you go, girl

From solar cars to fast (sort-of-green) cars. I am not a big fan of racing, but I was intrigued by an email from the social networking site Clean Action Network about NASCAR racer Leilani Munter, who runs the site Carbon Free Girl about her search for ways to offset the impacts of her racing activities:

Leilani Münter is Carbon Free Girl and this is her story -- the story of a vegetarian hippie chick race car driver's journey to be carbon neutral; a diary of her lifetime project of sorting through the facts & fiction about alternative fuels, organic food, clean energy, green buildings, solar power, wind farms, composters, recycling, politics & more all while she makes a living driving a race car at 200 mph. It's not always easy being green but Leilani hopes that by sharing her story, she will make your journey a little easier...

earth overshoot day

If you use up your monthly salary before the next payday, you borrow money to tide you over. Which might be alright, if you have a good credit rating and you don't do it every month. But if you spend just as much next month, you just go deeper into debt. In the same way, we use Earth's resources to run our lives, and the New Economics Foundation has come up with the date we go into ecological "resource debt" each year. This year, we used up the equivalent of Earth's annual budget last week, on Sept 23. At the rate we spend, Earth only produces enough to support us for 267 days a year; after that, we use up resources that have been "banked". And these resources are not only fossil fuels, they are also habitats, fresh water, forests, fish, and so on.

Unfortunately, the date this happens gets earlier every year, with the result that we are borrowing beyond our means - and have been doing so since 1986, according to NEF's calculations. We won't be able to repay the loan unless we make drastic changes. One can argue that overshoot day is just a concept, and probably not very accurate, but I don't believe anyone can seriously suggest that we can carry on with business as usual indefinitely. Dependence on finite oil reserves alone makes that an impossibility, but the environmental degradation we are causing makes it an ethical issue.

flying close to the sun

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's part of an F16 fighter jet that is now a solar car. I had a peek at the vehicles participating in the South African Solar Challenge, and this is one of them. Very sleek and very expensive, but it has technical problems and hasn't clocked any mileage on the journey from Johannesburg to Cape Town.

In contrast, the ugly duckling in the second picture is cheaper, and not so sexy - but it works. And it's made with parts you can buy (mostly) off the shelf in South Africa. Let's see who's left standing at the end of the South African tour.

Ultimately, despite appearances, this is not about powering cars directly from the sun; it's about squeezing efficiency out of solar panels and mechanical equipment. Nobody expects cars of the future to be kitted out with huge solar arrays, but exercises like this will help test components for more energy-efficient cars and other machinery. I'm rooting for the ugly duckling because it can show how to do more with less. And because I always cheer for the underdog.

SA's own electric car

Other South African bloggers have already picked this up here and here and here; but what the heck, when the South African Innovation Fund supports the development of a homegrown electric vehicle that could even make it to commercial production, I might as well join the hoopla. The Cape Times picked this up today because the "Joule", designed in SA by Optimal Energy in association with SA-born designer Keith Helfet, will be shown this week at the Paris Motor Show.

It's always great to see local initiative, but many of the factors that killed the electric car decades ago are still in play, so I wonder how far this will get. One can still hope. And there's a fascinating article in the latest edition of Wired magazine about an American who has suggested a new model for getting electric cars on the road. And he's starting to get noticed. I don't see the article on the website today, but it's in stores now.

Power storage is the biggest technical issue preventing rapid adoption of electric vehicles - primarily the weight of batteries, and the recharge time - and that's what this proposal addresses. The gist of it is that companies could be set up to sell electricity along with the cars. Buy yourself a contract that allows you to recharge your vehicle from a grid of power points, or simply by swapping batteries. The batteries are owned by the power supplier, making a battery swap an easy way to eliminate recharge time if you need to extend your travel range over one day, thereby eliminating the need for a costly backup internal combustion engine. And if you are not travelling far, you can keep fewer batteries on board to reduce weight. The car itself could even be free with a five-year contract for people who travel a lot, while others might buy the car and get electricity on a pay-as-you-go arrangement. Sound familiar? Yep, it's the cellphone contract model.

ground zero for the climate change battle

It's been widely reported that right about now - certainly this decade - cities are overtaking rural areas as home to more than half the world's population. Statistics like this tend to reinforce the emphasis on cities as the source of most environmental problems, making them the focus of research and planning. Most researchers and planners, after all, live in cities.

