transportation system is simply inadequate — too slow, too infrequent and too unreliable — to meet their needs.
We can’t ask future development to pay for past mistakes, but we can avoid making those same mistakes again. There are more creative ways to do this than we’ve employed and we should explore them. As a general principle, growth should be focused where the infrastructure can support it, kept out of areas where it can’t, and occur in a way that benefits our community.
Too many proposals, like some of the transportation ideas the council has seen, aren’t really about improving things, but about allowing things to get worse while narrowly avoiding the worst-case scenario. I don’t accept that worse is either acceptable or inevitable. I challenge all of us to think about what kind of community we want and to boldly go about creating it.
A sound growth policy should lead us to a place we want to be, not ask us to accept a continuing decline in our quality of life.
Marc Elrich, a Democrat from Takoma Park, is an at-large member of the County Council. His e-mail address is Councilmember.Elrich@ MontgomeryCountyMD.gov
Studies show Intercounty Connector will not ease Beltway, interstate congestion
====================================================================================
Originally posted at:
http://www.gazette.net/stories/091907/montlet213526_32365.shtml
Studies show Intercounty Connector will not ease Beltway, interstate congestion
The Gazette’s Sept. 12 editorial, ‘‘Now more than ever, we need the ICC,” included major misstatements and omissions.
First, the editorial stated that the 18-mile Intercounty Connector would have ‘‘reasonable tolls,” but didn’t mention that the state anticipates round trip, rush-hour tolls of $7 a day in 2010, according to the 2006 Final Environmental Impact Statement for the ICC (see Environmental Consequences, IV-350 of the FEIS at www.iccstudy.org).
Second, The Gazette continues to cite Beltway and interstate congestion as an argument for the ICC even though the Maryland Department of Transportation confirmed in the FEIS that the ICC wouldn’t reduce congestion on Interstate 270, the Beltway or I-95 (see Environmental Consequences, IV-352 and IV-380).
Third, the editorial omitted mention of a better east-west connection than the ICC: widening Muncaster Mill Road, and Routes 28 and 198 from Georgia Avenue to U.S. 29 to four lanes throughout. The estimated cost is $350 million, a small fraction of what the multi-billion dollar ICC would cost.
Fourth, the editorial wrongly stated that the Bush administration selected an ICC alignment that would have ‘‘the least impact on the environment.” In fact, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of the Interior are on record stating that the northern alignment would cause less damage than the one selected. In addition, federal agency staff concluded in January 2003 that the ICC was not a good candidate for a fast-tracked environmental review. President Bush disregarded the advice of professionals in both cases.
Fifth, contrary to the editorial, construction of the toll highway is not ‘‘already under way,” although some preparatory clearing has been done. The ICC is in court, not in concrete.
The Gazette is correct that transportation needs have been shortchanged for years — all the more reason why Maryland can’t afford to waste billions of dollars on the ICC high-toll highway. Scarce funds should be spent on less damaging, cost-effective projects like road widenings described above, and for crucial transit projects such as the Corridor Cities Transitway, which would bring light rail from the Shady Grove Metro to Clarksburg, and the Purple Line.
Philip M. Andrews, Gaithersburg
The writer, a Democrat, represents District 3 on the County Council.
====================================================================================
Originally posted at:
http://www.gazette.net/stories/091907/montlet213526_32365.shtml
Studies show Intercounty Connector will not ease Beltway, interstate congestion
The Gazette’s Sept. 12 editorial, ‘‘Now more than ever, we need the ICC,” included major misstatements and omissions.
First, the editorial stated that the 18-mile Intercounty Connector would have ‘‘reasonable tolls,” but didn’t mention that the state anticipates round trip, rush-hour tolls of $7 a day in 2010, according to the 2006 Final Environmental Impact Statement for the ICC (see Environmental Consequences, IV-350 of the FEIS at www.iccstudy.org).
Second, The Gazette continues to cite Beltway and interstate congestion as an argument for the ICC even though the Maryland Department of Transportation confirmed in the FEIS that the ICC wouldn’t reduce congestion on Interstate 270, the Beltway or I-95 (see Environmental Consequences, IV-352 and IV-380).
Third, the editorial omitted mention of a better east-west connection than the ICC: widening Muncaster Mill Road, and Routes 28 and 198 from Georgia Avenue to U.S. 29 to four lanes throughout. The estimated cost is $350 million, a small fraction of what the multi-billion dollar ICC would cost.
