The Big Green Apple | Ben Jervey | Talks at Google

Mr. Jervy also writes regularly about environmental issues and has been published in Good Magazine, Men's Journal, New York Daily News, Men's Vogue, and other online and print publications. He works part time for Solar One, a non profit renewable energy arts and education center committed to inspiring New Yorkers to become more environmentally aware urban citizens. Ben is also founder of evolvist.com, an online directory and resource for smarter sustainable urban living. He's a bicycle enthusiast and he has ridden across the United States and through much of Europe. He's currently planning a climate change awareness bike tour along the Gulf Coast. Please join me in welcoming Ben Jervy to Google New York.

Hi, I'm Ben. Thank you all for coming out. It's really exciting to be here in Google. I can honestly say that the research for this book would have been a heck of a lot more difficult without the service that you all provide. So it saved me a lot of time and, and research energy. So a lot of people often ask how I got here and why. Consider a book about environmental living in New York City. It seems sort of a weird paradox to a lot of people. I grew up in a pretty small town in rural Massachusetts in a relatively environmentally friendly household. Went to college in another small town in Vermont with these two over here. And in school I was studying sustainability, environmental studies, urban planning, sustainable urban systems. But I had never lived in a town of more than 10,000 people, so decided to really jump into the belly of the beast and move to New York City about five years ago now. Upon doing so, there was a certain sense of shock and adjustment as I tried to reconcile these, I guess, greener ethics with this new urban lifestyle. And I was looking for a resource like this and it didn't exist at the time. So this is sort of how the book came to be in terms of New York City as this environmental entity. I like to use this Timothy Beatley quote to sort of consider cities as the ecological beings that they are. He says the first and most obvious thing about cities is that they are like organisms sucking in resources and emitting waste. It sounds like it's a sort of, you know, one way road there, a one direction transaction. But there's a lot of positive that is embedded into the high density urban structure. And New York City is really an impressive place and an incredibly efficient place to live. And we'll get a little more to that in a moment. People often criticize New Yorkers of not really seeing beyond the five borough bubble. And as was made clear in this 1950s Saul Steinberg cartoon I don't think the impression of New Yorkers has changed much since then. But as you all well know, and as we as New Yorkers are well aware, we are worldly folk with concerns much, well beyond the five boroughs. And in terms of seeing New York City as the ecological entity. Positive system that it is, I'd like to quickly read the opening paragraph from an a New Yorker article by David Owen from two years ago. I think it's really striking and revealing. Owen writes, my wife and I got married right out of College in 1978. We were young and naive and unashamedly idealistic and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years we lived quite contentedly in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme. Our living space measured just 700 square feet, and we didn't have a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances, we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bills worked out to about a dollar a day. The utopian community was Manhattan. And here we are in Manhattan. And remarkably, a lot of people tend to be really surprised to find out that New Yorkers are the most energy efficient citizens per capita in the United States, largely because of this high density settlement pattern, great mass transportation and small cramped living spaces. And real quickly, I won't bore you with charts, but they are pretty impressive. That New Yorkers use a quarter of the gasoline per capita is the average American and the lowest nationally. We actually consume gasoline at a rate that was the national average back when Henry Ford's Model T was the best selling car in America. Interesting. Electricity consumption, mostly because we live and work in tinier spaces, is also lower. And this is a bad graphic, I apologize. But per capita New Yorker's carbon emissions are the lowest in the country. Per capita we have about a third the carbon emissions, which is the principal greenhouse gas largely responsible for global warming. We have a third that of the average American. And still, because our city is so mammoth, it still represents 1% of the national carbon emissions right here in New York City in our the tiny confines of our town. So there are sort of two ways you can look at New York as this highly efficient and really environmentally benign place as sort of represented by the map on the left. That's a New York City green apple map created by the Green Maps nonprofit, which was Founded by this great geographer, Wendy Brower, right here in the city. And it shows all these, just a litany of environmental offerings throughout the city. Or you can see New York as a place that in the summer months is dangerously polluted and as a town of 8 million that sucks electricity down and produces tons upon tons of waste that none of which remain within our borders. And it is both. And