Lights Out, NYC

So it's not exactly technology. In fact, my parents have reminded me to do it every time I leave a room for as long as I can remember. The Daily New's front page article yesterday criticized the Mayor for leaving unnecessary lights on throughout the city through the wee hours of the night-- several reporters roamed around city municipal buildings late to docuement it. Even worse, this came just days after Bloomberg's huge 127 part initiative to make New York City it's greenest. Apparantly he overlooked the most obvious solutions.

Bloomberg responded that janitors and other occupants are often working into the late hours, but there were a few buildings that were completely vacant, including the Bronx Hall of Justice, which was just built and doesn't even have occupants yet, especailly at 3am.

New York City expects to shell out $504 million in the current fiscal year on electricity alone. Bloomberg has plans to equip City Hall with energy efficient bulbs to whittle down electricity costs. The Education Department building on court street remained lit in the early hours as well, and turning off those lights would save the government 33% per year (about $57,000). According to the Daily News, this is more than enough to cover one new teacher or two new police officer salaries. If every building could work out a system that allowed janitorial duties to be taken care of in a few hours at the end of the day or early morning, then that would provide a huge surplus so that the Mayor might be able to fund all the grand initiatives in store.

I doubt New York will retire its title as the city that never sleeps any time soon-- Shutting off Time Square at night might cause wild riots, likewise for the many other city symbols that define New York, from the Empire State Building the Statue of Liberty. Bloomberg hopes to eventually equip all buildings and landmarks with energy-efficient bulbs.

Bloomberg's Big Plans

This year's Earth Day proved to be a bigger affair than usual due to recent attention to global warming, and the city of New York was no exception. In a speech at the Museum of Natural History, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled PlaNYC: A Greener, Greater New York, his grand scheme to make NYC the cleanest and most efficient of them all. The speech highlighted 127 separate initiatives that the government will take to improve 9 broader problems, from transportation to water quality. The plan includes a goal of reducing carbon emissions by 30% by the year 2030. With 984 days left in office, Bloomberg cites the thriving status of the city as reason to actively persue such an ambitious project that will accommodate more people in the 5 burroughs.
Brownfield remediation is one of the 9 areas of focus. The implementation of on-site testing, soil analysis, a new City office to focus on brownfield treatment, and a $15 million dollar fund for brownfield redevelopment are just a few of the initiatives planned to attack the problem.
In terms of housing, Bloomberg proposed development in areas with easy access to public transport, restoring unused waterfront property around the city, converting vacant schools, hospitals, and outdated municipal facilities into new housing, and constructing decks over transportation infrasturcture to create inhabitable land.
He stressed the need for more open space and parkland that is accessible to residents of every neighborhood. This will be implemented by opening city-wide schoolyards as public playgrounds, giving access to the better sports fields to all athletic teams, converting asphalt into multi-use turf fields, and installing lights at fields to allow for nighttime use, among several other initiatives.
A steep tax for cars entering the city below 86th street is one of the several initiatives aimed at improving transportation in the city. In addition to that, Bloomberg hopes to provide new and improved commuter rails to Manhattan, make transit more accessible to neglected areas and improve the transit system throughout the city, finish the city's 1,800 mile bike master plan to increase bicycle use, and many other transit and toll related plans.

Many of the 127 points fall under the energy reform plan, and some of these include adapting building codes that support energy efficiency, creating a city department that focuses on efficient energy use, enpanding New York's natural gas infrastructure, more solar energy in city buildings, and exploring waste-to-energy technology (I knew it wasn't far off!).

To improve water networks, Bloomberg plans to build an ultraviolet disinfection plant, build a filtration plant to protect the Croton supply, begin a water conservation plan to lower consumption by 60 million gallons per day, and complete and repair several of the water tunnels around the city, including a backup tunnel to Staten Island.

In terms of water quality, the plan includes implementing ribbed mussel beds, reduce combine d sewage overflow, and complete the long term control plans for the 14 watersheds in NYC.

Bloomberg connects air quality improvements to the transportation initatives, and also plans to waive sales tax on clean cars, help the MTA, port authority, and dept. of transportation to promote hybrid vehicles, expand the use of biodeisel and alternative fuels for city trucks, ferries, schoolbusses, and taxis. The plan also aims to reforest 2,000 acres of parkland and plant 1 million trees in empty lots over the next 10 years.

To combat climate change, Bloomberg hopes to reduce emissions by 60-80% by the year 2050. This requires creating a special taskforce to maintain the city's infrastructure while implementing new initiatives, teaming up with coastal neighborhoods to create site specific remedies, update FEMA's 100-year floodplain maps to take climate change impacts into account, and changing building codes within the city to address climate change.

