Tag: nrdc

Video Games Shoot Up Energy Bills

  • Playing Sonic on a Wii. The Nintendo Wii uses less energy than Sony's Playstation 3 and the XBox 360. (Photo by Manish Prabhune)

People across the country are firing up one of their favorite gifts they got from the holidays – video games. Mark Brush reports on some surprising results about what home video games can do to your energy bill:

Transcript

People across the country are firing up one of their favorite gifts they got from the holidays – video games. Mark Brush reports on some surprising results about what home video games can do to your energy bill:

Video games are a quick escape into an alternate reality… (snd up) fortunately with multiple lives.

(snd of gunfire)

There’s a war going on in this basement.

Taurus and his partner Walt are using their M-16s, grenades, and knives to fight off the enemy.

(snd)

In real life – Taurus is Will Frey.

He’s a sophomore at Michigan State University.

And he’s been working really hard on his overall ranking:

“So I am currently seven hundred and eleven thousandth”

That sounds really bad.

But actually it’s really good.

He’s better than more than 5 million other people playing Call of Duty 4 on their Xbox consoles.

It’s estimated that forty percent of U-S Households have a video game.

And that number is growing.

The games are played for hours and hours – but they’re also left on – even if nobody’s playing them:

“A lot of sports games – you can’t save in the middle of a game – and the games are like usually a half an hour, so if you’re like twenty minutes and you have to leave, you don’t want to lose that twenty minutes kind of thing you know.”

Frey says he has friends that leave their games on all the time.

They never shut them off.

Some don’t want to lose their progress in a game, and some, he says, are just plain lazy.

The Natural Resources Defense Council says some game designers overlook the energy footprint of these things.

They added up the energy used by all the gamers in the country in a year’s time. And found it roughly equals the juice drawn by a big US city in one year.

The report’s authors compared the energy used by the three most popular gaming consoles.

And the big energy winner was the Nintendo Wii.

It uses about 8 times less energy than Sony’s Playstation 3 or Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

That’s because the Wii doesn’t have the same kind of high end graphics and sound as the Xbox and Playstation – those take a lot more power to run.

Nick Zigelbaum is an energy analyst with the NRDC.

He says the games should be designed better:

“What people don’t realize is that video game consoles, although they’re very similar to laptops and computers in terms of hardware, they don’t go to sleep or go into idle mode like a computer would.”

Zigelbaum says the power hungry XBOX and Playstation games do have an autoshutdown option.

That means the games will automatically turn off if nobody’s using them.

But the games are shipped with the option turned off.

You have to manually set it.

And not all games are equal.

For some games it’s easy to save your progress – for others…
you might lose your spot in that twenty four hour car race.

Zigelbaum says that’s where the industry needs to step in:

“That’s the issue is that it’s not really standardized, it’s not really uniform throughout the whole software industry. So it would be difficult to really implement a strong auto-shutdown feature.”

Zigelbaum says a strong auto-shutdown feature would be the biggest improvement game makers could make.

That would mean no matter what – your game would be saved when the device shuts down.

If the industry did that – homeowners could save more than 100 bucks a year on their energy bills.

A Microsoft spokesperson said they encourage their users to turn the games off when they’re done.

Zigelbaum and the folks at the NRDC are hoping Microsoft and Sony will go farther – and do a better job when designing their next gaming consoles.

(snd)

Will Frey says his friends don’t really think about the energy they use.

How could you when you’ve got other things to worry about?

“Oh my gosh! That’s why the M-4 is the cheapest gun in the game. Next to LMGs.”

(snd)

That stands for “Light Machine Guns.”

Maybe next year’s gaming consoles will shoot holes in the amount of energy they use up.

For the Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Air Pollution Rule Has Some Fuming

Governors in New England are up in arms about some changes the Bush administrations
wants to make that would allow older power plants to add on but avoid buying new
pollution control equipment. Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

Governors in New England are up in arms about some changes the Bush administrations
wants to make that would allow older power plants to add on but avoid buying new
pollution control equipment. Mark Brush has more:

The proposed rule change would change how air pollution is measured from power plants
that expand their operations.

Right now, the air pollution is capped at a certain amount
per year. The new rule would cap the amount of air pollution allowed by the hour.

That
means a power plant could put out a lot more air pollution over the course of a year.

John Walke is a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. He says
this little change in the rule could have a big impact.

“So as soon as these utility companies began to expand their plants and to pump out more
smog and soot pollution. People in surrounding communities would see their air quality
worsen.”

