Reduce Your Electric Bill With These Simple Straightforward Tips!

Here are a variety of tips to reduce your electric bill. Remember, nothing will happen unless you take action!

First, the energy hogs: COOLING and HEATING your home.

Insulation is key for avoiding a big energy loss out the window. When there is no one at home the thermostat should be adjusted to take into consideration that the temperature in the home is less crucial to comfort.

Furnace filters have to be clean for maximum efficiency.

Kitchen and bathroom exhaust fans should be turned off, whenever you are finished with them.

Close the fireplace damper tightly to avoid the loss of up to 20% of the air out the chimney every hour.

The water heater is another huge energy waster. Insulating the pipes is a worthwhile investment. There are tank-less water heaters on the market now. What they do is to heat the water "on demand," in other words they provide an unlimited supply of hot water whenever it would be required. There is no holding tank to waste all that energy.

Taking a shower instead of a bath will save about 4-5 gallons of water.

Using a dishwasher for a full load of dishes actually saves another 4-5 gallons of water, compared to washing them by hand.

Fix leaking faucets! A one drip a second loss equals 2,300 gallons a year!

Do the laundry using cold water; it will save a huge amount of electricity. Just use the soap designed for cold-water washing. Do several loads in a row, (for the dryer) because a warm dryer uses less power.

Around the house there are a lot of little things that you can do to reduce your electric bill.

Use a microwave oven instead of a conventional one. They draw less than half the electricity, and cook food in a quarter of the time of regular ovens. If you do use a conventional oven, turn it off 20 minutes before removing the food so that the residual heat will not be wasted, and it will keep cooking even with the oven turned off. Resist the temptation to open the oven door to check on food, because each time you do that 25 percent of the heat is lost each time.

One should replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent ones whenever possible. These are huge energy savers.

Learn to read the meter, because you will see the immediate effect of your saving efforts and it will be a great motivator! Those meters are read from right to left, it seems backwards but that's the way they do it.

Some structural modifications can be done to save power, such a attic insulation, and the color of the roof.

The refrigerator and freezer coils should be cleaned once in a while.

Replace old appliances with efficient power saver types.

There are many ways to reduce your electric bill if you look around your home. In the long run, even small changes and improvements will add up to substantial savings. The entire community will benefit if there is cooperation with the neighbors in this matter.

Why Drinking Bottled Water is Bad for You and the Environment

find that a lot of people don't like or just don't trust the water that comes out of their tap. So instead of drinking that tap water, they spend a lot of their hard earned money on bottled water. You might say it still costs money to drink water from the tap but really it's only a few extra pennies on the water bill. If you're one like me who drinks tap water instead of bottled water, you can save quite a bit of money a year and also save the environment from hundreds of plastic bottles that don't get recycled.

Every state has a water treatment plant that ensures your tap water is safe to drink. The only problem with this though is what the water picks up through the pipes on the way to your home. You'll find that some pipes are pretty old and can add rust and bacteria to your drinking water.

To solve this problem, you use a water purifier like a Brita filter or a Pur filter. The Brita filter comes in a pitcher where you just fill it with tap water and it's purified via the installed filter. The Pur filter, on the other hand, can be easily installed on the your faucet itself to filter the water as it comes out of the tap. You do, however; need to change these filters every 1 to 3 months which will cost you around $100 a year.

So what about bottled water?

Maybe you bought that bottled water because of it's label telling you it's clean, spring water or water from an untouched sacred stream, but that's really not the case. The truth is that many of these bottled water companies get their water from the same place you do, from municipal water plants.

As with anything else you buy, you should check out the label for what you're really paying for. If the label says "purified," it probably came from the municipal water supply.

Aquafina, who is owned by Pepsi, is bottled at the Pepsi plant using purified municipal water. Same goes with Dasani, who is bottled by Coke, but they add a few minerals and a bit of salt to make you thirsty for more.

So what are you getting with bottled water? The same stuff you could be getting from home with a purified water treatment pitcher or filter.

