Rain in Arctic Bad for Reindeer

Reindeer in the Arctic could face harder
times in the future. Lester Graham reports
researchers believe global warming might hurt
their chances for survival:

Transcript

Reindeer in the arctic could face harder times in the future. Lester Graham reports researchers believe global warming might hurt their chances for survival:

It’s not just reindeer, but caribou, muskox – the hoofed animals in the arctic. They eat lichen and moss when they can find it.

Jaakkoo Putkonen is a researcher at the University of North Dakota. He and his team have studied the arctic herds. He says when it rains in the arctic… it freezes.

“So now you have an ice layer at the snow surface or at the soil surface which basically hinders their access to their feed.”

Putkonen says best case scenario the animals have to paw the ground, work harder to get to the food.

“And in the worst case they don’t get their food. So, basically they starve to death.”

It happens. Five years ago, three-thousand musk-ox couldn’t find food… and died.

And Putkonen says it’ll probably get worse. Computer models predict climate change means more rain in the arctic in the future.

For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Electricity From Factory Farms

  • Methane is one of the worst greenhouse gases contributing to global warming. (Photo by Bill Tarpenning, courtesy of the USDA)

Lots of people who live near big livestock farms complain
about the stench of manure. One of the by-products of all
that manure is methane gas – which can be used to create
electricity. More states are starting to offer tax breaks to
factory farms to make energy from their waste.
Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

Lots of people who live near big livestock farms complain
about the stench of manure. One of the by-products of all
that manure is methane gas – which can be used to create
electricity. More states are starting to offer tax breaks to
factory farms to make energy from their waste.
Julie Grant reports:

Several states around the nation are offering tax breaks to
encourage factory farms to capture the methane from their
cow manure – and to convert it into usable electricity.
Methane is one of the worst greenhouse gases contributing
to global warming.

You might think environmental groups would support the
idea. But Ed Hopkins of the Sierra Club says taxpayers
should not subsidize manure-to-energy projects.

“We see factory farms as a business. And like any business,
they should pay the costs for their pollution control
equipment – not the public.”

Hopkins says taxpayer money for manure to energy projects
will only encourage more factory farming and the other
pollution problems associated with those big operations.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

2008 One of Warmest Years on Record

  • The classic photograph of the Earth, taken by the Apollo 17 crew on December 7, 1972 traveling toward the moon (Photo courtesy of NASA-JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth)

2008 is on track to be one of the
ten warmest years on record. Rebecca Williams
has more:

Transcript

2008 is on track to be one of the ten warmest years on record. Rebecca Williams has more:

Scientists keep track of how hot and how cold it gets in places all over the planet. And this time of year they tally up the data.

Karsten Shein is with the National Climatic Data Center. He says 2008 was a cooler year – but it still ranks as one of the top ten warmest years in the past century.

“We do see there are periods where temperatures have gotten cooler for a short period of time and periods where temperatures have gotten warmer for a short period of time but over the entire period of record we’ve seen a general warming trend.”

Shein says many places around the planet continue to have more extreme weather – more rain, more heat waves and more snow.

For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Penguin Species in Peril

  • African penguins at the Bristol Zoo in England (Source: Arpingstone at Wikimedia Commons)

At the north pole… polar bears are threatened by melting sea ice. Now, on the other end of the earth… some penguin populations are dropping because of climate change and other threats. Rebecca Williams reports:

Transcript

At the north pole… polar bears are threatened by melting sea ice. Now, on the other end of the earth… some penguin populations are dropping because of climate change and other threats. Rebecca Williams reports:


Melting sea ice and warmer ocean temperatures are affecting the fish that penguins eat. Overfishing and oil pollution are other threats.


Pamela Hall is with the Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency wants to put seven species of penguins on the endangered species list.


“Hoping that by going forward with the listing of these particular penguin species we’ll be able to work with countries to do some cooperative conservation.”


The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the government to get these penguins on the list. The group is upset that the agency denied protection for the Emperor penguin. You might remember them from the movie “March of the Penguins.”


Government scientists say the emperor penguin populations are stable right now… though they say that could change in the future.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Road Salt Damage (2008)

Each year about 118,000 people are hurt and 1,300 people are killed on the roads during snowy and icy conditions. So, snowplows hit the roads, scraping snow and ice off the surface… and spreading incredible amounts of salt on highways, streets and roads to help keep them clear. Lester Graham reports there’s some concern about the long- term effects of all that salt:

Transcript

Each year about 118,000 people are hurt and 1,300 people are killed on the roads during snowy and icy conditions. So, snowplows hit the roads, scraping snow and ice off the surface… and spreading incredible amounts of salt on highways, streets and roads to help keep them clear. Lester Graham reports there’s some concern about the long- term effects of all that salt:


This dump truck is getting ready for a load of salt for a coming winter storm. Salt helps make icy roads safer. It helps prevent people from slipping and falling on sidewalks. And… it’s pretty cheap. But there are problems with salt. Salt pollutes and salt corrodes.


