Starting a New Fire!

The thought of $5 or $6 gas is often generated when we hear about fuel shortages, and everyone then reacts to the though by considering how we can discover more oil to refine into fuels and plastics for use the world over...

But are there alternatives?

The Rocky Mountain Institute through their recently released book, 'Reinventing Fire', offers a wide array of alternatives for use in the four primary areas where we use energy. The areas are Transportation, Building and Building Management, Industry, and Electrical Generation...and the alternatives are all worth considering...

Let's take just one for review... the refurbishment of the Empire State Building in NYC. Anthony Malkin and his company own the Empire State Building and over the past several years they have conducted a refurbishment of the site... $500M in refurbishment. This project brought the 81 year old building up to sustainable speed... and defined how large projects can successfully reduce costs. Consider this... initially the update on energy distribution and delivery was budgeted at $93M and was going to put in new, improved versions of the old equipment...including complete overhaul of the sub level chillers located under the streets of New York. Malkin however looked at the costs from several vantage points...and in the end he decided to completely redesign the energy structure for his building in a fully integrated way. The cost was $106M...or $13M more than initially planned. As a result the Empire State Building received all new double glazed windows (manufactured on site), under floor ducting for A/C and heating, improved natural lighting, energy capture from elevators and more...

What was the payback...? An annual savings of $4.4M in energy expense ...that's ANNUAL! He recovered the added expense in 3 years and is realizing that 'internal profit line' from now on. Add to that the reduced carbon footprint from lower fuel use at the power source, internal energy generation and the improved work environment and you begin to see the value added opportunities Malkin envisioned.

What if every realestate management team were to do the same...

The book is Reinventing Fire... and the ideas for how to reduce our oil use to near ZERO in 40 years are real and accessable now based on existing technologies...Just ask Anthony Malkin.

Earth really is a small planet...

As we look on to earth from the surface of Mars we come to understand that Earth really is a small planet. Too small for us to just keep heaping it with pollution.
This NASA photo taken by the rover Spirit in 2004 offers us the ability to witness our place in the universal expanse. But with all of that it also helps us to understand that man can do some amazing things, and that even one man or woman can make a difference.
We each need to find our path, and walk our path towards helping to change the world. Me? My choice is seeking out real, doable sustainable threads for all organizations and communities to do, and then working with them to get those things done.
What's yours'?

Saving $$$s and Diesel on the road...

Replacing the standard two thinner tires per wheel normally found on 18-wheeler Trailers with a single wide-base tire improves the fuel efficiency of heavy-duty tractor-trailer trucks and allows them to be made to run with more stability, according to studies by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Interstate tests by ORNL’s National Transportation Research Center show gas mileage increased nearly 3% with use of wider single tires on tractor-trailers. Bill Knee, who headed the study, said the change also allows widening of the trailer frame by six inches, providing a much more stable configuration.We noticed that there was about a 2.9% fuel saving in using the new generation single wide tires over the standard dual tires.

These trucks do 125,000 miles per year on the average. They currently get five miles per gallon. You can see there is a considerable amount of savings dollar-wise that can be realized through tires like this.—Bill Knee With those figures, a 3% improvement in fuel economy would reduce fuel consumption by about 728 gallons per year per truck. The wide base tires improve fuel efficiency by decreasing weight and rolling resistance. Knee said tire formulation and the design of the tire are likely contributors to the fuel savings.

Diesel costs over $4 a gallon today, and these savings will yield upwards of $1000 annually in fuel savings per trailer hauled. Now multiply that by the number of 18-Wheelers on the road and we see lots of gallons and dollars saved due to a shift in standard equipment.

The real storm causing global warming…population growth and its impact on the environment.

In 1776, the year of the American Revolution, world population was approximately 800 million…and the population of colonial America was 2.5 million…or about .0035% of that population.

Today the USA is at about 320 million and the world is at about 7 Billion raising our population to about 4.6% of the world’s population…but still well below the rest of man kind.

Understanding the global population picture requires that we recognize that our past growth
impacts our future population…and that 7 Billion today with a 1.07% growth rate in 2012 we will continue to grow…and even after we hit zero growth rate, .01% in 2016 or so, we will still be growing because the population is hanging in there and not leaving the planet.

1950 2,556,000,000
1960 3,039,434,000
1965 3,345,409,879
1970 3,706,601,448
1975 4,086,387,665
1980 4,453,863,820
1985 4,850,224,998

1990 5,277,725,410
1995 5,687,011,326
2000 6,081,002,937
2005 6,462,181,426
2010 6,840,423,256
2012 7 Billion!

With growth at .45% in 2050 still pushing our population up to between 9.3 and 10 Billion world wide…that means that in 1800 we were at just under 1 Billion in population and it took more than 125 years to double, however the next doubling happened in 33 years with 3-Billion in 1960…and 4 in 14 more years in 1974… a trend…yes, clearly.

We hit 6-Billion in 1999 and 7-Billion in 2012…now we are slowing, but we are past the point of resource burdening…and will hit 10-Billion by 2050 before we begin to reduce the population.

While we may worry about things like oil and gold…it better be obvious that the real critical
resources are Water and Food…and with these resources at or past peak production in many parts of the world we are facing short supplies and the resulting loss of life TODAY!

Oceans Rising....

As oceans rise due to climate change, entire countries are threatened by the increasing of high tide lines. Here in the Marshall Islands where the total height above sea level averages no more than three (3) feet every part of the nation is threatened. This photo is not a storm, its a by-monthly tide...