If you're wondering what you can carry around in your backpack instead of bottled water, stainless steel bottles are a great option. I really like my Klean Kanteen bottle. It's one of the very first companies to put stainless steel bottles on the market. This family owned company even donates 1% of their profit to environmental causes. I think they really do make the best stainless steel bottle out there.

Tapped, a new documentary about the bottled water industry, goes behind-the-scenes to show the effects of this industry on our health, climate change, pollution and our reliance on oil. It's an eye-opening view of how bottled water has negatively impacted our environment.

So the next time you decide to drink bottled water, think about the money you spend, the impact you have on the environment and how much better off you and the earth will be by drinking from the tap.

Environmental Pollution

Environmental pollution is contamination of air, water and land from man-made waste. Pollution leads to depletion of the ozone layer, global warming and climate change. Air pollution is the release of chemicals and particles into the atmosphere. Water pollution includes surface runoff, leakage into groundwater, liquid spills, wastewater discharge and littering. If toxins are spilled on the ground or if an underground storage tank leaks, soil can become contaminated. Well known contaminants include herbicides and pesticides. Toxic waste is waste material, often in chemical form, which pollutes the natural environment and contaminates groundwater.

News analysis: U.S., China cooperation crucial to slowing climate change

China and the United States must now cooperate like never before to slow the pace of climate change, experts say.

Indeed, China and the U.S. need to reach an agreement in December at the Copenhagen climate talks on how to slow greenhouse gas emissions and transition to low-carbon sources of energy, some experts said.

Given China's basic conditions and the international norms, the Chinese government has always insisted on the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" established by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"China and the United States are different in their stages of development, national conditions and historic footprints, so I think they should shoulder different responsibilities in tackling climate change," said Zhang Guobao, president of China's National Energy Administration.

Despite those differences, the two nations signed an agreement at last week's U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue calling for deeper ties on clean-energy technology.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the accord and said it would serve as the foundation for a new global treaty.

"We cannot ignore that the atmosphere was positive and there's a willingness to take this discussion to the next level," said Julian L. Wong, senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.think tank.

That means hammering out a decisive plan of action, Wong said.

"China and the U.S. need to come to an agreement on strategy," he said. "Hopefully they will come up with something before Copenhagen."

Rodger Baker, director of East Asia analysis at Stratfor, a global intelligence company, said the two sides will have to make some sort of compromise. That, he said, may include allocating funds and technology for carbon capture -- an approach to reducing global warming by capturing carbon dioxide from large sources such as power plants.

U.S. Democratic Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, praised China's investment in alternative energy, which is second only to green-minded Germany.

Kerry said last month that China "must not emulate our energy past" by overlooking the environment in favor of industrial development.

China has a right to develop its economy "but we ask that they do so in a way that does not represent the mistakes that the U.S. has made in the past," Kerry said.

Meanwhile, Kerry said, the United States must pass new climate legislation at home. It remains unknown whether Congress will pass a bill by December but Kerry said "we will keep working until we have the votes."

"I don't think a global deal is impossible without (U.S. domestic) legislation," Wong said. "But if there is no vote (before December) it could send a negative message to the world."

Wong thought sharing technology is crucial to slowing climate change.

Indeed, China is calling for more technology transfers from the United States, something Kerry said Washington would work toward achieving.

"If the U.S. is willing to engage fully with China in bilateral cooperation or joint research and development, it will mean a transfer of technological assistance," he said.

Last month's launch of a joint research project to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles and buildings may be a precursor for future efforts, he said.

In spite of a modest 15 million dollar budget, the effort is an important symbolic gesture, Wong said.

"It's a first step, but a lot more needs to happen. Those ideas in joint research need to be fleshed out and they need to decide how they will develop jointly," he said. "The world will be looking for more announcements along these lines."

Baker agreed there is much room for cooperation in the private sector. "Lots of companies want to get the jump on green technology and products and whoever can do this can get a competitive advantage," he said.

