I like to give credit where credit is due, especially when it’s someone who repeatedly disappoints and angers you. So congrats to the Bush EPA who finally did something good for the environment: tightened emissions standards for gas-powered lawn mowers. This is no small feat as fossil-fuel burning lawn mowers produce more pollution than vehicles, according to a famous Swedish study.
Me? I’m still using my now two-year-old Ken-powered mower though I’ve nearly beaten it to death and am a little disappointed that it wasn’t more durable. My next mower- solar-battery powered.
As an official boycotter of the Beijing Olympics, I must find things to do to fill the hours and hours I would waste watching people I don’t know play games I’ve never heard of in a country I don’t like. Fortunately in Utah, that’s easy. There are so many things to do outdoors year-round that it’s more a question of what to do, not “what is there to do?”
So after cleaning the hot tub, the backyard patio, trimming the bushes and reworking a graphic for work, I shot some of the hummingbirds that zoom around the house this time of year. This has been an especially great summer for hummers. They battle for territorial supremacy from sunrise to sunset from April to September. The hatchlings usually emerge in July and join in the action. The video here was what I gathered from about a half hour sitting in the backyard in a director’s chair in the shade with a cold drink.
Utah’s making international environmental news over alarmingly high levels of toxic mercury in Great Salt Lake. It’s no secret that concrete makers, coal-burning power plants, refineries, mining and fossil fuels pump most of the mercury found in ground water into the air and it eventually falls to Earth. We know that eating fish or water birds from mercury-laden water is hazardous, so much so that Utah’s and other health departments across the country have issued warningx to not eat too much from our poison ponds.
Contentions that mercury is appearing naturally seem to be swimming upstream from the obvious truth that Great Salt Lake is a popular spot for a long list of migratory birds who have either adapted to the toxic levels- or have not yet dropped dead. But could this be a case of “no harm, no fowl?”
Most of today’s articles and stories from the Olympics are about foreign journalists’ first encounters with Beijing’s air pollution. But most of these writers come from big cities including Salt Lake City (left) who have some of the worst air, quantities and forms of airborne pollutants in the world. As critical as I am of the Chinese, it’s time the editors of American media recognized and restate for the benefit of their audience and in the interest of fairness and accuracy that air pollution is a global problem of which THE UNITED STATES AND ITS CITIES ARE THE MAJOR CAUSE.
When athletes start dropping from breathing problems, warnings or other societal alterations occur, those stories should be done. But I think we’ve already gotten the message that Beijing has bad air. Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Houston and other big U.S. cities cannot claim the moral high ground on this issue. America can get away with being preachy about things like democracy, human rights and even product safety when it comes to China. But pollution isn’t one of them.
It was as if Salt Lake City had suddenly become the capital of Mars. I watched the front ooze into the valley from behind the Oquirrhs last night. With it came high winds, clouds and the distinctive smell of wood burning. It was smoke from Yosemite where the fires there burn on and the tourists keep coming anyway.
Ironically, and perhaps superfluously, I puffed on my cigar as the sky and eventually everything turned a grimy shade of pinkish-red (or is pink reddish?). I hadn’t seen sky like that since the Great Inversion of January 2007. This too demanded pictures for posterity.
At the same time, I found out on the 10 p.m. news, wildfires were burning near our own airport and up City Creek Canyon to our north. As the the aromas and plumes converged along the Wasatch, I felt an eerie oneness: a sense that a fire just up the road and another hundreds of miles away affect us all. Nature is so big, vast and powerful that it overwhelms us when it wills so without having to think, plan, choose or execute anything. No matter how we try we are incapable of taming or totally destroying it. We are only capable of destroying ourselves while Nature continues disinterested.
A new reader Todd sent me this great info that appears on his own site ecomind and it’s especially important right now. He did a paper about energy use in Utah which contains a lot of very revealing and disturbing facts about who’s causing energy use in Utah to grow out of control, leading to the increased use of dirty, polluting coal, now 95% of all power generated in Utah. Here are some highlights:
Rocky Mountain Power is facing a 2,400 MW deficit by 2012 and Utah is facing a 300-400 MW deficit every two years. Most of this deficit is due to large households central air conditioning systems. National averages for home consumption are 41% for heating and cooling, 39% for appliances (mostly refrigeration), 9% for lighting (25% of 9% reduced by compact flourescents), and 7% on electronics and computers. It has been thought that plasma TV’s will consume as much as a refrigerator. With monetary agendas it’s hard to know what is factual. However, plasma TVs use .34 watts/in2 which is the same as CRT TVs. LCDs use .29 watts/in2 and rear projectors use .14 watts/in2.
Note on his site, as a couple of other readers have since my post about the water needed for nuclear power not being available in Utah, how COAL USES AS MUCH WATER AS REACTORS. But the major blame for waste and extravagance falls on us:
Utah has the cheapest power of any state at 5.99 cents per kilowatt. Although it is argued that the low price of electricity encourages business in Utah it also creates wasteful practices. Also, Utah’s ethnocentric culture, politics, liquor laws, and lack of diversity discourage business investment. Coal plant emissions create environmental feedback as well. Water consumption per MW for coal plants is likely to be comparable to nuclear plants.
Emissions from Utah electric power generators in 2002 currently excluding mercury and other elements: Sulfur Dioxide 32,133 tons Nitrogen oxides 71,886 tons Carbon Dioxide 37,746,475 tons Total Utah generator emissions: 37,850,494 tons were just over half of 1% of the total U.S. emissions which were 7.2 billion metric tons or 6.5 billion tons of greenhouse gases (in 2005).
