Alternative Fuels/Power

Producing your own clean, renewable power is perhaps one of the most effective methods for you to limit your impact on climate change. By producing your own locally-grown energy with renewable technologies like solar, wind, micro-hydro, and geothermal, you’ll be removing your support from dirty energy and demonstrate to your friends and neighbours your commitment to fight global warming. Remember as well, that most renewable energy systems will qualify you for rebates or subsidies from the federal, state, or municipal governments: Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency.

• Perhaps the most obvious renewable energy solution for the average homeowner is solar photovoltaics. With this technology, all it takes are a few panels on your roof and you’re producing your own electricity with the power of the sun. You can alternatively install solar shingles or pole-mounted photovoltaics, depending on your home’s configuration. Regardless of your choice, you’ll have a system that guarantees the price you’ll pay for electricity for at least 25 years so you won’t have to worry about rising electricity costs, which are sure to come.
• The sun can also be used to produce warm water to use in your home (for showers, laundry, dishwashing, and more) as well as for your pool or spa. Solar water heaters are one of the most economical forms of renewable energy because of their lower up-front cost and quicker payback time.
• Growing in popularity are geothermal systems. These can be adapted in a number of different ways—they can produce electricity, provide hot water, and even heat and cool your home. They do have a longer payback time because of the higher capital costs, but geothermal systems last for decades and are one of the most reliable forms of renewable energy. They also add to your home’s value significantly.
• If you live out of town or are able to install a small turbine on your city home’s roof, wind energy may be a great option for you. These can be very economical and produce clean energy even when the sun isn’t shining.

One final option to those living near a water source is micro-hydro. By tapping into the energy in moving water without impacting the local stream or river, you can produce your own energy with very little expense.

Electronics

Whether it’s talking on your cell phone, watching TV, or playing online games, the electronics you use in your home could be adding to your monthly electricity bill. Only five percent of the energy used by cell phone chargers, for instance, goes to actually charging your phone; the rest is consumed when your phone isn’t even attached to the charger. Similar idle power drains—often called “phantom power” drains—occur with most electronic devices, including printers, computers, televisions, VCRs, DVD players, stereos, and more.

This unnecessary energy waste is completely preventable with a few simple and easy tricks. Buying more efficient models is certainly one way to save energy and money, but an even simpler, low-cost method is to enable your electronics’ power-saving features. You might just save enough to buy yourself an extra latte or video game!

• Look for the ENERGY STAR logo on all battery-powered devices you’re considering buying, whether it’s a power tool, a new electronic device, or a household appliance. These will come with battery charging systems that are 35 percent more efficient than standard models.
• Install a power strip to completely power-down all electronics, including televisions, computers, monitors, DVDs, VCRs, and set top boxes when they’re not in use. Although it’s difficult to estimate how much this will save one home since it depends on the quantity and efficiency of your electronics and the price of your power, as a nation, this could cut $750 million from our annual electricity bill.
• Choose an energy efficient television model to save $30+ every year on energy costs.
• If you’re television uses 130 watts, and your cable box 35 watts, and your electricity costs about $0.08 per kWh, one hour of television watching might cost $1.42. Save money by encouraging your kids to have one Green Hour every day away from the television and pocket the energy savings.
• LCD televisions are generally more efficient than plasma TVs, so choose a more efficient option to save up to $60 every year in power consumption.
• Choose a television with an energy-saving standby feature (and make sure it’s activated!) to save between $10 and $40 every year in electricity costs.
• If your television has a “quick start” or standby mode, consider turning it off. This mode typically consumed on the order of 50 times more power.
• Use your computer’s power management features to ensure it shuts down when not in use to save between $40 and $80 annually in electricity.
• If you’re in the market for a new computer, choose a laptop to save $25 in electricity yearly.
• Buy an ENERGY STAR television to save 30 percent in energy costs.
• Choose ENERGY STAR for your entire computer system (monitor, computer, printer, and fax) to save $115 in energy costs over the lifetime of your equipment.
• Although you’ll have to pay to power-up rechargeable batteries, and they cost more up-front to purchase, overall they will save on energy (it takes more energy to produce disposable batteries). An $80 charger and a $35 package of four rechargeable batteries could save you $670 in replacement costs over disposable batteries.
• Smoking adds pollutants to the atmosphere and your own body. Quit and you could save almost $1,500 every year.

