Tuesday, December 9, 2008

How we left a window open thru three Vermont winters (or why you might need a professional home energy audit)

Getting a home energy audit helps heal the planet, saves money, and makes for a more pleasant home. Everybody wins.

President-elect Obama understands the importance of efficiency, and so part of the economic stimulus package is to insulate all public buildings.

But let me tell you about that window. A few years ago, I decided to make our property as green as possible. First, I wanted to get solar panels. But the solar experts that I talked to said that the place to start is getting an energy audit, because you can save more energy faster and cheaper this way.

So I called in an expert in energy efficiency for a consultation. Bill Calfee, of Peak Energy Solutions, in Dorset, Vermont came by to do the energy audit. We walked through the house. Opening a closet in the guest room, we stood underneath the hole in the ceiling to the attic. There wasn’t a cover over the hole to the attic. “Well, here’s a big thing,” he said. “This is some of that easy-to-fix, low-hanging fruit that I mentioned. The money you’ll save by fixing this will make up for the cost of the audit many times over.”

See, the unheated attic is normally the same temperature as outdoors. Yet because there was no hole cover, the warm air was rising into the attic and cold air was descending. We had the equivalent of an open window to the outside. No wonder the house always felt drafty!

Calfee pointed to the black dust and grit attached to the pink insulation that had accumulated on the side of the hole. He said this was the residue of passing air, signifying lots of air passing through this space. “D’oh!” I said. Apparently, the house builders had only covered the hole with a piece of plywood. Somehow it had been gotten pushed aside and left uncovered. We think it had been that way for years. The closet door was often closed, so it wasn’t quite a wide-open window, or we might have noticed earlier. But that room was always cold. The next day somebody came and built a thick, foam-board insulated cap for the hole, and now it’s tight as a drum up there.

So I tell this story to illustrate why home energy audits are important. Experts can see things other people wouldn’t see. Sometimes you have to call in the pros. Additionally, the pros have a few superhero tools for sussing out a home’s efficiency. They have the blower door and the thermal camera!

Calfee brought a sort-of hand-held video camera that measured heat and cold. Pointing to the plastered over walls, the camera showed where the house builders hadn’t brought the pink roll insulation all the way to the top of the bay between the joists. By leaving just 2 inches uncovered, it was creating a steady heat lose. Pointing to the laundry room, he showed a section that somehow didn’t get insulated at all. The camera showed small cracks in the foundation that were easily filled. Everywhere that cold air was rushing in was made visible and so we could deal with it.

Next Calfee used “the blower door” to measure how airtight the house is. The blower door is a strong fan attached to a laptop computer, with a plastic sheet that fits snug over a door frame. You shut every window, door, and vent in the house. Then you turn on the blower full speed for five minutes. Then you turn it off and the computer measures the fan’ activity. Is it spinning backwards? How fast? By pressurizing the house in this way, we could see how airtight the house was.

Very useful information. It turns out though our house was only ten years old, it was pretty leaky. Recently, they did the blower door again, and now the house is tight. Getting this house to be energy efficient feels like a victory to me. It took almost two years, numerous calls to plumber, carpenters, and insulators, but now the house really is efficient and warm and green.

Here’s a short summary of what we ended up doing. We had a foot of cellulose insulation sprayed into attic to insulate the ceiling thoroughly. Fixed the cracks in the basement foundation. Made holes in the walls and blew in extra cellulose insulation. In the basement, we had a foam sprayed over the concrete walls, because concrete has an “R-value of 1” (or insulating ability of a single pane of glass.) The walls were sprayed with this gooey, soy-based foam, which hardens into a layer of insulation that looks like the surface of lemon meringue pie.

In the big picture, energy efficiency is one of the most important places where our society can start dealing with the environmental crisis. Every watt of energy that we save is one that Vermont Yankee doesn’t have to toxically produce. A tight house burns less oil and thus less carbon. Energy expert Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute says that saving energy should be a huge part of our national energy plan. He calls saved energy “negawatts.”

