PerpetualPlanet

What are you doing on Triple-Seven? Our family will be in Canada. Perhaps you’ll be on vacation too. On this particular day we’ll be checking out the LiveEarth music and activities in Quebec City and talking about what we’re doing about climate change.

If you haven’t checked out LiveEarth, get the details here at http://www.liveearth.org/event.php. The gist is a 24-hour concert series around the globe that many hope will be the tipping point for winning hearts and minds in the war on warming. Three hours of prime-time TV and round-the-clock radio and web broadcasts are planned along with live attendance at the 100 concerts.

If the estimates of 2 billion viewers prove accurate, I wonder if the concert might be the largest common experience in the history of humanity. I know it’s hype and Hollywood but I’m for anything that unites the planet on this issue.

I remember 7/20/69, at the McKenzie River with my family, listening to the radio — the day Armstrong set foot on the moon. Do you remember that day? It seemed that focused as we were then there was nothing we could not accomplish. I want my kid to have a memory like that as the challenges to come unfold.

The refrigerator in the house we will remodel is starting to whine and make other noises. It seems like a possible opportunity to get a head start on appliances for the new place, assuming we can predict the proper size and color we will want.

I found a good buyer’s guide in Home Power.

It seems you can save a big chunk of kwh/day with a well-made unit. Sun Frost leads the brands in efficiency. Super insulation and putting the compressor and coils on the top are the big reasons. The RF-16 looks like the best fit for our needs. But ouch, the cost delivered is about $3000! The most efficient conventional models are about $1000 for similar capacity. The Sun Frost uses about .48 kwh/day and the conventional uses about 1.25 kwh/day.

Sun Frost needs some competition!

Want to clean green? Simple ingredients blend to make cheap and safe cleaners. Borax is the one item to keep out of little hands. Stock the following under your sink instead of more expensive products.

The mixture for glass cleaner above beat all store products tested by Consumer Reports in 1992.

The means to heat and cool your home cheaply is outside in the dirt. Heat pumps provide a home with comfort without emissions and at substantial cost reductions from oil, gas or electric systems. The only requirement is digging and the space to do so. This heat pump technology is variously called ground-source, earth-coupled or geothermal. I’ve written primer which can be found here.

The Light Up the World Foundation is making promising progress towards their goal of providing solid state lighting for two billion people. With the simple guiding principle that “light encourages human development and facilitates peace”, the foundation’s mission is to put affordable LED lights in the hands of families in the developing worlds for night time reading and study. Many of their users depend on kerosene for lighting. Replacing lanterns in areas without affordable electricity with the new devices will save fuel and avoid the toxins and fire danger.

Students at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business helped design several alternative products that cost $8-10 each and in some cases can be manufactured locally. A power source, such as a photovoltaic panel, adds $90 to the system cost. A villager using 1 liter of kerosene per week ($0.5 - $1) pays approximately $52 a year. In two years the same villager can pay off the cost of an LED lighting system that has a life span of 10-20 years. With some micro-lending solid state lighting appears to be a profitable opportunity. In fact, several of the designers from the Stanford project have formed Ignite Innovations, to pursue solid-state lighting commercially.

China’s president Hu Jintau outlined his country’s economic goals for the coming 25-50 years in an exemplary speech before the APEC CEO Summit this past November in Santiago, Chile.  He noted that his country has a sustained annual growth rate of 9.5%, a result of the strategies defined 25 years ago and executed with continuous discipline.  That a country so successful at implementation of a far-sighted plan is now laying out its next set of goals ought make Europeans and Americans take notice.  The U.S. rate of growth is 3.5%.  China, now fully capable of feeding, clothing and sheltering its own, seems on a course to become the leading economic power on the planet by appropriate means.

“In a word, mankind is faced with both grave challenges and rare opportunities for development. Given the circumstances, the only right option for us to take is cooperation geared to a win-win result, and the only goal for us to endeavor towards is sustainable development. Our own experience with development tells us that every country must go through an evolving process that today’s development is the continuation of that of yesterday and the groundwork of that of tomorrow. When a country lays down its plans, chooses its strategies, decides on its approaches and implements its measures towards its long-term goals of development, it should take into account both its present and future needs of development and address both the current concerns of the people and the interests for their long-term development.”

It’s heartening to hear that sustainability is at the core of the plan, even if it is a disappointing reminder that our leaders in the U.S. are still planning for faster consumption of finite resources and the war machine required to secure them.

If your business is growing food or garden stock or you farm for a hobby, you should read Living at Nature’s Pace, by Gene Logsdon. Those folks interested in Permaculture will love it too. Logsdon takes us inside the operations of successful small-scale farms and convincingly challenges the inevitability of their demise. The best passage in the book describes a barn raising in an Amish community that begins with bare ground in the morning and concludes with animals eating hay in their new home that evening — all without power tools. In his P&L for the typical Amish farm, it turns out buying a tractor is a poor alternative to a horse-drawn plow and using pesticides would beg financial doom. Someone selling produce to McDonald’s might not get it, but if you define your success to include your family’s development and sustainability as well as profitability, then some of the techniques described are optimizations rather than compromises.