Six northeastern states are urging the EPA not to go forward with the rule change. In a
recent letter sent to the EPA they say the rule change – quote “threatens the quality of our
states’ air and the health of our citizens.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Imported Bottled Water

Environmentalists have been concerned about bottled water. They say it wastes
plastic and uses a lot of fuel to transport it. But one group points toward a certain type of
bottled water that’s more wasteful than others. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Environmentalists have been concerned about bottled water. They say it wastes
plastic and uses a lot of fuel to transport it. But one group points toward a certain type of
bottled water that’s more wasteful than others. Lester Graham reports:


Some bottles of water travel farther than others. Imported bottled water is growing in
popularity. Jon Coifman is with the Natural Resources Defense Council. He says
bottles of water imported from Europe or the south Pacific use a lot of energy in the
containers and shipping:


“It’s a bottle that gets pumped out of the ground, put into a plastic bottle made from
oil, shipped across the ocean on a boat that’s burning oil, trucked to a retailer, using
more oil. All of that for a sip of water you could be getting out of your faucet.”


Coifman and the NRDC acknowledge that bottled water can be convenient. But
they’re trying to persuade people that because of its environmental impact, bottled
water should not be appearing on the dinner table every night, no matter how trendy
the import.


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

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After a Decade, Epa Looks at Pesticides

The US Environmental Protection Agency plans to begin testing
hundreds of pesticides to see if they disrupt human hormones. Tracy
Samilton reports that environmental groups aren’t satisfied with the
plan. They say the research is too little, too late:

Transcript

The US Environmental Protection Agency plans to begin testing
hundreds of pesticides to see if they disrupt human hormones. Tracy
Samilton reports that environmental groups aren’t satisfied with the
plan. They say the research is too little, too late:


Ten years ago, the EPA was directed by Congress to test pesticides to
see if they interfere with human hormones which control everything from
metabolism to reproduction. Now the EPA says it will take two more
years before it will start studying a short list of 73 pesticides.


The agency will eventually test all 700 or so pesticides on the market.
The Natural Resources Defense Council says the testing could eventually
lead to banning some harmful pesticides. But the environmental group
says the EPA dragged its feet on the study for far too long. And the
NRDC complains the short list includes chemicals already known to
disrupt hormones.


For the Environment Report, I’m Tracy Samilton.

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Airports Make It Hard for Airlines to Recycle

  • Many airports don't offer airlines recycling, so all those soda cans and other recyclables are going into landfills.

A new report finds most airlines throw away their empty soda cans and other
recyclables. Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

A new report finds most airlines throw away their empty soda cans and other
recyclables.
Mark Brush has more:

The environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, surveyed around 30
airports and airlines about recycling. They found that most don’t do it. The group
estimates the airline industry trashes about 80% of the materials it
uses.

Allen Hershkowitz is with the NRDC. He says that they found the airports with the
best
recycling programs also save the most money:

“In some cases over six figures annually were saved were save by those airports that
had
the highest recycling rates. So really, in this particular case, economic cost
cutting and
ecological intelligence work in a mutually reinforcing way.”

Hershkowitz says airlines are often at the mercy of the airports they fly into. If
there’s no
recycling program in place they have a difficult time sorting out all their used
paper, cans
and bottles.


For the Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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New Challenges in Methyl Bromide Ban

Environmental advocates are calling for tighter controls on the farm pesticide methyl bromide, after finding out there’s more of the chemical sitting around in places such as railroad tank cars. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

Environmental advocates are calling for tighter controls on the farm pesticide methyl bromide, after finding out there’s more of the chemical sitting around in places such as railroad tank cars. Chuck Quirmbach reports:


Under an international agreement made during the 1980’s, the US is supposed to be phasing out use of methyl bromide. The chemical is linked to potential health risks and destruction of the ozone layer.


But it was recently learned that the size of the US stockpile of methyl bromide is larger than previously revealed. Now the Bush Administration has promised the US would try to cut production of methyl bromide while reducing the stockpile.


David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council says it’s now up to the EPA to live up to that promise in upcoming regulations.


“The EPA needs to cut that production allowance, because the stockpiles are there to meet the needs.”


The EPA says it’s trying to keep a “strategic reserve” of methyl bromide, while a lot of money is being spent on developing alternative pesticides.


For the Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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Cutting Mercury Emissions at Cement Plants

The US EPA is reconsidering a decision to let cement plants off the hook when it comes to mercury emissions. Tests at several cement plants showed they were emitting up to ten times the mercury being disclosed. Tracy Samilton reports:

Transcript

The US EPA is reconsidering a decision to let cement plants off the hook when it comes to mercury emissions. Tests at several cement plants showed they were emitting up to ten times the mercury being disclosed. Tracy Samilton reports:


Cement plants emit mercury from both the coal they burn and from processing limestone, an ingredient of cement. But the EPA has never regulated the mercury emissions. The agency said it would be too costly for the industry. Cement manufacturers say they plan to voluntarily reduce mercury emissions over time.


