Carbon taxes - What do you think?

More support for some sort of carbon tax arrived today -- this time, in a report from the Conference Board of Canada. It argues that greenhouse gas emissions should no longer be free. Industries and consumers should pay a price for them -- high enough to change behaviour and encourage development of new emissions-cutting technologies.

Presumably, it would make all the things we're discussing in this blog a lot more attractive, since there'd be bigger savings from doing them.

So, the list of conventional, business-related groups that favour green taxes continues to grow. Politically, though, only the Green Party has a strong, specific policy about them.

The Conferemce Board proposal calls, as most others do, for measures to offset the tax, basically making it revenue neutral by cutting other taxes, special transfers to Alberta and other provinces that would take a financial hit, and subsidies to help low-income people.

We'd like to know what you think: Are green taxes a good way to get lower emissions?

The low- or no-cost route to efficient appliances

Here are more, mostly free tips on how to get more efficient use from your big appliances:

Refrigerator:

• Position it away from a heat source such as a stove or oven, dishwasher, heating vent, or direct sunlight from a window.
• To let air circulate around the condenser coils, leave a space between the wall or cabinets and the refrigerator and keep the coils clean.
• Make sure the door seals are airtight.
• Keep your refrigerator between 35 and 38 degrees Fahrenheit (1 to 3 Celsius) and your freezer at 0 degrees Fahrenheit. (-18 to -15 Celsius.)
• Keep the fridge full.
• Minimize the amount of time the refrigerator door is open.
• Adjust temperature settings for different seasons. Check refrigerator setting by placing a thermometer in a jar of water and leaving in refrigerator overnight. In the morning, the temperature should read 35 to 38 degrees F. (1 to 3 C.) Adjust settings if necessary. Temperature settings usually need to be reduced in winter.
• During winter, freezer space often goes unused. Your refrigerator continues to use energy, however, to freeze this space. Take empty milk jugs, or other plastic containers, and fill them with water. Place them outside until they freeze, then put them in your freezer. This will fill the empty space and reduce the area to be kept cold.

Stove:

• Use the burner that’s the closest match to pot size. Heat is lost and energy is wasted if burner size is larger than pot size.
• Use lids on pots and pans so you can cook at lower settings.
• Pans with warped bottoms use 30 per cent more energy than flat pans. Insulated pans cut energy consumption by 58 per cent; pressure cookers by 68 per cent.
• Keep drip pans under conventional coil burners clean. Don’t line drip pans with aluminum foil — they can reflect too much heat and damage the elements.
• Preheat the oven only when baking.
• Check your oven temperature. Use a separate oven thermometer to ensure your oven control is accurate.
• Make sure the oven door seal is tight. Avoid opening oven door while baking: Each time the door is opened, about 20 per cent of the inside heat is lost.
• Turn oven off a few minutes before food is ready, and let oven heat finish the job.
• With gas stoves: electronic ignition will use about 40 per cent less gas than a pilot light.
• Use the microwave. They use only one-third to half as much energy as conventional stoves.

Washer:

• Match water level and temperature settings on your washer to the size of your load. Don’t fill the whole tub for a few items. Newer machines have automatic water level settings that adjust to load size.
• Call your water utility and ask them how “hard” or “soft” your water is. You may be using up to six times as much detergent as you need. Your appliance manuals will tell you how much you need for your water type.
• As much as 90 per cent of the energy used by your washing machine is used to heat the water. For most washing applications, cold or warm wash and cold rinse are just as effective as hot wash and warm rinse. The rinse temperature doesn’t effect the quality of the cleaning.
• Avoid using too much detergent. Follow instructions on the box. Oversudsing makes your machine work harder and use more energy.

