In a CRT monitor, this idea is perfectly plausible. The brightness of the screen is directly related to the energy invested in accelerating electrons at a phosphor screen. However, in a LCD monitor, the overall power consumption is dominated by the brightness of the cold-cathode tubes backlighting the screen. Therefore, with CRT monitors on their way out, the power savings is only going to be seen for those of you browsing the internet in the stone age. In case you’d like to try it out, though, a black-colored version of the popular search page has been constructed by heap media, aptly named “blackle.” The page even goes so far as to feature very dark text as well as a jet-black background. It looks cool, energy savings aside.While it is true that you will still save *some* energy by using Blackle, it should be noted that the savings on an LCD screen are negligible at best. To save energy while using an LCD screen, just turn the brightness down.

In a typical laptop computer, about 25% of the energy expended is used to backlight the screen. Earlier this year, Apple computers released their first professional laptop with a high-efficiency LED backlight conveniently timed in response to some high-profile public accusations against Apple by none-other than Green-peace. (Greenpeace listed Apple as one of the worst companies in regards to enviornmentalism for things like recycling, the use of toxic chemicals in its products, etc. and authored a clever website to encourage macintosh fan-boys and girls to put pressure on their computer (and ipod) producer of choice. Apple has since significantly improved on the GP meter by outlining concrete plans for change in their manufacturing practice, and I believe this is due in large part to Apple’s economic interest in pleasing its consumer base, for which the environment is an important issue. Nevertheless, Sony beat apple to the punch with the first LED backlit laptop screen months earlier.

Further information about the wattage required to display a specific color is published by the department of energy, who recommends setting your desktop background to a dark color in order to save energy all day long (provided you don’t open any windows!) and identifies which screen savers are the most energy efficient. The article does not tackle the discrepancy with LCD and LED monitors, however it does indicate the ultimate monitor energy saver; turn it off.

As for thingsicando.org’s testing, I am waiting to borrow a friend’s power meter so that I can test out the theory with my own displays. As I recall, a 20″ LCD screen drew about 40 watts the last time I tested it, but I didn’t give any consideration to the colors displayed. I am planning on testing a 17″, 20″ and 24″ LCD display in order to see if the hypothesis holds any water with the current technology.Where blackle could really help out are the thousands of library clusters, computer labs and internet cafes world-wide still using CRT monitors. In that spirit, I would encourage any admins reading this to give setting your desktops to a dark color a try in your lab and report back any change in energy consumption.

What to do…

So inconclusion, here is what you can REALLY do when designing a website to make it more eco-friendly: Don’t allow flash-based ads to be displayed on your pages.  Yes, flash ads look really cool, but unfortunately, the plugins that drive such ads cause the processor usage in my computer to jump way beyond what is reasonable for displaying a website, sometimes hitting 100%.  With many computers running power-hungry  processors, consuming upwards of 80 watts, loading a page on myspace.com for instance makes my browser beg for mercy.  Poorly coded flash ads are the worst, however, sabotaging processor performance and burning through precious energy at the same time.  As a consumer, you have a choice to disable flash content in your browser’s preferences.  There is also a plugin for firefox that allows you to set the color scheme of every webpage you visit to dark colors in the event you are still pushing your CRT to the limit.

A couple of websites that Guster recommends include this website that plants trees for you AND stops junk snailmail. And to be carbon neutral, you can buy energy offsets here. It has calculators to show you how much energy you use doing normal stuff, like driving your car or heating/cooling your home.

Eco-conscious and rockin’, Guster makes going green look easy. Check out all their green deeds on the band’s website, and listen to a little music while you’re there, too. They’re good.

Effecting change in your everyday household energy menu is tough if you don’t know what you’re currently using. With that in mind, let me introduce:

The Kill-a-watt

The kill-a-watt is a handy little device that can be picked up for as little as $30. There are more sophisticated devices on the market, but this one is a quick, cheap energy sleuth and is easily found on the internet, and in brick&mortar stores.

I borrowed mine from a good friend who uses it to gauge the energy usage of his server farms.

The units operation is simple. Just plug it in to an avaliable wall socket, and plug the device you want to sleuth into the 3-prong plug on the unit’s face.

You can easily discern the power draw from constant rate devices like lamps, electric heaters and fans using the “watt” setting. For instance, I discovered that the lamp in my living room pulls 65 watts. The compact fluorescent light-bulb (CFL) I purchased to replace it draws only 12 watts and is visually brighter. Other CFL’s in use in my apartment draw as little as 5 watts, although they are not quite as bright.

