Environmental SurvivalGuide

Green Options is a fairly new Website formed about a year ago. It’s a great resource for discussions on all that’s eco-friendly. They host a very active blog with over 40 different writers. You can even find a series of audio podcasts. They also open up the system to user forums and blogs so visitors can participate in the conversation. Another useful feature is their “Green Life Guide.” It is a wiki repository packed full of how-to information. Green Options is quickly rising to be one of the best resources for green living.

Learn about the effects diesel plays in the transporting of goods and polluting of the environment. Quest covers the problems diesel causes at the Port of Oakland. A port where over 10,000 freight ships and an endless amount of semi trucks and trains are pumping diesel soot into the air of Oakland. Diesel pollution is the number 1 health threat in California, causing 2,400 pre-mature deaths statewide. It’s particularily bad in West Oakland where residents are exposed at rates 5 times higher than other parts of the Bay area. Find out how this all relates to the inexpensive goods we buy. View the fullsize video.

TreeHugger is a blog dedicated to the green lifestyle, News, and reviews. They are one of the most popular green-focused blogs around and post 25+ articles a day from more than 40 writers. They feature both TV and radio media and have a wealth of information in forums and guides. They host another site called Hugg, which is a Digg for the environmental community. Also of note is a job board for people looking for an eco related job. They were recently acquired by Discovery Communications to help further Discovery’s planet green initiative.

Green building is spreading and there’s a good reason. This episode of Quest notes that buildings consume 70% of US electricity, 15 trillion gallons of water, and 3 billion tons of raw materials (steel, wood, etc). They are also responsible for 30% of all green house emissions in the US. So what do we do?

Find out what it takes to build green and get a glimpse into the new California Academy of Sciences. View the fullsize video.

If your living in New Mexico you can sign-up with PNM Sky Blue, a voluntary program that allows you to get up to 90% of your electricity from renewable wind power. We signed up about a year ago and have felt relief ever since.

The way it works, is they charge you a small amount extra for the electricity you want to receive from renewable energy. We pay between $10 (winter) and $20 (summer) extra per month for our home (1,500sq. ft. / family of four) in order to get 90% of our electricity from renewable sources. It costs more because wind fluctuates and at times they are required to purchase renewable energy from elsewhere. This is a small price to pay for the piece of mind it provides.

The reason it is important to sign-up for this program is that global warming (and other forms of pollution) cannot be stopped while 49.7% of US electricity is being generated from coal-fired power plants. Currently, in the US there are 151 new coal-fired plants in various stages of development. Efforts to reduce CO2 emissions is being negated by these plants. It is the reason why more people need to get on board with renewable electricity and support programs like Sky Blue.

If your not in New Mexico but would like to look into similar programs in your area, visit the Department of Energy’s Green Power Markets Program By State.

Inhabitat is an interesting blog that is focused on the materials and practices that push sustainable architecture and design forward. It’s mainly focused on this topic but also has a wealth of other information about green concepts, products, and transportation. In addition to their regular posts (2-4 a day) I also found their How-to guides a useful resource and the interviews were compeling. However, most of their videos were fairly on-the-spot style videography. Outside of that it’s a great resource and worth a daily read because of their wide range of green topics.

Plug-in Hybrids can extend the mileage of a typical electric/gas hybrid by harnessing more use from the electric motor. The minds at CalCars propose we electrify the world and look at ways we can then clean the grid. The report notes that electric cars produce only half the amount of green house gases as a typical gasoline vehicle. The Prius modifications they perform adds 20 lead batteries in place of the single factory nickel battery. This addition allows them to modify the car so that it runs on the electric motor for the first 10 miles. This saving allows their modified hybrids to push the 100MPG threshold.  View the fullsize video.

The first upgrade that I did on our home was to try and reduce our electrical consumption by replacing the incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents (CFLs). CFLs use about 75% less energy than a regular incandescent bulb and last about 10 times longer. If every household in the US replaced their 5 most used incandescent bulbs with CFLs, we would save approximately $8 billion each year in energy expenses. This is the equivalent to the emissions of nearly 10 million cars.

This was all the information that I needed to get interested. On my first outing to the hardware store, I returned with a four-pack of CFLs. I thought that I would test them out and see if we could get by without the warm, yellow light. After replacing the four 100-watt incandescent floodlights with 18-watt CFLs, we began to test our comfort to the new blue light. It instantly turned our kitchen into a cold place and I noticed that we kept turning on other nearby incandescants to compensate.

I went back a week or so later to try and read the packaging more carefully to find a CFL that could better match the yellow tone we were used to. I remembered seeing several different varieties and some that were actually covered in a yellow diffuser. I knew there had to be something that could work so I ended up coming home with three different bulbs. All three of these new bulbs had a near perfect yellow hue. One of them seemed to have trouble getting started and would take a short while to get up to full power. I was a bit confused why it did this so I looked a little more closely at the packaging and began to notice a little warning on the back about Mercury content.

This was not the cause of the delay but it did stop me from buying any more CFL bulbs. I didn’t even want to think about how many of these are going to end up leaking in the landfill despite recycling efforts. Will the Mercury content of these new light bulbs end up doing more harm than the emissions caused from powering incandescent bulbs? Michael Richard over at TreeHugger does a reality check on this mercury risk by comparing it to the amount of mercury that is released from burning coal in order to power incandescant bulbs. This is a great bit of information, validating the environmental savings over incandescents. However, I’m still going to look into LED lighting as my next step.

If your still interested in CFLs and you want to learn more about them, you should visit the Lighter Footstep’s Guide to Living with CFLs.  It provides a good overview about how to survive the change.