We planted several young trees at our home in October, including a Mission Fig, a Japanese Crabapple, a multi-trunk Magnolia, and a Copper Beech. Planting in the fall gives the trees a chance to put down some roots before the winter so that, in the spring, they don’t bloom spectacularly and then die from lack of a good grounding in the soil. We took out most of our lawn so that this spring we will use much less water. There is another fall activity that I keep putting off–changing our furnace filter. I think I am averse to climbing around in the attic where our air-handler resides, due to a fear of falling through the ceiling.

I feel good that those new trees are sucking carbon out of the air as we speak. But a recent talk at Berkeley Labs, where Home Energy’s offices are located, made me think much bigger. Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures and earned his chops as the founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems. Khosla Ventures exists to “assist great entrepreneurs determined to build companies with lasting significance.”

Khosla, a tall, thin, 60-ish, short-grey-haired man who looks like he runs marathons, threw out some questions on a big screen to get us all interested. “What if more coal plants meant cleaner air? What if more driving meant less carbon? What if a million year crude oil production cycle were reduced to hours? What if engines were twice as efficient, cutting world oil consumption in half?” There are companies supported by Khosla Ventures that are making progress on those “what-ifs.” For example, a company called Pax Streamline is working on turbine designs inspired by natural forms that will significantly increase the efficiency of wind turbines, power plants, and HVAC systems.

Living Homes is creating cheap, prefabricated, highly resource efficient and really swell looking homes. Khosla talked about making flue gases from coal-fired power plants into cement or fertilizer (that’s how coal plants will someday clean the air).

The title of Khosla’s talk was “Extrapolating the past or Inventing the Future.” He thinks we need quantum leap changes in the way we design car engines, the fuel we use; how we manufacture cement, steel, and glass; and the way we build buildings. He spiced his talked with phrases such as “80% more efficient,” “3- or 4-fold increase in storage capacity,” and “100 miles per gallon diesel.”

This radical way of thinking and imagining is more possible given 1) the Obama administration coming to Washington, 2) the cost in treasure and lives for our fossil fuel dependency, and 3) the crash in the financial sector and the stock market. The same old way of doings things (think incremental steps and short-term gain) isn’t working anymore. Except for tree planting. That’s always good, even if having a small effect on planetary atmosphere. And I like figs.

(Go here for a video of Khosla’s talk. Then go plant a tree and invent the future.)

Your house may not be your biggest contributer to globalwarming. Credit: Jim Gunshinan.

My focus in this blog had been on green homes, but there are other areas of our lives that account for our total carbon footprint–how much carbon we are responsible for adding to the atmosphere–a measure of our contribution to global warming. Our houses and apartments, but also our cars, air travel, and the food we eat all contribute.

Don Fugler, who does research for the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, estimated the amount each area of our lives contributes to our carbon footprint. He used a hypothetical family of four (two adults, two kids) in Ottawa, with a medium-sized house (2,400 square feet), and two cars (Ford Explorer and Honda Fit) to do the calculations. Both parents work and travel about 20 miles roundtrip to work each weekday. The kids travel a few miles each day back and forth to school. Both parents make a total of five trips to Toronto and five trips to other places each year for business, and the family goes on a yearly ski trip to Whistler by air travel, and back and forth by car to visit relatives in Nova Scotia once a year.

For us Californians, replace Ottawa with Oakland, Whistler with Lake Tahoe, add a trip to Hawaii, and subtract most of the energy used for heating a house, and I think we come close to the Canadian example.

The folks who brought us the movie also gave us a niftycarbon calculator. Use it to measure the size of your carbonfootprint (go to www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction). Credit: www.climatecrisis.net

Our hypothetical family, according to Don’s calculations, emits about 13 tons of CO2 from their house, about 14 tons because of air travel, about 10 tons from their cars, and about 5 tons from the food they eat (including growing, shipping, and waste disposal). Notice that the highest amount is from air travel!

