Since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of mexico on April 20th, the estimated fallout has increased rapidly.  BP initially claimed the rate of spillage to be around 1,000 barrels of oil per day but we are slowly coming to the realization that this will be one of the largest spills of all time.  Whilst BP continues to attempt to downplay the media reaction, the Flow Rate Technical Group has upped the estimate of the flow rate to between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels every day.  To put this in perspective the spill has already far eclipsed the Exxon Valdez disaster, previously the largest spill in US history.  Instead, this flow rate is approximately equivalent to an Exxon Valdez sized disaster every single week.

We’ve put together the above graph to help visualize the extent of the spill.  Current estimates of Deepwater Horizon put it between 2.1 & 3.7 million barrels, which mean some believe it is already larger than the largest historic spill from a well: Ixtoc I which took place place in Mexico in 1979.  The graphic also shows how small the Exxon Valdez disaster was in comparison.

The largest ocean spill of all time took place during the first gulf war, when Iraqi forces dumped the oil from a series of tankers in the Persian Gulf in an attempt to prevent the advance of US marines.  However, this is no longer stands that much taller and its looking increasingly possible that this could be exceeded.

The only larger spill in history was on land, in California, when the Lakeview Oil Company caused a huge underground oil reserve to erupt whilst searching for Natural gas in 1909.  The resulting spill is estimated at around 9 million barrels, which sadly isn’t out of the question for the current spill.  Hard to understand how BP exec Tony Hayward deems it acceptable to find time to sail whilst the fishermen of the Gulf remain rooted to shore.

1. Evidence of another oil plume has been found by the University of South Florida.

2. California takes the great step of banning plastic bags from retail stores and imposes a minimum fee on paper ones.

3. New study shows Arctic see ice is at its lowest point in thousands of years.

4. OpenPeak gets $52 million in funding for energy management products, with a focus on touch screen interfaces.

5. BP buys up the adds on Google for searches related to the oil spill to direct traffic to their website, rather than 3rd parties.  Witness a simple search for “Oil Spill”.

Here’s The Story of Bottled Water; a brief look at how drinks manufacturers managed to convince us to pay for bottled water.

So in honor of World Water Day say “No!” to bottled water, grab a reusable bottle and home water filter, and lobby your local government to invest in our public water infrastructure.

On Saturday Plastiki, a boat made of 12,000 plastic bottles, set sail from San Francisco on its 11,000 mile voyage to Australia. Plastiki is a unique 60 ft catamaran made of post-consumer recycled plastic bottles and other recycled plastic materials. The main purpose of the voyage is to raise awareness of marine pollution.

On its route Plastiki will sail across the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive sea of rubbish floating just below the ocean surface between California and Hawaii. Stretching over an area the size of the continental US, the Garbage Patch is estimated to contain up to 100 million tones of trash. Most of the refuse consists of small particles, held in suspension just below the water’s surface. It is therefore hard to depict the scale of the problem with a simple photograph, so research together with high profile voyages like Plastiki’s are needed.

You can track the crews’ progress here; and read their blog guilt free, as their laptops are powered by an exercise bike.
http://www.theplastiki.com/trackplastiki/
(This page has “Fact: Roughly 50% of all plastic products end up in the ocean”. This seems very high to me – I can’t imagine a mechanism that would allow so much plastic would get from our landfills to the sea. Perhaps they mean 50% of all marine refuse is plastic. If anyone finds a source let us know in the comments)

1. Ethical consumers less likely to be kind and more likely to steal, study finds – Guardian.

2. Bluefin tuna fails to make UN’s list of protected fish.

3. NYTimes reports that more Saudi Oil goes to China Than to U.S

4. Could McDonald’s replace beef burgers with seitan?

5. Advancements made by Canadian company in CO2 capture by algae.

My Emissions Exchange is a new market place that enables you to sell reductions you make in energy use as credits to people and organizations that are looking to offset their carbon footprint.  The service works by tracking your energy bills and calculating any reduction in energy use that you manage to make.  Savings that you do make can then be sold by My Emissions Exchange on your behalf or you also have the option of donating them to an organization of your choice.

The first thing to do when you sign up to the service is to set your baseline usage over the past 12 months.  You enter your energy data manually on the site but once you do this you must ‘lock it in’, after which it can only be changed by MyEex staff.  You will need to make copies of your energy bills and send them in to be verified.  The process isn’t entirely fluid, but the verification of carbon credits is extremely important.  False claims of carbon savings, e.g. when people tried to get paid for energy savings that would have happened anyway. This is the concept of additionality and is a challenge for all sellers of legitimate carbon credits.

