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Living "off the grid" is usually the choice of the hardened survivalist, the mountain man and perhaps the odd fugitive running from bounty hunters. But more and more Americans are now opting to disconnect from the grid - i.e., government, electric and other utility services - which delivers increasingly expensive fossil-fuel-based power and is, as millions in the Northeast learned during the 2003 blackout, anything but infallible. In 2006, Home Power magazine estimated that more than 180,000 U.S. homes were supplying their own power. "Some people want to minimize their impact on the environment," says Dave Black, a disaster...
Forward-thinking medical institutions are taking a hard look at their energy portfolio. "I've seen a huge uptick in hospitals exploring and investigating" ways to reduce fossil-fuel dependence, says Nick DeDominicis of Practice Green Health, particularly since 2007 when World Health Organization and U.N. reports suggested that climate change due to fossil-fuel use and CO2 emissions could threaten public health. Hospitals, such as the California-based Kaiser Permanente and San Francisco's Catholic Healthcare West, have gone greener by swapping out old equipment for more energy-efficient systems of heating, cooling, lighting and dehumidifying. DeDominicis says...
...Bednarz of Energy & Healthcare Consultants in Pittsburgh contends that the medical industry needs to rethink how it uses energy and, more important, figure out how it can get by on less - something that will become an inevitability when oil prices start creeping up again. Last summer's high fuel costs gave some in the field an inkling of what hospitals might face. "The old method of 'just in time' delivery for supplies [and trauma patients] made sense with energy sufficiency," says Bednarz. "It makes no sense when you have energy scarcity or very high prices." He says facilities will need...
Still, DeCicco points out, even if the CAFE numbers don't reflect reality, by raising the standard to 35 m.p.g., it mandates a relative increase in fuel economy of about 40%. But the government's double bookkeeping still matters - especially with the NHTSA set to issue final regulations that will help guide automakers to meet the new standard. An EPA analysis from September shows that the 35-m.p.g. CAFE standard will translate to 27 to 28 m.p.g. under real-world conditions - about the same fuel efficiency that the current CAFE standard purports to enforce. "The program is undermined...
...That's the first mandated increase in two decades - but the U.S. standards still lag behind those of Europe and Japan, and barely keep pace with China's. And, yet, that increase - against which foot-dragging U.S. automakers fought hard, complaining about the cost of meeting higher fuel efficiency standards - required compromises, which forced the NHTSA to keep using the old rules. "It's a shame that when this law was passed no one in the government went up and measured what was actually going on," says DeCicco. (Read "Heroes of the Environment...