Important People

We look to the heroes in our world for direction, inspiration, and motivation when fighting against impossible odds like those facing us today in the environmental community. Here are a few influential environmentalists you should watch as they change the world with their good green message.

• Perhaps one of the most influential environmentalists in Africa, Wangari Maathai is a fearless leader, working to improve human health, foster vibrant communities, and encourage women to become economically independent, all with a green angle. She was the first woman from Africa to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and started the Green Belt Movement.

• Despite the recent smear campaign against Van Jones, he is a leader in the environmental community worth watching. He has a knack for linking good jobs to social justice and environmentalism, skilfully connecting the dots and coming up with ambitious and innovative solutions for today’s greatest environmental problems.

• Founder of Better Place, Shai Agassi has a vision to make electric vehicles affordable and mainstream in short order. His solution is to provide battery swap stations that are powered by renewable energy, making personal vehicle ownership virtually emissions-free.

• Founder of Patagonia, a leading-edge, eco-friendly outdoors company, Yvon Chouinard has been experimenting with green concepts for over fifty years.
• Main character in An Inconvenient Truth and advocate for audacious climate goals, Al Gore is naturally one of the most well-recognized faces in the fight against global warming.
• An environmental hero in Canada and beyond, David Suzuki has been talking and writing and filming about the environmental challenges of our time for decades.
• If you’re looking for a humorous slant on the environmental movement, check out Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno for a quirky twist on the issues.
• Bringing the green to Hollywood, Ed Begley Jr. has been talkin’ up eco-friendly living for decades, too. He’s even got his own show, Living with Ed.

Videos

• Wangari Maathai

• Van Jones

• Shai Agassi

• Yvon Chouinard

New Products

Pushing the boundaries of existing technologies to find ways to produce energy, reduce the effects of climate change, and make our lives greener, healthier, and more productive is the task of the great thinkers of the world. Here are some of the projects they’ve been working on.

• Not necessarily new, but definitely significant in the fight against climate change, green roofs are super environmental. They help to mitigate stormwater runoff, provide habitat for wildlife and green spaces for humans, are a source of food, filter the air, and reduce the urban heat island effect.
• Electronic paper, which acts much like traditional tree-based paper, is being touted as an eco-friendly replacement. Epaper can be reused over and over again and works via microcapsules filled with particles that carry electric charges.
• Hydrogen power is perhaps one of the most sought-after forms of clean energy. If it can be harnessed safely and efficiently, hydrogen power has the potential to provide abundantly clean, infinitely renewable energy.
• Renewable energy comes in many forms, and scientists and engineers are working on better ways to turn the ocean’s waves into a source for clean energy. Wave energy has the potential to provide a significant portion of the world’s energy if it can be developed sustainably with little impact to ocean ecosystems.
• Another way to fight climate change is to remove heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide from the air. The process called carbon sequestration hopes to do just that by sinking carbon into the deep layers of the earth where it won’t contribute to the greenhouse effect.
• Some scientists hope to add to the renewable energy mix with ocean thermal energy conversion. The ocean absorbs enormous quantities of energy, so by taking advantage of the difference in temperature between the ocean’s surface and depths, they hope to produce electricity.
• The looming water crisis threatens to be even bigger than energy shortages, with the possibility of millions of people being negatively impacted by drought and serious lack of clean water. To combat this problem, many environmentalists and scientists are working on ways to remove salt from seawater, making it potable for the masses in a process called desalination.
• One more potentially positive source of renewable energy is algae. By employing algae to make biofuels, many hope we can generate energy using some of the smallest creatures on the planet.