Speaking of vampires in need of slaying, the AP reports:

A force as insidious as Dracula is quietly sucking a nickel of every dollar’s worth of the electricity that seeps from your home’s outlets.

Insert the little fangs of your cell phone charger in the outlet and leave it there, phone attached: That’s vampire electronics.

Allow your computer to hide in the cloak of darkness known as “standby mode” rather than shutting it off: That’s vampire electronics.

The latest estimates show 5 percent of electricity used in the United States goes to standby power, a phenomenon energy efficiency experts find all the more terrifying as energy prices rise and the planet warms. That amounts to about $4 billion a year.

The percentage could rise to 20 percent by 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Everything you could possibly want to know about standby power is here.

Buffy is back in Climate Progress. I’ll take any excuse!

Turns out former Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar is green, or at least green-tinged, like those monsters she used to fight.

She brings her own reusable bag to Whole Foods. Why? “So I get a discount.” Okay so the millionaire actress is cheap frugal. You got a problem with that?

She also rides a bike, to the annoyance of her neighbors:

“Not only is it bright pink with the bell and streamers and the whole thing, but it has Hello Kitty tires. Every time I leave my apartment, my doorman just shakes his head.”

Interestingly, some of the demons on Buffy spin-off Angel were also green, figuratively speaking. For the sake of its vampire employees, the Los Angeles offices of Wolfram & Hart employ “Necro-tempered” tinted glass, which “filters out the constituents of sunlight that are dangerous to vampires while leaving the brightness in tact. Plus it’s thirty percent more energy efficient“!

And you thought TV was a vast wasteland.

Yes, America’s climate policy is immoral. But that doesn’t make China’s rapacious coal plant building moral. The N.Y. Times has published the sobering numbers, which bear repeating:

The country built 114,000 megawatts of fossil-fuel-based generating capacity last year alone, almost all coal-fired, and is on course to complete 95,000 megawatts more this year.

For comparison, Britain has 75,000 megawatts in operation, built over a span of decades.

China is now the main reason the world is recarbonizing — the carbon content of the average unit of energy produced has stopped its multi-decade decline, as noted. Yes, America is still responsible for a great deal more cumulative emissions, which is what drive concentrations, and China is doing Much of its dirty manufacturing for U.S. consumers (never said our hands were clean).

But China seems to have adopted a policy of build as many coal plants as is humanly possible until they are forced to stop — or, I suspect, until they get a deal that pays the country to shut them down (much as they have gamed the clean development mechanism under Kyoto).

If China won’t alter its coal policy to make its environment livable today even with the Olympics coming, it will require very strong international leadership (led by an America with a moral climate policy of our own) to have any chance at making them alter it to preserve a livable climate in the future.

So why doesn’t China pursue alternatives? The NYT story explains:

Read more

Worldwide backlash hits biofuels – USA Today:

• Scientist Jane Goodall says the rush to grow biofuels is threatening primate habitat in Uganda and Indonesia.

• Brazil is trying to crack down on near-slave labor conditions that have helped keep down the cost of ethanol production.

• Paramilitary groups are forcing peasants from their land in Colombia to make room for palm oil plantations, raising the specter of “blood biofuels.”

Reimagining the Automobile Industry by Selling the Electricity – New York Times profiles a global venture capitalist. “He plans to extend the existing electric-power grids with a wide network of intelligent recharging stations in urban areas and supplementing it with a smaller number of automated battery-replacement stations.”

GM Launches New Advanced Science and Research Center in Shanghai – Green Car Congress. China is teaming up with universities and businesses to launch research centers in China designed to explore alternative fuels and the energy efficiency of new vehicles. A quick analysis excerpted from the Wall Street Journal (subs. req’d) summarizes:

The Commitment: GM is investing in fuel-efficient technology research in China, the world’s fastest-growing auto market.

The Intent: Chinese adoption would mark an endorsement because of the market’s size and the government’s involvement.

The Barrier: Fuel-saving technologies could find a limited market because they may appeal only to China’s most affluent drivers.