- What are the US's annual carbon emissions? How do they stack up against other major polluters?
- How many kilowatts does the US use annually?
- How many KWH does the average home use every month?
- How large would a solar array have to be to provide electricity for the entire US (let's ignore the storage question for this one)?
- How many watts of power does and average household use each year?
- How many average solar panels would be required, if working continuously, to meet all of a house's power requirements (assume ideal conditions and assume water is heated separately)?
- How many watts of power/mile are consumed by an electric car driving at 25, 45, and 60 miles/hour?
- Could one massive wind turbine produce enough energy to power a single household?
- How much power could one produce riding a stationary bicycle type power generator?
- How much CO2 does a lawn mower produce? a weed whacker? a rototiller? Leaf blower?
- How much oxygen does an average sized city tree produce? And how much CO2 does it consume? And how many trees are needed to provide enough O2 for one person?
- How is a unit of carbon measured when calculating the cost of manufacturing it?
- Describe an example of how embodied energy is used to justify a purchase?
- Is the energy required to recycle the different materials justifiable, vs. the energy used to produce the same product with new materials?
Friday, May 16, 2008
Here's a list of questions that I feel I should know the answer to - by heart - if I want to consider myself an advocate of clean energy.
Monday, May 5, 2008
I'm a lifetime Seattle resident, and so I never seriously considered moving out to the suburbs to get more house for my money. But alot of people have subscribed to the "drive until you qualify" method of buying a home. In other words, if you can't find the 3000 square foot house you want in Seattle, drive out farther until you find a 3000 sf house that you can afford. I always thought this was a little weird, since this inevitably means that people spend alot more time in their cars commuting to work, which means they a) spend more on gas, b) spend more on car maintenance, c) lose more of their day to sitting in traffic, and d) have to deal with *alot* more stress that comes from unpredictable commutes and traffic jams. My 3 years of crossing Lake Washington to work pretty much cemented my thinking about this - living close to where you work is a good thing, as each of the items I noted above has a cost (the worst one for me was the stress of the commute - need to be somewhere by a certain time? Throw it all out the window if you have to sit in traffic...).
Anyways, I always thought it would be cool if someone smarter than me put together the *real* cost of living farther out from where you work. Certainly you pay more money for your house if you live nearer to the city, where most jobs tend to be. But at what point does paying high prices for in-city homes outweigh the benefits of being close to work? And at what point does all the driving and commuting outweigh the savings one might get from buying a less expensive home farther out?
Well, the folks at the Center for Neighborhood Technology have finally put something out that lets people measure some of the costs of high priced homes versus a high priced commute.
The site is pretty cool, as it lets you view things like the average cost of housing + transportation for neighborhoods in some of the country's more populous regions. For example, I can see that living in Issaquah (a suburb of Seattle) has a similar cost of housing + transportation to living in my neighborhood in Seattle. And costs being equal, that tells me that I could make my decision on where to live based on the nearness of my place of employment, since that will cause me less commuting stress.
Now, the information is based on 2000 census data, and as a result it's not very current. I also don't think it takes into account the current cost of gas, which could make some locations far from centers of employment much more expensive than what the map shows. But it's a useful tool for comparing one area to another.
Here's the link: http://htaindex.cnt.org
Anyways, I always thought it would be cool if someone smarter than me put together the *real* cost of living farther out from where you work. Certainly you pay more money for your house if you live nearer to the city, where most jobs tend to be. But at what point does paying high prices for in-city homes outweigh the benefits of being close to work? And at what point does all the driving and commuting outweigh the savings one might get from buying a less expensive home farther out?
Well, the folks at the Center for Neighborhood Technology have finally put something out that lets people measure some of the costs of high priced homes versus a high priced commute.
The site is pretty cool, as it lets you view things like the average cost of housing + transportation for neighborhoods in some of the country's more populous regions. For example, I can see that living in Issaquah (a suburb of Seattle) has a similar cost of housing + transportation to living in my neighborhood in Seattle. And costs being equal, that tells me that I could make my decision on where to live based on the nearness of my place of employment, since that will cause me less commuting stress.
Now, the information is based on 2000 census data, and as a result it's not very current. I also don't think it takes into account the current cost of gas, which could make some locations far from centers of employment much more expensive than what the map shows. But it's a useful tool for comparing one area to another.
Here's the link: http://htaindex.cnt.org
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