Tag Archives: solar

Ford is revving up its plans for electric and driverless vehicles.

by MillieDoolan Posted on January 4, 2017

Tuticorin Alkali Chemicals promises to prevent emissions of 60,000 tons of CO2 a year by redirecting it from a coal-powered boiler to a new industrial process.

Here’s how the technology works: As the chemical plant’s coal-fired boiler releases flue gas, a spritz of a patented new chemical strips out the molecules of CO2. The captured CO2 is then mixed with rock salt and ammonia to make baking soda.

The process, invented by Carbon Clean Solutions, marks a global breakthrough in carbon-capture technology. Most such projects aim to bury CO2 in underground rocks, reaping no economic benefit; that’s called carbon capture and storage (CCS). But Tuticorin represents the first successful industrial-scale application of carbon capture and utilization (CCU), meaning the carbon is put to good use and helps turn a profit.

Tuticorin’s owner says the plant now has virtually no emissions. And the facility is not receiving any government subsidies. Many carbon-capture projects have needed subsidies because of high costs, but Carbon Clean’s process is more efficient, requiring less energy and less equipment.

Carbon Clean believes that CCU could ultimately neutralize 5 to 10 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions from coal.

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Ford is revving up its plans for electric and driverless vehicles.

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Fake news is old news to climate scientists

by c7u433n Posted on December 26, 2016

Think fake news is a recent plague, borne of the presidential election? It’s not.

“The notion of ‘fake news’ is hardly new to climate scientists like myself,” Penn State climatologist Michael Mann told Grist. “We’ve known about it (and written about it) for years.”

Thanks to researchers like Mann — the originator of the famed “hockey stick” chart and a frequent target of fake news himself — the science behind climate change is settled. And yet there remains a vocal contingent of ideologues who refuse to accept the connection between carbon emissions and a warming planet. For example, Donald Trump and a good portion of his proposed cabinet. For years, right-wing news organizations like Breitbart, Infowars, the Daily Caller, and Climate Depot have fed their denial, publishing stories that misinterpret, misrepresent, or distort scientific findings — or just outright lie.

This kind of fake news has set progress back years, if not decades, Mann said. It’s a “crime against the planet,” he told Grist, and a “crime against humanity.”

All the news that’s unfit to print

There are many flavors of fake news. Some of these stories push the idea that, yes, the climate is changing, but it’s just a natural effect of changes in the sun’s activity and humans have nothing to do with it. This theory has been a favorite of deniers for three decades, and even though it’s been widely discredited, Breitbart reported it in again in 2014, under the headline, “Solar Activity Could Cause Global Warming, New Paper Says.” Of course, this runs contrary to actual science, but Breitbart never lets that stop them.

Other fake stories claim that carbon dioxide is good because it increases plant growth, as the ever-optimistic Breitbart declared again last year. But while it’s true that CO2 can be beneficial for plants, it doesn’t outweigh the fact that increasing concentrations in the atmosphere are toasting our home planet. Good for plants does not equal good for people.

Bogus climate stories also allege that a so-called “pause” in global warming undermines established climate science. Although climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that temperatures are rising and climate change is real, there has been debate over whether the rate of temperature increase slowed in the early 2000s — which climate deniers refer to as the “pause” or “hiatus.” Fake media outlets have seized on this debate and tried to spin it as proof that climate change isn’t real: Breitbart even claimed that Mann jumped on the pause bandwagon, deserted his scientific colleagues, and decided that there’s been no global warming since 1998. This was likely news to Mann himself.

There’s also the classic seasonal variety of stories alleging that cold, snowy weather disproves climate change. This reached a fever pitch in 2015, when Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe threw a snowball on the Senate floor. What Inhofe and his fellow deniers don’t get is that weather is not climate. Climate change is about long-term warming trends, not individual weather events, and so snow and climate change just aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, a warming climate could actually lead to an increase in snowfall in some places as melting sea ice in the Arctic alters jet streams.

And, of course, some deniers claim that this whole thing is a vast conspiracy perpetrated by scientists hungry for government research money. (They have never, apparently, seen what climate scientists drive.) Others — like our president-elect — say it’s a hoax created by China to crush U.S. manufacturing. Still other deniers insist that it’s a scheme cooked up by Al Gore to make himself rich — but, not to worry, they also tell us that Al Gore was sued by 30,000 scientists for his global warming fraud.

