Count your Gas Blessings Carefully.

The cost of fuel (Okay, the price) has gone down a bunch recently. I have to think that it's because the big oil companies are cutting back on their profits in order to help the economies of the world.

HA! Just kidding. But, wouldn't it be nice?

I suspect that the price of gasoline going down is related to many issues, not the least of which is the success of renewable sources of energy. Don't let them fool you. Even the Biggest, Oiliest Oligarchs are divesting from oil. Every one of them uses solar and wind energy generation at their "Dacha's". Why wouldn't they? They like to save money, too. You just won't see it in their, "aren't we responsible?" advertising. According to the ad, BP have invested over 4.5 Billion Dollars in the Gulf for rebuilding. That's not so much an investment, as a court ordered fine to compensate for all the damage that their slovenly practices caused to the people and the environment of the Gulf. It's like me saying, that I invested over $20,000 in the State of Colorado, instead of me saying, I've had three DUIs!

Unfortunately, a huge contributor to this gasoline "discount", is the glut of natural gas, that these very same companies are extracting out of the ground in ways that make oil extraction look like a gentle kiss from a dying grandmother. You've heard of "Fracking", haven't you? This term is short for Hydraulic Fracturing, which is FAR more hideous than you'd ever expect. These oil barons take pipes and force them into the ground under your homes and into "seams" where free methane and propane are trapped as part of the decaying process of ancient organic life. In order to fracture the rock formations, and therefore "free" the trapped gas, they inject millions of gallons of fresh water, because everyone knows that we don't really need water for human life to exist, mixed with a concoction of carcinogenic chemicals and other chemical agents that assist in the destruction of the rock layers. The contents of this mixture are top-secret because Dick Cheney made sure we'd never know what's in it. Thank God, we know we can trust Cheney. Now, historically these oil entrepreneurs, have always looked out for the welfare and well-being of the public, and in these cases, they are just as publicly responsible as they always have been (Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, Keystone XL Pipeline, etc).

Take the dip in gas prices with a grain of salt and remember that in Battlestar Galactica if you got "Fracked" it meant something altogether different . Or maybe it didn't.

Baby Steps...

Let's Re-Think Family Planning.

It's weird.

I know a lot of women (my wife included) who have remained childless by choice and I'm a little sad to announce that these lovely and educated ladies are sometimes the object of ridicule by the strange “traditional” family-values cadre. Considering the rather dire straits that we find ourselves in, due to over-population and willful and negligent environmental devastation, I feel that this is not only ignorant and cruel, but just plain backward thinking.

I understand that, as mammals, there is a certain, small instinctual drive to procreate. I get that. But it's no greater than the drive to kill and eat other animals, and we've done a pretty good job curtailing that activity over the course of history. There was a time when a male individual would just mount the first female individual he saw whenever he got “the urge.” Thank goodness we've evolved beyond that.

The major reason that the vast majority of woman feel they need to continue to crank out children, is because of religious conditioning and programming. There may have been a time when it was logical to have children (mainly boys) so that you'd have some help in your chosen field of work. Farms needed lots of hands. So did blacksmithing. Same goes for ranching and sheepherding. These people had children for “practical” reasons. In many, if not most, cases this is no longer the case. But whatever religious tradition you adhere to, you are encouraged to breed indiscriminately. The more the better! The training starts at a very young age and is never questioned by anyone. Little girls play with dollies, but rarely do they play NFL owner or CEO. The subject of happily choosing not have children is never even suggested. As a woman, if you don't dream of having children, you're considered some kind of freak.

Smart, intelligent, educated women have myriad reasons for not getting involved in that lifelong commitment of child bearing and raising. Some have aspirations of travel, which is rendered difficult with small children. Some want to make a difference in the world other than populating it. Whatever their reasons, they don't deserve derision for making that choice. Hell, I commend them for even knowing that the choice exists. Your religion won't tell that to you. Or your school. Forget about hearing it from your government. Did you know, these institutions have a vested interested in making sure you have children? Preferably lots of them? People with families are much easier to control. And by control, I mean coerce. Your economic resources are spread thin, so that you have very few options.You will do whatever you are told, because you can't risk the health and safety of your family.

We don't really need any more people. When was the last time you were driving in rush-hour traffic, or walking through a mall and said to yourself, “You know, there just aren't enough people.” I'm not trying to vilify the people who have kids and families, but the #1 worst thing you can do environmentally is have a child. The source of most of our modern ills, is overpopulation and its cousin, thoughtless overconsumption. Restaurants throw away approximately 30% of all of their food. The figure is a little lower for personal households, but not much. In the name of convenience we make cleaning products out of chemicals and instead of cloth, we have to use paper products that can be thrown away. But there is no away. I bring this up because the biggest offender is disposable diapers.

