A lot of things people do in an attempt to \u201cthink green\u201d and \u201cleave a smaller carbon footprint\u201d can end up backfiring. <\/p>\n
As complex eco-systems which man has never been able even to accurately predict — let alone control — are simplified to the level of Miss Nancy of Romper Room advising the children to wash their hands and \u201cDo Be a Do-Bee,\u201d should we be surprised? <\/p>\n
If you\u2019re up-to-date on your anti-nausea medication, join with us as we slog through the first several paragraphs of the English version of a piece of \u201cobjective news reporting\u201d dished out by the Agence France Press over the June 6 weekend: <\/p>\n
\u201cYou worry a lot about the environment and do everything you can to reduce your carbon footprint — the emissions of greenhouse gases that drive dangerous climate change,\u201d the French reporters gush. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo you always prefer to take the train or the bus rather than a plane, and avoid using a car whenever you can, faithful to the belief that this inflicts less harm to the planet,\u201d the hand-wringers at AFP continue. <\/p>\n
\u201cWell, there could be a nasty surprise in store for you, for taking public transport may not be as green as you automatically think, says a new US study. …\u201d <\/p>\n
Sacre bleu! <\/p>\n
It turns out there are hidden or displaced emissions that invalidate any simple \u201ctailpipe\u201d tally, which attempts to measure how much carbon dioxide (a non-toxic and naturally occurring gas necessary to make the earth\u2019s ecosystem work) gets spewed out by the fossil fuels used to make a trip. <\/p>\n
Environmental engineers Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath at the University of California at Davis say that when these costs are included, \u201ca more complex and challenging picture emerges.\u201d <\/p>\n
Well, yes. <\/p>\n
It can actually be more \u201ceco-friendly\u201d to drive into town in your SUV than to take the train, the Californians found, depending on seat occupancy rates on the train, as well as the (previously uncounted) carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the process of building and maintaining the train and its tracks. <\/p>\n
\u201cThese often-unacknowledged factors add substantially to the global-warming burden,\u201d the Frenchmen moan, presumably while running about, fluttering their hands in the air. <\/p>\n
(The paper appears in Environmental Research Letters, a publication of Britain\u2019s Institute of Physics.) <\/p>\n
Meantime, a funny thing happened to that whopping $5 billion in economic stimulus \u201cweatherization\u201d funds as they worked their way through Congress last year. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf you were doing it on a national basis, you\u2019d do the most cost-effective jobs first, which would mean doing a lot in places like the Dakotas and Minnesota,\u201d explains Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a nonprofit group that favors weatherization. <\/p>\n
But that plan didn\u2019t do a very good job of attracting the votes of Southern congressmen. <\/p>\n
So instead, where in the past only 16 percent of such federal funds were spent insulating homes south of the Mason-Dixon line to save on air conditioning costs — a process which nets much smaller overall energy savings — the \u201cSouthern\u201d portion has now grown to 31 percent. <\/p>\n
The nation spends twice as much on heating as on cooling, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, and it consumes more energy heating homes than cooling them. When it comes to mankind\u2019s emissions of heat-trapping gases, the Energy Department found, home heating is responsible for emitting twice as much carbon dioxide as home cooling. <\/p>\n
This has raised repeated questions about the effectiveness of weatherization in hot-climate states, the New York Times reported last week. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which evaluates the program for the Energy Department, released a study last year questioning the program\u2019s results in Texas, which will get $327 million in weatherization money from the stimulus law. The laboratory found that insulating homes did not save a significant amount of money on cooling, a finding it consistent with previous studies. <\/p>\n
J. Bennett Johnston, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana who pushed for the new \u201c31 percent\u201d formula, said more people were dying from extreme heat than extreme cold. \u201cThis was not so much an energy saving proposal; it was more of an equity proposal, one that gave attention to public health,\u201d Mr. Johnston said. <\/p>\n
Besides, weatherizing in warm as well as cool states \u201chas a proven track record of … creating jobs across the country,\u201d explains Gil Sperling, the program manager at the Office of Weatherization and Intergovernmental Affairs at the Energy Department. <\/p>\n
Yep, it does create jobs. So would paying men to dig holes and then fill them in again. <\/p>\n
But even as Florida\u2019s weatherization allocation climbs from this year\u2019s 5 million to a planned 176 million tax dollars over the next couple of years, \u201ca review of the utility bills of nine Floridians whose homes were recently weatherized showed varied savings,\u201d The Times reports. \u201cA couple of bills were halved, with monthly savings of up to $178; most customers saved $13 to $44 a month, and one customer saw her electric bill rise as she consumed more electricity after her house had been weatherized.\u201d <\/p>\n
If private citizens believed those savings justified the cost of warm-weather \u201cweatherization,\u201d they could have paid for it themselves — or the government could have simply loaned them the money, to be paid back out of future savings. <\/p>\n
Instead, cost-benefit analysis went out the window, because \u201cWe\u2019re from the government, we\u2019re here to help, every congressman had to get his share, and after all … it\u2019s only tax money.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A lot of things people do in an attempt to \u201cthink green\u201d and \u201cleave a smaller carbon footprint\u201d can end up backfiring. As complex eco-systems which man has never been able even to accurately predict — let alone control — are simplified to the level of Miss Nancy of Romper Room advising the children to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-extreme-green"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-3Y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":248,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions\/248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}