Mark Cornwell has spent a good deal of his career trying to convince highway crews that there are better ways to keep things safe and reduce how much salt is dumped on roads and sidewalks:


“Salt basically damages just about everything it comes in contact with. Salt moves through concrete and attacks structural steel, bridges, roads, parking structures; it eats the mortar out of bricks and foundations. It damages limestone, you know, just on and on and on.”


So, even though salt is cheap, the damage it does costs a lot. It’s a hidden cost that’s seldom calculated. Imagine the cost of having to replace a bridge five years early because the structure is weakened by salt. And then there are your direct costs: trying to keep salt washed off your vehicle, and still seeing rust attack your car.


Cornwell says there are some cities and road commissioners working to reduce the amount of salt spread on the roads. But in most places, the political pressure to get the salt trucks out early, and laying it on thick to keep drivers happy, outweighs any concerns about trying to reduce the salt:


“I’m sure the public expects full attention to snow and ice. And they have absolutely no understanding, however, of what it costs to provide that.”


Nobody thought a lot about the damage salt was causing until the last couple of decades. In a few places, the people responsible for keeping the roads and walkways safe have been trying to reduce the amount of salt they use and still keep public safety tops on the list of concerns:


“So, this is our shops. The brine-maker is right here.”


Marvin Petway is showing me some of the tools in his arsenal to reduce how much salt is used and still keep things safe. He works at the University of Michigan, where there’s a goal to cut the amount of salt used in winter in half. What they’ve learned is using innovative ways of putting down salt can actually help melt snow and ice faster. One way is to mix it with water to get the chemicals in salt working a little more quickly:


“Why use 5 pounds of rock salt when you can use 2 gallons of liquid salt? We’re able to get better coverage, quicker, better cost, and we’re putting the material that is effective in reducing ice build-up directly to the area where we don’t want ice located.”


The crews trying to reduce salt use computer assisted spreaders to measure out only the salt needed, they mix in less corrosive chemicals that make salt brine more effective, and even just wetting the salt in dump trucks with chemicals all help to melt snow and ice faster and in the end use a lot less salt.


Nothing is going to replace salt altogether, but those efforts can add up to a lot less salt. That means less destruction of infrastructure.


But there are more reasons for reducing salt than the damage to roadways and parking decks. Salt also damages the environment.


Mark Cornwell first noticed the effects of salt because he was a horticulturalist. He’d work all spring, summer and fall planting shrubs, make the grass green, tending beds of flowers. Then the winter would come:


“Unfortunately what we were doing in six months of winter was undoing everything we did in the other six months of the year. If you’re going to get ahead, you’ve got to solve the problem and in my mind, that was misuse of salt.”


Use too much salt and it kills plants. And it turns out the cost of using all that cheap salt could be even greater than anyone guessed. For decades, it’s been assumed that rain washed away most of the salt, but studies in Ontario find that a lot of the salt doesn’t get washed away.


Instead, a good deal of it is percolating down into shallow aquifers. Researchers predict that in the future we’ll start find salt is getting into the groundwater that supplies many of the wells where we get our drinking water.


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

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.

Related Links

Greening Your Computer Usage

  • Follow the 'turn it off' advice and save, on average, $75 a year. (Source: Julo at Wikimedia Commons)

The average personal computer is a real energy guzzler. Only about half of the power it
uses makes videogames run, or music play, or run office software. The other half goes
up in wasted heat. Shawn Allee found out there are energy-saving PCs, but maybe using
the computer correctly can save the most power and money:

Transcript

The average personal computer is a real energy guzzler. Only about half of the power it
uses makes videogames run, or music play, or run office software. The other half goes
up in wasted heat. Shawn Allee found out there are energy-saving PCs, but maybe using
the computer correctly can save the most power and money:

I want a peek at some energy-saving PCs, so I head to a Best Buy electronics store.


“We’re heading to the computers.”

“Yes.”

I’m with a store manager. He wants me to use his first name, Tim.

Shawn: “When people come to the store, what’s usually the thing they’re asking
about or looking for in their PC?”

Tim: “First thing they look for is memory and hard drive space, that’s pretty much
it, and price.”

Shawn: “So it’s like, what can this thing do, and how much is this gonna cost me?”

Tim: “Exactly.”

Shawn: “How often is it the case someone comes in and says, Tim, which one saves
the most energy?”

Tim: “I have never heard that question asked.”

Shawn: “How long you been doing this?”

Tim: “I’ve been with Best Buy for five years.”

And you know, when I ask shoppers about energy consumption and computers, I just get
blank stares.

Well, Tim’s got several computers that have thumb-sized Energy Star labels.

Energy Star rated computers cut energy use by a third, and they usually cost the same as
comparable models.

This can save an average user maybe $25 a year in energy costs.

There are people who say that’s not enough.

You can actually save three times that by using PCs right.

One guy making this case is Pat Tiernan. He directs the Climate Savers Computing
Initiative, a computer industry group.

Tiernan says no matter how you get a PC – new or hand-me down …

“Make sure power management settings are aggressively set.”

Those are in the computer’s control panel settings.

Tiernan wants people to give power-settings the once-over, just to make certain the
computer can detect when you’re not using it.

“It puts it into a lower energy state like sleep mode.”

That’s if you don’t use the computer for fifteen minutes.

