Maine Community Seeing Things in a New Light

Fort Fairfield's new energy effificent streetlights | Courtesy of: Paul Cyr©2011 NorthernMainePhotos.com

As one of the northernmost communities in the “Lower 48,” Fort Fairfield, Maine (population 3,500) averages less sunlight every year than towns in the southern part of the state.

In the summer months, this isn’t a big problem since it stays lighter much later in the evening. In the winter, however, the hours of actual daylight are dramatically shorter, which can lead to higher utility bills for keeping streetlights on for more hours per day.

All this darkness and the need to save energy is one of the reasons Fort Fairfield was able to leverage $58,290 in Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant funding with a $45,675 lighting incentive from Efficiency Maine to replace 174 streetlights with LED lighting technology. … Continue Reading

Renewable Clean Green – The Lack of Oil in our History

Renewable Clean Green

It puzzles me to think of why people would not want Solar Energy Power or Wind Energy Power. My puzzlement is the same towards Hydro Power and Geothermal. All of these sources of energy are just natural to our whole earthly being.

The sun, the wind, the water, and also the nucleus of the earth, have been with us since the beginning of time, and there’s more than likely a good chance they will be with us till the end as well. For when they’re gone we’re gone too… These are truly inexhaustible resources free from our laws of supply and demand. Maybe this is why they’re not sought after more readily. … Continue Reading

Electric Buses Get a Jump Start

Electric bus: Proterra’s buses, including the one shown here, are being used in small numbers by transit agencies. Credit: Proterra

(By Kevin Bullis – Technology Review) A GM-funded bus could reduce transit agencies’ fuel bills by 80 percent.

The electric-bus startup Proterra has raised $30 million in new funding, including $6 million from GM Ventures. The company uses relatively small battery packs to keep down costs, intending them to be recharged frequently at rapid-charging stations that can replenish them in less than 10 minutes.

Fuel-saving technology is important to transit agencies, especially now that diesel prices are high and volatile—a gallon of diesel costs a dollar more that it did a year ago. Proterra CEO Jeff Granato says each bus will save the transit agency $600,000 in fuel costs over the 12-year life of the vehicle, plus another $70,000 to $95,000 in maintenance costs. Electricity to charge the buses costs about 18 cents per mile, compared with about $1 a mile for diesel fuel.  Granato says these savings make the total cost of an electric bus comparable to that of a diesel bus over the life of the vehicle, even though the electric bus costs more up front. (The company won’t say how much the buses cost, but they do, apparently, need nearly $700,000 in fuel and maintenance savings to break even with diesel buses.) … Continue Reading

Solar Service Companies Make Solar Affordable and Accessible

UpStart n. 1. A company or organization with innovative approaches to energy use, carbon pollution, resource consumption, and/or social equity, 2. A company or organization overcoming market barriers to build the new clean energy economy.

by Lisbeth Kaufman

Finally, roof-top solar power is becoming  affordable for the broad reach of the middle class.  And we can thank the UpStarts with innovative ‘solar service’ business models for making solar photovoltaics (PV) accessible to the average homeowner.

Companies like SolarCity, SunRun Homes, and Sungevity are remaking and retaking financing, installation, and system maintenance – and delivering power often at prices lower than the customer’s current electricity bill.

This sector has become so successful, it recently caught Google’s eye. … Continue Reading

Tea Party Republicans in the House Resume Assault on the Environment

Michell Bachmann - The Self-appointed Tea Party Leader; credit: Charlie Neibergall, AP

(NRDC) The U.S. House has just returned from recess, and the Tea Party Republicans want to make it their first order of business to resume their assault on the environment. House Republican leaders and their Tea Party colleagues are working to block any effort to update the protections that keep our air and water clean.

GOP forces are fighting this battle largely away from public view. Poll after poll shows that American voters favor public health safeguards, so these lawmakers are slipping their dirty measures into the 2012 spending bills in the form of policy riders.

Spending bills are the one kind of legislation that must be passed, even in this divided Congress. Yet policy riders have nothing to do with saving taxpayer money. They literally do not save a single penny. They are designed instead to dictate major changes in government policy with little public debate or transparency.

