Jacob mentioned this to me: an electric car that ran 370 miles on a single charge in Germany.

It appears to be legit, so I’m not calling scam (and I certainly hope it’s for real!), but something is lost in translation.

Assume the thing has a 30hp motor like a VW Beetle from the 60s.

30hp=22kW. Times 7 hours is 156kWh. (This is close to a comment I read that said 115kWh necessary, maybe the motor is even less powerful than a 1965 VW Bug.)

It also says charges in 6 or 18 minutes, depending on what article you read. Fine. Call it 18 minutes.

115kWh in 18 minutes is over 380kW. That’s what a 100,000 square foot office building draws on the hottest day of the year when all the AC is going, through a 2000A, 4kV bus in the basement with cables as big as your forearm.

No way is it coming out of your household service.

I am not even taking into account overhead losses, efficiency of charging, etc.

Also extra fishy, there are very few independent news sources reporting on this…it’s all blog posts quoting each other. Not reassuring.

I hope it’s true, but something is wrong here.

I took the train from NYC to Denver for the AASHE (higher ed sustainability group conference). Most people take it for granted that flying is the only way to go that distance. So I wrote a blog post for AASHE about my experiences. Find it here.

I’ve been following the blog Gas 2.0 recentlyas I’ve been doing research on electric vehicles and alternative fuels and they do a great job of giving the latest news.

They had a recent post on how the hairs on ferns that help it shed water could be used to make boats more fuel efficient, potentially saving as much as 1% of the fuel used worldwide!

Since I know Jacob loves biomimicry, I thought he’d want to read the article so I figured I’d share it with everyone. Here’s a link to the blog post.

I never cease to love the experience of seemingly disparate interests suddenly coming together in one topic.  Shall we proceed…?

I recently had the honor of sitting at the Detroit Yacht Club (pretty!) on the lovely Belle Isle (belle, belle!) for the Free Press’s first annual Green Leaders Awards ceremony for breakfast and awards among many great people. The keynote speaker (and an honoree) was Bill Ford, Jr. of Ford Motor Company. I found him comfortably down-to-earth (as I’d heard from his employees) and genuinely comfortable with environmental issues, which was no real surprise. I liked him. However, his central message had a flaw. His essential point was: Technology is going to solve the environmental challenges ahead.

Now, there are many in the environmental world who lambaste the “technology will save us” message that Ford, Tom Friedman and many other techno-greenies advocate. Some advocate a Luddite initiative, others simply dismiss the technological fix as a morally and environmentally insufficient red herring or (at best) stop-gap. Certain nuances of that latter approach start to approximate my own opinion, but let me be clear: I also believe that technology will save us – insofar as I believe that technological development will be an essential and irreplaceable part of the solution that we must embrace and strive for in the years ahead. But I still think Ford’s basic message is off in a crucial way.

Enter the feminist writer. I’ve long been a big fan of UK author Jeanette Winterson. One of her most recent books The Stone Gods is what many would call science fiction, though that isn’t her usual genre. She herself notes:

People say to me, ‘so is the Stone Gods science fiction?’ Well, it is fiction, and it has science in it, and it is set (mostly) in the future, but the labels are meaningless.

I can’t see the point of labeling a book like a pre-packed supermarket meal. There are books worth reading and books not worth reading. That’s all.

And because of this book, she was featured last fall on a BBC art critique TV show to talk about the rise of geek culture, along with movie director Kevin Smith and comedian-geek Natalie Haynes. At one point they got into a divisive discussion about the problems (or not) with violence in much of comic-book culture (see the video below).

Winterson’s basic point (just about the comic Kick-Ass, now a major motion picture) was this:

…the thing is just full of the worst kind of dripping violence, which is a kind of adrenaline injection which means you’ll be utterly dead to life in its subtlety, its complexity, its possibilities of expansion of relationships. This is the kind of thing that’s the product of human emptiness.