A plan

This investigation has revealed to me that the 4 lightbulbs I use the most in my house are drawing the most power. This is kind of ironic considering how I purchased a 5-pack of CFL’s from home depot in the hope of reducing my energy bills. Beginning march 1, I am going to replace the 5 remaining incandescents in my household with CFL bulbs. At the end of the month, I will reveal what impact (if any) that these bulbs made on my monthly power consumption.

a quick calculation reveals that replacing each 65-watt bulb with a 12-watt equivalent will use 19% of the power of my current bulbs. I am planning on spending about $2 per bulb for replacements

The Star

Another comparison I wanted to make was between the television technologies in my apartment. I have a sanyo TV in the living room which draws between 45 and 70 watts, depending on the volume of the television, and the picture on-screen. Investigating the LCD television in my bedroom, I discovered that it draws a mere 20 watts and is just as bright. The bedroom tv (A Cornea tv/monitor) is based on a relatively old version of LCD technology, being manufactured in 2001, and I would expect a modern LCD to draw even less power. However, sleuthing my desktop monitor (a 20″ Spectre LCD), reveals a steady power draw of 54 watts (1 watt in standby mode). I am surprised that my LCD monitor draws approximately the same power as my CRT-based tv!

LCD tvs and monitors main power draw is due to the cold-cathode tubes (usually 4) behind the transparent screen. The power requirements should be theoretically less than that of a CRT display. Further investigation is needed to determine whether LCD display manufacturers are not taking advantage of possible energy savings.

This brings me to my next topic. New energy star specifications have been unveiled earlier this year to indicate to consumers which computers are energy efficient in their class. C|net has an easy-to-read explanation of the new requirements for the energy star. Note that there is currently no energy star available to the server class of computers. (This means you, google.)

Little specifics can be discerned in reading that page other than the following:

This year, the Academy, the Oscar telecast producer Laura Ziskin and the entire production team endeavored to select supplies and services with a sensitivity toward reducing the threats we face from global warming, species extinction, deforestation, toxic waste, and hazardous chemicals in our water and food. With guidance and assistance from the Natural Resources Defense Council, a non-partisan environmental and advocacy organization, we learned that it was easy (and often cost effective) to make simple changes to reduce Oscar’s ecological footprint. Here are a few of the things we learned (with help from the NRDC website www.nrdc.org):

So at least it’s a step in the right direction.  If nothing else, a mainstream, highly publicised event has made a statement with their wallet, instead of just their opinions.

In other news, I found “organic” frosted mini wheats for sale in a local supermarket.  Having found  an “organic” frozen pizza the month before, I’m not sure what to think about this, but at least I’m not surprised.  The point I’m trying to make is, just because someone labels their product or event with an eco-positive tag doesn’t really mean much without discolsure.  For instance, “All-natural 7-up”, which contains high fructose corn syrup, a notoriously industrialized food additive.

So, science lesson time… How does a lightbulb work?

In a good ol’ incandescent, a filament is resistance heated until it is white hot (just like your toaster oven) and produces the yellow-y glow we’ve come to know and love everytime we flip on the switch. In CFLs, gases in the bulb are excited by electric field and create ultraviolet light which reacts with a phosphor coating inside the bulb to produce visible light. Since waste heat isn’t produced in mass quantity, it’s a much more energy efficient process. The light from CFLs tends to be more of a white-ish or blue-ish hue. CFLs also take a couple of seconds to “warm up,” so give them a minute or two to get to their full brightness.

editor’s note: Floursecents also last much longer than their incandescent counerparts. Incandescent lights fail quickly due to a phenomenon known as grain growth. At higher temperatures (filaments soar past 1000 Farenheit), the “Grains”, or particles, that make up the metal wire will grow in size, canabilizing neighboring grains without mercy, until they take up the entire thickness of the wire, and it looks like bamboo. Larger grains result in a weaker material. At this point, it is very easy for the filament to snap, with a tiny jolt or vibration. Using a thicker filament requires higher power draw to get the same light production, so incandescent technology is pretty much lost the battle in this regard.

Next question… why should you care?

Australia’s not the only government wanting to pass legislation on what kind of light bulbs should be used within its borders. The “How Many Legislators Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb Act” is the brainchild of California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine. If his legislation is passed, incandescent lights in California will be replaced with CFLs by 2012. There is similar legislation in the works in other states, including New Jersey.

How does this change effect the environment?

The Rocky Mountain Institute, a US energy research facility, estimates that replacing a 75-watt incandescent with a 20-watt CFL saves 1300 lbs of carbon dioxide over the life of the bulb.* The Australian Environment Minister projected that by 2015, the switch from incandescents to CFLs would reduce Australia’s greenhouse emissions by four million tons per year and reduce the electricity consumption by the continent five fold. Also, the incandescent bulb life is around 750 hours, compared to the 10,000 hour bulb life of a CFL. Sure, they’re a little more expensive up front, but they last a ridiculously long time.

editor’s note: 1300 lbs of CO2 is a lot. Buring one gallon of gasoline in the engine of your car, for instance, produces 20.8 lbs of CO2. That’s about 4 tanks of gas.

