The price of a barrel of oil has jumped
up from $45 to nearly $70 in just
three months. And gas prices have been
creeping up too. Rebecca Williams reports
these prices are out of sync with the usual
rules of supply and demand:
Transcript
The price of a barrel of oil has jumped
up from $45 to nearly $70 in just
three months. And gas prices have been
creeping up too. Rebecca Williams reports
these prices are out of sync with the usual
rules of supply and demand:
Right now there’s a huge glut of supply of oil – and at the same time, weak global demand for it.
Ruchir Kadakia is a global oil market expert. He’s with Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
He says speculators are driving oil prices up.
“People believe that with positive economic growth in the future there will be greater demand for oil. So they start to buy up oil in anticipation of that demand recovery.”
So these speculators are making money while most of the economy is in a slump.
But Kadakia thinks the realities of supply and demand will eventually catch up and drag oil prices back down.
“The pain we’re feeling at the pump today is probably going to be the worst we feel all this summer.”
He thinks gas prices might actually get back below two dollars a gallon.
Cities have started to use car sharing programs in order to save money (Photo by Ed Edahl, courtesy of FEMA)
Car sharing has long been considered a green
alternative to owning a car. Both in terms of
expense and the environment. Companies like
Zipcar have made this concept mainstream in
a lot of urban areas. Now some cities are
trying out car sharing with their municipal
fleets. Tamara Keith has more:
Transcript
Car sharing has long been considered a green
alternative to owning a car. Both in terms of
expense and the environment. Companies like
Zipcar have made this concept mainstream in
a lot of urban areas. Now some cities are
trying out car sharing with their municipal
fleets. Tamara Keith has more:
Karyn LeBlanc works in the Washington DC department of transportation, so maybe it’s not surprising that she was one of the first to try out the city’s FleetShare program.
“It’s this one over here, right here, says 6067 is the license plate on it.”
A white Honda Civic powered by natural gas is waiting for her in a parking lot behind a city office.
She went online to reserve the car and it’s expecting her. At least the very smart computer transponder thingie in the front windshield is expecting her. LeBlanc presses something that looks like a credit card up to the device.
“So, we place this right here and you hear that little click and the car opens.”
The tank is full, the keys are inside, and LaBlanc is off and running.
(sound of driving)
“I would say I use fleetshare 2 or 3 times a week for any meeting that I need to go to or that I need to get to. So I go where I need to go. I park it. I go to my meeting. I get back in the car and I go back to the office.”
For people who use Zipcar this process will sound very familiar. The company has simply brought its car-sharing technology to Washington DC’s municipal fleet.
So far DC has about 60 new cars outfitted with Zipcar gear. But here’s the remarkable thing, those 60 cars are replacing 360. How? The new cars are getting a lot more use than the old ones.
“We’re getting up to 71% utilization on all these cars.”
When we spoke to him, Dan Tangerlini was DC’s Deputy Mayor.
We’re standing in the middle of a municipal parking lot. On one side there are empty spaces where the fleetshare cars park – on the other side there are just a bunch of white city cars.
“You see all this white iron around here. All these DC government vehicles that are kind of sitting static because these are assigned to individuals and those individuals don’t have a reason to be in that vehicle right now.”
Tangherlini says this system will save the city about 6 million dollars over the next five years – which is welcome at a time when budgets are tight.
Which might explain why Scott Griffith’s phone keeps ringing. He’s Zipcar’s CEO and says the company is now in talks with 25 cities.
“They all have the same challenges, not enough tax money, too many cars. They do need to move people around during the day and we’re trying to make that happen in the most efficient way.”
But this isn’t just about money. Griffith says when people share cars they end up driving more efficiently. When they have to book in advance rather than a bunch of individual trips they stack all their stops in one trip.
Car sharing isn’t new for cities like Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia. They’ve had programs in place for some time where city workers can use cars loaned out by private car sharing companies. They use the same one the public uses.
Eli Masser helped form the relationship in Philadelphia between the city and the non-profit Philly Car Share which he co-founded.
“One of the benefits of car sharing with municipalities or most businesses for that matter is residential demand is in the evenings and on weekends and most business demand and municipal demand is during the day.”
Which means those cars are busy well beyond the 40 hour work week. Critics say this model is far more efficient than what Zipcar is doing in DC. But Masser says there’s an even better model – a hybrid of DC and Philly.
