Asleep at the Wheel

Welcome to the February 2013
Natural Living Blog Carnival:
Addressing Sleep Challenges.
This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Natural Living Blog Carnival hosted by Happy Mothering and The Pistachio Project through the Green Moms Network. This month our members have written posts about how they address sleep challenges in their homes.

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"You know things are grim," I said to CelloDad, "When you've had two hours of sleep and you don't even feel all that different." That was when our eldest was a tiny babe and CelloDad was just a dad, sleep-deprived like all new dads and too cross-eyed most of the time to be thinking of musical instruments.

Photo JonathanEric:
"The effect of working 9 hours
overtime, on a Saturday"

We somehow survived those first delirious days of parenthood, but even now we seem to be carrying a permanent sleep deficit. There's always something: if not the baby, it's work pressure, family circumstances, home repairs, rather more dinner than we need, or even an exciting movie too close to bedtime.

These days, it's those Alex Rider books that CelloPlayer and I are reading in a private book club (only two members); these are spy novels for children: fast-paced page turners, they're hard to put down! Oh yeah - and the coming of the Change. I could put that down any day. At this stage, mostly it messes with my sleep.

Boys with (Electric) Toys

I'm sure you've seen it happen: a boy brings in his shiny new toy and excitedly starts extolling its virtues, surrounded by a clump of friends who are filled with equal parts admiration and envy. It's only a matter of time before one of them can't take the bragging any more and says, "Oh yeah? well, let's see what it can do!"

Model S
Photo Tesla Motors Inc.

As the boys get bigger their toys also get bigger, but the dynamic doesn't change very much. Thus it is that among the car journalists who write polite and glowing reports on the shiniest new toy of them all, the Tesla electric car, there are always a few who push it to the limits to see what it can do.

Climate Rally: in Washington and at Your Home

Please consider joining the Forward On Climate rally this Sunday, 17 February 2013, in Washington DC to show your support for real action to stop climate change.

Of course, if you plan to go by car, please carpool: a car with all its seats filled has a per-passenger carbon footprint equal to that of a European train.

If you can't make it to Washington, take action at home: because when push comes to shove, it's up to you and me. Let us not wait for the legislative process to run its due course; soon the only thing that can be called "glacial" is the rate of progress in our legislative bodies. Let's do our bit, and do it now: It's not that hard to slash our carbon footprint.

And saving energy not only means cutting carbon emissions: in most cases it means saving money as well. The new reality: the climate IS the economy.

Get informed. Get involved. Get started today.

 

 

Review: Nissan Skyline, Infiniti G37

Infiniti's "G" sedan can be traced back to the Skyline, introduced by Japan's Prince Motor Company in 1957. The Prince Skyline was a luxury car whose 1.5L, 60HP engine could get it to speeds up to 140kph (87 mph).

The name "Skyline" was a constant through the decades that this car was marketed by Prince, then by Datsun, and now by Nissan and its luxury division, Infiniti. Both the car itself and its engines kept growing over the years, its engine now a huge 3.7L V6 with 328 HP.

The sleek lines of the G / Skyline are preserved in all its manifestations as a sedan, a coupé and a convertible; there is a crossover version as well (called the EX in the US).

Super Bowl 2013 Car Ads

I didn't see the Super Bowl. So I didn't get to see all the drama that was the game, nor all the drama in the commercials that sponsors have placed in the game at stratospheric cost. Since we don't have TV, I will also mercifully be spared the endless re-runs of all those commercials.

But I do find commercials fascinating: the ad men have spent astounding amounts of resources to figure out our buttons, so that they can push them and make us do their bidding, even while making us think that buying this or that is all our own idea. Free choice, and all that, you know? The marketing machine is frighteningly effective, endlessly fascinating, and never to be underestimated. When we are traveling I make a point of turning on the hotel TV with the express purpose of checking out the ads. Because they offer a glimpse into the nation's psyche.

So after the game I went to the Superbowl Commercials site, where you can enjoy all the game ads without being distracted by the game itself. When you see the ads all in a row, a few themes emerge.

The Carbon Footprint of a Car

A while ago, I looked into the carbon footprint of manufacturing a car, and found the GREET model (short for "Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation"), a lifecycle analysis developed by a team at Argonne National Lab.

Photo Wouter Hagens

That lifecycle model is process based, that is, they look at all the components of a car and ask how much energy it takes to make the steel frame (counted all the way back to the energy required to mine the iron and/or recycle the steel from scrapped cars), the glass windows, the plastic parts, the aluminum engine, the various fluids (except the gasoline) the electrical wiring with insulation - the works. This estimate is a huge undertaking.

For a "vanilla" car weighing 3330 lbs (think a Honda Accord sedan), they arrive at 8.5 tonnes CO2 for the Vehicle-cycle Energy. That's 8500 kg or about 18,800 lbs of carbon dioxide (or CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas).

Mom in Sheep's Clothing

Photo Basher Eyre
via Wikimedia Commons

Temperatures have dipped well below the freezing point. The wind chill is brutal. You get into your car to go skiing / skating / shopping for a down blanket. Which of these four options applies to you?