The folks who brought us the movie An Inconvenient Truth also provide an online calculator so that you can more accurately calculate your contribution to global warming–the site also gives good information on how to reduce your carbon footprint. Don recommends that we conduct more and more of our business using the Internet instead of traveling far from our homes, live close to our jobs in dense urban areas with good public transportation, ride our bikes a lot, and all become vegetarians.

These 5 folks are full of bright ideas. Image Source: PiccoloNamek

ACI trains home performance professionals through national and regional conferences and through the Web. Last week I participated in my eighth ACI national conference. The annual conference is where I go to network; learn about all aspects of home performance; recruit authors for Home Energy Magazine; and best of all, be inspired.

Here are a few of the people that I ran into last week who inspire me:

Don Fugler does research through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. He developed the Garbage Bag Air Flow Test. He rides his bike to work year round in Ottawa, and wears suspenders. He has a dry sense of humor and has toppled any lingering stereotype I had about Canadians. He told a crowded room at the ACI meetings in Pittsburgh that the way we live in our houses, the way we use our cars, and the way we travel in the air contribute about equally to our carbon footprints. The way we eat contributes a lot also. A pound of beef is responsible for a heck of a lot of greenhouse gases released. I don’t know if Don is a vegetarian, but I think he probably is.

Jim LaRue is a sort-of-retired home performance contractor from Cleveland, Ohio. He designed a really efficient and healthy house for a group of nuns in Ohio and wrote about it for Home Energy. He has also written for the Cleveland Green Building Coalition and for the magazine a Greening Your Home series of articles. I don’t know anyone who has worked harder to create healthy, efficient, and affordable housing in Cleveland. He’s retired but so far no one has noticed.

Linda Wigington has been with ACI since its beginning and is now the manager of program design and development. At the ACI Summit on global climate change held at the Pacific Energy Center in San Francisco last summer, which she was instrumental in bringing about, she talked about how she lived one whole winter in her home outside of Pittsburgh while never raising her thermostat above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. She is passionate about finding ways (mostly not involving such personal discomfort) to drastically reduce the energy use in existing homes to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Kate and Paul Raymer, founders of Hayoka Solutions, a green building and green building advocacy organization, announced the Starting from Home Challenge at the ACI meetings, an annual contest for post secondary school students around the country to create 70%–90% energy savings in existing homes with real people living in them. Hayoka is a Lakota Indian word describing someone who causes others to see things in a completely new way. Paul is an expert in healthy home ventilation. Don’t get him started on attached garages. “Why would anyone park their car in their house?” Paul often wonders.

I could go on, and on, and on. These are just a few of the people who inspire me. I hope they inspire you as well. 

I don’t think there is one big solution to our energy problems and the environmental problems related to the use of fossil fuels–there are lots of little solutions that in the end add up to a big solution.One of those little solutions I have been reading a lot about lately is a Drain Water Heat Recovery Device (DWHR). It looks like part of something you would find hidden in the hills and hollows of Appalachia that makes moonshine, but a DWHR device is a simple copper coil that you put around your shower drain that recovers some of the heat from your shower water. Cold water is circulated through the coils, gets heated by the drain water, and then flows into your hot water tank, or into your shower and hot water tank.The device is simple, effective, and doesn’t require much (like, no) maintenance. Drain water heat recovery devices contribute to large energy savings in laundries and in multifamily buildings, but will also work very well in single-family homes–as long as there is room under the showers. My one-story house in Walnut Creek is not a good candidate for such a device.

The simple workings of a drain water heat recovery device.Credit: gfxstar.ca, Inventroment Energy Solutions.

Canadian researchers from Natural Resources Canada tested the effectiveness of several DWHR devices at the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology.For an Ottawa household in which four people each take 12 minutes showers every day, a DWHR will save $150 a year in energy costs (at present, Canadian dollars are about equivalent to U.S. dollars). That’s about three times as much energy saved as the energy used to run an energy-efficient 20-cubic-foot refrigerator for a year. Over the 30-year lifetime of the DHWR, which costs about $800 including installation, the device will save the household close to $3,000.