Dryer:

• Use a clothesline or indoor drying rack as much as possible. It will save energy and reduce fabric wear on your garments (the lint on the lint screen is your clothing being broken down). Energy Minister Gerry Phillips says people could save $30 a year if they hung just a quarter of their laundry on a line.
• lf you must resort to a dryer, clean the lint screen after each use. Lint build-up greatly reduces efficiency.
• Overloading the dryer lengthens drying time. Clothes should dry in 40 minutes to one hour.
• Choose a “perma press” (cool-down) cycle. No heat is supplied in the last few minutes, but drying continues as cool air is blown through the tumbling clothes.
• Keep the dryer exhaust vent clean. It should be clear of cobwebs and lint. The moveable shutters should move easily — they’re designed to prevent cold air, heat and insects from entering the vent when the dryer is not operating.
• Dry multiple loads back to back. Because the dryer takes time and energy to warm up to drying temperature, stop-and-start drying uses more energy.

-- Peter Gorrie

The credit card route to efficient appliances

If you’re buying new, choose an Energy Star fridge and washer and the most efficient stove and dryer you can afford. An Energy Star label, by the way, doesn’t mean an appliance is the most efficient, period. It simply means it’s better than others of the same size and with similar features.

For fridges, top-mounted freezers are most efficient, followed by bottom-mount and, the worst, side-by-side. Ice makers and other add-ons increase energy consumption.

Clothes washers can be front- or top-loading. Top-loaders use more water and energy, but they don’t rattle around as much and are less likely to need repairs. Since up to 90 per cent of the energy use comes from heating the water, the biggest potential saving comes from using cold water for the wash and rinse.

Dryers are pretty much what they are. Natural gas versions are more efficient than electric.

The best stoves operate by induction — using magnetism instead of heating up an element to cook food. They apply 90 per cent of the energy consumption to cooking, compared with 65 per cent for a regular electric stove and up to 75 per cent for smooth-top models. But induction stoves typically cost more than $4,000. It might seem counterintuitive, but self-cleaning ovens use less electricity, mainly because they’re built with better insulation to contain the high heat of the cleaning cycle. Natural gas is less efficient than electricity right at the stovetop, but it’s better overall because of the massive energy consumption involved in producing and transmitting electricity.

Challenge 2: Clotheslining energy waste

It’s apparently a revolutionary idea.
The linear solar drying device.
The Ontario government caught on to the concept a few days ago when Energy Minister Gerry Phillips announced the province would end most prohibitions on its use.
The device is a technology for drying laundry. Here’s how it works: String a line outside; attach clothes to it with specially designed wooden or plastic pins; let the sun and breeze remove moisture; bring clothes back inside.
Indoor models are also available. Call them “linear ambient-air drying devices.” For some ideas, see this Yahoo site.

Okay, it’s just a clothesline. My mother used one way back in the 1960s: I helped to load and unload it from time to time. These days at home, challenged for space to string lines, we’ve come up with artfully crafted inner-city adaptations: the shower curtain rod, door knobs and, for small items, the drawer pulls on the dresser.
It’s an environmentally friendly, pollution-free technology. (Peter Ormond, of Hamilton, also points out how ludicrous it is, in winter, to shoot warm, moist air from a dryer into the great outdoors while a furnace burns energy to warm and moisten incoming air.)

Even so, judging by the shrieks of horror from many builders and suburbanites, you’d think it was the Devil’s work. Unsightly. Death to property values. Too much work. Such an evil blight that it’s banned in many housing developments. Underwear? Ugh!
So, the fact it’s making a comeback could be seen as revolutionary.

It's also as much message as solution. We’ve come to rely on gadgets to reduce our environmental footprint. Often there are simpler, cheaper options. The clothesline requires more time and effort than tossing laundry into a dryer. Most of the alternatives, though, simply demand a bit of thoughfulness.

Which brings us to this week’s Green Life challenge.

Challenge: Reduce the energy consumed by the four major appliances in almost every home — refrigerator, stove, washer and dryer, either by purchasing new energy-efficient models or taking low- or no-cost steps to make better use of what you have.

Motivation: As always, cut your energy consumption, and bills.

