6 Comments Add your own

• 1. Raymond C. Garcia M.D.  |  April 2nd, 2008 at 5:26 pm

  I think you just did, Jan. So how about it, Rockford? Maybe we can blaze a trail on this one…

• 2. gadfly  |  April 7th, 2008 at 10:45 pm

  How exactly was “carbon saved”? Did the city avoid splitting it in a fission reaction? Outside of a nuclear reaction, one cannot “save” or “destroy” an element. That this story is reported in such a fashion establishes the scientific vacuity of the whole emissions-caused warming issue.

  Doc, where in the world did you go to med school? Surely you took a higher-level P-Chem course — or maybe not?

• 3. Jan Herbert  |  April 8th, 2008 at 9:01 am

  Okay, you have me convinced. I\’m going to push for an Earth Hour every month, if for no other reason but to save on power usage.

• 4. Raymond C. Garcia, M.D.  |  April 11th, 2008 at 10:33 am

  How you “save” carbon:

  http://www.carbonfootprint.com/carbonfootprint.html

  And for the record, I am a proud graduate of the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Rockford.

• 5. Dennis wallace  |  May 24th, 2008 at 9:01 am

  When it comes to saving electricity… people confuse the practice of saving a gallon of gas by not driving as being the same as turning off a light to save electricity.

  Sorry guy’s and gal’s… they are no where near the same. If you save a gallon of gas you have the ability to save it, i.e. use it in the future.

  If you save a kilowatt of electricity, you might save money on your electricity bill but you save zero energy that can be used in the future.

  Com-Ed must focast demand and then produce electricity based upon this forecast… Unused electricity that is produced is plugged into the Grid but it can’t be saved for future use. Considering the inherent inefficiencies of the power grid, even the excess Nuclear based capacity in Rockford isn’t efficiently utilized somewhere else where they may be burning Coal or Natural gas to produce… electricity. i.e. No energy savings by the “feels good” dumb idea of an EARTH HOUR.

  When will people wake up and realize we need to go on a building boom of Nuclear Power plants ASAP on the scale of the race to Space in the 1960’s or the National Highway System of the 1950’s??? CHEAP, NONPOLLUTING ELECRTICITY PRODUCED BY NUCLEAR POWER CAN ALLOW US IN THE NEAR TERM (3-5 YEARS) CAN PUT US IN THE POSITION OF TELLING OTHER COUNTRIES TO KEEP THEIR DAMN OIL… WE DON’T NEED IT.

  Do you think just maybe a low cost Battery Operated Automobile would be possible if Electricity was dirt cheap to plug the car into every night before bed?

  Plus think about all the jobs created… and the competitive advantages for USA JOBS when companies have access to cheap electricity to power their factories?

• 6. Dennis Wallace  |  May 25th, 2008 at 10:57 pm

  Hey Doc, Gadfly has a point… Around here most electricity is produced by Nuclear power plants that don’t add carbon to the environment… You gotta love the Greenhouse Gas crowd who only report the story severly slanted towards there agenda…

  Some want to ignore the obvious that producing more clean, nonpolluting Nuclear based electricity reduces CARBON emmissions… AND every time Electricty is used in place of burning fossil fuels we reduce the demand for these nonrenewable resources.

  Yea Nuclear has issues to deal with but we are smart enough to figure them out… Best yet, we can do it in the very short term versus the pie-in-the-sky far fetched ideas to remake the world we live in… Yea Solar has its place and many other ideas too… But we need to reduce fossil fuel demand now… Not 20-30 or even 50 years from now.

  Cheap electricity that comes from todays Nuclear technology (versus like Byron’s built with pre-computer slide rule technology)… Hell yes we can produce cheap Electricty… saving us all big time while making current Battery technology feasible for an Electric Car while we work out the bugs with Fuel Cells and Solar.

  The only hurdle to overcome is the misconceptions promoted by fear mongers about saftey of Nuclear Power plants…

  For the record, a Nuclear Power plant can’t blow up and even the three mile Island accident of the late 1970’s gave off less radiation then a several cross country airline flights…

  For sure Chernobyl was a major disaster but the Russian ignored commonsense safty precautions and again they used Nuclear Technology from 1960’s…. I think we’ve learned a few things after we started to use Computers to design things…

  http://www.carbonfootprint.com/carbonfootprint.html

  1. The primary footprint is a measure of our direct emissions of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels including domestic energy consumption and transportation (e.g. car and plane).

  2. The secondary footprint is a measure of the indirect CO2 emissions from the whole lifecycle of products we use - those associated with their manufacture and eventual breakdown.

  Tips to Reduce Your Primary Footprint
  1. Holidays - Don’t go by air

  2. Electricity - Sign up to renewable energy

  3. Gas - Try using solar water heating - this can reduce your gas bill by up to 70% over a year.

  4. Travelling around - Use public transport as much as possible. Find out about your local bus services and then use it.

  5. Car Share - Sign up to a car share scheme to reduce your travel footprint.

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