Eventually we did get a pretty cool solar system. Forty percent of the homes HEAT is generated by the sun. We put in a big solar system that heats water that runs underneath the floors as radiant floor heating. Eighty blue vacuum-tube solar panels gather the sun’s heat, which warms tubes of the antifreeze liquid propylene glycol, and then circulates down into the basement to a 500 gallon water tank that stores the heat, and then it flows through tubes under the floors as radiant floor heating. This is a beautiful way to heat a home. The floors are warm to the feet. The energy is free and burns zero carbon. As we strive to create a zero-carbon world, solar heating systems should have a place of honor. We estimate this solar system will pay for itself with savings on oil bills over 10 years.

A real estate agent told me that everyone says that their home is tight but most houses aren’t. Creating a super insulated house could be a priority if you are building a new home, but it probably won’t be unless you plan for it. Construction workers are often more concerned with getting a job finished than creating a house that has long-term low heating costs. Efficiency and green building techniques should be ”the new normal”, but they aren’t yet.

I strongly encourage everybody get an energy audit and to deep insulate their homes. It saves money and energy. It’s a good investment if you own the house, because you’ll pay lower fuel bills in the long run. Additionally, houses with green credentials are a lone hot spot in the housing market, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. And the house is just nicer to live in. After the truck came and blew lots of cellulose insulation all through the walls and the attic, it was like a giant blanket had been placed over the house. Investing in good insulation is smart for the energy bills, the earth, and for our feet.

More info is online at www.efficiencyvermont.com. and www.serg-info.org and www.energy-wise-homes.com.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Transition Town cofounder rallies Vermonters

“I feel an intense urgency to do this work, and I hear that all over the world” said Naresh Giagrande, one of the founders of the Transition Town movement in the UK. Indeed, on that Nov. 24th evening at Montpellier’s Unitarian Church, one could feel that positive, encouraging, ready-to-go energy. It was an inspiring evening, and an auspicious beginning for Vermont’s Transition Town movement.

The church was packed. Vermont’s crunchy intelligentsia turned out in force. The energy in the room was palpable and refreshing. Climate change can be pretty doom and gloom, and the Transition Town movement nicely short-circuits this by shifting to a positive vision for a low-carbon future. Citizens are encouraged to create committees or councils that “Start creating visions of a positive future.” By “unleashing the collective intelligence of humanity”, the climate change crisis can be addressed by “letting a thousand flowers bloom.” On his powerpoint, Giagrande had written a T.T. slogan, “Action without vision is just busyness. Vision without action is fruitless.”

Giagrande is currently on a worldwide speaking tour to spread the word about this movement to create an “abundant, pleasurable, resilient future.” Resilient is a key word in Transition culture, meaning the ability of a living system to withstand shocks. In this case, a resilient, transitioned community will withstand the shocks of peak oil with grace. One quick way to measure the resilience of a community is looking at the cords of firewood and seeing if they are well-stacked, notes Richard Heinburg, author of Peak Everything.

Transition Town started in Totnes, England. A group of citizens have worked together to create an ‘energy descent plan’ that looks forward into a desirable future. And they are cultivating a pleasant vision: old school, homespun, communitarian, and fun. They are trying to embody that Buckminster Fuller proverb, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”

The Transition Town has a component called The Great Re-skilling. Giagrande said “We are probably the most useless generation in history. Most people can’t cook their own food, let alone grow it.” The Great Re-Skilling encourages people to meet their own needs rather than employ energy intensive delegation of the task. Or to reframe it, do it like our grandparents did before we paid Chinese slaves to do it. Mend soxs. Fix that bicycle instead of throwing it away and getting a new one. Grow and store food.

The Transition Town model is hugely hopeful. There are abundant web resources at www.transitiontowns.org.
Vermont has it’s own Transition website transitionvermont.ning.com. And also, on Dec 6th, at Vermont Technical College, there will be a conference on this subject, called “Community-based Approaches to Energy and Climate Change.”

Onward and upward, Transition Vermont!

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Fetus Origami, Endocrine Disruptors and You...

a Report from VPIRG Environmental Action Conference

I enjoy going conferences. It’s like an intense college immersion experience, minus the binge drinking and the tests. At the Vermont Technical College on Nov. 15th, VPIRG held their annual Environmental Action Conference. This Vermont’s biggest and best environmental conference, a sort of bio-regional Bioneers Conference. I came away with a head full of ideas of ideas that I’d like to share.