It's a very ambitious plan, but I can't quite figure out where all the money for the big clean up will come from. On top of that many of the initiatives are rather vague and don't actually specify WHAT the government will DO to accomplish the goal. But this is the kind of action that all cities need to take, and it's better to be overly ambitious than indifferent. It'll be interesting to see what he DOES accomplish in the 984 days left in office....

Holland opens their first offshore wind farm

Wednesday marked the opening of the Netherland's first offshore wind farm, built by Shell and Nuon, a Dutch power utility. The 200 million euro project boasts a 108 megawatt farm on the North Sea, which will also be function as a research center to expand knowledge and observe how marine life is affected.

Going off land seems to be the only way that Holland's new coalition government can accomplish their (and the EU's) goal of 20 percent of their energy coming from renewable sources by 2020. In 2006, 2.37% of the Netherlands' total electricity came from wind power. Until recently, the licensing process for wind power projects took five years, and the government had prohibited building wind farms on the North Sea.

Offshore windfarms are good for several reasons. For one thing, the wind is much stronger at sea, and the open space allows for much larger turbines. The trend is more popular in Europe, where land area is limited and shallow water is abundant and accessible. The US generally has enough land space to accomodate windmills, although an offshore park is to be built off Cape Cod in the next two years. Much of America's coast is to deep for off-shore farms to be a practical solution, as production cost increases with a greater water depth and larger waves.

Offshore farms are said to be barely visible from land and designed in a place that won't interfere with shipping. Boston based energy consulting firm La Capra Associates predicts the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts to save the New England electricity market $25 million per year, and will decrease the region's harmful emissions. The system will lower demand for natural gas, which could lead to lower natural gas prices in the region.

The nation rallies for response to climate change

While I was chained to a desk for three hours on Saturday morning taking a Psychology GRE Exam, millions of people across the country united to spur Congressional action against climate change. Thousand of New Yorkers clad in blue gathered in Battery Park to create a "sea of people," just one of the many stunts that colored the first National Day of Climate Action. They lined the edge of lower Manhattan to create an aerial image of what the island will look like after the effects of climate change set in-- significantly shrunken, as sea levels are projected to one day rise 10-20 feet.

The organization behind this grassroots effort is Step It Up, and the goal is to persuade Congress to pass pass a bill to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050. Though it sounds like a radical request, it would only mean a 2% decrease per year-- and we're clearly facing a problem that calls for drastic measures.

The nation saw more than 1300 rallies on Saturday, covering all 50 states on the map. Scuba divers in Florida went under water and held a Step It Up sign to draw attention to the damage that climate change will incur on coral reefs. Folks in the San Francisco area created a caravan of clean fueled cars and went to a Hummer dealership to protest the gas guzzlers. New Orleans saw citizens form a human chain that spelled out Step It Up, while students at Middlebury College in Vermont rose before dawn to send out a Step It Up message with flashlights.

Bill McKibben is the guy behind the movement-- a Middlebury Alum and environmental guru. Hes the author of "The End of Nature," a global warming treatise, and has organized several other similar events, including leading a 50 mile walk across Vermont to attend an environmental rally in Burlington.

The impressive turnout on Saturday was the first step in the appeal to Congress. The group is now in the process of sending all the pictures to Capitol Hill. They will send each U.S. Senator a copy of every picture that was taken at a rally in their state, and each U.S. rep will receive the same from all rallies in their district.

This action incited wild national and international media, and will likely be a significant push for legislative action thats already on the table in D.C. Step It Up is teaming up with Moveon.org to circulate a national e-petition for Congress, and encouraging all to make a pledge to put climate change on the front burner in the 2008 elections. Voters can pledge themselves at ClimateVoters.org. Step It Up's websites has many other ways that regular citizens can make a difference by working together-- I guess it just takes a bunch of hippies from Vermont to cultivate the grassroots approach.

Ethanol craze affecting food supply

President Bush has gone on something of an ethanol kick, his response to recent reports warning about the verity and consequences on the horizon as a result of climate change. Yet a recent article in The Economist sides with Fidel Castro's take on "the sinister idea of converting food into fuel." The price of corn has already risen as a result of America's fuel needs. Farmers are dedicating more land to corn, which in turn is increasing prices of other crops which are losing land. On top of that, corn is largely used as animal food, so the price of meat has gone up as a result of ethanol fuel. Our need for independence from foreign oil comes at a cost.