It's worth remembering that there's still the other half out there. A paper issued last week by the International Institute for Environment and Development claims that cities are often unfairly blamed for producing 75 to 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. If you look at where products and services are consumed, rather than where they are produced, cities are only responsible for 40% of emissions, according to the paper - and the consumer should rightly take responsibility. This is not to demonise people in rural areas; the point is that there are a lot of efficiencies and potential improvements in efficiencies that can be made in cities, but not so much in rural areas. Compact cities, for example, can make better use of resources, can have greater synergies between different land uses, and can have people driving less.

In general, wealthy people outside cities are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than those in cities as they have larger homes that need to be heated or cooled, more automobiles per household and greater automobile use.

It's not clear, from the summary of the paper, whether the global allocation of emissions to urban and rural areas holds true in developing countries, where there is a particular balance between rich and poor in urban and rural areas that differs from the mix found developed countries. The use of energy by poor people could swing emissions either way: rural poverty often results in less efficient use of energy, such as burning wood for cooking - and likewise, the smog hanging over urban slums might produce beautiful sunsets, but it sure doesn't help the environment.

The paper's author, David Satterthwaite, blames the rich for producing the bulk of emissions, and sees the easiest solutions in urban areas. Both conclusions might be true, but a sustainable solution absolutely must address poverty, wherever it exists, and address it in a way that does not replicate a middle class that consumes resources with abandon. I don't see the point in keeping the battle within city boundaries. Spatial planning, and design of the built form, need to be attuned to environmental preservation on farms, in towns and in the physical and functional relationships between settlements of all sizes.

In a separate editorial in the October 2008 edition of the journal Environment and Urbanisation, Satterthwaite acknowledges the importance of addressing poverty, but keeps the focus on urbanisation and seems not to recognise urban-rural relationships. He notes that efforts by poor communities to gain control over their economic situation can be more easily repressed, and their energy diffused, by municipalities that choose not to (or cannot) address urban inequalities. "In addition, physical proximity is no advantage for urban poor groups when city authorities view them or their settlements as constraints on the city’s development and capacity to attract new investment." Which leads me to think that some strategies to address human settlement challenges could in fact be more effective in rural areas or small towns. And where social and housing needs can be addressed with conscious planning, there must be a parallel opportunity to deal with resource consumption and GHG emissions.

Interestingly for South Africans, the same edition of the journal also includes a paper by Debra Roberts on how Durban has institutionalised a climate change strategy.

Durban is unusual among cities worldwide in having a municipal government that has developed a locally rooted climate change adaptation strategy. The paper highlights the need for climate change issues to be rooted in local realities that centre on avoiding or limiting impacts from, for instance, heat waves, heavy rainfall and storm surges, and sea-level rise, and also the ecological changes and water supply constraints brought about by climate change. The paper also notes how little attention international agencies have paid to adaptation, as the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (mitigation) has been prioritized. This paper also stresses the importance of building local knowledge and capacity about climate change risks and adaptive responses. Without this, decision makers will continue seeing environmental issues as constraints on development rather than as essential underpinnings of and contributors to development.

solar cars on show

If you are in Cape Town, you can see the solar-powered cars that are racing in the South African Solar Challenge. They will be at the MTN Sciencentre at Canal Walk on Wednesday 1st October. From the Sciencentre newsletter:

