When Sparks Fly

This week the blogosphere has been ablaze with a back-and-forth between Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and John Broder, energy reporter for the New York Times over nothing less than the viability of electric cars on America's roads. A week ago, the Times published Broder's report of his test of Tesla’s electric-vehicle “supercharger” stations between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Things didn’t go so well for Broder, who at one point had to have his loaned Tesla S sedan unceremoniously towed on a flatbed truck. That’s not great p.r. for Tesla, whose $100,000 vehicle has an EPA-rated range of 265 miles, far superior to the 80-and-under range of lesser priced EVs available today.

Musk accused Broder of faking his data, then posted blow-by-blow details from the car’s computer logs. Undaunted, yesterday Broder fired back. It’s still too hard to conclude that Musk is absolutely wrong or that Broder is absolutely wrong, but one thing is easy to conclude: While most Americans tend to treat automobiles like household appliances (and why shouldn't they?) electric vehicles and their charging infrastructure are still so new to the roads that they require an aficionado-like diligence. (Buy a Nissan Leaf in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, and you may be tempted to join the “Bay Leafs” owners group -- a dedication to information sharing that you’d unlikely consider when, say, buying a Kenmore refrigerator.)

Image of Tesla S by Tesla Motors.

Reed McManus is a senior editor at Sierra. He has worked on the magazine since Ronald Reagan’s second term. For inspiration, he turns to cartoonist R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, who famously noted: “Twas ever thus.”

Thanks Boss!

There's something uniquely heartwarming about seeing one's boss being hauled off to the pokey--especially for a good cause. That's what happened this morning when Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, Sierra Club President Allison Chin, and 46 others were arrested while conducting civil disobedience in front of the White House, demanding that President Obama nix the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. 

Doing so would not seem to be much of a stretch, considering the President's words about the importance of acting on climate change in last night in his State of the Union address:

"For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change. . . . If Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy."

President Obama's own EPA has estimated that building the Keystone pipeline would boost U.S. carbon emissions by 27.6 million metric tons--the same as if we put another 6 million cars on the road. (New research suggests that that figure may underestimate the carbon toll by a further 16.6 million tons.) Today's civil disobedience--the first in the Sierra Club's 120-year history--was a simple but forceful invitation to the President to follow up on his promise.

PAUL RAUBER is a senior editor at Sierra. He is the author, with Carl Pope, of the happily outdated Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress. Otherwise he is a cyclist, cook, and father of two. Follow him on Twitter @paulrauber

Is Vegetarianism Worth It?

It is an article of faith among many of those seeking a low-carbon lifestyle that consuming less meat and more plant-based food will have a large impact on one's toll on the planet. (See, for example, my own "Old MacDonald's Carbon Footprint.") But a new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition complicates that tidy narrative. Researchers analyzed the eating habits of 2,000 French adults alongside lifecycle studies of those diets' various components. When judged by weight alone, meat came out far more carbon intensive--14 times as much as produce. But when the diets are weighed by grams of CO2 emitted per calorie, the gap turns out to be much narrower--only 3 times as much. The energy content of meat is very high--one of the reasons for its enduring popularity. Fruits and vegetables require fewer carbon inputs to produce, but you have to eat a lot more of them to get the same energy content.

The most greenhouse gas - 857 grams - was still emitted to produce 100 kcal of meat, but it was only about three times the emissions from a comparable amount of energy from fruit and vegetables.

Greens also ended up emitting more gas for the calories than starches, sweets, salty snacks, dairy and fats. It was also about as much gas as pork, poultry and eggs.

And when [senior author Nicole] Darmon and her colleagues looked at what people actually ate to get a certain amount of energy from food every day, they found that the "highest-quality" diets in health terms - those high in fruit, vegetables and fish - were linked to about as much, if not more, greenhouse gas emissions as low-quality diets that were high in sweets and salts.

