Living Like Ed
Page 5
Another terrific use for the GreenSwitch is to “clear” your home before you go to bed, so you can save energy all night long.
A GreenSwitch should deliver a 30 to 45 percent reduction in energy use. Since the average American home uses more than 12,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, a reduction in energy use of 40 percent would save 6,336 pounds of CO2 emissions, which are created in the production of electricity.
—Gregory Hood
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Home Is Where the Savings Are
So far, we’ve come up with dozens of ways you can save energy—and save money—in your home.
Some are really simple, like closing your curtains at night, turning off the water while you’re brushing your teeth, turning off electronic devices when you aren’t using them, changing the settings on your refrigerator and freezer, and waiting to run the dishwasher or the clothes washer until you’ve got a full load.
Others require more of an up-front expense, like upgrading to Energy Star-qualified appliances and changing to double-pane windows. But you definitely will notice the difference as soon as you make these changes. And in a few years, you’ll recoup all that money you invested. Your home will be quieter, more comfortable, more energy efficient, and more environmentally sound.
But then, no matter how much you improve your home’s energy use and eco-friendliness, you will eventually need to leave it. When you do, you’ll need transportation—another opportunity to use, or save, energy. The next chapter looks at some of the ways you can save energy and make a difference when it comes to getting around.
Keeping your air filter clean can reduce an air conditioner’s energy consumption a lot—by as much as 5 to 15 percent.
As much as half of the energy used in your home goes toward heating and cooling it.
If you can reach a compromise in your home, a great way to save energy and save money is to dial back your normal settings 5 to 8 degrees, then put on a sweater in the winter or wear shorts in the summer. In some parts of the country, you can cut your energy bill 30 percent in the winter by going from 72 to 68 degrees.
In 2006 alone, the Energy Star program saved consumers $14 billion on their utility bills.
According to the Energy Star people, on average, refrigerators manufactured before 1993 cost over $50 more per year to operate than new Energy Star-qualified models.
If you use an Energy Star-qualified dishwasher instead of hand washing, you’ll save nearly 5,000 gallons of water a year.
Compared with a model manufactured before 1994, an Energy Star-qualified clothes washer can save up to $110 per year on your utility bills. The efficient machine also can use 50 percent less energy than a standard model.
There are many cleaning products made from natural substances such as pine, cane roots, and olive seeds.
A hundred pounds of cellulose insulation contains 80 to 85 pounds of recycled material. Cellulose insulation creates demand for recycled newsprint.
R-value refers to resistance to heat or cold. The higher the number, the more resistant that material is, and the better it insulates.
If you want to save a sizable amount on your heating and cooling bills, change from old single-pane windows to double-pane windows. Curtains can physically reduce the amount of heat that escapes through your windows in winter and the amount of heat that comes through in summer.
The single best thing you can do for your home’s bottom line is to change out every incandescent bulb for a CFL. If every American home replaced just one incandescent lightbulb with a CFL, we’d save enough energy to light 2.5 million homes for a year.
By saving water, you save a lot of energy.
Long showers really do use a lot of water—between 5 and 10 gallons every minute.
A leaking toilet can waste up to 60 gallons of water per day.
Switching to a water-saving shower head or installing a flow restrictor can save as much as 500 to 800 gallons of water each month.
Tests have shown that air inside a home can be four to eight times more polluted than air outside.
VOCs also react with sunlight to form smog.
Turn off your computer and monitor when you aren’t using them, or simply set them to go into energy-saving, or “sleep,” mode.
Home electronics items use several watts of power when they’re turned off.
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TRANSPORTATION
FEET, PEDALS, AND ED POWER
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You’ve got lots of choices when it comes to how you get from point A to point B.
You can drive. You can walk. You can ride a bike. You can catch a subway or a bus or a train. You can take an airplane.
How I choose to travel certainly depends on how far I have to go, and also on how soon I need to get there. But even within those confines there are choices to be made.
Ed’s Transportation Hierarchy
I’ve given this subject a lot of thought over the years, and I’ve devised my own transportation hierarchy. Here it is.
1. Walking is my first choice. It cuts down on traffic congestion, and it’s good exercise.
2. Riding my bike is number two. Also good exercise and great for reducing traffic. It also gives me much greater range—and gets me where I need to go faster than walking.
3. Public transportation is next. It not only saves money and energy, it’s also like a chauffeur. I can read or do a puzzle while I’m going someplace.
4. Next in line in the transportation hierarchy—and sorry to disappoint people who think it’s my first choice—would be my electric car. Only when I can’t walk, ride the bike, or take the bus to my destination do I then drive my electric car. I also choose it when I have to transport heavy things or go beyond the immediate neighborhood.
