Resource Center

Learn how to start your

OnlyGreen Business

Learn More

OnlyGreen News Alerts

Learn More

Home / Resource Center / Eco-News on the Net / From A To Green

Eco-News on the Net

From A To Green

Ask Umbra’s pearls of wisdom on sleeping
by Umbra Fisk

Dearest readers,

Yawn. Goodness me, I could use a nap—perhaps a nice long eight-hour nap to celebrate National Sleep Awareness Week and prep for Daylight Saving Time starting on Sunday (don’t forget to spring forward!). While I go catch a few z’s, enjoy my troll through the archives to snag slumber-related suggestions. Got any tips for beating the spring-forward slump we’ll all be facing Monday? Hit me up in the comments below.

Wood you rather? When scoping out a new frame to support your sleeping self, consider one made from sustainably harvested wood. If there is an environmental home-supply store near you, or perhaps a lumber-salvage outfit, it may have regional resources for low-impact furniture. Or opt for a bed constructed with lumber certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. And if you’re feeling particularly gung-ho, consider buying salvaged wood and hiring a carpenter to fashion the sustainable bed of your dreams (you have those dreams too, right?). Get the full Ask Umbra answer. Go to the mattresses. The important thing to look for when mattress shopping is that it’s free of polybromenated biphenyl ethers, or PBDEs. (Can we think of a rhyme for this one? Maybe, “PBDE-free is totes for me.”) These nasties have been linked to brain and thyroid problems in rodents and cats, and are especially dangerous to children. If you find a mattress you particularly like, it may be worth calling the manufacturer to find out if they do use PBDEs. Or maybe make your own mattress by buying three-inch-thick latex and thick wool mattress covers. Just pile up these cozy items until you reach the comfort you desire. Get the full Ask Umbra answer. Honey, I blew up the bed. Skip the PVC air mattresses for overnight guests—not only are they terribly uncomfortable, but they also negate my “no vinyl, that’s final” mantra. Instead, think about a rubber or latex model, a PBDE-free foam mattress (which can be rolled up for storage), or a thin, foldable, lightweight Japanese futon. Get the full Ask Umbra answer. In the heat of the night. Some people think it takes more energy to turn the thermostat up and down at various times than to just leave it running at the same temp all the time, so let me be crystal clear here: Turn down the thermostat at night and before you leave the house. Our heaters are fighting an incessant battle on our behalf, warming all the new air. If we are not there to be warmed, or are sleeping under a cozy duvet, we can turn down the thermostat. Programmable thermostats are very helpful and quite cheap. Get the full Ask Umbra answer. Goodnight Mac. You’re not the only one that could use some shuteye; your computer could too, but putting it into sleep mode isn’t the best way to give it a rest. Turning your machine off not only saves energy and money, but it also reduces heat and mechanical stress and prolongs the life of your computer. It is true, however, that you can save energy by encouraging your computer to sleep as often as possible. Change the settings so that it goes to sleep sooner, and use the sleep mode instead of a screen saver. But at the end of the day, turn the damn thing off. Get the full Ask Umbra answer.

Melatoninly, Umbra

Related Links:

Garden Girl TV: Raised beds in the city

Ask Umbra visits the Fixers’ Collective [VIDEO]

Ask Umbra on Annie Leonard and The Story of Stuff

Streetfilms: Fixing the car-centric city [video]
by Grist

“Fixing the Great Mistake” is a new Streetfilms series that examines what went wrong in the early part of the 20th Century, when our cities began catering to the automobile, and how those decisions continue to affect our lives today.

In this episode, Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White shows how planning for cars drastically altered Park Avenue. Watch and see what Park Avenue used to look like, how we ceded it to the automobile, and what we need to do to reclaim the street as a space where people take precedence over traffic.

For more of this fantastic series, visit our friends over at Street Films.

Hand-made electric cars serve a niche market in Japan

London’s transportation transformation for the 2012 Olympics [Video]

McMansion modular
by Lisa Selin Davis

Remember when modular homes were going to be part of the “green” future? In the post-Dwell, post-postmodern architecture era, pre-fab was going to be cheap, green, hot and hip. Yes, finally, an antidote to McMansions and an affordable alternative to ballooning home prices. As if that were not enough, these stylish boxes were set to erase our previous connotations, where modular meant mobile home and pre-fab equaled Lubbock double-wide.

Photo: Heather Lucille FlickrExcept it didn’t happen. Modular homes, like all homes, suffered the housing crash, though as we reported last year, there never was quite enough demand to make modular modern homes tumble off the production line; they’re only affordable if they’re mass-produced.

But apparently a new demand has sprung up for modular homes, only it’s not among the green set, or the young, or first-time homebuyers. And it’s not for the modestly sized versions of pre-fab. Rather, according to the Washington Post, mansions are increasingly going modular.