The Canadian researchers created a Web-based Drain Water Heat Recovery-Energy Savings Calculator where building contractors, plumbers, and homeowners can go to estimate the cost effectiveness of several DWHR devices on the market. You just need to know the model of the device, the temperature of your shower water, estimated shower times, and so on. Right now it is set to work for Canadian locations. For U.S. homeowners, you have to pick a city in Canada. The calculator will be updated as newer technology is developed and tested.Here are some Web sites where you can find out more about DWHR devices that were submitted for testing at the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology:

• Power Pipe www.renewability.com
• ECO-GFX www.gfxstar.ca
• Retherm www.retherm.com

If a million households in the United States installed DWHR devices, we’d save a collective $150 million in annual energy costs, or about the equivalent of 1.25-billion kWh of electricity–or a ginormous amount of carbon dioxide in air from the natural gas not burned and electricity not generated.

Over the course of a week of working with concrete,this landscaping job produced only one bucketof wastewater. Credit: Ann Hutcheson-Wilcox

As a lifelong Catholic and former Catholic priest, I often find myself wishing that the Church would stick to what it knows best: the Sacraments. I wish the Pope would declare a 10-year moratorium on anyone with any authority in the Church saying anything at all about sexuality.

But sometimes the Vatican gets it right.

Polluting is a now a recognized social sin, along with another act that tends to wreck havoc on the environment, that is, contributing to the growing social and economic divide between rich and poor. The rich contribute inordinately to pollution and the poor suffer inordinately from it.

The Church has installed photovoltaics (PV) on the roofs of some Vatican buildings, and has recognized the scientific consensus that humans contribute to global warming. One of my teachers in the Divinity program at Notre Dame, Fr. Tim O’Meara, said that the Church responds quite slowly to crisis and change. “It spends twenty-five years denying the problem, twenty-five years quietly addressing it, and twenty-five years claiming that this is the way we’ve always done things.” So by historical standards, the Church is moving with lightning speed.

One of my coworkers at Home Energy told me that she viewed the new sin as another tool in the environmental education toolbox. Through her experience as an environmental organizer, policy analyst, and fundraiser, she has learned that individuals are motivated to take action on behalf of the environment due to personal belief or their own unique life experience. While working with contractors on her own home, she has often found it challenging to explain to people in the trades why she feels that it is her responsibility to go beyond business as usual. Last week’s announcement that “la contaminación ahora es un pecado” (pollution is now a sin) came just at the right time. The contractors she was working with to rebuild a retaining wall made primarily of reused concrete and found objects figured out how to avoid dumping any wastewater into her gutter, which empties directly into the local creek, a home for native rainbow trout. If pollution were not yet a sin, they may not have been as willing to consider the alternatives. Over the course of a week of working with concrete, they produced only one bucket of wastewater.

The new sins do present a challenge to the imagination of poets like myself. In Dante’s Divine Comedy there is no place in hell for unrepentant polluters. Now that the Vatican has named pollution a serious social sin, we may have to invent a punishment, and a metaphorical place in hell for polluters. Let’s see-tyrants, assassins, and warmongers swim in a river of boiling blood, and the wrathful tear each other to pieces with their teeth-maybe polluters will have to tread water in that twice-Texas-sized trash dump floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for all eternity, or at least until we decide how to clean it up.

 

What do you think life will be like when gasoline costs $15 per gallon?

That’s the question asked of a group of scientists, sociologists, others, and myself who gathered at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy(ACEEE) Summer Study in 2006. (ACEEE has really great resources for consumers on its Web site, including energy efficiency ratings for cars and appliances.) The Summer Study is on my mind because every two years ACEEE hires Home Energy to come down to Asilomar State Beach and Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California to publish a daily newsletter at the meetings. I know, a tough assignment!