Ideally cities would have a relatively small city-owned fleet of shared cars and even heavy machinery. But most city workers would car-share with the public.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu says coal will have to be a part of the energy mix in the future, so the government is committing money to clean it up. (Photo courtesy of the USDOE)
President Obama’s Energy Secretary is talking about building a facility to find ways to burn coal more cleanly. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
President Obama’s Energy Secretary is talking about building a facility to find ways to burn coal more cleanly. Lester Graham reports:
Burning coal pollutes – acid rain, toxic mercury, soot. And lately the big concern – carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas contributing to global warming.
The Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu told Members of Congress, despite the concerns about pollution, we still depend on coal for half of our electricity.
“So, it’s very important that we develop the technology that captures and also that safely sequesters carbon from coal plants.”
The technology does not exist today.
Chu says three-point-four-billion dollars in government stimulus money is now available to find a way to clean up coal.
An experimental plant called Futuregen was supposed to find ways to burn coal more cleanly and do something about carbon dioxide emissions. But the Bush administration killed funding.
Secretary Chu says the Obama administration is now negotiating with Futuregen partners again.
Ellen Peterson has lived in Florida for many years and this is the first year her well went dry. (Photo by Arthur Cooper)
A much needed storm rolling in over Lake Okeechobee. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Droughts are nothing new for the Western US.
But lately, even some parts of the country
surrounded by water have gotten a taste of
droughts. Rebecca Williams reports as our
population grows, some experts say we’re going
to have to learn to live with less water:
Transcript
Droughts are nothing new for the Western US.
But lately, even some parts of the country
surrounded by water have gotten a taste of
droughts. Rebecca Williams reports as our
population grows, some experts say we’re going
to have to learn to live with less water:
(sound of birds)
Even in swampy, muggy Florida, people have been running out of water.
“This is the first time the well has ever gone dry.”
Ellen Peterson remembers water gushing out of her artesian well when she’d hook up the hose. These days she’s stuck with rusty water from her shallow well.
(sound of faucet turning on)
“Now if I let that sit it would settle out orange.”
We visited Peterson at the tail end of this year’s dry season. In the weeks since then, Florida’s been pummeled by major thunderstorms. But Florida water managers say it’s too early to know how much the rain will help.
This was the driest dry season Florida’s felt in more than 75 years. And it’s the third year in a row of serious drought. That’s meant some changes for people who live here.
Many cities put rules in place that limit watering lawns to one or two days a week. One woman actually ended up with a warrant out for her arrest after she watered her lawn on the wrong day and didn’t pay the fine.
Some cities in Florida are talking about adding a drought surcharge to bills for people using the most water.
Ellen Peterson says local water managers have even been capping wells in her area. Peterson may be 85 years old, but that didn’t stop her from telling her local official to back off.
“They told me they were going to cap my well and I threatened the guy with his life if he ever came back. (laughs) It hasn’t happened yet.”
So it’s not such an easy sell to get people to cut back on water.
(sound at a lake)
But that’s Gary Ritter’s job. He’s a water manager in the Lake Okeechobee area. It’s a giant lake – 35 miles wide – and it’s nicknamed the liquid heart of the Everglades. The lake level is 2.5 feet below average.
“For water to get to the Everglades it has to come from Lake Okeechobee. Now we have a juggling act as to how we manage this water in the system you know for multiple users for the water supply and for the ecosystem.”
The lake’s the center of a huge tug of war. Farmers and cities need the water, and the lake’s also a big tourist draw. And the Everglades are in major trouble – mostly because the water flow to this fragile area has been cut off by people.
Some experts say these kinds of conflicts are just going to get worse.
Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute. It’s a nonpartisan group that studies water issues.
“Places we didn’t think were vulnerable to water shortages in the past are now increasingly vulnerable. As our population continues to grow and our water supply doesn’t. As more and more people try to share that fixed resource there’s going to be growing competition for water and more natural and manmade drought.”
And he says we just don’t know what’s in store for us as the climate changes because of global warming. We could get a one-two punch.
First, from weird new weather patterns. And second, from more and more people moving into dry areas.
People have expected these kinds of problems for cities in the desert Southwest. But nobody really saw this coming in the Southeast.
Peter Gleick says even if you live in a place surrounded by water now, you shouldn’t expect to always have plenty of it.
One paint technology that GM is developing uses quantum dots - shown here irradiated with ultraviolet light (Source: Walkman16 at Wikimedia Commons)
Even though General Motors has filed for bankruptcy, Rebecca Williams reports the company is still dreaming big:
Transcript
Even though General Motors has filed for bankruptcy, Rebecca Williams reports the company is still dreaming big:
Someday you might be able to power your radio through your car’s paint.
