Comments grygy has made

  • Well Cyber, you asked for it and here goes - I am sick of your arguing. Enough accusing someone of being an apologist for Monsanto, taking pleasure in the misfortune of others, etc. FP is in the industry, you are apparently a dilletante, and on the basis of your vitriol I'd believe him a lot more than you. But perhaps you are more interested in commenting than discussing or effecting real change.On Why are (some) farmers afraid of Michael Pollan? posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago 26 Responses
  • A minor point, but having actually seen the movie, what we are talking about is Soylent Yellow or maybe Soylent Blue. The best closing line of any movie belongs to this one: "Soylent Green is..." but to finish that statement would be to ruin the movie, and I do have my standards :-)On Soylent Green is ... toxic algae?, and other not-so-tasty morsels from around the web posted 2 months ago 3 Responses
  • Thank you DrX and WannaBe especially (and Umbra) for your gentleness, this is one hot-button issue! Our family fost-adopted two boys, and I've thought a fair amount about the tradeoffs between raising their socio-economic status (means more impacts), "teaching the children well" (means less impacts, especially if they then go on to teach others well, either their kids or strangers). It's a hard thing to analyze and much harder to imagine quantifying enough to say "every extra kid that a middle-class environmentalist bears will increase CO2 emissions by XXX tons over the next 100 years; every extra kid by a Chicano welfare mom increases by YYY tons, etc." So just two things I know: 1) 2 children per family is BELOW the long-term replacement rate, so if the average woman bears two kids population will rise (because of the current over-representation of child-bearers) and then fall; and 2) the most effective ways to reduce family size in the third and probably first world are education of women, and alleviation of poverty. Both lead to children going to school, which means delayed childbirth, increased security for parents, smaller families.On Ask Umbra on big families posted 2 months, 1 week ago 48 Responses

  • Tyler: I agree with some of your points, but you are wrong about the auxiliary engines.  This is not a typical charter-cat crew, they have some serious sailors on board, and serious sailors do not like to motor. Remember Lynn and Larry Purdey (sp?), who have been sailing sans engine for literally hundreds of thousands of miles? 

    This boat will have two electric motors with 2 hrs running time in their batteries, for low-speed manoevering and harbor entry. Having tried an electric motor (Torqueedo) on my 22-foot sailboat, I agree they use a lot of juice. So they will sailing virtually all the time, just like other hard-core sailors do.

    As for the Lagoon cats you mention, rumor has it most of them have had so many problems they are being converted back to regular motors. You can be slmost as efficient by just using one of your two engines in a big cat. See http://www.latitude38.com/letters/200901.html and http://www.latitude38.com/letters/200902.html (search for hybrid in these letters and responses in the Bay Area's sailing mag)

    As for nuclear plants generating as much GHGs as coal - show me a reference, I think you are way off on that one too.

    On David de Rothschild: Saving the world, one adventure at a time posted 4 months, 2 weeks ago 9 Responses

  • OK, I know you wanted to be first at the mike, but next time how about a nice "please" instead of a knee in the groin?

    On Caption needed! UPDATE: Caption found posted 6 months ago 22 Responses

  • Silver buckshot and straw bales

    Gee, here I was all ready to pile on pangolin for vitriol, and he makes the same comment about straw bale that I was going to (he got there before I could log in, don't post much).  Straw bale generally has LESS embodied energy than conventional construction, try Googling it and see what I mean (here's one link, admittedly from an obvious booster - http://www.strawbale.com/strawbale-faqs/).

    As for the larger question, I'm glad that palgolin and others are "sharpening Adam's sword" and assume AW has grown back a thick enough skin to take the flack by now, but I do think that he's mostly correct - i.e. the situation is so dire that yes, ANYTHING that will get mass-consumers to start thinking and caring about the planet and other people is not only good but necessary.  

    What I'll call conventional environmentalism tends to emphasise the doom and gloom side of things, and that's not likely to motivate people unless it means immediate harm (like next 30 seconds), where fight or flight kicks in.  I myself have to take a break from my Sierra Club mag to read the more positive Nature Conservancy one, just to keep from getting burned out. (And Grist's humor helps too.)

