For better and worse we live in an in-between time.
A trying-to-get-clean time.
A turn-our-backs-on-coal-and-oil-and-change-the-scene-to-green time.
(sorry)

Earth will soon realize (or maybe she already has) that as she fights her addiction, some of the people she thought were friends will try to keep her on the “junk.” They’ll tell her that it’s not bad for her and that anyone who tells her otherwise is not her real friend.

Her other friends will try to show her that it is better for her to take the new road, the more difficult road of coming clean and starting anew. Sure, there are questions yet to be answered, and she has known the old way for such a long time, but they will tell her that if she sticks with it, in the end she will live a more productive and healthy life as a clean Earth.

Of course, those two groups of friends will vehemently argue and oppose one another. Lies will be told. Name-calling will be commonplace and confusion will be the norm. But, as Earth realizes what is right for her, and which friends to trust, she will come out of this in-between time happy and healthy, and well on her way to a cleaner, smarter future.

Our future is exciting. It’s just tough sometimes to be living in this in-between time, having to listen to the anger and deception.

Since I began this piece with some light-verse of my own, I will end it with a poem from W.H. Auden — who may best sum up the stance of those trying to keep the earth in its current state of environmental degradation.

We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

Follow Joe Mohr’s cartoonery at JoeMohrToons.com and on Twitter at @GreenCartoons

Continuing on with our Going Green Tips series, Going Green Tip #6 should be no surprise (we’re starting with the big boys). The general tip is to stop using coal power. Easier said than done, right? Maybe, but it is VERY important, and there are a lot of reasons why it’s easier now than ever.

Although it would be fun to talk about all the great energy sources and programs you can use to cut the coal, I think I will save those for future going green tips posts. In this one, I’ll focus on why cutting the coal is so important (so that everyone is clear on why this is such a high priority).

To start with, here is a nice intro on what coal is from the Power Scorecard:

Coal is the solid end-product of millions of years of decomposition of organic materials. In truth, coal is stored solar energy. Plants capture the energy from sunlight through photosynthesis, which directly converts solar energy to plant matter. Animals that then eat the plants to convert that energy again, storing it in their own bodies.

Over millions of years, accumulated plant and animal matter is covered by sediment and stored within the earth’s crust, gradually being transformed into hard black solids by the sheer weight of the earth’s surface. Coal, like other fossil fuel supplies, takes millions of years to create, but releases its stored energy within only a few moments when burned to generate electricity. Because coal is a finite resource, and cannot be replenished once it is extracted and burned, it cannot be considered a renewable resource.

One major issue with the burning of coal is that it is a leading contributor to global warming pollution. In fact, 73% of carbon dioxide emitted from electricity generators comes from coal power plants.

But coal is also a major source of numerous other environmental problems.

• “[C]oal power plants are responsible for 93 percent of the sulfur dioxide and 80 percent of the nitrogen oxide emissions generated by the electric utility industry…. These emissions spawn the acid rain that is eating away red spruce forests in the Northeast and Appalachia, and rob previously pristine streams of brook trout and other fish species in the Adirondacks, upper Midwest and Rocky Mountains,” the Power Scorecard reports.
• “Coal emissions also cause urban smog, which has been linked to respiratory ailments,” the Power Scorecard adds.
• “Coal plants are also a major source of airborne emissions of mercury, a toxic heavy metal…. In the West, about 87 percent of coal is removed from the earth through strip mining, which can contaminate soils with heavy metals and destroy near-surface aquifers. In the East, coal is sometimes mined by removing entire mountain tops to more easily extract the subsurface mineral reserves.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists, which also delves into the massive environmental damages related to coal mentioned above in much more detail, reports that, “Coal generates 54% of our electricity, and is the single biggest air polluter in the U.S.”

Coal and Human Health

Even if you care not for the environment at all, the human health consequences of all of this are humongous. And if you actually took those (alone) into account, the price of coal would be almost twice as high. “In 2005, the health damages caused by coal power cost $120 billion” (emphasis added).  Unfortunately, we don’t take the price of our health problems or the price of the environments we destroy into account, and our governments actually subsidize coal to a great degree.

But, you can take these issues into account and can switch to a cleaner power source, yourself. And, at the least, if you are financially strapped and have no affordable options in your area, you can cut your energy usage, in general, which is good for addressing all of the concerns above and is also good for your finances.

Perhaps this should have come earlier in our series, but without a doubt, cutting coal is a major “going green tip,” and something I think we will come back to repeatedly in this series.

Photo Credits: DerGuy82 via flickr & Stuck in Customs via flickr

Greenpeace has had a campaign going on both on Facebook and off telling Facebook to “Unfriend Coal.” In other words, Greenpeace and 500,000 supporters (so far) are urging Facebook to stop using energy from dirty coal plants.

The Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Kumi Naidoo, recently got into the discussion and wrote a letter to Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

In the comments section of that blog post, Barry Schnitt, Director of Policy Communications at Facebook, wrote a lengthy response, the heart of which was basically this: coal is bad and the world needs to use more renewable energy but Facebook has no power over the power mix they are supplied.

If he thought that was going to pacify Greenpeace or the half a million people behind this campaign, I’m not sure how he got his job at Facebook.

Greenpeace policy analyst Gary Cook responds with a lengthy letter of his own. Here is the beginning of this letter:

Dear Barry:

Thanks for your response.

We appreciate your recognition that Facebook has a coal problem with its Oregon data center. However, where we disagree is your claim to be powerless to do anything about it as, like Greenpeace and others, Facebook simply has to buy whatever electricity is available. This is not the case for Greenpeace, and is certainly not the case for Facebook, who is an industrial scale consumer of electricity.

As evidenced by the 500,000 users who have asked Facebook to get off of coal, we expect and demand more leadership from such an innovative company that is a playing an important role in bringing the world together.

Facebook is buying electricity in bulk to meet the needs of 500 million+ users, and is becoming a very influential company both inside and outside the IT sector. The expected power consumption of the Oregon data center alone gives Facebook the purchasing power of 30,000-40,000 homes, which gives you the ability and standing to shape how power is generated in Oregon and far beyond.

As we have seen with other environmental challenges, motivated companies with big purchasing power can make a powerful difference in driving environmental solutions and policy change. Greenpeace’s recent campaign targeting Nestlé (using Facebook no less) over their purchase of palm oil that is destroying the rainforest in Indonesia led the company to change its procurement policy, and has now led Burger King to announce yesterday that they will no longer buy palm oil from this supplier. This is sending a powerful signal both to the marketplace and to the policy makers in Indonesia and well beyond….

I imagine the conversation will continue on. And, hopefully, Facebook will get the point that they can and should do more. If you haven’t already joined the Facebook group or the campaign, you can do so now in order to tell Facebook that coal is a technology of the past that needs to be dropped and Facebook has the power to help unfriend coal!

Photo Credit: Greenpeace

photo via Nike In an attempt to honor the 29 coal miners who tragically died last year at the Upper Big Branch coal mine, the West Virginia University Mountaineers have teamed up with Nike to create new football uniforms that have the mark of coal. The uniforms are white, but have coal dust on the pants and shoulders. The yellow strip on the hemet is said to represent a miner's headlamp. In the photo featuring the new uniform a player appears to be emerging from a strip mine, leav...Read the full story on TreeHugger

"We all live downstream from one another," says Alexandra Cousteau. In other words, what we do to the water, we do to ourselves. A third-generation Cousteau explorer, Alexandra is an ambassador of the sea. She's the host of Planet Green's Blue August, is currently traveling the world as a documentarian with her organization Blue Legacy, and, when she has a spare moment, does things like c...Read the full story on TreeHugger

The lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries that will be powering the electric cars of tomorrow are much greener than originally expected, according to new research conducted.

Much has been made of whether electric cars will actually be the saviour of our future, or whether they are just redistributing the environmental damage to other aspects, like the production and disposal. One of the major concerns was how the lithium ion battery would affect the environment.

In the end, the results of the study were surprising.

“Lithium-ion rechargeable batteries are not as bad as previously assumed,” according to Dominic Notter, coauthor of the study which has just been published in the scientific journal “Environmental Science & Technology”.

A team of EMPA (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research) scientists created a life cycle assessment of lithium ion batteries, focusing on the most commonly lithium battery used in electric cars.

What they found was that in the long run the lithium ion battery only held a 15% burden on the environment, with half of that percentage being given over to the manufacture and refinement of the battery’s raw materials, copper and aluminium. The production of the lithium on the other hand is only responsible for 2.3% of the total.

The greatest impact on the environment comes not from the car itself but rather the method with which the car is recharged, or fuelled. Charging the battery from a mixture of sources, primarily coal-fired, atomic and hydroelectric, results in three times as much pollution as from the battery alone. If the electricity generated to recharge the car is solely from coal-fired power stations the ecobalance worsens by another 13%.

The conclusions reached by the EMPA team were that a petrol fuelled car must consume between three and four litres per 100 kilometres (or 70 miles per gallon) in order to be as environmentally friendly as the electronic car studied. Additionally, alternative energy sources must be considered and implemented if the electric vehicle is to be of any substantial help in minimizing the pollution pumped into the atmosphere.

Source: EMPA
Image Source: TheNickster