Christopher Webb is GM’s senior creative designer.
He says GM’s research teams are giving some thought to solar powered paint. He says it might start with tiny solar cells called quantum dots.
“You could suspend these solar cells in a resin system or a waterborne or solvent carrier and spray it over the surface of the vehicle. Technically the entire surface of the vehicle could become almost a solar conductor.”
Webb says nobody knows exactly how this might work yet. But he says he’s confident that GM will continue their research into new technologies like this even with the bankruptcy announcement.
Something else that’s being talked about is using volcanic rock in paint. It could be a coating that would reduce a car’s interior temperature by reflecting heat – so you could use the air conditioning less often.
Hoover Dam's backside stretches more than 700 feet from top
to bottom, but the dam's seeing trouble from the tiny aquatic zebra
mussel. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Lake Mead is the reservoir held back by Hoover Dam. Someone first
spotted an adult quagga mussel in early 2007. Now, the mussel's grown
on rocks, fishing lines, boats, and nearly everything else with a hard
surface. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Signs leading out of Lake Mead stress the importance of properly
cleaning any boat leaving the area. Quagga mussels can hitch rides from
one lake or river to the next by attaching to boats' hulls. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Hoover Dam generates some of the power that lights Las Vegas all night long. But there’s something
that’s making that job a bit more difficult. Shawn Allee found out, it’s a tiny aquatic pest:
Transcript
Hoover Dam generates some of the power that lights Las Vegas all night long. But there’s something
that’s making that job a bit more difficult. Shawn Allee found out, it’s a tiny aquatic pest:
The usual tour of Hoover Dam starts at the visitor’s center – way at the top.
Robert Walsh works with the federal agency that runs Hoover.
He shows me a sandal that was in water – and is smothered in them.
They’re like clams the size of your pinky fingernail.
“We went from zero to THAT in seven months.”
And that’s the problem.
Hoover Dam uses water from Lake Mead to spin generators.
The water moves around in pipes – and quagga mussels can attach to them – just like on that sandal.
Allee: “What does that mean in a real practical sense?”
Willet: “Our intake towers would close off. Once you start closing off, you can’t spin the
generators. That’s just kind of the big view of it.”
Zero power generation.
That’s the worst-case scenario. It hasn’t happened – but it’s a fight to prevent it.
“Now, we’re going to go down to the third floor, which is the generator floor.”
The generators are inside broad metal cylinders.
Big water pipes turn the generators. Smaller ones cool them off.
“Well, we circulate cold water from those pipes. If those start to plug up with mussels, then
you can’t keep a generator cool, if those … it shuts down due to overheating.”
Right now, it takes a lot of scraping to keep everything clear.
All this effort’s adding up – Willet says he’ll spend 2 million dollars soon on new equipment.
Even with that, Willet is still a bit jittery about some pipes outside, at the very bottom of the dam.
“The one that’s probably the scariest of all is, we have a fireline that runs around here.
Mussels love it. Then, your firelines, when they’re needed, are plugged with mussels. So
that’s another area you have to really be careful of, safety-wise.”
This didn’t have to happen.
Quagga mussels invaded eastern rivers and the Great Lakes first.
Experts figure the mussels hitched a ride West on someone’s fishing boat.
Apparently – someone didn’t clean their boat properly – and mussels dropped into Lake Mead.
Allee: “When they built this amazing structure during the Depression, do you think they had
any idea that something like this could ever happen?”
Willet: “I think there was a lot of disagreement among professionals that a little mussel the
size of your finger nail could impact a large hydro facility, but we’re quickly learning a bunch
of them can impact water and power delivery.”
Willet says if boaters aren’t careful – they’ll spread quagga mussels to the Pacific Northwest, where
there’re lots of dams and hydro power plants.
After all, if it can happen at mighty Hoover Dam – it could happen anywhere.
BPA doesn't line just baby products - it is in many canned foods and drinks (Source: Tomomarusan at Wikimedia Commons)
Food-packaging executives and
lobbyists for the makers of the
chemical bisphenol-A, often
called BPA, met in Washington
DC last week to come up with PR
strategies. Their message is:
BPA is safe. Lester Graham reports
someone took notes at that meeting
and then leaked them to reporters:
Transcript
Food-packaging executives and
lobbyists for the makers of the
chemical bisphenol-A, often
called BPA, met in Washington
DC last week to come up with PR
strategies. Their message is:
BPA is safe. Lester Graham reports
someone took notes at that meeting
and then leaked them to reporters:
Lyndsey Layton got ahold of those notes. She reports for the Washington Post.