Of course, a plant-based diet one third as carbon intensive as a meat-based one is still a laudable thing for many reasons. (But do read, however, former farmboy Mr. Green's stirring defense of meat). One lesson here seems to be that it is very easy for us to underestimate our carbon impact on the planet--especially when as many as two-thirds of self-professed vegetarians are eating burgers on the side. In fact, this Yale study puts the number of true vegetarians in the U.S. at 0.1%. Let she who abjures bacon cast the first stone.

Illustration by craftvision/iStock

PAUL RAUBER is a senior editor at Sierra. He is the author, with Carl Pope, of the happily outdated Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress. Otherwise he is a cyclist, cook, and father of two. Follow him on Twitter @paulrauber

Don't Get Snowed

As a blizzard descends on the Northeast, the Union of Concerned Scientists presents a handy explanation of why serious winter weather does not mean global warming ain’t happening, useful for forwarding to your Drudge-Report-reading climate-contrarian friends and relatives.

In sum:

Weather is what’s happening outside your door right now. Climate is the pattern of weather over decades.

The past decade has been the hottest on record.

Hotter air -- caused primarily by heat-trapping emissions -- causes moisture to be held in the air. This added moisture can fuel more intense rain and snow.

The amount of rain or snow falling in the heaviest one percent of storms in the U.S. has risen nearly 20 percent.

The interplay of “Arctic sea ice decline, ocean patterns, upper winds, and the shifting shape of the jet stream could lead to extreme weather in various portions of the northern mid-latitudes – such that some places get tons of snow repeatedly and others are unseasonably warm.”

So stay safe, northeasterners. And take some solace that spring weather arrives 10 days earlier than it used to, on average.

Image by iStock/martinedoucet

Reed McManus is a senior editor at Sierra. He has worked on the magazine since Ronald Reagan’s second term. For inspiration, he turns to cartoonist R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, who famously noted: “Twas ever thus.”

The Right Targets Clean Energy

First they scotched a tax on carbon. Then they nixed a national cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions and tried to block an extension of subsidies for wind turbine production. Now the nation's fossil fuel-friendly think tanks and public policy organizations are taking aim at state-level policies promoting renewable energy.

At present, 29 states plus the District of Columbia have renewable energy standards that require utilities to get a certain proportion of their electricity from renewable sources by a certain date. Nearly two-thirds of the country's new clean energy capacity has been added in states with active or impending renewable energy standards.

Leading the movement to repeal them are the libertarian Heartland Institute-famous for its billboards last year comparing believers in climate change to murderer Ted Kaczynski-and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which crafts "model legislation" for conservative politicians to introduce in their home states. ALEC's major donors include Peabody Energy, the world's biggest private coal company; ExxonMobil; and ultraconservative dirty-energy industrialists Charles and David Koch. Exxon and the Koch brothers have also contributed to Heartland.

ALEC's fill-in-the-blanks vehicle to roll back clean energy is the Electricity Freedom Act, written by staffer Todd Wynn. It casts renewable energy standards as a regressive tax that, says Wynn, forces "citizens, businesses, and industry within a state to purchase renewable energy whether or not they value or can afford it." (ALEC's dedication to market freedom, however, stops short of opposition to the far larger taxpayer subsidies that go to the oil and gas industries.)

It's a tough argument, because clean energy is a good deal. When the nonpartisan Energy Information Administration evaluated an 80 percent national standard, it found that it would have "a negligible impact on electricity prices through 2022." Xcel, Colorado's largest utility, says that the state's renewable energy standard of 30 percent by 2020 will save its customers $100 million over 25 years.

The past two years have seen attempts to roll back or repeal clean energy standards in 10 states, and many more are expected. But such attempts can backfire. A move late last year to weaken Massachusetts's standard rallied environmental groups to defend the act and, ultimately, strengthen it.