The thing that impacts increased tidal lines the most is not, surprisingly, the return of ice and glacial run off to the seas... its the increase in ocean volume due to expansion caused by an increase in ocean temperature. Raise the average temperature of the ocean by just 1 or 2 degrees and it will expand a corresponding 1%+...that's an extra 1000 gallons or more for every million gallons experienced today.

Raise the seas three feet and the Marshalls are gone... but so are parts of the Bahamas, sections of Florida, Australia, Russia ...flooding in London, Tokyo, Baltimore... heck, New Orleans is already below sea level...raise the oceans and the water will find a way into our cities, increase brackish water in rivers, corrupt our aquifers...world wide...and this isn't a guess...its happening now.

The question isn't if it is going to happen...it is when it will happen to you. Ask yourself "What will we do when we have 100-Million tidal refuges looking for a new place to live the world over?"

And after that?
Well we better have a plan....

Where did the moon come from?

The moon, 1/4 of the diameter of the earth, non-rotating and only 1/80th of
the density of the Earth, circles the earth in less than 24 hours and, along with the
gravitational force of the sun, influences tides and winds worldwide.

But where did our moon come from, and why is it less dense and absent an iron core like that of Earth? There are several theories that have been proposed… but most have no explanation for the lack of iron nor for the lack of water … both components that would be expected on a planet developed in conjunction with ours. Here are some ideas proposed:

- The molten earth, continuing in its formative rotation, developed massive waves,
not merely hundreds of feet high, but potentially thousands of feet high causing a literal separation of billions of tons of surface matter, spun off from the surface that excluded the already densely formed iron core…too heavy to break free. Both bodies continued to form for billions of years…the moon, absent a rotating core and nearly no atmosphere, cooled and formed, while the earth continued to rotate and evolve (Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us).

- Others once believed the Moon came from another part of the Universe with little iron, strayed near the Earth’s gravitational field, and was drawn into orbit. This, too, failed for three main reasons. This is called the Capture Hypothesis. One was due to the fact that the isotope composition of Moon rocks is very similar to that of rocks from our planet. Second is the
necessity for a very small (thus, highly unlikely) encounter velocity. And third, is the absence of a very thick atmosphere that should have been present to provide a so-called gas drag that would have helped in the capture process.

- Co-Formation Hypothesis proposes that both the Moon and the Earth were formed at practically the same time and in the same region in the solar nebula, drawing materials to each other from the dust around them. While this hypothesis is consistent with the proximity of the two bodies, it is difficult to explain why they the Moon doesn’t have as much iron as the Earth.

- Of all of these hypotheses that strive to explain the Moon’s origin, it is the Giant Impact that has received the widest acceptance. In this hypothesis, the Moon is believed to have been originally a part of the Earth’s crust, whacked out by a collision between the Earth and another body bearing
the size of Mars. As we consider the Giant Impact Hypothesis note that since the whacked-out
piece may have certainly come from the outer layer of the Earth (the crust), then this explains the lack of iron in the Moon. Furthermore, computer simulations also show how this theory is also consistent with angular momentum measurements.

Water just about everywhere...but only 1% to drink!

We find water the world over ... 96% of which is salt water in our oceans and seas. 3%...an amazing quantity really, is in our ice and snow...and 1% is fresh water in our aquifers, rivers, lakes and streams. Only 1%! and with that 1% we need to sustain life of all animals...pretty difficult when we now have a human population of 7Billion...going to 10Billion within view...

But what if we loose our ice? (Will we loose our ice?)... in 1951 Rachel Carson published The Sea Around Us in which she noted that we are in a cycle on the cooler to warmer track that has both long range cyclic impact (about 100,000 years) and inside of this there are shorter cycles ranging from 2000 to 3000 years...cold to warm and back to cold. She suggested back in the early 50s that we were on a warming leg of a short cycle...the long cycle being the ice age maker... and that we should expect ice to continue to recede, glaciers to vanish, and temperatures to go up.

We began exploring the Antarctic Continent in the 1800s...mapping its frozen coasts...landing infrequently until 1900 or so...when Shackleton and Scott lead their explorations into this hostile and treacherous land. Today about 45,000 tourists visit Antarctica each year to see what appears to be a vanishing land of ice.

In many ways the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica resemble the rubbled plains of Mars...so it was surprising to find extremophiles sustaining themselves in this frozen wasteland who remain dormant for decades awaiting temperatures warm enough and water pools ready to sustain their life forms. Yet if the globe continues to warm we may yield an even wider variety of unique life forms in this mysterious land (E. Willson, The Future of Life).

Today (Nov 2nd, 2011) we know that the Antarctice ice sheet is shedding a potential iceberg...with a fissure 165 feet deep, 18 miles long and increasing in width by 6 to 8 feet per day... this 300 square mile berg will be huge. Changes in patterns however are not necessarily part of global warming...ice is mobile and breaches in active sheets and glaciers are not indications that they are failing... it is the warming of the oceans ...by 2 or 3 degrees that should alert us, for that is an amazing amount of stored energy and represents a game-changing potential that could erase ice and snow from our poles and raise the oceans by hundreds of feet.

Not anytime soon however... in human years anyway. Though we are on Carson's warming trend we should expect this to take hundreds of years, if not longer...and if we are acting to solve the technical problems necessary to survive then man has a chance to make it...assuming that we don't overpopulate too much, and figure out the other issues necessary to sustain life. I guess time will tell...and it really is an adventure, isn't it.

So we should be setting goals to address sustainable issues for future generations, those in the crunch before the cold, and find a way to solve the enviornmental, economic, and equity questions that all of this change (real and potential) are raising.