Wide open spaces in “Big Sky Country”

Montana is known locally as “Big Sky Country” and with good reason. It’s a land of open spaces, rolling plains, sunshine and lots of blue sky. I lived here on a ranch on the Tongue River east of Billings for many years. It’s a breathtakingly beautiful and peaceful place…. such a contrast to the noise, pollution, crime and claustrophobia of Sao Paulo which I described in our Newsletter two weeks ago.

It’s wonderful to be back here for a visit and to work with my son, Sam, fixing fences, riding horses and moving cattle. It makes a father’s heart swell with pride to see his son taking his place among the men of the world.

Sam with his horse “Brumby” by the old barn at Bones Brother’s Ranch in eastern Montana.

Sustainable House Day, September 13th

Last year we opened the Greeny Flat for Sustainable House Day 2014. We’re planning to open again this year although we are not listed on the Sustainable House Day Website yet due to technical difficulties. Last year there were three other excellent projects open in our area. They also are not listed yet but if “The Keep” in Buxton and/or Glenn and Lee Robinson’s House in Bundanoon decide to open again this year I HIGHLY recommend a visit to both of them.

I’ll keep you posted once we get our registration sorted out. If you live in other parts of Australia you can find out what homes will be open in your area by visiting the Sustainable House Day Website.

Abbott Cops More Stick

In our Newsletter two weeks ago I wrote about the international criticism that is being directed at Tony Abbott Government for his appalling climate change policies. I’m delighted to report that he continues to cop more of the same. As reported this week on the Ecogeneration.com website, Australia’s clean energy industry has soundly condemned the government’s proposed emission reduction target saying,

‘These targets are vastly inadequate to protect Australians from the impacts of climate change and do not represent a fair contribution to the world effort to bring climate change under control.’

‘Australia has already attracted significant criticism from our trading partners, including China and the US, over concerns we’re free-riding on the backs of other countries’ efforts to tackle climate change. With these targets, we’re a leaner, not a lifter.’

I couldn’t agree more. I’m no political activist, in fact I detest politics and politicians, but I care about the environment and my son’s future. I can’t sit by and watch Abbott’s attempts to destroy the renewable energy industry, promote fossil fuels at all costs and set Australia on a course of local, national and global pollution and consumption without saying something.

NZ Shows The Way

So I was also delighted to read this week that New Zealand is plotting a VERY different course. According to this recent article from the Solar Quotes Blog, the kiwis have announced that they will close their last two coal mines by 2018 and aim to be 90% renewable by 2025.

That’s fantastic and stands in such stark contrast to Tony Abbott saying ‘Coal is the Future’ and ‘I hate renewable energy’. Hopefully some of that thinking will drift westwards over the Tasman before the next election.

‘By announcing that it will support renewable energy in such an emphatic fashion, New Zealand has assumed leadership on renewable energy amongst Pacific nations. This of course in contrast to the Australian policy of deliberately undermining clean energy whether by emasculating the Renewable Energy Target (RET) or gutting clean energy agencies that draw in millions of dollars of financing.’

Finally I can’t resist throwing in another photo from the ranch just for fun.

Sam leaves the barn after a long, hot ride.

The perfect winter weather for a Passive Solar House like the Greeny Flat is when you have clear sunny days and cloudy nights. Sun during the day warms the Thermal Mass of the floor slab which stores the heat and keeps the house warm through the night. When it’s cloudy at night the outdoor air temperature tends to stay much warmer than when it’s clear. The clouds act like a blanket that helps to keep the earth warm, and when the outdoor air is warmer the house stays warmer inside.

This is exactly what we have NOT been having here over the last couple of weeks. If anything, it’s been tending towards the complete opposite with cloudy days followed by clear, cold nights. We’ve had a lot of frosty mornings which wouldn’t normally bother us but, because the days have been cloudy, the house has not had much chance to warm up during the day so it’s gradually been getting colder and colder. For example, on a nice sunny day, even if the outdoor temperature only gets up to say 14degC the interior will usually warm up to 21 or 22degC. Then it will drop down to maybe 15 or 16degC overnight even if it gets below zero outside.

Today, with only partial sunshine, we only managed to claw our way up to 17degC inside and it’s predicted to get down well below zero tonight. So lately we’ve been resorting to turning on a little fan heater from time to time to help take the chill off the air. Not that I’m complaining… after twenty years in Montana where it regularly got below minus twenty or colder during the winter, anything feels pretty good to me. I especially love the clear, crisp, frosty mornings that we’ve been having and, because our house is small, well insulated and fairly air-tight, it doesn’t take much additional heat to keep it comfortable, even on the coldest days.

