Memories of 21, 42, 63 ... the 84th meandering

Hi teeny, good to see you again.............

The WX is so unpredictable these days - who knows what's coming next!!

Clicked for all.

Clickety click, and here is an update on the global warming bill making its way through the Senate.

October 25, 2009
Senate Global Warming Bill Is Seeking to Cushion the Impact on Industry
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON " The Senate bill aimed at reducing global warming pollution will initially grant billions of dollars of free emissions permits to utilities and industry but will require the bulk of the money be returned to consumers and taxpayers, according to newly released details.

The bill will also provide a cushion to energy-intensive manufacturing companies to ease the transition to a lower-carbon economy and to help them compete internationally, although the subsidies will disappear over time. The measure also sets a floor and ceiling on the price of permits to emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

With these and other changes considered, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that overall cost of the bill at roughly $100 a year per household, similar to that of a House climate change and energy bill passed in June.

The Senate measure, sponsored by Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Barbara Boxer of California, both Democrats, aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under a cap-and-trade system that sets a nationwide limit on emissions but allows polluters to buy and sell permits to meet it.

The bill’s targets for overall emissions reductions are 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050. The House bill’s limits are similar, except the target for 2020 was set at 17 percent after negotiations with utilities and other major sources of emissions.

Senators Kerry and Boxer introduced their bill in late September with a number of missing provisions. They filled in those blanks late Friday with a more detailed 923-page draft that spells out the formula for distributing pollution allowances and other provisions.

The latest version includes new financing for research on capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, more money for low-carbon transportation projects, additional assistance for rural communities and more favorable treatment for agriculture and forestry.

“We’ve reached another milestone as we move to a clean energy future,” Mrs. Boxer said in a statement, “creating millions of jobs and protecting our children from dangerous pollution.”

The bill is before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which Mrs. Boxer leads. The panel has scheduled three days of hearings next week and has tentatively set markup to begin the following week.

The E.P.A. analysis of the Kerry-Boxer bill found that its costs and impact were roughly equivalent to those of the House bill, which was sponsored by Democratic Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts. The two bills would reduce overall American emissions by nearly the same amount over the next 40 years. The costs to consumers are also similar, the agency found.

Neither bill would add to the federal deficit and both measures could actually produce some revenue from the sale of emissions permits, the agency found.

The E.P.A. did not try to quantify the benefits to individuals or society of reducing greenhouse gas pollution.

Other studies have found higher costs, although all such estimates are based on assumptions about how businesses and consumers would behave as energy costs rise and how quickly new technology would appear to replace increasingly costly fossil fuels.

Senate Republicans dismissed the E.P.A. analysis as incomplete and have threatened to boycott committee action until a more thorough analysis is done.

“It’s not unreasonable to demand that a committee, prior to legislative hearings, would actually have the bill in question with adequate time for review and analysis,” said Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, the senior Republican on the Senate environment committee.

“On top of that,” added Mr. Inhofe, who is a global warming skeptic, “one would think that, prior to legislative hearings, the committee would have a thorough, comprehensive economic analysis to understand how an 900-plus page bill, designed to fundamentally reshape the American economy, affects consumers, small businesses, farmers and American families.”

And a fascinating article about how and why an inland sea can be brought back after 90% destruction.

October 25, 2009
From Ecological Soviet-Era Ruin, a Sea Is Reborn
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 11:55 a.m. ET

AKESPE, Kazakhstan (AP) -- Standing on the shore under the relentless Central Asian sun, Badarkhan Prikeyev drew on a cigarette and squinted into the distance as one fishing boat after another returned with the day's catch.

Until recently, this spot where the fish merchant was standing, in a man-made desert at the edge of nowhere, represented one of the world's worst environmental calamities.

Now fresh water was lapping at his boots, proclaiming an environmental miracle -- the return of the Aral Sea.

The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth-largest body of fresh water, covering an area the size of Ireland. But then the nations around it became part of the Soviet Union. With their passion for planned economics and giant, nature-reversing projects, the communists diverted the rivers that fed the inland sea and used them to irrigate vast cotton fields. The result: The Aral shrank by 90 percent to a string of isolated stretches of water.

The catastrophe ''is unprecedented in modern times,'' says Philip Micklin, a geography professor at Western Michigan University who has studied the Aral Sea for years.

