Of all the sustainable building methods, one that receives far less attention than it deserves is building with whole trees. Well, they’re not exactly “whole.” The bark is removed (usually peeled by hand while the trees are still standing), and the ends are cut. But the trees remain round — not even one side is cut.

The advantages are that the unmilled wood is extremely strong, yet somewhat flexible. The trees are selectively removed from local forests or woodlots. And the homes are durable.

For further details and photos, visit Roald Gundersen Design or read Deep Roots, Strong Branches (be sure to watch the video that accompanies this article from Natural Home Magazine).

Ben & Jerry’s has found yet another way to cool down our environmental concerns. In addition to using natural ingredients and eco-pints, they have now teamed with Greenpeace to launch a climate-friendly freezer.

The Cleaner, Greener Freezer — as the company likes to call it — uses Greenfreeze technology, which uses hydrocarbons as a refrigerant instead of fluorinated gases. It specifically eliminates the need for hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the most common greenhouse gas with 1,400 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide.

The new-to-the-U.S. technology was actually developed in 1992 by Greenpeace engineers, but it hasn’t been allowed in the States until now. The EPA is allowing Ben & Jerry’s to test out 2,000 Greenfreeze-equipped units this fall in the Boston and D.C. areas. Even though the freezer is already used in 300 million refrigerators worldwide, Ben & Jerry’s hopes to be the first to bring it

Unfortunately, our nation has been behind the curve on yet another green issue, but thanks to Ben & Jerry’s, at least our ice cream will be freezing just like the rest of the world’s soon enough. Read more about the company’s eco-friendly quest here.

Curious about whether your home is a good candidate for solar power? Check out Roofray, a handy tool that takes advantage of Google’s complex map data to project your home’s solar power potential. Roofray also makes educated guesses about energy bill savings and installation costs for your location.

While the Senate wrestles to construct some kind of utilitarian financial bailout, economists and political activists have moved out of the Wall Street box – and into the green house.

With one-seventh the money it looks like it will take to bail out the economy (so $100 billion), an investment in green power would produce nearly twice the amount of jobs as the mortgage bailout would.

These figures come from a study by two economists at the University of Massachusetts, Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier.

An article by Greenpeace media director, Glenn Hurowitz, expanded on the study.

“Instead of golden parachutes for CEOs,” he writes, “the government could finance America's transition from an oil- and fossil-fuel-dependent economy into one run completely on clean energy.”

In addition to offsetting carbon, Hurowitz says a green-power stimulus plan would offset the jobs lost by the economic crisis and the rising price of fuel that is driving so many companies out of business.

He went on to say that a green stimulus plan could generate conservation by creating more national parks and restoring wetlands; foster technological breakthroughs; reduce the price of fuel – as less people will be so dependent upon it; and solve what he considers to be an even greater financial burden – global warming.

The financial costs of the effects of global warming equates to about $3.8 trillion of the U.S. budget, and globally between 5 percent and 20 percent of the economic output, Hurowitz says.

In the article, Hurowitz said big businesses relying on U.S. taxpayers to bail them out would suffer, but they’d be replaced by innovative, environmentally-conscious companies that would “get not only America but also Wall Street back on its feet.”

PHOTO BY ISTOCKPHOTO

Climate change getting you down? If you've ever wondered if humanity can really do anything about greenhouse gas emissions, watching David Letterman's recent rant about climate change may help you get it all out of your system. (You can find it here on The Huffington Post. The quick summary: We are dead meat.)

But this week I’ve been feeling more optimistic, and for good reason. On Tuesday and Wednesday I attended the Kansas State Energy Conference to learn more about what’s happening locally and nationally on different energy issues. As part of that, I was lucky enough to get to hear the keynote address from one of the leading experts on climate science, Dr. James Hansen.

Don’t get me wrong, no one is likely to walk away from a lecture on climate change with a rosy view of the Earth’s future. It certainly wasn’t all good news. But at the same time, Hansen wasn’t saying that we’re dead meat or that it’s already too late. Instead, his message was that we still have time to act.