Its also important that 12 months of data is used to create the baseline so that corrections can be made for seasonal variations.  In other words, if you live in a cold climate you can’t claim you have reduced your energy in the summer just because you are using less heating than during the winter.  In order to actually claim that an energy saving has been made, you need to demonstrate that your usage is lower in comparison to the same month from the previous year.

Much like the service EarthAid we recently reviewed, the next step is to go about reducing your energy usage.  The site provides some tips and resources to enable you to do this.  There is enough information to cover all the important basics which are where the most important savings can occur.  They are also categorized and contain estimates of the amount of energy/monetary savings you can expect from them, which can help you prioritize your actions.

If you manage to achieve savings over the comparable month from the previous year, then comes the payoff.  Once MyEEx verifies your savings they will certify and broker the trade.  And how much can users stand to gain?  Tami and Randy Wilson of Harrisburg, Pa received $17.50 for the metric ton of carbon dioxide that they saved, which would seem to compare reasonably favorably to market estimates.  A recent study from the Environmental Protection Agency suggested prices between $13 and $26 indicating there should be demand for carbon credits available on the MyEEx marketplace. Of course, users also stand to benefit from reduced energy bills.

My Emissions Exchange is a for profit company and currently take 20% commission on trades.  Project manager Paul Herrgesell believes the economic incentive is an important one, saying that MyEEx

“is a system that incentivizes you to save energy on a personal level and aligns with your economic interests”

Ensuring that energy savings are accurate and legitimate is a challenge that MyEEx will have to face.  Verifying actual energy bills seems like a reasonable way to do this, but is still potentially vulnerable to some types of fraud.  However, I don’t consider this to be in anyway insurmountable.  There are many industries which have to cope with an inability to extensively audit at such a granular level.  Instead, researching an appropriate quantifier is all that required.  For example, if you can verify that 1 credit in 100 is fraudulent, then the market price for credits on the MyEEx exchange would just be 99% of the price on the worldwide carbon market.

Challenges aside, My Emissions Exchange is a very exciting prospect with the potential to be an industry disruptor.  I’m really looking forward to seeing how the service develops and how the market at large reacts to what this company are doing.

1.  China, the good: NYTimes claims China is leading the renewable energy race.

2. China, the bad: Mark Lynas asks, ‘How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room‘.

3. Apple launches environmental accountability section on their site: http://www.apple.com/environment.

4. Water supplied to more than 49 million people since 2004 has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals.

5. The Onion ponders the effects of throwing away a single plastic bottle, by asking 30 million people.

Back since Google PowerMeter was first announced I had been excited to try it out.  Initially PowerMeter was only available from Utility providers that had partnered with Google.  Unfortunately the energy provider we use in our California office was not one of these and we started to consider switching just so that we could take PowerMeter for a spin.  Then Google announced that the PowerMeter service would become available to those who use select energy monitoring devices, the first being the TED 5000.  Great, I ordered one of these immediately, but too quickly to even read the small print which says that the TED 5000 will only work with 2-phase power supplies.  Inevitably, when I checked ours I found it is a 3-phase system and thus incompatible.  Of course, all of this only served to increase my anticipation.

So, when UK company AlertMe was announced as the second device partner, I finally got my chance to try out the elusive service.  AlertMe’s energy monitoring gadget is designed to monitor in real-time how much electricity you are using.  The system comes in two parts, the first being the ‘Meter Reader and Transmitter’.  This consists of a clip that attaches around your main electricity line.  Not an electrical connection though, it simply sits outside the wire’s shielding.  The clip is connected to a transmitter which will send the meter readings wirelessly to the second part of the system, the ‘Nano Hub’.  This gadget will receive these meter readings and via an ethernet cable will send your energy data over the web for you to access 24/7 from anywhere.

In addition to allowing you access to Google PowerMeter, AlertMe also provide their own dashboard to view your data, which is very functional.  Below you can see the initial snapshot view of whats going on.  You can see clearly your current electricity draw and a calculation of what it has cost you so far for the day.  Your personal cost per KWHr and currency is fully customizable.  The history feature is also quite detailed, you can view a graph of energy use for anywhere from one day to an entire year.  It can also be downloaded as a spreadsheet (csv).  Data is updated every 5 minutes so you can get a very detailed break down of your energy usage habits.  For example, you can clearly see peaks in the graph when your heating kicks in or when you put the kettle on for your morning cup of coffee.

