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Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Friday, May 4, 2007
Shut Off Your Cable Box -- And Other Adventures In Turning Green
The New York Times lead article in last Sunday’s Week In Review Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, But Is It Green?
One money quote, late in the article.
“There isn’t a single American household above the poverty line that couldn’t cut their CO2 at least 25 percent in six months through a straightforward series of fairly simple and terrifically cost-effective measures.”
We cut our electric bill by 60% in the last year by simply taking two actions (a) we switched to compact fluorescent bulbs where we could and (b) wherever possible, when we shut things off, we shut off the power strips, and/or pull the plugs out of the walls.
We’ve found it impossible, so far, to turn the desk-top computer off completely.
The rest of it is pretty easy.
Most of our savings has come from turning off the cable box completely when we are not watching television. All you need do is touch your cable box to see how much heat is being generated. It takes a few minutes to re-boot the cable box every time we turn it on. Once or twice a month, we find that the cable company has turned off our box completely, and we have to call them and ask them to reboot us.
The cable company tells us that if our cable box is not on during a “system wide patch,” then they have to turn off our cable box. It’s a nuisance, both for them and for us. However, a 60% savings on the Con Ed bill is a 60% savings. Our experience with this tells us that there has to be a more energy efficient way to make cable boxes.
We have switched to Con Ed Solutions , which means that we are paying our bill into a fund that ConEd (the electricity provider for New York City, and about the last people you would expect to be going green) uses to purchase electricity generated from environmentally friendly sources (about 65-75% hydropower, and the rest wind power). Last month, we switched to the wind-power only fund. We will now be paying an extra penny-and-a-half per kilowatt hour (less than $3.00 a month). We cut our bill by 60%, we did it at the higher rate, and we haven’t replaced the track lighting yet.
It’s the cable box.
****
I have been a big fan of carbon-offset programs, where people try to calculate the amount of carbon dioxide emissions that they use by driving cars, taking planes, cooling a home, and engaging in every day life, and buy “offsets” from one of the many (but not countless) companies that sell offsets. These offsets are not prohibitively expensive. Ours cost something like $39 a year. The companies then take the money and try to do some good for the environment.
We purchase our carbon offsets from The Conservation Fund . According to their website
“Your charitable contribution of approximately $5.00 per tree helps support the Fund’s Carbon Sequestration program – an effort to plant native trees to address climate change, protect wildlife habitat and enhance America’s public recreation areas. Since 2000, The Conservation Fund has restored 30,000 acres and planted more than 9 million trees through its carbon sequestration program. Over the next 100 years, these new forests will capture an estimated 13.5 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere.”
One of the reasons we like the Conservation Fund is that it appears that they do a lot of work in the Eastern United States, where we actually live.
We’ve also bought some carbon offsets from TerraPass . They take our money, give us a bumper sticker for our car, and invest in projects concentrating on wind energy, biomass (methane use), and industrial efficiency.
The New York Times article tends to denigrate the entire “carbon offset” movement as a complicated system of “indulgences” that allow people to continue to “take private jets and stretch limos.”
Well.
I am sure I speak for virtually all 250,000,000 of us private jet flying, stretch limo driving Americans. We will be happy to cut back on our addiction to these environmental dangers immediately if it helps save the planet. From now on I will limit my stretch limo driving to emergency trips to Price Club.
Beyond the cheap veiled pot shots (roughly ½ the article) at Al Gore and the other billion plus people who are trying to come to grips with climate change without throwing themselves off the roof, the New York Times article is right on one point. Not all carbon-offset providers provide equally good services. Like new markets everywhere, some are better than others.
The article references a report The Consumers Guide to Carbon Offsets , put together by a group called “Clean Air/ Cool Planet”. The group is unknown to me, but among the corporate sponsors of the report is Stonyfield Farms Organic Yogurt . Beyond having a tasty product, Stonyfield Farms helped turned us on to the entire carbon offset process in the first place.
The report lists 8 companies that they like more than the others. 5 of them are outside of the United States. The 3 in the United States are:
Climate Trust
NativeEnergy
Sustainable Travel/ My Planet
We will certainly take a look at these providers in our next purchase of carbon offsets.