The highlight for me was learning from keynote speaker Sandra Steingraber, author of the book Living Downstream: An Ecologists look at Cancer and the Environment. She said so many interesting things and here are some.

- The human fetus is folded together as with origami, flat sheets of tissue folding into the emerging body. The fetus starts growing head first, then downward, and center first and then outward. So if the baby has webbed feet, the toxic exposure was likely in the 11th week, when the outer stuff had started.

- The worst time to get hit with toxins is when you are really, really, really small. “Exposure during the opera of embryonic development can multiply exposure effect,” Steingraber said. After implantation on the womb wall, the egg is very vulnerable and after conception too.

- We should be thinking about pollution from the human rights perspective, Steingraber said. We have a right to live in a world without getting cancer. We have a right to be fertile and have children if we want them. We have a right to not get poisoned by Roundup’s Atrazine, no matter how much it would impact the economy to take it off the market. Lawyers from the Vermont Law School are pursuing this, and articulate this view in an article (available on-line) called “Law for An Ecological Age.”

- There is a massive movement to protect people from chemicals. Here are some resources in that movement. A blog called Nontoxic kids. A ‘Safe Cosmetics Campaign”. An European Union program called REACH, which will document all the chemicals that are on the market. Also, check out Rivernetwork.org, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and the Alliance for Clean and Healthy Vermont.

- Canned food is a major source of exposure to Bisphenol-A (pronounced: biss-fee-n’all-A). The cans are lined with a plastic that contains the Bisphenol-A and it leeches into the food. I always knew canned vegetables were nasty! Now I know they contain a “endocrine disruptor.”
Endocrine disruptors happen because the body mistakes certain chemicals for natural hormones and then everything gets out of wack. The body uses hormones to get jobs done, in minute amounts, parts per trillion. When we take in tiny microscopic chemicals from the canned pineapple or the old Nalgene bottle, our bodies get confused.
In an issue related to endocrine disruptors, girls are getting their breasts about 3 years earlier than they used to, at 10 years old instead of 13. The menstruation start times are about the same, only a month ahead of where they were in 1970. This long window between breasts budding and menstruation is not good. Girls are at risk for breast cancer later in life because the body has a long window of increased estrogen levels connected to the breast development, but without progestrerone, a menstrual hormone that balances out the effects of the estrogen.

- Steingraber compared the economy and the environment as twin ecosystems with many parallels. Both were global and integrated. “Only there are no bailouts for the environment if we hit a major tipping point.” She said her 7 year old child ran into the room saying “the Dow dropped 500 points” not knowing what that meant. Perhaps we don’t mourn the ecosystem’s decline as much because we don’t have metrics to count it. We need numbers that document the rise in carbon parts per million, so that TV anchors can grimace and say “the Carbon Index rose today to a new high of 388 parts carbon per million today, making our air the most carbonated since the Age of the Dinosaurs.”

- In an exciting note from the activist perspective, the California environmentalists have found a delicious, elegant leverage point upon industry. California legislators passed a law that says companies must say on the label if there is something in the product that is illegal in Belgium. Companies have to identify everything that doesn’t meet the higher standards of the EU. Thus, they will probably just start importing products safe for the European market rather than relabel. They might just do the switch all across the country, thus bringing America into de facto harmonization with the E.U.’s more sensible and stringent laws! Brilliant!

Friday, November 14, 2008

Last minute criminality by the Bush FCC on cell towers

Here’s a good way to spot government mischief. Watch for announcements on the days of really big news. For example, on election Tuesday, Nov 5th ‘08, the FCC announced a major change in the regulation of the wireless spectrum.

“Federal regulators on Tuesday approved the largest ever expansion of wireless Internet access, unanimously backing a controversial plan to allow a new generation of devices to use the empty airwaves between television channels to go online” reports the LA Times.

High tech industry call this plan “wi-fi on steroids”, essentially allowing really strong cellphones to be embedded in your computer, that then allow wi-fi access everywhere. The park, the subway, the car, the mountain top, at the bottom of the ocean, no place will be inaccessible for computing pleasure, and everyplace will be equally basking in the waves of cell tower radiation.