Process: The fast way to the biggest savings is to simply buy new, energy-efficient versions of these appliances. Fridges and washers come in Energy Star versions. Stoves and dryers don’t — there isn’t a big enough difference among the various models to justify the labelling — but modern ones are more efficient than older vintages.

But this is a big-ticket item. It costs at least $3,500 to replace all four. The savings are expected to be substantial if you compare the new appliances to those from a decade or more ago. The actual payback period will depend on what happens to electricity and natural gas prices. An Energy Star label, by the way, doesn’t mean an appliance is the most efficient, period. It simply means it’s better than others of the same size and with similar features. For buying tips see my post Buying Tips. Check Energy Star Canada for a list of appliance ratings, Look here to see how appliances have imprroved over the years.

The list of energy-saving tips is long. You can find a good one at Eartheasy or see my tips post. Remember that these apply to Energy Star models as well. In fact, it’s important to beware the common tendancy to use ssomething more simply because it’s more efficient. When you do that, the environmental and economic benefits fly out the window.

Whether you have new or old appliances, the challenge is to try these steps:

Refrigerator:

• Check the seal by closing the door on a $5 or $10 bill. If you can pull the bill out with the door closed, you need to replace the rubber gasket. While you're at it, make sure the fridge temperature is between 35 and 38 degrees Fahrenheit and the freezer is at 0 and 5 Fahrenheit. If there's no temperature readout, put a thermometer in a jar of water and leave it in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, the temperature should read 35 to 38 degrees F. (1 to 3 C.) If it doesn't, adjust the setting.
• If there's empty space in the freezer section, fill empty milk jugs, or other plastic containers with water. Place them outside until they freeze, then put them in your freezer. This will fill the empty space and reduce the area to be kept cold.

Stove:

• Always use the burner that’s the closest match to your pot size, and use lids on pots and pans so you can cook at lower settings. Avoid using pots and pans with warped bottoms -- they require 30 per cent more energy.
• Use a separate oven thermometer to ensure your oven control is accurate, and make sure the door seal is tight.

Washer:

• Match the water level to the size of your load. Don’t fill the whole tub for a few items. Use warm or cold water for the wash cycle and cold for the rinse.
• Check how much detergent you're using. Oversudsing makes your machine work harder and use more energy.

Dryer:

• Dry multiple loads back to back, since the dryer will already be heated, and clean the lint screen after each use. Lint build-up greatly reduces efficiency.
• Buy and use an indoor drying rack and commit to an outdoor line for summer. Energy Minister Gerry Phillips says people could save $30 a year if they hung just a quarter of their laundry on a line.

Cost: Apart from the minimal cost of a clothesline, the energy-saving tips are free. Energy Star appliances tend to cost at least $800 each, and the best are hundreds more.

Savings: The clothesline saving is already cited — $30 a year for a quarter of your wash, or $120 for the whole thing. The says you’ll save $71 a year, and about 275 kilograms worth of carbon dioxide emissions if you use warm water rather than hot to wash your clothes and cold water to rinse them. That’s if you have a natural gas water heater. The savings doubles with an electric heater. Savings from the rest of the tips are hard to predict, but since the steps cost nothing, anything is a gain.
As for new appliances, the savings and payback period will depend on the cost of the new item, the age and efficiency of the one it’s replacing, and the cost of energy where you are, now and in future. Carbon Busters estimates, for example, that a reasonably priced new Energy Star fridge will pay for itself in energy savings in just five or six years if it’s replacing an early ’70s model, but up to 30 years if you already have a recent conventional version.

Let us know if you have any other ideas, and how you do with this challenge.

--Peter Gorrie

Lighting up the blog

Thanks for all the bright ideas and questions about our first Green Life challenge, replacing incandescent lights with compact flourescents.

CFLs do raise issues. For one, it's sometimes hard to find versions that work with dimmer switches in tri-lights or enclosed fixtures, outdoors or in high-moisture areas like bathrooms. But they are available at Home Depot and elsewhere. The key thing is that you need a special type of CFL for each situation.

