Maryland Business

In response to my blog about a town in Germany selling potholes to citizens who pay to have them filled in, a reader has reminded me that this idea is not new — in fact, it was done in Baltimore before, during the administration of former Mayor William Donald Schaefer.

“Schaefer famously sold pothole repairs when he was Mayor. The repairs could be dedicated to a loved one, a red heart was painted over the patch and a certificate issued. A number of them are still visible around Baltimore. We have one on our block that we’re planning to ‘restore’ as a tribute to our great Mayor.”

As a former member of Mayor Schaefer’s staff during the ’70s, I should have remembered that getting potholes filled was one of his priorities — part of his detail-oriented, “do it now” approach to governance that won over voters — and involving the citizens of Baltimore was one of his greatest achievements.

I stand corrected.

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On the surface, companies with coal-fired power plants and organizations that protect ecologically important land and water don’t seem like an obvious love connection.

So it could have caught me off guard when I saw that Constellation Energy Group is donating $1 to The Nature Conservancy every time a post on its EcoStar Grants program gets re-tweeted — up to $5,000 worth.

But over the last few years Constellation has upped its eco-friendliness, lighting up the courts at the U.S. Open with wind power,  winning awards for its solar installation at Patriot Place (retail/dining area across from Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play) and its energy conservation program at a New England college. Not to mention its plans for solar and wind projects in Maryland and the recent upgrade to its Brandon Shores plant.

The EcoStar grants of up to $5,000 are for projects being completed near areas where Constellation does business, and according to the Nature Conservancy, it has helped to preserve more than 160,000 acres of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Instead of being surprised, I hit the re-tweet button. What can I say? I like spending other people’s money, especially when it’s for a good cause.

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Now that winter seems to be loosening its icy grip on Baltimore, potholes are blossoming on local streets, and officials are combing through their scarce budgets to find the money to pay to fill them.

But one town in Germany has come up with an interesting idea: Selling potholes. Niederzimmern, a hamlet in the eastern German state of Thuringia, will repair a pothole and attach an individual’s name to the newly filled hole. The cost for owning a pothole? Only $68.

Niederzimmern Mayor Christoph Schmidt-Rose said there’s interest from the local populace in the plan. “The point is to use a funny idea to find people who can then help us to get our streets back in order,” the mayor told German radio on Wednesday.

While an unfilled pothole begs for attention, one that’s filled is saying, “Someone cares about me.” And, as Mayor Schmidt-Rose observes, people who pay to fill a pothole “feel like they own [it].”

Some years ago, Baltimore officials got people to buy bricks inscribed with their name or the name of a loved one for placement along the Inner Harbor waterfront promenade. That idea proved to be very popular.

So who’s up for owning a personal, inscribed pothole?

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Environmentalists are livid over some remarks by state Sen. Richard Colburn, a Cambridge Republican. Now they’re calling for a formal and public apology.

It happened during a meeting on Feb. 15 between the Eastern Shore delegation and the secretaries of the departments of Agriculture and Environment, in which lawmakers complained that agency rules are slowing down or halting projects in their counties.

Sen. Colburn, one of those at the meeting, said he believes “river keepers,” environmentalists who watch over particular waterways, are dictating business on the Eastern Shore. He compared them to watermelons: “green on the outside and red or socialist on the inside.”

Members of the Waterkeeper Alliance are red-faced with anger.

“Characterizing any and every opposing group or elected official as unpatriotic or un-American is a political tactic and has no place in any form of reasonable discourse,” said Kathy Phillips of Assateague Coastkeeper, a Waterkeeper Alliance member. “We are hard-working Maryland residents, devoting our lives in many cases, to the protection of Maryland waterways from illegal and often toxic pollution. Our groups are comprised of concerned Americans who care very deeply about their country. Waterkeepers has more than a number of veterans working to restore clean waterways in our country. Senator Colburn is engaging here in a McCarthy-like slur and he owes us an apology.”

U.S. Marine Corps Colonel (Ret.) Richard Dove, registered Republican, and Neuse Riverkeeper Emeritus (April 1, 1993 through July 4, 2000) said: “This man [State Sen. Colburn] doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t know me or any of my colleagues, that’s for sure. Having served two tours of duty in Vietnam, I take it personally when someone calls me a Red, a socialist. I understand that Sen. Colburn aligns himself with big agriculture and the commercial farms that keep him in office, but the fact that our goals are not aligned doesn’t give him the right to blindly tag our members as socialists, implying somehow that we are un-American.”

Jeff Kelble of Shenandoah Riverkeeper said his family has been in America since the 1600s, homesteaded the Shenandoah Valley in the 1700s, and fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. “If anything, Riverkeepers are red-blooded Americans, not Red, socialists,” he said.