This is not good. This is the Bushites administration conspiring with industry for a last gluttonous orgy of regulatory irresponsibility before slithering off. Cellphone towers are cancer causing now. This plan will expand cell tower use, prevalence, and wattage. Essentially, our world will become ever more radiated by the bouncing waves of ever more electronic devices.

The FCC ruling was opposed by TV industry groups, because they said the wireless internet traffic would interfere with TV signals. Theater and concert promoters also complained that there might be interference between a concert-goer’s I-phone and the performer’s wireless microphone. Reasonable concerns. A far bigger concern is that wireless technology causes cancer. Therefore it should be contained and not expanded into new horizons of electrosmog pollution.

Cell towers create electromagnetic radiation, a.k.a. electrosmog pollution. Billions of digital ones and zeros in pulsing waves enter a biological world. Biological life evolved technologies to gather information from waves. Insects use their antenna to gather information from the environment. Bats fly by radar by picking up waves. And now, suddenly, humans are sending vast, unregulated, strong waves into the ecosystems. Increasingly, we’re getting negative feedback.

Here are three snapshots from the emerging story that scientists are recognizing that wireless technology is unsafe. First, the european Interphone study is documenting the link from cellphones to brain cancer. Second, the firefighters unions no longer allow cellphone towers atop firehouse because towers increase cancer rates. Third, the honorable Rep. Dennis Kucinich recently held congressional hearings on cellphone safety, and heard testimony from doctors and cancer victims on the subject.

I have been tracking the issue for a few years now. And it is largely the same story. Citizen’s groups and a few government regulators chasing the runaway train of an unhealthy but widely adopted technology. But the facts are coming in. Cellphones will eventually be widely understood to be as cancer causing as cigarettes. In 20 years, no sane person will give one to their children.
In the meantime, I encourage people not to use cellphones or wireless laptops (especially around me), and to keep track of the issue by reading the online journal www.microwavenews.com.

Cellphone technology was let onto the market without sufficient health tests or regulation. Now cellphones are widely adopted, but this doesn’t mean they are compatible with human biology. It was a great mistake to let this seductive technology out of the box, and humanity will probably suffer huge increases in brain cancer because of it. I think all cellphone towers should be torn down. Cellphones should be turned off permanently and properly recycled. The companies that have gotten rich on this unwholesome technology should pay for a fund to cover the tab on brain cancer patients in the years to come.

I’d like to close with an elegant quote that summarizes the issue well, from Lewis Mumford, who wrote “Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.”

We should say no to a wi-fi planet. I’m no technophobe Luddite. I love the idea of the internet as humanity’s central nervous system. But I want it to be wired. Wireless technology is simply unsafe.

May the communications industry take responsibility for the biological impacts of wireless radiation. May we live in a world where we can ride the bus without being radiated by our neighbor’s e-mail. May we develop an advanced human civilization that keeps technology in harmony with biology.

Theo Talcott

Thursday, October 30, 2008

check out this great funny video about activism and peace

John Lennon was the first peace activist I felt a deep connection with. I love his music and idealism and all of that is well expressed in this beautiful interview accompanied by funny cartoon that gets the point across the universe.

check it out...

http://www.odemagazine.com/blogs/readers_blog/3571/john_lennon_all_we_need_is_peace


All We Need Is Love,

Theo

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Great Quote from Transition Town newsletter

"Humans are capable of a unique
trick, creating realities by first imagining them, by
experiencing them in their minds. …As soon as we
sense the possibility of a more desirable world, we
begin behaving differently, as though that world is
starting to come into existence, as though, in our
mind's eye, we are already there. The dream becomes
an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this
process it begins to come true. The act of imagining
somehow makes it real… And what is possible in art
becomes thinkable in life". Brian Eno.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

here's our new website address: www.shiresenvironmentalalliance.com

hi all

shiresenvironmentalalliance-shiresenvironmentalalliance.com !!!

we have a website, and soon you'll be able to google it

but for now

enter the whole thing and it should pop up

www.shiresenvironmentalalliance.com


onward

theo