Green Options

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Author’s note: the following article on home heating is the seventh in an eight-part series. If adding thermal mass to your house isn’t realistic, another approach is to install a massive heater. That is to say, the heater contains the thermal mass your house may lack.

Clean and Super-Efficient Wood Heating
Super-efficient wood burning heaters with lots of mass are called by many names: masonry stoves, russian stoves, finnish stoves or finnish fireplaces, mass heaters. Though mass heaters may look like traditional fireplaces, they’re actually very sophisticated heating devices.

Burning wood in a mass heater doesn’t involve feeding in wood a few pieces at a time. The wood is added all at once, lit, and burned as quickly and as hotly as possible. Because of the high combustion temperature, there’s virtually no smoke. Combustion is so complete that, with the exception of a bit of smoke released when the fire is first started, most of what comes out of the chimney is carbon dioxide and water vapor.

… for production of renewable energy and maybe carbon sequestration.

Carbon neutral is gaining popularity these days, but Mantria Corporation is taking it a step further.

“We pledge Mantria Place will be the first carbon negative community in the nation by 2011,” states Troy Wragg, Mantria Corporation Chairman and CEO. “Carbon neutral is simply not good enough given today’s environmental issues. At Mantria, we believe that we must go much further to truly help our planet. Our goal is to be carbon negative.”

Located in Sequatchie County, Tennessee,  Mantria Place will be Tennessee’s largest master planned community weighing it at 5,500 acres. Nearly half of that will be green space in addition to two championship golf courses. A big question looms: can new, luxurious development really be green? With luxuries like two golf courses, how can their carbon footprint make it below par? Mr. Troy Wragg was kind enough to speak with me to answer that very question.

Parducci Wine Cellars announces the company’s conversion to 100% solar and wind power becoming the nation’s first carbon neutral winery.

I’m here to promote better eating. Not perfect eating, just better eating. I try to buy as much locally-grown organic food as possible, but winter season is humbling. Months of cold gray skies and fewer and fewer local fruits and vegetables make those imported bananas look awfully good. While bananas will never be locally grown in Oregon, they are nutritious, affordable, great kid food, and a huge boon [...]

The British capital markets watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, has released a report warning that many emissions trading companies make false claims about their green credentials.

The FSA says that the integrity of the carbon trading market is under threat. The information that carbon emissions traders relay to clients often has a truth content that’s lower than you’d expect. In many cases there’s also no clarity over the regulations involved, a lack of credible data. Investors are also frequently offered climate change related products that are totally unsuitable for their goals.

Red Bud Manor, a Victorian bed-and-breakfast in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, is offering a pretty neat special for the green-minded (and fuel-cost-conscious) traveler: the Carbon Neutral Package.

On Friday I spoke with CEO Glenn Farris about his company, Biomass Gas & Electric.

CleanTechnica: What does your company do?

GF: We use biomass (primarily woody biomass), but also forest residues, agricultural waste, and woody crops, to produce renewable energy in an environmentally beneficial gasification process that doesn’t involve combustion, and so is carbon neutral. BG&E currently has three contracts (Georgia Power Company, The City of Tallahassee and Progress Energy of Florida) to provide biomass-generated electricity, pipeline gas, and hydrogen. We have many, many other projects in development both in the U.S. and abroad. In states that have a Renewable Portfolio Standard, we provide tradeable renewable energy certificates. In other states, we sell renewable energy credits to large companies like IBM and Alcoa, who want to reduce their carbon footprint. We believe the future of the company is in the production of methane.

I played around for a few minutes with a heading that said something along the lines of “Scientists alert us to the Obvious… etc” for this story. It seems to me that I am dealing more and more with people who simply intend to live their lives with their heads buried in the sand.

That isn’t to say that [...]

Here’s a new wrinkle to advertising, photo and film shoots that are tracked and quantified for the amount of pollutants they produce during a shoot.

A London-based environmental engineering firm has created the tracking software, and it’s been used in the production of several TV commercials. Here’s Hoag Levins of Advertising Age with a report.