    I personally am not optimistic about the world's future, I suspect that the 9B people here in 50 years will be on the verge of dramatic collapse due to the usual venality and greed that seems to be our lot, and by the end of the century we might well be down to 10% of that due to war, famine and disease (after having irreparably soiled the planet).  But I also know enough about psychology (my wife is a therapist, after all) to know that as a tool for change, hope will trump doom and gloom every time. AW is trying to bring hope and purpose to millions of people who wouldn't read our blog if they knew it existed, and from the belly of the beast at that. For that I applaud him.On Adam Werbach calls for a new movement of a billion consumers posted 1 year, 7 months ago 73 Responses

  • Lower peak energy demand?

    Utilities have to plan for the peak load, which typically occurs around 4PM in the hot summer days; solar PV peaks at 1PM (remember daylight savings time), but closer to 3PM if you orient SW.  So please, aim your collectors not due South but about 45 degrees West of that.  When we all have time-of-use meters SW will probably be the optimal orientation economically for the homeowner (Severen Borenstein at UC Berkeley has some nice research on this), but it helps with the peak load whatever kind of meter you have.On Are solar incentives a subsidy for the rich? posted 1 year, 8 months ago 11 Responses

  • El Cerrito rocks!

    Greetings to greenengineer, we live up the hill from you, technically in an unincoporated area, which allows for more interesting architecture but less police patrols.  So waddawe do?  Compost a lot (2 bins now), recycle a lot, kids walk to school when we can get them up on time - and we not only adopted our cats, but the kids too (OK, so that wasn't really for environmental reasons - but if you counted lifetime emissions birthing a kid would be like driving a stretch Hummer limo hundreds of miles a day to gorge yourself at McDonalds. But I digress.)

    Bicycle to that great BART station when it isn't raining and I'm not too pooped - looking for a good electric assist to help me up the hills when I am.  Bath water goes out the window to the fig tree next to the compost bin, thanks Umbra for suggesting that a few months ago (and it's really easy using a standard 3/8" outboard engine hose siphon squeeze bulb).

    CFL's and LED nite lights everywhere except where dimmed, keep the heat low from the natgas fireplace and use waste wood in the woodburner for romance and on really cold nights.  And biggest trick of all - built our current house out of recycled Styrofoam (Rastra) 10 yrs ago, and last fall finished a new infill house next door made of reused, insulated shipping containers (called reefers).  Very cool looking, I just wish it had cost less than a regular stick house, but first in the world (we think) is never as cheap as you plan for.

    Keep those ideas coming, folks!On How are you greening your suburban life? posted 1 year, 10 months ago 16 Responses

  • Not a false dichotomy

    OK, in the best of all possible worlds we would dismantle all our coal-fired and nuclear generators and get by on renewables and natural gas fired plants, which together amount to about 30% of US generation right now.  We can improve conservation and reduce per capita consumption by maybe 3% per year (still pretty aggressive), but people still keep having babies and immigrants keep coming in so total electric emissions are going to be very hard to reduce in absolute terms. Even CA hasn't been able to do it yet, despite the most aggressive energy efficiency programs in the nation.

    So what is our transition fuel to keep CO2 from balooning in the next few decades? It had better be nuclear, and we had better get with the Europeans and settle on failsafe designs that allow waste reprocessing at lower costs than current designs, or we are, as they say, cooked.

    The good news is all that concrete can be made with way less greenhouse gas emissions, by using - guess what - coal flyash and also slag in up to 50% in the mix, it even increases the strength of the concrete (and the cure time).

    Wind is lovely (except to that idiot senator from MA), but also unpredictable, except in CA where it always peaks in the middle of the night and requires billion-dollar transmission lines to get it to where the load is. And yes, those transmission lines take 10 yrs to plan and build because of NIMBYism (among other things), just like a nuke plant.