The Alert Me Dashboard

Setting up the system to interface with Google PowerMeter is straightforward, it just requires you to link your google account to your AlertMe data.  Once this is set up, your data will be sent to Google every 15 minutes or so and will be viewable as a gadget on your iGoogle homepage.  The current version of PowerMeter is rather basic and centers around a simple graph view of your energy use.  It’s viewable by day, week or month as you can see in the snapshot.  The darker green line in each column represents the energy level that your usage never fell below.  Google calls this your ‘Always on’ usage and they emphasize this as it is a very good place for people to start reducing their energy use.  It represents all those gadget chargers that we leave plugged in continually, unnecessary usage for devices in standby mode and lights that are never switched off, to name just a few sources.  It’s a key target because a great deal of this is completely wasteful.

Google PowerMeter Dashboard

The other key feature Google PowerMeter includes is a comparison to your energy usage history (AlertMe does this also).  Its a great tool for charting your progress and a constant reminder of the need to improve your energy efficiency and cut out waste.  It’s interesting to note that originally in place of this Google had a feature that would allow you to see how your energy use compares to others.  However, they removed this tool as it simply wasn’t accurate and relevant enough.  It’s possible that they will re-enable this feature when they have more user data to compare your usage to, because without personalization comparing energy use is meaningless.  You can’t compare data from someone who lives in a sub-zero climate with someone who lives somewhere warmer as they have very different energy needs.  They revealed earlier this week that they only have “a few thousand users” currently, but that is sure to grow now that they have device partners like AlertMe and TED.

Overall the AlertMe system has been fantastic for me.  The setup was a breeze in comparison to other systems such as our DIY efforts or the TED 5000, where you actually have to make electrical connections.  Admittedly this provides greater functionality as it can also measure outgoing electricity if, for example, you operate solar panels which will send excess electricity on to the grid.  However, I think many users who don’t have this requirement will take heart from the simplicity of the AlertMe’s system.  It’s was easy for me to set it up but if you have any doubts at all I suggest you get a qualified electrician.  Unfortunately, the AlertMe system is only currently available in the UK but a company spokesman said they are working on a US version and hope to have it before 2010 is out.

The Alert Me Energy kit

EarthAid is a brand new system designed to help you monitor your energy usage and encourage you to reduce it. They provide a database of energy saving tips and users who carry these out successfully will receive points for the energy that they save.  This applies not just to electricity use, but both water and gas as well.  The service ties in with your online account for your utility providers so will track your energy use automatically.  Points can be exchanged for rewards from the partner network that EarthAid has set up.  Usefully, they also provide information on the various tax incentives that are applicable.  For example, if one of the actions you are considering is purchasing a new Energy Star qualified refrigerator they will link to the relevant tax rebates that you are entitled to.

Sign up is free, and the company makes clear that they intend to keep it that way.  The first thing that you need to do is link your energy accounts.  You can select your utility providers from a pre populated drop down menu and enter your login details.  Obviously, your utility provider will need to provide online access to your bills, but from a few trials on their system it seems that the majority of providers do offer this.  If your provider doesn’t allow this, I suggest you contact them because the sooner we can escape the black box of energy billing, the better.  If you successfully link your energy bills then your data will be fed into EarthAid and you can monitor your energy usage, similarly to Google PowerMeter.

EarthAid Screen Shot

After accessing your energy data, the next step is to go about reducing it.  EarthAid make this easy by providing a sortable list of energy saving tips, categorized by the cost, the potential energy savings and the work required to make them happen.  Again, this applies to electricity, water and gas so if you are only interested in starting with one of these energy sources, or only have access to an online account for one of them then you can filter the tips for whichever one you need.  The tips are plentiful and useful, although I’m sure that many more will be added in due course.  Each tip also links to any incentives that are available. You can mark off the tips that you have completed and save others to a personalized energy saving to-do list, which is a nice touch.

The social features are also interesting.  You can add friends and compare your energy usage and savings to theirs, which for the competitive people out there is only end up in even greater energy savings.  There is also scope for some very interesting aggregation of data.  You can see how your energy usage compares to the average.  At this early stage, this average is calculated based on homes in all locations and of all sizes, which temporarily limits comparisons, but this will become more personalized and relevant as the service increases its user base.  It’s also interesting to see the monthly and seasonal fluctuations in average energy use, which quite clearly peaks in both Winter and Summer, presumably for heating and air conditioning respectively.

Throughout all of this, it must be noted that the design and interface are fantastic.  The set up is straightforward and your energy data is displayed in attractive tables and graphs.  Navigation is easy and there are plenty of tools to help you find the energy saving ideas that are right for you.  The integration with energy utility providers is also impressive, making it incredibly easy to analyze your energy use.

