Mauka to Makai
A science blog for the massesArchive for February, 2008
Kilowatt Ours
Last week, the Frontier Café in Brunswick, Maine hosted a viewing of Kilowatt Ours–a short film about different ways we can all improve our energy efficiency. The slightly kitschy film starring Jeff Barrie (the filmmaker) and his wife explores the impacts of our large appetite for energy and the importance of finding alternatives to our current reliance on coal.
Barrie sets the stage with footage of coal mining practices in Appalachia–namely mountain top removal coal mining which literally involves blasting away whole mountains to get at the coal underneath. The most compelling footage, however, is of a coal slurry spill in Appalachia. In October 2000, a total of 300 million gallons of coal slurry (a toxic mix of carcinogens and heavy metals that is a by-product of “cleaning” the coal after it comes out of the ground) poured into a fork of the Big Sandy River when a containment pond failed. The slurry buried over 75 miles of waterway, effectively killing the river. It flooded houses and yards, contaminated the drinking water of countless communities and disrupted or killed tons of wildlife.
So, how do we reduce our reliance on coal?
By increasing our efficiency and tapping into alternative energies. There are a bunch of ways to do this and some of them will save you a chunk of change in the long run. (The Barrie’s cut their power bill in half by changing to CFLs and upgrading their fridge.)
- You’ve heard it before, but replacing your regular incandescent light bulbs with Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (or CFLs) is a quick way to save money and use less energy. Although CFLs cost a little more than regular lightbulbs, they last way longer and use three quarters less energy. One warning: they’ve got mercury in them so make sure you follow the specific guidelines for recycling and cleaning up broken bulbs.
- When it comes time to replace your appliances, make sure you buy Energy Star certified ones. Energy Star is a certification program that rates appliances on how much energy they use–or more appropriately, how much energy they save. New models are constantly improving their efficiency–today’s fridges are 20% more efficient than the ones built just 2 years ago–so even if you could squeeze another year or so out of an old clunker, it may save you more money to replace it with a more efficient model.
- If your furnace dates back to the original Star Wars movie you’ll probably need an upgrade sometime soon. Rather than just replacing your HVAC system (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) with a newer model, consider installing a geothermal heat pump. Geothermal pumps tap into the stable temperature of the ground in order to provide heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. It can be expensive to install, but the savings more than make up for it over the life of the system–especially considering the rising cost of oil.
- Installing solar panels or a wind turbine can also save you money. And if you generate more power than you need, the excess electricity gets put back into the system and your power meter spins backwards. Solar panels are becoming increasingly more affordable, even on par with coal (see Nanosolar ). And the technology is getting way cooler. Now you can get roof shingles that double as solar panels and soon hybrid drivers will be able to buy aluminum solar panels for the roofs of their cars.
- If you can’t afford to generate your own “green energy,” you can always switch to buying green electricity from your local utilities. Most suppliers offer green alternatives–electricity generated from solar arrays, wind turbines and low-impact hydro electric dams–at just a slight premium. This won’t save you any money, but it reduces our dependance on fossil fuels. Here’s the deal: the more alternative energy we ask for, the less electricity will come from coal–that means more solar arrays and less coal-fired power plants.
There’s lots of information on energy efficiency / alternative energy out there, but if you have a question, please post a comment. And if we can answer it, we will.
Saving the Killers
The population of chinook salmon in California’s Sacramento River isn’t looking too good. Last year, about 90,000 adult chinook (or king) salmon returned to the Sacramento. (That’s less than half the 2006 total of 277,000 and way less than the 2002 run of over 800,000 fish.)
To predict the number of adult spawners for the next season, scientists count the number of jacks (2-year-old male chinooks) that return to the river. That number is usually around 40,000, but last year only 2,000 jacks returned to the Sacramento.
This is a bummer for salmon and salmon fishermen, but it may be even worse for killer whales. Resident killer whales eat salmon–transient killer whales are the ones who eat seals, sea lions, and other marine mammals. The endangered southern resident population of killer whales is especially fond of chinook salmon. Southern residents spend most of their time in and around Washington’s Puget Sound, but for the last six winters, they’ve visited the California coast. Why the recent interest in Cali? Food. Sparse salmon stocks are likely driving the southern residents south, but scientists fear that this year’s declining numbers of chinook in California may leave the whales hungry.
Unfortunately, this salmon shortage isn’t the only obstacle facing the southern residents. The first major blow to this population came in the 1960s and ’70s when 36 southern resident killer whales were removed from the wild and placed in captivity in zoos and aquariums. In 1976, the Washington State Senate outlawed the capture of killer whales, but the southern resident population was slow to recover since most of the captured animals were young. (The removal of young animals greatly reduces the reproductive potential of the remaining wild population.) Scientists estimate that the population finally returned to its pre-capture size in 1993, but it is still small. As of November 2007, there were 88 southern resident killer whales.
Killer whales–which are actually the world’s largest dolphins–are loaded with contaminants. The level of contaminants in southern residents (including agricultural chemicals like DDT and PCBs, chemicals from pulp and paper mills, and flame retardants) far exceeds the levels believed to cause health problems in other marine mammals. In fact, southern residents are so contaminated that stranded animals are considered toxic waste.
