1. The oil leak that is destroying the Gulf of Mexico. Duh.
2. The likelihood of a major earthquake striking the Pacific Northwest in my lifetime. Let’s be honest:  I love my new adopted city, and I’m not leaving anytime soon.  But I am also probably not going to buy a brick or stucco house in this city, not unless it’s been seismically reinforced, or one story (but what’s the fun in that?).  The last time a major earthquake struck here was in 1700, and obviously the city was mostly settled after that, so many modern buildings were built in the absence of a strong seismic code.  And the chances of a big one hitting are pretty high.  Like, 4 in 10 high.  D’oh!
3. Jevons paradox and Khazzoom-Brookes postulate. Before you get all excited that I’m using strange, big words that you’ve never seen before, check out the Wikipedia articles that I linked to and then come back.  You’ll see that the two concepts are very similar in nature, and that they both allude to one thing: the idea that the more we increase efficiency of technology or energy, the more we consume as a society.   So you can imagine, then, why this might keep me up at night… I work for an energy efficiency company!  Our whole job is to increase the efficiency of buildings and help you save energy, and therefore money.  But I can’t help you save money if – as these concepts state – you end up increasing your consumption because you are saving money.  So, I will beg of you this:  do not become a statistic!  Don’t succumb to these concepts!  Please let me help you save money!
4. And finally, Hovershark.  I mean, seriously.  What the heck is this?!?  Are they evolving that quickly?!  I only live an hour and a half from the ocean, can they hover that far?!?  :)

image courtesy of www.warrenellis.com

• 3,060 unique visitors
• 4,209 visits
• 13,765 page views
• visitors from 91 countries/territories!

Oh how I love statistics.  But let’s see what our top ten countries sending visitors were:

1. United States (duh)
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. China
5. South Korea
6. Malaysia (that’s a cool surprise!)
7. India
8. Australia
9. Spain
10. Turkey

Welcome to all my international visitors, wherever you live!  And to those of you who actually pay attention on the occasions when I post something of value, I’m going to give you a little bonus tidbit:

Check out this article on Treehugger about the zero-landfill Subaru plant in Indiana.  I know I’ve been threatening to write a post about used cars, and I probably will here soon, but reading this article about the Subaru plant gives me warm fuzzies and actually makes me open to the possibility of getting a new car at some point.  Of course living in Oregon means that if I bought a new Subaru, I’d fit right in.  Now just make it electric and give me a wind turbine to plug it into, and I’ll be all set.

On the other hand, when you decide you need to go “real” shopping, you might never really consider Goodwill to be your first choice.  Right?

Well, let me introduce you to the concept of second-hand shopping “for real”, which is to say, going to the second-hand clothing store to buy items that you might wear every day, or at least NOT to a pimp & hooker party.  I realize this isn’t a new concept; vintage stores have been around for a while now and happy hipsters are no stranger to the ironic high school t-shirts from the 70’s.  But shopping at vintage stores has always been an unsatisfying experience for me – unless it’s a really REALLY special piece, I don’t hold the belief that clothing, like houses, appreciate in price over time.  So, NO, I don’t want to pay $80 for that dress that probably cost $15 in 1982.  Nice try though.

All of that changed when I discovered Buffalo Exchange.  Merely coming to the realization that places like Buffalo Exchange exist was a revelation for me.

Image courtesy of Time.com; visit the article here

A quick search around the internet tells me that I might be late to the second-hand clothing party, but then again if it took me so long to figure it out, then I know that there are others who haven’t yet.   Anyway, as per my usual disclaimer, this blogger is not paid to endorse or hawk any particular product or store, but if I find a product or a place that I think fits into a  “greener lifestyle” mantra, then I’m happy to talk about it.   Here’s a few reasons why I enjoy shopping at Buffalo Exchange so much:

