Individual action vs. collective action

Yesterday I spent most of the afternoon at an event with my Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL) chapter. When I got home, I found that in my absence Brian had:

• Washed all the dishes from lunch.
• Made a batch of coffee ice cream base with our new vegan cream.
• Ridden his bike to three different local stores and brought home four pounds of tofu, one pound of broccoli, a bottle of ibuprofen, a bottle of digestive enzymes, and a bottle of gin.
• Uprooted a large tree of heaven sapling behind the shed.
• Weeded the strawberry bed and the asparagus patch, which was so heavily overgrown that it probably contained more weeds than asparagus ferns.

In the same amount of time, I had:

• Driven to a town about half an hour away, filled out about 40 postcards for the Environmental Voter Project (EVP), and driven home. 

But when I commented to him about how much more productive his day had been than mine, his response was along the lines of, "Yeah, but the one thing you did was more important than all the stuff I did."

That brought me up short. Was it? 

Obviously I thought sending the postcards was important, since I was willing to devote a whole afternoon to it. And I had some basis for that belief, since the EVP has plenty of data to show how effective its efforts are in getting environmentalists to the polls. In some elections, the number of additional voters they calculate they've turned out has actually exceeded the winner's margin of victory. If the 300 postcards our chapter mailed out to voters in Virginia convince 300 environmentalists, or even half that number, to vote in the upcoming gubernatorial election, that could potentially tip the election in favor of a pro-environment governor who will enact pro-climate policies in that state. And if that happens, obviously it will make more difference to the planet than all of Brian's smaller eco-friendly actions.

But that seems like an awful lot of ifs. Brian's actions, by contrast, are guaranteed to have an impact. No matter what happens in Virginia this fall, it won't change the fact that Brian has removed one invasive plant from our yard, kept around 10 vehicle-miles off our car, and (literally) churned out one vegan dessert for the two of us. Each of those things may only make a tiny difference to the world as a whole, but they make a big difference to our household—and these effects, big and small, don't depend on anyone or anything else to bring them to fruition.

And that's why I think both kinds of action are important. It's true that nothing I do for the environment as an individual, from darning a sock to replacing our heating system, can possibly have as big an impact as government policies like a carbon fee or subsidies for clean energy. But it's also true that all the effort I've put in over the past 5 years with CCL, and indeed all the effort CCL as a whole has put in over the past 18 years, has so far failed to get a carbon fee enacted. And the clean energy subsidies we did manage to get just a few years ago have now evaporated and certainly won't be restored under this administration, if they're ever restored at all. So right now, if we want to make things better, those tiny, individual-level changes—in what we drive, what we eat, what we buy—may be the best we can do. 

Of course, we still need to keep pushing for the big policy changes. Even if it seems like we're getting nowhere right now, enough drops of water will eventually wear away a stone, and who can say which drop—which letter to a Congress member, which postcard to an environmental voter, which conversation at a street fair—will be the one that finally breaks through? But while we're working toward those few big, distant, difficult goals, it's also good to have a few smaller, closer goals that we can actually achieve, like biking to the store and picking up some groceries for a healthy vegan meal. That way, we at least have some small gain to point to at the end of the day. And those little wins can give us renewed strength for the bigger battles that we're still fighting. 

Heat pumps revisited

In the middle of last week's heat wave, I decided maybe it was time to take another crack at getting quotes on a home heat pump. We were getting along okay, using every trick we knew to stay cool—keeping the blinds lowered and the oven off, using fans everywhere, drinking lots of water, and retreating to the basement at night—and running our window air conditioner for just an hour or so in the hottest part of the day. But the longer we stuck to this routine, the more I realized it wouldn't be sustainable on a long-term basis. We weren't getting nearly as much sleep as usual, partly because of the cats prowling over us all night and partly because of the early morning sun shining through the thin curtains. During the day, we were sitting with desk fans pointing directly in our faces and still sweating through the bare minimum of clothing we had on. 

We bore up under this pretty well because we knew that the heat wave was only going to last a few days. However, we also knew that this heat wave wouldn't be the last. On the contrary, as the planet continues to warm faster and faster, heat waves will only become more frequent and more punishing. Sooner or later—most likely sooner—we'll reach a point where it's no longer sustainable to live through a New Jersey summer without central air conditioning. And if we know we're going to have to put ourselves to all the trouble and expense of adding central AC, it seems silly not to spend a little more on a heat pump that works in both directions, so we'll no longer need to rely on fossil fuels to heat our home.

When we looked into this last year, we had a rather frustrating experience. Most of the contractors we spoke to refused to give us a quote at all, and the one quote we managed to get was for $23,400—significantly higher than the top of the range most sources provide for a heat pump installation in New Jersey. We decided at the time that we should just repair our gas boiler and put off a decision on a heat pump for a few years, figuring that by that time there might be better options available. But now, with Congress about to vote on a budget bill that will almost certainly kill the tax credit for installing a new heat pump, it was looking like a better idea to act right away.

This time around, I searched specifically for heat pump installers in Middlesex County, rather than just HVAC companies. At first, it looked like I was having better luck with this approach: I was able to schedule three appointments with three different companies within a week. But very quickly, things started to go downhill. First, one of the three contractors called me back and said he was completely booked up for this week and had "no idea" why his secretary had scheduled him to give me a quote. I then got an appointment with a different company for that same day, only to get a call back from them saying that actually, the kind of installation we'd need was too big a job for them to do during the summer rush. I said I didn't need the work done right away, just the quote, but they said no, they couldn't even give me that until August. So I called up yet another company (number five, if you're counting) and managed to get an appointment with them for Monday.

The first contractor came on Tuesday, and right away, he started giving me the same line I'd heard from the previous HVAC contractors: listen, heat pumps are great in warmer climates, but here in New Jersey, they're just not a reasonable way to heat your home in the winter. Yes, yes, you might see sources online that say they can do it, but he knew from personal experience that in the real world, they weren't up to the job. In vain did I point out that I'd personally talked to people who use cold-climate heat pumps in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and even Canada—all of which, last time I checked, were all in the real world—who were all heating their homes this way; he swore that he'd tested them for himself and they simply weren't practical. He even claimed it wasn't just a matter of electricity being more expensive than gas; at low temperatures, he insisted, a heat pump would actually use more energy, measured in Btus, than my gas boiler to produce the same degree of warming. He didn't explain how a heat pump that's over 200% efficient is supposed to use more energy than a gas boiler that's just under 90% efficient; he just knew for a fact that it would, and that was that.

For all his negative talk about heat pumps, however, he declared himself willing to give us a quote on one if that was what we really wanted. He recommended that we add ductwork to the upper level for heating and cooling, then leave the gas boiler in place to heat the basement when necessary. Bringing the ductwork down to the lower level, he claimed, wouldn't be worth the expense, since we seldom used the space and it would cool itself naturally in the summertime anyway. When I asked about ductless mini-splits, which most sources suggested would be cheaper for a house without existing ductwork, he said, "Not these days," citing price hikes (due largely to Trump's tariffs) that had significantly jacked up the price of each unit. And, after examining our electrical panel, he added that we'd definitely need to upgrade from 100 amps to 200 amps, which would be an additional expense.

The visit from the second contractor started off much better. When I told him what the first contractor had said about heat pumps falling short on winter heating, he said, "That guy must have been a real old-timer," because he'd been installing cold-climate heat pumps that did a great job in this climate for over ten years. He also mentioned something the first contractor hadn't: PSE&G's new "building decarbonization" program, which would give us a rebate of a whopping $10,000 on an electric heating system provided we got rid of the old gas boiler. (The gas water heater, dryer, and stove could stay, for the time being, as long as the heating system was disabled.) After examining our space, he said he'd recommend a cold-climate heat pump with six air handlers: one for each room in the house, not counting the bathrooms and the currently unheated laundry room. He also said that we could, in fact, do this with our existing 100-amp service, since we would no longer need the circuits devoted to the boiler pump and the upstairs air conditioner. However, he said he could give us a separate quote that would include a panel upgrade as well, in case we wanted to do it now in preparation for further electrification later.