Fourth, the editorial wrongly stated that the Bush administration selected an ICC alignment that would have ‘‘the least impact on the environment.” In fact, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of the Interior are on record stating that the northern alignment would cause less damage than the one selected. In addition, federal agency staff concluded in January 2003 that the ICC was not a good candidate for a fast-tracked environmental review. President Bush disregarded the advice of professionals in both cases.
Fifth, contrary to the editorial, construction of the toll highway is not ‘‘already under way,” although some preparatory clearing has been done. The ICC is in court, not in concrete.
The Gazette is correct that transportation needs have been shortchanged for years — all the more reason why Maryland can’t afford to waste billions of dollars on the ICC high-toll highway. Scarce funds should be spent on less damaging, cost-effective projects like road widenings described above, and for crucial transit projects such as the Corridor Cities Transitway, which would bring light rail from the Shady Grove Metro to Clarksburg, and the Purple Line.
Philip M. Andrews, Gaithersburg
The writer, a Democrat, represents District 3 on the County Council.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Building Green
================================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.oasisdesign.net/faq/green4000ft2home.htm
Can a 4000 ft2 Home be Green?
I regularly receive requests for my ecological design services for very large private homes.
The individuals behind these requests are generally quite accustomed to getting what they want.
Some have a difficult time understanding:
a) why money alone cannot buy an ecological home, and
b) why I won't work on their project
This is a letter to one such client who I had a particularly nice personal connection with.
I never did work on their place, but I did give them an interview for their TV show about the project, expressing the views in this letter.
Dear ___________,
First let me repeat that I appreciate that your heart is in the right place, you are smart, focused, dedicated to this project, and unafraid of honesty.
Because of the time line on your project, there isn't much time to beat around the bush. Though I would like to tell you what you want to hear and help you achieve your goals, as an ecological systems designer I just can't embrace your project as currently conceived.
This is because the plan is for a house which is poorly oriented and far too big.
If you build a 4000 square foot house for 6 people on your site and do it conventionally all the way, it might cost you $500,000. If you add thin "green veneer," it might add 10% to the cost of the project. Thick green veneer might double the cost to a million dollars.
Examples of "green veneer" in this context are alternative construction materials such as straw bale, nontoxic paints, real linoleum, recycled wood, high performance windows & insulation, alternative power sources such as solar electric and heating, and alternative water sources such as recycled wastewater and rain water harvesting.
Some of these features may be found to save resources over the life of the project. But, if the fundamentals of the project and lifestyle of the inhabitants don't change, these features are essentially add-ons. Properly rigorous life-cycle analysis will show that most of these features will increase the overall environmental impact. "Green veneer" is a strong term, but warranted to countervail the tendency to overlook this uncomfortable reality.
In contrast, building a "deep green" house for six people on your site might cost $100,000-$200,000 less than the presumed base price of $500,000. A deep green house can't be bought with money; it takes something closer to love; lifestyle accommodation, rearranging of priorities, time and personal involvement in the design, construction, and use of the project. Most importantly, it means making a much smaller, better designed house.
It might incorporate nearly the same alternative construction materials, alternative power sources, alternative water sources. However, in conjunction with altering the fundamentals of square footage, siting for optimal solar exposure and water reuse, and occupant lifestyle, the result would be completely different.
The tendency is to view these fundamentals on equal par with other "list items" such as solar power. However, the fundamentals are vastly more—well, fundamental.
Square footage
If you overshoot on square footage, no amount of money spent on greening is going to yield a low-impact project. Lower the square footage, and you lower almost every other impact proportionately.
A 2000 square foot house with completely conventional construction would have a lower ecological impact than a 4000 square foot straw bale house which employed every ecological feature.
The average size of new single-family homes in the US increased from 1,500 square feet to 2,266 square feet between 1970 and 2000. The Census Bureau also reports that the average household size declined over the past 30 years, from 3.1 people per household in 1970 to 2.6 people per household in 2002. Thus, the square feet per person have nearly doubled in thirty years, from 483 to 872.
The ecological design approach is to take the most inherently simple solution and implement it as well as possible. In the case of housing, this means a small number of very well designed square feet.
Because the most ecological solution is always the cheapest, profiteers will do all they can to steer the market in the opposite direction: towards the most inherently complicated solution, with the option of shoddy execution to "save money" (actually, ensure future income from repair and replacement sales).
