Facebook on Coal?!
To all of you Facebook users out there, you might be excited to know that the second most visited site in the U.S. just announced that it is opening up their first data center in Oregon! Sounds cool right? Well, what if I told you that they are planning on to power that data center with coal?
Yes my friends…coal.
Treehugger.com seems to be the first one to have leaked this one on the Internet, but the news is actually spreading like…uhh…well, like wild fire across the blogosphere. It’s only natural that we bring the news here too. Jonathan Heiliger, VP of Technical Operations for Facebook, announced the news in late January right on Facebook that they were designing a facility that would be “highly efficient and cost-effective for our operations today and in the future.”
Well, we didn’t find out until just recently that those “cost-effective” operations means powering this new exciting step for them partly with coal. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that coal is NOT the most “highly efficient” choice I would have chosen. Perhaps, wind energy? Or what about solar panels?
It was interesting to see that “Cause groups” were popping up right within Facebook’s social network borders, calling for Zuckerberg (Facebook creator) and other Facebook higher ups to rethink the decision and go for clean energy instead. It kind of puts it’s users in a rut, especially if they are concerned that the network that they use to stay in contact with people across the world supports just the type of non-renewable energy economy that they would like to see the U.S. get out of.
Come on Facebook execs, rethink this.
I’m Back!
It’s so difficult to look at everything that has happened over the past month and evaluate what is important enough to put into the first blog post of the new school year. In good news (which there’s a lot) we’ve got Residence Halls without paper towels (yay!), “Food, Inc.” had people talking about what they were eating at the dinner table, and the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County will be offering a seminar series this fall to better our home energy efficiency.
In bad news, Ithaca College wasn’t listed among the Top 10 Green Colleges by Treehugger or the Princeton Review’s Top 15 Green Rating honor roll. In national news, you’ve probably heard about the chainsaw that was taken to “ACES” (American Clean Energy and Security Act). I think Jon Stewart said it best over the summer. And the “scariest polluter in America” is holding a “pro” America rally on Labor day to squash the clean energy bill. Some of your favorite guest stars include Sean Hannity, and Ted Nugent. If you’re wondering why this is so upsetting check out what Ron Perks from Switchboard had to say about it.
Besides increasing to a minimum of three posts a week, the blog is changing it’s coverage topics overall. Along with the great local coverage you’ve seen on the blog, I’ll also be expanding to more national news. I realized that with the tell-tale heart of the Copenhagen Climate Conference beating louder and louder, there’s a need for our campus and community to dig into these issues.
Welcome back Ithaca College! There’s a huge abundance of issues going on in our community. I’ll do my best to stay on top of everything, but if you hear a whisper or a bullhorn that you’d like to pass along, drop me a comment or an e-mail!
Closing words provided by: Congressman Caveman
The energy change train is a comin’, it’s a comin’!
Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill passed in the House Energy and Commerce Committee!!! This is a landmark bill which is well on its way to becoming one of the biggest shifts in energy and environmental politics since the Clean Air Act. The vote passed 33-25 last Thursday.
The bill sets up a cap-and-trade program on carbon emission and other Earth-warming gases with intentions of decreasing America’s carbon output by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. It also sets efficiency standards on buildings and pushes for an increase in renewable energy.
The NYT rightly calls the bill “the most ambitious energy and global warming legislation ever debated in Congress.”
Alumna Kate Sheppard, who reports on politics for Grist.org, has the full story here. There are several ways in which representatives are trying to weaken or kill the bill, including Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who attempted to remove the cap-and-trade portion, and increase production of oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power, Sheppard reports. Crazy, right?
The passing of this bill came just a week after Obama increased Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards on cars. By 2016, fuel efficiency must be increased to 39 mpg, which is up from 27.5 mpg. As Nancy Pelosi said, “It’s been a very good week for new energy policy.”
The Waxman-Markey bill has a way to go, though. It now has to face off against clueless representatives, misled by climate-change skeptics and the oil/coal lobbyists. Also, as Joe Romm from Climate Progress points out, most represenatives don’t deal with global warming and complex bills like cap-and-trade. Not to mention, global warming is abstract and its effects are hard to pinpoint.
Get on the Bus, Gus: Next SGA Pres. Challenges College
Future SGA President Jeff Goodwin spoke in Emerson Suites April 16 about campus shuttle system.
It’s about time IC has seriously looked at a shuttle system, but I never thought it would be this well done. Jeff Goodwin, a friend of mine and future SGA president for ‘09-’10, has spent his semester coming up with a comprehensive, “holistic” plan to bring a closed-circuit shuttle system to South Hill.
The shuttle system would run all day with more buses running during the early morning to compensate for the peak hours, and few buses would run during the day as students slowly left campus. The loop would start in the Circle Apartments, navigate down through campus then down Coddington Road and Hudson to loop back up 96B to the main entrance of campus and back to Circles to complete the loop. Goodwin said there are about as many students living off-campus on South Hill as there are living in the Circles.