And even now, nearly two decades after the Soviet Union broke up, the damage is far from reversed. Satellite images taken earlier this year show that one section of the sea has shrunk by 80 percent in the last three years alone. Uzbekistan, which controls three-quarters of the Aral Sea, has given up trying. The rescue has happened on Kazakhstan's portion, and it is striking.

Aralsk is a port that ended up 100 kilometers (60 miles) inland. But now, a dam built by the World Bank and Kazakh government is slowly resurrecting a small part of the sea, reviving the fishing industry and bringing hope to an area that some expected would simply dry up and blow away in the fierce, salty winds.

The returning water has crept to within 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) of Aralsk, also known as Aral, and the World Bank reckons it could reach the port in about six years.

Kazakhs can hardly wait. ''Good News -- The Sea is Coming Back,'' declares a sign at the entrance to Aralsk.

In some areas, the water is already lapping at the derelict hulls of ships that were stranded deep inland, heightening the ghostly and surreal aura of the landscape.

''Finally, there is hope and a life to be made here.'' said Prikeyev, 49, waiting for his fishermen near the village of Akespe, 90 kilometers (55 miles) west of Aralsk. ''Work is available for anyone who wants it.''

This summer his boats returned laden with heaving sacks of pike and carp.

The miracle is a small one compared with the damage that will probably never be undone. Uzbekistan has chosen to keep the lucrative cotton industry going, and to prospect for gas and oil under the exposed seabed.

But where the sea is being saved, the solution has proved elegantly simple.

The $88 million project launched in 2001 resulted in a dam to channel the precious waters of the Syr Darya river into the Kazakh section, rather than let them flow south and go to waste.

The five states of former Soviet Central Asia are in broad agreement about the need to coordinate use of the region's two life-giving rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. In practice, however, little concrete collaboration has been achieved, meaning certain death for large part of the sea.

The centerpiece of the Aral salvation project is the concrete Kokaral dam. It's an unremarkable-looking structure that can be walked across in less than a minute, but its impact has been dramatic.

The rising water level has noticeably cooled the climate and lowered salinity sufficiently to sustain freshwater fish.

According to the World Bank, the catch of freshwater fish reached around 2,000 tons in 2007, up from just 52 tons in 2004.

For the first time in years, many Kazakhs living near the Aral Sea feel they have a future.

''My father grew up in a fishing village and catching fish is what he did all his life,'' said Prikeyev, who oversees a crew of more than 100 fishermen and others during high season in summer.

After the sea began to dry up in the 1960s, Aral villages withered as people migrated to the cities for jobs. The surrounding region became a searing dust bowl and fishing, one the few sources of steady employment, collapsed. Prikeyev tried running a chain of small shops, failed and went back to fishing, only to find the fish disappearing.

The land became a desert, baking in the day, freezing at night. Salt blown inland by the wind off the exposed seabed unleashed a scourge of respiratory diseases in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

The drying-out has severely damaged plant and animal life and created huge salt and dust storms that can travel 500 kilometers (300 miles), Micklin said in an e-mail interview.

The payoff was a bonanza of cotton to supply the Soviet market as well as Cuba and the communist countries of Europe. The fishermen paid the price. By the mid-1970s, Aral catches were down by about three-quarters from the roughly 40,000 tons before the drying. Eventually fishing on an industrial level ceased altogether.

As dead freshwater fish washed ashore, desperate Soviet authorities introduced the salt-resistant flounder, a squat bottom-feeder, to save the local fishing industry.

Now it's the flounders that are dying in the returning waters, while Prikeyev is selling his catch in Russia, Ukraine and Georgia and has his eye on wealthy western European consumers.

''The western Europeans like the pike because it is so lean,'' Prikeyev said, as he waited for returning fishermen near the village of Akespe.

''We Kazakhs need fat ones, like that one,'' he laughed, pointing at a freshly caught carp shimmering on the beach.

''My dream is to improve things for the fishermen, so that they can live and work a little more easily,'' Prikeyev said.

Local fishing cooperatives have received $2 million in Japanese aid to house the fishermen in mobile homes with electricity and phone lines, Prikeyev said.

The fish have to be driven by jeep on a bumpy half-hour ride across a blinding white expanse to be loaded onto refrigerator vans. But Prikeyev hopes to eliminate those daily trips by building a $25,000 walk-in refrigerator in a nearby village.

On the northern side of the Kokaral dike, migratory birds and seagulls circle over the waters, screeching and scanning for prey. A few carp slide over the brim of the dam. All will die in one of the isolated pockets of the southern sea.