Story time…

My husband and I bought a house over the summer and he asked our builder to replace the would-be incandescents with CFLs. My husband works at GE, and part of their eco-magination mentality is CFL use. Honestly, you can’t really tell the difference in the amount of light that’s generated. And they’re made in the right shapes and wattages for use in almost any light fixture in the house. Other than the couple of seconds it takes for the CFLs to get going, the brightness is on par with traditional lighting. The big difference is when you see your energy bill. CFLs will save you money over the long haul. Period.

So, if you don’t want to change out our lightbulbs to save the environment or because big government tells you to, do it to save a couple bucks on your electricity bill each month. It’s okay to be selfish once and awhile.

For more information on CFLs, check out GE Lighting’s site.

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The earth is a big carefully balanced, symbiotic relationship.

Plants breathe (well, absorb) Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They store the carbon in the form of yummy carbohydrates. They then expel oxygen gas as a waste product. Eventually the plant dies, and is reincorporated into the earth by smaller organisms known as decomposer. I like to call the little critters composters.

Human beings (along with all other known life-forms on the planet) are made up of five major elements: Carbon, oxygen, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen. There are a few others required for us to metabolize and otherwise be alive, but we’re mostly built out of hydrocarbon chains (polymers). When we eat, (plants and other animals), we consume carbon, and when we breathe in, we consume oxygen. When we breathe out, we release water and carbon dioxide. In between, energy is transferred through a complicated process, from chemical bonds, into ATP, a sort of body-energy-currency.

Factories that produce compact discs (and other products) also release carbon dioxide. Lots of it. So much in fact, that there are national and international regulations to stem overproduction of the gas.

Which brings us back to symbiosis: We need plants for oxygen, they need us for CO2.

We haven’t created a factory-symbiot thing that takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and converts it into something useful yet (although progress with algae has been made), so factories don’t have a symbiotic counterpart like we do. This results in a net release of CO2, a known greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. It contributes to global warming, and because CD’s are made of plastic, it also contributes to the need for petroleum. Yes, music is a petroleum based product, don’t fool yourself.

certain artists know about this (the first album cover I read this on was Dido:Life for rent). They are planting trees to make up for the CO2 produced by the production and transport of their albums into the hands of consumers. These are known as “carbon-neutral” albums. It would be nice to see a big-5 record company make a policy like this instead of requiring the artists to finance it themselves. However, they’re too busy making record profits year after year and suing dead people, and single mothers with no internet connection to care about their role in the carbon cycle. (I wonder if I burned a bridge by saying that, but I doubt they read this silly little blog).

There is a music format that creates very little CO2: Digital Downloads
Digital copies don’t create waste like their counterparts irl* .
Who buys Digital Music?

Digital services can actually save money for a frequent music purchaser. The biggest downside to the all-you-can-eat music services is the selection. Local bands will not be found, and you don’t get to own the music if the service goes out of business, as is wont to happen in this business.

iTunes is far and away the big success in the digital music download industry. That being said, a new report reveals that most iPod users don’t use the music store…

Personally, I like CD’s. A lot. In fact, I haven’t bought a single digital song or movie download. Ever.

You can still have your CD’s, and be carbon-neutral if you buy used copies. Although not as effective as buying digital music, it effectively halves the resource use by allowing at least 2 people to enjoy, or discard the physical manifestation of the record instead of the usual one. It also helps fuel a cottage industry for retired sound guys and radio dj’s.

CD’s don’t often end up in landfills because their content is generally valuable enough to keep them in the second hand market (unless scratched beyond repair). That is, except for aol cd’s! No, they don’t really make good coasters. Really.

A new website, launched in June, lala.com, allows you to swap cd’s with others online. You make a list of CD’s you own, and CD’s you want, and then make offers for trade with other users. Each CD transaction costs you $1.75 (incl. shipping) and includes prepaid shipping envelopes a. la. netflix. Wired reports that artists will receive a percentage of the transactions, although I haven’t found confirmation of this on the lala website, they do have the Z-foundation, which may be what they were talking about; a sort of co-op for musicians.
Steal CD’s?

There was once a program on the internet with the purpose to allow internet thieves (normal people with Napster accounts) to pay music artists directly for their music downloads. This relied on the honor system, and as there is no honor among thieves, and not enough advertising for this system, it didn’t work. Lucky for you, there is iTunes. Unluckily for you, you can’t pay artist prices. (Artists make very little from CD sales, much like they make very little from digital music downloads, but that’s the industry…)

*irl=in real life. as in:

Tommenator4759: I totally went out with a level 4 WoW sorceress, irl. Her name was shr3klvr492.
Roflcopter69: lolz. That’s no moon, it’s a space station!

