Hippy Green

Yes, you heard right, the Vatican is going solar! The Paul VI audience hall will be installing 1,000 solar panels to power the entire heat,cooling,lighting of the entire building YEAR AROUND! The extra power will be fed back to the Vatican grid. This is great news for Catholics around the world and I hope to see a calling for Catholics to start a movement towards a “greener earth”? I know I have a need to go green, as you can see from this blog, but I have only begun to post about the technology and hacks that let you go green. I slowed down for the past two weeks because I was switching jobs, but I am hoping to start a posting frenzy and get Hippy Green off the ground!

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has given orders to have every taxi in New York City will be a hybrid by 2012. This is great news that a city with this much traffic is leaning towards going green. Currently there are about 13,000 licensed taxis and only 375 of them are hybrids. Seeing these numbers it almost makes me think, why not say 2010 or even 2009? 2012 is what 5 years away, buy then gas might be $10 a gallon! We need to make drastic changes rather then just putting a hybrid Ford Escape on the road that gets 32 mpg for a AWD SUV. These “hybrids” SUV have horrible miles per gallon compared to other sedan vehicles such as the Volkswagon Golf which gets 38 in the city. If the taxi companies just need “hybrids” the 2007 GMC Sierra Classic 1500 Hybrid Extended Cab SLE2 Standard Box 2WD gets 18 mpg city / 21 mpg hwy which is HORRIBLE! We need to set standards rather then just saying go get a hybrid. A hybrid can have WORST gas miles then another more FUEL EFFICIENT car.

So in conclusion I think what Mr. Bloomberg is doing is great, lets think green in NYC. I just have a problem when we think lets just go “hybrid” and it will lower our carbon footprint and save money on gas. We need to think smart when it comes to alternative energy and understand that all hybrids are not necessarily amazing fuel efficient cars/trucks. We also need to think out of the box and try and plan for the short term as well as the long term. I think the 5 year plan is great, but in all honestly we SHOULD do this in 3 years!

Yes, it’s that easy to recycle your computer equipment. Starting today grab your old monitor, computer, laptop, keyboard, and similar other computer devices and drive over to the local Staples. For a small $10 fee on large items, you can drop off your old computer equipment at any US or Canada Staples and have them properly recycled. Many people think this $10 fee should be drop, but there is a cost of properly disposing of computer equipment. Think of this fee as a carbon offset or a mercury or lead offset. By paying the $10 and properly recycling this equipment you can keep lead out of our environment. Most computer parts use lead in solder, but recently lawmakers have passed laws requirement manufacturing of electronics to be lead free.

Spring has almost past and summer is just around the corner. If you have not started to do some cleaning, nows your chance. Go find your old p2 or k6 AMD and drop it off at the local staples, you can even grab all your ink or toner cartridge and drop those off too! Lets band together and go green with Staples.

Sarnia, Ontario will be the future site of the largest solar installation in North America. This solar installation will be a 40 megawatt field of panels. This installation will not be the largest solar installation in the world, currently Germany is building their own 40 megawatt solar farm. The solar farm in Canada, OptiSolar Farms Canada Inc. will cover about 900 acres. The main reason behind building the solar farm in Ontario, is the Ontario government is offering 42 cents per kilowatt hour! OptiSolar Farms Canada Inc hows to start construction in 2008 after getting the right zoning and building permits. The estimated completion date for this solar farm is 2010!

Although 2010 is far away, starting January 2009, Southern California is planning on building a 500 MW solar farm with possible expansion to 850 MW. The news broke back while the Energy Policy Act of 2005 was still being worked out.

It seems everyday that I receive a Don’t Pump Gas Email so the major Gasoline Companies can feel a hit, but its a short run experiment. It’s a 1 day event that will NOT have an impact on major companies, if anything it will hurt the little mom and pop gas stops. These gas stops that have the HUGE food/Dunkin Donuts chain are the ones that might get hit if you don’t stop there, most of them can’t even change your oil let alone your tire. I feel that if we are going to plan a massive “attack” against the BIG oil companies the best way is to go out, get a hybrid or electric vehicle, and stop paying them every time you fill up your car. Better yet, write to your congress man, senator, and/or your governor and tell them to stop subsiding the oil companies. Yes, oil companies get money from the governments to find other places to drill for oil. I even posted about how much money oil companies are making. So if you want to take action, post this story to digg and lets get people out there selling their gasoline cars and replacing them with hybrids or full electrics.