Environmental Footprints

In your ‘average’ inefficient home, the operational energy used for heating, cooling and hot water is often by-far the biggest portion of the overall environmental impact of the building over its life, especially in very hot or very cold places like Montana. But in an energy-positive house like the Greeny Flat, which actually makes more energy than it uses, the operational energy is no longer a factor and other things become bigger issues.

For example, the ‘embodied energy’ (i.e. the energy required to manufacture and transport the materials used to construct the building) becomes a much bigger portion of our environmental footprint. It would be possible to do a full ‘life-cycle analysis’ to quantify exactly what the various environmental effects of our choices might be over the life of the house (or any other product or system) but that is the stuff of phd’s. I haven’t done the calculations and I don’t care to, but we did make a concerted effort to limit the embodied energy in the materials chosen for the Greeny Flat. That is one of the reasons why we chose to use timber frames and plywood linings, because they have lower embodied energy than steel and gyprock.

Almost every decision is a compromise between competing priorities. For example, we could have used timber weatherboards for the exterior cladding which may have had a lower embodied energy than the galvanised steel that we used. However the goals of low-maintenance, durability and fire resistance took precedence in that case so we chose to use the steel. The most important thing that any of us can do to limit the embodied energy in a building is to Keep It Small and Simple (K.I.S.S.). A small, simple structure will generally have much less embodied energy than a large and complex one.

Our transportation choices also become a much larger factor in our overall environmental impact once we have limited our home energy use. Another huge issue is the energy and resources required to grow, process, transport, sell, and cook our food. That is the subject of an excellent book by Michael Mobbs called ‘Sustainable Food’ which I highly recommend (even though we still have a long way to go down that path ourselves). For today I would like to focus more on the transportation side of things.

More About Sustainable Transportation

In last week’s Newsletter I wrote about solar trains, planes and automobiles and regular readers of this Newsletter will know that we often highlight developments towards more sustainable transportation options. Before I go on, I want to make the very important point that the most sustainable forms of transportation are walking and biking. As such, the most important thing we can do as a society is to design our towns and cities in such a way that people can walk or bike to just about everything they need. On an individual level, we can choose to live (and to build) in a place that already allows for this to happen. For example, as we discuss in depth on this page of our website, the site for the Greeny Flat was deliberately chosen because it is within easy walking distance of Mittagong town centre, shops, recreation, parks, libraries, etc, etc… and importantly, a railway station so that, if we need to go further afield, we can hop on a train to get there. In all honesty, it would be quite easy to live here without a car if we needed to, as long as we could continue to work from home or find work nearby.

Cintia’s car – hit by a ute that didn’t get far

We took one step closer to that ideal recently when an unfortunate young gentleman accidentally rammed his ute into the back of Cintia’s car that was parked in the street outside. Even though the car was perfectly drivable, the damage was too expensive to fix and the car was written off by the insurance company. So we’re going to try living with just our feet, our two bikes, and my little van for a while and see how it goes. I’m thinking that it might be a good time to get an electric assisted bicycle like my friend Glenn’s. I love riding my bike but if I had to go to a meeting in Bowral I would be fairly soaked in sweat by the time I got over Mt Gibraltar. An electric assisted bike would get me there a lot quicker and smelling a lot nicer. I would also be able to charge the battery with some of our excess solar power during the day.

Glenn Robinson with his electric-assisted cargo bike in front of his energy positive house.

If it turns out that we really need a second car we will seriously consider getting a electric one… perhaps a second-hand Nissan Leaf or similar. A Tesla Model S would be quite nice but I can’t see the sense in owning a car that costs about twice as much as our house. So for now an electric boosted bike looks like a good option.

Andy explains the Greeny Flat to the Southern Highlands Sustainable Lifestyle Organisation on Sunday

Today we had a very enjoyable visit from the Southern Highlands Sustainable Lifestyle Organisation. It is always a pleasure showing the Greeny Flat to people who are interested and knowledgeable in the field of energy efficient and sustainable building. Quite a few members of this group already live off the grid and grow much, if not all of, their own food. There were also a number of enthusiastic young men and women who are gathering information with a view to creating their own sustainable life in the near future. There were Wwoofers from Queensland, Germany and the USA, homeowners, farmers and gardeners. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day and we had a very lively and stimulating discussion sitting around our little patio. I’d like to thank the group for coming and also to invite other groups or individuals who are interested to come and see the Greeny Flat for themselves.

For more information about the Southern Highlands Sustainable Lifestyle Organisation contact Judith Collins via earthkeepers.com.au.