However, it’s a narrow window. We need to take serious action immediately, and it sounds like we’re talking about some pretty major steps — such as figuring out how to get off of coal completely unless we can figure out how to capture and store the carbon. There’s a great article from Hansen here on the Worldwatch Institute Web site with much more information on his views on climate.

Another bright spot: It was exciting to be at the conference and see how much is already happening in the world of wind power. There are a lot of new wind turbines being installed here on the Great Plains and in other windy spots around the world. Let’s keep them coming.

Photo by RUSTY DODSON/ISTOCKPHOTO

Drilling for oil in Alaska is among one of the key issues of the political campaigns this year. Each party presents its own justifications for its proposals for ending this spiral of choking gas prices and dependency on foreign oil, but what are they not telling you?

Politicians, economists and that guy sitting in the cubicle across from yours who knows everything about everything, can talk until they’re blue in their faces, but when there’s a division on the economy and the environment, the only answers good enough for both sides are going to come from the numbers. So here they are. Use them for what you will, but that guy, he’ll be hearing from me.

Current Petroleum Consumption

*The U.S. consumes nearly 21 million barrels of petroleum every day – that’s 7.5 billion barrels a year.

*Sixty-six percent of that petroleum is imported.

*At the current pace, the U.S. will spend more than $500 billion on petroleum imports by the end of the year.

Drilling Won’t Solve Our Problems

*A 1998 U.S. Geological Survey estimated recoverable oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) would be about 10.4 billion barrels – the equivalent of one and a half years’ current consumption. A more recent study, released by the Department of Energy put recoverable oil between 1.9 billion and 4.3 billion barrels. The report addresses reasons for the discrepancy.

*Fifty-nine billion barrels would be recoverable from the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), of which only 18 percent are off limits as per a federal moratorium. According to U.S. Department of Energy studies, lifting this ban would yield 1 percent our current consumption by the year 2030.

*DOE predicts ANWR oil reserves to reduce oil prices by 2 cents per gallon. Combined, lifting the moratoria on the OCS and ANWR would reduce the price by 6 cents, which wouldn’t be seen for another 10 years.

Alternatives Are Possible

*The new fuel-economy standard of 35 miles per gallon, as set by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, is projected to save more than 1.1 million barrels of oil per day in 2020. And people are learning how to make more fuel-efficient cars all the time.

*In time, oil imports could be reduced significantly with an electric public-transportation system and with restructuring urban transport.

*With the increasing production and modification of plug-in cars, vehicles could eventually be powered, at least partly so, from energy obtained through wind turbines. Here’s an article about this very concept.

MAX is heading for its competition debut in (gulp) less than three weeks. It's not exactly a warmup for the Auto X-Prize ... in fact it's a whole 'nother genre. It's Escape from Berkeley (by any non-petroleum means possible). So sure enough, we're going to perform yet another fuel change and run MAX from Berkeley to Las Vegas on raw vegetable oil.

Fickle, aren't I? Why don't I pick one fuel and settle down? Because in my opinion, the specific fuel is less important right now than the efficient use of fuel in general. I'm as eager as anybody to use wind generated electricity to charge the cheap lightweight batteries in my Detroit-built electric car, but it's not going to happen today. Even in the long run, the energy war will be fought on many fronts, and us humans may be looking for alternative fuels for a long time to come. Mother Earth News provides coverage of the alternative fuel scene, and I'll be your reporter for this alternative fuel event. And there's no place better to observe automotive competition than from the driver's seat, MAX will enter the Escape event.

Notice I've said “event,” rather than “race.” I'd like you all to look very serious while I tell you this is not a race. We're going to be on public roads and racing would hardly be appropriate. This is a timed rally, the goal will not be to get there first, the goal will be to get to the checkpoints exactly on time. We won't know what those times will be — we won't even know where the checkpoints will be — until shortly before the event begins, but we do know we won't have to break the speed limit to get there because that would be wrong. And now that that's settled, we can put on our game faces again.