1. Their clothes are not so “vintage”. Most of the clothing that seems to show up at the Exchange is from within the past 10 years or so… Sure, there’s some vintage items in there, but it’s actually contemporary stuff.  It’s a bit like having the chance to raid your roommate’s closet except that you are raiding ALL roommate’s closets all at once.
2. The prices are well within reason. Shopping at this second-hand clothing store – which sells both used AND new stuff – will not break your bank.  Most of the clothing I’ve bought has been between $12 – $20, and every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you’ll come across a pair of jeans or a designer piece that was once sold for upward of $200.  It might still cost you $50 at the Exchange, but it beats paying the original marked-up price.  (Back to my housing analogy, I think clothes are much more like cars, in that there is always an initial sticker price that is jacked up for name-brand appeal, and then as soon as you put it on it is worth about half as much.  But I will save my lecture about buying used cars for another post…)
3. Having less choice is sometimes really awesome. So this may not make too much sense, but let me explain.  Sometimes when I walk into a store, and they have an entire section devoted to cute dresses, each in about four or five different colors, I become really overwhelmed.  I am a very careful decision maker and if I like even two or three of those dresses, I could spend an entire evening trying to decide which two I want, and in which colors.  Buffalo Exchange takes that stress away from me.  There’s something almost liberating about going straight to your size section and knowing that what’s there is there, and that unless it’s a new piece sold only at the store, you’re not worrying about which colors to get, because that’s your only choice.  AND, per #2 above, you’re probably going to spend less on it, as well.
4. You can sell your own used clothes there too. It’s very satisfying to know that an outfit you might not be interested in wearing anymore might be very appealing to someone else.  My advice is to purge your closet before going, sell your clothes back to them for store credit, and then reward yourself for recycling by shopping!  They rarely buy all of your clothing but if it’s a unique and well-maintained piece, you’ll probably get something for it.  They also take shoes and bags!

In conclusion, next time you need a new outfit, or next time you start to take that bag of old clothes to Goodwill, try Buffalo Exchange, or another local second-hand store*.  Your wallet will appreciate it, as will the planet, since you’ll be diverting those materials from the waste stream.

*Note:  it’s been my experience that consignment stores are much more complicated than the second-hand stores that I am speaking about… If I remember correctly there are usually membership fees involved, but you should investigate for yourself if a consignment store might be as good – or a better – option.

• Buffalo Exchange   (www.buffaloexchange.com)
• Recently featured in Women’s Day and Lucky magazines
• 14 states nation-wide  (Including two here in Portland!)

I think that Daphne (my bike, above) and Ruby (Erin’s bike, below) would get along well, should they ever have the opportunity to cruise together in person.

Soooo, I know I said that LILAWAC was retired before… consider this post my official passing of the torch and an un-retirement party 

Please visit Erin’s first post here to wish her luck, and don’t forget to add LILAWAC to your RSS feeds!

“But why?”, you say.  (Or maybe you don’t, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, ha.)  Well consider this:  although you can’t see it, using a good amount of insulation and installing it properly is one of the greatest differences between having an energy efficient house and having a drafty, cold, money-pit of a house.  Observe:

From the GDC's Green Your Home tool

Now, knowing that you need a lot of insulation is one thing; know what KIND of insulation to get is entirely another.  In my diagram above, the pink part of the wall section is pink because I assumed that a lot of people associate that color with Owens Corning’s Pink Panther, aka “The Historical American Emissary of Insulation.”  And it’s true that Owens Corning has a lot of insulation products that are useful for homes, including a new product called Foamular, which is a rigid and moisture-resistant exterior insulation.  I’ve seen how this stuff is made – at the Owens Corning LEED Gold Manufacturing Plant just outside of Portland, no less – and it’s a heck of a lot easier to use than the old pink fiberglass stuff.  No offense to the Pink Panther, of course.

BUT, there are other, perhaps more sustainable options for insulation, ones that use less manufacturing energy or recycled materials, for instance.  Lloyd Alter over at Treehugger recently posted his thoughts on the debate between spray polyurethane foam insulation and recycled denim insulation.  There are advantages and disadvantages to both, and since Lloyd covered them already, I won’t repeat him.  But, depending on what the application is, you might find the fact that the spray foam is easy to install and covers up any gaps appealing; or, you may want to avoid VOCs and use the recycled denim, which helps eliminate material from the waste stream.

Obviously, I am not paid to endorse any product here at the GDC, nor do I personally have a preference as to what people use – perhaps one day when I buy a house, I will decide!  In the meantime, I DO encourage people who have homes and the money to renovate to check out the insulation in their homes and maybe consider upgrading … in almost every climate zone in the country, it will help you save energy, which will help you save money.  Hooray for saving money! 