so I think that the focus on individuals reducing their personal impact here in the city is that there's a lot of. And we already have our bar set pretty high, we're already doing a lot, but we can really elevate ourselves to sort of elite global citizen status with not too much effort and without really compromising your, your comfortable or cool urban lifestyle. It's really not that hard. So I'm not going to barrage you with too much tips or advice, but we'll breeze through some aspects of your life right now and then get to some questions and answers basically at home. Energy conservation is, is key, particularly in summer months. I know it's sort of blasphemous for an environmentalist to put such a condition on that, but really the majority of the damage we do here in the city is in the summer months when everyone flips on their air conditioners. In the peak loads of summertime, when demand is really high, thousands of diesel, supplemental diesel generators get turned on and produces this really noxious brew of low level pollutants that are a good part of the reason that four New York City neighborhoods have the highest asthma rates in the country. Our air in summer months is pretty bad. But there's simple, simple ways to reduce energy. And if you rent like a lot of New Yorkers do, then there's sort of limited amount you can do. You're not going to be changing your window casings or necessarily putting in a programmable thermostat to better monitor your temperatures. But you can do the simple things like switching out your light bulbs, which everyone seems to have heard at this point. It's been a pretty massive national campaign to switch to these, these compact fluorescent bulbs. They don't cost that much more at this point. They produce light that is equal, if not better in quality. Some blind visual tests recently have ranked them brighter and better and they last five times longer and will pay for themselves within six months of their use. So it's really the lowest hanging fruit in terms of New York City's energy savings. And it's, you know, the one thing that if you, if you haven't done yet, if every New Yorker would have changed just one one of their light bulbs, the light that they used most frequently in their house. Then we'd actually be able to. It would, it would prohibit the need to build two new power plants in the city that are currently anticipated. The demand we will need by 2010. So there is an impact. And that's the impressive thing about New York. When you have 8 million people doing, you know, taking on one conservation measure, the impact of that is serious and measurable. Another thing you can do here, which surprises a lot of people I talk to, is you can switch your electric load to wind power. It's about a five minute phone call or, you know, five minutes online. The company I usually recommend is ConEd Solutions, and that's because they work directly with the utility, they work directly with Con Ed and offset your exact amount of demand with wind power purchased from wind farms upstate and on Long Island. You still just get one bill and it's very transparent. You can see what your transaction is supporting. It's about a 10% premium on your bill. My apartment, $60 monthly electric bill jumped up to $66, which is a premium I'm personally happy to pay to help support this wind industry, this renewable energy industry as it develops. Not a lot of people realize it that 80% of New York City's peak load demand by mandate has to be generated within the city. So that means more power plants within our five boroughs. Unless we really work on these conservation and alternative energy solutions, solar is not an option unless you own a place here in the city. But there is really an endless amount of potential for the benefits of solar power here in New York. It's really, really impressive if you consider when electric demand is at its highest in the afternoons and summer months. That's also when the sun is strongest and providing the most amount of energy. And it's really an elegant and precise energy solution for the city. And the state has incredible incentives and rebates right now. So if you do happen to own a place, it's a good time to look into it real briefly. I'll touch upon sort of keeping toxics out of your home. David Kistner and back will be able to talk to you in a lot more detail about the dry cleaning aspect in general. I'll just mention that typical dry cleaning uses this chemical called perc, which is basically and bluntly, it's terrible for you and it causes a number of chronic illnesses and it's been proven and all sorts of tests and talk to David about it. He's got A great alternative to dry cleaning a lot. But that's something that pervades a lot of the household cleaning products and industries. A lot of these things have these volatile organic compounds. And this is stuff that by definition they are carcinogenic or cancer causing. And a lot of this stuff stays on your countertops and on your floors. And if you have children, they're particularly vulnerable to this stuff. You see a lot of people making these sort of transition to a more ecologically conscious lifestyle, to a more non toxic lifestyle when they have children because they start reading about the vulnerabilities that children have to these conditions. Fortunately, there are a lot of plenty of really good plant based non toxic alternatives and they're all over the marketplace right now, especially in the past year. They're really, they've