Wave Energy Makes Waves

Western Australian company, Carnegie Wave Energy has reached a world-first milestone by achieving 10,000 hours of continuous operation of their Ceto 5 units. Harnessing wave energy seems like such an obvious renewable energy solution but decades of research and development around the world have mostly succeeded in proving that it is extremely difficult to build a machine that can survive the rigours of salt water corrosion and constant pounding by the swells. Carnegie anchors their units below the surface of the waves where there is still plenty of wave motion but much less chop and turbulence. They use the submerged off-shore units to pump high-pressure salt water to an on-shore electricity generator. The pressure can also be used to force the salt water through a reverse osmosis membrane for desalination. For islands and other locations surrounded by wave energy and short of fresh water this technology looks like a promising way to provide both renewable energy and desalinated fresh water.

Click here to read an article about Carnegie’s record from Eco-generation.

It will be interesting to see how the Carnegie experimental plant holds up to the monster swell that is currently pounding the WA coast and making a lot of surfers very happy. Click here to read about the big swell that has WA surfers excited.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of articles about ocean-going craft that use the up-and-down motion created by the waves to generate forward motion of the vessel.

The Wave-glider

Whale Tales Improve Ship Efficiency

Disclosure: I own shares in Carnegie Wave Energy mostly as a way to support their research and development but also in the hope that eventually their technology may prove to be a viable business venture.

The Rest of Last Week’s Newsletter

About half of last week’s Newsletter did not appear in the email we sent out to subscribers (although it does appear here on the website). So, for those who didn’t see it, the rest of this week’s is a repeat of the rest of last week’s.

The Pope Acknowledges Climate Change but Ignores Population

In an action that will no doubt see him excommunicated from Tony Abbott’s Christmas Card List, Pope Francis has come out strongly in support of action to curb climate change. As noted in this report from ABC News, the Pope’s call for ‘decisive action’ has been hailed by supporters as ‘a potential game-changer in the debate over what causes global warming and how to reverse it.’

Unfortunately, like the rest of the world’s leaders, the Pope has shied away from any discussion of how population growth might be contributing to environmental destruction. Instead he lays the blame at the feet of inequality and over-consumption. Certainly if we are to seriously tackle climate change we have to deal with those glaring issues but surely we also have to acknowledge what this article from The Guardian calls the ‘two whopping Elephants in the Basilica‘ those being the status of women in the world and the growth of population. As long as we are being led by economists and religious leaders who believe that the survival of their institutions depends on growth in population we are all in trouble. When was the last time you heard a politician or a preacher say that we need to have fewer people on the planet? I’m guessing never.

Until we get serious action on the population issue we will only be dealing with part of the environmental problem. And unless we get much smarter, more courageous leadership and voluntarily make the necessary changes, those changes will likely be made for us in ways that we won’t like one little bit. Populations will be reduced… economic growth will be curbed… as Swami Beyondananda so wisely said, ‘There will be peace on earth, I’m just not sure that humans will be here to see it’.

The Swami also said, ‘the best way to illuminate the darkness is to make light of it‘…. good reminder.

Abbott Under Pressure

In what I see as good news, Tony Abbott is apparently coming under increasing pressure to pull his head out of the sand and do something about climate change. As reported in this article from The Conversation, ‘Australia as been singled out as a climate free-rider by an international panel led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan‘. …

But that’s more than enough about politics and religion…. here’s something much more interesting and positive.

This little vehicle is powered by evaporation

Turning Evaporation into Motion

According to this Gizmag article, scientists at Columbia University have developed a way of using bacterial spores to harness the power of evaporation and turn it into motion. Basically, spores expand in humid air and contract in dry air so, if you stick the spores onto some tape and then repeatedly expose the tape to wet, then dry air you can create a sort of ‘evaporation-driven piston’. By harnessing the repeated expansion and contraction of the tape you can turn evaporation into motion. The motion can then be used to power a generator or propel a vehicle. It’s a fascinating concept which so far has only been applied on a very small scale. It will be interesting to see if it can be scaled up into some sort of useful renewable energy source.

I wonder if we’ll ever find ourselves debating the status of spores in the world. Are spores living creatures? Do they have feelings? Is it wrong to stick them to a piece of tape and harness their swelling and shrinking for our own energy-craving benefit? Stand up for spore’s rights now before it’s too late!

The Moto Pogo one-wheeled electric transport device

Another One!

In last week’s Newsletter I featured the amazing Ryno uni-cycle/Segway type thingy… I don’t know what to call it… you can’t call it an electric bike because ‘bicycle’ implies that it has two wheels… anyway it looks like a really fun way to get around. And now I find out there’s another one. This one is called the ‘Moto Pogo’ and is under development in Canada. Apparently a Kickstarter pledge of CAD$2,200 will get you one which will go 25km/h for about 30km. Not as far or as fast as the Ryno but about half the price. I wonder how long before we start seeing these in Australia. They will certainly turn heads when we do. You can see it in action on YouTube at the following link…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhK01QnKd4M