One wonders whether or not Sen. Colburn has a case of the “blues” over his remark.

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Did you know there are 14 challenges the world must address to ensure the planet’s survival?

That’s according to an e-mail I got from the University of Texas at El Paso. Now, I’m all for a catchy headline or e-mail subject line to draw readers in, but this one felt a little extreme.

It seems UTEP is holding an international engineering conference to talk about the issues ailing the planet and they’re looking to drum up interest.  (University of Maryland and Applied Research Associates, which has offices in Maryland, are participating, which is probably why I was sent the e-mail).

From what I gather, they believe the world has 14 “grand challenges” and by identifying and solving them, our quality of life and health will improve, we’ll create a sustainable future and increase use of renewable energy.

It’s just slightly different from the planetary implosion I imagined before the text of the message filled my screen. So, what does UTEP think are our biggest challenges?

Most are pretty broad:

Providing access to clean water, preventing nuclear terror, engineering better medicines, developing better health information systems, making solar energy economical, capturing and storing excess carbon dioxide to prevent climate change, securing cyberspace, restoring and improving urban infrastructure, engineering the tools of scientific discovery and advanced personal learning.

Then there are the zanier items:

· Reverse-engineering the brain – Engineers are trying to create computers capable of emulating human intelligence.

· Managing the nitrogen cycle – Engineers can help restore balance to the nitrogen cycle with better fertilization technologies and by capturing and recycling waste. Controlling the impact of agriculture on the global cycle of nitrogen is a growing challenge for sustainable development.

· Providing energy from fusion – Fusion is the energy source for the sun. Human-engineered fusion has been demonstrated on a small scale. The challenge is to scale up the process to commercial proportions, in an efficient, economical, and environmentally benign way.

· Enhancing virtual reality – Virtual reality is an illusory environment, engineered to give users the impression of being somewhere they are not. It can be used for training, treatment, and communication.

Are these 14 items challenges? Yes. Do they all need fixing for our planet to survive? Probably not.

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According to a book by two researchers from New Zealand, because of what they eat, dogs have larger carbon footprints than SUVs.

Researchers Robert and Brenda Vale studied the composition of the most popular dog foods and found that the land it takes to produce all of the meat and grains is larger than the land it takes to produce the energy to fuel an SUV.

The book “Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living,” has gotten a lot of buzz. While the title may be provocative, the researchers don’t exactly suggest eating your pup, rather changing its diet to reflect a more sustainable food regimen.

However, they say a more eco-friendly pet choice would be a rabbit or a chicken. They find it socially acceptable to eat those pets.

But the book has left a lot of dog lovers and environmental types snarling over what they call shoddy figures.

The Vales say a typical medium sized dog eats 360 pounds of meat and 209 pounds of “cereals” each year, using about 2.07 acres of land. The SUV (they used a Toyota Land Cruiser) driving about 6,200 miles a year uses 1.01 acres of land.

But Clark Williams-Derry, director of research for the Sightline Institute, a nonprofit research center focusing on a sustainable economy and lifestyle in the Pacific Northwest, points to U.S. Department of Energy numbers that show that Americans drive our SUVs about 13,700 miles a year. He also says the energy consumed, plus what it takes to produce the gas and the car, are underestimated.

Then there’s the issue of the dog data. According to a study done by the Animal Protection Institute, a nonprofit animal advocacy group, dog food is made up from the scraps of human food — the stuff we wouldn’t deign to eat.

Pet food provides a place for slaughterhouse waste and grains considered “unfit for human consumption” to be turned into profit. This waste includes cow tongues, esophagi, and possibly diseased and cancerous meat. The “whole grains” used have had the starch removed and the oil extracted — usually by chemical processing — for vegetable oil, or they are the hulls and other remnants from the milling process.

Williams-Derry says that because most of what dogs eat are the scraps of what we eat, considering the carbon footprint of their food as completely additional to ours is inaccurate. He recognizes that dogs do have an environmental impact – just as SUVs do, but he takes issue with the Vales’ suggestion that owning an SUV isn’t so bad for the planet.

He says the idea that dogs are worse than SUVs is invalid. It might be time to put that idea to sleep.

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Want to save the planet? Then stop “going green.”

That’s the message from Mike Tidwell, executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

In an opinion piece in The Washington Post’s Outlook section Sunday, Tidwell says Americans should drop their “faddish” and small, voluntary efforts to be environmentally friendly, like installing compact fluorescent light bulbs, using eco-friendly detergent and washing clothes in cold water.

The little things aren’t getting us anywhere, he says. Instead, media coverage of “green gestures” are making us believe that most of America is embracing change, when only 10 percent of our light bulbs are CFLs and 2.5 percent of cars are hybrids.