turned up in force. So you shouldn't have a hard time locating them. You can also, I know some people actually they home brew their own with a combination of ingredients like lemon juice and vinegar and baking soda. And it works. Apparently. Recycling and waste is probably the sort of oldest environmental maxim. Reduce, reuse, recycle. I won't get too far into it here. Most New Yorkers know how to deal with their recycling bins at this point. I will point out that reduce, reuse, recycle isn't just a catchy phrase. It's also sort of a set of priorities. It's also in a prioritized order. You should first try to reduce the amount of waste that comes into your life, reuse that which you can, and then recycle any remaining waste. One thing I haven't been able to avoid in New York and I did an experiment last May for Good magazine. I was doing an article where I tried to live the most ecologically benign life possible for one month. The lowest impact life possible for one month here in New York. And try as I might, I couldn't stop the junk mail. And I've talked to this guy, no Impact Man, Colin Bevin, who maybe you've read about in the Times or seen him on some programs or heard him on Brian Lehrer. And he's had the same problem. He's trying a similar experiment for a year and he can't stop the junk mail. But one way of attempting to is this website here, DMA consumers, they control the junk mail lists. And try to get yourself off that real briefly. I'm going to mention New York City as an urban heat island. The summer temperatures in New York are actually about 5 to 10 degrees warmer than they are 25 miles out in the suburbs, it's because dark concrete and dark roofs collect heat a lot, and there's no surface to collect water that will transpire. One solution for this is the implementation and introduction of green roofs around the city. And you'll hear more and more about green roofs as an urban solution. And in coming years, they're sort of becoming a fad, which is a very positive thing, I think they. They solve a couple of problems and they improve quality of life. So there's really no downside to this. They collect rainwater, which then when it evaporates, acts as a natural coolant. Buildings with green roofs stay up to 5 degrees cooler in the summertime, naturally. Additionally, because rainwater is soaking into the ground and then evaporating, it's not running off immediately down into the sewers and into our stormwater. Very few New Yorkers realize, probably for probably best for their sake, is that 50 days a year, the city undergoes something called combined sewage overflow. It's whenever the rain rains hard, our sewer system is overwhelmed and raw sewage pours straight into. Into the rivers that surround our city. I saw this happen on Monday. I was standing over a CSO pipe as it spurt into the East River. And it's not pretty, doesn't smell good, and it's dangerous in the summer months. It can help breed malaria, mosquitoes carrying malaria and such. And it's just generally not a good thing for the city when there's shit in the water. So the green roofs really help to that solve problems on a couple of levels, and we'll see more and more of them, and they're just really nice. You see the Solaire there on the left, which is down in Battery Park City. That's the Queen's Botanical Garden roof on the right. And who wouldn't prefer a roof with vegetation and maybe, maybe some vegetables or prairie grass blown in the wind than something that's been swept with tar? In terms of eating practices, I'm going to assume that everyone's heard the organic argument at this point and knows the threats and risks of widespread pesticide use, and that. Your average apple that isn't produced organically still has traces of eight pesticides on it, even after being washed. We really do live in a chemical soup with our industrialized food complex. And the organic argument has, you know, certainly been made well and much to the benefit of businesses like Whole Foods. So I'm going to talk a little bit about local food. I've heard the expression that local is the new organic. And I like to Take the both together. And fortunately, here in New York, it's a lot easier. There are a lot of places to find good local food. On the left you see a map of all the farmers markets around New York City. There are, I think, 37 of them to date, over 20 of which operate year round. And all the food at any of the city's green markets has to come from within 150 miles of the city and has to be produced without pesticides and synthetic chemicals. And you can get meat, dairy, eggs, really fish. There's a great variety. You guys are close to the Union Square Green Market. It's one of my favorite places in the city. And there is something on a deeper level too. And not to get too holistic and New Agey on you, but there is something deeper that really does inspire something in yourself and in your soul. When you know the farmer who grew the food or, you know, where you know, the animal came from, that might sound a bit morbid, but it's. I would argue that it's better than not knowing. And there's something very comforting in that. And it does that there are benefits, you know, beyond environmental ones. And on the right you see community supported agriculture projects. And anyone who doesn't know what a CSA is, it's basically farmers will drive down into the city once a week and drop off heaps of produce to all of their members. And you basically buy a share in the farmer's