After this visit, I was feeling much more optimistic. If his quote was in line with the $23,400 one we got last year, the $10,000 decarbonization credit would drop it to a much more manageable $13,400, and the $2,000 clean energy tax credit—still available up through the end of this year—would knock it down to $11,400. Even if his quote was closer to the $28,700 price the earlier contractor gave us for a ductless system, our all-in price would only be $18,700.

But my optimism evaporated when we saw the actual quote. The price for a six-zone ductless heat pump system, plus the deactivation of the old boiler, plus the upgrades to the electrical panel, would come to $38,720 before rebates, or $24,470 after. Even if we chose to skip the panel upgrade, it would be $19,630 after rebates. Moreover, hat price included only deactivating the old boiler, not actually removing it or the baseboard radiators, which would add another several thou. Oh, and it also didn't include any fees for permits. 

As if to soften the blow, a line at the bottom added that we wouldn't have to pay this all up front. Instead, we could use "utility interest-free financing," which would cost us a mere $291 per month, conveniently tacked on to our monthly utility bill, for 84 months. I know this would technically be a better deal, since we could keep the money in our account earning interest until each month's payment came due, and we'd also get to make the later payments with inflation-depreciated dollars. But to me, having that extra $300 monthly payment hanging over our head for the next seven years felt even worse than paying the 24 grand up front and being done with it.

This quote left me feeling seriously dejected and doubtful about whether a heat pump would ever make sense for us. I know we're in a better position to do it than many people, because we have the money; we can choose to take that $24K hit for the sake of the environment. But we'd only be doing it for the environment. A heat pump almost certainly wouldn't save us any money on our utility bills; most likely, it would end up costing us more every winter, perhaps significantly more. There's no chance at all that it would ever pay for itself. So we'd be paying $24,000 now (or $291 per month), plus an extra $100 or more on our heating bills every year, just to save the roughly 295 therms we'd otherwise burn to heat our home. According to the EPA, that would keep approximately 1.56 metric tons of CO2 equivalent out of the atmosphere each year at a cost of roughly $3,600—about $2,300 per ton. That's five to ten times the price per ton of most carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects. We could do the planet a lot more good by investing $600 a year in CDR and leaving our gas boiler untouched.

I suppose I shouldn't give up hope yet. We still have one more quote scheduled for tomorrow, and it's possible we'll get better news from that one (or possibly from the first contractor's quote, which we still haven't received). But if we don't, we have to ask ourselves: how much is it really worth to us to say that we, personally, are not burning fossil fuels in our home? From a purely utilitarian standpoint, isn't it better to stick with our crummy, but cheap, heating (and occasional, expensive cooling) and pay to remove a larger volume of climate pollution somewhere else?

Dessert experiments

If you live anywhere in the eastern half of the country, you already know we're in the throes of a heat wave. Here in New Jersey, we got a bit lucky today: a heavy thunderstorm hit this morning, keeping today's heat index down to a mere 99 degrees F. But by 9 am tomorrow, we're expected to be in triple-digit territory, and we won't be back to a more normal level of summer heat until Wednesday night. All of which makes this an excellent week to enjoy ice cream and other frozen treats.

But before I get to my lighthearted dessert content, I'd like to take one minute to talk seriously about this massive heat wave. We all know, or at least nearly 80% of Americans do, that climate change is real, and that it's making dangerous weather like this much more common. And a solid majority of Americans want the government to do something about it, supporting a variety of policies that would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, three-quarters of all Americans think we should regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. 

Unfortunately, EPA director Lee Zeldin is not one of them. He recently announced a plan to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions standards for fossil fuel plants, arguing that this pollution is not "significant." He bases this claim not on how much of it there is or how much damage it does, but on the fact that, in his opinion, it's too expensive to fix. And if there is no "cost reasonable" solution, then by definition, there is no problem. To add injury to this insult to our intelligence, he's also decided this is a good time to repeal the rule that regulates power plants' emissions of mercury and other toxic substances, such as arsenic.

If you agree that this is mind-blowingly stupid, there's a way to make your voice heard. Elders Climate Action (ECA) has created two simple forms you can use to submit comments to the EPA on these proposed rules changes. All you have to do is enter your contact info, make any changes you like to the sample comment ECA has provided, and click submit. The comment form for the greenhouse gas emissions repeal is here, and the one for mercury and toxic air pollution is here.

So, desserts. I mentioned in last week's post that we'd recently tried Trader Joe's new vegan whipping cream and found that it lives up to its name, at least as far as whipping is concerned. Well, this week we got around to trying it in an ice cream base. We went with plain vanilla, since it has so many possible uses, and topped it with fresh berries from our garden. And I have to say, the result left absolutely nothing to be desired. This was the first plant-based ice cream I've ever tried that I literally couldn't tell was vegan. There was nothing about either the flavor or the mouthfeel that would make me suspect it was anything other than good old vanilla ice cream.

In short, this vegan dessert experiment was an unqualified success, and we've still got a little bit of the vegan cream left to tinker with. My idea is to try using it for a small batch of either the chocolate mousse or the raspberry mousse that goes into our anniversary cake. If it works for that—and there seems to be no reason it wouldn't—we can buy some of this stuff, rather than a pint of real cream, and make the cake dairy-free this year. It still won't be vegan, as the sponge cake itself contains eggs, but it will be one step closer to it.

But Brian and I were not content to rest on our dessert laurels. Tonight, we tried yet another new vegan ice-cream alternative, this time a healthier version made mostly from fruit. 

This one has a bit of a story behind it. Yesterday morning, we noticed that our neighbors across the street were having a yard sale. We wandered over to take a look, and the one thing on the tables that looked most intriguing to me was a Magic Bullet Dessert Bullet—a machine that claimed it could make "all natural, dairy-free, gluten-free, diabetic-friendly, low fat, low sugar, low calorie desserts everyone can enjoy." I couldn't tell whether the price sticker on top was a 6 or a 9, but when I asked my neighbor about it, he said he'd let me have it for $5. 

Well, I knew we didn't actually need this gadget, and there was a possibility it wouldn't even be able to do anything our blender couldn't. But I remembered that we'd thought the same thing about our regular Magic Bullet when we first acquired it on Freecycle, and it proved to be so useful that when it finally died, we went straight out and paid full price for a new one. There was always the chance that this $5 investment would prove just as worthwhile, and even if it didn't, I knew I'd have no trouble finding a new home for it. We'd only be out $5, and that was a price I was willing to pay just to satisfy my curiosity.

So I took the Dessert Bullet home, opened it up, and perused the recipe book that came with it. All the recipes in it appeared to be built around frozen fruit, with a few additional ingredients like yogurt, peanut butter, chocolate, or coconut thrown in here and there. They were basically smoothies, but with less liquid. The booklet provided instructions on how to prepare and freeze the fruit and how long to thaw it before putting it into the Bullet to get the right consistency.

For our first trial, we decided on a simple chocolate dessert recipe with just three ingredients: a frozen banana (broken into chunks), 2 tablespoons of "raw cacao powder" (which we figured we could swap out for cocoa powder without harming the flavor any), and a drop of vanilla extract. We popped straight out to the Superfresh for a bunch of bananas, peeled two of them, broke them into chunks, and put them in the freezer. 

The instructions said to freeze them for at least 24 hours, so we had to wait until tonight to give our new machine a literal whirl. It has several parts: the base containing the motor a chute to insert the fruit in, a pusher to shove it down with, a rotating screw attachment that grinds it up, and a couple of different orifices to extrude it from. We chose the basic oval mouth rather than the star-shaped one. Following the instructions, we let the frozen banana pieces thaw for 5 minutes and sprinkled them with the cocoa powder. We ran the vanilla extract through first to coat the screw attachment, then dumped in the bananas and pushed them down as the motor ran. After a few seconds, the banana reemerged, transformed into a wide ribbon of roughly soft-serve consistency.

The process was interesting to watch, but the finished product was far from life-changing. It did not taste at all like chocolate ice cream; it tasted, unsurprisingly, like a banana coated with cocoa powder. It wasn't bad, exactly, but it wasn't any more enjoyable than just eating a banana, which is a lot less work. If anything, it was less enjoyable, since the texture was a bit slimy. As a dessert, it wasn't nearly as satisfying as a cup of my low-sugar hot cocoa. 