The rules are pretty simple. No petroleum fuel allowed, a tiny bit of your non-petroleum fuel to get you started, and you can't buy any fuel along the way. Every drop/kilowatt/wood chip of fuel must be begged, mooched or otherwise scrounged en route. It's a three-day event, taking us over high mountains and low deserts, entrants include everything from biomass burners to hybrid bicycles. You've got to ask yourself, is anybody going to have a problem staying under the speed limit as they climb to Yosemite? I think for us entrants, it's going to feel a lot like a race ... like an open road race of a hundred years ago, when a 55 mph speed limit was a futuristic fantasy.

Not only will this be MAX's first race — I mean competition event — it will be its first extended outing with two people on board. As a responsible adult, I'm adding a few safety features.

Here's our new MAX back from the DMV — where it was declared officially an automobile, hooray! Note the new roll bar and back brace combo. It'll sure pay for itself in the unlikely event that MAX turns over like an SUV, but it's also there for the more likely event of getting hit from behind. The rear legs also protect the fuel tank, which on most Locosts and Lotus Sevens, is hidden behind a thin layer of sheet metal ... but you know what? I think I'm going to leave the back open so tailgaters can see the fuel sloshing around in there, maybe they'll give us a little more room. They'll never guess that the fuel is vegetable oil, and no more explosive than tailgating a grocery cart.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all the energy we used could come from local, renewable resources? Here’s a great article from the San Francisco Chronicle about people who are trying to make that idea a reality. (You can also read the article here on Common Dreams.)

It explains that just as a “locavore” is someone who eats locally grown food, a “locavolt” is someone who seeks energy created from local, renewable resources. One “locavolt” idea mentioned in this article is a concept Mother Earth News readers may already be familiar with, community supported wind.

If this gets you started thinking about producing energy locally, here are a few other resources you might want to check out.

* Do you live in a good location for producing solar or wind power? Here’s an article with more information on evaluating your home’s renewable energy potential.

 * To learn more about community supported wind power, a great resource is the non-profit organization Windustry and their Community Wind Toolbox.

 * The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has state and country energy profiles with good background information on energy issues in different areas. For example, here’s the profile for my home state of Kansas. Not surprisingly, it shows that we burn a lot of coal from Wyoming, but don’t yet have a lot of wind turbines.

What are some of the energy issues where you live? You can share your thoughts by posting a comment below.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past five years (which, admittedly, becomes more enticing everyday), you’ve probably seen a moped cruising around your city streets. As a college student, I encounter/dodge at least five every day on campus. The scariest part is that you can hear them coming before you see them, and I unfailingly always look for them in the wrong direction.

This European vehicle started to hit U.S. streets fairly recently, and on the surface, mopeds seem to be a promising move toward less gasoline consumption and CO₂ emissions — I’ve certainly coveted them on days they don’t run me over. But I’ve always wondered whether or not mopeds really are better for the environment, so I did some research.

Turns out, there are plenty of moped Web sites that herald mopeds as a new alternative form of transportation that reduces the rider’s carbon footprint and dependence on oil. While I think the idea of mopeds requiring less gasoline is pretty indisputable, the carbon footprint aspect is a tad more ambiguous.

From what I’ve found, there have only been two studies on the environmental impact of mopeds as compared to the emissions of conventional cars – and the results weren’t so promising.

In a study at the University of Denmark, mopeds were found to contribute more to Denmark’s pollution than typical cars. The results show that two-wheelers emit high amounts of hydrocarbon, carbon monoxide and particulate matter. The study also indicated that using fuel with ethanol makes insignificant change in the amount of emissions.

However, like I said, this was essentially the only information I’ve found on the subject, so I’m not really sure what to think.

Have you heard something I haven’t? What do you think of mopeds? Let me know below.

The X Prize Foundation wants to find solutions to the on-going problems involving energy and the environment, and the video below encourages just that. On Sept. 10, the foundation hosted a forum titled “Seeking Radical Breakthroughs in Alternative Energy — What I Would Advise the Next President.” Experts Dr. George Church, Dr. Saul Griffith and Dr. Ray Kurzweil came to present their ideas, which can be found here (Church), here (Griffith) and here (Kurzweil).

And now the foundation wants to hear ideas from the public.