Illustration by Steve Brodner

PAUL RAUBER is a senior editor at Sierra. He is the author, with Carl Pope, of the happily outdated Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress. Otherwise he is a cyclist, cook, and father of two. Follow him on Twitter @paulrauber

I’ll Drink To That

Thanks to a half-million dollar grant from the federal Rural Energy for America program, the Alaskan Brewing Company in Juneau, Alaska, has gone green. By installing a boiler that converts spent grain (the waste accumulated from the brewing process) into steam, the company is eliminating the use of fuel oil in its grain-drying process, and its overall fuel-oil use by more than half. “With moderate growth assumptions, Alaskan expects to save nearly 1.5 million gallons of oil over the next ten years,” the brewery announced in a press release.’ 

Traditionally, breweries sell their protein-rich spent grains to farmers and ranchers as feed. But Juneau is landlocked, and there are only 37 farms in southeast Alaska. So the brewery has been paying to ship its grain to the Pacific Northwest, and swallowing the cost of drying wt spent grain to prepare it for shipment.

The company is touting its “beer powered beer.” “While breweries around the world use spent grain as a co-fuel in energy recovery systems, ‘nobody was burning spent grain as a sole fuel source for an energy recovery system, for a steam boiler,’” Brandon Smith, the company's brewing operations and engineering manager, told Associated Press.

Alaskan’s products are available in 14 states. But if you ask any participant of a Sierra Club Alaska outing, they are particularly tasty when consumed just after a long hike, paddle, or mountain bike ride in the Last Frontier. 

Image from Alaskan Brewing Company.

Reed McManus is a senior editor at Sierra. He has worked on the magazine since Ronald Reagan’s second term. For inspiration, he turns to cartoonist R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, who famously noted: “Twas ever thus.”

Are Cat Parasites Controlling Your Brain?

Today's peer-reviewed study showing the enormous toll taken on wildlife by domestic cats is getting a lot of press, and rightly so. ("That Cuddly Kitty Is Deadlier Than You Think" in the New York Times is both the paper's "most viewed" and "most e-mailed" story of the day.) In the journal Nature Communications, authors Scott Loss,Tom Will, and Peter Marra find that

free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals.

The authors put the numbers at 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds killed annually in the United States, and 6.9 to 20.7 billion rodents. That's a lot of creatures. (Over at Mother Jones' Climate Desk, former Sierra intern Tim McDonnell helpfully put together a chart using the new numbers to put into perspective the much-lamented damage wind turbines do to birds, here.)

But here's the curious part. Why is this study getting so much more attention than the even more lurid indictment of felines in the current issue of Science News? "Little Mind Benders" by Susan Milius recounts how Toxoplasma gondii, a single-celled parasite that makes its home in the digestive tract of cats, "has wormed its way into an estimated one-third of people on the planet," lodging in their brains.

Studies comparing the infected and the noninfected raise the possibility that the parasite tweaks a person’s personality or ups the risk of suicide attempts, brain cancer and schizophrenia. Studies in people even report links between T. gondii and traffic accidents, greater odds of having sons than daughters, extra height and unusual opinions about the smell of urine.

T. gondii's effects on humans, it seems, are incidental to the world's creepiest reproductive strategy. The organism can only reproduce in the gut of a cat, and sends its offspring out into the world via the cat's feces, whence they hope to infect rats. Lodging in the rodents' brains, the organism causes them to "behave almost as if trying to become cat food."

A pounce and gulp from a cat is about the best thing that can happen to a parasite, but cat horror runs deep in rats. Even lab rats whose ancestors have not encountered cats for hundreds of generations normally avoid a catty scent.

When infected withT. gondii, however, rats became more active, a risk factor in itself for encountering a predator. They largely lost their reluctance to venture into test areas reeking of cat urine, and some of the infected rats actually spent more time in these urine-perfumed areas than in untainted refuges, Webster and colleagues reported in 2000. The parasite may possess an evolutionary trick that turns fear into a fatal attraction.

Take home advice from both stories: Keep kitty indoors, and be very careful when cleaning that litter box.  

Photo of a cat with an American coot by Debi Shearwater, courtesy of the American Bird Conservancy.

PAUL RAUBER is a senior editor at Sierra. He is the author, with Carl Pope, of the happily outdated Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress. Otherwise he is a cyclist, cook, and father of two. Follow him on Twitter @paulrauber.

