Apollo Gonzales's Blog: Solving Global Warming

Deepwater Dispatches: The Worst Possible Time

2010-05-04T02:33:54Z

I think it goes without saying that there is never a good time for an oil spill. Certainly, the "drill baby drill" crowd would agree with me on that. Yesterday, sheltered from the pounding rain in his boat Capt. Kip Marquize tells us why this disaster couldn't have happened at a worse time for the fishermen and shrimpers of the Gulf Coast.

Copenhagen: Another Perspective

2009-12-17T23:29:37Z

We're nearing the end of our time here in Copenhagen and there is a lot going on. Things were hectic last week and I thought it couldn't get busier, but as this week has rolled on it has reached a fever pitch. I'm working the social media front, watching tweets and blogs and working to get word out to the world about what is happening here. I leave the policy work to the experts on my team, and you can read their thoughts here on our aggregation page.

I've spent nearly two weeks glued to one screen or another - laptop, iPhone, Blackberry, television...you name it. So a couple of nights ago it did my spirits a whole lot of good to come across this little event in the city square.

Dispatches from Cop15: Over the Atlantic

2009-12-07T09:34:40Z

It is 1 a.m., and for the first time in my life I have crossed the Atlantic. I am traveling at 625mph, fast approaching the island that my wife is named for. Somewhere below, Ireland like my wife and son, is sleeping. I’ve not slept a wink, which is no strange thing, my son has been the best training I could have asked for. Now, 5 hours from my final destination, my mind is finally turning to the two weeks ahead in Copenhagen, and the work that is coming. It occurs to me that the only two times I have left my country have been in the spirit of, and in search of, the very thing I seek on this trip - collaboration and creation.

My first trip outside of the US was with a team of climber friends. We were recruited by a friend who, as a caver, was a bit of an oddity for us. Our inclination to verticality and exposure to the sun on our backs and faces was surpassed only by our love of the equipment associated with the sport. In those tools we found common ground, and conceded to joining her in a road trip into the mountains of Mexico, and into a cave system rumored to be the longest in North America. We went for the adventure, and to take measurements and make maps together, with hopes of uncovering the connections necessary to secure the title.

The trips to Mexico that followed kept us above ground, climbing the lechuguilla covered limestone monoliths of Potrero Chico. Our songs echoing in the little valley, we climbers spent the day on routes built by our more skilled and daring friends. On the days when it was too hot to sing and we were too hung over to brave the 3,000 foot heights, we languished near the base in the shade, the Mexicans with their tiny cars and loud radios drinking and shouting encouragement and taunts from below. Their revelry was an invaluable contribution to the effort.

My most recent venture out of the US took me to an island in British Columbia, northwest of Vancouver, called Cortes. My pack was lighter for this trip, but included my trusty sleeping bag, and my lightweight tarp. Even in a setting that had nothing to do with sport it was important to me to ground myself on, well, the ground. I went to Cortes alone, but knew that again this adventure was about working with others, learning from those more skilled and daring, this time bringing a little of my own skill and bravery to the table. I soon found comfort in those kindred spirits who work the social web every day to make this a better world. That week was as powerful and stimulating as hanging from a belay 500 feet above the valley floor in Mexico, or crawling through the phosphorescent glow of Moon Milk Pass somewhere hundreds of feet below an ejido in central Mexico.

The creative genius that came from these trips endures and is apparent to me in my life every day. None of these adventures could have sustained the energy to give birth to the ideas and friendships without the fuel collaboration, and selflessness. So, as I travel to Copenhagen it does not escape me that I am headed to the largest most collaborative event of my lifetime. The leaders of the world are gathering to collaborate, to create common ground in the face of the greatest challenge facing humanity. While I will not be at the table negotiating the details (those are depths and summits for more skilled than myself), I’ll be collaborating and creating with a community of people who work hard to find and to tell the story of those most impacted by climate change, and with those who have spent decades urging our leaders to do something brave.