Out of curiosity, I tried topping the banana mixture with a spoonful of the vegan vanilla ice cream we'd made the night before. As you might expect, this combination was vastly superior to the banana alone, but it wasn't nearly as good as the vanilla ice cream with raspberries. And I think adding more than that one little dollop of the vanilla stuff would have nullified any claim this banana dessert has to being healthful. 

So far, the Dessert Bullet doesn't look like a game changer, but we're not giving up on it yet. There are a couple of recipes in the booklet that don't depend primarily on banana, like Creamy Berry Sorbet (a blend of frozen strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries with unsweetened coconut) and Coconut Colada (a misleadingly named blend of frozen coconut-milk yogurt, frozen pineapple chunks, and unsweetened coconut). We'll try at least one of these, as well as a few other combinations of fruit, before deciding whether this gadget deserves a spot in our crowded kitchen cabinets.

[Edit, 7/2/25: Nooooo! We just tried to buy another carton of the vegan whipping cream at Trader Joe's, only to learn that it's been discontinued. The only plant-based alternative to cream we've ever found that was really satisfactory, and it's gone forever. I guess at least we know now a true vegan cream substitute is possible, but that's cold comfort if we can never find one again.]

The things I can change

I've always hated the Serenity Prayer. You know, the one that's printed all over on greeting cards, on T-shirts, in people's email signatures: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." It always seemed like such a ridiculous thing to say when we live in a world full of so many horrible things that I clearly can't change and that, just as clearly, are not acceptable. Just because I can't stop war, tyranny, wildfires, tuberculosis, or pointless acts of cruelty, I'm supposed to accept them all as facts of life, the same way Energy Secretary Chris Wright has apparently accepted climate change as just “a side effect of building the modern world"? I'm supposed to feel serene about them? 

But lately, I've begun to think about the lines in a different way—particularly with regard to climate change. In less than eight weeks, the Trump administration has already:

• pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords;
• ordered all references to climate change wiped from government websites;
• canceled billions of dollars' worth of climate and energy grants, even withholding funding from projects that were already under way;
• blocked approval for any new offshore wind projects and revoked authorization for some that had already been approved;
• frozen funding for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program;
• signed executive orders to increase oil and gas drilling and logging in national forests;
• cut thousands of workers from the EPA, NOAA, and the Departments of Energy and the Interior;
• and, most recently, announced plans to repeal the rule that recognizes greenhouse gases are pollutants at all.

Some of these moves are already being challenged in the courts, and many of them will probably be struck down eventually. But I personally can't change them, and sitting around wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth over them won't do any good. I'm not accepting them, not in the sense of seeing them as in any way okay; I'm merely putting them in the category of things that I, right now, cannot do anything about, and setting them aside so I can focus on the things I actually can do.

So, here are three things I'm doing:

1. Pushing for stricter regulation of methane leaks from natural gas pipelines. 

When it comes to methane, there's good news, bad news, and good news. The good news is, we can significantly slow global warming by ending methane leaks from natural gas pipelines. According to one estimate, quickly curbing methane emissions could slow the rate of near-term global warming by 30% and prevent 0.25°C of warming. This can buy us more time to get off fossil fuels and zero out the rest of our carbon emissions. The bad news is, the federal government is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Congress just repealed the Biden-era methane fee that was meant to provide an incentive for gas suppliers to plug leaks, before it even had a chance to go into effect.

But that fee was only ever going to address the biggest leaks, anyway. There are loads of smaller ones that, collectively, have a huge impact. And that's where the other good news comes in: Those small leaks can be tackled at the state level by Public Utilities Commissions (PUCs), which do not answer to the Trump administration. So Climate Changemakers is leading a big push to get people all over the U.S. to email and call their PUCs and ask for stricter regulation on gas leaks. Its website has a series of "playbooks" that can walk you step by step through the process of finding and contacting your PUC, state legislators, and other policy makers. Each playbook only takes around 20 minutes. And because utilities commissioners don't get nearly as much mail as legislators do, they're a lot more likely to pay attention when they suddenly start getting a lot of messages on the same subject. So this is one of those rare actions that's pretty easy and yet has a chance to make a real difference.

2. Donating to effective climate causes.

Some people like to do all their charitable giving once a year, often around the holidays. Others prefer to break it up into a steady stream of regular monthly donations. I like to take a middle ground: I make just one donation a year to every organization on my list, but I spread those donations out over the year so that I only have to make a few each month. And one of the scheduled recipients for March happens to be the Giving Green Fund, which researches and funds climate nonprofits whose strategies are "particularly promising, overlooked and/or underfunded." This allows me to support the most useful and cost-effective climate organizations without having to research them all myself. Also, as Vox notes, funds like Giving Green can time their donations "right when extra funding is most needed"—for instance, when a group is critically short on funds or needs them for a time-sensitive project.

3. Playing board games.

Tomorrow, Brian and I are hosting a board game party for my chapter of Citizens' Climate Lobby. His gift to me last Christmas was a copy of the board game Daybreak, in which each player takes on the role of a major world power and they all work together to find ways to bring down their carbon emissions before the planet tips over the edge into climate disaster. So when Nadine, the head of my chapter, mentioned that she was looking for ideas for the group to have more social get-togethers this year, I suggested a party to play this game together. She has a copy of the game as well, and if we have more people than those two games can handle, we'll open it up to include other cooperative games as well.

Granted, playing games together, even climate-themed games, doesn't directly tackle the problem of climate change. But it will give us a chance to learn more about all the different climate solutions out there, as well as brush up on our teamwork, communication, and problem-solving skills. All of which will help prepare us for the work we're still continuing, even in the face of an administration that openly denies climate change is a problem at all and a Congress that seems, at the moment, ready to cede its own power utterly to that administration. Because even if we know we can't make any major progress for at least two years—even if we know we're going to be losing ground in a lot of ways during that time—what exactly is the alternative?

We don't, in fact, have the wisdom to know whether our efforts will really change anything. But we know they won't if we don't try.

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: Summer Harvest

This past week has been brutally hot. Daytime highs have been consistently in the nineties, with soaking East Coast humidity on top of that. From Wednesday through Friday, we were under a heat advisory, warned to stay inside as much as possible as the heat index climbed into triple digits. By this afternoon, it was back down to a mere 98, but it still wasn't weather you'd want to spend any more time in than you had to.

Unless, of course, you're a plant. The ones in our garden are apparently just loving all this heat, yielding up a veritable cornucopia of veggies. On the first day of August, Brian braved the heat long enough to pick one largish zucchini, two cucumbers, one Carmen pepper, one Banana pepper, one Premio tomato, one San Marzano paste tomato, and 52 little Sun Gold tomatoes—and that's just one day's harvest.

To celebrate all this bounty, Brian made our favorite quinoa salad. This dish started out as the Couscous Salad from The Clueless Vegetarian, then morphed into kasha salad, and finally reached its pinnacle with chewy, protein-rich quinoa as the base. We eat this quite often, as it makes a useful catch-all for any leftover vegetables in the fridge that need to get used up before they go mushy. But this time, nearly all the veggies in it—cucumber, scallions, zucchini, parsley, two kinds of peppers, and two kinds of tomatoes—came from our own garden. The only exceptions were the garlic, which we have so far failed to produce a decent crop of, and the chick peas, which we've never attempted to grow.

Sadly, the one crop in our yard that isn't thriving in the summer heat is the plums. As far as we can tell, our plum trees tend to operate on a two-year cycle, giving us a bumper crop one year and essentially nothing the next. We have managed to harvest a handful of fruits off the Golden Gage tree, but only one off the Mount Royal and nothing at all from the Opal. And, to Brian's intense annoyance, we didn't even get to keep all of the fairly meager crop for ourselves. 

You see, last year, when our trees were simply loaded with fruit, some of our neighbors got into the habit of helping themselves right off the tree. We usually let this slide, but when one woman started not only eating them on the spot but filling up a bag, Brian went out and asked her to please stop it. She promptly apologized and insisted on paying for what she'd taken, so fair enough. 

But apparently she considered that by doing so, she had established her right to harvest our plums as long as she paid for them. So yesterday, he found the same woman outside, pocketing our Golden Gages and commenting on how meager the crop was. She gave us five bucks for what she'd picked, but frankly, we'd much rather have kept the plums for ourselves. It's one thing to share with our neighbors when the fruit is plentiful, but when the entire crop is maybe a few pounds' worth, we feel like we really should be entitled to first dibs.

