Be sure to celebrate Earth Hour tomorrow, Saturday, March 28, from 8:30-9:30 pm whatever your local time is. It's a symbolic and concrete action: turn out all unnecessary lights and electricity for an hour as part of a commitment to reduce global warming. Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia, when 2.2 million workplaces and homes turned off their lights for an hour. In 2008, 50 million people turned off their lights worldwide. This year, the goal is 1 billion people turning off their switches to send a message to world leaders at the global climate change conference in Copenhagen. Organizers have already exceeded their goal of 1,000 cities and towns participating. Of course, all the other actions you can take to reduce global warming are even more important, but this is a time when the whole world gets to act together (at staggered times) and send a message. (BTW, they've checked it out with power companies, and the event will have no ill effect on the power grid.) Watch this video with some inspiring footage of lights going off around the world. Then sign up at the official Earth Hour website. Happy Spring Break for those of you celebrating it this week or next! Remember to offset your carbon if you're traveling. Follow the links at the very bottom of this page to do that. Stay cool!
Bonney

WattzUp?

Today I came upon a website called WattzOn, which I found through a website called Carsharing.US, which is written by the guy who started the first carsharing company in the U.S., which was later swallowed up by Flexcar. I found Carsharing.US through a blog called Diamond-Cut Life, which I also recommend, and I found Diamond-Cut Life by Googling, believe it or not, global warming and fun. WattzOn offers a great tool for thoroughly examining your energy consumption, which is directly proportional to your carbon footprint, that is, the amount of greenhouse gases that are produced by you living your life the way you do. I took the test, and the WattzOn badge to the right tells you the result. You can click on it for more details, and do your own test at WattzOn. There's also a video to watch about individual energy consumption. My only complaint is that the site is a bit short on solutions. The intent is to create a community to share ideas, which is also my intent for this blog, but with a little more emphasis on solutions here. So send them in!

Stay cool,
Bonney

Pay As You Drive

Remember my post a few weeks ago on car insurance that costs less if you drive less? Turns out several companies are offering it around the nation. The Environmental Defense Fund offers a good overview here. The Brookings Institution reported that if all American drivers had pay-as-you-drive insurance, we'd drive 8 percent less, total US CO2 emissions would go down by 2% and oil consumption by 4%, and two-thirds of households would pay an average of $270 less per car for auto insurance. Here are the programs I found:

• Owners of GM cars with OnStar can get discounts for driving less through insurer GMAC in 47 out of 50 states. Click here for info.
  
• Progressive offers pay-as-you-drive discounts in Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey and Oregon.
• Texas is the first state to offer insurance that's charged per mile you drive, allowing you to get the full benefit of driving less, through MileMeter. Go, neighbor!
  
• In Massachusetts, the Environmental Insurance Agency offers a policy through Plymouth Rock that rewards you for driving less. EIA is owned by the Conservation Law Foundation, which has spent decades protecting the environment in New England.
  
• The Federal Highway Administrations Value Pricing Program is launching a PAYD pilot program in Georgia.
  

Post your experiences with any PAYD program, or any other global warming solutions!

Stay cool,
Bonney

Spotlight on 350.org

Check out climate action group 350.org. They have an upbeat, action-oriented website that points out the critical nature of global warming while leaving you inspired to take action. 350.org was one of the organizers of the largest anti-coal protest yet in the U.S. on Monday at the Capitol Hill Power plant, where thousands turned out in dress clothes and shut down the plant for the day by blocking access. Plans for the protest caused Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to announce they would no longer burn coal in the plant--last week! Coal-fired power plants are one of the biggest contributors to global warming. 350.org is also organizing a Global Day of Climate Action worldwide on October 24, 2009, six weeks before world leaders meet in Copenhagen to write a new global treaty on cutting carbon emissions. Find out more here: 350.org. The website also offers a link to a Facebook application that can earn you rewards for actions to reduce climate change if you're 16-25. Might be interesting for the rest of us, too.

