What to do for dinner when it's 101 degrees out?

How about a sizzling pot of baked beans from the solar oven? No charcoal, no air pollution, no heating up the house.

Yesterday I baked solar bread.

Tomorrow I'll be conducting a workshop on making this solar oven out of cardboard, aluminum foil and glass. You can make one too. Here's where you can find the plans for the SunStar cooker, thanks to Joe Radabaugh, whose book, Heaven's Flame, also contains the plans and much more information about solar cooking.


Here's a full view of the cooker posing in my weed garden.

The materials cost about $10, mostly for the glass, aluminum foil, glue and other odds and ends. Since we wanted the materials in the workshop to be uniform, we also ordered 25 sets of boxes in the same sizes, instead of scrounging boxes of various sizes and having to adapt the design to them. But you don't have to do that.

More after the workshop.

Energy efficiency vs. liquefied coal: Which do you think Congress is subsidizing?

Energy efficiency vs. liquefied coal: Which do you think Congress is subsidizing? | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist

This is from a May 29 article that I'm just getting around to posting. Clearly, the big push for liquified coal will vastly increase greenhouse gas emissions. Here's an excerpt:

So: an enormous expense, for miniscule energy security benefits and no carbon reductions. Sounds great, eh?

It sounds great to policymakers, though:

... the scale of proposed subsidies for coal could exceed those for any alternative fuel, including corn-based ethanol.

Among the proposed inducements winding through House and Senate committees: loan guarantees for six to 10 major coal-to-liquid plants, each likely to cost at least $3 billion; a tax credit of 51 cents for every gallon of coal-based fuel sold through 2020; automatic subsidies if oil prices drop below $40 a barrel; and permission for the Air Force to sign 25-year contracts for almost a billion gallons a year of coal-based jet fuel.

Why on earth would Congress do something so criminally stupid, so manifestly against the public interest? Why do they ever?

Coal industry lobbying has reached a fever pitch. The industry spent $6 million on federal lobbying in 2005 and 2006, three times what it spent each year from 2000 through 2004, according to calculations by Politicalmoneyline.com.

There's your civics lesson from today's NYT, kids:

• Energy efficiency: a financial boon and a cheap, fast way to reduce carbon emissions. But: no big industry lobby. Thus: ignored by the feds.
• CTL: a financial boondoggle with few energy security benefits that will aggravate climate change. But: big industry lobby. Thus: plied with billions in taxpayer subsidies.

Looking for something to chat about with your Congressional representative? This seems like a good place to start.

The funny thing is, by making a few painless changes in our daily lives--like replacing our light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs, or driving cars that are more appropriate for the one or two passengers they usually contain--we could save so much energy we wouldn't need to liquify coal.

Graphic is from the New York Times.

Change a bulb, change everything

Since January 1, people like you and me have kept nearly 9 trillion pounds of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. We’ve saved the energy of 137,000 cars on the road and 2 trillion pounds of coal.

How did we do it?

By changing a light bulb.

By switching to compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs), we accomplished more than all the government studies, research projects, and hand-wringing by the energy industry.

But we could do a lot more. Only about a hundredth of all households have switched any light bulbs to CFLs. Why?

Many people think of fluorescent lights as those cold white office and warehouse lights that flicker, buzz, take forever to come on and make you look like a ghost. They cause headaches. They’re expensive and don’t fit in a living room lamp. And who wants their living room to look like a workplace?

None of that’s true anymore.

If you tried CFLs 5 years ago and didn’t like them, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much they’ve improved.

Today’s Energy Star spiral CFLs are designed to mimic the shape of an incandescent bulb and can be used in any ordinary lamp. The magnetic ballast that caused the flickering and buzzing in the old bulbs has been replaced in all but the cheapest bulbs by an electronic ballast with an undetectable flicker and, in most cases, no sound at all. These new bulbs light up instantly.

You can now buy CFLs that mimic the soft yellow-white light you’re accustomed to in an incandescent bulb, in addition to the ones that mimic the bluer white of natural daylight. Lampshades further disguise any difference in appearance.

Fluorescent bulbs are coming down in price rapidly, but they are still a little more expensive to buy than incandescent bulbs. But they last 5 times as long, so when you’re buying one CFL, you’re buying the equivalent of five incandescent bulbs. And since CFLs use about a fifth of the electricity of incandescents, incandescent bulbs cost an average of $40 more per fixture to operate than CFLs. Now that’s expensive! It takes an average of six months to recoup the cost of a CFL in lower electricity bills. Your CFL will last a lot longer than six months.

Some people have pointed out that CFLs contain mercury. Won’t using CFLs put even more mercury in the environment?

Paradoxically, no. When you use an incandescent bulb, you’re using more electricity, and half of our electricity comes from coal-fired plants that discharge mercury into the atmosphere. Thus, each 100-watt incandescent bulb indirectly causes 10 milligrams of mercury pollution, while a 23-watt CFL (the equivalent of a 100-watt incandescent) causes only 2.4 milligrams of mercury pollution.

Of course, there are tiny amounts of mercury in CFLs—far less than in mercury thermometers—and used bulbs need to be disposed of responsibly. Just recycle them the same way you recycle your other hazardous waste (paint, solvents, used motor oil and so forth). Because CFLs last so long, you probably don’t need to recycle more often than every couple of years.

WARNING: A story has been circulating about a woman in Maine who broke a CFL in her child’s bedroom and had to seal off the room and hire an expert to do $2,000 worth of cleanup. Read the whole article. The Department of Environmental Protection says that you can clean up broken CFLs safely using household materials. The official who inspected the child's room was probably following guidelines for cleaning up broken thermometers, which contain 100 or more times as much mercury as CFLs.

Read more on mercury and CFLS. The link also contains disposal and cleanup guidelines.

Want your CFL light to look like incandescent light? Recently, manufacturers started adding information about “color temperature” to the bulb’s packaging. The color of the light is represented by a number in K units. The higher the number, the bluer the light. “Soft” light CFLs range from 2700 to 3000 K, while bulbs with bluer light that mimics daylight are 5000 K or higher.

Some purchasing guidelines:

• 25-watt incandescent = 7-watt compact fluorescent
• 40-watt incandescent = 11-watt compact fluorescent
• 60-watt incandescent = 15-watt compact fluorescent
• 75+-watt incandescent = 18-watt compact fluorescent
• 100-watt incandescent = 23-watt compact fluorescent

Ordinary CFLs won't work with dimmer switches. Use a CFL specially designed for dimmers.
Three-way CFLs are also available.

Read an exhaustive Popular Mechanics evaluation of CFLs and brand comparisons. The evaluation's test participants actually rated today's CFLs as having BETTER light quality than incandescents.

Find out more:
18Seconds.org
EnergyStar (Take the Energy Star quiz)
Department of Energy
EnvironmentalDefense.org (Tips on choosing and using CFLs)
Wikipedia
Fast Company article
CFLBulbs.com
Where to recycle your bulbs