To which Kevin Smith replied: “I thought it was just a comic book.” Smith and Haynes argued that this was just the culture of the medium and that the presence of a hard fighting young girl was progress. This is another debate that has raged in other places.  (Comics-god Scott McCloud points out that at least this particular conversation was a sign of progress for comics evolution).

But Winterson’s point, I believe, drives at something else. Specifically, that we must overcome the disconnects between actual life and all of the adrenaline pumping pretty things we’re presented with in today’s media. And this is what brings me back to Bill Ford.

Technology may do wonders for us in the future years. I think we’re going to see an exciting explosion of innovation and entrepreneurial successes in the realm of green technologies. As stated above, I think some of these innovations will be necessary for us to get to a tenable solution for the ecological crises that face us.

But technology does not appear from nowhere. Technology will not save us. People will. People will drive the vision and leadership to develop useful technologies (and the many social solutions we’ll need) to save ourselves.  Without people making choices, changing policies and doing the work to make those solutions emerge, then they won’t. If we keep our focus on the technology without remembering where it comes from (as well as who it’s to serve) then we run the risk of assuming that it will just emerge, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. If that were so, we would have had major solar technology breakthroughs back in the 80s regardless of the fact that Reagan slashed funding for it.

Technology can seem out of single-human grasp, but the maker movement is reclaiming the human hand in techno-crafting,  and we would all do well to remember the necessity of focusing on people (and our ability to understand nature, as well) as the developers of the solutions that can save us.

It’s a truism: American megacapitalism sucks because it cannot plan for the long term. Without any ability to look behind the next quarterly report, the thinking goes, we lack the benefits of a long range planning horizons that accrue to, say, Japan, or perhaps Oxford University. (Sadly for all those who have retold this hoary old tale, BTW, someone has debunked it on Snopes. Oh well.

In any case, it’s such a firm bit of received wisdom that who can doubt it? Nevertheless, I was intrigued by a bit of radiojournalism that suggested that some of the Catholic Church’s appalling response to pedophilia can be explained by the notion that the Pope is taking the long view. He simply doesn’t care about this month’s polls. His institution has been around for centuries, and he expects it to be around for centuries more…so, who cares about the opinions du jour? You’ll be dead, and the institutional memory will outlive you.

Taking this to back to the topic of corporations, maybe we should be glad they care about how public outcry affects this quarter’s stock price. Imagine if they didn’t, and took the long view, and whatever they thought they could weather in the long term, they simply ignored! The corporation has every reason to expect to outlive you and me so in some sense we should count ourselves as damn lucky we can get them to listen to us at all.

That is, until we finally get the corporate death penalty…but don’t hold your breath.

I was completely taken a few years ago when the fabulous local Bureau of Urban Living started offering T-shirts and posters which re-appropriated the old WWII British slogan Keep Calm and Carry On and introduced it as a slogan for the city of Detroit.

More recently, I was taken with how the old US phrase Home of the Brave, Land of the Free took on a completely different meaning, when applied to the city of Detroit.  So taken, in fact, that I’ve tried putting it front and center on the Sustainable Detroit website.

What gives?

I think this two-data-point trend helped me see a pattern that highlights one of the central things  I love about Detroit: life matters here. The recent recession has changed some of this, but America has been so comfortable for so long, that a certain malaise starts to kick in. Lack of purpose can become debilitating when a clear need is not present. Detroit has a clear need. Many needs. And some clearer than others — but the sense of need is clear. While this is seen as the source of much of it’s woes, many of us here know that it is also one of it’s sources of strength.

What we do here has an impact. What we do here matters. Of course, it matters in other places too, but it’s no big surprise to me how lost many progressive-minded folks in other parts of metro-Detroit or Michigan or Chicago or New York, etc.  end up feeling. They know they want things to be different, but it’s hard to imagine that they can have an impact. Not so, in Detroit. We’re still one of the largest cities in the country, yet individual effort can still yield a noticeable and significant impact.

