It's Easy Being Green

I’ve often referred to Phoenix as a cultural vacuum. I was born and raised in that city and every time I go back I sometimes shudder. Now I’m not so worried about the lack of culture in Phoenix but the lack of compassion and care for our environment. Everything in Phoenix is all about waste. The soccer moms driving Hummers and SUV’s speeding down the highway burning oil like it’s going out of style. Lush green yards and sprawling golf courses in a desert that only gets a few inches of rain every year. It’s all waste and it’s hard to look at when you spend so much time trying to green up your own life more than one hundred miles away.

A couple weeks ago we stopped at the Desert Ridge Marketplace in the north Phoenix/Scottsdale area and were shocked about the waste that was put on display for everyone there. In the middle of the food court was a roaring gas fireplace. The thing must have been about five or six feet wide and probably 15 feet long. The sun was shining and the temperature was in the upper 80’s, maybe even close to 90. There was absolutely no need for a fire to be roaring that afternoon, burning natural gas as if it was coming from a limitless supply! The scary thing was, there were people from Scottsdale just parking themselves in front of the fireplace complaining about how cold it was. Give me a break! Go stand in the sun for a moment, it’s almost 90 degrees!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, just ten feet away people were dining on the patio of a restaurant that had an entire bank of a misting system running non-stop. I’m not sure about anyone else but 80 to 90 degrees, in the dry desert of Phoenix, is actually a very comfortable temperature. It’s not too hot, not too cold. People just don’t blink an eye in Phoenix at those types of situations. Places like Phoenix are going to be the first cities that run out of water and are going to be looking to everyone else for help and a bailout. We have to live smarter than that regardless of whether or not you have thousands of dollars to drop in a swanky shopping mall and silicone implants in your chest that are making you cold.

Just to prove how nonchalant the Phoenix metro populous can be, check out the latest cover of the Phoenix New Times. A giant green f-you is emblazoned across the cover with the title “Green Fatigue: Is anyone else tired of eco-chic?” While the article might discuss ways to live a greener life, who would even bother picking it up with a message like that? There’s another hundred thousand pounds of paper going to waste!

Have you seen wastefulness in your city or some place you were visiting? Tell us about it and share your thoughts on it!

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Here’s four more tips showing you it really can be easy going green:

5. Adjust your home’s thermostat to be lower in winter and higher in summer. Learn how to heat and cool your home simply by venting windows at certain times of the day and when it’s cold, bundle up and put on your sweat pants!

6. Clean and replace dirty air filters in your home’s heating and cooling system. A dirty air filter can use 5-percent more energy while your a/c unit is running.

7. Replace the standard incandescent light bulbs in your home with the new compact fluorescent bulbs.

8. Help your water heater to be even more efficient by wrapping it with an insulating blanket specifically designed to go around your water heater.

Check back tomorrow for four more easy green living tips!

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Five days and counting to Earth Day so enjoy the easy ways to go green tips I post as we head to the big celebration:

1. When it comes to doing the dishes with your dishwasher, use the energy-saving setting. If your dishwasher is older and doesn’t have one of those settings, just let the dishes air-dry. Don’t use the heated option.

2. Reduce the energy needed to wash your clothes by washing in cold or warm water, not hot. We do all of our laundry with cold water, sometimes warm if some stain treatment or sterilization is needed and we’ve never noticed a problem with our clothes!

3. To save on energy used to heat up hot water, turn your water heater down to about 120-degrees. I have to confess, that’s a hard one for us to stomach because we love our hot showers and baths!

4. As you replace appliances in your home, pick out on the best energy efficient appliances. A lot of new appliances carry the Energy Star label which tells you that particular appliance is designed to save you money. If you’d like to learn more about what appliances to look out for, head over to the Energy Star website.

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One of the easiest ways to “be green” is by following a few simple steps to increase the fuel economy of your vehicle. One of those tips to always make sure your tires are inflated to the proper pressure and you might as well check the tread wear while you’re down there, ensuring your ride has safe traction in bad weather. Tires are declared legally unsafe when the tread is reduced to a depth of 1/16th of an inch and the rule of thumb was to stick a penny in the tread to measure this. With Lincoln’s head pointing into the tread (ouch!) you shouldn’t be able to see the top of his hair. If you did, it was time for new tires!

However, that measurement has changed. It’s now recommended that you use a quarter instead of a penny. Pointing George Washington’s head into the tread (again, ouch!), you shouldn’t be able to see the top of his head. If you do, head to the tire shop! It’s also important to pay attention to other danger signs on your tires including uneven tread wear, cracks or cuts in the sidewall, bulges and blisters and excessive vibration in your steering wheel. If your tires are showing any of these signs you should have them checked out. Tires are one of the most easily overlooked pieces of your vehicle. But if you keep regular tabs on them, not only will you save yourself money but you’ll also help the environment too.

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I was over cruising through one of my favorite blogs, Inhabitat, and read this interesting piece on the Masdar Initiative. It’s a new “city” being designed from the ground up by Norman Foster which aims to be completely carbon neutral, car-free and zero waste. Masdar City will be built in Abu Dhabi and construction is expected to begin sometime in the next month.