5. When I need to go beyond the range of that electric car—which has a range of about 80 to 130 miles per charge—I take a hybrid car. If I have to get up to Santa Barbara or San Francisco, or even if I need to drive to Pittsburgh or North Carolina, I’ll take the hybrid. I just drove up to San Francisco—about 250 miles—and it cost just $23 in gas each way!
6. Finally, if I have to be in L.A. on Monday and in New York on Tuesday, I will be a good boy, shut up, and get on an airplane. Yes, I’m burning kerosene up at 31,000 feet, and yes, I accept all the pollution associated with that for that seat on a commercial airliner. But I don’t do it often, and I will also take steps to mitigate that pollution with a carbon offset program.
Walking and Hiking
So you now know my preferred form of transportation is not my electric car, not Rachelle’s hybrid, not my bike. I just like to walk.
I’m fortunate to live in a neighborhood where walking can be my first choice. Most people say you can’t walk in L.A., but there are many neighbor-hoods, like mine in Studio City, where you can live and work and recreate all within easy walking distance from your home.
I specifically chose this neighborhood—and found this house desirable—because of its location. I can walk to the post office. I can walk to the drugstore. I can walk to seven really good restaurants. I can walk to the supermarket. There are these great places nearby that I can walk to. And when I say walk, we’re talking fractions of a mile to get major shopping done. It’s good, obviously, to get exercise at my age—or any age—and you’re also cutting down on pollution in the best way possible. There is very little pollution involved in walking, although you’ve got to factor in the life of your shoes, and the pollution involved in making them and in transporting them to you. Still, compared with any other form of transportation, it’s minuscule.
So walking is always my first choice of transportation if I need to go someplace within a mile.
As for the health benefits of walking, they’ve been well documented.
Studies have shown that walking is good for your mind and spirit:
• It reduces your stress level.
• It improves your mood.
• It makes you ment
ally sharper and more alert.
• Walking releases your brain’s natural “happy drugs,” called endorphins.
• Regular exercise in the form of walking has even been effective in the treatment of depression.
And if walking is good for your spirit, hiking is great. Rachelle and I both like to hike. I really enjoy the quiet time, the fresh air, the beautiful views. Hiking is a wonderful way to explore nature and appreciate the beauty of your environment, whether you hike up a mountain path, along a river, or through the woods.
Yeah, and Ed’s really fun to hike with, too. He hikes like it’s some kind of army training-camp drill. He’s totally oblivious, just marching up some steep hill, and I’ll be left behind. It’s like, “Nice hikin’ with ya.” Oh, and he says fun stuff too, like “Downhill is double time.”
It’s not like I’m out of shape. I’m a Pilates instructor. I’m in great cardiovascular condition. But Ed really likes to take things to the extreme.
I also like to leave the trail in better condition than I found it. It goes without saying that you should never leave any trash behind, but Rachelle and I take it to the next level and pick up any trash we find along the way.
Riding a Bike
After walking, if my destination is more than a mile from home but not so far away that I need to take the car, I’ll ride my bike. It’s very nearly as pollution free as walking.
I ride for fitness and just for pleasure. My daughter, Hayden, and I go for bike rides all the time, and Rachelle sometimes joins us.
I also like to ride my bike for errands—for the economy, in every way. It’s very inexpensive. You don’t have to buy an insurance policy to ride your bike or gas to run it. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to buy a bicycle, either. And bikes don’t wear out. With minimal maintenance, you can keep one in good working condition for decades. I have a nice bike from the ’80s that I still use, and my neighbor Bill Nye, the Science Guy, still rides a bike from 1975!
Also, you can move really quickly around the city on a bicycle—in many cases, more quickly than you can in your car. When there’s traffic, you just pedal right past those stopped vehicles. If you bike to work, you can vary your route, often more easily than you can commuting in a car. And with biking there’s no problem with parking. Of course, it’s good for the city too, because you’re putting one less vehicle into traffic lanes.
Biking is great exercise, and I love being able to pedal right past stopped traffic.
So biking is good for all of us environmentally. But biking is also good for you. It’s good for your health and has all the same benefits as walking—it’s a low-impact form of exercise that reduces stress and is good for your mind and spirit. I can go much farther on a bike than I can on foot. I’ve biked 80 miles in a day. I don’t have the time anymore to do those long bike rides, but I will bike somewhere that is 15 miles away, and biking over the hill into Hollywood or Beverly Hills is no big deal to me. It’s not like, “Ooh, I can’t do it. Am I going to be okay?” It’s no problem. I don’t think twice about making a 30-mile round-trip bike ride.
For many years, people would say, “There goes Ed, riding his bike to the Vanity Fair party.” And I would be thinking, “I can’t believe he rode his bike here.” But then all the paparazzi would be all over him, and I would think, “Well, that’s pretty cool.” People thought he was a bit nuts, and they didn’t take him seriously. And that was sorta hard.