Thanks for the links, Patty! Here's clickable links to the story about recycled gifts: http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/030109/liv_399646141.shtml#mdw-comments and the kids' energy-saving game: http://www.lets-decorate.com/edit6100/conservation/player.html.
Stay cool!
Bonney

Well, there's some good news and some bad news this week. The bad news is that Chris Fields, one of the heads of the Nobel-awarded Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that greenhouse gas emissions have been growing even faster than climate models projected. This makes the good news that President Obama asked Congress to send him cap-and-trade legislation to reduce global warming especially timely.

What's cap-and-trade? It's a market-based system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that was shown to be quite effective in reducing the sufur dioxide pollution that caused acid rain. It puts a strict limit on emissions, and the sources of these emissions then receive a permit to pollute, basically, up to a given limit. These permits are such that total emissions don't exceed the strict emissions limit. The system allows the emitters to stay within their limit any way they see fit. Those that emit less than their limit can sell allowances to those who emit more. Before you become horrified, realize that a) the limit is reduced every year and b) this system actually worked more quickly than expected to reduce acid rain emissions, and more cheaply than critics predicted. When's the last time you heard of anything working more quickly than expected in government? Let's get behind this effort, which has been in effect in Europe since 2005.

Read The Hot Topic, by Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King, for a good description of cap and trade, p. 156, and a wealth of good information on global warming solutions. And send me your tips and global warming info!

Bonney

I heard a cool idea this week (seriously, I didn't intend to pun) on Living On Earth, the weekly environmental public radio show. California's energy commissioner, Arthur Rosenfeld, is a big advocate of white or light-reflecting roofs, which are now required for new roofs and re-roofs in California. He'll soon travel to China and India to urge those nations to require white roofs, too.

"If white roofs took over the world or the urban world over a twenty year program, we would save twenty five billion tons of CO2, which is the same as turning off the whole world's emissions of CO2 for one year," said Rosenfeld.

You can reduce the energy you consume to cool your house by 10 to 20 percent if your roof is white instead of dark. In addition, the white roof, because it reflects heat back into space, cools your neighborhood and the world directly. A thousand square feet of white roof cools the world enough to offset the heating effects of ten tons of carbon dioxide. That's about two and a half years of emissions from your family car or one year's emissions from your house, according to Rosenfeld.

What happens in winter? The amount you save on cooling is a lot more than you lose on heat, at least in most places. In Boston, you lose 15% of the summer savings on increased winter energy use, but in Birmingham, Alabama, you only lose 5%. The winter loss is low because of our tilted planet: In winter, the sun is low and shines mostly on the south wall of your house, and in summer, it's high and shines mostly on the roof. So we should paint our roofs white and our southern walls dark. Read Bruce Gellerman's interview of Rosenfeld here. And send me your tips! Have a cool week.

Bonney

I can't say it any better than the Environmental Defense Action Fund does today: Friday the 13th just got a little scarier. The EDF Action Fund has put together 13 facts about the realities of global warming. Here's a few of them:

34% -- Percentage that 2008's Arctic seasonal sea ice melt outpaced normal levels.

1.5 million --Number of acres of forests in Colorado destroyed by the pine beetle, which is better able to survive warmer winters and is wreaking havoc in America's western forests. In Santa Fe, NM, we see thousands of trees killed by the pine beetle.

$427 million -- Amount spent by the oil and coal industries in the first six months of 2008 in political contributions, lobbying expenditures and advertising to oppose climate action.

A strong economy-wide cap on global warming pollution is the best way to get a handle on global warming, one that European countries have been implementing for years. But it will take a movement of millions of people like us to get our Congress to finally act.

So please, read the facts and click here to send your Congressional reps the message that you want action on global warming. Spread the word to your friends and family face-to-face, through email, Facebook, whatever. Send them a link to this blog! And help make future Friday the 13ths less scary!

Thanks, Patty, for sharing what you do to reduce global warming. If enough of us take actions like this, and I know there are a lot of you out there who do, it can make a big difference. Let us know what you're doing!