I'm not saying don't have families. I'm not saying people who have families are bad. All I'm saying is let's start letting little girls know that it's okay to dream about things other than becoming a baby factory. And let's start showing them that it's alright to make other choices and maybe even wait. They have to be educated in proper family planning (birth control), and encouraged in pursuits other than gestating. Stop the tyranny of religion. It's not necessary to have a baby to take some

Baby Steps...

Old King Coal. Not so merry.

Coal miners have been around for a awhile. 

Mining is dirty, dangerous work, that doesn't take a lot of education, just mostly muscle and courage. And a desire to take care of your family.
Especially in rural areas where the coal is found, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri, to name just a few. Miners generally have a pretty tough life, filthy, back-breaking work, for long hours. As long as the employer can legally require, that's how many hours a coal miner will work.

I just drove through Ludlow, Colorado where an abomination against humanity took place a while back. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre)

Fortunately, thanks to the unions and the incredible war-like struggles that they went through to get the miners a living-wage and some protections, the miners can enjoy a somewhat normal standard of living. A liveable standard, even though these mines tend to be in horrible, back-woods locations where the boom-town economies inflate all the costs that the miners incur. Many of these miners have worked the mines for generations, so much so that it's the only existence that they've ever known, or that they can even contemplate. The job is so ingrained with the life and the culture, that the miners, not only put up with the horrible conditions that the employers thrust upon them, they defend it against all logic and against their own well-being.
The nation should be getting off coal. And petroleum. And Natural gas.

It's obvious. Coal is a dirty source of fuel and mining kills miners through bad and unsafe practices and disease. There are natural, renewable sources of power generation that we can transition into, and these miners can, with very little adaptation, be transitioned into without the loss of any income. These types of energy can, and will, be in the same rural locations where these workers now live. But there's a catch. Isn't there always? The fossil fuel energy companies have powerful and deep-pocketed lobbies that won't allow that to happen.

Workers need to be educated in these things. (another reason that the rich and the corporations are dead-set against any public education) The Politicians and the corporations aren't your friends. They fought against your rights every step of the way and killed countless miners who only wanted to make life better for their families.

Let's get out there and help these people, because by helping them, we help ourselves.
The best way to get even with the Robber Borons, is to make what they stole from us, and our planet, worthless.
Let's do it.
Baby steps...

Global Climate CHANGE. (look it up)

Why oh, why is everybody having SO much trouble with the concept of climate change?
If you've been outdoors lately, it should be obvious.

Oh, yeah. Science. The devil's workshop. The devil's "Call of Duty".
Science. The one thing that hurts God more than the scourging of Jesus.
Science. The battle rages on between science and, uh, who?

Temperatures HAVE gone up. It's a fact that has been recorded for a loooong time.
If you have ever studied meteorology or climatology, you know that all weather patterns are caused by changes in temperature. Changes in temperature are caused by how much of the Sun's radiation reaches a certain part of the planet, land OR water. The relationship between hot areas and colder areas cause high and low pressure zones, which combined with the rotation of the Earth, causes wind. Pretty simple. Amazing how powerful the Sun is! Hey, why doesn't someone figure out a way to harness all of that power? But that's another subject.

Then there are the semi-deniers. "Oh, there is a change in the weather, but there's no way it can be man-made." Really?  God gave us the Earth to do with as we see fit. Take all the resources and use what we want and throw the rest away. If I need a little bit of gas, why shouldn't I pump thousands of gallons of some toxic chemical soup, the contents of which, I won't tell you, into the ground to filter wherever it happens to go. Once we get the coal, who cares where the ash and waste from the process goes?

The way I understood it, God gave man Dominion over the Earth, to be a good caretaker. If I hired a caretaker for a facility and that guy threw trash all over the place, and refused to clean up, I for one would fire him. What if my caretaker treated all of the men women and children, as well as all of the animals, as if they were just an inconvenience, out the door. Pink-Slip.

The big fallacy is throwing things away. There is NO AWAY. The Earth is a closed system. Suppose you lived in a deep sea diving suit, with a tank of air and a years supply of food and water. Within a few days your suit would start filling up (from the bottom, you know, gravity). After a few weeks, you'd be sloshing around in a soup of human waste products. How long do you think it would take till that suit was filled? And you Drowned in Your Own Shit? But thank god, it's not man-made.

The Closed system that is Our Earth is the same way. People that DON'T believe this are either incredibly stupid, or are interested in something other than long-term survival for the planet. If your greed blinds you to these simple truths, I hope we are all gone before you drown in your own shit. Maybe you can build a life raft out of your money. I sincerely hope not.

