Highlights

My inspiration to write is fairly low right now so just a quick update on things and a few highlights...

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This kills me:

it turns out, the greenest thing about paper bags is the way people perceive them. Because they seem more natural, people think they're better for the environment. Well, it's a damn shame, but they're wrong.

Whole Foods' moving over to 100% recycled paper is actually going to be worse for the environment.

Creating recycled paper, it turns out, is a much more energy-intensive process than creating plastic bags. That's why grocery stores prefer you take the plastic. Plastic is also much easier to ship, as it takes up way less space in packing, and they weigh far less per item of shopping you take home with you. And while we might worry that all that plastic is coming from foreign oil, the amazing thing is that even with all the billions of plastic bags we use every year, they constitute about 0.03% of our oil use in the U.S.. Obviously not the most pressing problem we've got.

Frustrating because of the perception dissonance but a good thing to know regardless.

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Speaking of getting things in perspective, watch this space:

www.eyesofatexan.com

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Speaking of Josh projects, check out my updated lens:

www.squidoo.com/joshisjosh

And my website under construction:

joshcanhelp.com

Big things! and also reasons why I have been able to blog as much.

Also check out the Young Forest Martial Arts Academy website... my first web site!

www.yfmaa.com

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Back to the grin, more soon for sure!

Entoo da feu-chah

I might just like this because of it's acronym, LAPCAT. This pic is, of course, computer generated:


It's basically a hypersonic beer can (mach 5 speed and no windows).

From Inhabitat (of course):

Not too far in the future you may be able to travel that entire distance in less than 4 hours - emissions free - thanks to an amazing hypersonic hydrogen jet project called LAPCAT. LAPCAT standsfor Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologie, and is funded by the European Space Agency. This type of hypersonic jet would put the Concorde to shame with it’s speed, and the best part is that it would not be powered by the typical fossil fuels, but instead by a much greener hydrogen alternative.

That about sums it up. There is, of course, the usual criticism about where the hydrogen comes from but those are so BORING.

The concept is basically a turbine jet engine that benefits from ram-compression, which is essentially air being smashed into the intake. If you're going really, really damn fast, you don't really have to worry about injecting oxygen, you simply use the rushing air in front of you.

From the LAPCAT site:

The Space Shuttle punches through the atmosphere as quickly as possible on its way into orbit, but the LAPCAT project is focusing on an aircraft that would remain well within the Earth's atmosphere throughout its flight. Whereas the Shuttle uses the thrust of its engines to fight the force of gravity, a hypersonic vehicle would use the aerodynamic lifting force generated on its wings and fuselage. This vision of sustained hypersonic flight requires air-breathing engines, which are highly efficient because they scoop oxygen from the atmosphere rather than from an onboard tank.

My take? It's completely conceptual right now which is uselss for the time being but I really like this concept... much more than the some of the car concepts I've seen. This overcomes two big hurdles: air travel time and the green factor of the jets themselves (leaving the generation part to be answered]).

My personal take? From the comments section (me):

I hate flying and I hate looking out the window at the wing/engine/ground. Doing everything you can to shorten my trip AND helping me avoid eye contact with what is around me is the biggest favor that the airline industry could do for me. Yay for supersonic beer cans!

What do you think?

My first foray into entrepreneurship!

Here's the first site:
http://www.squidoo.com/joshisjosh

www.joshcanhelp.com and Craigslist ad push coming soon!

If you know anyone in the San Diego area that needs tech support on just about anything you can plug in, let me know!

Recycling day

Should have taken a picture of the car full of crap... it was great, we looked homeless, quite humbling.




No, the one picture of all the Heineken bottles is NOT all from us.

We go about once every 2 - 3 months after collecting everything in our storage unit. It really begs the question, is it all worth it? I decided to figure it out.

Loss

• 85 minutes
  
• 0.58 gallons of gasoline (19 miles at about 33MPG)
  
• $1.89 (058 gallons at $3.29/gallon)

Gain

• $5.32 from glass and plastic (they don't pay for tin... or non-CRV glass)
  
• $1.50 from mixed paper
  
• John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” (Anna recommends)
  
• Richard Preston's "The Hot Zone" (Josh recommends)
  
• Will Self's "The Book of Dave

I'll say the loss of 85 minutes on a sunny day with a beautiful girl is definitely negligible. Total monetary gain was $4.93 ($1.74/hr wage for each of us, yikes). The three books were found in the mixed paper pile at the recycle place. No, I/we were not digging through garbage, they were right on top (that's what they all say). It was interesting, actually, there were hundreds of books in this pile. I started rifling through them and it was a really diverse collection... computer books, business books, fiction, textbooks. I would have spent a few hours looking through them (just the ones on top, of course) but then it occurred to me that the place paid someone for the books so I would actually be stealing from them. We took a couple but since the place weighs your car before and after you dump the stuff, we ended up paying for them. Random!

So, really, was it worth it? Personally it is but what about environmentally (which is the point of the whole thing)? Let's find out...

The only environmental cost imposed on the world would be the gasoline used to transport the materials; everything else is too small to be counted.

0.58 gallons of gasoline = 2.42 kg of carbon = 5.34 lbs of carbon(Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

2.42 kg carbon = 201 moles of carbon (basically, a certain number of actual atoms of carbon [12,133,529,620,000,000,000,000,000]) = 201 moles of CO2 and CO combined

* It's hard to get a number/percent of how much of the exhaust is CO. I'm going to go with 10% and feel good about it.

201 moles of CO2 and CO combined = ~181 moles CO2 = 7.97 kg CO2 = 17.6 lbs CO2

Also...

0.58 gallons of gasoline = 124,884 BTUs (onlineconversion.com)

I'll see if I can't find some good numbers on how much plastic + paper + glass manufacturing pollutes per bottle. Or, even better, how many bottles, etc. my pollution accounts for... stay tuned.

In a bizarre twist of destiny and fate...

.... I ended up driving this (not this one exactly but same car/color):


...a brand new V8 6-speed Aston Martin Vantage last night. Hands-down, one of the sexiest cars I've ever been around and certainly the fastest/nicest care I've ever driven. One of the lest green too but it was only a couple miles ;)

The inside was glorious (again, this is not the exact one I drove):


If you're reading this, thanks Jose. I'll be your D.D. anytime.

Green Vocab WotD #003: REEV

A quick one

REEV = Range Extended Electric Vehicle.

From ecogeek.org:

The idea of a REEV is that an electric motor drives the car 100% of the time. REEVs plug in to your house and charge overnight or while you're at work (4-8 hours depending on batteries), and then the REEV drives purely on the more-efficient (though still not carbon-neutral) grid power for a set number of miles (generally betweem 20 and 60.)

After those 20 - 60 miles of driving, a small onboard generator kicks on to recharge the batteries and "extend the range" of the electric vehicle. This onboard generator can be anything that produces power: gasoline engine, diesel engine, ethanol engine, or even a hydrogen fuel cell. The vehicle remains as efficient as a hybrid even after the grid power is all used up because they still use regenerative breaking.

The engine (meaning that which does some kind of power production: gasoline/diesel combustion, ethanol combustion, fuel cell, etc) does not power the wheels, it charges the batteries. That means that forward motion is only being caused by an electric motor so they are, in all sense, electric vehicles (or EVs).

I think this is an interesting concept but I wonder: is this just another technology to "get us through the now" (such as the Prius - good for now but not forever) or is this our answer for the next century+? Something to think about...