harvest for a year. You pay up front. Turns out to be about 15 bucks a week or something. You get like 4 pounds of produce early in the season. It's definitely, you know, it's a lot of greens, a lot of arugula, and if you're in a year round one, then in the winter it's plenty of root vegetables. But really it's a cool scene at these places. And you're meeting your farmer, you're talking to them, there are recipes exchanged. It's a very unique scene in New York. It's something you're not finding everywhere. And it's a real community action that, you know, you don't see every day in New York. As New Yorkers, we are from a transportation standpoint, far, far superior to the rest of the country in terms of our efficiency. It's a great, great city for mass transit. Obviously, we have the best subway system in the country, arguably the world. And it being a compact, dense, relatively flat place, it's a good town to bike in, which I certainly advocate. It's good for your, good for your health and Spirit, there are great, great resources. I'm just going to reference transportation alternatives here. It's a local nonprofit. If you care at all about livable streets and sort of car free city and pedestrian and bicycle safety, they are incredible advocates in the city. You should become a member. It's the best $20. I spend all year on the taxi front because cars are obviously everyone needs them sometimes. You've probably seen a lot of hybrid taxis introduced around the city recently. It's a new development and ideally, hopefully within a few years the whole fleet will be converted. You can see the real benefits there. I just check out the column with the Ford Escape, which seems like the one that's getting tapped by the city for introduction here. It costs less than the Crown Victoria, which you can see on the far left, costs less up front, gets over twice as many miles per gallon and saves drivers six, six or $7,000 a year. It's in, it's a no brainer. It's an absolute, you know, it's the lowest hanging fruit for, you know, public or for taxi paid car service, you know, transportation here in the city. Another company has started up called Ozo Car. I'll just mention them because they're more traditional car service that offer hybrids and so it's worth checking out. I can't talk about environmental subjects without getting at least a little bit political, certainly not in a partisan way. But we are at the point where personal actions are positive and it's the first line of defense. But more serious action has to happen on the political level. And actually seeing Arnold there in the bottom, he's probably done more for this country's environmental movement in the past few years than any politician in American history. It's incredibly remarkable and encouraging to see it coming from that side of the aisle even. But you can look at politics nationally and regionally in scope. But New York City's council, and there's a report there in the middle from the League of Conservation Voters. New York City Council has. It's a remarkably accessible political body. You can talk to your city council member like that. You can let your concerns be known. And it's a powerful body within the city. Since they were in charge of 8 million people, their impact is broad and far reaching. And New York City Council is a place where a lot of really positive change can occur. And that change, it being New York, this global center of commerce and culture and business and policy and creativity, the influence would be really widespread. This is just a reference to this past Saturday. There was a big national day of climate action or around the country. There were over 1,400 actions in support of legislation to call for American carbon reductions 80% by the year 2050. So follow that story. There's going to be more to it just wrapping up. There's a couple of places you can check out for more information about general local environmental news. And you can measure your ecological footprint, which shows how much of Earth's land is responsible for your lifestyle. I took the quiz again last night and if all the world lived like me, we would need two and a half planets to support my lifestyle. And actually the scary thing is that's a really low number compared to our national averages. So it's interesting. The carbon footprint is also something people are paying more and more attention to as this climate change issue really takes leg. And finally, a pretty shameless self plug here. I've been working on creating with my business partner Marvin here working on creating this online resource directory of all local local businesses and organizations. And it's a user fed directory with really data heavy and we think that the Google crowd would find it interesting. So here's a sneak peek screenshot of the site which is technically live, but we're still working out some kinks. So if anyone takes a peek, shoot us an email and give us some feedback. We'd certainly encourage feedback from this audience who probably is more savvy with this stuff than we may be. And yeah, get in touch if you have any questions. I'm always happy to help out people as they sort of find their way into this field. That illustration by the way is from the good magazine article and I get a big kick out of it. So that's it for now. I can more than happy to answer any specific questions you guys have about any of the presentation or anything about the book or anything about green living in New York City in general.