Well, that may soon change, at least a little bit.  Enter the HOME STAR Jobs Bill.   HOME STAR provides two paths for consumers to save energy in their homes (from their Web site):

1. The Silver Star prescriptive path provides a near-term incentive for specific energy saving investments that is simple to administer and easily introduced into the existing marketplace. Homeowners receive between $1,000 and $1,500 for each measure installed in the home, or $250 per appliance, with a benefit not exceeding $3,000 or at least 50% of total project costs (whichever is less). Covered measures include air sealing; attic, wall, and crawl space insulation; duct sealing or replacement; and replacement of existing windows and doors, furnaces, air conditioners, heat pumps, water heaters and appliances with high-efficiency models. The legislation will utilize existing standards for qualifying products at a level sufficient to significantly increase consumer demand for highly energy efficient building materials and mechanical systems.  SILVER STAR improvements may be implemented by any appropriately licensed and insured contractor, but all participating contractors will receive information about opportunities for accreditation and training programs.
2. The Gold Star performance path offers an incentive to households that choose to conduct a comprehensive energy audit and then implement a variety of measures that are designed together to provide greater total returns in energy savings. This performance path represents the future of home efficiency: state-of-the-art building science is used to identify problems, present solutions and deliver verifiable energy savings, generating confidence among homeowners and investors alike. This technology-neutral approach is based on performance, not specific products, so market forces will direct funds to solutions that achieve the best results. A certified professional with accreditation from the Building Performance Institute (BPI), the Residential Energy Services Network (RESNET) or an approved equivalent conducts an energy audit before work begins, and a test-out when the performance retrofit is complete. Consumers receive $3,000 for modeled savings of 20%, plus an additional $1,500 incentive for each additional 5% of modeled energy savings, with incentives not to exceed 50% of project costs. Contractors implementing the GOLD STAR performance path must be BPI accredited.

What this means is that, essentially, if this legislation passes, millions of people will very quickly have several options available to them by which they can implement energy-saving measures in their homes by actions as simple as upgrading appliances or by doing an all-out renovation.  The bill primarily hopes to quickly create as many jobs as possible, while providing energy efficiency on a massive scale, which not only will ease the burden on our aging energy infrastructure, it will ultimately reduce carbon emissions.  (Both of which, incidentally, were the goals when I started this Web site.)  Additionally, anyone wishing to implement these measures will have financing options available to them that are guaranteed through the provisions of the bill.

Pretty neat, eh? Now we just need to hope that the legislation gets passed! If you’d like to learn more about HOME STAR, visit their Web site here.  If you’d like to join the coalition supporting it, visit the Efficiency First Web site to sign up and find out how you can contact your legislators to voice your support.  Even if you don’t own your own home or aren’t in a position to change your living situation to make it more efficient, I think we can all agree that adding a couple hundred thousand jobs during a recession to a very depressed construction market is a good idea, and making several million homes more efficient is an even better idea.   So CHECK IT OUT!!!

First of all, you may want to know what a “home energy rating” consists of.  The funny thing is, there’s actually LOTS of home energy ratings.  There’s the HERS, which is given by ResNet, which is the group hosting the conference I’m attending this week; there’s a BPI rating; there’s the ENERGY STAR designation; there’s the LEED for Homes; there’s the NAHB Green Home Standard; and I’m pretty sure there’s a few that I’m forgetting.

An example of a HERS score: image courtesy of ResNet

Each of these rating systems use a set of standards that are either administered during the construction or remodeling of the home, or they are checked after the home is completed.  To adhere to these strict standards, your home needs to have properly installed insulation, tight construction (so that your home doesn’t leak too much air),  an air/moisture barrier (again with the leakage), properly sealed ducts, and it wouldn’t hurt to have good windows, weatherstripping, very efficient HVAC equipment, and … basically your home should be a well-constructed, high-performance house.

I would regale you with the details of the various sessions that I’ve been attending but I can almost guarantee that you would get bored and fall asleep reading.  I’ve been having a hard time staying awake myself, which I attribute to the warmth of the rooms and the fact that I’m operating three hours ahead of my home time zone.  Nevertheless, it’s an incredibly informative conference and I’m getting to meet a lot of very knowledgeable people who are working to help homeowners save energy.

Now, back to watching the Olympics! 

Just to be clear, YES, I lived in Los Angeles for two years without a car.

And I did so intentionally.  Before I left the Midwest, I sold my beloved Volkswagen GTI, bought a bike, and moved to LA car-less.  I did the math – not having a car in LA for two years would save me an estimated $10,000, and when you’re living on a shoe-string budget and trying to put yourself through graduate school, every little bit counts.  And I’ve always been a big fan of public transportation and bikes, and since you can bike almost year-round in LA, I figured I would do just that.  Besides, I told people – I wanted to prove that it could be done.  I wanted to put the system to the test and see if my life was severely impacted by not having a car, in one of the most car-obsessed cities in America.

So how did I do? …You might be wondering.  Well, would it surprise you to know that this blog-happy cyclist started a blog specifically about my experiences in LA while car-less?  It’s called, ahem: Living in Los Angeles Without A Car. Original, no?  I called it LILAWAC for short, because that’s the abbreviation, and because it sounds cute.  Please feel free to have a look if you are interested in hearing more about the authentic LA car-free experience, from myself and a few other contributors … although I stopped posting well over a year ago (this little thing called a “graduate thesis” got in my way), it’s still up and public, and every once in a while I get an odd comment on there.

