Globally Green Living

Between now and February 28th - Delta is giving away 1,000
miles to the first 10,000 SkyMiles members who donate $50 or more
to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund while booking a flight at delta.com.

The Fund enables the Red Cross to provide shelter, food, counseling and other assistance to victims of disasters - and the Red Cross needs resources now more than ever.

To donate and earn miles, choose your itinerary at delta.com, click on “Trip Activities” and select your donation amount. Then confirm your trip summary and finish your delta.com purchase. Be sure to provide your SkyMiles number during booking to ensure your miles are received.

Disasters change lives - you can too. Give back today.

Want to know more about the Red Cross organiztion? (more…)

Ok, So I’ll be the first to say that bike riding as a means of transportation scares me. I don’t want to get hit by a car. However, I really think there are some huge benefits to bike riding:

1. It’s good excercise
2. Save on gas
3. Enjoy nature

Here are some tips to get started riding a bike again… (more…)

Denny Klein originally designed a water burning engine for tools like his welding torch that can burn metal in seconds. He expanded by designing a water burning engine to fuel cars.

There are plans to design a hummer for the U.S. military that can run on water or gasoline and he’s taking his patented method to other consumer markets.

Cars only require a small amount of water for fuel but not everyone has a never ending supply of water. Denny says he only needs 4 ounces of water to go 100 miles! Check out the fox news video clip called water as an alternative fuel source for more.

GM has reached out to include bloggers at the NAIAS (Detroit Auto Show), letting them know that they are aware of people’s concern for the environment. They also explain how they are trying to make vehicles more environmentally friendly. This shows that they do understand the importance of the blogosphere, their influence and opinions.

• Matt Keegan from The Auto Writer was one of the bloggers selected to attend the Detroit Auto Show and was also there for their 2008 press preview. Over the next several days, he will be sharing his behind the scenes discoveries with some videos included.

• Matt also had the privilege of interviewing the auto industry icon Robert A. Lutz among others and you can read about that on his “Interview with Bob Lutz” post on the Auto Writer. Bob Lutz has had a large hand in the Chevy Volt, which is of the most anticipated vehicles being featured at the NAIAS. The Volt is a plug in that will run for 40 miles on a charge so theoretically you would never have to use gasoline.

This year General Motors will have nine different models out and state that it is more than any manufacturer in the world. GM will continue to produce one new automobile model every three months for the next four years.

Some of the technologies coming include hybrids, ethanol as well as improvements in transmission and fuel cell with the long-term goal of sustainable mobility. Several models will not be available until 2010 including the Volt, but the fact that the cars are being designed is exciting.

Thanks to Matt Keegan, we will get to see a behind the scenes view of the Detroit Auto Show that we might not have otherwise.

Imagine that! It turns out that the MPGs that we see on the sticker when we shop around for cars is not exactly accurate. In fact it is rather biased toward the high end. I guess the EPA was sleeping at the wheel when they approved the numbers that go with the vehicles but no more. Starting in 2008, we can expect the MPGs to be less biased and to have less of a difference. So the estimates become more efficient but the cars become “inefficient”–get it?

Alfred and I went to the market early this morning, around 7:30 am. The air was brisk and very few people were walking around. Dave had not even gotten his arugula out when we first passed by his stand. But the pot dude was already there. I had to take a couple of glimpses to make sure that it was him because he was clean-shaven and his hair was short. Totally different from the long-bearded and disheveled hair man I had gotten used to seeing. His speech has also changed.

The pot dude usually talks to passer-bys to try to convince them that pot should be legalized because it does not cause addiction and because of other reasons that I have never cared to hear. But today he was defending using pot to make biofuel, specifically ethanol. So he went on about how carbon dioxide emissions would be kept under check if we all started using pot ethanol. I am not sure about the current technological feasibility of doing that, but I cannot help but wonder if a big chunk of the pot supply would not be diverted to other less fuel efficient uses…

Forget the organic claim and expand on the buy local frame of mind. These days some Americans are checking labels to make sure that what they are buying is, well, American. That means, according to these folks, that the product had to travel less miles around the globe and thus less carbon dioxide emissions were created.

Call me the party pooper but one should also make sure that land or air transportation within the U.S. is environmentally friendlier that shipping things in a huge boat. Because, truthfully, if long distance transportation is able to create less emission per item than short distance transportation (because you are dividing the emissions over a lot more items), then it’s not better to buy American stuff. Think about it like this: if you go to the supermarket in a car once a month and buy all your supplies for that month, you’ll cause less emissions than if you go in a motorcycle three times per week for a month.

Everything is relative these days.

P.S. I do prefer to buy American or European than from other continents because labor practices are usually better in the U.S. and Europe, although sometimes there are exceptions.

I have said here before that one way to save money and the environment is to drive less, but let me expand on the subject. I work at a university where parking is a little bit of an issue. A parking permit is actually a hunting permit for a parking spot. I’m too cheap to pay for it, although it is really not that expensive if you consider that it’s an annual fee. Anyway, I just park in the street about 10-15 minutes from campus. This way I get a little bit of a morning walk and a little bit of an evening walk, which relaxes me, saves money on parking, and saves gas. And by being farther away from the campus I have to deal with less pedestrians crossing crosswalks and I also avoid some of the rush hour traffic. Everyone wins…

But my office mate is the lucky one. He lives in an apartment complex, so he just takes one of the free buses that stop at his complex and serve the university. While on the bus he can read or just relax while being taken to work. I wish there was a bus that served my area. I figure that that would save me about $100/month. With the savings of $1,200 a year you can go on a pretty decent mini vacation.