Those of you who believe in saving the planet, keep working!
Baby Steps...

Sometimes thing happen just like you planned.

In a past post, I mentioned that you might be able to ask your landlord to consider making some changes that would affect our impact on the planet. Well, by golly, my landlord did just that.
Recently our complex installed hot water-on-demand in all of the buildings. Not only does the water operate on this system, so does the heat (which is hot water). I'm not going to pretend that their motives were environmental and altruistic, in fact, I'm sure they are just enjoying the HUGE energy savings, but I'll take what I can get.
In fact, that is exactly how it works. Once businesses realize that they can actually save money by doing the right thing, hey, look at that, they start doing the right thing.
Baby Steps...

The least I can do.

Most people, if you ask them to recycle their cans will say, "Of course. It's the least I can do."
This is so true. But it's also a start. I've known of people who, because of their home policy of recycling cans, they have passed that practice on to their family and friends. And then it gets passed on and on...
Do the least you can, and then some . We all teach by example. Be that example. It's the little things that make a difference in life. And in the life of the planet.
It starts with cans. Then bottles. Then paper and cardboard. Then Batteries. Then plastic. Then computers and other electronics.....
Do it.
Baby Steps...

Have we started a fire?

Jan 26th, 2012 by Vince Curran
Well, for Christmas this year, Amazon posted some pretty impressive sales numbers, especially on their very popular Kindle.  In the month of December alone, they sold 4 million Kindles.  Now this is a pretty impressive record and I feel it bodes well for the life of trees.  Especially since the sale of electronic books or e-books has gone up 175% in the last year.  Now if everyone used a Kindle for all of their reading, including books, magazines, catalogs, TV schedules, e-mail and school textbooks, that would represent a significant reduction in paper used to produce books.
Now this is a pretty obvious benefit, but there are some benefits that are not quite so obvious, for example, all of those millions upon millions of books don't have to be shipped from the printer to the distributor to the bookstores.  That may not seem like much, but I think anybody who has ever had to move knows.  What's the heaviest thing that you move when you move.  At least in my case, it's always the boxes and boxes and boxes filled with bookses and bookses and bookses.  And those bad boys are heavy.
For those of you who don't know, standard paper weighs approximately 75 pounds per cubic foot.  That means each box of books you carry when you're moving weighs approximately 75 pounds.  Now, when there's a bestseller, the publisher prints up a whole bunch of hardback editions, each one of these weighing between three and 7 pounds and they ship them all over the country, generally by truck.  That's a lot of weight in a lot of trucks requiring a lot of fuel, and a lot of wear and tear on our streets and highways.  Now, if these books aren't actually printed and can be sent zooming through the cloud, that saves a lot of transportation resources and their related costs.  Not to mention all the trees that don't get cut down to produce these books since most printers use virgin pulp.  In addition to the paper being used, paper mills, create an awful lot of waste products, which won't be produced if we're using e-books.
So, this is a pretty impressive technology and it does just what technology should do, save time, resources and money.  It will be interesting to see how the use of e-books evolves over the next several years.  It will be interesting to see if we can actually change the method in which we consume media.  It will also be interesting to see how much paper is actually saved over the next several years.  And how much fuel for trucks, and all that other good stuff.
Here's a great example of what technology can do.  Train us to do the right thing, which we could have been doing all along by just going to the library.  However, I salute Amazon and Kindle and anyone who uses the Internet and technology to consume the media that we have all become addicted to.  Now, if we could only invent some technology to make us stop wearing fur or wasting water.  Or maybe an app to make us stop eating junk food.  Or a gizmo to make us exercise.  Or a program to make us start acting logically and with common sense.  Or a whizbang to keep us from hating others and starting wars.  They may not be big sellers, but at least we can say we tried something.
Baby Steps...

ZPG bees.

Jan 12th, 2012 by Vince Curran
Okay, here's my confession.  Well, it's not really my confession, but my parents’.  My parents, like most Irish Catholic parents, or any kind of American Christian parents, had a large family.  In my family.  There were seven kids.  And that was only one set of twins.  In the grand scheme of things.  Having kids, or at least having a lot of kids, is one of the worst ecological disasters, you can inflict on our planet.  And inflict we did.  I was the first in 1955.  I can say with a certain amount of pride, even though it wasn't up to me, or my parents, we didn't use any disposable diapers.  The primary reason is they didn't exist yet.  Back in those days, you used cloth diapers, and usually contracted a diaper service.  Ours was “Tidy-Didy Diaper Service”, and the driver who came to our house to pick up the diapers and deliver the clean ones, actually wore a Pith-Helmet.  No kidding!  A Pith helmet.  How funny is that?