Besides traditional presentations and discussion, the last Summer Study on residential energy use had groups competing to heat water above 1400F using a pop bottle, some bubble wrap, aluminum foil, a test tube, and the partial sunshine of the Pacific Coast. And, as I described in my introduction, the Summer Study gathers experts in many fields to look to the future and try to imagine what life will be like when fossil fuels begin to run out. Many people (including me) think we have reached worldwide peak oil, and the downward trend in oil production will bring higher and higher prices at the pump, for heating oil, and for many things we use every day that are either made from fossil fuels or are transported to us using fossil fuels.

When gasoline hits $15 per gallon, I think we will all be driving less. As transportation costs rise higher and higher, I think we will be forced to buy food grown locally and products made locally. It will still make sense to import some things from other states and other countries, but that will be increasingly rare. And I don’t think we’ll be building big houses in the suburbs and exurbs much. It will cost too much to heat, cool, and power a 4,000 to 5,000 square foot house and also commute 100 miles a day to work, even if the driver makes good money.

While a few religious people will wait and hope for the end of the world, I think many more will look to their local faith communities, as well as their families and friends, for mutual support as energy and other resources become scarce and fear towards the future increases. (Didn’t churches invent the food bank?) I’m not sure that we’ll all be living in communes, but there will be more groups living in large homes, and more people living in apartments, condominiums, or small single-family homes in or near cities.

Buses, subways, trains, and other forms of mass transportation will become much more popular, and large SUVs driven to the grocery store and soccer practices will become rare. I also predict… that hand cranks for windows, like I have on my 1997 Geo Prizm, will make a comeback! It will be harder to get parts for our complicated, automated machines and home appliances, and simple, tried and true technology will be in.

What do you think life will be like when gasoline costs $15 per gallon?

It would be easy to think that the 2007 Energy Bill, signed by President Bush at the end of last year, was all about automotive fuel economy. The legislation that requires fleetwide average fuel economy for cars and light trucks to reach 35 miles per gallon by 2030 has generated a lot of buzz. On the negative side, the lack of strong support for renewable fuels such as wind and solar has generated some buzz as well. I cannot find anything in the Bill about renewing solar and conservation tax credits for homes, and that is a big, big omission. But there is a lot in the bill that is positive for residential buildings—not enough to tackle problems like our addiction to fossil fuel and the specter of climate change, but certainly a step in the right direction.

Here are some home energy highlights, thanks to a summary of the bill by the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit coalition of business, government, environmental, and consumer leaders.

Appliance energy efficiency. The bill establishes new external power supply efficiency standards, based on the standards of California and other states; updates and creates new appliance efficiency standards and test procedures and provides for a regular review of those procedures; updates boiler efficiency standards and creates an electricity use standard for furnace fans; creates regional, climate-specific standards for furnaces, air conditioners, and heat pumps; requires DOE to include consideration of energy consumed while in standby mode for appliances already addressed by efficiency standards in their active mode; and directs the Federal Trade Commission  to require energy labels for televisions, personal computer monitors, cable and set top boxes, and digital video recorders.

Building efficiency. The 2007 Energy Bill directs DOE to set standards for manufactured housing that are at least as stringent as the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) national model code. There are also lots of provisions to increase the energy and water efficiency of government buildings and to create green building demonstration projects. The latter’s effect on housing? The government’s purchasing power moves whole industries—in this case it moves the building industry in the right direction.

Lighting. The Energy Bill directs DOE to set performance standards for general-service lightbulbs to achieve a 25%–­30% savings compared to incandescent bulbs by 2012–14. The bill also directs DOE to establish Bright Tomorrow Lighting prizes for the development of solid-state lighting.

Green jobs. The Energy Bill authorizes a Department of Labor energy efficiency and renewable energy worker training program, and establishes within the Office of Solar Energy Technologies a grant program to create and strengthen solar-industry workforce training and internship programs for installation, operation, and maintenance of solar-energy devices.

The bill also supports the recommendations offered by a group from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, including that of Home Energy Magazine Technical Editor Steve Greenberg, for greening the capitol complex, a set of buildings in Washington, D.C., including the Capitol, office buildings, and the capitol complex power plant. No mention is made of hot air energy recovery efforts from the chambers where Congress does its business.