As well, CFLs are weakened more than incandescents by being turned on and off. Each flick cuts about 10 minutes from their expected life. That's not really a great deal. But the rule of thumb is, if you'll be out of a room for more than two minutes, turn off the CFLs. (For incandescents, it's 30 seconds.)

As some of you suggested, there is a slight danger if a CFL breaks. There's a bit of mercury vapour, and likely a tiny amount of solid, inside the glass tube. Our experts say there's not much risk from a broken bulb or two, but you need to do a thorough clean-up and, most important, be careful around them.

Disposal remains a major problem. The mercury needs to go for hazardous waste treatment dump. Right now, you can drop them off at Home Depot and Ikea, or you can store them for your city councillor's regular Environment Day in summer and drop them off with your expired batteries. The Recycling Council of Ontario is working on a proposal that would require all stores that sell CFLs to take them back for safe disposal. Chris Winter, of the Conservation Council of Ontario, which has launched a Weconserve campaign, favours a household Red Box collection for CFLs, batteries and other hazardous domestic products.

Incandescent bulbs do help to heat your home, so your furnace will have to work a little harder in winter after you switch to CFLs. But if your furnace runs on natural gas, it's far more efficient than the incandescent bulb at producing heat. Incandescents also generate unwanted heat in summer, and it takes three times more energy to compensate for that by cranking up the A/C than than it does to tweek up the furnace for their absence in winter.

Halogen bulbs are relatively efficient, but you can do much better by replacing them with LED lamps, which are still quite expensive but last a long, long time and require only a trickle of electricity. Their main drawback is that they focus light even more effectively than halogens do. The solution is to have several in a fixture with a lens to spread the light a bit. Even if the fixture contains half a dozen LED lamps, it will still require just 7 or 8 watts of electricity, says Richard Krause, of Carbon Busters.

--Peter Gorrie

Update:

Some uncertainty about tri-light CFLs. Jenny Vassilev at Grassroots Environmental Products reports that they're hard to come by, since early versions were unstable, so it's back to the drawing booard for them. Home Depot sells them, though.

Grassroots sells a covered CFL called the X-Bulb which can be used in enclosed fixtures. It helps if a little air can get at the bulb.

Tree skyscrapers - Skyscraper trees

There's a great little place on Queen St., a bit west of Dufferin, called Cafe Taste, where you buy wine and they supply a plate of cheese that's selected to compliment the drink. Sunday nights, they also show films, usually with an environmental bent -- not surprising, since owner Jeremy Day is trying to make the cafe as green as possible. He even recycles the little aluminum candle cups. With the movies, he says, "we're doing what we can to reach out and shake things up."

I was there a couple of weeks ago to see a PBS documentary on climate change. It covered all the bases, with billions of pixels devoted to shots of belching smokestacks and raging storms.

These days, I'm far more focused on solutions than on adding to the warnings about what climate change will do to the planet and to us.  Fear isn't a great motivator for long-term change.

This movie was long -- two hours -- a series of talking heads that made it seem the only people involved in the issue are white males between 45 and 65 (but that's another story.) The main thing is that it raised all the potential answers, and then showed how none would work. In the end, the message was, we have to wait with our fingers crossed for some new miracle technolgoy, like giant (pie-shaped) mirrors high in the sky) to come along.

One of the things trashed -- and in about 15 seconds -- was the idea of conservation. It seems that it involves wearing a sweater, and that's too difficult so forget it.  Unfortunately, that's a pretty common idea. And it's wrong. After covering the environment for years, I've concluded that conservation -- simply finding ways to use less energy and resources -- appears to be the one thing with a chance of success.  But we have to go at it with enthusiasm and imagination. Some of the steps depend on new technology, but a lot are simply being smarter and less wasteful, not to mention learning from the past.

That's what this blog is about. Ideas and experiences. What works, and what doesn't.