Are the southern residents screwed? Hopefully not. The federal government released a recovery plan for the southern residents last month. In it, NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service) outlines a strategy to restore salmon habitat, clean up existing pollution, minimize contaminant inputs, reduce the risk of oil spills, and improve response to oil spills by permanently stationing a tug boat at the mouth of Puget Sound. If all goes well, salmon will be abundant, the oceans will be pristine, and the southern residents will live happily ever after.
Bats on Blow?
Throughout northeastern North America, scientists are finding dead bats with a white substance around their nostrils. In a handful of caves throughout New York and Vermont, researchers are trying to figure out just what is killing these bats, and how it is jumping from cave to cave. In upstate New York, 90% of the bats in one cave succumbed to this mystery illness over the past 2 years. Is this a bat pendemic? If researchers don’t figure out exactly how the bats are dying, how the disease is transmitted and most importantly, how to contain it, then it could be.
The powdery looking substance around their nostrils is the white Fusarium mold–ruling out the obvious theory of an out of control cocaine addiction in the bat community. But while scientists have identified the mold, they don’t know what role–if any–it plays in the deaths.
Theories abound. The ”white-nose syndrome” could be linked to increased pesticide use in agriculture. The mold could be a symptom of a new pathogen (any disease-causing agent like a virus, bacterium or some other microorganism) in the bats’ environment. Or maybe the bats are more susceptible to existing disesases because of poor nutrition.
Right now the die-offs are limited to around 10 sites in New York and one in Vermont, but white-nose syndrome has already spread to four different species of bats, including the endangered Indiana bat. Little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) make up the largest percentage of the dieoffs, but that may be because they are the most common bat in North America. Little brown bats are found in almost ever state and every province in North America.
With close to a thousand bat species worldwide, bats represent a fifth of all mammal species. There are two kinds of bats: microbats and megabats. Like their name suggests, microbats are small. The smallest is the hog-nosed bat in Thailand, a microbat that weighs only two grams, or seven hundredths of an ounce. Although some microbats eat fruits and nectar, most microbats are insectivores—they only eat insects. And they do it quickly, eating half their body weight in bugs each night. (Little brown bats can eat 600 mosquitoes an hour.) And they do it blindly. Microbats are nocturnal (they only come out at night) and have such poor eyesight that they must rely on echolocation to find their prey.
Echolocation works much like the sonar used by submarines. The bats send out high frequency sound waves that bounce off insects, trees and anything else in their way. The returning sound waves not only tell the bat that something is there, they also let the bat know the size, shape and density of an object, and how far away it is. But not all bats echolocate. Megabats, less familar cousins of the microbats we know in North America, don’t echolocate (with the exception of one Egyptian species). Some megabats even fly around during the day.
While microbats are found worldwide, megabats are found only in Asia and Australia. And unlike microbats, megabats are huge. The world’s biggest bat, the gigantic flying fox found in Asia, has a massive 6-foot-wide wingspan. But there’s no need to cross Asia off your list of places to visit. Gigantic flying foxes, like all megabats, only eat fruits and nectar.
Bats are more important than most people realize. They eat mosquitoes and other nighttime pests, but they also protect our agricultural industry by eating bugs that directly damage crops, like grasshoppers and leafhoppers. And they eat beetles and moths, whose larvae also damage crops. As for those bats that eat fruit and nectar? They are important pollinators, especially for a number of cactus species in the southern US and Mexico.
Bats are already getting hit hard by habitat loss and decreasing prey availability (thanks to pesticides). And while scientists don’t know what’s happening to the white-nosed bats yet, many bat specialists consider this one of the biggest threats to bat-kind that they have ever seen.
Organic Cotton: Why Bother?
You eat organic food because you don’t want to put chemicals straight into your body, right? But why bother buying organic cotton clothes, sheets, or cotton balls?
Cotton is doused with more pesticides than any other single crop. Even though cotton fields cover only 2.4% of the world’s farmland, they account for 25% of the world’s insecticide use. And these chemicals aren’t exactly mild. Of the 46 pesticides used to grow cotton, 5 are classified as extremely hazardous, 8 as highly hazardous, and 20 as moderately hazardous.
While there are some concerns about putting chemical-laden fabric next to your skin or—ahem—in your body (tampons are made of cotton), buying organic cotton is much more of an environmental issue than a personal health issue.
Pesticides don’t exactly stay put, nor do they only kill what they’re supposed to kill. Heavy rains wash pesticides from the cotton fields into nearby streams. In 1995, contaminated runoff from cotton field killed more than 240,000 fish along a 15-mile section of an Alabama river. And in Corpus Christi, Texas more than 100 adult laughing gulls and a quarter of the breeding colony’s chicks died after eating insects contaminated with pesticides sprayed on cotton fields three miles away.
These pesticides poison people as well. A study by World Wildlife Fund estimates that the pesticides used on cotton poison 3 million people and kill 20,000 people each year. Some of these people come in direct contact with the chemicals as farm workers while others drink contaminated water, inhale sprayed mist, or eat animals that have been contaminated with pesticides.
So, why choose organic cotton? It’s grown without chemicals. ‘Nuff said.
The wombat tells it like it is
Last night, the Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival came to Portland, Maine. The festival showcased seven very different films, but my personal favorite was Wombat. Listen to what this little guy has to say (and watch him dance). Wild and Scenic is traveling around the country. Check the schedule to find out when it will be coming to your area.