Happily, there is a bright side on the fruit front. Our raspberry canes, having finished with their spring season, are already showing signs of gearing up for their fall crop. The canes toward the front of the bed are covered in little green berries, and one of them has even produced a couple of precocious fully ripe ones. So it won't be too long before we have fresh fruit available for the picking—and since the canes are as full of prickers as they are of fruit, we probably won't have to compete with any scavengers for the harvest.

And there's more good news: As I write this, a rainstorm is rolling in, bringing with it a much-needed respite from the heat. The climate being what is is, there will no doubt be further heat waves before summer is over, and most likely further setbacks in the garden too. But for now, between the crops in the garden, the crops on the horizon, and the welcome cool breezes blowing in through our windows, I'd say we have more cause for satisfaction with our outdoor lot than for disappointment.

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: First Fruits

Summer has only just officially begun, but we're not easing into it gradually. New Jersey, like most parts of the country, has been baking under a heat dome for the past six days, with highs in the upper nineties and heavy humidity to boot. Mind you, we've gotten off easy compared to places like Las Vegas, Palm Springs, and Washington, where daytime highs have been in the triple digits. Brian had to drive to work a couple of times rather than riding his bike in the heat, but otherwise, we've been getting along fine without even needing the A/C. But we haven't been in much of a mood to go out and work in the garden. 

Fortunately, we've only had to venture out for a few minutes each day to harvest fresh veggies and fruit. Our honeyberries are about done producing, but we're still getting a few strawberries and plenty of raspberries. Our spring lettuce is also living up to its name (Marvel of Four Seasons) by continuing to provide ample fodder for salads, showing no signs of bolting in spite of the extreme heat. And just this week, Brian harvested the first handful or two of our basil crop. (We were planning to use it in a grilled veggie recipe I dug up online, but we changed plans when the sky started to look ominous. So instead it went into a pesto dish that I'll cover next week as our Recipe of the Month for June.)

Sadly, not all our summer crops are doing so well. In particular, our cucumber vines, which would normally be just starting to produce right about now, appear to be a complete write-off. We planted two varieties: a couple of Marketmores, using seed left over from our last Fedco order in 2022, and two of a new variety called Boston Pickling that we ordered last winter from a new seed supplier. And of those, not a single plant has actually come up. But at least our dill is producing, so Brian was able to use some of our garden produce in the season's first batch of pickles even if the cucumber itself had to be store-bought.

As I write this, the heat wave appears to be breaking at last. The expected storm hasn't hit here yet, but it has brought gusts of cooler air, which we're pulling into the house as fast as possible with every window fan at our disposal. Tonight it's supposed to dip below 75 degrees for the first time all week, and it should continue to do so every night for the next week to come. Granted, daytime highs will still be in the upper 80s and low 90s, but after the week we've just been through, that level of heat will feel positively mild.

Why climate scientists are losing hope—and why they're wrong

A week ago, I was feeling incredibly depressed and pessimistic about climate change. I'd just read a piece in the Guardian in which top climate scientists shared their views about the future, and they were almost uniformly bleak. Nearly all agreed that there was no chance now of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and most thought that realistically, there never had been. Many thought warming would exceed 3 degrees, and one said even that number was "hopeful and conservative." They predicted a "semi-dystopian" future in which large swaths of the globe would become uninhabitable and billions of people would die or be displaced.

For many of these scientists, the most frustrating thing was knowing that this didn't have to happen. They talked about how they'd been sounding the alarm for decades at this point, and still world leaders were dragging their feet. One expressed incredulity that the world was willing to spend trillions to deal with COVID but couldn't muster several billion to address a far more existential threat. One said it was "almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken"; another was "relieved that I do not have children, knowing what the future holds." A third confessed that she considered giving up her climate work, which seemed to be having no impact at all, and becoming a nightclub singer.

All this had me questioning whether there was even any point in trying to deal with this problem anymore. And then a member of my Citizens' Climate Lobby chapter posted a link to an episode of "The Ezra Klein Show" that offered a completely different perspective. In it, Klein interviews another climate scientist, Hannah Ritchie, who has recently published a book called Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. Their discussion brought out several highly convenient truths that don't often get mentioned in the climate discussion:

• First, it's simply not true that nothing has been done about climate change. She pointed out that before the 2015 Paris Agreement, scientists were predicting "completely catastrophic" levels of global warming—between 4 and 5 degrees Celsius. Today, those estimates have fallen to between 2.5 and 3 degrees. She acknowledges that this is still very, very bad, but it's no longer in world-ending territory. Even though most nations have fallen short of their Paris goals, we've still "chopped off a degree" or more from the worst-case scenario we were looking at less than a decade ago.
• While it's almost guaranteed that we will breach the 1.5-degree threshold, that doesn't mean it's too late to avert disaster. That's because the impact of global warming —how much rising temperatures affect precipitation, storm strength, and other problems—isn't linear. Going from 1.5 to 2 degrees is much worse than going from 1 to 1.5 degrees. So not only are we not too late, what we do now matters more than ever. Every tenth of a degree that we can shave off our temperature trajectory means a much bigger difference to our future than it did before.
• One of the biggest problems—switching to clean energy—is already more or less cracked. Not only do we have wind and solar and electric cars, these technologies are now better and cheaper than fuel-burning alternatives—something that wasn't true just five years ago. So it's not true that we've had these solutions for years and haven't deployed them; we've only just now reached the point where we have cost-effective alternatives that can replace fossil fuels without holding back human progress. Now all we have to do is build them.
• Some people object that we can't simply rely on the clean energy sources we have now, because we don't have enough of the critical minerals required. This too is false, says Ritchie. In the first place, we keep finding new deposits of the minerals we need and new ways to extract them. In the second place, the amount of material needed for each new battery or solar panel keeps dropping as the technology improves. And finally, unlike fossil fuels, these minerals don't get used up. When a solar panel reaches the end of its usable life, we can extract the contents and use them again.
• Another common objection is that we don't have the space for all the solar farms and wind farms we'd need to power our whole country. But while solar and wind farms do take up more space than fossil fuel plants, the footprint of a fossil fuel plant isn't limited to the plant itself; you also have to consider all the land used for extracting the fuel. Right now, says Ritchie, we're using lots more land for other energy sources than we would need to produce all our power from solar and wind. One mind-blowing statistic: if you took all the land currently being devoted to producing not-that-efficient biofuels and covered it in solar panels, it could power the U.S. three times over.

Ritchie admits that we don't have all the answers yet. We know how to produce low-carbon electricity, but we don't know yet how to produce low-carbon cement, steel, jet fuel, or meat. (She also acknowledges that simply getting everyone to go vegan, as she has done, is a nonstarter. People don't care much about what powers their cars or heats their homes, but they do care a lot about what they eat.) But she stresses that this shouldn't stop us from rolling out the clean technologies we do have as fast as we can. There's no reason we can't tackle the problems we know how to solve and look for new solutions to other problems at the same time.

Klein's conversation with Ritchie covers a lot more than this, from air pollution to nuclear energy to some knotty issues related to meat consumption. (For instance, is it worse to eat beef, which has a much higher carbon footprint, or chicken, which requires killing a lot more animals?) It's worth listening to the whole thing, or reading the transcript if you aren't into podcasts. 

But the main takeaway for me is that we haven't lost the climate battle yet. Yes, things are already bad, and yes, they are going to get worse. But what we do in the next ten years will make a huge difference, for good or bad. And to a large extent, we have our work cut out for us.

More ecofrugal episodes

Once again, we've been having some ups and downs in our ecofrugal life this week. Rather than recount these ecofrugal episodes in chronological order, I think I'll arrange them from most disappointing to most satisfying. That way I'll be able to end the post on a nice positive note. 

Thus, we'll start at the bottom, with:

Ecofrugal Episode 1: The Earth Fair Washout

I spent most of this afternoon "tabling"—that is, setting up a table and talking to people—for Citizens' Climate Lobby at a street fair in town. Unfortunately, the event was a bit of a washout—literally. The weather was chilly and wet, progressing from clouds and drizzle in the morning to steady, soaking rain in the afternoon. Fortunately we had a canopy to keep us dry while we were actually at the table, but we got pretty wet whenever we ventured away from it. By the time we finished putting away all our gear at the end of the event—including the canopy itself—we were all pretty well soaked.