Unfortunately, conspiracy theories are hard to combat. Research shows that when presented with evidence that contradicts our beliefs, instead of reconsidering those beliefs, we humans tend to double-down on our preconceived notions. So if you already believe climate change is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American public or that the Earth hasn’t warmed in 17 years or that this is all a big Communist plot, it’s unlikely that evidence to the contrary will dissuade you.

Some deniers — perhaps those who really believe Al Gore was sued by 30,000 scientists — think climate science is a lie because of the misinformation they absorb every day on TV and through social media. But other deniers have a more base motivation: money. The most high-profile deniers — people like Inhofe and Climate Depot’s Marc Morano — are backed by the fossil fuel industry. Exxon alone spent over $30 million to fund climate-denying organizations between 1998 and 2014, and an investigation by Carbon Brief found that nine of the 10 most prolific authors of papers skeptical of climate change have ties to Exxon. The industrialist Koch brothers, too, have spent a fortune on climate denial, donating nearly $50 million between 1997 and 2008 to groups that work to undermine climate science.

The money, it seems, was well-spent. Right-wing media outlets spread those groups’ misleading messages far and wide. So while the rest of the world has long since accepted the reality of climate change and humanity’s role in causing it, in the U.S., not only are we still debating its existence, but a climate change denier is about to occupy the White House.

Reality strikes back

Soon, however, there may be a cost to spreading misinformation about climate scientists, if not about climate change itself. The D.C. Court of Appeals recently ruled that Mann can proceed with a defamation suit against two bloggers who called his work fraudulent — and worse.

“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” wrote Rand Simberg in a 2012 post on the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s blog, “except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in service of politicized science that could have dire consequences for the nation and planet.” The National Review’s Mark Steyn then quoted these comments in a post of his own, writing that Simberg “has a point” and calling Mann’s work “fraudulent.”

For this, the court has ruled that Mann can sue both bloggers as well as their institutions — but you wouldn’t know that from the headlines in the climate-denying press. Climate Depot reported, “Court dismisses Michael Mann defamation lawsuit against National Review.” This is a clear manipulation of the truth: While the court did dismiss Mann’s claims against one National Review editor, its ruling clearly says that Mann can proceed with his suit against Steyn and National Review itself. But if we learned anything from the election of 2016, it’s that truth no longer carries much weight.

In the court’s ruling, Judge Vanessa Ruiz wrote, “Tarnishing the personal integrity and reputation of a scientist important to one side may be a tactic to gain advantage in a no-holds-barred debate over global warming.” It’s not a new tactic, but tarnishing reputations and publishing lies has proved to be an effective one. As for how destructive, we’re soon to find out.

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Fake news is old news to climate scientists

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Elections expert says North Carolina is no longer a democracy.

by HesterHull Posted on December 23, 2016

Andrew Reynolds, an adviser with the Harvard-based Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), has observed elections across the world — from Afghanistan to Burma, Egypt to Sudan.

“If it were a nation state,” Reynolds writes in the Raleigh News & Observer, “North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly-free, democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.”

North Carolina scored 58 on EIP’s 100-point scale in its report on the 2016 elections, ranking near Cuba, Indonesia, and Sierra Leone for overall electoral integrity. When it comes to the state’s electoral laws and voter registration, it does even worse, standing alongside Iran and Venezuela. Its score on unfair districting is the worst in the world: a whopping 7 out of 100.

The implications are vast: the GOP-controlled legislature succeeded in a last-minute attempt to limit the incoming Democratic governor’s power. This less-than-stellar democracy has its share of suffering already, ranging from wildfires to floods to toxic coal ash spills and millions lost in state revenue after passing HB2 anti-transgender bathroom bill.

Recently, a federal court ordered the state to redraw it’s notoriously gerrymandered districts earlier this year. Maybe North Carolina will graduate to second-worst government in the world on districting, after that.

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Elections expert says North Carolina is no longer a democracy.

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Trump hates wind turbines even more than he hates women he deems unattractive.

by gilbertoranieri Posted on December 21, 2016

No, it isn’t ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson.

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, named to serve as ambassador to China, is in favor of wind energy and policies that promote it. Like, really in favor.

“Our leadership in green energy not only makes us a leader in renewables but also powers job growth,” the Republican said in his 2016 Condition of the State address in Iowa. “Every wind turbine you see while driving across our state means income for farmers, revenue for local governments, and jobs for Iowa families.” As governor of the No. 2 wind state, he’s also in favor of federal incentives for wind energy like the production tax credit.

