Forgive the informality, but this article on the BBC, EU rethinks biofuels guidelines , is like so duh! what did you think was going to happen if you started using food for fuel (for something besides eating)? Finally some eyes are opened to the fact that these things are linked and the whole thing needs to stay balanced.
Certified Organic Can Be Bad for Small and Local
GRAIN recently published an article about the politics of certified organic seeds.
While every country has a slightly different interpretation of the rule, generally speaking, certified organic food must be grown with certified organic seeds when they are available.
This sounds innocent enough, even logical to some people. As innocent as it sounds it’s a really insidious rule that makes things very difficult for some small farmers and decreases global biodiversity.
No Significant Difference
While no one should use treated seeds in their garden, and organic foods certainly should not be grown from treated seeds, the use of organic seeds doesn’t make any sense.
The root of the definition of certified organic is the plants should be grown on land that has not come in contact with chemical fertilizers and pesticides for two years. By the time you purchase and grow any seed in your garden, two years will have almost certainly passed since the parent plant could have been sprayed anyway.
If you are purchasing an OP or heirloom variety of plant, there is a reduced chance pesticides or other chemicals would have been used in it’s production. This is because a large portion of the chemicals used in agriculture are used to make produce appear cosmetically perfect or to protect it from spoilage. These chemicals aren’t needed when seed is produced. This doesn’t apply to F1 hybrid varieties, for which toxic chemicals are frequently used, and presumably these chemicals are allowed under organic certification because organic F1 seeds are widely available.
The chance of transporting chemicals of any significance into your garden or dinner table with an untreated purchased seed is infinitessimally small. First the original plant has to be sprayed, then the chemical must find it’s way to the very small seed, then the seed decomposes in your garden leaving a new plant in it’s place. It’s virtually impossible any chemical residue could be left behind that is any higher than what’s already present in your garden anyway. If you add supermarket vegetable scraps to your compost, you have a much greater chance of adding chemicals to your garden than using non organic seeds.
There is no possibility organic seeds can produce better plants. When you grow a seed, you are simply using it’s DNA. If a seed germinates and grows into a plant, that plant will be the same regardless if it came from an organic seed or not. There are simply no realistic possibilities for any differences to exist.
If you save your own seeds and trade with your fellow gardeners, the idea of organic seeds becomes a non-issue anyway. This is one more reason why we should all be doing this.
No Big Favors to the Environment Either
Of course one of the reasons many people buy organic foods is to help protect the environment. As anyone who has ever saved their own seeds will tell you, the amount of seeds that comes from a single plant is enormous. You can easily plant one seed and get thousands as a result.
Seed production is not as chemically intensive as producing market produce anyway, and the amount of land needed is a tiny fraction of that used in agriculture.
How Could Organic Be Bad?
The problem comes about in the interpretation of the rule ‘organic seeds must be used, when available’.
In North America many smaller seed companies specializing in OP and heritage varieties, knowing they could soon be shut out of the chain of organic agriculture if they didn’t, have been arranging their own organic certifications. This means in this part of the world organic seeds are widely available for most of the common OP and heirloom varieties. Probably for this reason, the certifying agencies have not been very strict about requiring the use of organic seeds.
In Europe and many other places in the world, it’s a very different story.
In Europe there are a very complicated set of rules governing the production of seeds for agriculture. In particular purchased seeds must come from a licensed source and generally can only be modern commercial varieties. Under limited circumstances, farmers are allowed to save their own seeds, but never to sell or trade them. For farmer grown seeds to be considered organic they must have been grown for two consecutive years first. It’s virtually impossible under realistic circumstances for farmers to maintain their own collections of seeds for their own varieties. If farmers can’t maintain their own seed collections, most heritage and OP varieties cannot be purchased as certified organic.
What’s happening in Europe right now, and the Netherlands was singled out by the GRAIN report above as being one of the worst offenders, is certain classes of crops are being closed when it comes to considering if organic seed is unavailable.
For example, the organic certifying agencies might simply say there are enough certified organic cauliflower seeds on the market, so no organic farmer can claim they can’t find certified organic cauliflower seeds. No arguments are accepted over the varieties available or the price seed companies are asking. Farmers who want to grow organic cauliflower must either have saved their own seeds for the past two years or purchase organic seeds from one of the companies selling them. There would be no other possibilities.
Who are these companies selling the organic seeds?
Referring to the Netherlands in particular, since this was addressed in the GRAIN report, one company called Vitalis controls 82% of the market for organic cauliflower seeds.
In each one of these classes of crops being closed for consideration of organic seeds not being available, only a small number of large companies control the seed market, leaving them in a position to charge virtually whatever they want.
New Permaculture Blog!
Cmarion has left several really interesting comments here, and just started her own blog Gardening in the City.
Her plan is to create an urban food garden, based on permaculture principles, together with her partner, in their new house in Hartford CT.
They’ve started with layers of cardboard, newspapers and mulch, and made a really interesting post on her plans for remineralizing the land. I don’t know anything about remineralizing, so I’m really looking forward to reading about their experiences with it.