****
The other point in the article, beyond debating, is that purchasing carbon-offsets is not going to be enough, and is probably not enough now.
Like everybody else, we are trying to do more. We just joined a fruit and vegetable coop which promises us to provide produce from local farmers (the East End of Long Island, I suppose).
And like everybody else, we just got here. When we renovated our coop in early 2005, we did not consider green issues at all. We put in halogen track lighting in our kitchen. There are no compact fluorescent alternatives to that yet. We have ceiling fans and light fixtures for which there are no compact fluorescent bulbs yet either. We did buy energy saver appliances, but solely in the name of saving money, but that’s it.
In late August of the same year, Hurricane Katrina changed my wife’s thinking 180 degrees. Of course, under the circumstances, my thinking changed a little as well.
The most important thing we do for the environment is live in a co-op in Queens where we are 2 minutes from the subway and 5 minutes from the railroad. I bought my current car (a Honda Accord -- no power windows) in October, 2001. It has just over 30,000 miles.
Obviously, living in an apartment will always be more environmentally efficient. We have over 100 families and only one lawn. There are limits, too. We can not unilaterally demand that the building immediately put up solar panels. It will also be a long time before the building is in a position to allow us to switch from plastic to paper in throwing out garbage.
All-in-all, the New York Times does its readers, and the planet, a tremendous disservice by suggesting that people who are beginning by buying carbon offsets are driven by sloth and the pleasure principle, and that the alternative to doing everything all at once is doing nothing at all.
One money quote, late in the article.
“There isn’t a single American household above the poverty line that couldn’t cut their CO2 at least 25 percent in six months through a straightforward series of fairly simple and terrifically cost-effective measures.”
We cut our electric bill by 60% in the last year by simply taking two actions (a) we switched to compact fluorescent bulbs where we could and (b) wherever possible, when we shut things off, we shut off the power strips, and/or pull the plugs out of the walls.
We’ve found it impossible, so far, to turn the desk-top computer off completely.
The rest of it is pretty easy.
Most of our savings has come from turning off the cable box completely when we are not watching television. All you need do is touch your cable box to see how much heat is being generated. It takes a few minutes to re-boot the cable box every time we turn it on. Once or twice a month, we find that the cable company has turned off our box completely, and we have to call them and ask them to reboot us.
The cable company tells us that if our cable box is not on during a “system wide patch,” then they have to turn off our cable box. It’s a nuisance, both for them and for us. However, a 60% savings on the Con Ed bill is a 60% savings. Our experience with this tells us that there has to be a more energy efficient way to make cable boxes.
We have switched to Con Ed Solutions , which means that we are paying our bill into a fund that ConEd (the electricity provider for New York City, and about the last people you would expect to be going green) uses to purchase electricity generated from environmentally friendly sources (about 65-75% hydropower, and the rest wind power). Last month, we switched to the wind-power only fund. We will now be paying an extra penny-and-a-half per kilowatt hour (less than $3.00 a month). We cut our bill by 60%, we did it at the higher rate, and we haven’t replaced the track lighting yet.
It’s the cable box.
****
I have been a big fan of carbon-offset programs, where people try to calculate the amount of carbon dioxide emissions that they use by driving cars, taking planes, cooling a home, and engaging in every day life, and buy “offsets” from one of the many (but not countless) companies that sell offsets. These offsets are not prohibitively expensive. Ours cost something like $39 a year. The companies then take the money and try to do some good for the environment.
We purchase our carbon offsets from The Conservation Fund . According to their website
“Your charitable contribution of approximately $5.00 per tree helps support the Fund’s Carbon Sequestration program – an effort to plant native trees to address climate change, protect wildlife habitat and enhance America’s public recreation areas. Since 2000, The Conservation Fund has restored 30,000 acres and planted more than 9 million trees through its carbon sequestration program. Over the next 100 years, these new forests will capture an estimated 13.5 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere.”