Branstad may experience some whiplash as he represents an administration that is particularly antagonistic to wind energy to a country that has invested billions of dollars in wind and solar.

On climate change, Branstad is not a denier but he buys into his party’s reasoning for not acting. “We need to recognize this climate change issue is a global issue,” he said in 2011. That’s the excuse many Republicans use to argue that the U.S. shouldn’t clean up its act until developing economies like China and India do.

But if he doesn’t know it already, Branstad will soon learn that China is doing plenty to fight climate change right now.

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Trump hates wind turbines even more than he hates women he deems unattractive.

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Meet the most pro-climate appointee Trump has made yet.

by EdisonAndronicu Posted on December 20, 2016

The administration announced Tuesday that President Obama will use a provision in the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to halt new offshore drilling in parts of federally owned Arctic and Atlantic waters — forever. While previous presidents have used that act to protect parts of the ocean, this is the first time it’s been exercised to enact a permanent ban on drilling. Canada will also indefinitely ban future drilling in its Arctic territory, the country said in the joint announcement.

The announcement came four weeks shy of Obama’s White House departure. President-elect Trump, a climate change denier, has vowed to undo many of Obama’s executive orders as well as dismantle the Clean Power Plan, open more federal lands to drilling, and withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.

But by using an existing act instead of issuing an executive order, Obama made the reversal of this drilling ban more difficult for his successor.

“We know now, more clearly than ever, that a Trump presidency will mean more fossil fuel corruption and less governmental protection for people and the planet, so decisions like these are crucial,” said Greenpeace spokesperson Travis Nichols. “President Obama should do this and more to stop any new fossil fuel infrastructure that would lock in the worst effects of climate change.”

This story has been updated. 

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Meet the most pro-climate appointee Trump has made yet.

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Trump Hates Renewable Energy—Unless It’s Powering One of His Hot New Hotels

by HubertGreaves Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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At a rally in Pennsylvania in August, Donald Trump had some complaints about wind power. “The wind kills all your birds,” he told supporters. “All your birds: killed.”

It was typical Trump: The president-elect hates wind turbines. He derides them as colossal eyesores. “It looks like a junkyard,” he said in October, referring to wind farms outside Palm Springs, California—”a poor man’s version of Disneyland.” And, he says, they’re unreliable: “Half of them are broken. They’re rusting and rotting.” He spent years battling to prevent a wind farm from being built off Scotland’s coast; his company called the project a “dangerous experiment with wind energy” that would spoil the view from his golf course. (Trump lost—though he’s far from letting the issue go.)

But in at least one major business venture, Trump’s organization embraced wind power big league.

In August 2010, one of the real estate mogul’s most exclusive new hotels—the glassy Trump SoHo in downtown Manhattan—boasted that it would be investing in 100 percent clean power. Specifically, it would be purchasing electricity from wind.

According to one of the deal’s main architects, the move to purchase wind energy was spearheaded by Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and potentially saved the hotel hundreds of thousands of dollars in energy costs.

“Ivanka was the one that wanted the 100 percent green requirement,” said Bill Cannon, who helped broker the deal when he worked as a senior vice president for Choice Energy Services, a Houston-based energy advisory and brokerage firm. (Ivanka Trump and the Trump Organization did not respond to a request to be interviewed or to written questions.)

Trump SoHo hotel condominium in New York City. Alec Perkins/Wikimedia Commons

Purchasing green energy can actually be pretty complicated. Much of the electricity produced in New York State comes from fossil fuels, so unless a hotel straps turbines or solar panels to its roof, there’s no way to pick and choose the “green” electrons that power a building. So the key to the Trump SoHo deal was the purchase of “renewable energy certificates”—RECs—a tradable financial instrument designed to represent the environmental benefit of energy produced by clean sources, such solar or wind. In other words, the hotel buys energy in one market, but the actual renewable energy is produced elsewhere.

RECs can be controversial (more on this below). In theory, they allow consumers to support the production of renewables even when the actual power they use comes partly from fossil fuels. By purchasing the RECs, Trump could claim to offset the carbon pollution released by the plants powering his new hotel.

