Wow. Nickels does something right:

SEATTLE - Mayor Greg Nickels announced today the city of Seattle and other local agencies will participate in a yearlong demonstration project testing the performance of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles in an urban area. Thanks to funding and technical support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory (INL), matched by funding from program participants, 13 existing Priuses will be converted to plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) at a total cost of $156,000.

The project will test technology used to convert the second generation Priuses to 100 miles per gallon vehicles; test PHEV performance in an urban area; help evaluate PHEV-electric grid integration issues; and promote electricity as an alternative fuel for transportation.

Achieving up to 100 mpg, plug-in hybrid vehicles are just one more step in the city’s fight against climate change with the added benefit of ultimately reducing dependence on foreign oil. Expected greenhouse gas emissions from the PHEV Priuses in this demonstration project are 50 percent less than conventional Priuses. link

Via CalCars

This appears to be related to the mayor’s Seattle CAN (Climate Action Now) initiative, which looks like a big step in the right direction.

Hey, it’s Blog Action Day, the day bloggers who care about the environment are supposed to blog about it. Hope you didn’t find out too late (thanks, BoingBoing!)

Since just saying that it’s Blog Action Day doesn’t really contribute much (especially since most people won’t read this today), here are some thoughts that might actually help you reduce your water usage.

This is something of a lifehack, so forgive me if it’s a bit mundane and/or obvious.

When I’m washing dishes (which I do - I promised Amy I would before we got married), I try to make the water I use go as far as possible. Here’s how I do that. In defiance of the fact that there is a detergent called Cascade, I’m calling this the Cascade Method, since the idea is to get the water to cascade from one dish to another as much as possible. It has nothing to do with the detergent. Skip to the last step if you hate long lists.

• Put the biggest, dirtiest dishes in the sink first
• Open the dishwasher in preparation for loading and pick up the scrubber
• Turn on the water and quickly rinse any dishes that need it, using the scrubber to knock off the big food particles that will cause problems in the dishwasher (but don’t over-rinse!)
• Load the dishwasher, turning off the water as quickly as possible and with as little rinsing as necessary
  
• Once some big dishes are full of water, you can turn off the water and immerse smaller dishes in them for scrubbing
• If a big dish like a chili pot is getting the other dishes dirtier, scrub it a bit, dump it out, and continue
• After the dishwasher-able dishes are loaded, start washing the smaller items
• As you rinse each item, let the soapy water fill up another, as yet unwashed dish

That’s it. A stroke of genius it’s not, but hopefully it will save some water - and soap too - next time you’re doing dishes. Which if you’re a guy should be soon. Because if you’re single, chances are you haven’t done dishes in a while. And if you’re not single, your woman will appreciate it when you do the dishes.

…and just, for crying out loud, drink tap water.

Groups and individuals across the country are pledging to choose tap water over bottled water and we need your help!

You can help reverse this trend. At events and over online networks hundreds of thousands are supporting the efforts of local officials to reduce the environmental harm of bottled water by prioritizing public water systems. Taking the Think Outside the Bottle Pledge is quick, easy, and sends the message that water is a human right, not a commodity.

Bottled water corporations are changing the very way people think about water. Though many bottled water brands come from the same source as public tap water, they are marketed as somehow more pure. What’s more - bottled water corporations sell water back to the public at thousands of times the cost. Plastic bottles also require massive amounts of fossil fuels to manufacture and transport. Billions of these bottles wind up in landfills every year. Take the pledge!

Previously:

• Bottled Water is Bad. Bottled Water from Fiji is Really Bad.
• Water Has a Carbon Footprint
• Close the Loop on Food Packaging
• Wasteful Food Packaging

What do you think of this organization and their petition? I’m not sure what I think, but they’ve contacted me several times so I thought I’d post this and see what people think.

Amy and I were on the Harding campus today and were interviewed about our church planting efforts for a video that will be shown in chapel.

Afterward, we ate lunch in the student center. The sandwich shop’s fare was quite good. As we got ready to leave, though, we noticed that there was no place to recycle our glass and plastic beverage bottles. Not in the student center, not in the Heritage Center, not in the caf lobby. Nowhere outside, either.

We drove past the freshman girls’ dorm (Sears Hall) and saw a huge dumpster outside to hold all the move-in trash such as cardboard boxes from new microwaves. A huge amount of this material is recyclable - probably over 50 percent of move-in trash, which is mostly packaging.

I don’t know the economics of recycling vs. garbage in Searcy, but generally it’s cheaper to get rid of recycling than garbage - not to mention the environmental impact of all that unnecessary landfill-bound material.

It’s the 21st century. Is recycling really all that much to ask, even in a very red part of a very red state? We did it when we lived off-campus in Searcy our junior and senior years. Recycling is not exactly left-wing or fringe any more.

