By Chris Pastore on July 13, 2010
The ERA – and what it means I like baseball, and very much enjoy the statistics that can derive from so many events. During today’s game they were talking about the Earned Run Average of pitchers over the past few decades. (For those who don’t follow baseball, this is a measure of how many runs [...]
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Posted in Energy | Tagged baseball, climate change, global warming, go green, green lifestyle, mlb, perfect game, phillies, roy halladay
By Chris Pastore on June 29, 2010
Abiotic Oil The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has brought up a renewed interest in “abiotic oil” (or “abiogenic oil”). Most of us learned in high school that oil is a “fossil fuel.” It is the result of extremely long pressure and heat changing biological life into petroleum. We think in terms of [...]
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Posted in Energy | Tagged energy, go green, Lifestyle, peak oil
By Chris Pastore on May 7, 2010
The pending arrival of the Nissan Leaf got me thinking about cars and the environment again. (BTW my previous post on the Prius vs. the Hummer is here). Considering that for many of us an automobile is a necessity, we have a new range of choices in automobile purchases to minimize the impact. High efficiency [...]
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Posted in Life Cycle Analysis, Lifestyle
By Chris Pastore on March 25, 2010
I’ve written previously about Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The idea of LCA is relatively new, becoming popular in the 1990s and continuing to grow. When the basic concept of LCA was burgeoning in the industry, it was a considered to be a good tool to support sustainability claims that could eventually be used for marking [...]
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Posted in Life Cycle Analysis
By Chris Pastore on February 23, 2010
The Bloom Box promises a low cost electrical service to the individual home-owner in the next 5 to 10 years. It is described as a $3,000 “grapefruit-sized” device that can be installed in the home. Skeptical? I don’t know about you, but when new technologies are promised but the under-pinning details are kept hush-hush, I [...]
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Posted in Energy
By Chris Pastore on February 11, 2010
A few years back, a good friend of mine told me that people “know” that global warming is real because of their personal experiences. He wanted to start the introduction to a book with a series of personal experiences of people who observed things getting warming. Sometimes a story captivates the imagination. A story can [...]
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Posted in Life Cycle Analysis
By Chris Pastore on December 21, 2009
There seems to be confusion in the media about what constitutes skepticism. I’ve taken the moniker “The Skeptic” for our radio show/podcast with careful thought. Skeptic comes from the Greek word skeptikos (skeitkos) which means thoughtful, and implies careful consideration. The modern skepticism movement is based on a search for truth. Although we don’t believe [...]
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Posted in Philosophy
By Chris Pastore on December 3, 2009
How do we know if a product is “green” or “sustainable”? Consider the Life Cycle Analysis of cars performed by CNW in 2007 (here (PDF)). One of the more controversial conclusions of the study was that the Prius is less sustainable than a Hummer (H2 and H3). Naturally this created an uproar in the community. [...]
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Posted in Life Cycle Analysis
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