    We are not going to survive as a species without going full court press on ALL the low-GHG technologies, and that includes nuclear. Carbon capture is a lot further off, so for the next 10 years I'd "just say no" to new coal plants.On Umbra on nuclear vs. coal posted 1 year, 10 months ago 25 Responses

  • State by state lbs CO2 per kWh

    Sorry, forgot to include this in my post...
    http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/ftproot/environment/e-supdoc-u.p ...On Hybrid emissions: Facts and numbers posted 1 year, 10 months ago 34 Responses

  • Grams CO2 per mile for electric cars

    Vinod, you cited US average lbs/kWh to get the grams per mile under electric propulsion, but let's talk actual buyers and actual off-peak marginal emissions, not national averages.  

    To tackle the second issue first, emissions per kWh will always be less at night, when the cars are generally plugged in, than during the peak or on average.  So plugging in a Volt at night if you have an "average electric utility" generates less emissions than the US EIA average cited (probably by 20-40%, depending on the season).  To get an idea of how much more efficient the marginal power plants are at night you can check on-peak and off-peak wholesale power prices, and that ratio will be approximately equal to the efficiency ratio.

    The trickier issue is that the majority of VOLT and Prius drivers are indeed affluent, and they happen to live in states that have low-carbon electricity sources - the average for CA where you live is about 0.6 lbs/kWh rather than 1.34 for the US average, and up in Gristland (OR and WA) it's less than 0.3, though the latter is mainly from hydropower which is basically NEVER on the margin because it's an energy-limited resource.  For the entire Left coast you can almost always assume natural gas at the margin, with heat rates of between 6000 and 9000 (million BTU's per MWH) except during heat waves. Sorry, I don't have the calc to lbs C/kWh for those, but they are both significantly less than the national average.

    My point is, your grams per mile is between 1.2 and 3 times too high for the electric propulsion modes, and that unfairly downplays the environmental benefits of plug-ins and all-electrics.On Hybrid emissions: Facts and numbers posted 1 year, 10 months ago 34 Responses

  • Another reason to focus on transportation

    One of the more promising ways to reduce carbon emissions is to shift transportation from ICE to electric, via hybrids, plug-ins or all-electric, whatever works best/most cost-effective at any given time.  This will create a net reduction in carbon, but an increase in carbon output from the electric utilities.  (Natural gas-fuelled generation is basically always on the margin in the West, so no comments about electric cars run on coal please ;-)

    If we focus on the electric utility players and ignore transportation it will create a nasty dis-incentive for this kind of technology upgrade; the electric utilities need to be able to capture the benefits from reducing transportation emissions from oil somehow.On Why the West should worry about transportation emissions posted 1 year, 10 months ago 5 Responses

  • Choosing efficient toilets

    Thanks colwyn, couldn't have said it better.  We are close to finishing a green house on NorCal and used the MaP document (plus plumber's experience) to choose dual-flush Caromas for it.  Aussies have been using them for 10 years, they work. I suspect people who claim low-flush toilets don't work hasn't used a good one like Caroma or Toto.

    Of course one can also go the hippy route, but that's hard when family comes round, dual-flush works for even your 90 yr old granny. And do check out the MaP pdf file, it's big but the pictures are worth it...On Umbra on replacing toilets posted 2 years, 4 months ago 8 Responses

  • Centralized power production

    I hate to say this, but those centralized power plants actually HAVE been getting more efficient lately, the "heat rate" (BTU per MWh) has been dropping from around 10,000 to 6500 for the latest models, which means they use about 35% less fuel than the 1960s variety. I notice Amory Lovins' graphs tend to stop in the 80s, a lot has happened since then.  And transmission losses are at most 10%, usually more like 3-5%.  So the "2/3 of energy is wasted on the way to end-users" is pretty far out of whack.

    Even with distributed gen (which I love), you still have to build it, and pay for the silicon in the solar panels (now starting to run into supply problems) or the gen-sets or whatever - and polluting distributed gen generally pollutes more than centralized per unit of energy.

    Not to say there ain't a lot of good in there, but please do clean up the specifics before some RW think tank staffer gets ahold of it.On TomPaine op-ed: 'The Alt Fuels Distraction' posted 3 years, 6 months ago 17 Responses