Dear Jill,
Just one week until your TerraPass membership anniversary. By taking just a few minutes today you can help to fund clean energy and carbon reduction projects for another full year: renew your membership today.
In just four years, the TerraPass membership has grown to over 150,000 people like yourself. Together you've supported over 1 billion pounds of carbon reductions across the United States. It's the equivalent of:
- Avoiding 1 billion miles of driving
- Replacing about 10 million regular light bulbs with compact fluorescents
- Installing 4 million low-flow showerheads
Together we are making a real difference. Individual reductions really do add up to something meaningful. Please don't let your membership lapse.
A LOT TO BE PROUD OF:
Your purchase of a TerraPass reduced 11,000lbs of carbon.Every TerraPass is verified by an independent, third-party auditor, so you can be confident that buying a TerraPass is an effective step in the fight against global warming.
The Forum for the Future is asking you to vote for the top low-carbon innovation. The winner will receive $75,000 to help bring their product to market. Choose from among five contenders:
Kyoto Box – a $7, solar-powered cardboard stove for use in rural Africa. It can halve firewood use and reduce exposure to dangerous air pollutants. (Kyoto Energy Ltd, Kenya)
Carbonscape – a giant industrial microwave which ‘fixes’ the carbon sucked out of the atmosphere by trees by turning wood into charcoal, which can be buried, used as fertilizer or as a highly-efficient fuel. (Carbonscape, New Zealand/UK)
Deflecktor – an inexpensive, lightweight aerodynamic cover for truck wheels that reduces drag. It can cut fuel consumption by 2%. (ADEF Ltd, USA)
Mootral – a feed additive derived from garlic that cuts the methane produced by cows, sheep and other ruminants by at least 5%, and up to 25% with optimum dosage. (Neem Biotech, UK)
Evaporating Tiles – an indoor cooling system that uses exhaust air to evaporate water within hollow tiles built into a false ceiling. It halves the energy use of air-conditioning systems. (Loughborough University, UK)
You can vote here.
So this Earth Hour, turn off the lights and enjoy the companionship of a billion people around the world who, by participating in this simple gesture, are saying, with you, “Hey, I care about this too.” After all, it’s only by getting the great mass of humanity on board that we’re going to dock the climate change ship safely.
If you like to cook, you may already be familiar with Harold McGee, tireless kitchen tinkerer, experimenter, and debunker of myths. Recently McGee set out to find whether it’s really necessary to cook a pound of pasta in six quarts of water.
This may seem like a minor matter (and it is!), but Americans do boil a billion pounds or so of pasta every year. By McGee’s own math, cutting the heating time for those big pots of water could save the equivalent of half a million barrels of oil per year.
McGee found that not only can you boil pasta in significantly smaller amounts of water, you can actually start the noodles in the pot while the water is cold:"It’s possible to butta la pasta in 1 1/2 or 2 quarts of boiling water without having the noodles stick. Short shapes just require occasional stirring. Long strands and ribbons need a quick wetting with cold water just before they go into the pot, then frequent stirring for a minute or two."
The loss of these ice shelves means that rare ecosystems that depend on them are on the brink of extinction, said Warwick Vincent, director of Laval University's Centre for Northern Studies and a researcher in the program ArcticNet.
"The Markham Ice Shelf had half the biomass for the entire Canadian Arctic Ice Shelf ecosystem as a habitat for cold, tolerant microbial life; algae that sit on top of the ice shelf and photosynthesis like plants would. Now that it's disappeared, we're looking at ecosystems on the verge of distinction" said Derek Mueller, an Arctic ice shelf specialist at Trent University in Ontario.
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