About Anthony Butler

Anthony is a Principal at Light Partnership, a communications firm dedicated to helping companies in the Energy Efficiency and renewables space. He has worked with Cambridge Energy Alliance for the last 15 months on a variety of web and graphic design projects.

Cap and Trade? Or just keep your head in the sand.

Posted on July 3, 2009 by Anthony Butler

jeff-jacoby-color The conservative backlash against the Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill has started.

The handsome devil you see to your left is Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, one of the most vocal critics on Cap and Trade and pretty much any other idea he didn’t read in the Weekly Standard.

Jacoby, who was hired by the the Globe in 1994 to provide editorial ‘balance’ to the liberal columnists already in the Globe’s employ, has managed to stay employed despite several incidents at the Globe, one of which lead to him being suspended without pay for four months in 2000.

In his latest column, Jacoby attacks the Obama Administration for having the nerve to push through legislation that addresses climate change, when the jury is ‘still out’ on global warming.

Remember folks, this is the same tactic used by the cigarette industry for several decades. Deny reality for as long as possible while they wring the last few bucks out of the racket..

Still, even if one wishes to forget the whole global warming thing, let’s remember there is a reason why it’s called ‘non-renewable’ energy. At some point in the future, it will become obvious we are reaching the end of the earth’s resources. If we haven’t moved away from carbon-based energy sources at that time, the competition for what’s left will make the Iraq War look like a neighborhood dispute.

Electricity figures from UK reveal effects of recession

Posted on June 2, 2009 by Anthony Butler

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An article from yesterday’s Guardian in the UK provides a thorough, yet somewhat disappointing, analysis of recent electricity usage from their National Grid. Consumption is provided in half-hour increments and reveals the largest drops in demand occurred when industry and business would be expected to use a large majority of power from the grid. At 7:30am and 6pm, when people are either preparing to leave their homes or returning for the evening, electricity demand is only down a few percent, whereas consumption figures from 4am when demand comes mainly from factories and other commercial buildings is down over 10%. This indicates household consumption has not dropped significantly-calling into question the effect of recent energy efficiency campaigns in the UK, but where is the analysis of the campaigns they are trashing?(Of course, this is The Guardian we’re talking about) And why is John McEnroe trying to fix the washing machine?

Doing well by doing Goode?

Posted on June 1, 2009 by Anthony Butler

good-600 Last week, ABC premiered “The Goode Family” a new animated series from Mike Judge, the creator of “Beavis and Butthead” and “King of the Hill.”

As with his past work, Judge’s main target is political correctness. In King of the Hill he used a gun-toting Christian family from Texas as his target, This time around, the central characters are a family of “tree hugging nutjobs” who have taken political correctness to the n-th degree. Apart from designating their adopted white Afrikaner son an “African American”, the Goodes are also extreme environmentalists.

Their mantra for life is WWAGD “What would Al Gore Do?”

In the light of recent developments in the “green space” including the pronouncement that the green “bubble” has burst, it is interesting to see that making fun of “do-gooders” is now considered mainstream fare. Of course, there’s also the mocking of “helicopter” parenting, Whole Foods style stores, hybrid cars, vegetarianism, campus politics, reproductive rights and the teenage “purity movement.”

Anyway, why not check it out yourself?

Foot Traffic in Wakefield saves energy, burns calories

Posted on May 31, 2009 by Anthony Butler

Dolbeare Elementary School students in Wakefield participate in a ''walking school bus'' on Massachusetts Walk to School Day earlier this month. A new initiative in Wakefield, MA sees students from Dolbeare Elementary School going to their regular school bus stop–to wait for the rest of their classmates to walk past on their way to school. They get on the ‘walking bus’ and proceed to the next ‘stop’ to pick up some new students.

At the end of their journey, they arrive at school having already done something to address two of society’s most pressing problems–childhood obesity and the release of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere.

Cape Cod wind farm approved… sort of.

Posted on May 26, 2009 by Anthony Butler

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From this week’s Cape Cod Times comes news of the Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board voting unanimously to approve a bundle of permits for the long-proposed (and infinitely delayed) Nantucket Sound wind farm.

This vote marks the first time the state agency has issued a super permit, wrapping all required state and local permits for a project into a single decision. Which, of course, upset many of the project’s opponents, who vow to keep fighting. Of course, Federal permits are still needed from the U.S. Minerals Management Service, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Aviation Agency…

Nonetheless, Warm Home Cool Planet sees this as significant progress, but it also explains why any picture of a wind turbine operating in Nantucket Sound is likely to remain an ‘artists rendering’ for a couple of years at least.

New Energy… One Atom at a time.

Posted on May 6, 2009 by Anthony Butler

340px-graphene_xyz2 MIT has just announced it is working with a substance called graphene to find new information technology and energy related applications.

