Save and Conserve

Last week I wrote about how Republicans, backed by George W. Bush, want to slash funding for Amtrak ... just as the service is needed (and used) more than ever.

Looks like the good guys have won a small victory this week in Congress.

A congressman’s bid to derail Amtrak has been squashed by his colleagues.

The House of Representatives voted 328-94 against a move to end Amtrak’s federal subsidies.

The move to strip Amtrak’s support was made by Rep. Jeff Blake, a Republican from Arizona, a state with limited service from the national passenger railroad.

President Bush, a fellow Republican, has also been a vocal opponent of giving federal funding to Amtrak but is willing to provide federal funding for the airline industry.

Congress is working to fund Amtrak for the next several years, but a Bush veto still looms. I think this is quite important, so I plan to continue the updates as the Amtrak funding story continues ...

Posted by tom c. at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How great is it when you find a new website that provides a truly unique (and useful) service for free? Pretty freakin' great, right? Well, check out Walk Score ... it is a diamond in the knee-high rough that is the Internet.

What is Walk Score?

Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc.

Walk Score is very simple. You punch in your address and click submit, then the site queries Google Earth to find stores, restaurants, schools, theaters, etc. near your address. Using its proprietary ranking algorithm, Walk Score calculates a customized score somewhere between 0 (you can't walk to anything but your car) and 100 (walk nirvana).

I just noticed that the site is currently not functioning because it is over its Google Maps quota, but when I tried last week, I scored a dismal 18. I live in Albany, NY - but not near the downtown area. Other than a small park across the street, we have nothing closer than 0.6 miles away from our door. Seems like a half mile is a critical marker for Walk Score's algorithm. If you have stores & restaurants within a half mile, you are likely to score above 50.

If you visit the site and can't run your score, try back in the morning the next day. The Google Maps quota resets daily.

I have Walk Score bookmarked. An invaluable resource when considering relocation. Great stuff!

Posted by tom c. at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Want to save some energy and reduce your electric bill? Shut down your computer when you're not sitting in front of it. Pretty basic notion ... but apparently a lot of people leave their computers turned on overnight - especially their work computer. The Wall Street Journal is reporting:

A recent report estimated that American businesses could save $1.72 billion each year merely by getting more employees to shut off their computers at night or allow the machines to enter an energy-saving mode.

I never leave my laptop at home powered up overnight or when I'm not using it, but I do leave my work computer turned on when I leave for the day. (On Friday afternoons, I usually shut down for the weekend.) Not sure why I leave it turned on overnight ... I think it basically boils down to laziness and the fact that I'm not responsible for paying for the electricity I consume at work. There must be a creative way for companies to incentivize employees to shut down every night. Maybe a conservation drive. Compare year over year energy use and if it is lower in the current year, everyone gets a Starbucks gift certificate or some other small token. Just a thought.

And if there are concerns about the wear and tear associated with lots of shut-downs & power-ups, those can be put to rest:

Several commenters on blogs and the Register suggested another possible reason to leave computers on: Switching them on and off drains energy, and may cause damage. Several energy experts told me that doesn’t apply to today’s machines, for which the amount of energy saved by switching off dwarfs the amount consumed during the booting process. “PCs are not hurt by turning them on and off a few times a day,” said Jonathan Koomey, a project scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Economic obsolescence is much more dangerous to PCs than turning them on and off.”

Shut down your work computer before you call it a day. It can't hurt.

Posted by tom c. at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In early June, I blogged about how someone at my office was driving a new Hummer to work. At the end of the post, I wrote the following:

I have a prediction. Those middle fingers won't be proudly displayed much longer. There will come a point in the not-too-distant future when driving an H2 will be embarrasing. H2 owners will have the option of spending an afternoon in the stockade or wearing a beige sweater with a massive yellow "H2" nylon patch sewed onto it, Hester Prynne style.

Turns out I wasn't too far off in that prediction. A Washington Post article today tells us about 32 year old Washington DC resident Garreth Groves and his new gray Hummer:

It [the Hummer] lasted five days on the street before two masked men took a bat to every window, a knife to each 38-inch tire and scratched into the body: "FOR THE ENVIRON."

Anti-Hummer vigilantes? Interesting ... Expect to see more of this stuff going forward.

Also, the reason Mr. Groves was inspired to purchase his now vandalized gas guzzler?

Groves, who grew up in the District and works in marketing for a local radio station, said he wanted the car in part because he is starting a company, Washington Sports Marketing, that is "image-based."

"Image-based". Puke.

Posted by tom c. at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When I read this article detailing Amtrak's financial and budget woes (even though business has been brisk of late), I felt so frustrated. Here we have oil prices reaching historical high levels (WTI at more than $74 per barrel as I write this) and an administration trying to slash funding for passenger rail.

According to Amtrak CEO Alex Kummant, the system could keep operating if the congressional legislation, expected to pass sometime in September, evades a promised veto. But (President) Bush, never a friend of Amtrak, says he’ll nix any bills that exceed his budget requests.

Got to hand it to good ole George dubya ... he really knows how to run a country right into the ground, in the most efficient manner possible.

If forced to slash service, everything outside the busy northeast corridor (Boston-New York-Washington) could be in jeopardy. That would mean elimination of all passenger train service in the west, midwest, and south – creating a much heavier demand on an airline industry that is already stretched to the breaking point.

Perfect! Let's put more strain on refiners to produce more jet fuel to meet rising airline fuel demand. That should also help with the climate change issue. Somebody wake me up on 01.29.09 ...

Posted by tom c. at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lifehacker is a cool site ... and they have published a couple of posts today related to conservation.

