“I watched everything play out in horror,” says Mr. Petersen. “And, like everyone else, I went through the process of thinking, ‘What can I do?’ ”

Petersen donated money and considered volunteering, but that wasn’t enough. “I kept feeling this well up inside me, I felt compelled to act,” he says.

As the city’s cleanup began, Petersen, the president and CEO of Global Green, an environmental nonprofit that promotes green building, saw a silver – or green – lining in Katrina’s catastrophic wake.

“I began to think, ‘Maybe I can do more.’ I run an organization with big thinking behind it; it’s a Red Cross for the environment. We have the greatest assemblage of green building expertise. How can we deploy that?” he says. “Certainly the city was going to be rebuilt. And this great city presented us with an opportunity to create the first truly green city in our nation.”

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Then take a peek at Southwest’s new green airplane and consider an environmental side effect of the world’s yearly 1.2 billion lightning flashes.

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Martin and I were standing outside the house with Dale King, the previous owner who is also our lead builder and who lives down the road. (More on Dale later.) I was talking about how we’d like to renovate as “greenly” as possible but also maintain the historic nature of the house.

I didn’t like the idea of having huge, high tech solar panels glinting on top of the elegant old white clapboard frame.

“Why don’t you look into geothermal?” he suggested.

“We’re not in Iceland,” was my first thought, which I fortunately kept to myself. Instead, I took his advice and was stunned not only by how much common sense geothermal energy makes, but also that there’s a nascent but fast-growing geothermal industry here in the United States.

In a nutshell, geothermal energy consists of using the constant temperatures stored naturally underground to heat and cool your house.

You drill a few wells, run pipes through them, and then circulate a liquid through those pipes. As the liquid travels through those pipes underground, it heats up to at about 55 degrees F. – the steady temperature that the earth naturally generates between 10 feet and 300 feet down. You then hook those pipes up to a heat pump in your basement.

In the winter, the heat pump compresses the liquid to increase its temperature to about 75 degrees F., which is then used to heat the house. In the summer, the circulating 55 degree F., temperatures are used to air condition the house.

You do need an energy source to run the heat pump – you can use electricity or natural gas, but other than that, the main source of your heat and air conditioning is the ground beneath you.

Say goodbye to that oil company and the thousands of dollars you pay them each winter to keep your house warm.

I immediately began researching local geothermal companies and was delighted to find several in the area. I contacted them and got several quotes. My first reaction upon seeing them was “YIKES!” as I’ve mentioned before.

The initial upfront costs for just the equipment ranged from $55,000 to $75,000. And then there’s the cost of drilling the wells. Our first estimate for that was around $28,000. We’re talking $20,000 to $30,000 more than a high-efficiency oil burner system for a house of a comparable size.

From an economic standpoint, in the short term at least, it made sense to forego my geothermal dreams.

But I couldn’t get over how much common sense geothermal made to me – using the natural heat underground to heat your house, versus depending on a very expensive fossil fuel (also from underground) that was probably drilled thousands of miles away in a manner that is not sustainable and the daily use of which contributes to global warning.

I then called the geothermal contractor who came with the highest recommendation from other local contractors and from our well driller. His name is Tony Silverio.

He sat with Martin and me for more than an hour and explained the pros and cons of geothermal (which I’ll get into in the next blog). but the bottom line, he said, was that with a geothermal system’s annual heating and cooling costs are estimated to be between 65 and 70 percent less annually than a traditional fossil fuel system.

Then to help soften the blow of the initial up front costs, there are federal and state tax credits. When you take advantage of them, what looks like an outrageously expensive system becomes a more moderate one.

This was confirmed in Interesting Energy Facts:

Geothermal energy can provide not only 100 percent of home heating, but also air conditioning and hot water, and it requires no additional use of oil, natural gas [although you can use it] or any other fossil fuel. And the payback on geothermal is more than acceptable. If you consider the 30 percent federal tax credit, payback usually takes less than five years in new construction and somewhere around seven years for retrofits. This translates to gigantic 15 percent annual return on investment simply by installing a geothermal system, which is really a number from which many other energy sources are still far off.

The logic in this whole story is quite simple, namely homeowners pay back the investment with the money they would have paid to oil or gas company. After payback, the savings continue with an average return of more than 65 percent – percentage that is likely to be even higher as fossil fuel prices are very likely to increase after recession is over.

OK, I was sold. But there are limitations and drawbacks to using a geothermal system, which I’ll talk about next.

Editor’s note: Alexandra Marks will be blogging twice a week about her green and budget-friendly restoration of a 1902 farmhouse in Connecticut. See a photo gallery of the early days of the project by clicking here. You can read all she’s written about the project so far by clicking here and then looking for Sheep Dog Hollow under Topics on the right side of the page.

You’ll find numerous articles about the environment at the Monitor’s main environment page. Also, check out our Bright Green blog archive and our RSS feed.