Just like a big SUV is a more profitable than a small car, a big, feature-laden house is more profitable in every way. Like the impacts, the profits also multiply by the square feet. The construction industry knows they want lots of square feet, and they'll do everything to pass laws requiring more, bigger features, and brainwash buyers into thinking they want these things, too.
Do we see our homes as investment commodities, or the cradle of our family's soul?Even if you make houses and sell them for a living, you don't need them to have mass appeal. You just need one buyer who is in love with the place.
Like many of my fellow citizens, I feel a pull towards a large, valuable real estate holding. Considering how focused I've been on resisting it, to a surprising extent I accept the central tenet of the brainwashing, that "bigger is better," even though my life experience doesn't validate this point.
Vast, rectangular spaces with high ceilings and a correspondingly low level of detail work and craftsmanship are soulless and leave me cold.
On the other hand, I've noticed that the spaces I'm most comfortable in are cozy, well-fitting, generally old or self-built homes with "substandard" ceiling heights, odd shapes, narrow doorways, and smaller rooms, and maybe one bigger one for gathering. Interesting shapes, real materials, and a high level of craftsmanship, detail and hand work give a building soul. Such features are very expensive or impossible to implement in a large home.
Built on sub-hobbit scale, this was a surprisingly delightful family home for us as summer turned to fall in Northern California. Several skylights provided nice light. It has both a diminutive fireplace and a woodstove, bookshelves...all in about 110 square feet. Needless to say, it was easy to heat.
One summer my parents, sister and I traveled for three months in a 19 foot camper. We were all amazed at how much easier it was to live in a hundred and fifty square feet than 1500. You could reach the silverware drawer from the dining table and the kitchen sink. Cleaning was a breeze.
Living on various boats, I had similar experiences.
My wife, six year old daughter and I lived happily for a year of traveling in a two person tent—forty square feet (with lots of outdoor living space around it).
Traveling in other countries, I noted that norms for square feet per person are way lower.
Back in our house, a 600 square foot summer cabin, we could feel the house wasn't "working." Despite all the experiences above, I bought the standard diagnosis, that the house was "too small" (apparently I'm a slow learner).
Fortunately, as the first step towards adding on more space, we filled one room with building materials, functionally removing it from our everyday lives. Surprise!—without that room, our house worked much better! This was the experience that finally broke the marketeer's "more is better" spell that had me in it's thrall.
Now I seriously question the purported advantage of more space. What we really need is better designed space—something much less straightforward, but a much worthier pursuit. Fifty square feet of well designed space per person is possible, 200 square feet per person is generous. At 500+ square feet per person ecology is out the window and domestic help is no longer a luxury but a necessity.
Siting and orientation
Siting and orientation are also as important, but in a different way. If your house faces the sun, the solar design just clicks into place. If it doesn't, the solar design requires much more time and money to achieve less result.
I understand that you want a wall of windows to face that Northwest view, but this simply isn't compatible with your desire for a passive solar heated home. No amount of money (or wishfull thinking) can make a wall of northwest facing windows a passive solar asset.
(Putting a wall of windows to the south, with a few small, well sited and framed, insultated view windows to the northwest would enable the view to be enjoyed while the house was heated with passive solar. It is a myth that windows need to be big to make a view enjoyable. The most beautiful view window I've ever seen frames a long west view in a window well about thirty inches high by eight inches wide, and a foot and a half deep.)
The same with water reuse. If the wastewater generation points are a short distance uphill from the wastewater reuse points, the design, its implementation and use all take less time, money, and resources.
Dual plumbing in a small house might take 30 additional feet of drain pipe. In a large house with several bathrooms and other water sources, it could take hundreds. With only a few people living there, this investment can't be justified.
Lifestyle
Finally, lifestyle is the king of all the considerations. If the occupants are willing to alter their habits, this makes it much easier to design a low-impact house. A low-impact lifestyle is easier and more comfortable in a house designed to support it—this synergy can ratchet impacts down dramatically.
I hope the foregoing helps explain the reaction of myself and the other designers you've talked with. It's not that the straw bale guy and I don't want to help you make something ecological, it's that we can't make something ecological without ecological fundamentals to build on. It would be like...one of your commercial real estate clients wanting to buy something they didn't have the resources to buy.
So where do you go from here? I suggest you take a breath and really look closely at those fundamentals. I suggest you read Principles of Ecological Design (article), which could perhaps help make the leap out of the Santa Barbara mind set, which is antithetical to an ecological approach.