Top 10 Computing Energy Savers
Conserve Water with Navy Showers

Both worth a look.

Posted by tom c. at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article about people who want to make their homes more energy efficient running into serious snags with local building commissions and zoning groups that want to maintain the homogenous look and feel of the town's homes.

Towns really need to wake up and start removing these types of hurdles, because they really will deter people from moving to renewable sources of energy (which are already expensive enough without the hassles involved in getting permits and approvals). Some states are more progressive on this issue than others:

Some states are trying to make energy-efficient improvements easier. California has long restricted homeowners' associations from blocking solar-panel installations, and New Jersey and Arizona passed similar legislation this year. A bill in Connecticut would override zoning restrictions and make it easier for people to put in wind turbines on their property. It wasn't passed, but lawmakers hope to revive it next session.

A story like this illustrates how removed most people are from the reality of our current energy crisis. Until local, state, and federal government gets religion, renewable energy at the residential level will continue to look a lot like salmon swimming upstream. Which is unfortunate ...

Posted by tom c. at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now that Live Earth is behind us, hopefully we will stop reading about how counter-productive the concert series was in terms of energy waste. Yes, a lot of carbon was burned in order to produce the massive shows and yes, that includes a lot of air travel. I personally think it's justified given that the concert focused some high-profile attention on a global problem in an effort to wake people up and (hopefully) start to get people interested and invested in doing something about climate change.

Still, Live Earth left me with the same feeling I had after watching An Inconvenient Truth: the feeling of not being sure what to do next. Several times I heard advice like: replace your lightbulbs or recycle more. The focus seemed to be on the easy, really small stuff. Come on, Cameron Diaz - that's not going to get it done.

The concerts may have been better served by unifying the experience in a slogan that people could digest and go home with. Something like "create your own offsets". Carbon offsets are pretty controversial because they are basically like the old Catholic indulgences, where the faithful could literally pay to have sins cleansed from their record. Today, the person who flies from New York to LA can purchase carbon offsets, leading to a global warming-free conscience.

Of course, we don't really know whether carbon offsets actually offset all or any of our activities.

So how about "create your own offsets"? For instance, if you have a trip coming up and you're flying somewhere, why not make a point to walk to the store half the time - instead of driving all the time? Every time you walk instead of drive, you have just banked some credits to offset your upcoming trip. If you are going on a big road trip, stop watching the TV until the trip. Bank some credits to offset your gas guzzling.

Chances are, creating your own offsets would end up being a lot easier and fun than it maybe sounds. Make a game out of reducing your energy use. See how many credits you can bank. Think before you jump into the car or book that next flight. In the long run, those are the types of changes that will make a difference, because it mandates some thinking about your relationship to the world around you in the context of energy use and climate change. It's too simple and cheap to point to CFLs and be satisfied. Real progress will require real change ahead.

Posted by tom c. at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The iPhone is a truly innovative communication tool. Since buying it on Saturday, I have been amazed by its capabilities and great design. On a hike in the Catskills on Sunday, my fiancee mentioned that she thought I should blog about iPhone. At first, it didn't seem relevant to energy ... but the more we talked about it, the more we realized that iPhone can potentially save energy and help people reduce their energy footprint.

Here's what I'm thinking ...

iPhone can be charged by the sun
I have blogged about an awesome little solar charger before ... and it dawned on me that - if someone wanted to - the iPhone could be run exclusively from solar power via a charger like the Solio. While it may not be practical to run iPhone off sun power, it nevertheless exists as a possibility and that's what is important. Small solar chargers are going to continue to become more popular and have more impact on our lives. That's a good thing.

iPhone saves paper
iPhone is tightly integrated with the Internet and, in particular, with Google Maps (a wonderfully useful tool in its own right). Whenever I'm about to embark on a road trip to a new location, I usually punch up directions in Google Maps and then print those directions out. About 3 out of every 4 times, the directions print out on 2 pages when 1 would have seemed sufficient. This must be due to the fact that the web page does not translate well to print. Anyway, iPhone eliminates the need to print out directions since you can view them - step by step - on the phone. Hell, you don't even need to deal with punching up directions on your computer at all, since iPhone can access the Internet from anywhere over the Edge network. If my calculations are correct, iPhone could save a billion pieces of paper per year. Then again, I haven't done any calculations, so take that with a grain of salt.

iPhone's map feature saves fuel
Speaking of how the maps saves paper, it also saves fuel. Armed with the hard copy directions, you still invariably find yourself lost when traveling in your car. Now that you can punch up an address and get directions with iPhone ... you will get where you're going quicker. Less time on the road means more gas in the tank. Really, iPhone is this good.

iPhone helps you avoid parking lots
And by parking lots, I mean the kind that form around rush hour on interstates and highways. The map widget (application-?) - whatever you call it - has this neat button that looks like a car. After you punch in your location to get directions, you can tap the car to get real-time (remember, you're networked to the www) updates on traffic. How useful is that? Not only will this save you from the horror that is the highway traffic jam, it will save gas, too. Just ask BankRate.

iPhone reduces computer time
I'm already spending less time in front of my laptop at home ... because of the iPhone. For quick hits like checking email or checking scores or getting quick directions, the iPhone delivers. Which means I no longer need my computer for those things. Which means my computer will not be sucking down watts (I never keep the computer running unless I'm working in front of it.)

So there you have it. In just a matter of hours, the iPhone has already contributed to a reduction in my energy use/footprint. I'm sure as I get more comfortable with it, I will uncover additional tricks that lead to energy savings. Thanks, iPhone!

Posted by tom c. at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)