The whole system would reach about 1,000 students, and it would be a 7 1/2 minute ride time. Each planned pickup/drop-off point is within a two to five minute walk of most students. Goodwin says the buses, which will likely be similar to the nostalgic yellow school bus, can carry 648 passengers per hour.
I could go on forever about the numbers. You can see there is some fantastic research in this system. You can view the full Keynote (or PowerPoint, for you Mac illiterate) below.
But to flash one last amazing fact, Goodwin says this system, which would hire two full time staff, six part-time student staff, three buses (at $55,000 each) would cost nothing for the college based on savings alone. The upfront costs, according to Goodwin, is around $210,000 ($252,000 per year) while the savings would be around $275,411.
“Seriously? What are we saving?” you might ask.
“What do we cut to make this happen?” Goodwin said. “And, the real beauty of this is, we don’t have to.”
Eliminating the future spaces in the A&E lot, maintenance fees on parking lots (such as repaving, plowing, painting lines etc.), and end the $22,000 lease of Y lot across from main entrance all contribute to the potential savings of having a shuttle system.
It’s obvious, but the environmental impact of a shuttle system on the college’s carbon footprint would reduce our carbon from transportation by more than half. Goodwin said we’ve signed the documents, such as the ACUPCC, and it’s “time to put our money where our mouth is.”
Check out Jeff’s full PowerPoint Presentation here!
It was a fantastic presentation, packed with information that impressed President Tom Rochon, who said, “All I can say is we’ll take a very close look at this” and gave Goodwin a thumbs-up after the presentation. Goodwin, just elected as SGA president, plans to make this a priority during his tenure, especially after he saw so much student support.
“This is something that I’ve been wanting since I got here.” Goodwin said. “I’m realistic in that I understand that I won’t be here if this ever happens, but if I can lay the foundation down, I’ll be satisfied”
The event happened at Academic Symposium today; Goodwin presented “Establishing a Campus Shuttle System at Ithaca College.” About 80 to 85 students, faculty and many administrators were in attendance, including President Tom Rochon, VP of Student Affairs/Campus Life Brian McAree, Associate Vice President Rory Rothman and Shelley Semmler, VP of institutional advancement.
Now we’re cookin’ with…sun
Steve Reeves (center) shows the power of the sun to Krista Fieselmann ‘10 (right) and Kim LaReau ‘10 (left)
For a few hours on Tuesday afternoon, Shawn Reeves made nachos, hot water for tea and was thinking of heating up some couscous; all with the power of sun. In only an hour, even on the partly cloudy day, his soda can of water increased from 60 to 80 degrees Celsius, and was still warming. In his spare time, he built a solar cooker out of aluminum foil, glue and a cardboard box.
Reeves is a part of a non-profit charity, or 501(c)3, which has just moved to Ithaca recently, called EnergyTeachers.org. Reeves, a high school physics teacher from Newton, Mass., is doing some outreach and advocacy on campus for his organization. In 2004, when the energy crisis was making headlines, he founded Energy Teachers as a way to share lesson plans and develop curriculum focused on energy. Now he travels all over giving lectures and helping teachers develop classes on energy. For instance, he told me, he just talked with one science teacher who had a bike that could generate electricity, but he didn’t now how to use it in the classroom. Energy Teachers helped develop a lesson on the difference in power to illuminate a incandescent light bulb verse a compact florescent.
On the stone wall on the back patio of the Center for Natural Sciences by the greenhouse (irony), Reeves set up a few solar cookers and some science equipment: a light meter, and a heat and light reader which he can plug into his computer and graph the days data. While I stood talking and taking pictures, students and professors stopped by to talk and learn about the power of the sun.
Reeves boasted to students about the time he cooked a pot of steamed yams in the middle of January. He said it doesn’t matter how cold it is with a solar cooker, only how cloudy it is. He uses a sealed jar to insulate his food, and protect it from the cold wind. His ’solar oven’ looks like a satellite dish, and concentrates the suns rays onto his food from multiple points.
For him, solar cooking is a relaxing pastime. He’s not trying to tell everyone should use solar cooking, or even to replace solar cooking as a means to reduce one’s carbon footprint. In fact the amount of energy a typical house hold uses to cook food is a small fraction compared to space heating, cooling and water heating. To him, solar cooking is just a cool pastime, and he hopes a few more people will take an interest.
Cornell Alum & Exxon Mobil VP supports climate skeptic politician
Caption: Sherri Stuewer gives $592,216 check to Cornell President David Skorton.
At 4:30 p.m. tomorrow in B-17 Upson Hall Sherri Stuewer, a VP with Exxon Mobil, will speak at a program titled, “Oil and Natural Gas - Sustainable in a World with CO2 Constraints?”