And so these slogans from a less cynical and jaded time (even though things like British war propaganda which would inspire Orwell’s dystopic visions often were good cause for cynicism) can actually appeal to progressives. And it doesn’t have to be ironic to be admired. Is it layered and not just a surface propaganda yes? But it’s layered with multiple levels of direct meaning, not just multiple layers of irony. For the irony-weary amongst us, this is just another indication of Detroit’s ability to deliver on it’s long touted ability to Keep it Real.

I was radically changed by my experience of moving to the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in its earliest days and trying to build a new society starting nearly from scratch.  Having just spent most of my 20s trying to do some good things in the world and thinking a lot about what was important to me, I had nonetheless found it hard to enact my beliefs in every day life. And then I moved to the ecovillage, where the whole point was to enact many of those beliefs.

My mother sometimes jokingly (mostly) referred to it as Voluntary Hardship. But the irony was that the work was a pleasure and blurred the standard connotations of “work.”  It was, if you’ll forgive the jargon, empowering. Instead of “work” draining my soul, it fed it, and thus my work gave me energy. It gave me power. I wouldn’t be the first to point out that this may be our most significant kind of renewable energy.

One of my favorite Dancing Rabbit sayings came from those early days. We were trying to build a sustainable society, but many of didn’t have the skills we wanted.  And when it came time to do something new, we had to just launch in and do our best. Thus we had the saying:

If you’ve seen it done, you’re good at it.

If you’ve done it once, you’re an expert.

This was later amended with “And if you’ve read about it, you’re a consultant!” We’d say it with a laugh, roll up our sleeves and make whoever had done it once teach the rest of us. We did a lot of reading and research and sometimes we made some horrible mistakes. But mostly we got a lot done by not letting our own limitations get in the way. It completely changed how I approach living in the world.

I was reminded of this when reading Derrick Jensen’s recent article in Orion Magazine, Resistance Resisters. I’ve long been a fan of Orion and I know many people who are big fans of Jensen’s. I’ve personally had mixed reactions to different things of his that I’ve read and this article fit the pattern.

I appreciate Jensen’s clarion call for deep change and his dissatisfaction with piecemeal efforts. However, I also find his rhetoric to be anything from unhelpful to damaging as a strategy to achieve the very ends he’s pursuing. For now, I’d like to focus on one particular aspect: action.

Jensen’s criticism is a strong call to action. And as per my own experience, action becomes a very useful teacher. The overcoming of inertia is a mighty feat by itself  (one of the reason’s why I think Jensen’s condemnation of small steps is misled), and more importantly action leads to feedback. Action and learning are not separate acts, and in fact action often spurs greater learning than just reading or thinking, for action provides new information about the particulars of the exact scenario in front of you.  So  I agree with Jensen that we must take action.

But actions taken out of fear and anger tend to beget more fear and anger. And this is the problem with Jensen’s treatise. Even if one is deciding to take a direct action civil disobedience approach, even if fear or anger provided the initial impetus and spark to action, being driven by these twin demons rarely results in a greater good for the world.

I’ve certainly found this to be very true in my personal life.  It’s such a simple premise, but I saved myself tremendous trouble when I came to the conclusion that I shouldn’t make any major decisions or take any major actions when feeling miserable, but only once I saw something that I felt hopeful about to move to. I don’t think this maxim always holds true, especially when one is in danger or under threat. But once those kinds of threats are out of the way, I found that I did much better when I waited until I found, felt or saw something good that I wanted to move toward instead of just moving away from something that was hard. When I acted out of pain, then I was usually not happy with the results.

If we carry this analogy forward to Jensen’s article, it calls into question the danger-exception. He eloquently points out the danger and threat to many forms of life currently underway. So the call to action stands. Still, when we ask what actions we will choose I’d rather take my chances with hope and love than fear and anger. I think we’ll build a better future for all life that way.