The project strangely reminds me of the Biosphere 3 project that was opened outside of Tucson, Arizona. Eventually things went a little wacky with that project environmentally but I think there’s a lot of learning and knowledge that will be gained from Masdar City. It will be interesting to watch it evolve over time and see what the city’s designers master and what fails. I yearn for country living so the idea of living in a mini city like Masdar doesn’t really excite me. But I think it will do great things for all those who choose to live in high-density areas. Check out the video!

[youtube yWVsi0UtmgI Masdar City]

What do you think about the project? Would you be inclined to live in a dense development like that if it was more sustainable than your current lifestyle?

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It’s warmed up to a balmy 17-degrees outside today but with the wind chill it feels more like 4-degrees.  It was bitter cold last night and the car wasn’t too excited about starting up for the drive home from work.  This morning the house felt more like a meat locker inside…making us realize just how truly un-efficient this rental house is.  If you’re faced with high heating costs or just the aggravation of trying to keep your house at a comfortable temperature, you should think about doing your own energy audit.

It’s pretty simple.  You just need to walk through your house and begin considering where you could be losing heating and cooling efficiency.  Unless you’re doing a remodel or buying a house, there’s not much you can do about existing insulation in your walls and ceilings.  However, if you can find out what the insulation value is inside your walls  you can determine the efficiency of that.  A lot of common home insulation is rated around “R-11″ or “R-19″.  The higher the number, better the insulation is.  Some homes will have r-values reaching into the 30’s or 40’s.  According to the Department of Energy, eco-friendly homes built with straw bale walls have an R-50 value!  You can read more about their test homes and the different insulation comparisons by clicking this link.

The biggest source of decreased heating and cooling efficiency is air leaking in and out of your house.  The home we rent is only outfitted with single-paned windows.  That’s extremely inefficient because there is such a rapid exchange of cold air through these windows into the house.  It’s the opposite for summer, with a rapid exchange of heat into the rooms.  The house is outfitted with honeycomb shades on most of the windows.  If lowered prior to dark and kept closed until the sun is well up, they seem to do a decent job of retaining heat and keeping the chill out.  But if the house was outfitted with double-paned, “Low E” windows it would feel much more comfy in here.

There’s also a set of French doors off the dining room and kitchen that are poorly sealed.  You can see the light coming through gaps in the frame and weatherstripping on the door.  About $10 worth of weatherstripping and caulking and a half hour of work could greatly improve the cold air that moves through these doors.  We also hang curtains over it to keep the cold draft out and place an old rolled up blanket at the base of the door to prevent that draft too.

If you’re faced with any of this dilemmas, you should check out the Energy Department’s Home Energy Audit.  It’s easy to click through and tells you all the potential trouble spots in your home.  Best of all, it’s something you can do in just an hour or two or even spread out over several days.  In the long run it could help you save money and keep your house a little more comfortable.

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Is anyone else even a little dismayed by the current administration in The White House? In case you missed it yesterday, oil prices hit the long-awaited $100 per barrel mark. It’s the highest dollar value the commodity has ever traded at. Granted, if you compare it to the oil crisis of the 1980’s economists say the $100 mark is still a dollar below the 80’s crisis point if it’s adjusted for inflation. There was a lot of speculation by economists last night that the only reason the oil hit that high was because a few lone investors really wanted to see it trade that high. After all, we’ve been awaiting this most glorious milestone for months now!

Well, it seems at first glance those lone few on the trading floors yesterday got to see their fairytale price point. But the implications of it are going to be more far-flung than just rounding another base. Already the economy is feeling pinched. While final numbers from the holiday shopping season aren’t out yet, retailers apparently had a dismal season. That’s no surprise really because it seemed like the writing was on the wall well before Black Friday ads were being leaked to the internet. Now retailers are slashing and dashing, trying to get people into their stores during a time of the year when people are just plain tapped out. It’s been reported that major U.S. restaurant chains are freaking out about the first financial quarter of the year. They’ve already seen huge decreases in the amount of people dining in their restaurants all because of a steadily rising cost for gas, energy used at home and a waning economy.

To trump all economic concerns with the oil climb, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino talked about how in order to stave off high gas prices, the U.S. needs to start more domestic oil exploration and production. It seems Perino really has been given a heavy dose of the Bush/Cheney crack infiltrating every Capitol Hill office! Do our oil producers really need to be given the green light to tromp around already protected areas of wilderness looking for more oil, especially when most experts say it wouldn’t be online for production for another 10 years? With the Dems in control in Congress it more than likely won’t happen. But the Democrats also want the government to start dipping into the strategic oil reserves to bring prices back down. I think that’s another incredibly bad decision when we’re already at the mercy of foreign, oil producing countries.

This is the time for our government to do something good. Quit giving the tax breaks to big oil. Quit giving higher fuel-economy and environmental standards the pussyfoot approach. With our presidential elections just months away, this is a great time for candidates to show what they’re made of in the face of an impending oil and financial crisis. In the meantime, I’m doing what I can to make myself knowledgeable and able to live in a time where oil isn’t always available or worth the cost. I just got the book Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life After Gridcrash by Aric McBay. It shows you how to plan for the future, surviving and thriving when the food, transport and energy industries sputter out after consuming their last drops of fuel. I also just stumbled on Cody Lundin’s book, When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need to Survive When Disaster Strikes. I’ll let you know how the books are and maybe discuss them as I go along.