Over the course of last year, Sherri Stuewer donated $3,750 to Texas Republican and global climate change skeptic, Joe Barton for his re-election. According to NewsMeat, she donated $3,350. In 2007-08, Joe Barton received a total of $19,149 from Exxon Mobil.
Also, in May, she delivered a nearly $600,000 check to Cornell from the ExxonMobil Foundation.
In an interview with EurActiv.com, Stuewer wiggled out of a question of man-made climate change by saying that we should look to solve the problems and not question how the carbon ended up in the atmosphere.
Excerpt: Interviewer: Can you actually separate these two questions? If you want to come up with solutions, you have to understand what the origin is. And if you think global warming is due to the sun’s influence as some scientists believe, you will have to go for a different solution than those who believe it is caused by human intervention and the burning of fossil fuels….
Stuewer: “That does not mean that we believe everything we need to know about the contributions from anthropogenic emissions to climate change is known and what all the other contributions are.
But we do believe that the risk that rising greenhouse gas emissions are affecting the climate justifies action now. As you approach the policy debate, you cannot approach it without looking at what is cost-effective to do in light of that.
Where we are right now in the debate is looking at what are the policy options and how cost-effectively we can address the issue of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But anything that you do that effectively puts a cost on carbon out in the economy has an impact on economic development. So we cannot approach this policy debate in an isolated manner.”
Her answer reminds me of Nick Naylor, from the movie, “Thank You For Smoking.” Watch how this greasy cigarette lobbyist convinces an audience that tobacco is a friend of a lung-cancer victim.
So, does that mean that Stuewer is a scum-of-the-earth, slimy Exxon VP with thousands of dollars wrapped around a dangling carrot for politicians and institutions of higher ed?
We’ll have to attend the meeting to see what she has to say about these financial donations, what she believes is the responsibility of Exxon Mobil in creating the global climate crisis, and what exactly Exxon is doing to eliminate carbon, reduce oil production and create a green energy economy. This should make for an exciting Wednesday afternoon.
Actually, Ithaca is George. George Jetson!
The frigid walk back to Prospect St. from the bars in The Commons is a memorably miserable experience. I have a few friends who live in this famous part of town, and I don’t envy their journey staggering in high heels or baggy jeans. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some kind of system to take you directly home? Something cheap, quick and comfortable. Not a bus, which will take you all over the damn city, or a pricey cab with crammed seating for the six of you in the back seat.
We need a podcar!
You know! Think “the Jetsons.” An elevated light-rail system. A heated gondola on stilts. A cab without the cabbie. You know? No more carbon-polluting cars and buses. No more congestion and stop lights. An automated, fast, direct, cheap and easy podcar system, which shuttles the drunkies from Moonies to Manos. If only …
Turns out there are plans for such a system right here in Ithaca, and there’s a vigorous debate among the sustainable movers and shakers at Ithaca about whether such a system is worth our tax dollars. The system is being developed by an ad hoc group call “Connect Ithaca” and was discussed last September during the second annual Podcar City Sustainable Transportation Conference. Since then, the discussion over the cost and practicality is getting lively on the sustainability listserv.
Marian Brown hasn’t committed to a side, but does think the George Jetson future of the podcar is “interesting and worthy of further study.”
“I have shared with the Connect Ithaca folks personally that while I can see PRT [or personal rapid transit] in some areas in the City, notably downtown or along Route 13, I have REAL trouble envisioning elevated tracks and suspended passenger cars flying past the windows of homes along the 2-lane section of 96B inside the city limits,” Marian wrote me in an e-mail. Earlier she had posted an article from Treehugger.com about podcars in Abu Dhabi.
Professor Michael Smith, “a more devoted advocate of non-automobile transportation alternative,” thinks the idea is “just pie-in-the-sky silly when examined carefully.”
“I am increasingly alarmed by how quickly the Ithaca community seems to have embraced it as a viable option,” he wrote via e-mail. He’d rather invest in cleaner energies and transportation that we already use, like buses and trains. He also believes the true costs and designs haven’t come forward yet, and believes the implementation will be more difficult than anticipated. He posted this negative article by someone he calls, “one of the dean’s of transportation planning in the world.”
Now, I’m a “Go-Big-or-Go-Home” kind of person, but with estimates at $3 million to $20 million per mile, I just don’t see this making any sense. For that relatively short walk from The Commons to Prospect, I might have to pay $2 to $3 for a podcar. I’m totally speculating of course, but it’s got to be way more expensive than T-CAT. The New York Times says it’ll cost between 50 cents and a $1.50 per trip, but what do they know? So, listen, I say let’s drop the expensive, futuristic podcar design. Instead, we should design yak tracks for high heels, and make “Fargo hats” fashionable again, so that trek to Prospect won’t suck so much.