If your wife is not willing to concede an inch on comfort, perhaps she could be persuaded to try life in a very well-designed 2000 square foot house, with the option of adding more (already designed) space if she hates it. You could point out that she would probably not want for space if your family were to spend six months on a 60 foot yacht, and that your home could be equally well-designed, and twice as big.
Whether you go "deep green" or some degree of "green veneer" I suggest you hire a project manager with extensive green building experience to prevent yourself from going crazy with work overload and cultural isolation.
Wishing you the best of luck,
Art
================================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.oasisdesign.net/faq/green4000ft2home.htm
Can a 4000 ft2 Home be Green?
I regularly receive requests for my ecological design services for very large private homes.
The individuals behind these requests are generally quite accustomed to getting what they want.
Some have a difficult time understanding:
a) why money alone cannot buy an ecological home, and
b) why I won't work on their project
This is a letter to one such client who I had a particularly nice personal connection with.
I never did work on their place, but I did give them an interview for their TV show about the project, expressing the views in this letter.
Dear ___________,
First let me repeat that I appreciate that your heart is in the right place, you are smart, focused, dedicated to this project, and unafraid of honesty.
Because of the time line on your project, there isn't much time to beat around the bush. Though I would like to tell you what you want to hear and help you achieve your goals, as an ecological systems designer I just can't embrace your project as currently conceived.
This is because the plan is for a house which is poorly oriented and far too big.
If you build a 4000 square foot house for 6 people on your site and do it conventionally all the way, it might cost you $500,000. If you add thin "green veneer," it might add 10% to the cost of the project. Thick green veneer might double the cost to a million dollars.
Examples of "green veneer" in this context are alternative construction materials such as straw bale, nontoxic paints, real linoleum, recycled wood, high performance windows & insulation, alternative power sources such as solar electric and heating, and alternative water sources such as recycled wastewater and rain water harvesting.
Some of these features may be found to save resources over the life of the project. But, if the fundamentals of the project and lifestyle of the inhabitants don't change, these features are essentially add-ons. Properly rigorous life-cycle analysis will show that most of these features will increase the overall environmental impact. "Green veneer" is a strong term, but warranted to countervail the tendency to overlook this uncomfortable reality.
In contrast, building a "deep green" house for six people on your site might cost $100,000-$200,000 less than the presumed base price of $500,000. A deep green house can't be bought with money; it takes something closer to love; lifestyle accommodation, rearranging of priorities, time and personal involvement in the design, construction, and use of the project. Most importantly, it means making a much smaller, better designed house.
It might incorporate nearly the same alternative construction materials, alternative power sources, alternative water sources. However, in conjunction with altering the fundamentals of square footage, siting for optimal solar exposure and water reuse, and occupant lifestyle, the result would be completely different.
The tendency is to view these fundamentals on equal par with other "list items" such as solar power. However, the fundamentals are vastly more—well, fundamental.
Square footage
If you overshoot on square footage, no amount of money spent on greening is going to yield a low-impact project. Lower the square footage, and you lower almost every other impact proportionately.
A 2000 square foot house with completely conventional construction would have a lower ecological impact than a 4000 square foot straw bale house which employed every ecological feature.
The average size of new single-family homes in the US increased from 1,500 square feet to 2,266 square feet between 1970 and 2000. The Census Bureau also reports that the average household size declined over the past 30 years, from 3.1 people per household in 1970 to 2.6 people per household in 2002. Thus, the square feet per person have nearly doubled in thirty years, from 483 to 872.
The ecological design approach is to take the most inherently simple solution and implement it as well as possible. In the case of housing, this means a small number of very well designed square feet.
Because the most ecological solution is always the cheapest, profiteers will do all they can to steer the market in the opposite direction: towards the most inherently complicated solution, with the option of shoddy execution to "save money" (actually, ensure future income from repair and replacement sales).
Just like a big SUV is a more profitable than a small car, a big, feature-laden house is more profitable in every way. Like the impacts, the profits also multiply by the square feet. The construction industry knows they want lots of square feet, and they'll do everything to pass laws requiring more, bigger features, and brainwash buyers into thinking they want these things, too.
Do we see our homes as investment commodities, or the cradle of our family's soul?Even if you make houses and sell them for a living, you don't need them to have mass appeal. You just need one buyer who is in love with the place.