Now, being green is so cool! You’ve gotta get a gimmick if you’re gonna get ahead in Hollywood, and a lot of people seem to be choosing the green gimmick. Only with Ed, it’s no gimmick. He’s been doing it for years. And no one is laughing now!
One reason I love bicycles so much is because they’re the most energy-efficient machines for ground transport that man has ever invented. Maybe you could say a sailboat is more energy efficient, since you can use the wind to take you around the globe. But as far as ground transportation, there’s nothing better than a bike. You can literally go 30 miles being fueled only by a bowl of rice or a cup of beans. I’d say that’s pretty good mileage.
If you need to go longer distances, there’s another option now: a hybrid bicycle. Unlike a hybrid car, which runs partly on an electric engine and partly on a gasoline internal-combustion engine, a hybrid bike runs partly on an electric engine and partly on human energy. Rachelle got me an iZip hybrid electric bike for my birthday in 2006, and I love it. I’ll let Larry Pizzi from Currie Technologies, which makes the iZip, explain more.
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Ed’s Green Friend: iZip
Electric bicycles come in many shapes, sizes, and capabilities, but they all share the ability to power the bike solely by human power—pedaling—or with electric power, either to supplement the rider or as the sole motive energy. This category of bike is also called pedalec, a term used primarily in European countries to classify pedal-assist vehicles.
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Here’s how it works. Stored energy, in the form of a battery, feeds an electric motor, which then propels the unit. Endurance, speed, and distance are limited by the amount of energy stored and by the rate of discharge to the motor.
Great strides in improving performance have been made in recent years, thanks to innovative technologies that have created batteries with higher energy densities that charge faster and weigh less. The best systems may incorporate sophisticated battery management computer chips that both protect the battery and enhance performance. The digital revolution also has had a major impact through the creation of microprocessors that efficiently calculate and send precise bursts of energy to the motor.
Another major innovation has been the creation of a link between human and motor-driven power. The result is a form of hybrid power whereby pedaling force triggers a proportional energy contribution to the motor. This linkage significantly increases range and, depending on how an electric bike is tuned, it can raise top speed substantially without too much deterioration to that range.
With microprocessors doing much of the work behind the scenes, throttles and other annoyances can be disposed of, creating a simple interface and a more bike-like experience.
Electric bikes are an efficient alternative for urban transportation, for commuting shorter distances, and now even for fitness and fun, as on the hybrid pedalec versions that allow a rider to travel greater distances at a faster pace.
Compared with automobiles, the hybrid bike’s energy use and carbon footprint are infinitesimal. So, in the process of enjoyment and practical use, you can really benefit the planet, plus get some light exercise for your own well-being. And, of course, operating costs are far lower than for most other means of transportation.
Ed now has several iZip bikes, and they free him from his dependence on the automobile for daily situations, such as shopping, buying a paper or coffee, visiting friends, and generally getting around. In the process, he enjoys a better standard of living with a closer connection to the world, and to his own emotional and psychic center, while helping maintain his own physical vibrancy.
—Larry Pizzi
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Public Transportation
When walking or biking simply isn’t practical, I always look to public transportation before hitting the garage door opener. By public transportation, of course I mean buses, trolleys, subways, commuter trains, and light-rail service—even cable cars, if I’m in San Francisco. The official definition of public transportation, according to the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), also includes paratransit services for senior citizens and people with disabilities, as well as ferries and vanpool services.
You could say public transportation is like carpooling, on a grander scale. Carpooling clearly reduces the use of fossil fuel: It reduces tailpipe emissions, it saves money, and it reduces traffic congestion. Using public transportation obviously takes carpooling to a whole other level, with dozens—if not hundreds—of people able to share a ride at the same time.
For public tran
sportation to make sense for you as a regular option, of course you need to live in a place that makes it convenient. Luckily, I do. A natural gas bus stops at a corner near my home, and I can take it—only one stop—to a big, beautiful electric subway that goes to many parts of Los Angeles and connects to other light-rail systems that go to other parts of the city. So I’m very fortunate on one hand, and very clever on the other hand, to have chosen this home, where it’s easy for me to get to the places I want to go by walking, biking, and taking public transportation.
If I have to go downtown or into Hollywood, I often take the subway. I can avoid the traffic, and if I buy tokens, it costs me just $1.10 per trip. You can’t even park downtown for $1.10!
And when I’m on the subway, I can leave the driving to someone else. I can do a Sudoku puzzle or a crossword puzzle or the Jumble. Occasionally, I have to go downtown to testify for some City Council meeting or the L.A. Board of Supervisors. In that case, I can review the material I’m going to talk about on the way down there, or I can read the newspaper and relax. The same on the way back. It’s very convenient.
And let me be clear that I take public transportation by choice. There are many people who are dependent on it for financial reasons. But though I have alternatives, I take public transportation pretty regularly—just not with my wife.