Category: Energy & Sustainability

A politics-neutral report on how to vastly reduce New York City’s energy use could serve as a model for cities around the country, and around the world.

Some of the plans make a huge amount of sense, especially for a city like NYC with a well-developed transit system and large inventory of existing buildings.

In NYC, most of those buildings have flat roofs. I have long advocated using those roofs for food and energy self-sufficiency, through garden spaces and solar collectors. The report points out that solar hot water is 60-70% efficient–far better than photovoltaic (solar systems that change sunlight into electricity). In my own very non-urban house, my experience bears this out. Our solar hot water system works extremely well, but our photovoltaic panels generate a much smaller percentage of our energy than I’d hoped. The three hot water panels immediately sliced out a big part of our electric bill (we had been heating our water with electricity), while the four PV panels made a much smaller reduction.

Better still, says the report, would be a crash program to retrofit existing buildings with low-energy light bulbs and capture the heated or cooled waste air that escapes (often because tenants in overheated apartment buildings actually keep windows open in winter!).
Combine that with a serious program to switch from cars and trucks to other transit alternatives, and NYC would slash its energy use.

While this report mentions a number of technological alternatives to conventional fossil fuels, I feel one area where it’s weak is in evaluating those technologies. It gives lip service to the major problem of food displacement if there was a widespread switch to biofuels, but doesn’t go into any detail. And then it brings up tired dead horses with high energy and pollution costs, such as oil shale extraction. Haven’t we learned something in the last 30 years?

Still, this report has enough easily- and cheaply-implemented strategies to be well worth a look–as long as we use a critical thinking filter to evaluate the ecological and dollar consequences of each recommendation.

The more I learn about biodiesel, the less convinced I am that it is anything more than a temporary feel-good “solution” with problems of its own.

Keep in mind that oil and coal are biofuels: when we burn them, we are burning fossilized plant matter from ages long past.

I don’t have a problem with biodiesel that uses waste oil from fast food restaurants, etc. But when crops are grown to be converted to energy–and that’s what will happen if there’s large-scale conversion to biodiesel–there are a number of issues. To name a few:

As for carbon credits, I never liked them, any more than I liked the pollution credits of 20 years ago. They are nothing more than a license to pollute. While buying carbon offsets is certainly better than not buying them, bringing down the level of pollution and greenhouse emissions and global warming impact are better strategies to me than polluting and paying.

I do think massive tree planning is a good thing, and if the offset programs enable that, it’s a start. But think of the environmental impact of buying a tiny and fuel efficient car instead of a Hummer–or better yet, walking or biking or taking public transit.

So what are the truly Green approaches? Conservation and solar, for sure. Wind, geothermal, and small-scale hydro (especially approaches that don’t actually dam the stream), if done correctly. And little lifestyle changes that minimize resource use.

Among some very intelligent calls, such as the inventor of the life-saving MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) technology, the National Inventors Hall of Fame has named John E. Franz, inventor of the herbicide Roundup.

Pardon me while I puke.

Roundup has been linked to cancer and many other diseases, as well as some severe pollution issues:

Roundup is toxic to earthworms, beneficial insects, birds and mammals, plus it destroys the vegetation on which they depend for food and shelter. Although Monsanto claims that Roundup breaks down into harmless substances, it has been found to be extremely persistent, with residue absorbed by subsequent crops over a year after application. Roundup shows adverse effects in all standard categories of toxicological testing, including medium-term toxicity, long-term toxicity, genetic damage, effects on reproduction, and carcinogenicity.

This kind of “fame” we can do without. Infamy is more like it.