Between the Aral's old coastline and the current one, a new ecosystem has taken root. Salt-encrusted seabed has become scrubland full of gophers, lizards, spiders, warthogs and roaming herds of camels.

The fleet of stranded boats, hulls rusting, wheelhouses cobwebbed, is thinning out, plundered by scrap metal dealers.

And hope is returning with the waters. Alexander Danchenko, a retired shipyard worker, feels it in the weather.

''When there was no sea, it felt like we were in a frying pan here in the middle of the desert,'' he said. ''Now it's returning, sometimes you can feel a pleasant, cool breeze coming in from the south.''

At Aralsk's port, disused cranes loom over open space strewn with garbage. Murat Sydykov, 70, a musician who lives in the city, says his mournful music is inspired by the fate of the sea, but he is optimistic it will one day play a happy tune again.

''When the sea returns to Aralsk,'' he said, ''I will write a symphony and get an orchestra to play it by the shore.''

Nice articles, sue

I cannot believe the weather, and how there are 'sceptics' against global warming facts. Amazing

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

The prospects of saving the world's coral reefs now appear so bleak that plans are being made to freeze samples to preserve them for the future.

A meeting in Denmark took evidence from researchers that most coral reefs will not survive even if tough regulations on greenhouse gases are put in place.

Scientists proposed storing samples of coral species in liquid nitrogen.

That will allow them to be reintroduced to the seas in the future if global temperatures can be stabilised.

Legislators from 16 major economies have been meeting in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, to try to agree the way forward on climate change.

The meeting has been organised by the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment (Globe).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8324954.stm

They're wonderful! Yep, gotta love 'em, huh? They're refreshing compared to what we had for 8 years. I just wish Dick Cheney, would go away! Talk about unity, Sarah Palin, the #1 Wanna-Be, just endorsed an Independent over a New York Republican, while Newtie endorsed the Republican! How's that?

On gun-totin' hunters like Palin, comedian Chris Rock said, "we're the only animal that hunts on a full stomach"! Some conservation huh?
Well, those photos are just great. I'm supposed to go up on Wednesday with a group from the local VFW, to the Statue. Taking my cane, in case I get tired and have to lean on it.

Hi Danon!
Was it crazy raining here or what? Today it's sunny but cold. That' s why this season is called FALL! Leaves blowing everywhere, rain pelting and all of the weekend football games canceled!

from one of my friends at FB....(hilarious)



A person named 'Newt" shouldn't be allowed to vote!!! Did his mother not like him or what?

Hope you're holiday is marvelous. Have fun!!!

I saw this exact photo on one of the comedy shows, probably Real Time, with Bill Maher! If you didn't realize that Bush was really the President, you'd mistake him, for a joke! I cannot believe that a country supposedly intellectual, would actually allow itself to become the laughing stock of the world!
What passes as "intelligence" in the Bush Administration was a "smoke screen". I just hope that the next 3 years, will thrust us into recovery.

Agree with all the above...

Interesting reading all. I think that almost everyone agrees the globe is warming - but, the arguement appears to be - is it man made or is it a natural occurrence. I can't understand the people who think it's natural - that seems an intellectual copout.

All clicked down here in NE TX.........

been clickign...


resting up a little lately - on the quiet side...

but clickign

(hugs all) xxxx

A bit of both, imo.

We have natural phenonima happening, true, so it can be difficult for some to understand that humans are the cause of most of the planets ecological decline.

Hi Iz!

Hugs right back to you.

xoxo

Hi to everyone, especially teeney and Izzie. We never get enough of the two of you.

Freezing coral in liquid nitrogen? Brilliant. But can they freeze enough?

catching up quickly

home puter is at the puter hospital

This is interesting. Real science is finally back in our government.

October 26, 2009
Energy Dept. Aid for Scientists on the Edge
By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON " The federal Energy Department will make good on a pledge for a bolder technology strategy on Monday, awarding research grants for ideas like bacteria that will make gasoline, enzymes that will capture carbon dioxide to counter global warming and batteries so cheap that they will allow the use of solar power all night long.

A new agency within the department will nurture these and other radical proposals, most of which will probably fail but a few of which could have “a transformative impact,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in an interview on Friday. The money will go for projects at all stages of development, including some that exist simply as a smart idea, Dr. Chu said.

