Now this is the way to think. Prince George’s and Montgomery counties in Maryland, have worked out a 10 year contract to use wind power for one third of its energy needs. As a direct result of this move, wind generated electricity is being purchased from Pennsylvania to power water and sewage treatment for 460,000 homes in Maryland.

By using the energy produced by just 14 wind turbines over the life of this agreement 10 billion pounds of carbon that would have been put into the atmosphere by coal generated energy, will be eliminated.

Maryland has put forth a mandate that the large companies doing business in the state are required to get 20% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020. The encouraging response to this mandate was real action and a workable solution to the energy needs of two Maryland counties.

I trust that this example will prove that the need for wailing and gnashing of teeth as a response to energy reduction measures is behind us. There is a task to complete that has been clearly defined, that of reducing energy usage and therefore carbon output. There are many ways to approach and complete this task and Maryland has presented one example of how it is done.

How “Green” can we get? The greening of our lives is an ongoing process that will continue to evolve and progress with the advent of new technologies and continued education on the sources and effects of Greenhouse Gas emissions. That critical first step is to get an accurate accounting of your building’s Carbon Footprint.

Your Carbon Footprint is the total carbon that is created during the daily use of your building. This requires a comprehensive audit of your building that can be achieved by the use of energy auditing software. This data will show clearly the areas that can be addressed in an effort to lower energy use and therefore carbon emissions. When the audit is complete there will be many changes that can be made from shifting fuel sources or upgrading facilities components to changes in worker habits that impact your carbon footprint. As the mindset of the company is changed and energy cost savings is realized; new ideas and technologies will continue to lead your company to a greener way of conducting business. Greening your business is one of the best public relations and marketing efforts that can be made in the growing global mindset of lowering carbon emissions.

How green can we get? The answer is Carbon Neutral. Companies that have made the necessary modifications and set up programs to offset their remaining carbon output have achieved a carbon neutral position. In the growing world of carbon trading many of these carbon neutral companies can now trade credits from their energy reductions on an open market for profits. How far is your operation from a Carbon Neutral position? Once this question is answered the next question is; how would your company profit by achieving such a position?

Hiding in the corner of many an executive office is an energy black hole; the Torchière. A Torchière is the name of that floor lamp with the Halogen bulb that everyone bought years ago because it was cheap and provided pleasing, ceiling reflected, indirect lighting.

These popular, now very dated floor lamps, burn up an astonishing 500 watts of electricity. That is the amount of wattage that is used by 40 compact fluorescent bulbs (CFB). Just the simple act of removing these energy vacuums and replacing them with lamps that use CFB’s will create dramatic savings on your electricity bill.

Incremental steps like this one quickly add up and get everyone in the mindset of seeking out ways that their department can take part in your energy reducing plans. After you have removed your Torchières, all the lighting in your building can be rethought.

With your lighting audit complete and upgrades made, your Facilities Manager will be able to replicate this audit and upgrade procedure throughout the diverse energy consuming systems in your building.

The quantifying and reduction of your company’s Carbon Footprint will become mandatory very soon. You will be asked to leave no stone unturned in a company wide effort to reduce carbon emissions. For those of you who operate large complexes such as power plants, the retrofitting that you could be asked to undertake to comply with a mandated cap on your energy use and then therefore carbon emissions, could cost millions to complete. You could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on scrubbers and refitting to convert your plant from the use of fuel source to another.

Even Hospitals, Schools, Hotels and large Manufacturing Plants will need to invest capital to bring carbon emissions in line with carbon caps. Tools such as sub-meters will become necessary to gather a true picture of your company’s energy consumption. A review of your building’s insulation, windows and HVAC systems will need to be completed.

This is not to say that every change has to be monumental to impact your carbon footprint. There are many low or no cost changes that you make in the office areas of your plant. Remember things like recycling, passive solar, unplugging or turning off equipment, these add no costs and are easy to bring online. Motion sensors are another low cost item that can lower your lighting costs by eliminating the need for lighting to be operating in unoccupied rooms. This type of system is used widely now in the hotel business.