At my place, a downtown rowhouse, three people, we've cut our Hydro bill be more than half without changing anything about how we live -- which means there's still a long way to go. Some of the stuff -- like a new furnace and windows -- was expensive, but the main change wasn't. We replaced an electric water heater with a natural gas model, and turned down the temperature a little. Since both heaters are rentals, there was very minimnal upfront cost, and the increase in gas use is a tiny fraction of the previous electricity consumption.

Long lists of these types of things are availalbe. For a start, try the Conservation Council of Ontario's Weconserve web site.

I'm also interested in bigger-scale projects, because we won't stop climate change with small, piecemeal actions like the one's I've taken. They're important, but not nearly enough. How can we construct houses and other buildings better, so they use little or no energy? How can we change the forces that continue to promote urban sprawl? I love things like the home being built by David and Cathy Braden, near Hamilton, which doesn't need a furnace and will use only about 15 per cent as much energy as the average house. Or others that I've heard of since I wrote about the Bradens last month. Or, potentially, the skyscraper, to be unveiled next week, that's supposed to do everything a tree does -- generate its own energy, create soil, support life -- except reproduce itself. Or the communities in Germany that produce more energy than they consume. Or the house in Thailand covered with paint that cools the surface enough that every day 80 litres of water condenses out of the air to be used for washing and toilets. It's described in Chris Turner's book, The Geography of Hope.

So, I aim to present, and I hope you'll add, ideas big and small, that are different and workable. What have you tried? What happened? What would you like to see? How can we make that happen?

Next up for me will be that tree-skyscraper-tree. Okay, soon up. Another challenge is coming first.

-- Peter Gorrie

Treadmill Thoughts

I just came from The Star's gym where I sweated over a bike in spin class for -- cough-cough -- can I say 35 minutes? In front of me was a line of fit joggers whirling on the treadmills.
Now, I'm a big runner most of the time. (Do I admit here that I'm actually 7 months pregnant? So right now, the only jogging I'm doing is for a seat on the subway. Which I rarely get. But that's another rant...) But I've always had a thing against treadmills.
They seem to me like a symbol of our wasteful consumption. And totally contradictory -- like taking an elevator to the gym to spend 30 minutes on the Stairmaster.
So I did a little research. It turns out (according to Treadmills USA) that the average treadmill uses around 1500 watts -- the equivalent of 15 of those old-fashioned light bulbs we've all chucked this week. So, over 30 minutes, you use .75 kilowatt-hours (logic= 1.5 kw x 0.5 hours) -- the same amount you'd use to light up your Christmas tree for six hours. (To check out the amount of electricity you use for appliances, check here.)

According to the Energy Star website, there is no such thing as an Energy Star treadmill. It's called running outside.

-- Catherine Porter

Challenge No. 1, Climate Savers, Should You Accept

I still buy lunch in Styrofoam containers. I drive to the grocery store some weekends, when I could walk. And no matter how much I whine and cajole, I can't get my husband to turn off the computer modem at night.

Even as someone paid to research and write about the environment, I still ain't no green purist.

I get overwhelmed too. Many choices befuddle me. My one-year-old daughter wears cloth diapers but the studies I've read say they aren't necessarily gentler on the environment than disposables -- especially chlorine-free ones.

And there are times I feel defeated. As in, what's the point of me riding my bike to work instead of driving, if our government won't even commit to meeting its own feeble watered-down green house emission cut plan?

But then, someone like my neighbour Mary-Margaret comes to the rescue. She's the community eco-witch (her term, not mine, but I like it.) She scouts the streets for plantable spots and then calls the city and orders a tree. She saves fliers errantly left in her mailbox to write notes on. She rides the subway with her two kids to environmental protests. And at a crazy party at her house, I noticed she has a bin in her bathroom for tissue to be composted instead of flushed.

I'm not her only devotee. Another neighbour told me she now collects her compost while on vacation and schleps it home to Toronto to be put into the green bin, inspired by Mary-Margaret.

She's proof, in my mind, that one person can make a difference.