I heard about, correct me if I'm.

Wrong, a couple weekends ago, trying to.

Go Hudson to each river arm and.

Armed for a certain cause.

And how did that go?

Yeah, that was that Step it Up rally this past Saturday and we were downtown in lower Manhattan. We had over 3,000 people there basically standing along the 10 foot elevation line which is sort of a symbolic reference to the level at which the city is right now at present moment vulnerable to to storm surge from from a strong storm of a category three which are a lot of insurance companies actually are predicting are going to be a lot more frequent here in the New York City area due to warming warming Atlantic and the Gulf Stream warming up. It Also in the longer term, represents an actual sea level inundation as sea levels rise. If the Greenland ice shelf, if just half of it were to melt, which hopefully it won't, we're working to Prevent with this 80% reduction in carbon by the year 2050. I read an article recently in New York magazine about some skyscrapers that they're conceptualizing. I guess that would be skyscrapers that have farms inside them. I don't know if you know much about them. Are they kind of economically feasible? Is that a good possible thing to look for in the future? Angus asks about these. There was an article in New York magazine about sky farming. These big skyscrapers that sort of self sustaining buildings that contained all these like hydroponic crop farms and produced enough, just going, if memory serves here, produced enough produce for something like 20,000 people inside each building. It's a really interesting theory. I think that I would love to see it explored. I don't have any economic sense of how much investment is required to make that go. I think that, you know, there's certainly a lot of lot more potential for producing food within the city limits, you know, producing food locally, whether it's on a community garden level or whether using, you know, greenhouse structures with hydroponic technology. The fact that the average American meal travels 5,000 miles from farm to fork is, you know, it's troubling from not just a standpoint of the distance you are from your food source, but you consider how much, you know, how much diesel fume is spewed in the backs of these trucks carting this stuff across country. And yeah, I'll come back again and again to the local production of food as being really important environmental and social development. And I don't know if I'm really answering your question here, Angus, but it's. I think these buildings are a great idea. It's a great theory. I'd love to see it tried out. So you mentioned the Con Ed solutions, wind power. So I signed up for that too. And I really have no idea why. The problem with wind power isn't that there's a bunch of windmills spinning on wind farms and nobody's finding electricity. Right. It's that you can't make enough wind power and we don't have enough wind farms. So that power is probably being used anyway. Right. I mean, what if I change my sighting up to that? Yeah, it's the trickiest question describing the wind power premium. It's. It's kind of like an offset, a carbon offset, which is even more Difficult to explain the premium you're paying. Under no circumstances, save a really, really unlikely coincidence, is the power flowing into your apartment going to have been generated at that wind farm. But purchasing from Con Ed Solutions ensures that your money is going directly to that farm rather than to the local producer, which is actually Con Ed still within the city. They operate all the power plants, all the natural gas plants within New York City. So your money is not funding the Con Ed production of natural gas power. It's funding the wind power being developed up there. Yeah, that energy would be used otherwise somewhere near the farm, and it is tougher to get your head around. And I've heard people from Con Ed Solutions try to explain this for 30 minutes to an audience that didn't understand it. So I'm probably going to have even more trouble pulling it off. But you are directly supporting. You're creating the demand for wind energy, I guess is the easiest way to consider it. You're creating the demand which helps them develop more windmills and more power. Okay, so just quickly follow up in the extreme example. Say everybody in Manhattan signed up for that and say they could only power 5% of the homes in Manhattan. Does that mean that they would be getting all of the money from all the electric bills in Manhattan for powering 5% of the homes and that the power plants in the city are getting hunt? That's a good question. I don't think so. But Con Ed will always take their cut as the distributor because they own the infrastructure that distributes the power. New York City's energy or electricity grid is one of the hardest and most complex and convoluted things I've ever really tried to understand. There are five or six entities governing different aspects of it, from the transformers to the lines to where there's another organization determining where power goes at any given moment across the grid. It's tough to give an easy answer about that. I think if everyone in New York signed up for wind energy, yeah, I think it would cause some, a little bit of economic mayhem, actually. Well, they're not paying for the carbon emission here in the US at least. I'm not sure about European carriers right now with their, you know, with their regional greenhouse gas initiative. But here in the US we don't have any sort of cap on carbon emissions yet. So, yeah, these carbon offsets are being offered to airline passengers as a way of offsetting. And yeah, carbon offsets are another very similar to the wind power thing. Another really convoluted economic process that is hard to make clear. Sense of in a, in an hour long lecture, let alone a five minute response. But I mean to get directly to your question like no, the airlines aren't paying for that their carbon emissions yet in the United States. Oh yeah, absolutely. And more and more are even encouraging more carbon caps and for there to be some sort of cap and trade system of greenhouse gas pollution, of carbon pollution because they realize that regulation is coming, it's going to happen certainly in the next administration, no matter what side of the aisle the candidate comes from. There will be some sort of carbon cap and trade system put in place. Almost certainly. So the industries want to become a part of that. They want to be a part of that discussion so that they can help position themselves correctly for it.

