Big Foot revisited

Just when you thought going green couldn't get any more complicated along comes the New Yorker magazine with "Big Foot," an article by Michael Spector that raises questions about the assumption that eating locally produced food is always better, in climate change terms, than stuff that's imported from a long distance away, even if it's shipped by air. It's generally assumed that greater distance means more greenhouse gas emissions. Spector argues that's not invariably the case. It's worth a read, although it doesn't deal with the issues raised in our Challenge 3, about the heavy impact of consuming animal products. Here's one example:

"Researchers at Lincoln University, in Christchurch, found that lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to England produced 688 kilograms of carbon-dioxide emissions perton, about a fourth the amount produced by British lamb. In part, that is because pastures in New Zealand need far less fertilizer than most grazing land in Britain (or in many parts of the United States.)"

Nevertheless, that still leaves the choice of lamb or not lamb. 686 kilograms is a lot of CO2.

--Peter Gorrie

Challenge 5: Throwing down the gauntlet -- and the keys

Not more joking around.

You’ve switched your light bulbs, screwed in your water-saving nozzles, even given up one of those T-bone dinners you love so much every week. But, if we are really going to rope in climate change before it’s too late, we need to address one inescapable habit: driving.

No matter how many pet names you have for your car, it’s still chief among evils when it comes to greenhouse gases – not to mention smog, acid rain and sprawl.

So, this week, it’s time to cut back on the gas.

For some of you, whose Hondas resemble igloos right now, it might hardly seem a stretch. But if you count yourself among that special Greater-Toronto breed of commuters, spending up to an hour and twenty minutes behind the wheel every day just to get to work and back, it will seem a serious sacrifice.

The Challenge: Spend one less day in the car this week than is your norm. Period. Taking a cab instead of driving doesn’t count.

If you are a road-warrior who all but lives in your car, that means one day on transit, carpooling or walking.

If you are like me, and only really drive on weekends, it means schlepping your groceries the old-fashioned way – on your shoulders.

Motivation: Transportation makes up more than quarter of our green house gases in the country.

Specifically, for every kilometre you drive in average-sized car, you spew out 316 grams of green house gases. Your SUV discharges an extra 145.

The average Canadian round-trip commute is 16 kilometres. But in the GTA, where people are known to leave their homes before dawn to avoid parking on Highway 401, it’s much, much more. One commuter profiled in The Star last December, Michael Barrett, drives 150 kilometres a day to get from his Oshawa home to his office in Mississauga and back.

So, let’s take a happy median. If you chuck your keys and cut out 32 kilometres of driving over one day, you’ll cut out more than 10 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Do that every week for a year, and you’ll cut out as much carbon as if you’d unplugged your home for two whole months. Astounded? It's true -- if you factor in the fact that in Ontario, about about 80 per cent of our electricity comes from green sources. (I know that building nuclear plants requires a lot of greenhouse gases, but so does building solar panels.... I'm talking output here.) To do the math on that, the World Wildlife Fund Canada's Keith Stewart pointed me to Environment Canada's inventory on greenhouse gases, which shows that in Ontario every kilowatt-hour of electricity translates to 220 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Process: Remove car keys from pocket, put them in a distant drawer for the day. Locate the nearest public transit stop.

Cost: Time spent planning. If you live in the suburbs and need to cross town for work, you’ll have to get familiar with a host of Go Transit and TTC maps.

Savings: About $14. Not driving 32 kilometres will mean you’ve just saved about four litres of gas – or about $4. Add to that the ransom you pay daily to park downtown.

-- Catherine Porter

Jail time for climate change deniers?

Politicians who don't address climate change should be thrown in jail.
That's what environmentalist David Suzuki said in a speech at the McGill Business Conference on Sustainability last week.

Their inaction and dismissal of the problem, he said, amounts to a "intergenerational crime."

"What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing is a criminal act," he told the crowd. 

In his blog, he reiterates his point. Check it out.
-- Catherine Porter 

Challenge 4 -- Slow the flow

After a week up to our knees in the sublimated version of the wet stuff (okay, it was snow), being careful with water might not seem a major issue.
But how we use it has big impacts. So, this week’s challenge is to reduce the amount flowing into, and from, our homes.

The Challenge: Cut your domestic water consumption as much as possible with a few new habits and, perhaps, a couple of purchases.

Motivation: Daily water use in Toronto averages 253 litres per person. The city’s goal is a 15 per cent cut by 2011. Unless your home is one of those in the inner city still paying a flat rate, using less will save you money. It could also cut greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation. It takes one kilowatt-hour of electricity for each cubic metre of water drawn from Lake Ontario, purified, pumped to consumers, removed, run through a sewage treatment plant. That costs only eight cents, but Toronto used 374 million cubic metres last year. Toronto Water's Lou Di Gironimo also points out conservation's biggest benefit is that it lets the city provide water to more people with less infrastructure. what we don't require, we don't need to build.

Process: First, change a few habits: Turn off the faucet while you brush your teeth, shave, or wash vegetables. If you have a dishwasher, don’t pre-wash under the tap. If you hand wash, use the second sink or a bowl, rather than running water, for the rinse. Next, install a low-flow showerhead and faucets: If you’re more ambitious, get a low-flow toilet. Unhandy as I am, I did it recently and, apart from issues related to the fact I live in an old, jury-rigged house, the installation was easy and it does what it’s supposed to.

Beyond these few challenge items, the list of potential water-saving tips goes on and on and on and on. Again, they range from further no-cost changes in habits to the relatively expensive purchase of a water-efficient clothes washer. Mostly, though, it's a matter of viewing water as a precious resource, not just something that's there in an endless supply that we don't have to think about.