So, at least for the first five of us born between 1955 in 1961, we didn't use any disposable diapers, a huge ecological problem.  The other thing about children is they tend to become the same type of consumers their parents were.  If the parents are huge meat eaters, the kids probably will be too.  If the parents needed new clothes every week, guess what?  If the parents drive huge cars, the kids probably will too.  If the family had a huge Kentucky bluegrass lawn, that tradition will probably be carried on over and over and over.  The best thing you can do for the planet is to reduce, reuse, recycle.

Reduce the number of kids you have.  Please!

Reuse.  Okay, I know this is using the word little out of context, but there are plenty of children around the world who are already born, and need a home with loving parents.  Adopt!
This is sort of Recycle also, granted, not in the traditional sense.

I have to say, that our family, my siblings and I, have worked to try to balance out the population growth caused by my parents.  My wife and I both decided we wouldn't have any children.  My sister has two daughters, both adopted.  My next brother, no children.  The next two, the twins, have five children between them.  And finally, no children from my last two brothers, either.  A net gain of new people on this planet, minus two.  Not bad for an Irish Catholic family, huh?

Baby Steps...

(originally appeared in Denver Green Streets.com Jan 12th, 2012 by Vince Curran

Greenwash?

I know, it seems counter-intuitive, but using a dishwasher actually saves energy and therefore, money. Especially if you fill that bad boy up. Newer models use only about five gallons of water, and if you get an eco-friendly soap, that's a whole lot less energy and water than I use in my tiny little place (with no dishwasher). I like to think that I'm pretty careful when washing my dishes, but, first of all, my sink is only so big, and it won't store many dishes, so rather than doing the dishes every 2 or 3 days, I'm forced to wash them every day.
Secondly, the only control of heat I have is the water boiling furnace/tank thing, which is set on "Flay".
So, I wash. if the skin doesn't completely come off my hands, I can stack washed plates in the second sink. Then, I turn on the icy-Colorado-mountain-stream-cold water to rise. It's difficult to turn the water off and on, off and on, so I usually let it run while rinsing. Conserve as I might, I doubt I can keep my comsumption down to 5 gallons.
So get a good Energy-Star dishwasher. Here's one case where technology has out-paced your humble narrator.
Party on, Garth!

Water you gonna do?

Whether you've practiced it or not, most Westerners are aware that we are running low on water and really should be conserving it.  There are a lot of ways to conserve water, for example, my wife and I actually shower together every single day.  There are lots of products, which will restrict  the flow of water in your home.  I recommend using some of them. One of the biggest offenders in residential home is the toilet.  Standards for the amount of water per flush toilets have gone up recently, but how many of us have a new toilets?  Every time you flush, you are using anywhere from 1 to 5 gallons of water.  This is fresh water.  Water that we drink.  Just to get rid of your waste.  Doesn't seem right, does it?  I've always thought that one of the smartest things you could put into a home, would be a urinal, because the number one cause of flushing is number one.  I finally feel vindicated.  Now when I go in the shower, I'm an environmentalist, not a pig. 

Not only are we flushing away valuable water, were also flushing away nutrients which are present in male urine.  I'll address this more in a different post, but male urine is now being added to so many compost heaps, because of its nutritional value primarily in nitrogen.

The most wasteful residential use is watering lawns.  Americans have become very enamored of their Kentucky bluegrass lawns.  Acres and acres of the green grass.  And this grass is thirsty.  This is also a huge drain on our water supply in the commercial world, keeping golf courses green.  Recently, a grade school child saved a city that he lived in millions of dollars, just by suggesting they turn down the pressure on water fountains and bathroom sinks in public parks.

Water will be the next scarce resource that human beings are going to fight over.  How are you going to help?

The Flip Side of The “Lap of Luxury”

Come on. Really?
I was at the King Soopers the other day and there wasn't one brand of recycled toilet paper. Not one. Most of the stores at least stock Seventh Generation, but on this day, at this time, nothing.
There is NO conceivable reason that toilet paper needs to be made from virgin pulp. Especially considering Americans use 7 Billion rolls per year!
Considering where we are going to use it and where it's going to go afterwards, Post-Consumer recycled paper should be more than adequate. I'm pretty sure my backside isn't impressed by a “scented” paper, but my nose may be farther from my target than some other people.
Tell the manager of your grocery that you not only want recycled paper, but that you want choices. Get your friends to do the same. Call it a “movement”.
Lets wipe this problem out and flush it away.