Under the deal, the hotel agreed to purchase 5.5 million kilowatt hours of wind energy annually from Green Mountain Energy, a renewable energy retailer owned by the electricity giant NRG. A press release issued at the time by Green Mountain claimed that the arrangement would offset 4.6 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions each year. According to Green Mountain, this would be the equivalent of 1.3 million houses turning off all their lights for a day. Citing client confidentiality, Green Mountain declined to confirm any details regarding its relationship with the hotel beyond the publicly released information about the 2010 deal.

The deal apparently made financial sense, too, allowing the hotel to lock in low retail electricity rates and avoid market fluctuations. Cannon estimates the upscale building, managed by Trump’s hotel chain, would have enjoyed annual savings in the ballpark of $120,000, compared to regular commercial usage via ConEd, the New York City utility. Cannon says the deal was renewed at least once before he left Choice Energy Services. (Choice did not respond to emails. Cannon now works for a boutique energy brokerage in New York City.)

“Everybody won,” Cannon said, adding that the top brass at the Trump Organization was involved in every step of the decision to invest in renewables. “I was constantly being told, ‘This is a requirement, this is a requirement, this is a requirement,'” he said of Trump’s business people.

Trump SoHo spokeswoman Nicole Murano told Mother Jones that the hotel has since switched energy vendors. She said the hotel still uses renewable energy, but she didn’t provide any further information.

Donald J. Trump and Ivanka Trump at a 2007 news conference announcing the sale of condominium units in the Trump Soho tower Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts/NC via ZUMA

The effectiveness of RECs is often disputed by critics such as Daniel Press, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Press argues that RECs do little to reduce emissions in the real world because they have become too cheap to shift energy markets or incentivize businesses to build new turbines or solar panels. Often, RECs can be purchased for far less than what it actually cost to produce the renewable power that they supposedly represent.

“You’re still buying electrons that are generated from a coal plant or from a natural gas plant,” Press told me. “So you didn’t cause the wind turbines to be built, because no one can build a wind farm for 10 cents on the dollar.”

Even so, Auden Shendler, a sustainability expert and a vice president at Aspen Skiing Company, which prides itself on its climate activism, commends Trump SoHo’s 2010 efforts. Shendler, who is generally not a fan of RECs, sees the deal as a step in the right direction. “While experts dispute the value of RECs, clearly the Trump Organization was trying to do the right thing given the knowledge they had at the time,” said Shendler. “This was the right, well-intentioned thing to do, and you can’t blame them for not being a weirdo expert on these things.”

While “it probably doesn’t move the industry much, RECs are a piece of a movement towards more clean power,” he added. “It does help a little bit. This is a kind of crack of light.”

No matter the environmental impact, top Trump executives were thrilled: “We regard this as a wise business decision on all levels,” said the then-general manager of the hotel, David Chase, in the press release announcing the deal. He added that the move “respects the values of our guests who are as concerned as we are about protecting and caring for the environment.”

The 2010 deal stands in stark contrast to much of Trump’s energy rhetoric. Anti-wind Twitter rants are one weapon in Trump’s anti-climate arsenal.

His cabinet picks are another weapon. They are uniformly pro-fossil fuel and anti-regulation—and some are unabashed climate change deniers. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, picked by Trump to run the Energy Department, claims climate scientists have “manipulated data.” Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt has repeatedly sued the EPA—the agency he’s been selected to lead—to block environmental regulations.

And just days before signing on to lead Trump’s Energy department transition, former Koch Industries lobbyist Tom Pyle penned a memo predicting that the new administration would take a “closer look at the environmental impacts” of the wind industry. “Trump has been concerned about the harms to wildlife from wind turbines such as bird and bat deaths,” wrote Pyle. “Unlike before, wind energy will rightfully face increasing scrutiny from the federal government.”

But just six years ago, Trump was singing a very different tune, as his hotel executives touted his renewable energy purchase as a business coup. As Cannon puts it, the SoHo wind deal gave the company another commodity that is precious in the Trump universe: “bragging rights.”

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Trump Hates Renewable Energy—Unless It’s Powering One of His Hot New Hotels

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Google Says It Will Achieve 100 Percent Renewable Energy Next Year

by EfrenGell0 Posted on December 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Tech giants are jockeying to be the first to hit a 100 percent renewable energy goal. Google, which has invested in solar and wind energy for a decade, intends to get there by 2017.

Google is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy and plans to buy enough wind and solar energy to offset all the electricity used by its 13 data centers and offices in 150 cities worldwide, the company said Tuesday.

Apple seems close to reaching its own 100 percent goal as well. The company said it achieved 93 percent in 2015. An Apple spokeswoman said the company has yet to set a year for when they would likely cross the finish line.

