mattbell

On my second-to-last trip down to LA, I found two examples of green-gone-wrong.

1.  I saw a van on Sunset Blvd advertising Icelandic bottled water that was Certified Carbon-neutral.

OK... fresh water is fresh water.  We've got some great water coming into LA via those giant channels they used to steal all the water from the Owens Valley (see Chinatown).  Why oh why do people think shipping water all the way across the Atlantic ocean and the United States from Iceland is possibly good for the environment?  If there's anything special about the impurities in the Icelandic water, they could be filtered out and sent to the US to be added to the local water. 

Really, this is all silly. Chances are the European upper classes are drinking ultra-pure water bottled at the source in the SIerras.  How much energy could we save by just all drinking our own damn water? 

2.  There was an airplane pulling a big banner saying "THINK GREEN" by the beach in La Jolla. 

Airplanes use a lot of energy.  Airplanes pulling giant streamers in the wind use even more energy.  The hypocrisy hurts.  Wouldn't a billboard on a highway be a hell of a lot more energy efficient while allowing the same number of ad impressions?

This is the big trouble with thinking green vs acting green.  Being green is somewhat hip right now, so companies are trying to figure out how to staple a green image onto whatever it was they were already doing.

So what *actually* helps?

Well, the Economist has a nice graph showing the net savings or costs of reducing carbon emissions in various ways.



It looks like the most useful things we as private consumers can do to save energy while maintaining our current lifestyles involve:
- Getting energy-efficient lighting and appliances
- Insulating our homes properly. 
- Recycling (though it doesn't break it down by what is recycled... I believe aluminum has the greatest impact)

And since it's a net cost *savings*, people should be excited to do them.  All we need is to disseminate information and have easy-to-get loans for certain kinds of home improvement.  Apparently, the Obama administration is planning something like this, but it's in the form of rewards and subsidies instead of loans.  It does seem a bit silly to offer a subsidy for something that's already a cost savings but requires an initial investment when a loan would bridge the hurdle just as well and would cost the government less. 

On a vaguely related note, this is the clearest I've EVER seen the skies in LA:

I recently learned of a new generation of nuclear power technologies that, if successful, will change how people think about nuclear power.

Many of the negative views about nuclear power came from the first generation of nuclear plants built during the '50s and '60s. From what I understand, these plants are trickier to operate, have a greater risk of meltdown, and produce more nuclear waste than modern reactors. Most of them are still in operation despite their aging status because there is opposition to building new nuclear plants in the US. Other countries that started deploying nuclear plants more recently tend to use more modern designs. France actually runs almost entirely on nuclear power. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France )

However, the technologies I've seen recently look at using small nuclear power plants as ridiculously long-life batteries.

Hyperion claims to be refining a design for a nuclear reactor that would fit inside a truck and power a community of ~25000 homes for 7-10 years. It's totally self-contained and (they claim) it's extremely resistant to meltdown. We'll see if they actually deliver in 2013. Small reactors could power more isolated towns, large factories etc.

For the extremely micro-scale, there's this technology, which is essentially a tiny nuclear reactor on a chip. It produces electricity more or less directly from nuclear decay of tritium. It can't produce much power, but it can run a small remote device for 10-20 years.