Some Wise Words on Bees and CCD
Felicia Gilljam recently made a great post on her blog about Colony Collapse Disorder. She is a beekeeper and biology student, and offered her perspective on the problem from that point of view.
An American problem because beekeeping is much more industrialized there? Bad weather? The result of breeding for docility, repressed swarming behaviour and increased harvests? These are all things she discusses.
As was touched on in the comments, my personal opinion is that CCD is more than anything a result of the general degradation of the environment caused by global warming, intensive agriculture and mono-cultures and the ongoing loss of global biodiversity. It’s not that very serious attention shouldn’t be paid to CCD, and effort shouldn’t go into understanding it better, but the only real solution is going to be to address the underlying problems.
Home Energy Audit
We pay an estimated monthly amount, but our meters are read and our home energy use (gas and electric) is calculated once a year. When our bill comes each year, it’s always the time to think about how much energy we are using and why, and think about how we can improve things. Since our bill just came and I was thinking about these things, I thought I would do a post about it and see if I got any interesting feedback from my fellow bloggers.
Anyone reading this has to understand my priority is using less energy without spending money in the process. I realize this can be a controversial position to take, but I have never believed much in the idea of doing good by spending more money.
I don’t buy the most expensive food available thinking it is the healthiest, I don’t buy every fertilizer and pesticide available thinking it’s going to make my garden grow better and I don’t think going out and buying all the latest energy saving appliances is doing any favors for the environment. I prefer to focus on the ways I can save energy that don’t involve buying things I wouldn’t need to buy for other reasons anyway.
Of course when I do need to buy a new appliance, I am always looking for the greenest alternative available for a reasonable price.
There are a number of personal circumstances that cause me to consume more energy than I would otherwise. My house is larger than most people in Amsterdam have, it’s not very well insulated and the windows are leaky. I have closed off as many rooms as possible and leave them unheated, and made as many small repairs as I can to the leaks. We also have our home thermostat on a timer and keep it as low as possible. The climate here is mild, and mostly our heat is off unless we turn it on because we’re cold. I would replace all of our windows with new double glazed windows if I could afford it, but realistically this is years away, and probably not until the windows are completely falling apart anyway. There are other similar decisions we have made that end up using more energy.
The Major Appliances
As it turns out most of our major appliances are pretty modern and new. In the last 3-4 years all of them gave out in one way or another and we had to replace them. We used the opportunity to get the most energy efficient models we could find. We have a new refrigerator, chest freezer, dishwasher, washing machine, clothes dryer and hot water/central heating combo unit.
I realize the clothes dryer is probably a controversial item for some people. Actually, until about 3 years ago we air dried all of our clothes on racks and didn’t own a dryer. This made laundry an almost constant chore and wet laundry a permanent fixture in our house. The Dutch government had an offer of a €200 subsidy when you bought a new energy efficient gas dryer, and since the price of a new dryer was €320, this covered most of the cost. It was a little bit of luxury we decided we wanted, and decided considering the 15 previous years we had done without a dryer it was an okay thing to do.
A gas dryer is common in the US, but very rare in Europe. I hired a plumber to install the gas line, and he said he had been a plumber for 30 years and never seen one before. As far as I’m aware, a gas dryer is significantly more energy efficient than an electric dryer, but it’s hard to know for sure because you can’t make a direct comparison of the two. A gas dryer certainly costs a lot less to use.
I have my doubts of the energy efficiency of my washing machine. It received both top ‘A+ ratings’ for energy/water use and cleaning clothes. After I installed it, and read the instructions, I became acquainted with the ‘intensive wash’ button. The instruction manual explained this option should be selected for all but the most lightly soiled clothes. Apparently the washing machine received it’s A+ rating for cleaning clothes with the button pressed and it’s A+ energy/water rating with the button not pressed. A portion of the energy efficiency rating is a result of a high spinning speed meaning the clothes come out drier. They then supposedly need less time in the dryer, but I have a very energy efficient dryer anyway. We also need to give all of our clothes an extra rinse or they are too soapy, putting the water efficiency in doubt.
What seems so far one of the best purchases is our water/central heating unit. We’ve had it a year now, and our gas use is much lower. The old one was also supposedly energy efficient, but the new one is clearly much better. Our gas bill is almost €500 less (30% reduction in energy use) compared with last year. Perhaps if I had given the matter a little more thought, I might have done better installing a solar hot water heater and buying a smaller and cheaper heating unit, but now that I have the new unit this isn’t economical any more.
The Other Things
Beyond the major appliances, we have a TV (old style CRT type) together with the usual stack of VCR, DVD player, satellite box, etc. We have several computers, which we normally turn off but are sometimes left on overnight. Together with the computers we have a wireless network and adsl connections with the associated hardware, all of which stays on all the time.
We have a conventional electric oven with a gas top, as well as a separate microwave/toaster oven. We have a few other kitchen appliances, vacuum cleaner, mobile phones, a couple of radios and a few other minor things.