In less than a day-and-a-half, a six-bedroom, six-plus bath, 7,200-square-foot home can appear on a slab of land in any number of charming styles: Prairie, Arts and Crafts, French Country. The one profiled in the Post ran the owners a cool $2.5 million, though an estimated 15 percent less than traditional stick-built homes of that size and level of luxury (replete with elevator shaft). Nice for them. And because these Lego-Mansions are raised so quickly, the construction loans are shorter, and therefore cheaper.

It’s true that even pre-fab XXL can contain green features, like geothermal heat pumps and pre-cut walls that defend against mold and mildew.

Yet their very size precludes these homes from being truly green; it’s just plain environmentally unfriendly to build a home with 10 times as much living space as actually needed. That sentiment recently bubbled to a boil in Berkeley, where a software mogul is building a 10,000-square-foot mansion that is classified as green by the city’s standards; they measure things like water use and building materials for the designation, not size.

The trend of modular mansions isn’t completely new; there’s a 2005 book on the subject that showcases 12,000-square-foot monstrosities. Presciently, perhaps, even that book predicted these would be “the homes of the future.” While they account for only 3% of newly built homes, their popularity seems to be on the rise. They are a recession-friendly luxury.

Don’t blink, the new “green” house next door could go up overnight, and it could be ginormous.

Related Links:

Modern modular done right

Abu Dhabi bailed out Dubai—is the world next?

San Francisco commits $150 million to green homes

How many Venezuelan soldiers does it take to change a lightbulb?
by Ashley Braun

An entire army, apparently.

El Presidente of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, put in big orders for energy efficiency when he commanded the country’s lightbulbs get swapped for CFLs. Why the power play? A drought of hydropower has the nation in energy crisis and the military armed with efficient lightbulbs, laying waste to every wasteful incandescent in their path. The troops are battling against the highest per capita energy use on the continent, but the spoils of war will ease the shift from years of being spoiled by oil.

Viva efficiency!

Via inhabitat

How the cap-and-trade controversy could lead to good clean energy policy

Job Creation Begins at Home

Banana briefs are growing on us
by Ashley Braun

Gents, if the thought of pesticides on your privates bums you out, then start thinking outside the boxer. AussieBum has gone down under to pioneer briefs that put a banana in your pants.

That’s right, these skivvies are a smoothie mix of banana tree-bark fibers, organic cotton, Lycra (cough), and an “eco friendly flavor that will keep you coming back for seconds.” Mmm ... yeah.

Hat tip to our friends at HuffPost Green. We just couldn’t pass up the op-pun-tunity.

A recipe for delish disaster: global warming hot apple pie

Tasting five organic French roasts leads to buzzkill

Retooling green jobs for the next generation
by Jesse Jenkins

When you think “green jobs,” do you conjure images of green hard hats, caulk guns, and tool belts? Well it might be time to start thinking about “green” lab beakers, “green” drafting tables and “green” brief cases as well, because the careers needed to secure competitive clean energy industries will also run the gamut from cutting-edge researchers and high-tech engineers to innovative designers and fearless entrepreneurs, according to Dr. Henry Kelly, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency.

Dr. Kelly spoke to an audience of Stanford University students Monday about the steps necessary to educate “the Energy Generation,” warning that it will take a generation of the nation’s best and brightest, working in dozens of diverse fields, to truly build a clean and prosperous American economy:

So what is a green job? Well green jobs are architects and engineers that build buildings, design buildings that operate at extremely low energy use. They are people that design, manufacture, and install devices in buildings ranging from high-tech windows to lighting to sensors and controls and electronics. It means looking at radically new industrial processes which simply replace previous kinds of industrial manufacturing with sophisticated bionumetics and nanotech approaches, to cutting down the material intensity and energy intensity of production, this is the kind of thing you need to do to stay competitive in the modern world.

If you look at what the nation’s transportation system is going to look like, Henry Ford looks like he’s toast, it’s going to be replaced with an entirely new generation of either extremely high efficiency fuel powered vehicles, electric vehicles, perhaps even hydrogen fuel cells—the people that make and maintain these are going to be operating in a different world that’s an enormously sophisticated operation.

If you’re looking at where power comes from, of course you have the entire range of science and engineering involved, you mentioned we’re relying on geologists to tell us how to get geothermal energy, getting very sophisticate semiconductor manufacturers involved in the production of solar cells and CSP, if you look at biologically based fuels and materials, some of the most sophisticated biological processing techniques.

So this is an enormous range of skills, but apart from the technical skills you also need people who really understand the economics of finance ... behavioral economics, people who understand policy, all of these qualify as green jobs and it touches I think almost every academic discipline.