The department will announce 37 grants totaling $151 million, mostly going to small businesses and educational institutions but also to a few corporations. Some of the ideas may be supported until they are picked up by venture capitalists or major companies, he said.

The new effort, directed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or Arpa-e, is modeled on a Defense Department program known as Darpa that helped commercialize microchips and the Internet and helped develop body armor and other high-tech products. Darpa is known for quick decisions and long-shot bets, an approach seldom associated with the Energy Department.

President George W. Bush signed the agency into law in 2007 but did not propose any money for it. It got its first appropriation in the stimulus act, $400 million to be spent over two years. On Wednesday, the Senate confirmed Arun Majumdar, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California to lead the agency.

Dr. Majumdar said in a telephone interview that his new agency would identify challenges in the energy industry and would finance “five or ten different approaches.”

“We don’t know which ones are going to work, but we’ll try them,” he said, “and if many of them fail but one works, that’s great, we’ve solved the problem.”

Dr. Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, was a co-author of a 2006 paper for the National Academy of Sciences that called for the creation of the Arpa-e program.

In the initial round, the grants average $4 million. One is going to researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus who are working on developing an organism that uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into sugars and another that converts the sugars to gasoline and diesel. The two can live in a “co-culture” in a thin latex film, according to Lawrence P. Wackett, a professor of biochemistry, although much research remains to be done to make the organisms work as a system.

“A venture capital group might say it’s a little early for them,” Dr. Wackett said.

“It’s not all worked out, but that’s the spirit of Arpa-e,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be things that are 90 percent worked out, but more what-if kinds of things.”

A second grant will go to a group led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that is trying to develop an all-liquid metal battery. It could smooth out the intermittent flow of power from sources like wind mills and solar cells, displacing sources that emit heat-trapping gases like coal, oil or gas.

A third would finance research by United Technologies to use enzymes, which are essentially the digestive juices of living things, to capture carbon dioxide from the stacks of power plants. Existing systems can do the job but consume 30 percent of the power plant’s energy in the process.

Crucial to the new strategy is using top-notch scientists to evaluate the projects, Dr. Chu said. He said that he had written this year to university presidents around the country and asked them to assign their “best and brightest” to the project, and that that 500 top scientists had responded. They sifted through 3,600 preliminary proposals and selected 300 to be developed into fuller proposals before choosing 37 to finance in the first round.

With only about 1 percent of the proposals receiving money, Dr. Chu said, the Energy Department might decide to arrange a “fair” at which venture capitalists could size up some of the others.

The Arpa-e grants are part of a flurry of energy announcements by the Obama administration. In a speech on Tuesday in Arcadia, Fla., President Obama plans to discuss $3.4 billion in spending from the stimulus package to improve the electricity grid. White House officials said the government money would be matched by as much as $5 billion in private spending.

In Arcadia, the site of one of the nation’s largest solar panel arrays, Mr. Obama will also highlight the administration’s commitment to renewable energy sources like the wind and sun, White House officials said. He will also emphasize the importance of upgrading electric transmission systems to improve reliability and reduce energy losses.

The so-called smart grid will include meters for homes and businesses that allow customers to monitor their energy use.

John M. Broder contributed reporting.

Collecting the coral probably won't be a problem, but reintroduction? At least the worlds leaders are serious about reversing the causes of global warming (if possible)

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Ode to a Clothesline

Constance Casey, a former New York City Parks Department gardener, writes regularly on natural history and gardening for Slate. Her blog is The Observant Gardener.

There is more to using a clothesline than righteously defying community authorities or saving money. The process of pinning the clothes on the line has unexpected pleasures. The first revelation is that when you’re hanging clothes, you can’t help looking up. The red and white striped shirt against the blue sky becomes as significant as William Carlos Williams’ white chickens and red wheelbarrow on which so much depends.
Like arranging flowers, hanging clothes on a line can be a form of art.

Choosing to pin a pale peach T-shirt next to a bright blue bathrobe feels like the decision-making that goes into putting flowers in a vase. (The bathrobe sash, by the way, stretched and clipped, dried flat, un-scrunched, for the first time since it came from the store.) Especially on a hot, breezy day, this is an even more ephemeral art form than arranging flowers. Neighbors have commented that the display is a reminder of the past, and the opposite of unsightly (To add to the mood of yesteryear, I hold a couple of clothespins in my mouth.)