The production of ethanol for fuel in America has only been around 3.5% of total fuel consumption, but the amount is expected to increase at a rate of 25% a year, which is causing a building boom in refineries in the midwest. Subsidized by government funds, ethanol is the only alternative energy source that has widespread political support, as farmers, carmakers, and the oil industry all benefit.

However, according to some studies, corn-based ethanol isn't as green as we might have thought, as it calls for almost as much energy to produce as it uses when burned. According to the International Institute for Sustainable Development, government funds for ethanol are costing $5.5 billion and $7.3 billion in taxes per year. Sugar cane based ethanol, on the other hand, creates much more energy than is required to produce it, and places where it is currently produced (Brazil's a big one) aren't affecting food supplies as there's sufficient land available for crops. Sugar-based ethanol could be a great export for many developing countries with tropical climates.

Ethanol produced from wood, grasses, and agricultural wastes which contain a great amount of cellulose is a more environmentally viable solution than both sugar and corn, but the process is quite expensive. With more development, this system would be most ideal, as it wouldn't affect food supplies and would create a constructive use for farm waste. I fear that it could lead to the gung-ho use of trees in the production of cellulosic ethanol, which wouldn't help in the fight against global warming.

America presently taxes imported ethanol, which is soon to anger taxpayers as they see the rise in food prices. Importing sugar-based ethanol would both help developing countries and allow us a much more significant impact against global warming, which is one of the reasons that brought the US to this spot in the first place. It seems to me that even when the country tries to do something right, we screw it up by choosing the most convenient option-- in this case "bad" corn-based ethanol.

Scientist turning plastic into fuel...

Richard Gross is onto something. A chemistry professor at Brooklyn's Polytechnic University, Gross has recently developed a "fuel latent plastic," which can be turned into diesel fuel after its been used for it's packaging purposes. Plant oils are already in use in the making of biodiesel, and Gross thought to use the material to first create plastic, which with the help of a naturally occuring enzyme(cutinase) and warm water can then convert the plastic into fuel.
This development could be big for the military. A soldier produces an average of more than 7 pounds of packaging waste a day, which, according to the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency requires special transportation, especially for far away bases. This special plastic would cut transportation needs in half and save substantially amounts of fuel money. Although the process still requires further research, the Pentagon threw in $2.34 million to spur on development.
The process itself takes 3-5 days. The plastic is shredded (a paper shredder would do the trick) and placed in water with a bit of the enzyme. A few days later, the fuel surfaces on top of the water. Gross says that the amount of biodiesel produced by a gallon of soy oil remains the same, regardless of whether it is first made into plastic form or not.

The pentagon refers to the initiative as Mobile Integrated Sustainable Energy Recovery program (MISER), and aims to recapture 90% of packaging energy to convert to electricity.

Depending on the future of oil prices in the US, and if the government decides to tax carbon emissions, this technology could gain economical dependence. Furthermore, the plant base of the plastic/fuel means that it leaves a much smaller carbon fooprint on the atmosphere-- the carbon that is released will be absorbed by subsequent crops that are grown to make the plastic.

Supreme Court decision rules against EPA

Yesterday was a big day in the battle against global warming, as the Supreme Court voted against the EPA in the Massachusetts v. EPA case. The decision, which is perhaps the most important environmental case of the decade, rejected a long list of excuses that the Bush Administration EPA gave for failing to control the emission of greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Hopefully the monuemental decision will spur Americans into action-- the US is one of the leaders in greenhouse gas emissions, yet an international BBC poll found that Americans and Europeans are the least concerned about climate change. Go figure. The decision will likely bring regulations into the car industry and other large scale industrial outfits, but personal regulations for emissions aren't likely for any time soon.

However, there are hundreds of small things that we can each do to reduce our carbon imprint, and Time magazine compiled a list of 51 things that the average person can do to cut their emissions, from using public transportation to insulating your water heater.

Although the EPA isn't on the list of favorites at the current moment, their Energy Star program (shared with the department of Energy) is dedicated to promoting energy efficiency for the sake of saving the environment AND saving money. In 2006, ENergy Star helped people to save $14 billion in Utility bills at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to that of 25 million cars. Homes, household appliances, and renovation plans which are Energy Star approved supposedly enable customers to pay one third less in utility bills, and reduce emissions by roughly the same amount. In February 2007, more than 3,200 buildings had earned Energy Star approval, and they rate almost any household and business appliance you can conjure up, from dehumidifiers to vending machines. New York has 696 businesses that have become Energy Star partners, including NYU medical center, among many others.

Yesterday's historical first supreme court decision to deal with global warming brought the issue into the news spotlight, and maybe people will begin to realize that by cutting emissions they can actually save a lot of money. Who can say no to that?