A link to the original story is here:

You would probably be surprised by the amount of companies that have promised, and succeeded, in going 100% green (at least in terms of electricity)! As of July 9 this year, the amount of 100% green power that companies were purchasing for their US operations stood at more than 3 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) annually, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Green Power Partnership.

The most recent company soon to join their

[...]

Big news Planetsavekateers, I’m outta here.

I’m leaving Green Options and Planetsave, though not to join Tom and John in their fight against the thetans.

I would like to say it’s to spend more time with my family, but that just makes me sound like a scandal ridden Bush official.

While I probably will get to spend more time with my family now, I’m leaving the company to work on my green home project and a few other side projects. My tenure at Green Options and Planetsave has been one of the most interesting, exciting, and invigorating times I’ve had. It ranks as one of my favorite startups (out of my current total of four) and I’m walking away with a greatly expanded network of friends and contacts, a ton of great experience in green publishing, and an awesome project to jump to.

What would have been called “The GO Home Project” is coming with me. I am buying the entire project from Green Options and taking it independent. I’m still working on a name for it (send it on if you have a good one) and will be building a site for it once that’s nailed down, but we’ll be starting up right away on sheagunther.org.

The short of it is is that me and my family are moving into two tipis to live for a year before building the coolest greenest house on the planet. We have 52 acres in North Yarmouth, Maine; the leading green architect in the state; a partnership with Smart HomeOwner Magazine, and a whole lot of great energy pushing it forward. Both me and my wife Heather will be blogging about living in the tipis and I will be set up in a smaller third tipi as my office. I’m sure I’ll have many a five minute snowshoe commutes to work this winter. We’re going to do our best to create a guide and recorded history of our life and work so as to inspire others to do choose the same green building path.

It’s been a great past year building Green Options and past few months working on the new Planetsave, but I’m super excited about all the fun stuff I’ll be able to take on now that my time is freed up from GO/PS work.

Here’s a few places you’ll be able to follow along on my adventures…

- SheaGunther.org - This is my home site, where I started blogging before I knew what blogging was (back in 2001) and current home of Musings of an Eco-Entrepreneur, the most kickass in-stasis eco-entrepreneur blog on the web. It’s been dormant since we launched Green Options but I’ll be doing a relaunch with a new theme in the next week or two. We’ll be blogging about living in the tipis and I’ll have a separate page for my links/musings drops . If you grew to like my blogs here on Planetsave, you’ll want to head over there.

- Treehugger- Graham Hill was kind enough to set up me up with a writing spot at Treehugger. I have to work out the exact details with their uber editor Michael but I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve been a huge fan of Treehugger since back in the day (back in the day in the green blogosphere means two+ years ago) and have always wanted to write there. They have such a great group of editors, writers, and an amazing reach- about 25X more daily readers than what Green Options is pulling these days.

- Yet to be named website for the Green Home Project. We’ will be documenting the crap out of our experience building the coolest greenest house on the planet on our yet to be named website. Sheagunther.org is a good place to go to keep up while I figure out what this new thing will be called.

- Stumblegods.com- It’s not really officially launched yet, but my buddy Michael (editor and founder of Groovy Green, founder and publisher of Ecorazzi, chief editor guy at Ecotality Life) and I will be sharing our insights about the power of StumbleUpon at our new site Stumble Gods. Our thumbs move masses baby.

- Ecotality Life- I’ve been working as a consultant with the awesome and talented Brooke Lowry over at Ecotality on the relaunch of their blog. We’ll be getting Ecotality Life up in the next week, in the meantime check out the current site. Ecotality Life will be relaunched with a focus on green gadgets and green business and investing and should be a good read.

- Email: sheagunther@gmail.com, Skype: shea_gunther

It’s been rad, I’ll miss a lot of the people at Green Options and Planetsave. I’ve gotta give it up to my main man Jan, the founder of Planetsave (he sold it to Green Options this Spring and works on both GO and PS stuff) and pimp dad advertising sales guru man. HIC! He’ll be assisted by the talented Noelle d’Estries (Michael’s sister) who will bring her savvy news sense (have you seen the Green Report, that’s all her) and keen wit to the table trying to fill the void that my voluminous ego will leave behind.

Keep up the good fight. Keep on saving the world.