So, what rewards are available?  As you build up your points you can exchange them for various offers made by businesses around the country.  These tend to be discounts on products or services from organizations that have an eco/environmental theme.  For example, 15% off CFL bulbs or 10% off eco-consultation services.  They tend to be geo-located so you will be paired up with reward partners that are in your area.  As more and more partners sign up the offers will become more extensive and possibly more competitive.   This is where the EarthAid business model kicks in as partners will have to pay for the exposure being a partner brings them.  There is also an accompanying e-commerce site that sells much of the equipment required to save energy.  For example, when you read the tip suggesting you switch out incandescent bulbs for energy saving CFL ones, they link to the EarthAid Kit site where you can purchase them, much like we do.

EarthAid also talk about the possibility of using the energy saved by its customers as offsets to be sold on a carbon market, which is an interesting idea to say the least.  I get the impression they are still working on the finer details of this, but it could be important.  Potentially, contracting people to reduce the energy they use is as valid a carbon offsetting technology as reforestation or carbon capture.  It’s an idea we’ve seen others such as MyEmissionsExchange, but there will be the usual obstacle of needing a way to ensure that carbon offsets aren’t granted for savings that would have happened anyway.  Anyway, the EarthAid service is great right now, with enormous potential for the future as it goes.  I suggest you sign up right now and check it out for yourself.

These days you can’t go anywhere without stumbling over someone who’s attention is deeply invested in their beloved iPhone.  I’ve managed to avoid this trend so far (I’m an android), but I’ve managed to test out a number of green and environmental iPhone apps on my old iPod touch.  Whether the ubiquity of these gadgets and gizmos is a positive for the environment is a debate we will save for a rainy day.  There’s no doubt that a lot of additional electronic waste is produced, but there are undoubtedly situations where these items can be helpful, e.g. cutting down on travel needs or being used as an alternative to newspapers.  With out further ado, let’s get to it:

CFL Light Bulb Savings Calculator

The CFL Savings calculator is a very simple app that will allow you to calculate just how much money you can save by switching energy intensive incandescent bulbs for CFL ones.  CFL bulbs represent a far more energy and money sensitive option over traditional incandescent bulbs.  Choose how many bulbs you have and your location, which it uses to provide the cost per kWHr and it will calculate your savings.  You can also enter the cost of each bulb and the amount of hours per day you use them.  The app is great as it makes it clear what a no brainer it is to switch to CFL bulbs.

• Price: $1.99
• Free Version Available?: No

3rd Whale’s FindGreen

FindGreen has been described as Yelp for the environment.  Quite simply it is a guide-book to all the great environmental and sustainable resources that surround you.  The app auto locates you using GPS and with 60,000 listings makes it a breeze to find anything from yoga studios to bicycle shops or organic restaurants in your vicinity.  Features include the ability to submit new listings and rate existing ones.  The ‘green tip of the day’ function is also a very nice touch.

• Price: FREE
• Free Version Available?: Yes

A Real Tree

The name really says it all for this incredibly straight forward iPhone app.  Quite simply, when you purchase this app for $0.99, one tree will be planted in the real world.  The tree will be planted in one of 12 countries that are currently fighting deforestation.  All of these countries are located in tropical regions where the climate benefits from tree planting are maximized.  When you purchase a real tree, or one for a friend, the app will furnish you with a ‘virtual’ tree (as pictured) which you can display proudly on your Facebook page.

• Price: $0.99
• Free Version Available?: Nope, just buy the tree!

Amazon Kindle for iPhone

Another simple, but effective app.  This app from Amazon allows you to read the books you have purchased for your Kindle, Amazon’s popular eBook reader.  Whilst the small size of the iPhone doesn’t really provide an optimal interface for reading it can be useful for reading a few pages on the go.  The app will sync the page that you are on with your Kindle, so it is easy to pick up just where you left off.  eBooks are set to have a big future in reducing the amount of paper we use and tools like these are important for making that transition.

• Price: FREE
• Free Version Available?: Yes

Clear Standards Carbon Tracker

The idea behind this carbon tracker is that it will use the iPhone’s in-built GPS system to track your movements and use this to calculate your carbon footprint.  The limitation here with the iPhone is that you cannot run applications in the background, so you will have to have this app open, or there will be a fair amount of data to enter manually.  If you can get over this hurdle, it’s a great tool to help you reduce your carbon emissions.  It allows you to set monthly goals and motivates you to keep them each time you open the app.

• Price: FREE
• Free Version Available?: Yes