At the forum, Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, announced the foundation’s new “What’s Your Crazy Green Idea?” video contest, sponsored by Prize Capital. The winner will receive a $25,000 prize for the best video with a new, world-changing X Prize competiton, relating to energy and the environment. The foundation’s goal is to gather ideas from a global perspective to find breakthroughs in clean fuels, renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy storage, carbon reduction and sustainable housing. They’re asking for contestants to submit two-minute videos on their YouTube Web site that answer these questions:

1. What is the specific prize idea?
2. What is the grand challenge or worldwide problem that you are trying to solve?
3. How will this prize benefit humanity?

Three finalists will be identified, and then visitors to www.xprize.org will make the final vote to decide who wins.

The deadline is Oct. 31, 2008, so hurry up, and get started! For more information visit the X Prize Web site.

We received a most unusual product in the office last week – a clock that runs on water. No batteries, cords, solar panels ….. just salt water!! How you might ask does this work? Chemistry!

The innards are made of two opposing metals and the ions in the salt water create a charge that produces the “electricity” to power the Bedol water clock. Now don’t get too excited and think that this is the cure for our energy woes. The amount of electricity produced by this chemical reaction is very small. But still, no batteries are required – so all of those disposable batteries that required manufacturing, shipping, selling and disposing of will never be needed to operate this clock.

The clock I received last week hasn’t lost any seconds since I added the salt water and set it. It will be fun to see how long it goes before I need to add more salt. In the meantime, I’m really enjoying this attractive, very low-tech addition to my desk top.

We were a big hit at Art Walk. People had a million questions and we were swamped most of the evening. But we had a lull while the fire-eating exotic dancer was performing, so I snapped this shot.

Art Walk is a regular feature here in Cave Junction. We're just north of the Oregon/California border, so we have lovely warm evenings during the summer. With that in mind, every second Friday of every summer month, selected artists show their work on Main Street. It's an opportunity for the community to get together and talk about something aside from politics. Anyway, last month, one of the organizers said our cars were beautiful. Then I said we make them ourselves and the next thing I knew, I was a selected artist for Art Walk.

I'd worked out a patter, sprinkled with phrases such as “the art of economy,” but everybody seemed to accept MAX as a piece of kinetic sculpture; the gas mileage thing was frosting on the cake. And since Art Walk is about things to look at, we brought The Plague along too.

See that black car next to MAX, the one covered with SCCA Solo Championship stickers? The one with the 44 inch high stack of racing tires behind it? That's MAX's evil twin, The Plague. It has a Honda CBR1000F sport bike engine, whereas MAX has a Kubota tractor engine. The Plague has about five times the horsepower of MAX and is a serious, national-level autocrosser.

Autocross is the art of high-performance driving on extremely tight courses, zipping around cones in parking lots (temporarily closed off to the public, as you'd expect) and specialized race tracks. The cars run one at a time against the clock — it's low risk, yet high excitement. And because a run typically takes less than a minute and an event is typically three runs per driver, autocross doesn't squander a lot of gas.

We had the hoods off both cars, probably 30 times in three hours, with grownups looking at MAX and saying “Would this run on vegetable oil?,” and youngsters looking at The Plague and saying, “Man, this is totally wicked!” It was a good show.

Afterward, while we were packing up, someone told Dave (he's in the white shirt in the photo) we were the most popular presentation at Art Walk. “Even more than the fire eating exotic dancer?” Dave asked her.

“What fire eating exotic dancer?” she asked.

“You didn't see him?”

“Him? You're kidding!”

Sure enough, Dave was kidding. There are limits to what we can call “art” in Cave Junction, and even MAX was a close call.

Photo by Jack McCornack

How much electricity do you use each month? Have you ever wondered how your electric bills compare to other households?

These are the average figures for electricity bills in the United States, according to this handy page of statistics from the Energy Information Agency (EIA).

 * The average residential monthly bill is $95.66

 * Average residential monthly use is 920 kilowatt hours (kWh)

 * The average price paid per kWh is 10.4 cents, so about a dime. (Here’s a further breakdown by state.)