What would be a good way to get HU to recycle?

When I was in college, the student body leadership started a bike-sharing program to let people without their own bikes get to class faster. They were called ‘Bison Bikes’ after our school mascot, and painted in gold and black, the school colors.

Back then, the motive was to reduce driving from class to class and mitigate parking and traffic issues. Today, we’re more concerned about the environmental impact of too much driving.

Paris has started a bike-sharing program similar to Harding’s. The 10,000 bikes the’ve made available are being used around six times a day, for over a million trips so far.

The Bison Bikes were all stolen or destroyed within a month. After that, they became something of a campus joke. Let’s hope the Paris program(me) is more sustainable.

Of course, Paris has trains and a subway. T’would be nice.

Via CalCars:

Toyota Motor Company said Tuesday that it was testing hybrid vehicles with rechargeable batteries in the United States and Japan, setting up a direct challenge with General Motors to develop the industry’s first plug-in hybrids. more

This is great news. Plug-in hybrids, which let you charge your car overnight and only use gasoline when the (larger) batteries run out, could reduce the average driver’s need to fill up the gas tank to just a few times a year. You get the efficiency of an electric car with the flexibility to drive long distances using the gas engine if you need to.

Right now, we’re waiting on higher-capacity lithium ion batteries; Toyota is testing lower-capacity NiMH batteries for now.

Hopefully we’ll see production models by 2010. You can follow plug-in hybrid news via the CalCars Yahoo group.

I told you so. Fast Company tackles America’s illicit affair with bottled water:

Bottled water is the food phenomenon of our times. We–a generation raised on tap water and water fountains–drink a billion bottles of water a week, and we’re raising a generation that views tap water with disdain and water fountains with suspicion. We’ve come to pay good money–two or three or four times the cost of gasoline–for a product we have always gotten, and can still get, for free, from taps in our homes. link

The article is an eloquent, devastating assault on the wastefulness and hypocrisy of drinking bottled water in an age when so many in the world lack access to clean water, and when we claim to be so concerned about global warming. In an attempt to be healthy or look healthy, we pay more for water than for gasoline - water that’s no different from the tap water we can get for, according to my latest utility bill, $0.00385 per gallon.

Some shocking facts about the bottles:

Americans went through about 50 billion plastic water bottles last year, 167 for each person. Durable, lightweight containers manufactured just to be discarded. Water bottles are made of totally recyclable polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, so we share responsibility for their impact: Our recycling rate for PET is only 23%, which means we pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year–more than $1 billion worth of plastic.

Apparently, Fiji water (the kind in the square bottle) really is bottled in and shipped by ship and truck from the beautiful island of Fiji. Where many people get sick from a lack of clean water. Nice.

The author goes on to quote Peter Singer (ick) and John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, who talk about how bottled water is a choice. It’s not any more wrong than buying a Coke in a plastic bottle or paying for any other status symbol. The difference is that we can get bottled water for next to nothing by simply bottling it ourselves, in a reusable bottle such as a Nalgene.

While I was reading Amy facts from this article, she happened to be looking at these pictures from Chris Jordan. Scroll down to the third set, and you’ll see an image of two million plastic bottles - the number Americans consume every five minutes.

Adam at TerraBlog continues to crank out gems for the environmentally conscious. For the urban dweller who can take mass transit to work, he suggests, rather simply, carrying a book at all times, effectively dropping your commute time to zero:

But if you’ve got a good book, you’re never waiting. You’re reading. While this might seem an obvious point, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. As a frequent subway rider, I can say from experience that a good book will almost magically shrink your commute time to zero. It is not at all uncommon for me to be disappointed when I finally reach my destination, because it means pulling my nose out of my reading.

Perhaps you prefer other diversions. Maybe you’re a crossword puzzler or a sudoku fan. I’m a bit suspicious of these activities, actually. However enjoyable you find them, they seem like time-fillers. They may make your wait more bearable, in much the way that radio makes your drive more bearable, but you’re still killing time. A good book offers just a whole different kind of enjoyment. But others may disagree.

This points up one of the larger problems with the supposed convenience of driving. Driving does move you around more quickly, but time spent in the car is guaranteed dead time (unless you’re on your phone, which you shouldn’t be). By using a book to eliminate the dead time from public transport, you shift the convenience equation considerably.

You can read or subscribe (RSS) to the TerraBlog to get stuff like this directly from the source.

I personally have been listening to audiobooks and podcasts on the bus lately, which is a little easier since I’m carrying my coffee and a bagel when I wait for the bus. Once I sit down on the bus, I can’t have the bagel out, so it’s pretty easy to pull out a book, but fumbling for bus fare while holding a book and coffee is a bit of a pain.

However, this is prime reading time, so I think I will try to start reading more on the bus.