Like many of my fellow citizens, I feel a pull towards a large, valuable real estate holding. Considering how focused I've been on resisting it, to a surprising extent I accept the central tenet of the brainwashing, that "bigger is better," even though my life experience doesn't validate this point.
Vast, rectangular spaces with high ceilings and a correspondingly low level of detail work and craftsmanship are soulless and leave me cold.
On the other hand, I've noticed that the spaces I'm most comfortable in are cozy, well-fitting, generally old or self-built homes with "substandard" ceiling heights, odd shapes, narrow doorways, and smaller rooms, and maybe one bigger one for gathering. Interesting shapes, real materials, and a high level of craftsmanship, detail and hand work give a building soul. Such features are very expensive or impossible to implement in a large home.
Built on sub-hobbit scale, this was a surprisingly delightful family home for us as summer turned to fall in Northern California. Several skylights provided nice light. It has both a diminutive fireplace and a woodstove, bookshelves...all in about 110 square feet. Needless to say, it was easy to heat.
One summer my parents, sister and I traveled for three months in a 19 foot camper. We were all amazed at how much easier it was to live in a hundred and fifty square feet than 1500. You could reach the silverware drawer from the dining table and the kitchen sink. Cleaning was a breeze.
Living on various boats, I had similar experiences.
My wife, six year old daughter and I lived happily for a year of traveling in a two person tent—forty square feet (with lots of outdoor living space around it).
Traveling in other countries, I noted that norms for square feet per person are way lower.
Back in our house, a 600 square foot summer cabin, we could feel the house wasn't "working." Despite all the experiences above, I bought the standard diagnosis, that the house was "too small" (apparently I'm a slow learner).
Fortunately, as the first step towards adding on more space, we filled one room with building materials, functionally removing it from our everyday lives. Surprise!—without that room, our house worked much better! This was the experience that finally broke the marketeer's "more is better" spell that had me in it's thrall.
Now I seriously question the purported advantage of more space. What we really need is better designed space—something much less straightforward, but a much worthier pursuit. Fifty square feet of well designed space per person is possible, 200 square feet per person is generous. At 500+ square feet per person ecology is out the window and domestic help is no longer a luxury but a necessity.
Siting and orientation
Siting and orientation are also as important, but in a different way. If your house faces the sun, the solar design just clicks into place. If it doesn't, the solar design requires much more time and money to achieve less result.
I understand that you want a wall of windows to face that Northwest view, but this simply isn't compatible with your desire for a passive solar heated home. No amount of money (or wishfull thinking) can make a wall of northwest facing windows a passive solar asset.
(Putting a wall of windows to the south, with a few small, well sited and framed, insultated view windows to the northwest would enable the view to be enjoyed while the house was heated with passive solar. It is a myth that windows need to be big to make a view enjoyable. The most beautiful view window I've ever seen frames a long west view in a window well about thirty inches high by eight inches wide, and a foot and a half deep.)
The same with water reuse. If the wastewater generation points are a short distance uphill from the wastewater reuse points, the design, its implementation and use all take less time, money, and resources.
Dual plumbing in a small house might take 30 additional feet of drain pipe. In a large house with several bathrooms and other water sources, it could take hundreds. With only a few people living there, this investment can't be justified.
Lifestyle
Finally, lifestyle is the king of all the considerations. If the occupants are willing to alter their habits, this makes it much easier to design a low-impact house. A low-impact lifestyle is easier and more comfortable in a house designed to support it—this synergy can ratchet impacts down dramatically.
I hope the foregoing helps explain the reaction of myself and the other designers you've talked with. It's not that the straw bale guy and I don't want to help you make something ecological, it's that we can't make something ecological without ecological fundamentals to build on. It would be like...one of your commercial real estate clients wanting to buy something they didn't have the resources to buy.
So where do you go from here? I suggest you take a breath and really look closely at those fundamentals. I suggest you read Principles of Ecological Design (article), which could perhaps help make the leap out of the Santa Barbara mind set, which is antithetical to an ecological approach.
If your wife is not willing to concede an inch on comfort, perhaps she could be persuaded to try life in a very well-designed 2000 square foot house, with the option of adding more (already designed) space if she hates it. You could point out that she would probably not want for space if your family were to spend six months on a 60 foot yacht, and that your home could be equally well-designed, and twice as big.
Whether you go "deep green" or some degree of "green veneer" I suggest you hire a project manager with extensive green building experience to prevent yourself from going crazy with work overload and cultural isolation.
Wishing you the best of luck,
Art
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