We are not fans of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), and don’t own any. Rather than buy one more expensive consumer item, with it’s own waste disposal problems, I prefer instead to use normal light bulbs with a lower wattage and be more diligent about turning off lights when they are not used. We also have a number of halogen lights.
I realize not using CFLs is going against the popular trend now, and another controversial decision on my part. The energy my lights use is a small percentage of the overall energy consumption in our house, and I have saved far more energy in other ways than I could by switching to CFLs. CFLs are made with heavy metals, and especially if you don’t have a way of properly disposing of them when you are done, are not environmentally friendly. In my case, most normal light bulbs are made in Europe, but the CFLs are made in China, have to travel farther and don’t support the local economy as much.
Probably the most important reason I prefer normal light bulbs is because the technology behind them is too old to be patented, unlike CFLs which are patented by companies like Philips.
It seems to me the reason it’s so important we all switch to the new light bulbs has much more to do with corporate profits than protecting the environment. The Dutch government has promised to phase out normal light bulbs soon, at which point we won’t have a choice any more because it won’t be possible to buy them.
Anyway, this pretty much sums up the hows and whys of our energy use.
Choosing an Energy Supplier
I guess like many places now, it’s possible to choose an energy supplier and buy your gas and electricity from many different suppliers, some of whom claim to be greener than others for different reasons.
There’s a strong emotional impulse to buy your electricity from a company that claims to generate is all from wind or solar power, or other renewable source. At the same time it’s not that clear to me this is actually the case.
Everything is interconnected, so there is no guarantee a particular electron comes from any particular company, and indeed we are promised if anything happens to the company you buy energy from like it goes bankrupt or their generation facilities fail, you will continue to get energy from some other company.
Since the so called dirty power plants will continue to operate, even if I pay more money for green energy from another company, what’s to say I’m not just subsidizing the use of dirty energy by someone else. In theory the dirty power plants will generate the same amount of energy regardless if I buy it, so if I buy green energy won’t that just make it cheaper for someone else to purchase the dirty energy?
The issue of clean and dirty power generation is much more politics than anything else. Companies are the biggest consumers, and governments establish prices with subsidies and taxes, which determine what energy companies decide to purchase. Treaties like the Kyoto Protocol establish limits that are likely to have a much more significant impact on how power is generated than what energy company I choose.
In the case of Europe, the electric markets have been privatized with one important exception, standard ‘grey’ electricity from the local energy company. I don’t like the idea these energy markets have been privatized, and I prefer to continue to buy my electricity from a regulated source as long as it’s possible. Remember what happened to the state of California and Enron a few years ago?
In theory it’s possible to save money by switching energy supplier, but in fact prices fluctuate a lot and it’s not always true in the long run. In order to keep your costs low, you may have to keep an eye on prices and frequently change energy companies. I prefer to save money and be green by using less energy than by switching companies.
These are the reasons I’ve chosen not to choose a ‘green’ energy company.
The Bottom Line
Gas:
Use: 1660m3
Usage Costs: €1002.73 annually (€83.56/mo)
CO2 Emissions: 2948 Kg
Electricity:
Use: 4507 kWh
Usage Costs: €1007.44 annually (€83.95/mo)
CO2 Emissions: 2572 Kg
Fixed Costs:
Gas: €170.05 annually (€14.17/mo)
Electricity: €87.65 annually (€7.30/mo)
Taxes and Subsidies: €-198.02 (€-15.59/mo)
It’s a little interesting the CO2 emissions are on my energy bill now, but especially for the electricity I question how accurate or biased it is.
Is the electricity figure only for my energy company, the country as a whole or a European average? The answer is very important to understanding the meaning of this figure, and I don’t know what it is.
Update: After doing a little research I found a little more information about the CO2 emissions for electricity. It is related to the choice of energy supplier, in my case ‘grey’ electricity from the standard supplier, probably from the natural gas plant near Amsterdam.
I also discovered my gas use is a little below the national average of 1820m3 per year, my electric use a lot higher than the national average of 3500kWh, and my overall CO2 emissions also a little higher than the national average of 5221Kg.
Where Does it Go?
The gas is mostly used for central heating and hot water, but some is used by the stove top and clothes dryer.
My working assumption is my electricity usage is divided up roughly as follows:
Dishwasher and Washing Machine: 50%
Lights: 10%
Computers and Internet: 15%
Everything Else: 25%
Everything else means mostly standby appliances, refrigerator, freezer, TV and kitchen appliances. I should probably break this down a little further, but many of these things I’m not sure how much energy they consume.
We’ve done our best to reduce the number of standby appliances that stay on, but we still have a few.
We just bought a more energy efficient computer for primary use, so maybe next year our energy use for this will be less.
On average, we use our dishwasher and washing machine for about one load each per day (our washing machine is much smaller than most standard US models).
So how does all of this compare with the decisions you’ve made, your usage and costs?