Six families, who each have bay-front homes with long wooden-plank piers, stuffed the bags with oyster shells. They then tied the bags to the newly rebuilt fishing piers and dropped them into the water.

These families are experimenting with “oyster gardening” — using old shells to provide the hard surface upon which oyster larvae can attach and grow.

This is one of several creative projects, paid for by federal and state grants, under way to restore a small portion of the 8,000 acres of oyster reefs killed when Hurricane Ike buried them in sediment a year ago.

Oysters are important to the Texas economy as a food and are also efficient filters that remove contaminants from the water as they feed. A single oyster filters 50 gallons a day.

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That’s the word from a study appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But global warming may not be the whole story behind Mt. Kilimanjaro and its environs. And therein lies a tale of how human activities may affect local and regional climate in ways that can mask or reinforce a long-term warming trend.

Understanding those effects is critical to devising strategies for adapting to global warming at regional or local levels.

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The projects are, in the words of one observer, so crazy they may actually work.

If just one is successful, it could transform society, says another.

They’re talking about the recently formed Advanced Research Projects Agency — ARPA-E for short – which awarded $151 million in grants to 37 projects in 17 states. Of the major recipients, small businesses make up 43 percent, educational institutions 35 percent, and large corporations 19 percent.

In its own words, “ARPA-E’s mission is to develop nimble, creative and inventive approaches to transform the global energy landscape while advancing America’s technology leadership.”

ARPA-E is modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the agency that helped develop technologies like the stealth fighter, the M16 assault rifle, and the Internet, among other transformative ideas.

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But the American Palm Oil Council calls it “nature’s gift to the world.”

So, which is it?

Made from the flesh of fruit from oil palm trees, palm oil stepped into the void when towering oil prices put pressure on companies worldwide to find alternative sources for products from biofuel to shampoo. Demand for the oil surged by an average of 2.2 million metric tons worldwide each year between 2000 and 2009.

Although palm oil saves money, when carbon-rich peatlands in nations such as Indonesia and Malaysia are drained and turned into palm oil groves, the environmental impacts are enormous, says a 2009 United Nations Environment Program report.

The report notes that because of the additional release of carbon sequestered in peatland as a result of some forms of palm oil farming, its combustion “generates 3 to 9 times the amount of CO2 produced by burning coal.” The upshot? A carbon debt “requiring 420 years of biofuel production to repay.”

Another loser in increased palm oil production is the orangutan, which lives exclusively in the palm oil meccas of Borneo and Sumatra and inhabits lowland areas near rivers that are also favored for palm oil plantations. Zoos Victoria in Australia estimates that palm oil development causes the deaths of up to 50 orangutans per week.

To help prevent loss of orangutan habitat and the adverse environmental effects of most current palm oil production, environmental groups, palm oil producers, and companies that use the oil have banded together to form the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Its goal: to advance the production and use of sustainable palm oil.

This may be the start of a solution, but “it’s not going far enough,” said Leila Salazar-Lopez, rain forest agribusiness campaign director for the Rainforest Action Network, during a panel on palm oil policy in Boston. “We applaud companies that are members of the RSPO but we need further action.”

Companies can buy sustainable credits to help support farmers who produce ecofriendly palm oil, but the small supply so far makes this unfeasible on a large scale, says Jeffrey Hollender, executive chairman of Seventh Generation, which makes environmentally friendly household products. As a result, sustainable palm oil is unavailable as a pure product. Instead, it’s mixed with regular palm oil. Consumers have no way of knowing how the palm oil in products they buy was produced.

Solid dialogue between the palm oil industry and environmental activists is important and has been aided by the existence of the RSPO, says Serge Wich, a researcher at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, a conservation group. “I think that we need to have a constructive dialogue with the palm oil industry,” he says. “If we’re going to say the palm oil industry is the problem, and we’re not going to provide constructive solutions, then that’s not going to help.”

Editor’s note: For more articles about the environment, see the Monitor’s main environment page, which offers information on many environment topics. Also, check out our Bright Green blog archive and our RSS feed.

Costumes
Reuse materials from thrift stores or yard sale to make costumes, instead of buying them, suggests Larry West, who covers environmental issues at About.com.

Blythe Copeland at Planet Green shares creative costume hints with “Top Homemade Halloween Costumes for the DIY-Impaired.” How about turning a black pillowcase into Pac Mac with just a red marker?

Elizabeth Seward also presents some excellent budget-friendly costume ideas in “Make Your Own Cheaper, Better Halloween Costume.”

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A report released Thursday, Oct. 29, by the US Geological Survey also shows that industries as well as the general population are sucking up less water overall than in 1980, when the nation’s thirst for water peaked.

Experts said it was particularly welcome news in the burgeoning West, where cities built in dry regions are grappling with intense disputes and ecosystem collapse tied to dwindling supplies.

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In that way, I concluded, Martin and I could make informed decisions about which technologies to use based on our limited budget and save the money we’d use on an expert.

Even as I was writing that last sentence, I knew that I had not done due diligence.

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