I have a three year-old Honda Accord that is about to come off of a lease. I have three options: Turn the car in, lease another on very favorable terms or buy the car, again on favorable terms (it’s very low mileage). All three probably cost me a similar amount. I either continue making a payment for a new car or for the existing one. Most leasees would go for the new car.

In the Marcc 2008 issue of Metropolis magazine (sorry no link that I can find) Roberta Gratz has an essay on the environmental impact of historical renovation as opposed to tearing down and building a new ‘greener’ building. She notes that:

” The greenest building is one that’s already built”

The struck me as being very relevant to two themes of this blog and my life these days: The hidden carbon cost of apparently environmentally-friendly products like organic produce (shipped how far to reach a wintry city like Rochester?) and the fact that when I buy something used I’m keeping its materials out of landfills and eliminating the need to make something new.

So I decide to buy the car I have already rather than buy a new one and thus add a carbon-intensive new motorized object to our collective environment. And while I have a dream to build a contemporary urban living space, I think I have to find a building and reuse it rather than build new. The ‘cost’ of tearing down and recycling or landfilling the building would far outweigh the advantages of ‘green’ new construction.

We cannot think about environmental issues the way we did in the past. Food that is grown without pesticides and fertilizers is great until you ship it a thousand miles to the consumer. That shipment just wiped out any advantages from an environmental perspective (the health advantages are also offset by the emissions associated with the travel). There is no free lunch for those who believe that they do right by buying this stuff.

Economically, with a recession upon us, the current administration’s solution is to hand out money and tell people to go forth and consume. This will allegedly stimulate the economy by increasing demand which in turn increases manufacturing. There’s only one problem with this: We live in a world that has fundamentally changed. If we all keep consuming at some point we turn all the raw materials of the planet into manmade objects. Not a pretty picture.

I saw a headline today that there are worldwide grain and food shortages because of American farmers growing corn for ethanol, a fuel most of us cannot use or afford if not subsidized by the government. The complexity of the idiocy behind this is mind-boggling.

The point here is that you cannot take a short term, simplistic approach to any purchasing decision these days. Do I buy a Prius to get an extra 20 MPG when that decision pushes a car somewhere into a landfill and adds another, albeit efficient, car into our global inventory? That’s the kind of question we have to ask ourselves in an environmentally damaged world.

A team of US climate scientists using computer models has determined that there is no flexibility in how much greenhouse gas emissions we can continue to emit if we want to stop warming. The only viable goal is zero emissions. The value of this is that it gives us an unsullied goal, one that is easy to measure but very difficult to achieve. In fact I suspect the target we really have to shoot for is a negative emissions goal, one in which sequestration is an equally important part of the total number. This will be necessary to offset the growing demand for and use of energy worldwide by a rapidly growing global population. Those of us in the Western world have a responsibility to go beyond zero in our carbon emissions.

Apparently it’s not rocket science to do this but it would require a lot of power so they are proposing creating a nuclear-powered gasoline generation plant that would convert carbon dioxide into gas.

Just one more technology solution to throw into the mix. This one becomes viable when gas at the pump hits $4.60/gallon. The national average cost a year ago was $2.26, today its around $3.20 but oil closed above $100/barrel yesterday for the first time so that $4+ number could happen this year.

The economics of alternative energy sources get a lot more compelling as prices rise, just as do those of public transportation.

I’ve been waiting for this one since it has always seemed to that the potential of kinetic energy generated by humans has been ignored. With nanotech, scientists have discovered how to make fabric that generates electricity from the movement of the wearer. As usual, they offer up the ability to charge a phone while moving around. But what if the charge was used to warm or cool the wearer? When working hard you’d either generate heat when it was cold out or cool yourself when it was hot. Clothing technology could have big affects on energy use…