That’s the biggest energy saver.

Tiernan’s next tip is to simply turn off the machine when you’re not using it.

“It’s funny to me, people don’t just leave their cars on when they’re done with them,
right? They don’t leave them running in the garage or on the street. Yet, most
people in the U.S. leave their devices on in one form or another.”

Now, Tiernan says, there’s turning off a machine and there’s really turning off a machine.

“Even though you’ve turned many devices off on your household doesn’t mean
they’re not using power.”

Tiernan says computers always sip a little electricity out of your wall socket.

Printers, computer speakers and monitors can, too.

“Put your devices on a power strip. Flip that switch off and you’ll be doing yourself
and the environment a benefit.”

Now, there are critics of turning off your PC.

Shawn: “I have heard in the past that turning your desktop on and off again is hard
on your hard drive, though.”

Tiernan: “Well, a hard drive is and spinning up and spinning down throughout its
entire use. Does it put added wear on your hard drive? It really depends. Depending
on what you have loaded on it, your disk may be spinning up and down anyway, so
there’s a good argument to be made that turning it shutting it down for 8 hours that
you sleep may be better.”

So, what’s the bottom line if you follow Tiernan’s ‘turn it off’ advice for your PC?

On average, you could save $75 a year.

You can save even more if you use an Energy Star model.

But Tiernan says cutting power doesn’t just help your bottom line.

He says there’re more than a billion PCs on the market.

Cutting their power use can take a bite out of climate change.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Stripping Energy From Slow Water

  • Michael Bernitsas, professor in the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, stands before a prototype of his VIVACE hydrokinetic energy device. (Photo by Scott Galvin, courtesy of the University of Michigan)

Some scientists think that
the future of energy is in water.
More specifically, it’s in slow-
moving water. Kyle Norris has more:

Transcript

Some scientists think that
the future of energy is in water.
More specifically, it’s in slow-
moving water. Kyle Norris has more:

Michael Bernitsas is really excited about using water to generate electricity.

“Marine renewable energy is huge. Water is the best natural medium for
storing energy.”

Bernitsas is a Professor of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at the
University of Michigan. And he’s made this machine. Basically it’s a
cylinder that bobs up-and-down in a tank of slow flowing water. The
cylinder creates these swirls of water that hit a generator. And it turns the
kinetic energy into electricity.

Bernitsas thinks there’s a lot of potential to create clean, renewable energy
from flowing water. He says people could eventually put machines, like this
one, in rivers and power houses.

And he says bigger versions of the machine could go into oceans and rivers.
And generate as much electricity as a small coal-burning power plant.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Related Links

Asian Carp Barrier on Low

  • Asian Carp can grow up to 110 pounds (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

A stronger electric barrier
to keep an invasive fish out of the
Great Lakes is set to be turned on.
But people who travel past the
underwater barrier are worried about
electric shocks. Chuck Quirmbach
reports:

Transcript

A stronger electric barrier
to keep an invasive fish out of the
Great Lakes is set to be turned on.
But people who travel past the
underwater barrier are worried about
electric shocks. Chuck Quirmbach
reports:

This barrier is supposed to keep Asian carp from getting into the Great Lakes.

Those fish escaped from Southern fish farms years ago. They’ve spread up the Mississippi river.
Now they’re near a canal that connects the Mississippi system with the Great Lakes.

Biologists worry the big fish would ruin Great Lakes fishing and the Lakes’ ecosystems. Start up
of ‘The Stronger Barrier’ was delayed because of concerns the electric current could hurt crews
on barges and people on recreational boats as the vessels passed by.

U.S. Coast Guard Captain Bruce Jones recently gave thumbs-up to running the new barrier at
low power.

“ We believe it will continue to keep the Great Lakes protected from carp through the winter, until
spawning season starts.”

But biologists don’t think the barrier will work well enough at low power. And barge operators
don’t want it on at all. They’ll be discussing the concerns at a meeting in Chicago in January.

For The Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

Related Links

Heat Leak Detecting Raygun

  • The light beam changes to blue when it hits a spot of colder temperature (Photo courtesy of Black & Decker)

Soon, you’ll be able to buy
a sort of raygun to detect heating
leaks in your home. Jessi Ziegler reports on a Thermal Leak
Detector:

Transcript

Soon, you’ll be able to buy
a sort of raygun to detect heating
leaks in your home. Jessi Ziegler reports on a Thermal Leak
Detector:

This tool looks like a little toy raygun, and it shines beams of light
that read the temperature around your house.

Scott Pollard is the Senior Product Manager at Black and
Decker, which makes the tool. He says it’s really easy to use.

“Shine it on the wall, it starts off with a green light, and as they
move it from their wall to their window, or door, or around pipes,
or floor, or ceiling, the color will change to red if it hits a hot spot,
or blue if it hits a cold spot.”

And, if you think you the little leaks don’t really matter, well,
Pollard’s research shows that if you add up all the little cracks
and leaks in a typical home, it equals a hole the size of a
basketball.

The EPA says that homeowners can save 20% on their heating
and cooling costs if they seal air leaks and insulate their houses.

For The Environment Report, this is Jessi Ziegler.

Related Links