For Google, hitting the 100 percent target means for every unit of electricity it consumes—typically from coal or natural gas power plants—it would buy a unit of wind or solar electricity. The company wouldn’t say how much electricity it will need to have purchased by the end of next year to reach its 100 percent goal, but did say that the amount would exceed the 5.7 terawatt-hours solar and wind energy that it bought in 2015.

“We want to run our business in an environmentally responsible way, and energy consumption is the largest portion,” said Neha Palmer, head of energy strategy and development at Google’s Global Infrastructure Group.

Google is taking a big leap to that 100 percent goal, having achieved just 37 percent in 2014. The company has invested in renewable energy ever since it kicked off the construction of a 1.6-megawatt solar energy system in 2006. Since 2010, it’s signed 2.6 gigawatts worth of solar and wind contracts.

The tech giant isn’t alone in setting the 100 percent target. A global campaign to promote 100 percent renewable energy use in the business world includes Ikea, Facebook, Starbucks and Johnson & Johnson.

Businesses, like homeowners, have historically relied on their local utilities for power. In 2015, about 67 percent of the electricity generated in the United States came from fossil fuels. Businesses would have to build and run their own solar or wind farms if they want to hit their 100 percent more quickly, but that will require hefty investments and expertise they don’t have. As a result, when companies set strong renewable energy goals, they often reach them by buying enough solar and wind electricity or renewable energy credits to offset their use of electricity from coal or natural gas power plants.

Some companies, such as Google and Microsoft, have invested in solar and wind power plants to help increase the amount of renewable energy in the local electric grids. Or, using their clout as large energy customers, they work on convincing their local utilities to invest in renewable energy.

Once extremely expensive, solar and wind have seen their prices falling significantly in the past 10 years. Government tax breaks have also helped to make solar and wind more affordable to both businesses and homeowners.

The price for building large solar farms that have the scale to supply utilities dropped 12 percent in 2015, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, part of the US Department of Energy.

Market analysts expect the prices to continue to fall even with the abundance of cheap coal and natural gas. The pressure on countries around the world to meet their targets from the Paris climate agreement, which went into effect last month, will make renewable energy attractive, said Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The research firm has projected that solar and wind will become the cheapest sources of electricity for “most of the world” after 2030.

“Renewable energy has become incredibly cost effective,” said Dan Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California-Berkeley. “There is no company on the planet that can’t make a 100 percent energy target a viable, cost-effective strategy.”

Yet most businesses have yet to set a renewable energy target. That’s because cost isn’t the only issue. Big companies tend to have an advantage over smaller firms because they have the resources to understand the energy markets and negotiate contracts to buy renewable energy, said Colin Smith, solar analyst for GTM Research.

“You’re talking about very complex deals and arrangements with unique risk profiles that most companies aren’t fully well equipped to understand,” he said.

Google currently pays for wind and solar power from 20 renewable energy projects in the United States and abroad, in places such as Sweden and Chile. However, it doesn’t limit itself to buying solar and wind only in regions where it operates and sees itself as a champion of reducing the emissions produced by the electric industry, which is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

“Wind and solar developers couldn’t get financing without us guaranteeing to pay for the power in the long term,” said Palmer.

Setting the 100 percent renewable energy goal is not the only way to reduce a company’s carbon footprint, said Dan Reicher, executive director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University.

Businesses should first look at cutting down on their energy use and becoming more energy efficient, said Reicher. That will then reduce the amount of renewable energy they need to procure.

“Energy efficiency tends not to sound as sexy, just as putting solar panels on your roof is more interesting than putting an efficient furnace in your basement,” he said. “But from an economic and environmental perspective, you want to start with energy efficiency.”

Reicher also noted that electricity isn’t always the biggest source of energy for a business. FedEx, for example, uses far more energy in transportation, he said.

“Often a big chunk of a company’s business goes beyond electricity,” said Reicher. “What are they doing on the industrial side, on the transportation side, for heating and cooling?”

The election of Donald Trump as president has worried renewable energy supporters about the progress made to make solar and wind competitive against coal and natural gas.

With the new administration under Donald Trump, renewable energy supporters worry that the government will stop supporting renewable energy. Trump has vowed to revive the coal industry, which has seen half a dozen bankruptcies in recent years as it struggles to compete with the cheaper natural gas. But whether the new administration will create anti-renewable energy policies remains to be seen, Reicher said.