GOP leaders used the same tactic a few months ago in the spending bill for this year, known as a Continuing Resolution. While the media and the American people focused on how deep spending cuts would be, Republican lawmakers in the House stuffed 19 anti-environmental riders into the bill.

These provisions would have harmed public health and the environment. For example, they would have stopped the EPA from applying Clean Water Act protections to many waterways threatened with pollution, blocked the implementation of the Supreme Court decision that concluded carbon dioxide is a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, and stopped efforts to restore iconic American ecosystems including the Chesapeake Bay and the San Francisco Bay-Delta.

In the end, opposition from Senate Democratic leaders and the president forced the House to drop the riders, but not until the very last minute as a government shutdown loomed.

We must now raise the alarm again as Congress prepares to pass the spending bills for next year.

The dirty amendments have already started, and the House hasn’t even gotten to the main environmental measures yet. Just a few weeks ago, House Republicans attached a rider to the 2012 spending bill that would force the Agriculture Department to abandon new nutritional guidelines for school meals that are designed to fight childhood obesity and would recommend more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

The amendment would also prevent the Food and Drug Administration from restricting the use of antibiotics in healthy livestock—a practice the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatricians, the Center for Disease Control, and other medical organizations have concluded is contributing to the rise in drug-resistant superbugs endangering human health.

And the House Republicans have resumed their efforts to once again prevent Clean Water Act protections from applying to many wetlands and streams.

We must fight back against this attack on sensible safeguards that protect our health and the environment.

But to succeed, we need the White House and Senate. Several months ago, President Obama and Senate leaders spoke out against riders in the Continuing Resolution that would have blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from updating critical limits on toxic air pollution. Their efforts prevailed; those dirty measures were removed from the final legislation.

But when they refused to stand up for wolf and other wilderness policies, the anti-environmental measures stayed in. Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt spoke eloquently last week about the real and destructive consequences those riders will have on America’s public lands.

We must ensure the latest round of anti-environmental riders fails before they do more harm. We must preserve the safeguards that reduce the pollution that causes asthma attacks, keep toxins out of our drinking water, and protect beloved landscapes for our children.

The fate of these riders will largely determine the fate of public health and environmental quality in the coming years. These riders are bad policy, and they should not be loaded on to spending bills in a attempt to thwart the public will.

Source: Frances Beinecke’s Blog

Carbon Policies

The main reason people are trying to replace or limit the use of fossil fuels is the environmental issue caused by CO₂ emission. Many countries have enacted regulations or policies as a force to reduce their carbon footprint.

A Carbon Tax is the most common and simplest way to do so. Based on the amount of carbon involved in the “production” process, the company or individual has to pay different levels of tax as compensation to its’ negative impact on the environment. The question is whether or not this is the way to save the environment? It doesn’t make any sense if the tax is used to build another gasoline power plant for example. It does seems reasonable however, as long as the tax collected will be used in ecosystem protection activities or renewable energies production. However, a tax is not the only way to achieve the target of CO₂ emissions control but, It needs other helpers as well. Even though in my opinion, I don’t think a carbon tax is a truly effective way to curb polluters unless, the tax is set at a level greater than the profits generated through non-emissions controls, which would certainly force a company to give up. Unfortunately though, this is impossible and therefore big energy companies won’t care about the tax while after making large amounts profit.

Another way of course is through “cap and trade.” Cap-and-trade is an environmental policy that is mandatory for companies controlling their environmental-polluted items emission, such as CO₂, NO_x, etc. Programs include the Acid Rain Program and NO_x Budget Trading Program. Some doubt these program’s efficiencies and see it as a dangerous distraction rather than a real solution. Cap and trade is a strategy created by economists, this means it is a dollar-based strategy, and instead of “punishing” the polluters with a tax, the polluters would earn money to stay below the “cap” – say 80% CO₂ emission reduction by 2050. There are also potential dangers in this flattering strategy as well. Who’s to say that an ethically challenged company wouldn’t be encouraged to create more pollution since by law, the more they have, the more they can trade. And secondly, suppose a company took the money used to treat the trade, and then findings show that the polluter uses the money but never reduced the required amount of CO₂ or maybe never reduced anything at all. In he world we live, money should not be used as an encourager to reduce one’s carbon footprint.