This doesn’t mean choosing to not act at all, however. Even given my maxim. The top priority then becomes seeking the actions that provide positive directions. We still cannot ignore the dangers and damage.

Looking through the various posts of the recent blogathon, I came across this beautiful description from Liz McClellan, organizer of Hyperlocavore – A Free Yard Sharing Community about her visit to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage back in the early days. I think it makes an excellent mantra for this topic. It’s what she said she learned from that visit:

Stop talking. Do.
And while you do, Dance.

Biking for the Blogathon

For today’s blogathon-fundraiser we are trying to power our computer via pedal power but pedaling is certainly not the answer to all of our energy needs. America’s electricity use per capita is over 35 kilowatt-hours per day. If you wanted to supply all that energy via pedal power, each person would need to bike at full speed for 118 hours per day. In other words it would take the entire population of the US and China pedaling 24/7 to generate enough electricity for the current US demands. Or…

Conservation is almost always a key element to meeting our needs in a sustainable way. Before we look at alternative power or fuels it is best to look at reducing our demands. Once we are consuming less, sustainable sources of power are a lot more realistic.

How you can reduce your computer’s power consumption

Your average desktop computer uses between 150 and 300 watts while it is running. Your first step in conserving energy is to turn off your computer when you are not using it or at least make sure that its power management settings are configured to have it sleep or hibernate when it is not in use. It used to be that people worried about wearing out disk drives from turning computers on and off, but that is not really an issue any longer, given modern drive technology and the typical lifespan of a computer these days. This is the most important thing you can do to save power – make sure your computer is sleeping or off when you are not using it.

The next thing you can do is consider switching to a laptop computer. Laptops can easily use only 10-33% of the power that a comparable desktop computer uses. To make them last longer on battery power they are designed with low power components.

Another option is to switch to an Energy Star computer, either desktop of laptop. To get an Energy Star rating, computers have to automatically shut down when not in use and are generally designed to have low power draws. The trick is you have to make sure that you don’t turn off any of the power saving features, like the power management system.

So lets look at an example. Let’s say you’re currently using some random desktop with an external LCD monitor (heaven forbid you still have a CRT monitor). Let’s assume it uses 150 watts and you leave it on 24 hours a day – you’ll use 3600 watt-hours per day. If you let it go into sleep mode (which use something like 5 watts) for 16 hours a day you cut your use down to 1280 watt-hours. Now let’s say you switch to an Energy Star Desktop like the iMac 21.5 inch which only uses 90.5 watts while running and 2 watts while sleeping, your power use could drop to 756 watt-hours per day.

Blog Central at the DR Blogathon

If instead you get a new MacBook Pro with a 13 inch display which Apple says uses 14 watts while its running with the display on. Let’s say you use your computer for 8 hours a day on average and the rest of the time you leave it in sleep mode (which uses 1.1 watts), you’re using about 130 watts per day for your computing needs. At that point your computer is using about the same energy as a lightbulb (a CFL of course, heaven help us if you’re still using incandescents).

So to summarize:

• Desktop (24 hours on)- 3600 watt-hours/day
• Desktop (8 hours on) – 1280 watt-hours/day
• Energy Star Desktop (8 hours on) – 756 watt-hours/day
• Energy Star Laptop (8 hours on) – 130 watt-hours/day

The electricity you use running your computer is only half the story

Now one thing to consider is that the electricity you use running your computer is only half the story. Apple gives a detailed assessment of the greenhouse gas impact for each of its products and “customer use” generally accounts for about half of the emissions. So it also helps if you buy used, or keep your computer for longer.

How Does Computer Use Compare to Other Eco Impacts

So how do home/work computers fit into the big picture of your ecological footprint?

On average Amercians emit about 24,000 kg of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) per person per year.

Using Apple’s figures for its products, computer use, including the embodied energy, produces about 100 kg to 300 kg per year per computer. Compare this to over 1100kg for a desktop thats on 24/7, or 465kg for the desktop on 8 hours a day. By changing your computer use, you could save up to 1000 kg of CO2e or about 4% of the average American’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.