Google doesn’t anticipate changes to its renewable energy initiatives in the near future.

“The results of any one election won’t change our plans,” said Palmer.

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Google Says It Will Achieve 100 Percent Renewable Energy Next Year

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16 Ways to Make Your Bathroom More Eco-Friendly

by ConcepcMacarthu Posted on December 3, 2016

Making your bathroom more water- and energy-efficient might not seem sexy, but it can make a big difference in your home’s utilitybills and environmental impact. These are somebig and small ways to make your bathroom more eco-friendly.

When we’re talking about making any room more eco-friendly, there are really two things going on:

  1. The things in the room.
  2. Your habits in the room.

The list below looks atboth ways to improve efficiency in the bathroom and good habits you can adopt to conserve water and energy when you’re bathing or using thetoilet. Some are quick and easy fixes while othersrequire a time or cash investment.Have a look through the list and see which options are the best fit for your home and budget!

16 Ways to Make Your Bathroom More Eco-Friendly

1.Stop theleaks. Running toilets and leaky faucets are more than just an annoyance. In fact, when you add up all of the little water wasters like these across the U.S., it adds up to over 1 trillion gallons of water per year. If you have a leak or suspect one, get a plumber in as soon as you can to repair it or take a stab at repairing it yourself.

Related: 20 Ways to Conserve Water in Your Home

2. Go low flow. This is an affordable way to make your bathroom more eco-friendly that almost anyone can do. Installing a low flow faucet on the bathroom sink or your showerhead is incredibly easy. Really, it is. I’ve done it, and if I can do it,I’m betting that you can, too.

3. Go dual flush.If you’ve got the budget,this is a big water saver. Dual flush toilets use around half the water to flush liquid waste compared to standard toilets. If getting a new toilet is not in your price range, you can buy kits like this one to convert a regular toilet to dual flush.

4. Go old school. If you want a really low-tech solution to reduce the water your toilet uses, put a small plastic bottlefull of water into the tank, so it won’t fill withas much water. Back in the 90s, some people put bricks into their tanks to displace some of the water. Do not do this! A brick erodes over time and will mess up your toilet.

5.Skip abath.Unless you take very long showers (16 minutes or more), a bath uses far more water to get you clean than a shower.Take showers instead of baths to rack up the water savings! This will also save energy, since you bathe in hot water. Reducing hot water usage is a double whammy, saving you water and energy.

6. Skip a shower.Showers use less water than baths, but afive minute shower still uses about 12.5 gallons of water. Sure, if youwent for a run or worked in the garden, you probably need a shower. But if you just hung out watching TV or even worked in an office all day, do you really need a daily shower? Even skipping one shower a week makes a difference!

7. Get an efficient water heater. Whether you’re taking showers or baths,you’re taxing your home’s hot water heater. Heating water accounts forabout 20 percent of your home’s energy costs, so getting a better heateris a great way to make your bathroom (and kitchen and laundry room) more eco-friendly. Consumer Reports has a great guide to the best water heaters. If you can swing it, it looks like a tankless is the best bet from an energy-conservation perspective. Tank water heaters store hot water, meaning they’re constantly running to keep the water hot. A tankless heater only turns on when you turn on the hot water tap.

8. Turn down the water heater. It only takes a couple of hours to reduce the temperature on your water heater, and this fix is free! You don’t need it at 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Turn it down to 120 to save money and energy in the bathroom. The video above shows you how to adjust the temperature on your home’s water heater.

9. Try the shower bucket. Whether you have a tank or tankless water heater, it takes a few minutes for your shower to get hot. Rather than let this water go down the drain, you can collect it in a bucket and use it to water house plants. You can also use the shower bucket when you’re dripping faucets during a winter freeze. Drip the tub faucet instead of a sink, and stick that bucket underneath.

10. Ditch the PVC shower curtain liner. Vinyl shower curtain liners are no good for the planet or for your home’sair quality. PVC liners offgas harmful volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are bad news for indoor air quality and your health. Unfortunately, PVC shower curtains are not recyclable. The best thing that you can do is toss the old one and replace it with a non-PVC alternative. Companies like Ty even make non-toxic shower curtain liners that you can recycle.

12. Turn off the tap. When you’re brushing your teeth or washing your hands, you don’t need water running while you scrub. A sink faucet uses 2.5 gallons of water per minute. Turn it off until you really need that water to rinse.