The South African Solar Challenge 2008 is an epic two-week race in solar-powered cars through the length and breadth of South Africa. Teams have had to build their own cars, design their own engineering systems and are now ready to race those same machines through the most demanding terrain that solar cars have ever known. Don't miss the opportunity to have a closer look at the solar cars and speak to the team members during their stop in Cape Town. Cars will be parked at the Vida court inside Canal Walk for the day on Wednesday 1 October

outmoding the commode

What the modern fridge does for household electricity consumption, the modern toilet does for water. Actually, the toilet - in its most common form - is not modern at all, and it's time for a makeover. But toilets that use little or no water face the same problem I mentioned yesterday in relation to the energy-efficient refrigerator: poor public image. I am not talking about the low-flow models that are now fairly common in some countries. Five- or six-litre flush toilets are a bit like the hybrid car: better than gas-guzzling 4x4 vehicles, but not something that will really wean us off liquid fuels.

I am talking about a litre or less per flush. We need a revolution in the water closet, and Dwell magazine presents a few models that might do the trick. But they are a long way from price levels that will encourage widespread adoption, and some of them still look like they belong in a caravan, not a house. Design, design, design.

old fridge design brought back to life

A few years ago, when I witnessed the effects of Eskom's budget-sapping rollout of the national electricity grid to rural Transkei, I wondered how people who rely on a largely subsistence economy could possibly afford to buy, operate and maintain the electrical appliances that they could now run on 220 volts of coal-generated power. Most rural families probably have one or more family members working in cities, sending money back home, which helps pay the bills; but is that really a sustainable approach to community development?

I have written before about alternative financing models for supplying renewable energy to make rural life more convenient, and here is another technology that could help significantly: a fridge design that was invented by Albert Einstein in 1930. The original design was abandoned when freon and cheap power made it possible to sell fridges that operated with more efficient compressors. But the compressor is what makes it difficult to run a modern fridge using solar power, so the Einstein fridge is being dusted off and improved so that its zero-moving-parts design can be powered with solar panels. In addition to reducing reliance on dirty power, this approach also reduces maintenance needs, so it's perfect for rural communities.

Of course there are more primitive systems, like evaporative fridges, but let's face reality: a huge challenge in stemming the tide of human desire for electrically-powered appliances in the developing world is in coming up with designs that don't make people feel like they are being handed second-rate goods. This sounds like one that could work.

crowdsourcing energy solutions

If we leave everything to the experts, we might never make progress. A new alternate reality game called World Without Oil has been developed to stimulate ideas on an oil-free future by engaging online gamers.

The premise of World Without Oil was simple and provocative: What if an oil crisis started on April 30, 2007 - what would happen? How would the lives of ordinary people change? Players were invited to imagine how their lives and communities would be different and how they would cope if the world’s oil suddenly dried up. The “plot” unfolded dynamically. First, the players read the “official news” and what other players were saying. Then, using a combination of blog posts, videos, images and even voice mails, they told their own stories of the challenges they were facing. As the crisis continued, players updated their stories with further thoughts, reactions and solutions.

The game ended after 32 days, having engaged thousands of players around world and woven the fabric of 1,500 stories into what [game designer] Ken [Eklund] describes as “living breathing mega narrative that presented some eerily plausible scenarios, complete with practical courses of action to help prevent such an event from actually happening.”

how we get to work makes all the difference

While we try to improve the energy performance of buildings through design, efficient technologies, water re-use and various strategies that are recognised through auditing tools like BREEAM, LEED and Green Star, we can't lose sight of how people get to these buildings. A recent study in the UK starts to put some numbers to the role of transport in the overall performance of office buildings.

As reported on BSRIA, an evaluation of a range of buildings shows that the gains made in making buildings energy-efficient can be completely wiped out: among the case studies, the most efficient building had 80% of employees driving to work, while some less efficient buildings were better located or used by more environmentally-conscious occupants and showed better overall performance if the emissions from transport were considered. Which is why the South African pilot version of the Green Star - Office tool gives credit for locating close to high density residential areas so that there is a greater possibility of office workers living close and walking to work.