One of the reasons we like the Conservation Fund is that it appears that they do a lot of work in the Eastern United States, where we actually live.
We’ve also bought some carbon offsets from TerraPass . They take our money, give us a bumper sticker for our car, and invest in projects concentrating on wind energy, biomass (methane use), and industrial efficiency.
The New York Times article tends to denigrate the entire “carbon offset” movement as a complicated system of “indulgences” that allow people to continue to “take private jets and stretch limos.”
Well.
I am sure I speak for virtually all 250,000,000 of us private jet flying, stretch limo driving Americans. We will be happy to cut back on our addiction to these environmental dangers immediately if it helps save the planet. From now on I will limit my stretch limo driving to emergency trips to Price Club.
Beyond the cheap veiled pot shots (roughly ½ the article) at Al Gore and the other billion plus people who are trying to come to grips with climate change without throwing themselves off the roof, the New York Times article is right on one point. Not all carbon-offset providers provide equally good services. Like new markets everywhere, some are better than others.
The article references a report The Consumers Guide to Carbon Offsets , put together by a group called “Clean Air/ Cool Planet”. The group is unknown to me, but among the corporate sponsors of the report is Stonyfield Farms Organic Yogurt . Beyond having a tasty product, Stonyfield Farms helped turned us on to the entire carbon offset process in the first place.
The report lists 8 companies that they like more than the others. 5 of them are outside of the United States. The 3 in the United States are:
Climate Trust
NativeEnergy
Sustainable Travel/ My Planet
We will certainly take a look at these providers in our next purchase of carbon offsets.
****
The other point in the article, beyond debating, is that purchasing carbon-offsets is not going to be enough, and is probably not enough now.
Like everybody else, we are trying to do more. We just joined a fruit and vegetable coop which promises us to provide produce from local farmers (the East End of Long Island, I suppose).
And like everybody else, we just got here. When we renovated our coop in early 2005, we did not consider green issues at all. We put in halogen track lighting in our kitchen. There are no compact fluorescent alternatives to that yet. We have ceiling fans and light fixtures for which there are no compact fluorescent bulbs yet either. We did buy energy saver appliances, but solely in the name of saving money, but that’s it.
In late August of the same year, Hurricane Katrina changed my wife’s thinking 180 degrees. Of course, under the circumstances, my thinking changed a little as well.
The most important thing we do for the environment is live in a co-op in Queens where we are 2 minutes from the subway and 5 minutes from the railroad. I bought my current car (a Honda Accord -- no power windows) in October, 2001. It has just over 30,000 miles.
Obviously, living in an apartment will always be more environmentally efficient. We have over 100 families and only one lawn. There are limits, too. We can not unilaterally demand that the building immediately put up solar panels. It will also be a long time before the building is in a position to allow us to switch from plastic to paper in throwing out garbage.
All-in-all, the New York Times does its readers, and the planet, a tremendous disservice by suggesting that people who are beginning by buying carbon offsets are driven by sloth and the pleasure principle, and that the alternative to doing everything all at once is doing nothing at all.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Mitt Romney for President?
One of the reasons Sullivan might have printed my little post was that he was grappling with the same issues in his review of the Dinesh D'Sousa book in The New Republic .
I will be reading the D'Sousa book at around the same time I am reading Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so I have to take Sullivan's word for the description of the book.
Basically, the book says that fundamental Islam is not terrorism. It's not even bad, since it promotes a desirable social order (woman and homosexuals and Jews in their place). No pornography, no personal freedom, no thoughts that there might be personal freedom, or some play in the joints of the power structure where you might exercise personal freedom away from a moral code which -- surprise on surprise -- Dinesh D'Sousa gets to make up himself.
Apparently, D’Sousa says that blowing up buildings in New York in response to freedom is not terrorism. It is a more than reasonable reaction to American liberalism. Therefore, American Liberalism in and of itself blew up the World Trade Center.
Essentially, according to Sullivan, D'Sousa wants a theocracy, but D'Sousa isn't even interested in theocracy as a means of enforcing even his own theories of the sacred. D'Sousa is just looking for the power of people like "him" to have control over people like "us."