“Tompkins County’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions Element of the Comprehensive Plan
Live Blogging at the National Teach-in:
Robert McKenna is from Energy Stratigies
11:20 am - Looking at the energy of Tompkins County
11:21 - GHG Legislative Proposals - What the projected out look will be, and proposals from national government proposal. Trying to cap about 80% by 2050. There are about ten different plans on the graph from the 110th Congress.
11:25 - “From a technology standpoint, there’s a lot of work taking place.” They are looking at sequestration putting high carbon fuels underground. Said it’s very expensive and and unproven technology.
11:25 - Geothermal is being used in Gateway building, which out West there are potential to make electricity in West because there are geological warm water.
11:26 - Algea is mention as well as huge wind farms, consisting of 1000s of turbines lined up together.
11:28 - Discusses the carbon market, in Chicago there is a carbon market, and in Europe there is also active trading. So what’s the cost of carbon in the future?
11:30 - We pay a lot for our energy right now, because we use about 50% carbon sources, such as nuclear and hydro power. Wisconsin gets cheap fuel from coal, so they pay less now. But Wisconsin will see a 54% increase in energy costs because of the carbon price/market, while New York will only see a 13% increase.
Obama: Carbon and Energy
11:33 - Obama - “Delay is no longer an option, denial is no longer an accepted response.” Beth is getting excited. So am I.
11:34 - Obama has called for $15 billion each year for private sector to build a new energy future. And a renewable energy standard of 25% by 2025.
11:37 - The energy and climate change team - Obama is a ethanol advocate, which Beth says is a proven non-solution.
11:39 - The Obama energy team:Carol Browner is the “Energy Czar.” Very cool person. I remember seeing her in DC speak with Tom Friedman and Governor of Pennsylvania.
11:41- Cap and Trade is explained: used very well to reduce sulfur which contributes to acid rain. Check out the Center for American Progress’s plan on Cap and Trade
11:43 - States taking action on Cap and Trade: South east isn’t doing anything. 21 states and three provinces have developed carbon markets.
11:45 - Key Issues to be resolved in Cap and Trade. What sectors do you regulate. How do you give away the allowances? Europe made mistake of giving it away, while some want to give away their allowances.
11:46 - Some want free-for-all in offsets, which is pointless if you ask me.
11:49 - The first carbon capture system is in Illinois which should capture 90% and cost about $2 billion. This of course is somewhat scandalous because this is Obama and Blagojevich are from. Many Senators are trying to get Chu (the Secretary of Energy) to bring this tech to their states.
11:54 - Massachusetts vs. EPA (2007) case back in 1999 petitioned the EPA to regulate carbon under the Clean Air Act. US Supreme Court had a decision in 5-4 held that the plaintiffs had standing to sue and that the agency must regulate CO2 emissions if it finds that GHG emissions “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger” public health or welfare.
11:56 - The EPA has not yet made a determination. There are growing state and regional inconsistencies which means there must be a call for federal legislation. The EPA was told to look at the Clean Air Act and are looking at if they must regulate. Bush said no, but Obama says yes!
11:58 - California was one of 18 states wishing to impose stricter tailpipe emissions standards. New proposed standards at federal level would raise passenger car and light trucks mpg to 35. Go Governator!
12:01 - There is a quick dated talk on the Stimulus Package which includes a $40 billion to DOE for clean, efficient, America energy. $2.6 billion to replace older fleet vehicles with fule efficient automobiles. $6 billion to repair fedearla buildings using green tech. $400 million for rural business inititves.
Drop that tray!
SOURCE: flicker/drfishy520
I can’t believe I have to say this, because it comes so obvious to me. Dining trays are useless, inefficient, food-wasting vehicles for one student to carry mounds and mounds of food from the pasta bar to the table. Get rid of them!
Being the educated, sustainable audience that you are, I’m sure you know that the Towers dinning hall has dropped its trays from use. The effort to phase-out the trays began in late October last year. The pilot program lasted about a month and eliminated the trays all together on November 17th.
Why eliminate our precious trays? Let me count the ways
1. Trays waste dish water, which also costs a ton to heat.
2. Trays waste dish soap.
3. Trays encourage dinners to stack their plates with food
4. This extra food is thrown out, i.e. food waste
or, this extra food is eaten, i.e. Fatty McChub Chub
Stephanie Piech, the dining services sustainability intern, is now trying to bring trayless dinning to the Campus Center Dinning Hall. As a way to promote the idea and encourage dinners that they can survive without the tray (mark your calendars) Stephanie is declaring Tuesday, Feb. 10 as Trayless Tuesday! If you’d like to volunteer for the event (you know, get the word out, educate the masses) contact Stephanie (spiech1@ithaca.edu) BEFORE Feb. 9th. But don’t wait until Feb. 10th! Start going trayless today!
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