“According to these notes, they called it the ‘holy grail’ spokesperson would be a pregnant, young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA.”
Ironic in that many studies associate BPA with birth defects.
John Rost is the Chairman of the North American Metal Packaging Alliance.
He says the reporters got bad notes. He says it only came up because environmental activists used pregnant women to testify against BPA.
“We discussed that as an option and dismissed it and actually find it a little ironic that we are being criticized.”
Some retailers have taken toys and baby bottles made with BPA off the shelf in response to a consumer backlash.
It’s likely most consumers don’t yet realize the chemical also lines beverage and food cans.
When schools run out of room, they often have to put students in portable buildings (Source: Motown31 at Wikimedia Commons)
When schools get too crowded, they often resort to sticking students in modular classrooms – cheap trailers, essentially. But Sheryl Rich-Kern reports some innovative architects are saying that the energy savings and efficiency of modulars make them an ideal, and often, permanent solution:
Transcript
When schools get too crowded, they often resort to sticking students in modular classrooms – cheap trailers, essentially. But Sheryl Rich-Kern reports some innovative architects are saying that the energy savings and efficiency of modulars make them an ideal, and often, permanent solution:
I’ve actually taught a class in one of those temporary, portable classrooms. It was in the early morning at a community college.
Students would walk in droopy-eyed. My job was to keep them engaged and awake.
Not an easy task – the room was either too hot or too cold. And the ventilation system made weird noises.
But, some experts say portables don’t have to be that way. They can be the kind of room that educators actually prefer.
Michelle Gould is a teacher and parent at the Carroll School in Lincoln, Massachusetts. And she teaches in a new kind of portable classroom.
“The air is very clean in here. It smells like the outside. It doesn’t smell like air conditioning or heating. The lighting is very good for not working under natural light. It seems like you’re outside. And it makes a big difference tutoring kids.”
Tutor: “Did you write your last name, Will? No? Very good, nice spacing. Close your books and put your pencil down.”
(sound of kids playing outdoors)
The Carroll School’s main building is a brick mansion from the early 1900s.
It is stately, elegant. The portable next to it is not. It’s boxy, and has a flat, white roof. Kind of ugly.
But, when you walk in to the portable you feel a change. It’s comfortable!
Cliff Cort is president of Triumph Modular, the firm that leases the country’s first green portable classroom.
“This is a vestibule, we think is a necessary ingredient to almost all buildings, because it controls the weather from the outside to the inside.”
Vestibules aren’t typically found in modular classrooms. Neither is the paperless drywall that eliminates mold, or the sensors that “learn” the best way to control the heating.
“If the teacher tends to come in early on Mondays, the building will begin to learn her habits, and then turn on the heating or A-C just before she gets here. And if they start to take off half a day on Wednesdays, the building would start to learn that no one is here in the afternoons, and then they can shut down. So it helps manage the use of the HVAC system.”
Cort points to the domed skylights known as sun tunnels, which bring in daylight.
“But they don’t bring it in a way that’s too harsh. As you can see, this is screened a bit. So it’s diffused light.”
Triumph Modular is just one of the companies making these more environmentally friendly modular classrooms.
Tom Hardiman is director of the Modular Building Institute, a trade association for dealers and manufacturers of commercial modular buildings.
“Improved acoustics. Improved daylighting. There are countless studies out there that show that it does improve the learning environment.”
Hardiman says many of the old-style portable classrooms end up being used for 20 or 30 years. The problem is they weren’t meant to.
But higher-end portables, like the one in Lincoln, Massachusetts, are built to last.
And, because of the modular construction, they’re greener.
“We typically produce much less construction waste material than site-built construction. Because our factories buy in bulk, they can resuse smaller pieces of material. If you’ve been on a construction site, you’ve seen dumpster after dumpster of two-by-fours and drywall and siding sticking out of the dumpster. There’s just not that much waste with modular construction.”
Hardiman says that green portables are the wave of the future.
They’re not the cheapest solution. But Hardiman says they do provide the best learning spaces on campus.
