The Newspaper of the San Francisco Bay Chapter
March - April 2007
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Lower your personal impacts
The Sierra Club has introduced three new on-line calculators to help you understand and reduce your impacts on the environment.
COOL IT!
The Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra is collaborating with Acterra and 3 Phases Energy Service to enable individuals to reduce their personal carbon dioxide emissions through an innovative new online program called COOL IT!
COOL IT! lets you identify your personal CO2 emissions and take steps to reduce or offset those emissions. COOL IT! consists of three steps:
- emissions calculation of your personal CO2 emissions (e.g. transportation, home heating, and electricity);
- emissions reduction through meaningful actions to reduce personal emissions (e.g. carpooling, driving a fuel-efficient vehicle, purchasing energy-efficient appliances and electrical equipment, weatherizing your home or apartment);
- emissions offset by purchasing "Green Tags" from 3 Phases Energy to offset those CO2 emissions you can't eliminate. Green Tags, also know as Renewable Energy Certificates, represent the delivery of one megawatt-hour of renewable power to the total energy infrastructure.
Mr. Green's virtual tour
About 20% of all energy used in the U.S. is used in the home. Walk through a real house on the Sierra Club's new virtual Cool Home Tour with Sierra magazine's answer man, Mr. Green (aka Bob Schildgen; some of you may remember him from his earlier stint as editor of the Coop News). You'll learn how to have a cool house, save money, and help chip away at a threat that faces us all - global warming. Go to Cool Home to download Mr. Green's Cool Home Checklist and tour your own abode to see what you're doing right and where you've got room to improve. (The tour does require audio.)
I Want My MPG!
With the White House and Congress continuing to oppose higher fuel-economy standards, the Sierra Club is launching its new "I Want My MPG!" fuel-economy calculator to help Americans understand how much they could benefit if automakers were required to use existing fuel-saving technology.
"Making our cars and trucks go farther on a gallon of gas is the biggest single step we can take to saving money at the gas pump, curbing global warming, and cutting America's oil dependence," said Carl Zichella, regional staff director for the Sierra Club. The technology exists today to improve car manufacturers' fleetwide fuel efficiency to over 40 miles per gallon. Raising Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) would save the average driver $500 to over $1,000 per year at the gas pump. Taking this step would also curb global-warming emissions and cut America's oil dependence by 4,000,000 barrels per day by 2025 - more oil than the United States currently imports from the entire Persian Gulf and could ever take out of the Artic Refuge, combined.
"I Want My MPG!" allows consumers to find out how much money and pollution they would have saved if CAFE standards had been raised. Consumers enter their specific make and model, local gas price, and the number of miles they drive each year.
Instead of helping consumers save thousands of dollars at the gas pump by increasing the fuel economy of American vehicles, the Bush administration and Congress have blocked meaningful improvements in fuel economy. The Sierra Club has joined 10 states (including California) and a coalition of environmental groups in filing a lawsuit against the Bush administration's fuel-economy standards for light trucks. The suit contends that the Bush administration's paltry 1.8-mile-per-gallon increase by 2011 violates the law since it fails to set the standards at a level that is the "maximum feasible", as mandated.
© 2007 San Francisco Sierra Club Yodeler