Having a clothesline makes you acutely sensitive to the weather " scattered showers or windy and bright. This is yet another of those cases, increasing as we try to figure out how to fit in to the natural world without wrecking it, in which we’re called upon to be more observant, patient and flexible.

Not long ago, tens of thousands of people in Ontario took up the Toronto power company’s offer of free clotheslines. Darn, maybe the Canadians really are more attuned to nature than we are. They probably trudge through hip-deep snow to hang their flannel shirts and nightgowns. Let’s think flexible: On bright days, enjoy the sky; When it’s raining, use the drier.
Orlando/Three Lions/Getty Images New York City, circa 1955.

The preceding delightful ode came from a site linked below, which has other articles along the similar vein, which see.

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/rethinking-laundry-in-the-21st-century/?pagemode=print



October 25, 2009, 7:00 pm
Rethinking Laundry in the 21st Century
By The Editors

Larry Mishkar The air-dry method in Olympia, Wash. To see more reader photographs of clotheslines, go to Green Inc.

On college campuses, in subdivisions, hotels and even prisons, efforts to transform the way Americans do their laundry are steadily building. Save energy, save money: what’s not to like? It turns out that it takes persistence and research.

Should Americans have the right to hang their laundry outdoors, even if many of their neighbors oppose it and community rules ban clotheslines as unsightly threats to property values? Legislators in Colorado, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont have prohibited anti-clothesline rules, and similar action is being considered in several other states. (Catch up with the issue on The Times’s Green Inc.) How do college students do their laundry, without hanging a lot of clothes in the quad? How do hotels get their guests to reuse their towels? And how do prisons balance their sanitation and security needs yet reduce laundry costs?

* Alexander P. Lee, Project Laundry List
* Chelsea Hodge, E Source
* Robert B. Cialdini, author, “Influence: Science and Practice”
* Fiona Hensley, Allegheny College
* Brett Daniels, Aquawing Ozone Injection Systems
* Jill Saylor, cook, Canton, Ohio
* Constance Casey, The Observant Gardener

Giving Up the Dryer

Alexander P. Lee is executive director of Project Laundry List.

The tumble dryer is the second largest energy-consuming appliance and the leading cause of house fires among appliances. There is no such sense as an Energy Star dryer; these machines are inherently inefficient, using natural gas or electricity to heat air.
Look to Italy and Denmark for guidance.

In Italy, only about three or four percent of households own a dryer. In Denmark, newly constructed student housing included space for indoor drying. In China, the bamboo shaft is still a ubiquitous clothesline. In the United States, approximately 80 percent of households own a dryer. Project Laundry List believes, from anecdotal evidence, that the vast majority of families can see a 10 to 20 percent savings on their electric bill by going cold turkey and setting up a clothesline or drying rack.

Read more…

While the Department of Energy spokesperson is correct in saying, “Clothes drying, both gas and electric, uses about 3 percent of all [my emphasis] energy used in homes,” this leaves the wrong impression. Laundry dried at a laundromat or down the hall at your multifamily housing complex’s shared unit does not show up at all in this statistic, because it is technically commercial energy consumption, as are the millions of pounds of laundry done at prisons (home to 2 million people), hospitals, restaurants, fish piers, and universities, for example.

While pretty much every household has a refrigerator, millions of households do not have dryers. Looking at the average, instead of the median, household energy consumed by a dryer may leave people with an inadequate impression of how much energy would actually be saved were we to move toward wider adoption of clotheslines.

Speaking of cold, make sure you turn your washing machine and dryer dial to the low temperature setting, as this will also save you a tremendous amount of energy. There is little evidence that washing in warm or hot water (140 degrees) or drying at high heat can kill the viruses and bacteria about which we should be most concerned. There is plenty of evidence that running power plants and mining for natural gas in order to power domestic hot water heaters is causing asthma and climate disruption at the micro and macro level.
The Post-Clothespin Generation

Chelsea Hodge graduated from Pomona College in 2009 as a double major in economics and environmental analysis. She currently works as a research analyst for E Source, an energy efficiency research and advisory firm and lives in Boulder, Colo.

If 95 percent of Italians, some of earth’s most fashion-conscious inhabitants, don’t own a dryer, then why are Americans so adamant about tumble drying their clothes? After contemplating this question while studying abroad in Florence, I decided to begin turning the tides by starting at an obvious place"my college campus.
Hanging laundry " inside " at Pomona College in sunny Southern California.

