Carbon

One of the things I really want Oil is Dumb to do that hardly anyone else does is to account for our energy and resource use comprehensively.

Here's what I mean. It's becoming increasingly popular these days for companies (and people for that matter) to think about their carbon emissions. We're very aware of our carbon use, and how carbon emissions contribute to global warming by being a greenhouse gas. But here's the thing. Carbon is not the whole story. There are a lot of other emissions that are important, like sulfur dioxide; and we also need to think about our consumption of resources, like paper, which are also a major strain on the environment. Not to mention how much energy we use in the first place.

As an example, a company that operates a manufacturing plant for scientific instruments might use mercury. Let's say they're concerned about the environment, and they've decided to assess and offset their carbon emissions from the energy they use in their manufacturing. So they can be carbon neutral, but as a byproduct of their manufacturing they still dump mercury in a river. So do they get to claim that they're an environmentally friendly company? I think the answer is obviously no. Mercury is toxic, and call me crazy, but if you dump poison into the water supply, I think you're doing something bad for the world.

So these are my thoughts on carbon. Carbon is a great proxy for how environmentally responsible your company is. It is correlated to many other things. If I cut my electricity use dramatically then less coal needs to be burned and less carbon goes into the air. Or if I use less paper, then not only am I saving trees, but less paper needs to be made, which saves electricity and water, both of which in turn save coal, which in turn reduces carbon. So they are all interrelated.

But while this is true, they aren't completely the same thing, as in the example about the mercury. I think tons and tons of companies fall into this category. You can't be carbon neutral and dump mercury into a lake, and still think you're doing something good for the environment. So being carbon neutral is good, but it doesn't mean I am good to the environment.

So here's what I'm doing. I'm going to go all out, and comprehensively account for all of my resource use, and all of my emissions. A while back, when I first started Oil is Dumb, I made this decision. And I decided to keep accounting records for all these things just like I keep accounting records for money. I've been doing this for a year and a half. I decided that for us to consider ourselves solvent as a company, we had to take in more money that we spend, but we also had to conserve more resources that we used, offset more emissions that we emitted, and in general to actually leave the planet in better condition that we found it.

Here is the list of accounting records we keep: oil, electricity, natural gas, paper, water, landfill waste, carbon dioxide, sufur dioxide, nitrous oxides, and mercury. Why doesn't every company do this? We think they should. And here is my favorite thing about Oil is Dumb: as a company, Oil is Dumb has conserved more oil that we have used, used a net negative amount of natural gas, paper, and water; have produced a net negative amount of landfill waste, CO2, SO2, NOx, and mercury, and the business has conserved more electricity than it takes to run itself. It's really amazing. But the most amazing part is how easy it proved to be. I couldn't believe how easy it was. Honestly, I think if other companies even tried, many could do it. We call this being eco-negative, and we call this business model Upside-down business.

More Money

Congratulations to Geoff O., of Austin, TX, who was the winner of the $50 drawing for his picture of his clothes washer set on cold. Thanks for taking concrete steps towards making our nation energy independent.

Results of the January, 2009 No-Brainer

The first No-Brainer contest to be posted on this blog was a success. We had 8 people send in pictures of their washers on cold, and 17 participants total. That is a company record. The challenge was to set your washing machine on cold (or cold/cold) and leave it there for the rest of the month. I offered to pay $10 for each entry. And I am also doing a $50 drawing for the people who sent in pictures. All the awards payouts will go out this week.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this very successful No-Brainer.






Here was the impact of the January, 2009 No-Brainer:

Oil
Electricity: ................. 553 kWh
Natural Gas
Water
Paper
Carbon: ...................... 0.37 metric tons
Landfill Waste
Sulfur Dioxide: .......... 1.732 lbs
Nitrous Oxides: ......... 0.630 lbs
Mercury: .................... 0.15691 lbs
Cost: .......................... $170

There are assumptions that go into these numbers. Here are a few: I assume everyone who says they will do it actually does it (for two weeks anyways, though I see that some folks are planning on doing it for another month...); washers comprise around 7% of the total household energy use; around 90% of the energy required for washing goes into heating the water; and I assume the average household electric bill is 1,000 kWh each month. Also, however, this data does not take into account natural gas use (around 20% of clothes washers run on natural gas). The actual electricity saved will be a little less, and we will have saved some natural gas, but the emissions will be roughly the same. Nevertheless, I wanted to give a rough report on the impact of this contest as soon as possible. The full report will be posted on the new website sometime soon.

Putting this into terms that make sense (i.e., I'm not going to talk about hot air balloons), 520 kWh is a lot of energy compared to a person. Since I am a light bulb running at 100 Watts, this contest saved enough energy to run me for a little over 7 months. There are many other wonderful things to say, but I want to keep it simple for now.