What else can you do that saves 1000kg of CO2e?

• Drive about 20% fewer miles (around 2200 miles)
• Increasing your MPG by 25%
• Eat 200 fewer cheeseburgers
• Take 1 less 2500 mile round trip airplane flight

These aren’t examples of total lifestyle changes but they aren’t insignificant either. And I would certainly rather use my share of CO2e to take a vacation rather than leaving my computer running 24/7.

Can computing be part of a sustainable world?

There are a lot of factors involved in that question, but my gut sense is that it can be, assuming we are making sustainable choices in the rest of our lives. If we were aiming for reducing our impact by 90%, then using a laptop for 8 hours a day might be about 5% of our reduced impact. Still significant, but for those of us who are so dependent on our computers as to practically be cyborgs, I think its worth it.

Of course this was all about your home computer, coming next, What is the impact of the internet!

Consider making a donation to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage as part of our blogathon. All donations will be matched dollar for dollar, doubling your impact. Thanks!

Back of the Envelope (BOTE) calculations are extremely handy to calibrate your gut sense of what’s possible and what’s not. Most people don’t bother and often there is humorous (OK, to some…) confusion that results.

At work I received a sales pitch for software that reduces wasted pages printed (like when people print web pages and the last page has only the footer on it and so forth). A noble cause but I was distracted about their savings calculations based upon the “fact” that printer ink costs $10,000 per gallon. True enough in a way, if you count the whole price of a single inkjet cartridge against the fraction of an ounce of ink it contains and then just scale up to gallons! But ridiculous when a simple Google search finds refill ink selling for $80 per gallon. They were off by two orders of magnitude!

So what’s the part about BOTE that you won’t forget? It was this memorable series of calculations performed by myself and Craig Deforest at Synergy, a Stanford student co-op. I’ve updated the numbers for 2010.

You should be able to do this with only minor Googling.

1. Number of people on Earth: 6.8 billion
2. Number of men: 3.4 billion
3. Number of men over 12 and less than 70: call it 75% of the above, so around 2.5 billion
4. Average frequency of ejaculation: got no idea but factor in all the younger guys who are doing it once a day and factor out the older guys doing less frequently and you’ve got to think the average is at least a couple times per week…call it 0.25 times/day
5. Worldwide ejaculations per day (multiply 3 and 4): 650 million
6. Volume of ejaculate: about 1 teaspoon
7. Teaspoons per gallon: 768 (D’oh! Standard American units!)
8. Gallons of ejaculate generated daily: 800,000
9. Volume of an Olympic size swimming pool: 660,000 gallons

Sum it all up in less then 10 easy steps: the world’s men are generating more than an Olympic size swimming pool full of ejaculate daily.

Go BOTE!

It turns out that Frank Capra, known for his film It’s a Wonderful Life, apparently had his heart more in science than film making, according to his biographer. In any case, he made a series of science films in the 50s, including one warning about climate change. Called The Unchained Goddess, it’s making some rounds now on various blogs and news media (such as this NPR story). You can view a clip of it on Youtube.

It’s fascinating and sort of fun. Apparently Capra also was interested in solar technology back then and got Jimmy Stewart’s character in another film to promote it.

But ultimately, the aesthetics of a 50′s documentary do little to convince anyone of anything. In fact, I find that they more seem to imply two dimensional propaganda – regardless of their content. It’s just that the stilted film style automatically seems garish to our modern film sensibilities. And while some folks are claiming that this shows a historic awareness of climate change, I’m not sure that means a lot in this context.  The historic science predictions may be relevant (e.g.  the early predictions about US peak oil production which bore out to be true) or they may not (e.g. Einstein’s prediction that nuclear energy wouldn’t be obtainable).

But hey – if it had Jimmy Stewart in it, I might watch it anyway….