This bike got me around Los Angeles for two years!

Sooo… If you are moving to LA, or just visiting, and you’d like to try and do it car-free and carefree (ha), here’s a crash course for you (ha ha, crash course):

• Bookmark your LA Metro Bus and Rail Trip Planner. Even after a year of living there, I’d occasionally find a quicker way to go from point A to point B using this widget.  Check out my tips for riding the bus here.

• When possible, take the DASH buses.  They are awesome and only cost 25 cents.  Plus, they take pennies!

• Oh and don’t forget that Los Angeles isn’t the only city in the Southland… keep an eye out for Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus or the Culver City green buses, in case there are some gaps in your public transportation route.

• Trying to get from LAX Airport to anywhere in Los Angeles is daunting, but not impossible.  That is what the LAX Flyaway is for.

• Car sharing, on the other hand, is nearly impossible in LA.  At least, I found it troubling.

• If you’d rather go by two wheels instead of Metro, keep in mind these points:

1. Riding on the sidewalk is not only irritating, it is illegal.
2. Ride in the street when there’s not a bike lane, and when in doubt, take the lane. Yes, LA drivers are crazy, and yes, it’s scary riding on the same road with them.  But if you try to squish yourself in between a lane and the parked cars on the side of the road, you put yourself at a much greater risk of getting sideswiped or doored … better to just be IN the lane.  Very few drivers will straight out mow a cyclist down if you are in front of them.  (At least that’s what I tell myself so I can sleep at night.)
3. Cycling in LA can be tricky, but it can also be awesome.

Image courtesy of the Laist.com - that's me!

Now another thing you should know is, although I may be the only one with a Blogspot LILAWAC, I’m certainly not the only one who ever lived in LA without a car. In part because of my blog, I was approached by a very nice woman named Diane who decided to put together an exhibit of all our experiences. She’s a photographer by trade so the exhibit was sort of a pictoral essay, a series of short testimonials by 100 people like me, all of whom went car-less for various reasons. One of my quotes even made it into the exhibit (photo above).

I hear the exhibit is still making its rounds about Los Angeles! And although I am not still making my rounds about LA, and yes, I do now have a car (although one can hardly call it a big expense), I still look back on LILAWAC with fondness. I wish I could bequeath my old blog to some other car-less buddies still in the Southland who wouldn’t mind sharing their experiences for the benefit of all Angelenos. In fact, if you’re interested in being the face of LILAWAC for the new decade, leave me a comment! Just remember, car-bound people need not apply

What do you see?  Do you see a happy polar bear, playing with a butterfly?

Perhaps he’s taking a nap next to his “friends”, the baby seal and the baby polar bear…

Or, maybe you see a polar bear that’s running… you see, the sun came out and it started to melt the ice underneath the polar bear’s feet.  He needs to get somewhere, and fast!

What these animations are depicting, if you were perceptive enough to figure out from the dashboard on the left-hand side of the page, is real-time energy usage on the campus of Dartmouth University.  Unlike many other institutions, which have mandated efficiency programs and/or building goals that were set by the university or the government, Dartmouth sought to reduce energy consumption in their dorms – solely through behavioral changes – by 15%.  From their Web site:

Launched on April 24, 2008, the goal of the program is to change behavior by providing energy information in meaningful and compelling ways. … We encourage students to change the way they use energy in their daily lives by monitoring and displaying information about the resources students have control over, such as plug loads for electricity, heat and water use. We hope to help students understand the larger impacts of their actions and develop tools and approaches to energy conservation that can carry over into their everyday lives.

This program at Dartmouth is innovative, educational, interactive, and fun.  It’s also an example of a hybrid energy efficiency system that exists in very few places in the United States – it’s a behavior modification program that relies on a building monitoring system for real-time data.  The polar bear reacts to the energy load on the building at any given time, and the students can therefore react to the amount of energy they are using immediately.  And it’s not presented in a boring way, either … it’s an animation of a polar bear that lives a happy life or dies based on the energy consumption by the students at Dartmouth.

And by all accounts, it’s been a great success.

This is a good example of an innovative system that buildings might want to employ in the future to encourage occupants to save energy.  The polar bear may not work in all circles, but I, for one, do not want to see any majestic animals suffer because of climate change, so this would have worked on me like a charm.

Kudos to the students at Dartmouth for thinking outside the box to achieve massive energy savings on their campus!