How do you feel about companies that sell credits that are core profit companies, for example Terrapas as opposed to non profits?

I'll give the disclosure that I'm friends with the marketing director of terrapass. So my answer is a little skewed. He has Adam Stein, his name is. He has managed to convince me, not just as a friendly favor or anything, but he has managed to convince me over many conversation, over many a beer at the bar that their system is actually beneficial, that what they're doing is actually helping. And in terms of it being a for profit endeavor, I think that, I think there's a lot to be said for creating a real for profit economic market around this stuff. I think that a lot based on donations.

This is what sort of makes me very good company is there are company that they voluntary donations. So their profit is coming directly out of commissions, right?

Well it's not a donation. You're actually purchasing. You're actually purchasing the offset. It's, you know, there's an economic transaction there. You can't write off your, your Terra Pass purchase as a non profit donation. So basically you're purchasing that transaction. You're purchasing that amount of carbon to be reduced through a project that they are developing.

But it's New Yorkers who I think.

A lot of wants to do.

Red.

What do you think is like the number one easiest thing that you can do on a day to day basis that you discover through your studies and your research that can actually make.

Some kind of difference in the apartment.

Or and you know, living our lives. What's the one way to you know, use less or you know, is it recycle more? I mean one specific thing that you think is a good suggestion that we can meet with and be like wow, you know, what would you do that.

Without getting into engaging your politicians or anything, because I'm really strong on that these days. I'm really strong on getting politicians to act on things. In terms of your own personal life, I would say your diet is a huge, huge factor. And it's something that people have an easy time sort of pushing to the side. They'll separate their recycling, change light bulbs and ride mass transit, but then they'll eat a burger of questionable origins.

Four.

Or five times a week. And they've found that switching to a vegetarian diet, which I'm not advocating, I'm actually a pretty strong proponent of supporting local meat producers, local meat farmers or harvesters, but that switching to a vegetarian diet from a more traditionally sourced American meat diet reduces your personal lives, carbon emissions more than switching from an SUV to a hybrid would. So there's a lot of embedded energy in the production of meat in the industrialized food industry in general, from the processing of food to the shipping to its packaging and shipping. There's a lot of energy there. So I would really advocate finding, trying to include more locally sourced food into your diet. I think that's a huge thing. And as I referenced before, it's easier than you think. And the benefits go far beyond the sort of good feeling of doing well. It's healthier, it's better quality food. I don't think you'd find many people who would question that the taste of an apple that had been picked that morning from a grove 50 miles upstate, that. That isn't just that much more succulent than something that's been on a freighter from New Zealand for two weeks. It's a quality of life thing, a health thing and an environmental thing. I would definitely push for it. First. You've probably read the Law of Emergency by Jim Con Spurk. I actually have not, no. The other question is who did you vote for for mayor? I voted for Bloomberg.

