The Brighter Planet Blog

Our site is full of tips and suggestions for little things you can do to cut your carbon footprint. This isn’t exactly a new feature (people have been using brighterplanet.com to keep track of their conservation efforts since last fall), but we’ve just added a lot of improvements we thought you’d be interested in. I’ll show you how to use a few of them a bit further down.

Why are conservation recommendations helpful? Our system lets you find tips that fit with your lifestyle, add them to a to-do list, and then check them off as you work them into your life. We here on the Brighter Planet staff do our conservation this way because we know we can’t do everything at once. Here’s a knowledgebase entry that shows you how to use the system.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, probably a lot, but I’m thinking about one thing specifically. And I usually don’t drop names like this, but we’re really excited about this one! Late last year, we decided to hop on the bandwagon with these fine companies to become national sponsors for the Wild & Scenic Environmental Film Festival. The fest is in its 6th year and growing, it’s the largest environmental film fest and has been called “the next Sundance” for its increasing popularity and quality of films – the films cover all the bases: community, activism, adventure, agriculture, and pure natural beauty. To add to the variety, there are feature-length films, documentaries, animation and everything in between.

In January, a few of us took a road tip across the country to attend the 3-day festival in its hometown, Nevada City, California – a quaint mountain town with a rich gold-mining history and old buildings to prove it. Most of the films were hosted right downtown at the Miner’s Foundry, a converted metal factory-turned-community meeting house and cultural center that documents what was once the most important mining operation in all of California. The building itself was a spectacle to see, but the films, film-makers and all the great people we ran into along the way made for a very inspiring weekend.

Now, I have to take a moment to reflect on (and promote!) my favorite film that I saw that weekend. Inspired by the work of Michael Pollan, who we saw in Vermont just a few weeks ago and Robbie wrote about earlier, and selected by the festival Jury as one of the best films, I would highly recommend that everyone go out of their way to see the film King Corn. It’s about these two young guys who realize that so much of what we eat is either made out of, or made possible by — you guessed it — CORN.

They hop in their pick-up in Boston and head for Iowa where their mission is to grow just one acre of corn, learn everything they can about it and follow it until it eventually becomes food (or, as Pollan says, a food-like substance). The film is simultaneously hilarious, enlightening, saddening, and inspiring … and suitable for all ages, so definitely check it out! Here are the guys in their truck, and I bet you can guess what’s behind them.

If you’re wondering whether the Fest is coming near you, check the Tour Calendar to find the venue closest to you. The fest is making 80+ stops this year in cities and towns across the US, and for all you Vermonters reading this, we’re hoping to bring Wild & Scenic to Burlington in the fall, so stay tuned!

–Emily

In case you missed it before, Jon Isham, a prominent thought leader on climate change, is not only a founder, but an active member of our advisory board. Here, he sits down with Robbie to talk about achieving new leaders and allies in the climate change movement.

Previously:

Chatting with Jon Isham

There are few things as frustrating as a Type A recycler, this I know.

Call me picky, but I find that nothing is worse than digging through bins to separate items. I’ve gone so far as to rip out the cabinets to install separate bins for redeemable items such as bottles and cans, as well as recyclable plastic and tin. And of course, paper has a bin of its very own. I told you I was picky.

My children are well trained. They know which items are worth five cents, and which are simply worth making into a new one – it’s easy to learn when you live it every day. Visitors are a little more challenging.

Each winter, we welcome our annual steady stream of houseguests. (Side note: if you’re having trouble making friends, try moving to a ski town. Your popularity will soar.) However, nothing causes greater confusion for them than our endless options for refuse: in my house, the concept of throwing something away is taken to the extreme.

Despite my best explanations, guests don’t always understand our system. After a weekend with two winter, we had two families visiting, which resulted in some serious Dumpster-diving with my kids and a bit of explanation about our recycling system to our new guests.

It didn’t quite take: when I returned home one afternoon, I found an array of used cans, bottles and other items lined up on the counter for me to organize. Our system might not have been understood, but it was obvious that they got the message that we take recycling seriously. And what more can you ask for?

– Ashley

The first step to fighting climate change is to reduce your personal emissions, and the first step to reducing your emissions is to figure out where they come from. Here in the US, 80% of our emissions come from dirty energy – energy produced by burning fossil fuels. The three main fossil fuels — coal, natural gas, and petroleum — provide 85% of the total energy we use.

So where does all that dirty energy go? We use a little bit directly to heat our homes and fuel our cars, but most of it is used behind the scenes to produce the goods and services we enjoy. I whipped up a few illustrations that help show fossil fuel usage for the different sectors of our economy. The house represents the residential sector, or home energy use. The office building represents the commercial sector, or energy used by shops, offices, schools, and government buildings. The factory represents the industrial sector, or energy used by manufacturing, farms, and construction equipment. The car represents the transportation sector, or energy used by cars, trucks, boats, and airplanes. The power plant represents energy used to generate electricity.

Let’s start with petroleum, the fossil fuel you’re probably most familiar with in the forms of gasoline, diesel, and home heating oil. Each barrel represents enough petroleum to fuel a million cars for 9 years.

The transportation sector uses 70% of our petroleum, and another 24% is used by the industrial sector. That leaves just 6% for heating homes and commercial buildings, and generating electricity.

Next is natural gas. Each flame represents enough natural gas to heat a million homes for 20 years.

The residential and commercial sectors use about a third of our natural gas for heating and cooking. Another third is used by the industrial sector. The transportation sector uses a small amount of natural gas for alternative fuel buses, and the rest is used to generate electricity.

Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel, and the one that you’re least likely to have any direct contact with. Each cart represents enough coal to fill 450,000 freight train cars.

The residential and commercial sectors do use a little coal for heating, but they represent less than half a percent of our total coal consumption. Almost all of our coal is used by electric power plants, with a little left over for industrial manufacturing.

Let’s take a closer look at electricity. It’s not dirty in and of itself, but as you saw in the previous illustrations a third of our fossil fuels and most of our coal are used to generate electricity. The end result is that 70% of our electricity is effectively dirty. To make matters worse, generating electricity is an inefficient process that captures less than half the energy in the fuels that are burned. And about 9% of all electricity generated is lost during transmission through power lines.

Electricity is so ubiquitous in our everyday lives that we rarely notice it. But more than two thirds of the average home’s energy use is electricity. In this illustration, each bolt represents enough electricity to power a million refrigerators for 700 years.

The residential and commercial sector each use a bit more than a third of our electricity, and the industrial sector uses almost all the rest. The transportation sector does use a little electricity, but it’s insignificant compared to the other sectors.

Hopefully knowing more about where dirty energy goes will help you find ways to minimize your use of it. Remember that most dirty energy stays behind the scenes – it heats your office in winter, transports the food you buy, and generates the electricity to power streetlights, cell phone towers, your computer, and a million other things. Whenever you use less dirty energy, or support clean renewable energy, you help reduce emissions and fight climate change.

For more tips on how to reduce your energy usage, check out our conservation tips.

– Ian