To get beyond our small victories, Congress needs to act.

Ours is a nation of laws; if we want to alter our practices in a deep and lasting way, this is where we must start. After years of delay and denial and green half-measures, we must legislate a stop to the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

Instead of action, we’ve gotten a House bill passed “riddled with loopholes” and the Senate hasn’t voted on a bill yet.

So what’s the problem? There’s lots of blame to go around, but the distraction of the “go green” movement has played a significant role. Taking their cues from the popular media and cautious politicians, many Americans have come to believe that they are personally to blame for global warming and that they must fix it, one by one, at home. And so they either do as they’re told — a little of this, a little of that — or they feel overwhelmed and do nothing.

How do we fix the issue? Tidwell says before you spend the day caulking leaky windows, you should pick up the phone or get on the computer to contact your senator and demand action. Here’s his plea:

So join me: Put off the attic insulation job till January. Stop searching online for recycled gift wrapping paper and sustainably farmed Christmas trees. Go beyond green fads for a month, and instead help make green history.

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The holiday lights that adorn Baltimore’s Washington Monument each December are getting an efficiency makeover. The lights will twinkle festively just as they did before, but they’ll use 90 percent less energy.

Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. will provide the energy efficient LEDs (light emitting diodes), which burn brighter and last longer than the incandescent lights that have heralded the holiday season for the last 37 years.

The company says using the LEDs for lighting the monument is part of its effort to meet the state’s EmPower Maryland goals — reducing power consumption 15 percent by 2015 — and to encourage Maryland residents to do the same.

The city will get its first glimpse of the new lights Thursday night during “A Monumental Occasion: The Annual Lighting of Baltimore’s Washington Monument.”

Nearly 17,000 bulbs on 84 strands of lights will decorate the Washington Monument this year. The monument’s old incandescent bulbs used approximately 40 watts per bulb, while one strand of LEDs contains 200 bulbs and uses 12 watts of energy.

The amount of electricity we use is measured by consumption over an hour through kilowatt-hours (1,000 watts = 1 kWh, so a 100 watt incandescent light bulb used for 730 hours – or all month long – would use 73 kWh).

Even if the city leaves the Washington Monument’s lights on all month long, electricity use would be about 735 kWh, well below the 1,000 kWh the average home uses each month. At 40 watts per bulb, if last year’s display also had 16,800 bulbs, lighting the monument for the month would have used 490,560 kWh.

Looks like the switch to LEDs should go a long way toward cutting electricity consumption at the monument…it remains to be seen if your neighbors will swap their North Pole lawn extravaganza lit by incandescent bulbs for LEDs.

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When bear hunting season opens October 26, the state Department of Natural Resources plans to keep hunters informed by using Twitter.

The DNR has put a limitation on this year’s hunt of 60 to 85 black bears; once that mark is reached, the hunt’s called off.

Bear Project Leader Harry Spiker told the Associated Press that tweeting is just another way of keeping hunters informed.

There’s a title if I ever heard one – “Bear Project Leader.” Now that’s something to tweet about.

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Let’s face it, no matter how “green” you are, if you don’t have the green to pay for solar panels, they’re out of the question.

A California group, recognizing the prohibitive cost of the panels, thought it might be worthwhile to round up some like-minded neighbors to get a group discount. They formed a company, One Block Off the Grid, and got to work making solar power more affordable to several West Coast communities.

1BOG has no plans to head east to Baltimore or Washington, D.C., but if you round up enough friends to signal interest on their Web site (no obligation, just enter your e-mail address, ZIP code and some info about your home so they know if solar would work there), they’ll set up shop right here in town.

“What we’ve been saying for a long time is if we generate a critical mass of interest in any city then we’ll set up there and the magic number is 100,” Brad Burton, the company’s operations and development guy, told me.

So far, 1BOG has only found enough interest outside of California in New Orleans. Burton said about 20 percent of people who sign up for information usually end up buying into the solar program, which is  double the normal conversion rate.

Participation in 1BOG programs are free — aside from buying the panels — so you might be wondering what’s in it for the company? Well, solar installers pay a fee for customer referrals. The referral fee is always the same, so 1BOG says it’s always looking for the best deal for the community.

The cost of panels varies, but Burton said 1BOG usually negotiates a 15 percent to 20 percent discount.

On top of that, the government changed its tax rebate scenario for the panels in February. Where homeowners used to get a tax credit for 30 percent of the cost, with credits topping out at $3,000, now you can get the 30 percent tax credit with no limit if you install by 2016.

1BOG doesn’t actually take customers off the grid — sometimes you’ll need more energy than your solar panels can produce — but using solar energy would lessen your load on the area’s ailing power grid.

Power to the people.

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