13. Stop with the anti-bacterial soap. Anti-bacterial soap is not necessary, and when it rinses down the drain it is an environmental nightmare. It’s no more effective than regular ol’ soap, and there’s even evidence that it weakens heart and muscle function. No, thank you!

Related: 6 Reasons to Stop Using Antibacterial Soap

14. Choose LEDs. Just like anywhere else in the house, efficient light bulbs add up to big energy savings over time. LED bulbs are a bit of an investment up front, but they last up to50 times longer than incandescents. And unlike CFL bulbs, they don’t contain mercury.

15. Get recycled toilet paper. Do we really need to cut down new trees to wipe our bottoms? No, we don’t. While you’re at it, try to use less toilet paper in general.It still takes energy and water to create a roll of recycled TP.

16. Chooseorganic towels. Next time you have to replace your bath towels, choose organic cotton. Conventional cotton is one of the most water-intensive and polluting crops on the planet. Don’t go out and replace your perfectly good old towels with organic ones, though. The lowest-impact choice you can make is to buy nothing.But when your old towels are starting to fall apart, go organic.

Do you have any tips or tricks you use to save water or energy in the bathroom? Tell us in the comments!

Related:
20 Ways to Conserve Water in Your Home
6 Reasons to Stop Using Antibacterial Soap
14 Tips for Using Less Heat this Season

Image Credits: All images via Thinkstock.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Excerpt from: 

16 Ways to Make Your Bathroom More Eco-Friendly

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Appalachia, who? The red heart of America is smoldering.

by MiltonSargood Posted on December 1, 2016

Amnesty International investigators interviewed laborers as young as 8 working on plantations that sell to Wilmar, the largest palm-oil trader. Palm oil goes into bread, cereal, chocolate, soaps — it’s in about half of everything on supermarket shelves.

Wilmar previously committed to buying palm oil only from companies that don’t burn down forest or exploit workers. Child labor is illegal in Indonesia.

When Wilmar heard about the abuses, it opened an internal investigation and set up a monitoring process.

It’s disappointing that Wilmar’s commitments haven’t put an end to labor abuses, but it’s not surprising. It’s nearly impossible to eliminate worker exploitation without addressing structural causes: mass poverty, disenfranchisement, and lack of safety nets.

Investigators talked to one boy who dropped out of school to work on a plantation at the age of 12 when his father became too ill to work. Without some kind of welfare program, that boy’s family would probably be worse off if he’d been barred from working.

The boy had wanted to become a teacher. For countries like Indonesia to get out of poverty and stop climate-catastrophic deforestation, they need to help kids like this actually become teachers. That will require actors like Wilmar, Amnesty, and the government to work together to give laborers a living wage, and take care of them when they get sick.

Credit: 

Appalachia, who? The red heart of America is smoldering.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Anker, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, Jason, LAI, LG, ONA, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Appalachia, who? The red heart of America is smoldering.

This senator has given 150 pleas for climate action. Now, he has a few words for Trump.

by OdessaMarr66 Posted on November 29, 2016

Amnesty International investigators interviewed laborers as young as 8 working on plantations that sell to Wilmar, the largest palm-oil trader. Palm oil goes into bread, cereal, chocolate, soaps — it’s in about half of everything on supermarket shelves.

Wilmar previously committed to buying palm oil only from companies that don’t burn down forest or exploit workers. Child labor is illegal in Indonesia.

When Wilmar heard about the abuses, it opened an internal investigation and set up a monitoring process.

It’s disappointing that Wilmar’s commitments haven’t put an end to labor abuses, but it’s not surprising. It’s nearly impossible to eliminate worker exploitation without addressing structural causes: mass poverty, disenfranchisement, and lack of safety nets.

Investigators talked to one boy who dropped out of school to work on a plantation at the age of 12 when his father became too ill to work. Without some kind of welfare program, that boy’s family would probably be worse off if he’d been barred from working.

The boy had wanted to become a teacher. For countries like Indonesia to get out of poverty and stop climate-catastrophic deforestation, they need to help kids like this actually become teachers. That will require actors like Wilmar, Amnesty, and the government to work together to give laborers a living wage, and take care of them when they get sick.

More:  

This senator has given 150 pleas for climate action. Now, he has a few words for Trump.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Anker, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, Jason, LAI, LG, ONA, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This senator has given 150 pleas for climate action. Now, he has a few words for Trump.