Mr. Green's Stance on Suds

Hey Mr. Green,

I'm hoping you can settle a debate between my wife and me. I want to use diluted eco-friendly dish soap (e.g., Seventh Generation) to wash my hands, while my wife prefers antibacterial hand soap. I want to avoid the triclosan in her preferred soap, while she says that my dish soap has other nasties that aren't good for the hands. What do you recommend for economical hand soap?

–Toshi in Oakland, California

Antibacterial hand soap is unnecessary for healthy people, and does no more to protect you from bacteria than washing with ordinary soap, according to publications by the American Medical Association and the Centers for Disease Control and research at several universities. It doesn’t even kill all that many germs in the typical five-second hand washing, because it takes longer than that for it to sabotage bacteria. Frankly, the most effective thing about bacterial soap is its marketing, which has whipped up a raging bacteriophobia. Lysol, for one, has now ratcheted up the terror of germs with a new device that excretes its germ-killing soap without your even having to touch that allegedly filthy little pump knob on top, which the commercials show crawling with bacteria. We moderns smugly joke about those medieval scholars debating how many angels could occupy the head of a pin, but the hazards of germs on the plunger of a plastic soap bottle are almost as fictitious, while lacking the charm of the pin’s imaginary inhabitants.

Seventh Generation’s dishwashing soap is safe and claims to be hypoallergenic, so it probably won’t bother your hands. If it did, you could always discontinue using it. Besides, it comes in a 90 percent recycled plastic bottle. By contrast, triclosan, the common agent in antibacterial soap (and many other household and health and beauty-aid products) may be a hormone disrupter that can cause thyroid problems, according to some studies. Of course manufacturers counter with their own studies indicating that it’s safe and effective, but as always, your best bet when there are contradictory findings about a chemical is that old precautionary principle: “Better safe than sorry.”

There is also some concern that antibacterial soaps may breed stronger bacteria, just as overuse of antibiotics in animals and humans has evolved bacteria that can resist antibiotics to the point where the medications are no longer effective.

Finally, since you asked about “economical”: Depending on your personal habits, a bar of cheap, simple soap with minimal additives and scents will give you more hand washes per dollar than the liquid variety—at least according to a test I ran in my independent laboratory.  Plus, the simple paper packaging of bars is obviously more sustainable than those plastic bottles and pumps.

A Burning (Wood vs. Electricity) Question

Hey Mr. Green,

I burn wood to heat my home. Otherwise, I use electric heat when I’m away from home. How can I determine my carbon footprint using the wood versus using electricity?

--Dot in Central New York

The comparative size of your carbon footprint depends on the source of your electric power and the quality of your wood burner. If the electric power used to heat your home is generated from coal or other fossil fuels, then your footprint might be bigger than if you're burning wood in a new, efficient, EPA-approved firebox or stove. But if you've got an old, inefficient stove or a traditional fireplace, your footprint could be way bigger than with electric heat. Also remember that you’ve got a major environmental tradeoff here: Even if the new wood burner has a smaller carbon footprint, per unit of energy it still releases a lot more other pollutants into the air than a coal-burning power plant, and it releases them right where you and your neighbors breathe. Burning wood to heat a home emits 250 times as much global-warming methane as burning coal in a power plant.

Electric heating is not such a great choice either. This is because only around 35 percent of the energy in coal gets converted to electricity; the rest is lost as heat, friction, turning the dynamo, and so on.

To calculate the difference between your two sources, you need to think in terms of British thermal units (Btus) and kilowatt-hours (kWh). Really, it's not hard. Bear with me. Since a typical generator's efficiency is only 35 percent, producing one Btu worth of electricity requires about 3 times as many Btus worth of coal to get the same amount of heat from electricity that you’d get from direct combustion of the coal. Since the carbon emissions generated to produce a Btu from burning wood are only a bit less than burning coal, to get 1 Btu from your wood, the total carbon dioxide released from the stove is roughly half that of coal-sourced electric power, provided you had a modern 75 percent-efficient wood stove. But if you've got an ancient stove, or an old-fashioned fireplace, which can be less than 15 percent efficient, then your carbon footprint could zoom up two or three times higher than with electric heat.

Of course, it’s not as easy to regulate the heat in a wood burner as in an electric heater, so you could end up burning more wood than you really need, pushing your carbon footprint up.

Does the Coal Industry Get Subsidies?

Hey Mr. Green,

An acquaintance of mine claims that there are no subsidies for the coal industry. Well?

--Bill in Landenberg, Pennsylvania

Puzzling out the subsidies to the coal business is as unnerving as edging through a dark mineshaft swarming with Velcro-winged bats. This is because a big chunk of the subsidies are not direct handouts, but packaged as tax credits, tax breaks, and other goodies too numerous to itemize here. The U.S. coal industry enjoyed subsidies of around $17 billion between 2002 and 2008, including tax credits for production of "nonconventional" fuels ($14.1 billion), tax breaks on coal royalties ($986 million), exploration, and development breaks ($342 million), according to a study by the Environmental Law Institute.

On top of this federal largesse, state and local governments coddle coal with hundreds of millions per year. The Kentucky state government’s net subsidy to coal is $115 million. Virginia grants tax credits of about $26 million to power plants just to burn Virginia coal, and doles out credits ranging from 40 cents to $2 per ton for another 20 million tons not burned by power plants. Bioregionalism at its finest.

Around $1.5 billion of the federal costs are associated with damages to miners’ health such as the notorious black lung disease. Thinking of the miners’ plight lands us smack in a morass of hidden subsidies as thick as the billion gallons of coal-ash sludge that poured into eastern Tennessee in 2008.

What is the true health and environmental cost when mining machines rip off mountaintops and chuck the rubble into streams? What was the cost of acid rain? What’s been the healthcare cost of 47 tons per year of mercury from burning coal that put 300,000 fetuses at risk for neurological damage each year? And how do you calculate the cost of coal’s 20 percent contribution to global-warming gases?

It doesn't end with this list. There are huge subsidies, direct and indirect, for the coal industry in the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), H.R. 2454, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last year. It remains to be seen what will emerge after the Senate has its go at the bill, but the EPA's own analysis notes that there will be substantial subsidies for carbon-capture technology, up to $90 per ton for carbon dioxide that’s "captured" in the first ten years. This is why some critics say it looks more like a "Coal Subsidy Act" than a Clean Energy and Security Act. For those who don’t have time to wade through the 946-page proposed law, Grist provides a valuable summary of welfare for coal here.