With a strong majority of college students deeply concerned about climate change and college administrators vying to one-up each others’ greenness, college campuses seem an ideal place to promote line-drying laundry.

Despite this potential, my initial research yielded the finding that only a handful of colleges actively give their students the opportunity to line-dry their clothes. Unable to find much information about these initiatives, I set about designing a program for my alma mater " Pomona College " from the ground up. An online survey of 20 percent of the student body revealed that students have a strong preference for drying their clothes in a private, secure space.

Read more…

And a survey of the campus revealed that Pomona, with its suburban location and highly manicured campus, would not be a good match for ground level outdoor clotheslines, despite our sunny Southern California location.

After considering everything from out-the-window clothesline pulleys, to rooftop lines, to installing racks in residence hall bathrooms and hallways, I decided on two approaches. The first was the installation of one or more compact drying racks in all residence hall laundry rooms that had space for them, for a total of 420 feet installed. The second was the launch of a racks-for-loan program in which students could check out a compact, foldable drying rack for a semester from the Sustainability Integration Office to use in their room. The checkout program began with 25 racks and was so successful that another 40 were purchased the following year.

Despite the fact that line-drying laundry is widespread in much of the developed world, including Europe and Australia, it is no longer a part of mainstream American culture, thanks, perhaps, to our increasingly affluent, urbanized and over-scheduled populace.

My hope is that drying racks and laundry lines on college campuses will give students who never held a clothespin growing up the chance to try out and ultimately embrace the simple act of hanging out their clothes. Though the drying racks at Pomona are unlikely to significantly reduce the College’s greenhouse gas emissions, the behavior learned, spread over a lifetime and among friends and family, can definitely have an impact.
Hotel Room Psychology

Robert B. Cialdini is author of “Influence: Science and Practice” and co-author of “Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive.”

During your last hotel stay, you probably encountered an in-room card asking you to reuse your towels. Although wordings vary, such cards always urge this action to preserve the environment. What the cards never say is that the majority of guests do reuse their towels at least once when requested. My research team suspected that this omission was costing the hotels " and the environment " plenty.
The psychological key to getting hotel guests to reuse towels.

To test our suspicion, we conspired with the management of an upscale hotel to place one of four cards in its guestrooms. Three cards employed some version of the typical environmental appeal. A fourth card added (true) information that the majority of guests do reuse their towels when asked.

The outcome? Compared with the first three messages, the final message increased towel reuse by 34 percent. How easily we can be influenced to act by honest information about how those around us are acting.
Adding Moisture to the Air

Fiona Hensley is a junior at Allegheny College in Meadville, Penn.

Last year my Environmental Science 110 classmates and I created the 350.org Underwear Project on Allegheny College’s campus. This project highlighted the contribution of machine-drying clothes to atmospheric carbon dioxide and illustrated an alternative: line-drying our laundry (underwear). We tapped into 350.org, an international movement to lower atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million from about 385 parts per million.

Underwear Project at Allegheny College from The Meadville Tribune on Vimeo.

It is often pointed out that my generation did not grow up with clotheslines. But a strength of our generation is that if a group makes something available to us, shows us how easy it is and emphasizes its utility, we will take to it. If someone came to a college and installed a hang-dry system, educated the campus on the simplicity of it and emphasized its benefits " less of an energy cost to us, a healthier atmosphere, a political action affecting the global community " we would adopt the cause as our own.

Read more…
Environmental Science freshmen hung 350 undergarments outside the campus center at Allegheny College.

This does not mean people have to see laundry lines. The interior of dorms are a great place to install laundry lines, rather than leaving them out in our temperate northern climate. Indoor air is notoriously dry during the winter due to the use of furnaces. However line-drying clothes would help add moisture to the air and therefore reduce the spread of seasonal flu germs which thrive in warm, dry air. The ceilings of laundry rooms are under-utilized and would lend themselves to such an endeavor.

Of course, such a hang-dry system would have to exist alongside a regular dryer system at first because of space limitations that will need to be worked out (capacity) and students’ current habits. If everyone dried their spare sheets, towels, washcloths, socks and other items that might not be needed the next day and reduced their dryer use to once every week or two weeks it would be a giant step in the right direction.
Even Prisons Can Save on Dryers

Brett Daniels is vice president of Aquawing Ozone Injection Systems.
Ozone laundry system.