Before you switch on the AC again today, remember the swamp cooler- if you have one. At low humidity like we’ve been having, they will keep your house 15-20 degrees cooler than the outside temperature and use 1/7 of the power. As one reader has pointed out, on high pollution days (the past few have been Yellow in the valley), swamp coolers will suck ozone into your home which could cause reactions with substances inside your home releasing hazardous chemicals. But remember: air conditioning units release CFCs into the air which create ozone. So you’re aggravating the problem by running the AC.
My recommendation for escaping the heat, go camping in the Uintahs. Less than one hour away- and about 30 degrees cooler.
Please read Todd’s paper for more on this, oil shale and energy speculation in Utah, and more great information on why efficiency, conservation and renewables are the way to go for Utah’s energy future.
As a member of The Nature Conservancy, I’m really proud of the research our organization does to show not only how important maintaining our wild places is but how much damage and death is caused by encroachment of humans on our environment. This new study proves the harmful effects of air pollution on Nature, just in time to head off the attempt by the Bush Regime to allow the building of more coal-burning power plants next to wilderness areas and national parks. Of course, Bush’s people never read, listen to or follow even their own research results. This study will likely only be good in dsicouraging yet another disastrous policy mistake that will end up getting overturned by a federal court.
In yet another reversal of a Bush Regime environmental assault, a Montana federal judge has put grey wolves in the Yellowstone area back on the endangered species list. There were any one of a number of reasons for the reversal. The Regime ignored scientific evidence showing that the wolves are not safe now, instead buying the argument of ranchers and state authorities who said a hunt was needed to “thin” the pack. Of course, we all know that the Regime always does this because they have an aversion to anything right and/or good when it comes to Nature and will believe anything or just make it up themselves in order to achieve their reckless goals.
Another argument anti-wolf forces use is that the elk herd around Yellowstone is too small because of wolf predation, threatening ecological balance, and doesn’t leave enough for hunters. But as new and continuous information has shown, the reality is exactly the opposite. The lack of wolves is not only bad for the elk for the ranchers and their precious livestock. The latest shows that the Yellowstone elk herd is out of control, due to the lack of predation, giving rise to a deadly disease that, ironically, is spreading to the livestock that the ranchers have fought so hard to “protect” from the big, bad wolves.
This is what happens when politicians, acting either out of payback to special interests or reckless and ignorant ideology, try to play God. Like everything else Bush and his people have done, they screw it up and someone who really knows what they’re doing has to come in and fix it. Too bad a judge can’t just fix similar Bush decisions on air quality, Iraq, and other monumental policy disasters.
It’s July 11 and I haven’t even taken the covers off the air conditioners yet. Temperatures in July and August in Utah are the hottest of the year and this summer’s no exception. It’ll be well into the 90s or close to 100 today as it has been the past month or so. But my home studio stays below 80 all day and the upstairs as well even though it’s totally above ground with a broad southern and western exposure (Note: passive solar characteristics cut both ways, making your house warmer in the winter but the same in summer). No protection from trees or other vegetation. At night, we simply open the windows and sleep like babies until the construction crew building the new house down the street shows up. How do we do it?
Like solving America’s entire energy crisis, we acccomplish this through a combination of solutions including understanding our unique local conditions. First, we don’t use our two air conditioners (one for each floor) unless the temperature’s above 100 degrees or the humidity more than 25% (even then we’ll only use the upstairs one and let the cool air flow down. The other was needlessly installed by the previous owners). We almost exclusively use our evaporative or “swamp” cooler, a popular appliance throughout the west. They sit on your roof, connected to your water system, and blow mist into your house which cools the interior naturally as water blowing through the air does. They work best when the humidity’s low (10-30%)which it usually is in semi-arid climates like Utah, Arizona and most parts of the intermountain region.
I turn it on when the temperature hits 85 and the humidity 25% which is remarkably consistent during the summer. I turn it off when the temperture and humidity go below/above those levels at night. I leave it on low during the day when I spend little time upstairs and go to high when we occupy the upstairs at night. Shades are manually deployed when and where the sun bombards the house during the hottest part of the day between 2-8 p.m.
Another esthetic reason swamp coolers make sense is you don’t close the entire house like a tomb for them to work. You must crack windows in the parts of the house where you want the cool air to come through. The air must escape somewhere or the house just builds up with humidity making it actually less comfortable. More than anything, swamp coolers use about one-seventh the electricity of an air conditioner and don’t release harmful CFCs as AC, even in your car, does. Most older homes in Utah have them because AC wasn’t always cheap. Newer homes and buildings don’t have them because cheap coal power made swamp coolers “unnecessary” much the way cars made sidewalks obsolete. And with all the blazing sunshine and long days, the solar panels cover our consumption.
The swamp cooler helps cool my studio downstairs only a little. It’s essential that I keep my computer equipment cool because heat destroys it. I shut off the downstairs in the morning after leaving the windows open all night (don’t worry- we have a great security system). Because the downstairs is partly underground, it stays cool all day, temperatures varying only between 72 and 78. By the time the hottest part of the day rolls around about 6 p.m., I’m done for the day anyway. When night falls, the windows are opened again to allow the cooler breeze to come in again.
Obviously, not everyone works at home, lives in the west or has a passive solar home. But there are a number of ways to keep your home cooler without blasting the AC at 68 from Arbor Day to Labor Day. Keeping our energy bills down, keeping CFCs out of the air and maintaining an open feel to our home are the imperatives here and we meet them all. If we can make it through this long, hot summer without using the air conditioners at all, I’ll use all the money we save to throw a party. Outdoors in September when it’s a lot cooler, of course.