Monday, June 1 is the official start day of hurricane season (Photo courtesy of NASA)
Today is the first day of the Hurricane season,
but we’ve already seen a tropical depression off
the Atlantic coast. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
Today is the first day of the Hurricane season, but we’ve already seen a tropical depression off the Atlantic coast. Lester Graham reports:
The Weather Channel noted that tropical depression was farther North earlier than any potential hurricane in the 159 years of storm records.
You can’t help but wonder whether climate change is having an effect here.
Jeff Masters is a former hurricane hunter, now with Weather Underground.
He says that’s not what’s happening. He says this storm was getting stronger by following the the gulf stream.
“There just happened to be a little blip of warm water associated with the gulf stream that this storm took advantage of. It was a very small storm so it was very lucky. It was able to stay over the warmest part of the gulf stream.”
Masters says it’ll be decades before we’ll be able to tell if climate change is actually affecting hurricanes.
Forecasts this year call for a pretty average hurricane season.
Masters says an El Niño event could occur later. That’s important, since the number and intensity of Atlantic storms are usually reduced during an El Niño year.
For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.
The Anacostia River in Washington DC is ridden with garbage, and plastic bags make up 20% of the trash tossed in (Photo by Kavitha Cardoza)
For years, the Anacostia River that flows through
Washington DC was widely known as the forgotten
river, lost in the shadow of the better known
Potomac. At one point, some say the trash in the
river was so thick you could walk from one side to
the other without getting wet. Today things are
better. But, most people say not enough has been
done. DC’s city council is considering a five cent
tax on every disposable plastic and paper bag with
most of the money going to cleanup efforts. As Kavitha
Cardoza reports if it passes,
the fee would be the toughest law on plastic and paper
bags in the country:
Transcript
For years, the Anacostia River that flows through
Washington DC was widely known as the forgotten
river, lost in the shadow of the better known
Potomac. At one point, some say the trash in the
river was so thick you could walk from one side to
the other without getting wet. Today things are
better. But, most people say not enough has been
done. DC’s city council is considering a five cent
tax on every disposable plastic and paper bag with
most of the money going to cleanup efforts. As Kavitha
Cardoza reports if it passes,
the fee would be the toughest law on plastic and paper
bags in the country:
Kindergartners from the Evergreen School in Wheaton, Maryland are leaning over a rail and looking at bags, cups, wrappers and other trash floating in the Anacostia River.
They’ve travelled to D.C. to learn more about, as they put it, “what kills fish.”
The five-year-olds are NOT impressed with what they see.
The children roll up their sleeves and start pulling trash from the bank. But, it’s going to take a lot more than their small hands to clean up the mess.
Jim Connerly is with the Anacostia Watershed Society. He says Washington D.C.’s own environmental studies estimate each year 20,000 tons of trash is thrown into the Anacostia.
“It’s like a landfill on a conveyor belt.”
Studies also show plastic bags make up about 20% of the trash in the Anacostia.
When grocery bags are thrown away, many of them are swept up by rain water and carried into storm drains that flow into streams. They end up in the Anacostia.
The bags often ensnare birds and turtles. Fish eat the small torn pieces. That results in toxins making their way into the food chain.
Tommy Wells is the D.C. council member who came up with the idea of charging a nickel for plastic and paper bags.
“By charging a nickel, it really gets more into your head than your pocket. Also, it reminds you maybe I should have bought a reusable bag.”
And part of the money raised will help low-income residents buy reusable bags.
But Laurie Walker hasn’t heard about that proposal. She says, as a senior citizen on a fixed income, those nickels can add up quickly.
“Five cents is a whole lot of money, if I put it in a jar, every month when I get paid. I can buy a chicken, hot dogs, eggs for my grandchildren or for myself. I can buy a whole lot with that.”
The fee would raise nearly 2.5 million dollars a year. Besides the reusable bags, the money will fund educational efforts and return a portion to local businesses as an incentive.
The chemical industry which makes the plastic bags hopes anybody opposed to these kinds of fees or taxes will come out against this proposal. But environmentalists like the idea.
(sound of a beaver)
Back at the Anacostia River system, Jim Connerly says, with a little effort, the Anacostia could be trash-free in just a few years.
“In a perfect world, the water quality would be addressed. The thing that’s encouraging to me is that nature is always trying to seek balance. If we let the river alone, if we stop the input of pollutants, it would clean itself. It’s just that we’re not allowing the river to do that.”
Connerly and many others are hoping the Washington DC bag fee helps make that happen.