Furthermore, there were fewer people to talk to than there would usually be, since many people were sensibly staying home and keeping dry. All in all, we had about 30 conversations over the course of four hours—five if you count the time we spent setting up and putting away all our gear—and only a few of those could be considered enthusiastic. It's not a lot to show for the amount of effort we put in. 

On top of that, we had to put up with a lot of other annoyances unrelated to the weather. The organizers of the Earth Fair put our booth into a slot right next to the music stage, so we couldn't converse at normal volumes. The parking lot they told us to use for unloading our gear was completely filled up five minutes before the time they told us to arrive, and we weren't allowed to use the nearby bank parking lot—not even for the few minutes required to unload—because it was reserved for an EV car show. (Fortunately, we'd already unloaded our car by the time they told us this; otherwise we would have had to find a parking spot on the street and then haul all our gear several blocks to the site.) Given how much hassle we went to for such a small benefit, I'm inclined to think it's not even worth signing up for this event next year.

Ecofrugal Episode 2: The Case of the Compacted Soil

Yesterday was our big spring planting day in the garden. We put in seeds for twelve squares of beans, four of cucumbers, six of basil, and two of herbs, and we transplanted eight tomato seedlings and four peppers. This proved to be a much harder job than I expected—literally. I'd expected to just poke some holes in the dirt and put the seeds in, but the soil was so dense and compacted that I could barely get the blade of a trowel into it, much less my fingers. I had to spend several minutes hacking at the soil in each square to break up the clods of clay before I could put the seeds into it.

This is both puzzling and frustrating, because we've had these raised garden beds for about fifteen years at this point, and we've spent that whole time following the advice in all our garden books about building healthy soil. We double-dug the beds when we first built them, turning over all the soil twice to break it up, and we haven't tilled it or walked on it since then. We add compost to it every year during spring planting and mulch the beds with leaves in the winter. And we've never once used any sort of harsh synthetic fertilizer or pesticide. By now, our soil ought to be so rich and soft we could plunge our hands right into it, not packed so hard we can barely dig in it.

Based on all the sources I've consulted, the best explanation I can find is that we're not adding enough organic matter to the beds. Our little home compost bin only provides enough compost to add a thin layer—less than one inch—to each of the beds each year, and we should be piling on at least a couple of inches. Bagged compost isn't an ideal solution either, since we would need to buy several bags and then test every one of them to make sure the contents weren't herbicide-laden "killer compost" that would kill our plants. If any of the bags failed the test, we'd have to buy new ones and test them too, repeating the process until we got only clean results. But that would seriously delay our planting schedule, so to avoid the problem, we'd have to buy a lot more compost than we thought we needed—at least twice as much—in the hope that at least one bag in two would be usable. 

Probably the best solution is to go to the Belle Mead Co-Op every year and load up with half a yard of bulk leaf mold. We haven't been using this stuff regularly because we learned that it's not actually a great source of soil nutrients, but it should be effective as an amendment to loosen up the soil, hold moisture, and attract earthworms. The only problem with this plan is that we can't do this at the same time we buy mulch because there isn't room in our car, or our garden shed, for both at once. So probably we should either buy a load of mulch every spring and a load of leaf mold every fall or vice versa.

Ecofrugal Episode 3: The Case of the Disappearing Eggs

One of the things that made Lidl an instant hit with Brian and me was its prices on Certified Humane (CH) eggs. We used to buy these at H-Mart, where sale prices ranged from $2 to $4 per dozen. But at Lidl, we consistently found them for $2.40 a dozen. Even during the pandemic, when most food prices soared, this price held steady. We did encounter occasional shortages, during which we'd go in and find the CH-egg shelf empty, but we figured these were due to temporary blockages in the supply chain. The eggs were always back a week or so later, so we didn't worry too much about it.

But in the past month or two, Lidl's CH eggs seem to have disappeared entirely. The case where they live is still there, with the price on it marked at $2.40 a dozen, but every time we show up, it's empty. Brian guessed this could mean that the store's delivery cycle has changed, so that the eggs now arrive on Friday morning, and consequently they're always gone when we show up on Thursday evening. (We found a little support for this theory last week, when we showed up a little earlier on Thursday and found exactly one carton of eggs in the case, with one of them smashed. Clearly it hadn't been sitting there all week, so it was most likely the last one left, passed over on account of the damage.) But given how full our schedule is this spring, we haven't found an opportunity to go to Lidl at some other time and check.

For a while, this problem left us stranded without a good source of CH eggs. The $8 per dozen at the farmers' market was much too rich for our blood; we hunted around at other local food stores, but none of them—not even our once-trusty H-Mart—could do much better than $5 per dozen. (Trader Joe's, we discovered, didn't carry them at all; it had only "cage free" eggs, a much wimpier standard.) And then it occurred to us to check the refrigerated case at Rite Aid, which carries a small selection of dairy products. To our astonishment, not only did the store carry CH eggs, they were only $3.20 per dozen—about 35 percent less than their nearest competitor.

We don't know how a drugstore chain, of all places, manages to offer humanely farmed eggs at better prices than any local supermarket. But we're pleased to have a new source of eggs so close to home. We'll still keep checking the Lidl when we visit to see if our cheaper eggs have returned, but we won't need to rearrange our whole shopping schedule in the hopes of catching them there.

Ecofrugal Episode 4: A Reusable Replacement

My favorite way to brew coffee, hands-down, is the Aeropress. It's much faster than a drip machine, uses much less ground coffee to brew the same volume, and produces excellent coffee from fairly cheap beans. It's also much easier to clean than the French press so beloved by coffee snobs. All the grounds get compacted into a dense little puck that you can shoot directly out into the compost bin, so all you have to do is rinse off the plunger. 

The Aeropress has only two downsides. First, it takes a lot of effort to depress the plunger; I often have to put my full weight on it for a minute or so before it finally sinks. And second, it's not completely zero-waste. The paper filters it uses are fairly tiny and cost only a couple of cents each, and they can go straight into the compost bin with the coffee grounds, so the waste it produces is fairly minimal. But still, I have thought from time to time that it would be still more ecofrugal to replace those paper filters with a resusable one.

So, when I noticed that I was running low on paper filters, I decided this was my chance to give it a try. This was an easier decision to make since the paper filters had gone up in price, from $6 for a pack of 350 to between $8 and $10, not counting shipping. By contrast, a set of two reusable metal filters from a site called Mason Jar Lifestyle was only $10 ($14 with shipping). The price was barely any higher, and I'd have two filters to experiment with and see which I preferred. And if it turned out they were both unacceptable, I'd still have time to switch back to the paper ones.

Having now tried both filters, I can say they have both advantages and disadvantages compared to the paper ones. Most obviously, they're more ecofrugal; they produce no waste and should last for years, making them much cheaper on a per-cup basis. They also let more air through than the paper ones, which reduces the amount of muscle needed to depress the plunger. This is particularly noticeable with the perforated metal disk rather than the fine mesh one.

One downside of these metal filters is that they allow more sediment into the coffee than the paper  ones. However, this isn't a huge problem, particularly with the fine-mesh disk. A much bigger drawback is the extra cleanup work. Removing the filter from the press before knocking the grounds out into the bin doesn't sound like that much added hassle, and it wouldn't be if the filter came away cleanly. But no matter how carefully I pry it off (after running cold water over it so it's cool enough to touch), at least half the coffee grounds end up stuck to the filter rather than the press. And unlike the grounds stuck to the plunger itself, they don't come off cleanly. If I simply rinsed them off the filter, I'd be washing several grams of coffee grounds down the drain with every cup of coffee I brew, and I think it wouldn't be long before our plumbing objected to that. I've tried scraping the grounds off the filter onto the plunger before emptying it, but that never works neatly. Some grounds stay stuck to the filter no matter what I do, and some get all over my hands, so they have to be washed too.