Are your electric bills above or below these averages? Are you taking steps to reduce your electricity use? You can share your thoughts by posting a comment below.

Photo by Thorsten Christian Pohlmann/Istockphoto

Wind turbines come in all sizes, but if you’re trying to understand exactly how big a wind turbine is some of the terms are unfamiliar. What’s a kilowatt exactly? How is that different from a megawatt?

There’s a handy cheat sheet here that explains all the measurements, but I find them a little hard to visualize. Fortunately, there are a lot of great photos out there on the Web! Below are a few wind turbine photos as a frame of reference. You can find many more wind turbine photos online by visiting the Web site of the National Renewable Energy Lab.

Small Wind Turbines

The smallest home wind systems are equal to about a kilowatt. For example, the wind turbine pictured in this cornfield is a 1 kilowatt wind turbine.

Another common size of small wind turbine is a 10 kilowatt turbine, such as the one pictured by this house.

For a better sense of what sizes wind turbines come in, check out this page from the American Wind Energy Association. It has a list of manufacturers of small wind turbines (defined here as anything 100 kilowatts or less), and the models they produce, with links to more information.

Big Wind Turbines

On the other hand, some of the commercial scale wind turbines are closer to a megawatt (1,000 kilowatts.) The wind turbines pictures along this road are 1.5 megawatt wind turbines.

If you want to get a better sense of what megawatts means, check out this handy map from AWEA that shows commercial-scale wind projects in the United States. Click on the links to different states and you can find out exactly where new wind projects are being built and how many megawatts they are.

 Photos courtesy DOE/NREL

We're almost back where we started. This is the last shot of MAX 2.0 before it goes on the road. This Wednesday, we're scheduled for show-and-tell at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Then on Friday, of all things, MAX is going to be in an art show (that's why it looks extra clean right now). We still have to hook up lights and put glass in the windshield frame ... and maybe a couple more wheels, but by golly, we're going to make it.

Once MAX is on the road again (hey Willie, I have an idea for a song for you) we'll run a tank of diesel through its system (as mentioned in Update No. 7, we have already introduced one variable — we changed the overall gear ratio — and we don't want to introduce a second one yet) for baseline data. But after that, I'm going to fill 'er up with biodiesel.

As discussed back in Update No. 2, biofuels aren't going to make the energy crisis go away. There are technical and social hurdles to overcome before biofuels qualify as an unqualified success, and even if/when the day comes that biofuels come from 100 percent inedible feedstock grown on 100 percent non-arable land, an ethanol guzzler will still be a fuel guzzler, and an efficient biofuels car will do less harm to the world than an inefficient biofuels car. Energy doesn't come for free.

Anyway, I fell off the biofuels bandwagon because I got sick of TV ads saying you can feel all green and fuzzy by buying twice as big a car as you need, and getting half the mileage that it should, as long as it has “E85” in big letters on the gas cap. I'm also annoyed by the corporate spokesfolks who say biofuels have no influence whatsoever on the price of food. I'll accept that it's only a small part of the food equation, but I won't accept that it's no part at all, and if biofuels are so great, why don't their growers run their tractors on it? Lately there's been a totally over-the-top backlash against biofuels in general, and biodiesel in particular, so I'm going to start frontlashing a bit, in hopes of encouraging development of sustainable, renewable, biofuels.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, the backlash is taking the form of protests, picketing and good old fashioned one-on-one customer harassment, in an effort to close down biodiesel stations. Seriously, there are people treating biodiesel outlets like they're meth labs, photographing people who buy biodiesel and getting their license numbers. (For more about the situation, see this article from Seattle Weekly.) There's already the problem that biodiesel is more expensive than petrodiesel, the biodiesel retailers and researchers are having a plenty tough enough time staying in business without big-name greenies trying to scuttle them. The only alternative to biofuels today is petroleum fuel, and hearing these “save the planet” guys with their “just say no to biodiesel” platform is like hearing a Greenpeace member demanding we run our cars on whale oil.

So first chance I get, I'm going to vote with my wallet and buy some biodiesel. Lucky for me that MAX gets great mileage, so I won't have to vote very often.

Photo by Jack McCornack