What was the first question? We didn't hear it over here.

He asked if I read. Option. I don't know too much about the hydro option. I know that it's supposed to be run of the river hydrogen, which. Or, sorry, hydroelectric, which means that it's not a dam, essentially. Damming comes with its own sort of set of environmental criticisms and arguments, mostly having to do with aquatic ecosystems and fish habitats. But the run of the river are supposed to be. They're just turbines basically placed at the bottom of the river that will sort of turn continuously. And it seems like a pretty clever solution.

So when there's a storm surge and the sewer systems combined, the More you flush at home, the more electricity will.

Be, the more electricity you generate. I guess there is a little positive feedback loop there here. Yes, sir. Nuclear. Yeah. Well, there's no sort of general environmental consensus on this. I know that the current executive director of the Sierra Club is now taking a stance as pro nuclear. I don't see it being economically as feasible as, as a lot of these renewable energy solutions. It is technically, I guess, can be considered a clean energy, although we don't yet know what to do with that radioactive waste. And the facility out there in Nevada doesn't seem to be ready yet. It's a security threat, obviously. We live very close to a nuclear plant and I know that it's certainly often cited in national security reports as being a very high level threatened terrorist target. There's a danger there, I guess, and it's sort of a, you got to run your own personal sort of cost benefit on it. But the economics of it to me are that what it costs to develop those plants and how long they take to put into operation, it doesn't get us where we need to be in terms of reduction in greenhouse gases quickly enough. We have the space offshores in ranches and plains across the Midwest for widespread implementation of wind. We have plenty of roofs and the city is full of roofs that could host a really nice mix of vegetation base and solar panels. That technology is here now and it's cheap compared to nuclear. You know, I would push for that first. Behind you first. Sorry. In the yellow.

I guess my question kind of goes off the renter, but are there any organizations that specialize in helping renters work with their landlords and finding either the wind power solutions coming to an agreement in terms of splitting with the tenants, or solar power.

I work part time with an organization called SolarOne. They do a lot of green energy education and local advocacy. They're probably a good first stop to look into this stuff. She was asking about organizations that will help with implementing solar on a local level and talking to your landlords and building managers about that stuff. Last one. I've noticed recently that probably the biggest amount of energy that my household probably.

Uses and I'm not certain what electricity.

Is the home heating. Gallons and gallons and gallons of diesel fuel or home heating oil every winter.

Have you looked into alternatives for that? I know there's tons out there, but.

I don't know what's being used and what's most effective. It really depends on your situation if you rent or own, if it's a standalone building or an apartment. In apartments, really the best thing you can do is focus on insulation and more passive heating and cooling measures. Having strong, well sealed windows and well insulated spaces in terms of keeping it cool in the summer months, you can draw the shades during the day and prevent heat from coming in. Real simple things like that that actually have bigger effects than you would realize in terms of larger scale solutions for say a standalone house. There's a lot of attention recently being put towards geothermal heating, which is pretty interesting, exciting stuff. Basically it's tapping into the ground about five feet underground. The temperature never changes and it's always constant. A lot of people are bringing that air through their homes and it's more complicated than making it sound, but it can be done for relatively cheap. One case example I read of actually Malcolm Gladwell's father, the author of the Tipping Point. His dad installed one up in Ontario, like Northern Ontario, cold, cold town. And for about $10,000 put in a do it yourself geothermal system and completely wiped out his need for a furnace. It's a possibility.