Shifts can also be made in an ongoing fashion inline with normal operations or capital improvements. In the regular rotation of your fleet of vehicles for example there is an opportunity to shift to the use of alternative fuels, electric vehicles or more fuel efficient conventional fuel vehicles. These shifts are part of the annual operating budget and are implemented with less impact to bottom line than something like a newly mandated retrofit.

The footsteps you hear behind you will be the echo of you own carbon footprint and it will be up to you to reduce the impact of that footprint on your workers, community and your company’s bottom line.

I just can’t see the problem. Why is it that we have the technology and the resources to build wind farms and yet we sit on our hands and watch countries all over Europe build a power infrastructure that will free them from the dependency on foreign oil? I understand all the arguments out there but none of them have convinced me that wind is a bad idea.

From every angle wind works. For a price cheaper than an oil refinery or a nuclear power plant or even a natural gas plant you could build a wind farm and get free, green, renewable, sustainable, non-polluting energy. For the price of one year of war in Iraq we could erect enough wind turbines to power Indiana. So money is not the issue.

I have heard that wind turbines make a whooshing sound; big deal. The whole idea of a wind farm is to place it where the wind blows consistently and free of obstruction so that means in the open spaces where there are no homes to hear the whooshing sound. There are places in the wind belt of this county where you could drive for hours and never see a man made dwelling. So it gets cold in the northern states; we can equip the turbines with on board heaters and heat the blades so they don’t ice up. The wind can get very strong in our mid-western states so we would need to use turbines that operate with clutch systems that would compensate for the excessive wind speed. I can’t see the problem.

The states of Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming and the Dakotas could produce as much energy as Saudi Arabia and do it without the economic strong-arming or CO2 emissions that we get from the oil producing countries. I have heard that the oil companies don’t want wind farms because they would compete with oil profits. This is simply not true; Oil Companies are the biggest investors in wind technology. Wind farms make money. If you want to get rich just design a better battery system or a more efficient turbine and you will be rich beyond your dreams.

Wind is simply our best bet to affect change right now. Wind farms can be set up in a manner of months, whereas power plants that use most other types of fuel would take years to build. So now is the time for land owners to contact their local utilities and set up a meeting to explore the economical advantages of leasing out land for wind turbine use.

The global food situation is getting ridiculous. Our planet has the capacity to feed us very well and meet all our nutritional needs with plenty to spare. One of the side effects of global warming is the expansion of available cropland in the northern latitudes. The excess CO2 in the atmosphere is a plus for plant growth, so the only reason there can be for a shortage of available and affordable food is mismanagement of resources.

Locally grown food requires less transportation costs and therefore if we shop for our produce from the local farmers we can save on food costs. If the farmers markets charge similar prices to large chain grocery stores, that transport their produce from around the world, then they will be punishing us for our support of them and for our green efforts.

If every Church, Temple, Mosque and Synagogue were to set up and sponsor community gardens then our seniors and low income families would not have to make the choice of sacrificing their nutritional health for the sake of transportation or heating costs. These organizations have a non-profit status, not because of their religious views but because of their pledge to serve the community and this would serve one of our greatest needs.

On a much larger scale, developing countries still need the help of the global community to provide them with the types of crops that would be sustainable and inexpensively abundant in their climate regions. We have the science and the management skills to work this out. The large populations in India and China can feed themselves if they continue to look for new approaches the food production. Every large building in an urban center could use its rooftop for a garden. Hydroponics and other methods of crop growth are underused around the world. The water from all these melting glaciers is going somewhere; why not create lakes that could provide drinking and irrigation water as well as a place to farm cold water fish. You can grow crops under the windmills on a wind farm and get duel use of the land.

We all need to work together at all levels of this global community to think through this and remove hunger as an issue around the world.