You deposit your delicate derrière onto the driver seat and you:

(a) Run back into the house and don't emerge until May.

(b) Grit your teeth, remain seated and get frostbite on your bum.

(c) Turn on the seat heat and drive away. - OR:

(d) Settle yourself in comfort and calmly drive away.

I have a friend who goes for option (a), spending winters holed up in her house until she runs out of food. As she telecommutes, she really only needs to emerge to walk her dog a few times a day: since it doesn't involve putting her behind in contact with any cold objects, she can deal with that.

But a mom like me doesn't have that option. There's school, sports, fossil hunting. There's grocery shopping and cello lessons. I have to take that driver's seat.

Review: 2013 Chevrolet Cruze

Photo by Navigator84
via Wikimedia Commons

Here's a surprise: Contrary to the trend, GM is offering the Chevy Cruze in the US with the smallest engine available for it, and only in the sedan version, not the hatchback or the larger wagon.

In South Korea, the Chevy is available in either sedan or hatchback, called the Cruze5 (for five-door vehicle, presumably). In Great Britain the Cruze is also available in those options, called Saloon and Hatchback, with a Station Wagon to arrive later this year.

Stop the Smog: use cleaner coal and diesel.

I've been thinking about Chinese moms: the ones living in large cities, who have recently had to cope with their families living inside a thick pall of smog. Megacities don't have the cleanest air in the best of times, and for places like Beijing these are not the best of times.

Smog contains many gaseous chemicals that are bad for you, but the most worrisome part of the pollution are the small particles (soot and aggregates) that can penetrate deeply into the lungs and cause breathing problems, exacerbate asthma, and even lead to lung cancer. The smallest particles, the ones that cause the most trouble, are those of a size 2.5 micrometers (µm) or smaller, and are referred to as PM2.5.

Last weekend, the PM2.5 count was 993 µg/m³ (micrograms per cubic meter) by official measurements. That is an astounding 40 times the maximum of 25 µg/m³ recommended by the World Health Organisation. In the developed West, the latest proposed guidelines call for a limit of 18 µg/m³ in Europe (by 2020), and 12 µg/m³ in the US.

In the past week the PM2.5 counts in Beijing have eased, but over this weekend they have risen again, to around 400 µg/m³ earlier today.

Beijing, August 2005. The photograph on the left was taken after it had rained for two days. The right photograph shows smog covering Beijing in what would otherwise be a sunny day.
Photo Bobak via Wikimedia Commons.

Young children are especially at risk. Imagine the choice: it's either playing outside breathing bad air, or being cooped up inside all day. And after all this time, surely some of the pollution has made its way inside.

My Big Fat Dutch Wedding

 

Welcome to the January 2013
Natural Living Blog Carnival: Green Confessions.
This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Natural Living Blog Carnival hosted by Happy Mothering and The Pistachio Project through the Green Moms Network. This month our members have written posts about areas of their life where they aren't as "green" as they may want to be.

 

I'm in this culture clash, and it's entirely internal.

Here I am, a proponent of simple living and an advocate of the low-carbon lifestyle: I've got my bike, my high-MPG car, my near-vegetarian cooking, my wind-powered electricty, my steadily dwindling amount of household waste, blah blah.

And there I went jetting off across the Atlantic to get married. Although we weren't high school sweethearts, we had gone to the same high school in the beautiful city of Delft, in the Netherlands. We had both been living in the US for years and years, but I had never got around to un-registering myself from the city, which entitled us to a wedding in its city hall dating from the middle ages.

Photo Herebedug via Wikimedia Commons

We had a glorious time at the party, with our families from both sides, some Dutch high school friends, and a few American ones who had found research or postdoc positions around Europe.

But the carbon footprint of this wedding!

The Average Speed of the Average Car

In the mid-1970s the illustrious Ivan Illich, Austrian philosopher and critic of Western culture, calculated the average speed of a car to be 3.7 miles per hour, about the speed of a brisk walk.

Cleveland, 1973
Photo Frank Aleksandrowicz

Illich arrived at this shocking number by dividing the average annual miles per car driven in the US in 1974, approximately 6000 miles, by 1600 hours, which represents the total of time required to make the car go that far. Those hours include the actual time spent actually driving it, the time spent pumping the oil and refining it into gasoline, the time spent by health care professionals on the consequences of traffic accidents, and so on.

You might think that this falls firmly in the category of "Lies, d--n lies, and statistics". But Illich used this to illustrate the concept of counterproductivity.

I would like to update the result for the early 2010s. However, I think it is excessive to include such things as the time spent on producing oil and refining it into gasoline: after all, that can be counted towards time that someone else spends on their job.

So in my analysis I am going to count only the amount of time actually spent driving the car, plus the time required to make enough money to own and operate the car.

Is Energy from Natural Gas Cleaner than from Coal?

Is it good news? The US is transitioning, albeit slowly, from dirty coal-burning power plants to electricity generators run on natural gas. Natural gas contains no toxic mercury, and does not generate coal ash and other nasty waste products. The waste product from burning natural gas is carbon dioxide and water.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but the nice thing about natural gas is that it generates electricity with a much smaller carbon footprint than coal.

Or does it?