The good news is that if we do this right we’re generating a lot of new interesting jobs, not just for sophisticated designers but for people who are manufacturing and operating these.

“The bad news,” Dr. Kelly said, is that America’s competitors in Asia and Europe are surging ahead to develop competitive clean energy industries and investing in a highly-trained and technically competent workforce:

If you’re looking at how the U.S. fairs competitively, we have far from the most highly trained workforce. In fact we’re the only country in the top 20 OECD countries where ... the average high school graduation rate is going down. We’re static in university degrees and other countries are bypassing us, and they’re getting degrees increasingly in the sophisticated subjects we need to move forward, both in energy and rebuilding our economy.

So we’re facing this tremendous dilemma, where we have these opportunities to rebuild the economy around sophisticated technology that’s clean, but the ability to turn out people who are able to actually take advantage of these opportunities is declining. It’s something we’re incredibly concerned about.

While attention has been paid in recent years to funding new training programs for “green collar” technicians, building trades, and manufacturing positions, the federal government has only just begun to put resources towards training and empowering the wide variety of cutting-edge innovators, engineers, and entrepreneurs needed to stay competitive in the 21st century clean energy race.

“The kind of things that you need to do make an economy that is clean and reducing its fossil fuel consumption is precisely the same thing you need to do to make the economy productive and competitive internationally, which means constantly transforming itself around new technology,” Dr. Kelly said. “If you look at the kind of technologies we’re talking about, it does touch virtually every part of the economy.”

With Asian and European competitors pulling farther and farther ahead in competitive clean technology sectors, the economic stakes of these investments are high.

“There’s little doubt we’re in a race for our lives to maintain our productivity and competitive edge to keep high tech manufacturing here in the U.S.” Dr. Kelly declared.

In 2007, Congress passed the Green Jobs Act which authorized $125 million in annual funding to develop training programs for workers in a variety of renewable energy and energy efficiency industries. The program was first funded with a $500 million chunk of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus bill), and further funds were allocated in the climate bills now struggling to secure passage in Congress.

While the Green Jobs Act has advanced technical training programs at the nation’s community colleges and technical schools, funding to inspire and empower students at four-year institutions to enter a wide range of careers crucial to competition in the clean energy sector has languished in Congress.

In 2009, President Obama’s FY2010 budget included a new Department of Energy and National Science Foundation-run program called RE-ENERGYSE, the nation’s first program aimed at strengthening America’s position in clean energy education. Despite the urgent need for such a program, Congressional appropriators rejected the $125 million funding request.

The administration hasn’t relented, however, and RE-ENERGYSE is back in the new FY2011 budget request now on its way to Congress. The $74 million program would be the first small but critical step to re-energize a new generation of scientists, innovators, and entrepreneurs ready to tackle the United States’ energy and competitiveness challenges (see this fact sheet for more [PDF]).

Ultimately, however, greater funding will be necessary to help the next generation of intrepid American innovators rise to the nation’s clean energy challenges.

“In 1958, right after the Soviet Union launch Sputnik, the U.S. federal government authorized the National Defense Education Act, which invested billions of dollars over several years to try and regain our competitive edge in general science and engineering, and more specifically in the space race,” said Teryn Norris, the moderator of the panel, adviser at the Breakthrough Institute, and director of Americans for Energy Leadership, a student-led initiative campaigning across the country for investments in clean energy education and innovation.

With Americans facing a new race to dominate the high-tech fields of the 21st century, the federal government will ultimately need to secure investments on the scale of the National Defense Education Act to keep the nation’s competitive edge.

Dr. Kelly and Mr. Norris were joined on the panel by Dr. Lynn Orr, director of the Stanford Precourt Energy Institute and Camron Gorguinpour, director of Scientists and Engineers for America. You can watch a video of the panel here.

Originally posted at the Breakthrough Institute and WattHead.org

Related Links:

The Maine Lesson of Cap and Trade

The Climate Post: Uptick in denialism halts glacier melt, lowers sea levels

Job Creation Begins at Home

A recipe for delish disaster: global warming hot apple pie
by Ashley Braun

apocalypsecakes.wordpress.com

Just because the planet is turning up the heat, doesn’t mean we should get out of the kitchen.

If we’re going to be globally baking anyway, we might as well take a slice out of the life of pi pie of life while we’re at it. So go eat up this delectable recipe for Global Warming Hot Apple Pie from Apocalypse Cakes before the Senate tries something crazy ... like addressing climate change.

“Good news: it’s easy to keep your pie warm when it’s 140 degrees outside. Bad news: you’re decomposing from heat-rot.”

And while that pie’s in the oven, the recipe recommends you start searching for those sea-level-rise pool floaties. Wheee!

Banana briefs are growing on us

Cocaine addicts are snorting their way to a warmer world