I have calculated my personal carbon footprint to be about 3 tons per year. The national average is about 7.5 tons per year. In an effort to lower my footprint to neutral I have set forth a personal plan of action.

I will reduce my driving miles and start saving for a more fuel efficient or hybrid car. Changing the lighting in my house and office to compact fluorescent lighting and lowering my thermostats will make further reductions of my CO2 output. I am in the process of making arrangements for three trees a year to be planted to offset my carbon footprint; this move alone would greatly help make me carbon neutral since tress absorb 1 ton of carbon over their lifetime. I have a head start on outputting carbon but I will only live 30 more years or so and the trees will be able to keep absorbing my mess after I’m gone.

These steps are easy to do and will not effect my lifestyle to any great extent. There is nothing new about these steps either, which proves that we all know what we could do on a daily basis to contribute to the lowering of carbon emissions. The next step is to explore what new technologies or personal habits I could employ to become personally neutral.

From the wind swept plains of Kansas, Governor Sebelius fights against the building of two new coal-fired power plants while strongly advocating the use of wind power to provide Kansas with clean renewable energy.

State Senate Bill 148 was set to allow the building of two plants by Sunflower Electric that would have produced about 11 million tons of CO2 annually. The Kansas legislators in favor of the bill pushed the idea that the project would bring jobs and low-cost energy to the region. Governor Sebelius vetoed the bill and the legislators brought it back but failed the post enough votes to override the veto.

After the rise and fall of corn based Ethanol as the “savior” of the global ecosystem, a movement that affected the Kansas farmers greatly, groups like “The Alliance for Sound Energy Policy” are now steering the people of Kansas into the pit of cheap energy at the cost of their health and the environment. Governor Sebelius is promoting wind as an obvious alternative power source, capitalizing on the abundance of wind available throughout the Great Plains region.

In today’s world, the people who we elect to represent us in State Government need to understand that the jobs on the line here are theirs, if they fail to lead in these issues.

I am asked to explain on a daily basis why we can’t spend our intellectual resources on finding ways to recycle carbon by “Capture and Reuse,” instead of creating the largest commodities market in the world around trading carbon. This is absolutely a direction we should head. Until we find a way to eliminate excess CO2 output, we need to look at all our options. One of these options is recycling CO2.

Scientists are looking into ways to combine CO2 with chemicals or minerals to create compounds that can be used for fertilizers, fuels, resins, chemicals and a range of other products that reuse the CO2 that we emit. At a range of around 30Gt/y of anthropogenic CO2 emissions we have an abundant supply from which to draw. CO2 can be extracted even before combustion of fuels in a power plant further reducing total CO2 emissions.

The age of static ideas on how things are done and how things are used or can be used is long gone. We now have the greatest number of educated minds we have ever had in history which affords us an unprecedented opportunity to invent and create our way out of this current challenge.

Coal has been a major contributor to our power supply for the last 200 years and now it’s time to say goodbye. There have been many moves lately to cutback or eliminate the use of coal as a source of power throughout the world. The burning of coal produces 2 billion tons of GHG’s annually in the US alone. Since coal produces a greater amount of GHG emissions through its use than most of the fuels available today, the world is calling for the end of coals use or at least a halt in new coal plant construction. The biggest hurtle may be the reduction of coal use in China.

Canada has set a ban on new dirty coal power plants by 2012 in a move to provide greener energy. Duke energy who is the third largest consumer of coal in the US is considering shutting down a number of coal plants to meet emission targets set for 2030 while warning customers that such a move could affect energy bills by as much as 60 percent. In January the DOE canceled a “clean coal” research project under their restructuring plan. Further, DOE moves include funding only the capture and sequester component of any clean coal plant and not the entire plant construction costs and previously considered.

These are steps by major coal users that will make some impact on global GHG emissions. Consumers will need to absorb the costs associated with shifting fuel sources and these costs should intensify the speedy search for economical ways to provide carbon free energy sources.