I consulted Reddit on this subject and found two suggestions for dealing with this problem. Some users say that sliding the metal filter off sideways rather than lifting it off removes most of the grounds. Others say pulling the plunger back slightly and then inverting the press and letting it rest (without unscrewing the cap first) allows the grounds to drop back onto the plunger and away from the filter, leaving it mostly clean. I'll give both methods a try, and if either one works, then I'll be able to say definitively that the mesh filter is superior to the paper ones. 

[UPDATE, 5/5/24: I have now tried both methods of cleaning the metal filter. Neither one is perfect, but the first is much better than the second. When I invert the plunger and let it rest before removing the cap, the grounds do not fall away from the filter; they remain stuck to it at the top. When I remove the cap, some of the grounds fall off onto the top of the plunger, but at least half remain on the filter:

By contrast, when I rinse the plunger, unscrew the cap, and slide off the filter, it leaves only a thin film of coffee grounds behind. A quick spray with the faucet hose is enough to get them off. And I'm not concerned that the amount of coffee washing down the drain will clog it up.

I've also discovered another advantage of the metal filter: it fits more securely than the paper ones. With those, I always had to take care that the filter was exactly centered in the cap before screwing it on. If it wasn't, it would slip to the side and let some of the grounds through into my cup of coffee. I'd have to strain it a second time before I could drink it. 

So, in addition to saving me money and eliminating waste, this metal mesh filter has eliminated the two biggest problems with my Aeropress: the stuck-plunger problem and the slipping-filter problem. The additional step of rinsing the filter is a small price to pay for that.]

[FURTHER UPDATE, 9/13/24: I've now figured out that the best method of all for cleaning the filter is to combine the two suggestions. After rinsing the press and unscrewing the filter basket, I pull the plunger back slightly so the metal filter is flush with the bottom of the tube before sliding it off. This takes only a few seconds and leaves almost nothing stuck to the filter.]

Ecofrugal Episode 5: A Pressing Concern

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I had ordered us a new (or more accurately, new-to-us) garlic press to replace our old Oxo one that broke. After a little research, we decided to go with the Joseph Joseph Garlic Rocker, which got consistently solid reviews from cooking sites. A new one costs $15 at Amazon, but since we don't do Amazon, we bought a secondhand one from eBay for $14 ($17 with shipping).

It has since arrived, and after testing it out several times, Brian reports that it's better in almost every way than its predecessor. It takes a couple of passes over a garlic clove to mince it as finely as the old one, but on the plus side, it does mince the entire clove rather than extruding part of it and turning the rest into a sort of squashed blob. It's easier to clean than the old press and takes up less room in the drawer. And since it's a solid piece of metal with no moving parts, we can be confident it won't simply fall apart like the previous one.

This espisode makes me inclined to add a seventh principle to my Ecofrugal Manifesto: Buy It to Last. (You could call this a subset of my sixth principle—Mend It, Don't End It—but I think it's different enough to deserve a principle of its own.) If you have to buy something new, buy something that's built to last as long as possible. Look for sturdy materials and construction, check reviews for complaints about durability, and minimize the number of moving parts that can break. And, other things being equal, opt for mechanical rather than electronic controls whenever possible. Electronics of all kinds usually cost more to repair than to replace—if it's possible to replace them at all.

Ten climate tidbits for 2023

This weekend was the annual (virtual) fall conference for Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL), a climate group I've been involved with since 2020. Like last year's conference, this one didn't really give me any broad new insights about climate problems and solutions, but it supplied several interesting nuggets of information worth sharing. This year's ten tidbits are:

1. Language matters. The keynote speaker at Saturday's session was commentator and activist Van Jones. He's worked with people on both sides of the aisle and says that both groups often "get hung up on language." He gave the example of police reform: conservatives didn't want to listen to talk about "injustice" in the penal system, but were often open to the same policies when they were framed in terms of "liberty." He argued that similarly, they would be willing to move on climate policies if they were framed as being about "pollution" or "helping farmers" or "protecting God's creation" rather than "climate." He admitted that it's stupid for the word "climate" to be politically charged, but given that it is, it would be even stupider to insist on using it if it makes it harder to address the problem.

2. People do have their own facts. Senator Pat Moynihan famously said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." But at the time he said it, the media landscape was very different from today's. Everyone got their news from the same local papers and major TV networks. Nowadays, your social media feed and your Google search results will show you different facts depending on your political orientation. Type "gun" into Google and it will auto-fill "gun rights" if you're on the right and "gun control" if you're on the left. Consequently, each side is getting an incomplete picture of every issue and is often unaware that the other group's facts exist. So when you're talking politics with someone who seems blind to the facts, Jones says, you have to remember "They're not in the same movie as you." To communicate better with them, talk less and listen more to figure out what their starting point is.

3. Red states benefit most from IRA incentives. Last year's Inflation Reduction Act was short on sticks and heavy on carrots: subsidies to build and install clean energy infrastructure across the country. And the benefits are accruing overwhelmingly to red states. They have plenty of open land on which to place new solar and wind farms, and their lower taxes and wages make them attractive sites for new battery plants. Jones thinks this is good news, as voters will look more favorably on the clean energy transition if it puts money in their pockets.

4. Politicians respond to RAP. That's Jones's shorthand for "reward and punishment," which he says carry a lot more weight with legislators than logical argument. You're much less likely to convince them by talking about the perils of climate change or the benefits of clean energy than by showing them polling numbers on how popular climate policies are or how many voters are swayed by climate issues. Therefore, Jones suggests, if you have an extra hour to spend preparing for a lobby meeting, spend it learning more about the politics of an issue, rather than the policy. As he points out, "We already know the policy."

5. Van Jones reads graphic novels. As interesting as I found Jones's speech, at once point I found myself distracted by the background on his Zoom screen. I enlarged the picture to get a closer look at his bookshelf and, sure enough, there was a copy of Watchmen and several volumes of The Sandman that I recognized from their distinctive covers. He's not just a policy nerd; he's a nerd nerd!

6. Renewable energy is growing amazingly fast. Following the keynote address, there was a "good news" session with a CCL policy maven who had some mind-blowing stats to share on clean energy. Did you know that nearly half of all solar capacity ever installed in the U.S., since the dawn of time, was added in the last three years? Or that 75% of all electric vehicles ever sold in the country were sold in the past three years? In 2010, less than 1% of all new cars sold in the U.S. were electric; now it's 10%, and if we manage to get permitting reform passed to improve the electrical grid, by 2030 it could be anywhere from 40% to 60%. Likewise, with permitting reform, we could install twice as much new wind and solar capacity in the next three years as we did in the last three—quadrupling the amount we had three years ago.

8. Goofing around is good for your health. The next panel I attended was on "resilient climateering" (a portmanteau word the presenter made from "climate" and "Mouseketeers"). According to her, playfulness has a wide array of mental health benefits. She had sources (which I unfortunately didn't manage to get the links for) to show that it releases endorphins and endogenous (self-made) opioids, which I didn't even know were a thing; stimulates nerve growth in areas of emotion and decision making; and even reduces dementia. I don't know how much of that is true, but it certainly couldn't hoit!

9. Stress can shut you down. One source from the "climateering" presentation that I did find a copy of was this polyvagal chart showing how stress affects the body. Most of the time, when we talk about feeling stressed, we're talking about the effects in the yellow zone: increasing levels of anger and fear, increases in heart rate and blood pressure, dry mouth, heavy breathing. All these are signs of hyperarousal: the familiar fight-or-flight reaction. But when stress is intense or prolonged enough, it can cause just the opposite effect: hypoarousal. At this stage, we stop trying to fight or flee and just give up. This red zone is associated with feelings of despair, numbness, or shame; physically, most of the body's processes slow down as it pumps out extra endorphins to block out pain and, basically, prepare for the end. We all know about the negative effects of spending too much time in the yellow zone, but the red zone is really bad news. Probably best to keep an eye on those yellow signs and avoid getting to that point.