And not to get all Kum Bay Yah on you, but I buy the argument that many people making small changes can add up to big impacts. All it would take is one new compact fluorescent bulb in each Ontario home to cut 66,000-cars worth of emissions.

It's the whole getting started part that can be tough.

So, in the lead up to Earth Hour, my colleague Peter Gorrie (much more knowledgeable, experienced and green than me -- think plaid shirt and bicycle helmet during negative 20 weather) will issue a weekly challenge -- for both ourselves and you.

In some cases, you might be leagues ahead of us. In others, we'll have done more legwork (his electricity bill is half the Ontario average, for one.) But, in the end, we should all have made some changes that lighten our load on the earth.

And we want to hear from you -- how you are doing, what you are doing, suggestions and challenges of your own. So hit the comment button. Or send us e-mails.

Think of it as a little green support group. Or the nudge you've been waiting for.

We'll start easy this week, with a positively painless challenge. It's also the first rite of passage for eco-converts.

So here it is.

Challenge: Replace all incandescent light bulbs in your homes with compact fluorescents and slay all indoor power vampires.

Motivation: While most people blame industry for the bulk of our country's green house gases, own personal lifestyles and choices contribute to one-third to half of them. About 16 per cent of that comes from the electricity and heat we pump into our homes -- a lot of it totally wasted.

Old-fashioned light bulbs, for instance, use 95 per cent electricity towards heat instead of light. And since lighting can take up 15 per cent of your home's electricity bill, that's a lot of wasted dollars and green house gases. Especially when there's an easy fix. Compact fluorescent bulbs use a quarter of the electricity their incandescent brothers suck up, and each bulb lasts ten times as long.

Never heard of power vampires? They are electronic gadgets that suck energy to stay on even when you turn them off (Shocking, no?). Things like your television, DVD player, cell phone charger, stereo. The average home has 30, according to Godo Stoyke, author of The Carbon Buster's Home Energy Handbook. (He's a full-time energy-efficiency consultant, but in his spare time, a complete conservation nut. He lives in a solar home in Alberta, which makes that doubly impressive.) To add insult to injury, they can suck up 20 per cent of a home's electricity bill, surpassing even the mighty fridge.

They're like eating chocolate while you're asleep -- super high calories you don't even get to enjoy.

There are fancy tools that will tell you definitively if a gadget is a vampire, and how much power it sucks while in stand-by mode, like the Watts Up and Kill A Watt meters. But, the easier low-tech test is to turn it off and see ten minutes later if it's still warm. (Also, if it has a black brick on its cord, it's a given vampire.)

Process: Don't wait for old ones to run out. Unscrew them now, and replace them with new ones -- opting for cheap bulbs in places like the basement, where you don't care if it glows, and for more expensive ones that cast softer light for your living and bed rooms. Remember, you need to buy special outdoor CFLs for your porch, and special dimmable ones if your outlet comes with a dimmer switch. (Regular CFLs don't work with dimmers.)

As for the vampires, simply unplug the old television you rarely use, and buy power bars for the things like your computer, that you use regularly. Then, it's just remembering to turn the power bars off -- something I fight with my husband about regularly.

Cost: $120 - $100 for 16 light bulbs, and $20 for three power bars.

Savings: Replacing 16 bulbs with CFLs will save you about 1050 kilowatt hours over the year (assuming you keep them on for four hours a day) -- about a month's worth of electricity in my house. Slaying 90 per cent of your homes' power vampires will save you around 1060 kilowatt hours, according to Stoyke. Taken together, that's about $210 in electricity bills, and 600 kilograms of green house gases you've just saved from the atmosphere -- as much as driving from Toronto all the way to Winnipeg (about 2000 kilometres), according to Toronto Hydro's green calculator.

-- Catherine Porter

Reader Philip Ridge offers a variety of helpful energy-reducing hints in the comments section to this post, and has graciously provided an image of his hydro bill as proof that they can add up to impressive savings. Click the thumbnail to your right for a closer look, or click on the "comments" button to see how he did it.