Winner Wind

The next issue of Sierra is devoted to wind, and here's the perfect introduction: the official 2012 figures are in, and the American Wind Energy Association reports that not only did wind have its best year ever, installing 13+ gigabytes of generating capacity, but that it was the number one source of new generating capacity in the country, providing 42 percent of all new electrical power. Here are the top ten wind winners in new installed capacity:

1. Texas (1,826 MW)
2. California (1,656 MW)
3. Kansas (1,440 MW)
4. Oklahoma (1,127 MW)
5. Illinois (823 MW)
6. Iowa (814 MW)
7. Oregon (640 MW)
8. Michigan (611 MW)
9. Pennsylvania (550 MW)
10. Colorado (496 MW)

By the way, here's what wasn't a source of new generating capacity last year: coal. Not a single new coal-fired power plant opened last year, and (since 2010) 137 plants have been retired.

Image by chromatika/iStock

PAUL RAUBER is a senior editor at Sierra. He is the author, with Carl Pope, of the happily outdated Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress. Otherwise he is a cyclist, cook, and father of two. Follow him on Twitter @paulrauber.

Slouching Toward a BPA Ban

Ten years ago, Sierra published one of the very first articles linking the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) to reproductive and developmental problems. At the time, the substance was nearly ubiquitous, notably in clear, hard plastic #7 water bottles. The story led the Sierra Club to quickly withdraw its line of polycarbonate bottles. Today, the field is dominated by metal bottles--although major manufacturer Sigg continued to use BPA in bottle linings until August, 2008.

(For more on hydration hardware, see "Drinking Buddies" in our current issue.)

Meanwhile, evidence against BPA has continued to mount. Frances Cerra Whittelsey, who wrote our groundbreaking piece, followed late last year with a short update on why the FDA is dragging its feet on banning the stuff. (She has a much more comprehensive version on her fine blog, The Equalizer.) While the agency dawdles, Suffolk County, New York, has banned sales receipt paper coated with BPA, and California is moving to declare BPA a reproductive health hazard (albeit at a high exposure level). With BPA-free alternatives readily available, why are we still using the stuff at all?

Image by iStock

PAUL RAUBER is a senior editor at Sierra. He is the author, with Carl Pope, of the happily outdated Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress. Otherwise he is a cyclist, cook, and father of two. Follow him on Twitter @paulrauber.

 

Your Carbon Couchprint

Watching the Super Bowl is good for the planet. Energy consulting firm Opower compared the electricity use of 145,000 American households on Super Bowl Sunday 2012 to that of other winter Sundays with similar weather and found that Game Day helps the U.S. reduce energy use by as much as 7.7 percent, depending on region. According to the New York Times, “the precise reasons are hard to identify, but apparently the increased reliance on some appliances - running a big-screen TV, opening and closing the refrigerator - were outweighed by other changes in routine, like not running the clothes dryer or the vacuum cleaner.”

“The total decrease in U.S. home electricity usage during the Super Bowl is greater than three times the energy consumed by all the TVs watching it,” writes Barry Fischer, who edits Opower’s blog. “With so many people glued to the couch during the game, fewer households are using electricity for cooking, cleaning or anything else other than watching the tube." All that communal couch-sharing turns into widespread energy-dollar savings. “Super Bowl XLVI demonstrated that when around one-third of Americans collectively watch a single 3.5-hour sporting event, the corresponding reduction in the nation’s daily energy bill can be upwards of $3.1 million,” Fischer writes.

So grab a bag of Sun Chips and a handful of baby carrots and curl up in front of the flat-screen guiltlessly this Sunday. And with feigned apologies to my Baltimore-based colleague Heather: Go Niners.

Image by iStock/4x6.

Reed McManus is a senior editor at Sierra. He has worked on the magazine since Ronald Reagan’s second term. For inspiration, he turns to cartoonist R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, who famously noted: “Twas ever thus.”