Joint ventures could occur in areas such as batteries for electric vehicles, for example. Later the Chinese might sell products such as energy-efficient light bulbs on the international market. Foreign firms will also want to bring those types of products to the Chinese market, which could lead to joint ventures, he said.

Whatever happens, Kerry said, the two nations must act quickly.

"We don't have much time," Kerry said while quoting Chairman Mao Zedong. The United States and China, he said, must "seize the day, seize the hour."

Climate change brews up trouble for coffee growers

How will climate change affect coffee production, and what should we do about it? Coffee is the world's most valuable tropical agricultural export — produced by about 20 million smallholder families — so these are important questions.

The weather outlook for coffee growers over the next millennium is poor: it will be hotter everywhere, with prolonged dry spells in many places, interspersed with very heavy rain.

Coffee grows well within a limited climatic range. As temperatures rise, so will coffee — to higher altitudes and latitudes. But space is limited and there will be competition with other crops. Coffee farmers will experience climate change through greater unpredictability, with more droughts and floods — the last thing any farmer wants.

Climate change already seems to be affecting coffee production. It is difficult to attribute direct causality, but the changes we are seeing are entirely consistent with climate modellers' predictions.

Sometimes the effects are slow. For example, 50 years ago, nearly three-quarters of Indian coffee production was the premium bean, arabica; now it is less than half, with robusta coffee (a species that withstands hotter conditions) filling the gap.

And sometimes the effects are abrupt. Mexico is still recovering from Hurricane Stan in 2005: "The land is very tired; it has faced hurricanes, winds, natural deterioration. Everyone here has a smaller harvest, less maintenance and less investment," Ingrid Hoffman, a coffee farmer in Chiapas, told Reuters in 2009. "I think one day we will be able to recover."

This outlook is typical. Local organisations and governments are making brave efforts to recoup losses and return to the way things were, and attribute their problems to acts of God.

But are they right to think like this? Climate models suggest that things will get worse — but few stakeholders, including governments, international organisations, farmers, traders, companies or standards setters seem to be thinking ahead, trusting the science, making strategic plans, zoning the land, adapting or diversifying.

Science should be guiding their decision-making. And the problem is not just with coffee — many countries face a similar crisis in agriculture and land-use resource planning and implementation.

Coffee's recent history reflects that of globalisation: the role of governments has been reduced and institutions downsized in the name of efficiency. The rationale was that efficient market-oriented initiatives would arise to supply any services they needed.

In a way, this has happened: nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) stepped in to assign new production norms enshrined in certifications that you find stamped on coffee packaging in most supermarkets.

This was a positive step that brought important social and environmental issues into the public domain through the Fairtrade Foundation and the Rainforest Alliance, for example. Coffee companies have followed, and substantial amounts of coffee are now certified under some form of sustainable label.

But these schemes focus mostly on farm-level issues without tackling larger scales of space and time. Climate change, however, cannot be adequately addressed at the micro-scale. Farming communities will need watershed-level projects to store water, improve disaster responsiveness and plan for new invasive pests and diseases, for example.

More adaptive, participatory research is needed to find out how best to help farmers, and there should be a greater emphasis on long-term research to develop crop varieties more resistant to climate extremes, pests and diseases. Neither NGOs nor private companies can hope to manage many such activities. And there is an unresolved paradox: sustainability is about imposing order and stability, whereas climate change is about adapting and transforming.

As the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it, globalisation is where everything is connected and nobody is in charge. And that highlights the weakness in the neoliberal agenda — global problems such as climate change cannot be solved by the invisible hand of the market.

So we find, towards the end of the first decade of the new millennium, that support institutions are weak and fragmented. Numerous standards-setters are competing for scarce donor funds and smaller certification fees, with little concerted response from the private sector.

There is no alternative but for governments to regain more influence over the fate of their agriculture. Brazil has shown the way with extensive modelling, leading to zoning schemes where farmers can obtain cheap credit for planting crops recommended by the models. It is now among the top three exporters for ten global commodities, including coffee.