10. Climate deniers can change. Honestly, I didn't feel like I learned that much from the "CCL Group Leaders Tell All" session. It was basically just leaders of several different CCL chapters talking about how they got into the job and how they do it—info I don't expect to need, since I'm not interested in being one. But one of the group leaders had an origin story that interested me. His parents were—to an extent, still are—climate deniers, and he was brought up to think human-made climate change was a big lie. But his parents also taught him to stand up for what he believes in, and in high school he came to realize that he believed in the dangers of climate change. So he became involved with climate and, as a freshman at Michigan, joined the college's CCL chapter, of which he's not a co-leader. And his parents, remarkably, have not only been supportive; they've also been willing to talk with him about the issue. They may not be believers yet, but he thinks they're gradually changing their views, and they even support some of CCL's policies. And the reason for this, he thinks, was their personal connection to him. It's harder to dismiss "the other side" when it includes your kid—or your parent, your sibling, your spouse, or your good friend. When someone you care about is involved with an issue, you may disagree with their views, but you can't just reject them without consideration.

And maybe that's the most important lesson from this year's conference, one that all the speakers echoed in some way or another: build connections first. Build connections with legislators, connections with friends, connections with other climate activists, instead of just leaping into facts and arguments. Because it's much easier to tell your story in a way people will hear if you know who's listening.

Why green Americans should want permitting reform

Way back in 2016, I posted about how I was hunting for a magazine with an ecofrugal spin. Unfortunately, I never really found one I was happy with. But over the years since then, I've searched again from time to time, and last January I thought I might have found a solution. By becoming a member of Green America, I'd automatically get a subscription to its Green American magazine, which covers a range of topics related to climate, social justice, and green living. Even if it wasn't exactly what I wanted, at least my subscription fee would go to support a worthy environmental organization.

So, the year went by, and I was reasonably satisfied with the magazine—not utterly delighted, but I thought it was good enough to be worth the membership fee. Being a member also meant that I would periodically receive emails urging me to take action on various environmental issues, but I didn't really mind that. I'd occasionally click through if I thought the issue was worthy of attention, and if I didn't, I'd just hit delete. Until this week, when this message from Green America brought me up short:

Tell Your Senator to Block Manchin's Dirty Deal

Senator Joe Manchin’s “Dirty Deal” is back and, if passed, would put front-line communities at greater risk and increase greenhouse gases by “streamlining” the approval process for fossil fuel projects. The senator wants to dismantle the policies in place that are meant to protect communities and mitigate the climate crisis. We need to stop it ASAP.

So, you may ask, what's wrong with that? Shouldn't an environmentalist like me want to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure? I mean, if we want to transition to a clean energy economy, isn't blocking fossil fuel projects a crucial part of that?

No. No it isn't.

The fact is, fossil fuel projects are already on the decline. And it's not because environmentalists have been vigilant about blocking them; they're just too expensive. At this point, the cheapest ways to generate electricity are solar and wind. In 2021, 85% of all new energy capacity came from clean sources, mostly solar. And of the new projects currently in the "queue"—that is, proposed projects waiting to be approved—over 92% are wind and solar. Natural gas accounts for only 7.5% of the total, and coal for none whatsoever.

But here's the catch: Most of these proposed clean energy projects will never be built. And the main reason why is problems with permitting—not just for the plants themselves, but for the power lines they need to carry their energy.

You see, the best places to put new solar and wind farms are out in the country, where there's lots of room for them. But in order to get the energy from these facilities to cities, where it's needed, you need new transmission lines—a lot of new transmission lines. According to Princeton University's Net Zero America project, we need to more than triple the rate at which we're building new transmission lines in order to support a fully renewable power grid by 2050. If we continue to build them at our current, slow rate, we'll miss out on about 80% of all the emissions cuts promised by the Inflation Reduction Act. In fact, fossil fuel use in the U.S. will actually increase, because we'll have to burn more coal and gas to meet the increased demand for electricity from all those electric cars and heat pumps.

But right now, getting those new power lines built is a long, slow, cumbersome process. On average, getting a new long-distance transmission line built takes over ten years. And over four of those years are spent just getting all the necessary permits. If a transmission line runs between states, you have to get separate permits from each state government—and often from municipal governments too—before you can even start building. Each of these governments has its own rules about permitting, usually involving extensive environmental review. And a project can be challenged at any step of the process, tying it up in court for years.

Approval for fossil fuel pipelines tends to go significantly faster. These can be approved at the federal level by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The Energy Independence and Security Act would have allowed FERC to approve interstate transmission lines and also to intervene in fights over who should pay for them. But because the same bill also contained some provisions that would have helped fossil fuel suppliers, environmental groups—including Green America—have labeled this a "dirty deal" and lobbied heavily against it, blocking it not once but twice. Even though the bill's benefits would have gone overwhelmingly to clean power projects, and even though failure to improve the grid will actually make emissions worse, they decided that it was the principle of the thing that mattered.

Consequently, I will not be renewing my membership in Green America after all. Even if I really liked the quarterly magazine—and frankly, it was just okay—I'm not giving one penny of my money to any group that is actually working to stop the reforms we desperately need to achieve a carbon-free economy.

Ten climate tidbits

This weekend marks the December conference of Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL), an organization I've now been part of for close to three years. For most of that time — in fact, for most of the time it's existed — CCL has been focused on one specific policy goal: putting a price on carbon in some form or other. But since our pet policy didn't make it into the landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the organization has decided to expand its approach to climate legislation. Thus, the main purpose of this conference was to unveil our new multi-pronged approach. We're planning to continue the fight for carbon pricing (perhaps at the state and local level for a while), but we're also going to be working toward three additional goals:

• Permitting reform. Remember how I said last summer that the IRA would get our carbon emissions down to about 40% below their 2005 level? Well, it turns out that number was a little fuzzy. The bill's provisions will allow us to build enough green energy infrastructure to get to that level — but whether we actually build them will depend largely on whether the projects can get the necessary permits. Right now, there's a lot of red tape holding them up. So cutting through that tape is one of our new policy priorities.
• Building electrification and efficiency. It's not enough just to make the power grid greener. There's a lot of other stuff out there that currently runs on fossil fuels, such as vehicles and home heating systems. To eliminate those emissions, we need to convert all that stuff so that it runs on electricity, while at the same time making sure the electricity it runs on is green. (Efficiency is part of this because the more energy-efficient we can make homes and other buildings, the less green electricity we'll need to power them all.)
• Nature-based solutions. Trees are an ecological two-fer: They suck up carbon, and their shade helps make it easier to survive on a hotter planet. To make the most of these benefits, we need to manage existing forests better so we don't lose so many trees to development and/or wildfires. And we need to add more trees everywhere we can: whole new forests, trees on cropland (silvopasture), and trees in cities.

This, then, is the broad overview of our agenda. But as always, God and the devil both are in the details, and it was these details that most caught my attention at the conference sessions I attended. Here, in order of appearance, is a quick rundown of the ten most interesting tidbits that I learned:

1. Most climate bills are bipartisan. Anyone who was paying attention knows that the IRA passed without a single vote from Republicans. But this actually made it an exception to the general rule. Up until now, every major environmental bill— the ratification of the Kigali Amendment, the 2021 infrastructure bill, the Murkowski-Manchin energy and water bill — has had significant Republican support. Which means there's good reason to hope that we can continue to pass climate legislation in the upcoming, closely divided Congress.
2. Permitting reform, though boring, is absolutely vital. To achieve our climate goals, we need to triple our capacity to transmit clean energy within the next 30 years. But right now, we're only expanding electric transmission at about 1% per year. If we continue at that slow rate, we will only realize about 20 percent of the emissions reductions from the IRA. In fact, U.S. emissions will actually increase, because if we can't connect cities to the wind farms and solar farms being built in rural areas, we'll need to burn more coal to make up for increased demand for electricity.
3. Fossil fuels are already on the way out. In the U.S., we've pretty much stopped building new fossil fuel plants already. About 90% of all proposed electricity capacity in the queue is wind or solar. Global demand for fossil fuels is projected to peak by 2025.
4. Weatherization is a huge money-saver — especially for low-income households, which spend a bigger share of their income on fuel. It can cut their energy bills by as much as 35%.
5. Forests sequester up to 12% of all carbon emissions in the U.S, and we could potentially boost that number as high as 22%. (The linked article says 21%, but it's from 2018, and our total emissions have fallen since then.)
6. Urban trees literally save lives. They improve air quality and help cool urban "heat islands." Neighborhoods with trees have measurably lower mortality rates than neighborhoods without them, even when you control for the fact that these neighborhoods tend to be richer and whiter.
   