Sounds to me, and its been sounding this way for a couple of years now, ever since, in my intellectual development at least, I was jumping up and down about Terri Schiavo:
The Republican Party, the Conservative movement, is slowly being dominated by a sort of nostalgia for pre-Reformation, pre-Lutheran Protestantism in the United States.
They are looking for a Protestantism that never was, mixed with a sort of pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism. There would be no Pope, so it can be observed by Protestants. Then they want to use the power of the New Deal/ Fair Deal state to ram this new religion down everyone's throats. The head of the government would be the only person with the power to be the head of the church.
Some proof of the fact that this concoction is new is that there was no law for these people to turn to when they were making up rules for Terri Schiavo, and there is no law for these people to turn to when they try to get Scooter Libby off for perjury. And there is no law for Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales, to turn to when they are trying to claim voter fraud based on the fact that black citizens turn up to vote. These people hate judges, even conservative Republican judges, because even the most conservative Judge will look to the law to justify an exercise of power. These people want the judges to exercise “Higher Law” as they see it.
It is true that traditionally, it has been liberals -- from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Martin Luther King, Jr. -- who have tended to claim “Higher Law”, especially in the area of civil rights. Conservatives have long been outraged -- calling these people Massachusetts liberals (Emerson, Thoreau, Sumner) and anarchists (Joe Hill) and Communists (Martin Luther King, Jr.) who did not understand the nature of the rule of law and the Constitution.
Turns out the Conservatives were never outraged over appeals to “Higher Law.” They were just waiting to overturn the Government that defeated their ancestors in war, freed their slaves, and then, 100 years later, gave their slave’s ancestors some of the rights of human beings.
In today's lead editorial, The New York Times
(obviously not objective, but not necessarily wrong), claimed that U.S. Attorneys are being fired, basically for allowing the descendents of these slaves, the right to vote in accordance with the law.
These Republican John Ashcroft-appointed U.S. Attorneys had the audacity to actually take their jobs seriously.
They didn’t understand the role of law in the new America.
Now, these new conservatives are beginning to wrap themselves in a religion that never existed to claim this is what God wanted for them all along.
Why shouldn’t a Mormon be our next President?
I will be reading the D'Sousa book at around the same time I am reading Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so I have to take Sullivan's word for the description of the book.
Basically, the book says that fundamental Islam is not terrorism. It's not even bad, since it promotes a desirable social order (woman and homosexuals and Jews in their place). No pornography, no personal freedom, no thoughts that there might be personal freedom, or some play in the joints of the power structure where you might exercise personal freedom away from a moral code which -- surprise on surprise -- Dinesh D'Sousa gets to make up himself.
Apparently, D’Sousa says that blowing up buildings in New York in response to freedom is not terrorism. It is a more than reasonable reaction to American liberalism. Therefore, American Liberalism in and of itself blew up the World Trade Center.
Essentially, according to Sullivan, D'Sousa wants a theocracy, but D'Sousa isn't even interested in theocracy as a means of enforcing even his own theories of the sacred. D'Sousa is just looking for the power of people like "him" to have control over people like "us."
Sounds to me, and its been sounding this way for a couple of years now, ever since, in my intellectual development at least, I was jumping up and down about Terri Schiavo:
The Republican Party, the Conservative movement, is slowly being dominated by a sort of nostalgia for pre-Reformation, pre-Lutheran Protestantism in the United States.
They are looking for a Protestantism that never was, mixed with a sort of pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism. There would be no Pope, so it can be observed by Protestants. Then they want to use the power of the New Deal/ Fair Deal state to ram this new religion down everyone's throats. The head of the government would be the only person with the power to be the head of the church.
Some proof of the fact that this concoction is new is that there was no law for these people to turn to when they were making up rules for Terri Schiavo, and there is no law for these people to turn to when they try to get Scooter Libby off for perjury. And there is no law for Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales, to turn to when they are trying to claim voter fraud based on the fact that black citizens turn up to vote. These people hate judges, even conservative Republican judges, because even the most conservative Judge will look to the law to justify an exercise of power. These people want the judges to exercise “Higher Law” as they see it.