For those of you without a post-grad science degree, graphene is a sheet of carbon atoms formed into perfect hexagonal patterns. Graphene has several other properties that identify it as a material with extraordinary potential. For instance, it was found to have a breaking strength 200 times that of steel.

It is also one of the most expensive materials ever produced. A ’sheet’ of graphene the width of a human hair current costs almost $1000 to produce. This is the part of the story that got Warm Home Cool Planet’s attention, however:

“Unique electrical characteristics could make graphene the successor to silicon in a whole new generation of microchips, surmounting basic physical constraints limiting the further development of ever-smaller, ever-faster silicon chips… that’s only one of the material’s potential applications. Because of its single-atom thickness, pure graphene is transparent, and can be used to make transparent electrodes for light-based applications such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or improved solar cells.”

If something invisible to the human eye can be used to make, store and transport energy, the possibilities for alternative energy generation would seem to be limitless. Now, if we could just do something about the price.

Are Smart Meters a Smart Idea?

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Anthony Butler

410px-intelligenter_zaehler-_smart_meter The debate on the value (and costs) of wide spread deployment and installation of ‘Smart Meters‘ for monitoring energy usage rages on-most notably in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

A succession of articles and editorials has been published recently, with each author taking a particular side of the argument. As is the case with many issues batted about by the press these days, the reader is left none the wiser.

There are obviously large capital costs involved in both preparing each property for energy use metering and providing a display device for each customer to examine their energy costs–then make intelligent decisions about saving energy and reducing the costs of powering their house.

After seeing how this debate is starting to be defined in the public arena, Warm Home Cool Planet would like to share a couple of observations:

Given the fact most houses have internet access, there should be some cost savings in allowing customers to use their current computers or mobile devices to view real-time energy use information through a web browser. All you need is a simple web connection for each energy device that reports through a customer’s current web connection to a central database. This would also allow the utility to see energy consumption patterns in real-time, including the ability to respond to service outages before the customer even notices.

Secondly, the ‘unique’ editorial policies of papers owned by Rupert Murdoch allow editors to add their own opinions to articles which are meant to serve as informational tools for readers to make their own decisions. For instance, last week’s article was titled “Smart Meter. Dumb Idea?“. What would the casual reader make of this?

Editorials published in response “Smart Meters are, well, Smart” are revealed to be written by leaders of trade associations who are hardly neutral observers on this subject. In the end, WSJ readers are likely to walk away with a sense of confused paralysis on the whole issue.

No matter which side of this argument you’re on, that is not the outcome we need.

Cambridge Forum in Harvard Square

Posted on April 30, 2009 by Anthony Butler

Cambridge Forum is one of public radio’s longest running public affairs programs. The program is recorded live every week in Harvard Square, before being broadcast on WGBH.

Next week, noted futurists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus from the Breakthrough Institute will be speaking on the topic “Beyond the Pollution Paradigm: Why We Can’t Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists”

As you can probably tell from the forum topic, these guys don’t follow anyone’s lead–or pull any punches–in suggesting how we can fix our environment and secure our energy future. They have been labeled as infidels and pariahs by everyone from the Sierra Club to Al Gore for their pro-growth, pro-technology environmental ideas.

Warm Home Cool Planet will be there. What about you?

Time & Date: 7:30pm – May 6, 2009
Location: First Parish: 3 Church St., Cambridge, MA

Report from the Summit

Posted on April 28, 2009 by Anthony Butler

Cambridge, MA-Friday, April 24: Over 300 people, including your faithful Warm Home Cool Planet correspondent, assembled in Walker Memorial Hall at MIT to hear from some of the major players and most provocative thinkers in the field of sustainability. Unlike the content you’ll find here, which stretches all the way from global energy policy to insulating your water pipes, the Sustainability @ MIT conference was exclusively focused on the big picture.

Continue reading →

What? Greenhouse gasses, dangerous?

Posted on April 24, 2009 by Anthony Butler

The Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) has recently determined that greenhouse gasses(GHG) pose a danger to public health and welfare. This weeks announcement by the EPA enables the agency to put the Clean Air Act into action. The act defines the responsibility of the EPA as protecting and improving the nations air quality. There is a 60 day public comment period which will be documented in the federal registrar. Once the public comment period closes, the EPA will be required to take some sort of action.

In addition, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, is being reviewed in the house and hopefully will gain the traction needed to pass as the nation’s first commitment to reduce its GHG emissions. The bill calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions 20% below 2005 levels by 2020, 42% by 2030, and 83% by 2050. If the EPA were to enact this legislation, it would most likely address emissions from automobiles, power plants, and major industrial sources.

factories

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-17-epa-moves-toward-regulating/

Warm Home Cool Planet

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