7. Building with wood is a win-win. Replacing materials like steel with "durable wood" can cut the emissions from construction by 25% to 33%, while also sequestering carbon within the wood.
8. Electrifying buildings automatically makes them greener — even if the electricity comes from fossil fuels. That's because modern electric appliances are a lot more energy-efficient. Heat pumps are two to three times as efficient as a traditional heating system.
   
9. It also saves a ton of money. Replacing an old-school heating system with a heat pump can save a family anywhere from $100 to $1,300 per year. (Households with oil heat or electric resistance heaters see the biggest savings.) Electrifying everything — space heating, water heating, cooking, transportation — could cut the cost of powering our economy in half.
10. If you're not ready to go electric, you can still get your home "electric ready." This means putting in the necessary circuits so that when you are ready to replace your heating system, your water heater, your gas-burning car with a plug-in electric, you can just do it. There's information about what this entails on the Rewiring America website, which also offers a detailed guide to how the IRA can help pay for it. The Carbon Switch site also has lots of useful info on how to go electric. 

I'm sure I'll be diving deeper into these new topics (reforestation, building electrification, urban forests, permitting reform) over the coming weeks and months. But for now, these ten fun (and useful) facts are my top takeaways.

Money Crashers: Inflation Reduction Act of 2022

I've already devoted one post on this blog to the Inflation Reduction Act and the fact that it could help the U.S. reduce its emissions by 40% from 2005 levels. But I haven't really gotten into the nuts and bolts of how it achieves those reductions. And I haven't even begun to talk about the other provisions in the bill, which are fairly significant in their own right: boosting U.S. industry, controlling Medicare costs, closing some big tax loopholes, and improving tax collection.

If you're curious about all that stuff, my latest piece for Money Crashers can help. It doesn't get too far into the weeds, but it does provide a broad overview of what this new law does, how it could affect you, and what it will cost. (Spoiler alert: It more than pays for itself.)

Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 – What’s in the Bill, What Does It Cost & What Does It Mean for You?

 

More climate solutions

Last week, while celebrating the fact that our country finally, finally managed to pass meaningful climate legislation, I also stressed that the new law itself wasn't going to be enough. We still need to keep up efforts to decarbonize our economy at all levels of government, and in the private sector as well. So what's next? Which new approaches will do most to help us cut carbon emissions, and draw down existing emissions, as fast as possible?

Glad you asked! Back in January, in an effort to fight off climate despair, I posted a small roundup of five ideas that had the potential to be game changers on climate. Here are four more — this time, complete with some suggestions on how to help them along.

Game changer #6: Fake meat

Last month, I read a piece in Knowable magazine that posed the question, "How sustainable are fake meats?" The answer turns out to be, "Maybe not as sustainable as other plant-based proteins, but way better than real meat." Measured in kilograms of CO2 equivalent per gram of protein, plant-based faux meats are much better than beef, better than pork or chicken, and in some cases, even better than eggs. They're not as carbon-light as tofu, pulses (legumes), or peas, but they're not that far behind. They use much less water, too. And in terms of land use, they're actually more sustainable.

How much could this help the climate? Quite a bit. According to the article, 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock. Replacing the meat we eat now with faux meat could cut that figure by anywhere from 53% (for pork) to 93% (for beef). So if you figure 70% on average, that's about a tenth of all our greenhouse gas emissions gone.

What's holding it back? Two things: quality and cost. At present, there are good plant-based substitutes for ground beef and chicken nuggets, but not for the good stuff, like steak and chicken breast. And because these meats are pretty cheap, the plant-based versions are currently more expensive.

How can you help make it happen? This one's easy. Fun, even. Just start sampling the wide variety of tasty plant-based meats out there until you find one you really like, and then sub it in for real meat whenever possible. 

Game changer #7: Superhot rock energy

Besides being a really good name for a band, superhot rock energy is "the carbon-free energy resource you've never heard of," according to the Clean Air Task Force (CATF). See, we already know that there's an essentially limitless source of heat energy in the earth's mantle, but the problem is tapping into it. Traditional geothermal energy relies on natural sources of underground steam, which you only find where there are hot spots quite close to the surface. But there are few such locations, which greatly limits its potential as an energy source.

For superhot rock energy, you have to go deeper into the earth's crust, down to the regions where everything is hot. Then you drill wells and inject water to pick up that heat and carry it back to the surface, where you can use it to generate power. It can also serve to split apart water for clean hydrogen fuel. 

How much could this help the climate? It could be huge. We're talking unlimited power that's available basically anywhere, anytime. All you have to do is build the power plants (or repurpose existing fossil-fuel plants) to tap into it. 

What's holding it back? First of all, these wells need to be really deep, and they're in areas that are, by definition, very hot. So we need new techniques and new materials to make it work. And second, you need to figure out how to do it without setting off earthquakes in the process, the way fracking can.

How can you help make it happen? You can donate to organizations (such as CATF) that are working to make this new clean energy source a reality. And in the meantime, you can read up on it, so when climate skeptics start whining about how renewable energy is unreliable because sometimes the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, you can say, "Well, actually..." and take the wind right out of their sails.

Game changer #8: Plastic-to-graphene recycling

This idea is about as ecofrugal as you can get. It's about turning something harmful that no one wants (plastic waste) into something incredibly useful that everyone wants. According to Design News, scientists at Rice University have figured out how to recycle waste plastic into graphene, a material that's a useful part of electronics, concrete, new plastics, and all kinds of other stuff. And better still, their technique is considerably cheaper than current methods of making graphene.

How much could this help the climate? So, plastic waste isn't just ugly and toxic and harmful to wildlife. It's all of those things, but it's also a threat to the atmosphere because when it ends up in the oceans, microbes digest it and in the process convert oxygen to carbon dioxide. Plastic that ends up in landfills can break down into methane, which is even more harmful. Turning plastic into graphene not only eliminates these emissions sources but also reduces the need for environmentally harmful graphite mining. It's not clear from the article just how big an impact it could have, but considering all the other problems plastic waste creates, having less of it (and better yet, turning it into something useful) is clearly a Very Good Thing.

What's holding it back? Mostly the fact that the idea is so new. The paper announcing it came out less than two years ago, so it will take time to scale it up. But the team at Rice is already getting started, working with Ford Motors to recycle the plastic parts of deceased Ford F-150s.

How can you help make it happen? Well, you could consider a Ford for your next vehicle. But for now, you can probably do more good by reducing plastic waste in other ways, like giving up stupid bottled water.

Game changer #9: Leaner, cleaner, greener air conditioning

Living on a warming planet makes us all more and more dependent on air conditioning — but the more we use air conditioning to cool ourselves, the more we heat the planet. The electricity it uses is part of the problem, but we can fix that by making the power grid greener. The bigger problem is that the coolants in most air conditioners are themselves potent greenhouse gases, and there's no way to keep them perfectly contained. It's an environmental catch-22.

But that may not be the case much longer. A recent Vox article talks about new, experimental air conditioners that could completely change the way we cool ourselves. For instance, a company called Blue Frontier has developed an air conditioner based on a "liquid dessicant": a highly concentrated salt solution that absorbs moisture from indoor air, then releases it outdoors. (A video from a rival company, Advantix, shows how this works.) Another company, Transaera, uses "a novel sponge-like material" to snork up moisture from the air, then recycles the heat thrown off by the machine to dry it out again. And the British company Barocal is using "barocaloric cooling," which depends on a material that heats up as pressure is applied to it and cools off when the pressure is released.

How much could this help the climate? If an A/C unit runs on 100 percent renewable energy, and if it stays completely sealed, it does very little damage. However, those conditions seldom apply. According to the World Economic Forum, if we could replace today's conventional air conditioners with new designs that cut emissions by four-fifths (which these experimental models do), it could eliminate emissions of as much as 100 gigatons of CO2 equivalent by 2050.

What's holding it back? The technology is there, but it's very new. It will take time and money to scale it up.

How can you help make it happen? Unfortunately, you can't buy one of these new, hyper-efficient air conditioners today, and you won't be able to any time in the next few years. But you can follow the news of these companies, as well as the Global Cooling Prize, which helps support new cooling technologies like these. And if you get a chance to invest in them or otherwise support their work, go for it. It'll help bring these technologies to market faster, and given how much the world needs them, it'll probably pay off in the long run.