It is true that traditionally, it has been liberals -- from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Martin Luther King, Jr. -- who have tended to claim “Higher Law”, especially in the area of civil rights. Conservatives have long been outraged -- calling these people Massachusetts liberals (Emerson, Thoreau, Sumner) and anarchists (Joe Hill) and Communists (Martin Luther King, Jr.) who did not understand the nature of the rule of law and the Constitution.
Turns out the Conservatives were never outraged over appeals to “Higher Law.” They were just waiting to overturn the Government that defeated their ancestors in war, freed their slaves, and then, 100 years later, gave their slave’s ancestors some of the rights of human beings.
In today's lead editorial, The New York Times
(obviously not objective, but not necessarily wrong), claimed that U.S. Attorneys are being fired, basically for allowing the descendents of these slaves, the right to vote in accordance with the law.
These Republican John Ashcroft-appointed U.S. Attorneys had the audacity to actually take their jobs seriously.
They didn’t understand the role of law in the new America.
Now, these new conservatives are beginning to wrap themselves in a religion that never existed to claim this is what God wanted for them all along.
Why shouldn’t a Mormon be our next President?
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Republican -v- Republican -- Lewis Libby
What makes the whole Libby thing different is that the Republicans did it to themselves.
This is not the Democrats going after Nixon. This is not the Republicans going after Clinton.
No. The right hand man of the most powerful Republican Vice President in history was done in by a lot of other Republicans.
The John Ashcroft Justice Dept agreed with the CIA request to investigate the Valerie Plame leak. Ashcroft’s Republican assistant, James Comey, appointed one of his own, Patrick Fitzgerald, perhaps the only Republican in Chicago.
When Libby lied to Fitzgerald, and in so doing, made Fitzgerald’s leak investigation meaningless, Fitzgerald sought to expand his investigation by going to the same Republican three-judge panel that agreed to expand Kenneth Starr’s investigation some years earlier.
Then, after years of Republican complaints that the press had too much immunity under the First Amendment, Fitzgerald basically had the law completely reinterpreted, and forced a lot of very rich, very well-backed reporters to testify. In fact, the only person who saw, who is likely to see, jail time in this whole enterprise was a reporter for the Republican bete noir, the New York Times.
In the end, a Republican prosecutor got Republican judges to get Democratic reporters to testify against Republican politicians.
All the leading players on both sides of the fence in the Libby trial are Republicans. As far as I can tell, no Republicans were involved in the selection of any jurors. If the jury, as it now appears, was unusually well educated (does that mean that they are presumptively more something or other), then that is the fault of the Republican defense attorneys that allowed those jurors on the panel.
Just like all the leading players on both sides of the issue in the U.S. attorney firings are Republicans. Most of these U.S. attorneys were appointed by John Ashcroft, a former Republican elected official, with the support of Republican senators and congressmen.
Just like a new Republican Secretary of Defense is forcing the generals feet to the fire in the Walter Reed scandal.
But to hear the right-wing media tell it, Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorneys, and Secretary Gates are all bleeding heart liberals trying to bring good conservatives down.
Don’t let ‘em do it, Democrats. Don’t waste your time rearguing WMDs and 2002. Democrats should keep the House hearings focused on the nuts-and-bolts stuff about where the money went. Believe me, they’ll be entertaining enough.
In the Senate, why bother to do anything when no one has the votes? Instead, they might want to spend their time on special projects. By which I mean the Martha Stewart kind.
If Democrats just grind it out, or better yet, just do nothing at all, they can continue to make those Republicans eat each other.
The bones they spit out are those of new liberals -- the Republicans who made Lew Libby’s conviction, the U.S. attorneys firing scandal, and the Walter Reed scandal possible.
So I’d like to welcome, to the liberal side, John Ashcroft, James Comey, Patrick Fitzgerald, and 8 Republican former U.S. attorneys.