Regardless of what the league of incredible biker gentlemen may say, you can start biking to work tomorrow, and every day of the year!

There are a few reasons you might start riding your bike to work

1. To look cooler than everyone else
2. To smell better than everyone else
3. Elitist self-gratification

These are the wrong reasons.

Here are some better reasons

1. Gas is expensive ($3/gallon)
2. I want to get in shape!
3. Chicks hate bikes.

Reason number one: Gas is Expensive! (so is parking) (so are parking tickets)

Let me share my personal experiences biking to work, as an example. All of the data in this article is real, and verified by my bike’s odometer/stopwatch and car’s in-dash computer.

My current workplace is only 2 miles away. Including stoplights, stop-signs, and slow traffic, it takes me about 8 minutes to drive to work. In 8 minutes of stop-and-go traffic, the engine doesn’t warm up enough to become very efficient (Remember the carnot cycle?*) and my in-dash computer tells me that gas economy has dropped off significantly. In fact, it damn near cuts in half. (30 mpg becomes 16, which is good, for an SUV. I don’t drive a SUV, however, I drive a tiny Swedish car**, and my turbo is partly to blame for the terrible economy drop-off)

Let’s do a quick calculation:

In order for me to drive to work and back, it costs 1/4 gallon of gasoline. This translates to $0.75. So, each time I ride to work instead of driving, i save $0.75 I would have otherwise spent on fuel. We will neglect other car maintenance costs for now.

It takes me between 5 and 15 minutes to ride to work, according to my stopwatch. The most common time is 9 minutes. 2*(9-8)=2 minutes net time invested in riding my bike that would have otherwise been spent sleeping in. Some quick division reveals that I am making $0.75 every 2 minutes of extra time, so my extra time is making me $.75 x 30 = $22.50 per hour!¤
This is hard to beat working at a fast-food joint. The only downside is that I only ride to work on weekdays; 20 times a month (on average), which means I am only making $15 per month by riding exclusively to work.

¤If paid for the entire effort of riding to work, however, the wage per hour is $4.50, which is easily beaten by working at a fast-food joint.

break even

I bought my bike (used) for $125. I have since put about $150 into fixing it up and making it look fast. Safety equipment (a definite must) put me back $60. My total investment is $335.00. At $15/month made in gasoline savings, My break-even point should be 22 months. The real clincher is, parking permits at my place of business cost between $75 and $340 per year. Parking convenient to my office is of the $340 variety as the $75 and $175 permits require walking about a mile to my office.

The permit cost is a “sunk cost”, meaning that I have to pay for it up front, but I am not charged each time I use it. From this standpoint, parking costs less than a dollar a day, but it effectively doubles my return investment on the bike. With the cheap parking permit, my investment pays back after 18 months, and with the expensive, but convenient parking permit, my investment pays off immediately.

Reason Number Two: I want to get in shape!
20 minutes of round-trip bike riding is just about right for a decent cardiovascular workout. Couple this with a lunch-time ride of another 10-20 and you’re getting your workout out of the way before you get home. If your business has gymnasium facilities, this is even easier to accomplish, and you have the added benefit of free, usable showers when you show up in the morning, gleaming with sweat from your bike-ride.

All told, riding for 20 minutes between 12 and 14 miles per hour will burn about 300 calories if you are as heavy as I am. The number of calories per hour burned reduces as your weight goes down. source 1 source 2

Reason Number Three: Chicks hate bikes.

I saw this on a tshirt once, so it must be true.

Seriously though, every gallon of gasoline you don’t burn prevents about 20.8 pounds of CO2, (a known greenhouse gas) from being emitted into the atmosphere.

But I don’t have a bike! (yes you do, it’s just not yours.)
You may have read all the way through this article and thought, “well, that’s nice, but I don’t have a bicycle. Boo Hoo.” Cut the self-pity already. You don’t even have to own a bicycle to get around on one! Community Bicycle Programs exist in many areas. If not your area, I apologize for berating you just now.

Special circumstances

If your commute requires more than 30 minutes to get to work, it may be time-prohibitive for you. In this case, I recommend taking public transportation, hitch-hiking***, or car-pooling**** as appropriate. For reference, 30 minutes on a bike is a range of about 6 miles, in city traffic.

*The Carnot Cycle, or Carnot Engine, is a definition from Thermodynamics, which states that no cyclic engine (like a steam engine, or internal combustion engine) can have perfect efficiency, but that efficiency increases as the temperature of the engine increases.

**driven by Maria Bellow’s character in the movie “Secret Window“. She gets to watch her boyfriend’s head get popped off with a shovel.

***Kidding. Don’t do this.

****That’s another article…