Peng Cao

Magic Piezoelectric Energy

Have you ever enjoyed the wild shaking on the dancing pad? Have you ever been excited when walking on a floor, a colorful pattern shows along with your footprints? Have you even been asked by your kids that why their shoes give out light? Yes, you know that there must some special device there working in some way. You got it! It’s called piezoelectricity. The phenomenon appears on some certain crystals or ceramics which can generate electricity when a pressure applying on them while a strain happens when they are put in an electric field.

Actually, the piezoelectric technology was developed dated back to the First World War. As other “boring” technologies which are not used in people’s daily life, piezoelectric was applied in military and medical use, such as depth detection and medical imaging. However, this technology will be not that far any more if you or your kids are crazy about dancing pad game. Also, with people bringing in the idea about waste energy recovery, such technology might be transplanted into your cell phone to collect extract energy from the vibration of your voice or waste heat. So your cell phone then might not need a charger, a really “mobile phone”, and you have to shout at your phone if you want a quick charging. Likewise, the future piezo-shoes might be much more than entertainment. You could wear them, walk around and charge all your portable devices at the same time.

Sure, you are not caring about inventing or designing. Perhaps you would have more interest in make your room colorful or do some magic to amuse your kids. What about a bed changing color when you turn over? What about funny chair making farting sound when people sit on it? You name it wherever pressure exists. Magic there!

34 groups to Lisa Jackson: EPA should request extension and field hearings on tar sands pipeline supplemental review

Ruptured Enbridge Pipeline from Kalamazoo Spill, credit: NTSB

Today, NRDC and over 30 other organizations sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson regarding the Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement (SDEIS) for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, asking EPA to hold strong on their concerns about the pipeline, and to request field hearings along the right of way. The letter also thanks EPA and Administrator Jackson for their engagement on Keystone XL thus far and outlines concerns with the supplemental review, and how it does not address many of the concerns expressed by EPA about the Draft Environmental Impact Statement.

The letter comes on the heels of a hearing yesterday on draft legislation that would speed up the process for making a decision on Keystone XL even further than the State Department’s planned needlessly fast-paced timeline. At the hearing, pipeline proponents outnumbered opponents, yet opponents’ messages about the economic and environmental riskiness of this pipeline came through strong, thanks to Congressmen Waxman and Rush, and to NWF’s Jeremy Symons, who testified.

Rushing the decision making process for Keystone XL does not make sense, given the gravity of the decision and the large number of people it would affect. In our letter, we ask EPA to “request the State Department to hold field hearings in every state through which the pipeline would pass, in order to publicly present the information contained in the review and give the public a forum to voice their concern for this major project” and note that “The timeframe for public comments should be adjusted as necessary to allow these field hearings to take place with sufficient notice.”

The Keystone XL pipeline would threaten communities from Alberta to Texas. It would put communities at risk in Alberta, where the tar sands are extracted and where communities downstream are already experiencing high rates of cancers. Along the pipeline route, the extra corrosive diluted bitumen it would carry could cause a rupture into the vital Ogallala Aquifer, which could be even more devastating and difficult to clean up than last year’s Enbridge tar sands pipeline spill into the Kalamazoo River. And in Texas communities such as Port Arthur, already named by EPA as an environmental justice showcase community, additional refinery pollution from the tar sands that would be refined would exacerbate already serious health and social justice issues.

Yet the State Department has failed to analyze many of these critical environmental issues, both in the Draft EIS published in April 2010, and now in the SDEIS published in April 2011. Despite the significant shortcomings of the supplemental analysis that environmental groups, government officials and landowners alike need time to analyze, the State Department has only allowed 45 days for the public comment period, which will close on June 6, and are not holding field hearings along the right of way. This decision by the State Department to rush the environmental analysis in order to meet a self-imposed timeline does not allow for sufficient public participation and is not in line with the Obama Administration’s commitment to environmental justice issues and to open government. We hope that EPA shares these concerns, will express them to the State Department, and will again rate the SDEIS inadequate and ask them to answer the questions that they posed in July of last year.

In the mean time, here’s what you can do: go to www.nrdc.org/noKXL and ask the State Department yourself for a proper environmental review, a 120 day public comment period and field hearings along the right of way.

Elizabeth Shope’s Blog