With all our coffee beans in ever fewer baskets, the risk of price instability increases alongside the mounting risk of regional droughts, diseases and floods.

The coffee industry has been a world leader in advancing the cause of sustainability. Now it should take stock, pat itself on the back, and quickly move on to a concerted response to humanity's greatest challenge: tackling climate change.

Psychological barriers hobble climate action

Psychological barriers like uncertainty, mistrust and denial keep most Americans from acting to fight climate change, a task force of the American Psychological Association said on Wednesday.

Policymakers, scientists and marketers should look at these factors to figure out what might prod people take action, the task force reported at the association's annual convention in Toronto.

While most Americans -- 75 percent to 80 percent in a Pew Research Center poll -- said climate change is an important issue, it still ranked last in a list of 20 compelling issues such as the economy or terrorism, the task force said.

Despite warnings from scientists that humans need to make changes now if they want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, "people don't feel a sense of urgency," the association said in a statement.

Numerous psychological barriers are to blame, the task force found, including: uncertainty over climate change, mistrust of the messages about risk from scientists or government officials, denial that climate change is occurring or that it is related to human activity.

Other factors include undervaluing the risk. Even though an international study showed many people believe environmental conditions will worsen in 25 years, that could lead some to conclude that they don't have to make changes now.

Some people believe anything they do would make little difference and they therefore choose to do nothing.

Habit is the most important obstacle to pro-environment behavior, the task force found.

But habits can be changed, especially if changing saves money and people are quickly made aware of it. People are more likely to use energy-efficient appliances if they get immediate energy-use feedback, the task force said.

It identified other areas where psychology can help limit the effects of climate change, such as developing environmental regulations, economic incentives, better energy-efficient technology and communication methods.

Fake Outrage Hits Climate Change Debate

While Democrats have complained in recent days about supposedly "manufactured outrage" over health care reform proposals, evidence has emerged of blatantly inauthentic outrage over climate change legislation being discussed on Capitol Hill.

A lobbying firm indirectly hired by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy (ACCCE) has admitted sending fake letters, allegedly from real nonprofit organizations, to congressmen to protest climate change legislation, the New York Times reports.

ACCCE said in a statement that it is considering legal action against the responsible lobbying firm, Bonner & Associates.

"ACCCE has always maintained high ethical and professional standards," the statement said. "In this case, the standards and practices that we require for grassroots advocacy outreach were not adhered to by Bonner and Associates."

The ACCCE contracts out its "grassroots" efforts primarily to the consulting firm the Hawthorn Group, which in turn hired Bonner & Associates to create "outreach" against the climate change bill that passed earlier this year in the House of Representatives.

About a dozen fake letters were sent to Reps. Tom Perriello (D-Va.), Christopher Carney (D-Pa.) and Kathy Dahlkemper (D-Pa.). The letters were purported to be from local minority groups, including Albemarle-Charlottesville chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. -- a group that actually is in favor of the climate change legislation.

"We support making the environment cleaner, but the reason we are writing is that we are concerned about our electric bills," one letter said, the Times reported. "Many of our members are on tight budgets, and the sizes of their monthly utility bills are important expense items."

While the work conducted by Bonner & Associates did not go as planned for ACCCE, the group is continuing its aggressive efforts to make any climate change legislation Congress may finalize more clean-coal friendly.

The group will be running ads this month promoting its agenda over the radio, on billboards, online and probably on television in Democratic states, Politico reports. The group also reportedly plans to send teams to town hall meetings to question senators about the legislation.

The bill which passed in the House calls for a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020 from 2005 levels and an 83 percent reduction by 2050. The legislation aims to meet that goal by instituting a price on carbon emissions through a "cap-and-trade" system, which would enable industries to buy and trade permits that allow them to emit certain levels of carbon. About 85 percent of the permits would be given away, however. It also includes billions of dollars for carbon capture and sequestration -- or "clean coal" technology.

Some senators are interested in creating higher environmental standards in its own version of the legislation, but the competing interests that will be impacted make that a challenge, the Washington Post reports