As I go along, there are many other intuitions I want to develop, such as how much mercury this is compared with how much mercury is toxic to a plant or a person, and also how these numbers compare not only to a person, but to a small company like Oil is Dumb. But that will have to wait for another post.

By the way, the cost I just paid per kilowatt-hour was around 30 cents. This is about 3 times the cost of traditional electricity, and roughly the same cost as solar power.

I Am a Light Bulb

What if I told you that you could save 3 tons of CO2 if you just flipped a light switch? Wow!

Wait, what if I said it was 100 tons? Would you know the difference?

Here's a quiz. How much is a kilowatt-hour? Is it a lot of electricity or not very much? What if I said that if you put all the barrels of oil we use in a year end-to-end it would reach to the moon? How about the sun?

I'm convinced that most facts we hear about the environment are dumb. Because they don't mean anything to us. Here is a great one I recently read on an eco-minded website: "If everyone put an insulation jacket on their hot water tank, we'd cut CO 2 emissions by 900,000 tonnes - enough to fill around 182,000 hot air balloons."

What does that even mean? I'm pretty sure nobody knows.

Facts like this are basically pointless. How are we supposed to live in a way that's more energy conscious, and ecologically friendly, when the world is presented to us in this way? It's not that the data aren't there. It's just that they don't mean anything because they aren't tied to things we know. (Who has a good gut feeling on the size of a hot air balloon?)

So I'm going to start over. I'm going to wipe my mind clean of anything I think I know about energy and the environment, and I am going to start with something I am familiar with. And I'll make it the center of my understanding about energy and the environment. I'm going to start with the human body. I am one, so I have a feel for what it is.

Now here's a genuine and honest question. If I asked you to compare your human body to a household appliance, in terms of the energy it uses, what appliance would you say uses a comparable amount of energy? Most people say refrigerator. Or freezer. And some people say dishwasher. So here is the simple (and amazing) answer:

I eat about 2,400 Calories per day.
There are 1.163 Watt-hours per Calorie.
So I use 2,781 Watt-hours during each 24 hours.
And so my power is about 116 Watts, or just a little more than a light bulb.

Women use fewer Calories, requiring only about 90 Watts. So I'm going to kind of take an average, and just say that people's bodies use about 100 Watts.

So I am Chuck.
And I am a light bulb.

And that is my first energy lesson to myself.

Cutlery

So I went into the grocery store today to get some lunch at the cafe they have. Part of my lunch was a bowl of fruit. I asked the person at the counter for a fork, to eat the fruit with, but she said they didn't have just a fork, and hands me a plastic wrapped set of plastic utensils. Here's an exhaustive list of what was in the package: a heavy duty plastic spoon, a plastic knife, two individual packages of salt, and one of pepper, two thin napkins, and of course my plastic fork. All wrapped generously in clear plastic.

So then the whole time I was eating my fruit, I watched the opened plastic wrapper with the rest of the stuff in it, sitting on the table. It was a nice day so the sun was coming in the window and I was relaxing and enjoying myself while I ate, but the concept of the plastic bag being sealed up so you have to open all that stuff even if you just want to get one of the utensils out was still bouncing around in my mind. You can't return the rest of it, because even if you convince them to take it back, because it's unused and you're environmentally minded, they'll throw it away as soon as you turn to leave. And I can't take these home anymore, because my drawer at home is already filled with plastic knives and forks wrapped in plastic from just these kinds of occasions. But I don't think I've ever used any of them.

January, 2009 No-Brainer: Wash Your Clothes on Cold

Okay. I just posted the January, 2009 No-Brainer. This is the very first No-Brainer that I'm posting on the new blog.

I'm asking people to commit to washing their clothes in cold water for the rest of the month. I'm gonna pay $10. Plus I added an extra that says if you take a picture of your laundry machine on the cold setting and send it in, I'll enter you into a drawing for $50. Seems like a good contest.

The contest is here.

I'm hoping to get a lot of people to take pictures and send them in. I think it would be cool to have a page on the site where you can see a lot of people's washing machines all set on cold.

Simple

A thing about the name Oil is Dumb.  We complicate all this stuff.  But we don't need to.  We need to conserve and live smarter.  That's all.  So that's why I call it Oil is Dumb, because it's a simple statement, that expresses a simple truth we all know - that our fixation on oil as our energy source, and our incredible waste of it, and our incredible waste of many of our other resources, is dumb.  It avoids a complex assessment or gets into a deep debate about the exact right thing to do.  Those things are important, of course, but that's not what I'm focusing on.  What I'm saying is:  there are certain things that don't require a complicated solution.  We need to change our habits to conserve more and waste less.

So my goal is to be simple and dumb.