I am beyond tired, and beyond excited. The work begins soon, and I am roped up and ready get started. Climb on!

Lowering the Cost of Play

2008-11-19T13:00:00Z

In my living room sits a 32" LCD HDTV. I feel guilty every time I turn it on because I know how much energy the thing uses. Every night I turn it off, and not just stand-by, but OFF. It's the only device in my entertainment center that I turn off every night because it is the largest amongst the usual suspects identified as vampire devices.

At bedtime, when I turn the lights off, my entertainment center looks like something from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At the very heart of all of those little LEDs are my gaming consoles. With a 7-month-old baby my time logged gaming is no longer measured in consecutive hours, but in 10 or 15-minute chunks. That means I don't have time to waste waiting for my consoles to boot, and then load a saved game. So I do what nearly half of all gamers do, I leave the console turned on. What I didn't know until today is that collectively gamers are logging 16 billion kilowatt hours per year. For a single gamer like me, that means that my console is burning more energy than my refrigerator - in fact, chances are it's using twice as much. And that TV I feel so guilty about? My console uses 2-3 times more energy.

In a new report called Lowering the Cost of Play NRDC outlines how I, and gamers everywhere, can change the way we use our consoles to save a little cash and 7 million tons of CO2 emissions every year. For a little perspective 7 million tons of CO2 emissions is about the same as the electricity use of 841,000 homes a year. The good news is that the steps are simple, and we can take them now.

The holidays are upon us, and that brings lots of extra time, and a host of new games. Before settling in for a marathon session with Fallout 3, take a few minutes to tweak your console, because being able to destroy your environment in a game shouldn't mean you have to destroy THE Environment in meatspace.

On Leaving My Wallet At Home

2007-11-21T03:28:40Z

I am a geek of the worst kind. I am an electronics gadget geek. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a lover of many other geeky things, like comics and video games, but nothing else comes close to my obsession with gadgets. Now I may not be able to afford an iPhone or latest Garmin GPS, but my lack of funds doesn’t stop me from knowing everything there is to know about those two items. If the opportunity to get one at a sweet price should present itself, I will be prepared. This obsession is evidenced by my possession of not one, but four Polar heart rate monitors. I use one of them, and only very, very rarely. I got such amazing prices on them (a savings of over 80%, amazing right?) I could not walk away. I have memory sticks, cell phones, mp3 players, mp3 player accessories, cameras, computer speakers, laptops, enough cords to make a rug, power tools, and I’m not even going to get into the cycling and camping gear because this could go on all day.

When these items become obsolete, I usually box them up and put them away. Every once in a while the stash gets to be too much and I have to get rid of a few items. Recently I disposed of a Sprint cell phone from 1999. That my friends, is not a joke. When the time comes though, I always find myself searching for a way to recycle the product, and when I can’t figure it out I take it to Goodwill. No one will ever buy these items from Goodwill, and deep down I know those items are going to end up in a dumpster. As AP writer Terence Chea pointed out this week in a story highlighting the problem of "e-waste", those items are going to end up in China. My old printer, the one that worked fine, but was an eyesore, is now somehwere in China polluting a river.

This coming Friday is Black Friday. It is a electronic gadget geeks Christmas. The savings are so obscene that an entire world of Black Friday websites have popped up across the internet. Less than $500 for a 32” HD LCD television? Are you kidding me? Break out the lawn chair and sleeping bag, I’m getting in line today! But why? My television works fine. And so does my first generation iPod mini. And my year old Motorola Razor. And yes, even my Polar hear rate monitor.

So this coming Friday, I’ll be joining the growing movement behind Buy Nothing Day. I’m not going to explain Buy Nothing Day, because it is exactly what the name implies. This year marks the 10th year that BND has been positioned on the same day as Black Friday. After finding out that we are sending about 300,000 tons of our unwanted electronics to China every year, I can’t imagine waiting another year to get behind the cause. No matter how badly I want an iPod touch.