But Michael Wall of the Natural Resources Defense Council says the EPA needs to exert control over the plants now.


“It would be as if we took a segment of the coal-fired power plant industry and just said ’emit mercury freely, we’re not going to do anything about it.’ That makes really bad policy and it’s really bad for our public health.”


An EPA spokesman says the agency is taking a second look at the issue, in light of stack tests showing some plants may have been grossly underestimating their mercury emissions.


For the Environment Report, I’m Tracy Samilton.

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Jump in Great Lakes Beach Closings

  • A new report says health-related beach closings have increased. (Photo courtesy of the EPA)

A new report says the number of beach closings in the U.S. increased last year compared to 2003. The report says the number of closings in the Great Lakes region jumped more than 60 percent. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Michael Leland has more:

Transcript

A new report says the number of beach closings in the U.S.
increased last year compared to 2003. The report says the number of
closings in the Great Lakes region jumped more than sixty percent.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Michael Leland has more:


The report by the Natural Resources Defense Council says the number of
closing or health advisory days last year was higher than ever in the
group’s fifteen years of record-keeping.


Throughout the region, there were about three thousand closing or health advisory days in 2004. They say that’s due in part to states monitoring more beaches more often, but also due to
increased sewage and stormwater runoff. Mike Shriberg heads the Michigan environmental group PIRGIM.


“Under the Clean Water Act, we should not be discharging raw or
partialy-treated sewage or, in fact, any polluted water into the U.S. What’s
happening now is we’re having a third-world solution to our sewage problems,
by allowing much raw or partially-treated sewage to flow freely into our
waters.”


The NRDC is calling for tougher enforcement of state and federal clean
water standards, and full federal funding of proposals to modernize sewage
systems along the Great Lakes and other waterways.


For the GLRC, I’m Michael Leland.

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Enviros Tracking Bush’s Environmental Actions

  • While many may be closely watching President Bush's foreign policy, environmental groups are still keeping an eye on actions the Administration is taking on the environment. (Photo by Eric Draper courtesy of whitehouse.gov)

The big environmental groups are assessing President George
W. Bush’s record on the environment. Mostly, they’re giving him poor marks. But after the Bush win in November, the real question is whether enough people care about the low rankings. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham
reports:

Transcript

The big environmental groups are assessing President George W. Bush’s record on the environment. Mostly, they’re giving him poor marks. But after the Bush win in November, the real question is whether enough people care about the low rankings. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


With the country at war, a lot of people note President Bush has bigger issues than the environment to address. Greg Wetstone is a spokesperson for the environmental group, Natural Resources Defense Council. He says the Bush administration has been dealing with environmental regulations – quietly dismantling them.


“I think there has been a very concerted effort by the Bush administration to make these changes happen in a way that does not receive much public scrutiny.”


Wetstone says the NRDC’s most recent report on the Bush administration might not cause policy changes right now, but it does serve a purpose.


“This report, which is really an effort to document what’s happening because, you know, the day will come when we’re going to need to go back and try to fix as much of this as possible.”


And the environmental group says once the people realize the damage that’s being done to the environment, they’ll want it fixed.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

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Methyl Bromide Use to Increase

Starting January first, the U.S. will let farms and certain
other businesses use more of the pesticide methyl bromide. But
environmentalists may go to court over the issue. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

Starting January 1st, the U.S. will let farms and certain other businesses use more
of the pesticide
methyl bromide. But environmentalists may go to court on the issue. The Great
Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:


Methyl bromide is used to sterilize soil before planting and to fight invasive
insects that come
into the U.S. on wooden pallets. But scientists say emissions of methyl bromide
harm the ozone
layer. In the 1980s, the U.S. agreed to phase out use of the compound, except for
critical cases
where there are no feasible alternatives.


Methyl bromide use is only a third of what it was in 1991. But the Bush
administration wants to
let that figure rise to 37 percent this coming year. David Doniger is with the
Natural Resources
Defense Council. He says he doubts whether more methyl bromide is needed.


“The problem is the critical use exemptions have mushroomed… way out of control.
So we’re
going backwards.”


The U.S. has agreed to reduce use of methyl bromide in 2006… but critics say that
promise may not be kept. The NRDC says it’s likely to challenge the 2005 plan in
court. An
Indiana company is one of the nation’s largest suppliers of methyl bromide.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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