Hippy Green wants to make this blog a crowdsourcing blog rather then a standard wordpress blog. We are looking for writers as well as researchers.

If you are interested in writing for us, please Contact Us with your article and if it looks good we will post! We are not giving away money (yet!) but we will be giving you link backs as well as (possible swag?) in the future, who knows. As for researchers, we are looking for links, anyone can do this! Please tag a website using del.icio.us with the tag hippygreen. We will either link back to the del.icio.us account its coming from, or if you Contact Us we can match it up and give you the credit (link back) you deserive.

Please also feel free to Contact Us with any ideas, news, comments, or just want to say HI!

Continuing with yesterdays post on 20 tips to reduc your home’s carbon footprint, here is another ways to reduce your footprint.

Most peoples carbon footprint comes from their car. Daily driving of combustion engines continues to grow our carbon footprint. Planning your trips and cutting down on travel can lower your carbon footprint (sounds easy? Lets do it!). I know since I sold my STI this past July, I have been without a car. Now don’t get me wrong I still drive, but I share a car or borrow one. Their are many downsides with not having a car, but here are 10 reasons to ditch a car.

If you are not feeling up to the challenge of ditching a car, why not take the 10 mile pledge. I know when I had my car I would just go in run my errands without thinking of what I need exactly, knowing that I could always run back out if I forgot something. By eliminating this extra trip and writing a list of stuff I need to do and pickup I could lower my carbon footprint. The article also suggest that you have a car-free day every month. This is a great alternative and also allows you to relax at home and reset. Getting up early Saturdays and doing all your errands can allow you to relax the rest of the week and could allow you to have a car free Sunday every weekend.

Driving is just 1 way to reduce your carbon footprint, what are you doing to lower your footprint?

I have started to realize that people have been tagging websites with hippygreen on del.icio.us. I figured I need to start using them in some of the blogs and get more people to post links to del.icio.us with the tag hippygreen.

I got this link from Steve Cavrak via kyero. They posted 20 tips to lowing your home’s carbon footprint, below are some highlights that I found useful.

Your home carbon footprint can be pretty big dependent on the size of your house and different types of energy used in it. Adding a solar hot water heater can reduce the electricity needed to heat water, but even a quick fix like lowering your hot water heater by a few degrees can make a huge difference.

Use energy-efficient light bulbs. Changing to a energy efficient light bulb can be as simple as picking one up when one dies. This way you are not hit with a huge cost of replacing working ones, but also save electricity and lower your carbon footprint over time. Antics posted about the hazard with your energy footprint a while back showing how CF bulbs and the proper disposal methods for these types of light bulbs.

Some of the other tips require a bit more work then changing a light bulb, but you should start to think more your carbon footprint and how a little change can make a big difference.

Buying rechargeable batteries helps the environment as well as doesn’t leave you stuck in a blackout with a flash light and dead batteries. For the past couple of years I find myself either buying rechargeable batteries for all the little electronic gadgets I own. I feel as if this way I will never have to buy a bunch of batteries for a device over and over again.

Disposing of batteries is also a pain and a problem. These batteries end up in landfills where they corrode and leak with various content (mercury, cadmium, etc.) into our grounds and possibly end up in our water systems. Do you dispose of your batteries properly? You can also save money because batteries are expensive. By recharging them you are just increasing your electricity bill by pennies rather then paying $5 or more on batteries every couple weeks/months/years.

There are various types of rechargeable batteries, the latest form that I have found so useful are the usbcells. These are AA, AAA, 9V, or even some portable device batteries that have a USB port to be used to recharge and then ready to uses. I find this great for wireless keyboard and mouses, just charge them over night and plug them in first thing in the morning. These rechargeable batteries are great for the UBER Geek in you, you always have a free USB port, but how many times do you run out of batteries?

It looks like Apple has been getting a lot of flak over the issue of proper disposal of toxic chemicals that are part of their products. Apple normally only speaks of their doing as it happens and not tell of a bright future of all these various products that they are working on.

Apple recently posted a A Greener Apple on their website explaining the various chemicals that are in computers,ipods, etc and how they have dealt with them over the years. Apple also posted some numbers and pretty graphs showing how much e-waste they recycle. Along with recycling Apple is looking at their overall carbon footprint. You can also read the PDF Version of this document if you want to pass it around.

For US and Canada readers you can easily recycle our old computers by calling 888-638-2761. You can even get 10% off the purchase of a new ipod while recycling your old ipod. Apple is dedicated to the environment and shows a history of their plan