Cost: The city sells water efficiency kits for $15. Toilets cost $100 to $400, but you get a $60 rebate from Toronto Water.  There’s also $60 back if you buy an efficient washer. Again, I’ve done both and the cheques do arrive in the mail.

Savings: The city charges about $1.81 for each 1,000 litres of water. Your actual payback depends on how much you reduce. For some changes, the calculation is obvious: Switching from a conventional to low-flow toilet cuts consumption by seven litres per flush. It would take about 150 flushes to save around $2, but they add up fast. Other results aren’t so immediately clear and you’ll likely need to wait for your next water bill to see them.

Let us know how you do.

--Peter Gorrie

Did you try Challenge 3?

By now, some (many?) of you may have tried to go vegan for a day. We'd like to hear how you managed.

What was easy about it? What was hard? What were the worst things to do without, and what new foods did you discover that you really liked?  One of the worst things for me -- and it's tiny -- is finding a substitute for milk, on its own or in the essential cups of coffee. I like soy as a solid, but as a milk replacement -- ugghhh.

Our challenge might have been too simple, since it allows you to just postpone a meaty meal for a day. But this is mainly about awareness and using new knowledge to make choices.

---Peter

Nosing into Nanticoke

So, Tyler Hamilton and I got a rare peak inside of Nanticoke a couple weeks ago.
Tyler cover's clean technology for The Star, which means he's far smarter than me. At least on this topic.
(I'm a better volleyball player, right Tyler? Not that I'm competitive.....)

It was the first trip by journalists into the place in a year. They're rare, for reasons the staff couldn't articulate. At first I thought it might stem from security concerns --  ie. showing too much of the essential nuts and bolts of our energy system to terrorists, or angry hippies, or the folks at Greenpeace, who last year piled into a dinghy and tried to interrupt a shipment of coal enroute to the plant. But then, it could be that Nanticoke has been on the top-three-places-to-despise list of many people for the past couple years, since Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers made the bestseller list. (If you haven't read it, head out to the library right now. Really excellent.) And really, who likes to be unpopular?

The truth is, unless you've signed up for Bullfrog Power and are paying an extra $1 a day for clean electricity to be pumped into South Ontario's grid, Nanticoke is part of your daily life.

If you want to take a peak, check out this little video I shot while there. (Sorry for the odd bumby picture. We were walking too fast at times to set up a tripod.)

-- Catherine Porter

Challenge 3: Moooo-ve away from meat

Mmmmmm.
A thick juicy steak, dripping with barbecue sauce.
Hmmmmm.
A spicy lentil casserole, fragrant baked beans or golden cubes of tufu in a coconut-curry Thai sauce.
The choice is at the heart of this week’s Green Life challenge.
For some of you, it won’t be a big deal. In fact, you might get a free pass this week.
All you dedicated carnivores, though, might think it’s far tougher than the previous challenges — changing light bulbs and making more efficient use of your major appliances.
The Challenge: Eat less meat: To be specific, go vegan for one day a week. That means no animal products. Which means taking meat, poultry, fish and dairy off the menu. And not adding it on any of the other days.

Motivation: There are plenty of alternatives and most of them come with hefty health and environmental benefits. Many also taste just as good; just different.

Meat production consumes a lot of resources and is responsible for substantial pollution, including nearly one-fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — which makes it roughly equal to transportation as a contributor to climate change.

The average Canadian eats about 33 kilograms of beef and nearly 38 kilograms of poulty each year. Per capita consumption has declined a bit here in the past few decades, but globally, meat consumption has soared by 500 per cent since 1950 and is expected to rise 2 per cent annually until 2015.

Some other motivators:

• 70 per cent of Earth’s agriculture land is devoted to pasture or lfeed crops.
  lOne-third ot global cereal crops go to feed livestock.
• Transporting that feed generates 160 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year.
• This is no joke. Cattle produce prodigious amounts of methane, which is 23 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. More than 35 litres of methane are generated for each litre of milk.
• Animal agriculture produces 100 million tonnes of methane per year, 85 per cent from digestion and the rest of lagoons where their wastes are stored.

• Vast tracts of forest are cleared for livestock grazing and feed crops.

• A recent Japanese study says the energy consumed to produce a kilogram of beef is enough to drive a reasonably efficient car 100 kilometres or light a 100-watt bulb for 20 daysdays. This and many other tidbits are found in Mark Bittman's New York Times article Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler.

• The average American eats about 100 grams of protein a day. That’s about twice the amount recommended by the U.S. government. Three quarters comes from animal products. So, dietary experts say, we could dramatically cut consumption without any ill effects and, in fact, probably less heart disease and cancer.

Put it all together, says Keith Stewart, of WWF-Canada, and switching from the average Canadian diet to meat-free would cut per capita greenhouse emissions by 1.3 tonnes a year. Since the average total is about 20 tonnes, that’s a substantial gain.

“Simply by going vegetarian (or, strictly speaking, vegan) we can eliminate one of the major sources of emissions of methane, the greenhouse gas responsible for almost half of the global warming impacting the planet today,” says blogger Elizabeth Neve, who proposed this challenge.
PROCESS: Eliminate animal products from your diet one day a week. Don’t increase their consumption the rest of the time.

There are plenty of recipes on the Internet. A good place to start is the Vegan Chef.

If you want to learn what it means to be an all-out Vegan.

And check out the Ethical Man, as he goes vegan.

COSTS AND SAVINGS: Hard to calculate, but plant-based foods are generally cheaper than animal products.

-- Peter Gorrie (Who doesn't eat meat but is big on fish and dairy so will find this a substantial challenge.)

Note from Catherine Porter: For those of you that think one day is extreme, check out this Californian who has pledged to eat only things out of his garden plot for the year, with a few exceptions. He calls it his "100-inch diet."

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.