I’d like to welcome Secretary of Defense Gates to the liberal side. A good betting pool can be formed by guessing how long Secretary Gates is going to survive in the Pentagon now that he insisted on shedding some light on the Walter Reed scandal.
Most poignantly, I’d like to welcome as new liberals all those poor wounded soldiers and their families – most from Red States, an overwhelming number of whom support the President. Their only crime against the Republicans is to ask the Bush Administration to keep its own promises.
It seems that one group of Republicans has a problem with another group of Republicans. You know, the old fashion type of Republican, who may disagree with me on policy, and even on procedures, and even on what the Constitution says, but at least believes in the primacy of the Constitution and the rule of law.
I wonder what Ann Coulter, new fangled Republican, would call those old fashioned rule-of-law-loving Republicans.
This is not the Democrats going after Nixon. This is not the Republicans going after Clinton.
No. The right hand man of the most powerful Republican Vice President in history was done in by a lot of other Republicans.
The John Ashcroft Justice Dept agreed with the CIA request to investigate the Valerie Plame leak. Ashcroft’s Republican assistant, James Comey, appointed one of his own, Patrick Fitzgerald, perhaps the only Republican in Chicago.
When Libby lied to Fitzgerald, and in so doing, made Fitzgerald’s leak investigation meaningless, Fitzgerald sought to expand his investigation by going to the same Republican three-judge panel that agreed to expand Kenneth Starr’s investigation some years earlier.
Then, after years of Republican complaints that the press had too much immunity under the First Amendment, Fitzgerald basically had the law completely reinterpreted, and forced a lot of very rich, very well-backed reporters to testify. In fact, the only person who saw, who is likely to see, jail time in this whole enterprise was a reporter for the Republican bete noir, the New York Times.
In the end, a Republican prosecutor got Republican judges to get Democratic reporters to testify against Republican politicians.
All the leading players on both sides of the fence in the Libby trial are Republicans. As far as I can tell, no Republicans were involved in the selection of any jurors. If the jury, as it now appears, was unusually well educated (does that mean that they are presumptively more something or other), then that is the fault of the Republican defense attorneys that allowed those jurors on the panel.
Just like all the leading players on both sides of the issue in the U.S. attorney firings are Republicans. Most of these U.S. attorneys were appointed by John Ashcroft, a former Republican elected official, with the support of Republican senators and congressmen.
Just like a new Republican Secretary of Defense is forcing the generals feet to the fire in the Walter Reed scandal.
But to hear the right-wing media tell it, Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorneys, and Secretary Gates are all bleeding heart liberals trying to bring good conservatives down.
Don’t let ‘em do it, Democrats. Don’t waste your time rearguing WMDs and 2002. Democrats should keep the House hearings focused on the nuts-and-bolts stuff about where the money went. Believe me, they’ll be entertaining enough.
In the Senate, why bother to do anything when no one has the votes? Instead, they might want to spend their time on special projects. By which I mean the Martha Stewart kind.
If Democrats just grind it out, or better yet, just do nothing at all, they can continue to make those Republicans eat each other.
The bones they spit out are those of new liberals -- the Republicans who made Lew Libby’s conviction, the U.S. attorneys firing scandal, and the Walter Reed scandal possible.
So I’d like to welcome, to the liberal side, John Ashcroft, James Comey, Patrick Fitzgerald, and 8 Republican former U.S. attorneys.
I’d like to welcome Secretary of Defense Gates to the liberal side. A good betting pool can be formed by guessing how long Secretary Gates is going to survive in the Pentagon now that he insisted on shedding some light on the Walter Reed scandal.
Most poignantly, I’d like to welcome as new liberals all those poor wounded soldiers and their families – most from Red States, an overwhelming number of whom support the President. Their only crime against the Republicans is to ask the Bush Administration to keep its own promises.
It seems that one group of Republicans has a problem with another group of Republicans. You know, the old fashion type of Republican, who may disagree with me on policy, and even on procedures, and even on what the Constitution says, but at least believes in the primacy of the Constitution and the rule of law.
I wonder what Ann Coulter, new fangled Republican, would call those old fashioned rule-of-law-loving Republicans.
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