One American institution that uses a huge amount of energy " and a lot of it in laundry costs " is the prison system. Obviously the first priorities in a prison are security, safety and sanitation. Energy efficiency takes a back seat. Clotheslines are obviously not an option in prisons for security concerns: officials fear prisoners might try to commit suicide or attack other prisoners, or use the line to escape.

So what about the option of changing from hot water to cold water? That would save a huge amount of money. Not all ozone systems are clinically validated to kill bacteria and viral strands " always a concern in such a close environment " but with clinical disinfection this technology changes the cold vs. hot water issue.

A properly manufactured and supported ozone laundry system can reduce total water by as much as 30%, save 80% on hot water usage and reduce drying times as high as 20%. How does it work?

Read more…

With the most efficient systems, ozone is directly injected in to the base of the wash wheel. Once injected, the ozone serves as a disinfectant and a catalyst for wash chemicals. The ozone relaxes fibers and reduces surface tension. This allows the mechanical action of the washer and the chemistry to be more efficient, which is the primary reason for the decrease in water usage. Because ozone relaxes the fabrics, moisture retention is improved during the extract step of the wash cycle. The less moisture in the laundry allows for significant reduction in dry time.

In state prisons in Missouri, the Aquawing ozone laundry system is being used to save $1.2 million a year as well as millions of gallons of water each year. Based on results independently reported by Corrections Forum magazine, the return on this investment is less than 14 months. While environmental concerns are not at the top of state officials’ lists when it comes to prisons, reducing costs is a huge priority.
A Mobile Home Park’s Hesitance

Jill Saylor is a full-time cook in Canton, Ohio, and a part-time student at Kent State University.

My mobile home park was leery about using clotheslines because I think they thought that the tenants would hang them from trees and in between trailers and that it would look trashy. It’s not the nicest mobile home park, so I’m not sure what they were worried about.

But we pushed and petitioned for the umbrella kind that could be taken down and put away at night. They wouldn’t be in the front yard, and you can hang your underwear on the inside of the line and hide them behind your shirts and pants on the outside rows.

I phoned and phoned the home office of the park until I finally reached the owner and he allowed the use of them, after I mentioned the letter in the mail that they just raised our lot rent $10.

Read more…

It was bittersweet though because the weather had turned cold and rainy by then. I posted signs at the mail boxes to share the good news, and they were taken down, but then put back up two days later. I continue to dry my clothes on the line inside and haven’t used my dryer in months now. My electric bill is so much lower, and I’m making an impact on the planet as well.

I grew up with our mom hanging our clothes out to dry. We hated that she hung our underwear up to where the neighbor kids (who we played with all our childhood lives) could see them. But other than that, it never occurred to us that it was odd to hang laundry outside.
Ode to a Clothesline

Constance Casey, a former New York City Parks Department gardener, writes regularly on natural history and gardening for Slate. Her blog is The Observant Gardener.

There is more to using a clothesline than righteously defying community authorities or saving money. The process of pinning the clothes on the line has unexpected pleasures. The first revelation is that when you’re hanging clothes, you can’t help looking up. The red and white striped shirt against the blue sky becomes as significant as William Carlos Williams’ white chickens and red wheelbarrow on which so much depends.
Like arranging flowers, hanging clothes on a line can be a form of art.

Choosing to pin a pale peach T-shirt next to a bright blue bathrobe feels like the decision-making that goes into putting flowers in a vase. (The bathrobe sash, by the way, stretched and clipped, dried flat, un-scrunched, for the first time since it came from the store.) Especially on a hot, breezy day, this is an even more ephemeral art form than arranging flowers. Neighbors have commented that the display is a reminder of the past, and the opposite of unsightly (To add to the mood of yesteryear, I hold a couple of clothespins in my mouth.)

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Having a clothesline makes you acutely sensitive to the weather " scattered showers or windy and bright. This is yet another of those cases, increasing as we try to figure out how to fit in to the natural world without wrecking it, in which we’re called upon to be more observant, patient and flexible.

Not long ago, tens of thousands of people in Ontario took up the Toronto power company’s offer of free clotheslines. Darn, maybe the Canadians really are more attuned to nature than we are. They probably trudge through hip-deep snow to hang their flannel shirts and nightgowns. Let’s think flexible: On bright days, enjoy the sky; When it’s raining, use the drier.
Orlando/Three Lions/Getty Images New York City, circa 1955.