Reverse the brainwashing

Buying a very high milage car, new or used, i.e. Prius, Civic Hybrid, or a high milage non-hybrid car isn't the key to happiness but either is owning a SUV.

The reasons you have convinced yourself not to buy one.

(Assuming you have the "appropriate" funds and need to buy a car.)

Waiting for the car manufacturers to come up with a miracle as in a plug-in hybrid or a fully electric vehicle that is "practical and affordable."

Kept calculating the costs of your current car vs the costs of the "Prius" without calculating the actual and very real environmental cost differential caused by the significant difference in MPG.

Convinced yourself you need the "whatever" that another car with a much higher MPG can't give you, i.e. enough seats for 8, (even though you almost always drive alone), enough horsepower to tow a small house, enough speed to win the Indy 500, enough status to get you a movie deal and enough of whatever the advertises think you might need to make you feel happy.

Owning a "status" car will not make you happy. (I know you are thinking that even a Prius has become a status car but even that will also not make you happy. But it will lower the negative environmental impact of most people's driving habits.) You are not genetically hard wired to achieve happiness from owning a "status" car. As I previously mentioned you were brainwashed by advertisers to think owning a "status" car will bring happiness. Before the 19th century cars didn't even exist and people still found happiness. In fact, I know this might not exactly be a practical idea since our entire transportation system would need to change but I believe that most of us would be happier if we could just toss our car into the recycling bin.

This previous explanation holds water with many other products besides cars. You don't need chlorine bleached toilet paper, surfactant filled dish washing liquid, artificially perfumed hand soap to bring about internal bliss. But...how do you feel when a beautiful butterfly glides by? Brings a sense of wonder and elation, doesn't it.

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45, 000 Uncertified Abandoned Wells

"The report, (from the Alberta Environment),  said there were more than 45,000 uncertified abandoned wells at the end of 2008, compared to less than 25,000 uncertified wells in 2001."   Calgery Herold, July 26, 2009.

Drilling more than before, making a bigger environmental mess, still not taking responsibility and we get stuck with the dilemma.  The "drillers" and their money can't be bothered. They are off to wreck someone else's backyard.  Do you think the CEO of XYZ oil company has a rig set up in his backyard. 

Actually the joke is on all of us now, except some of us just realize it.  I guess some thought they could go back to their ranches in Texas or wherever and clear some brush, hike around and say they were concerned about the environment. 

But now it's inescapable, the destruction is everywhere.  Actually it always has been everywhere it was just easier to ignore.  Sure there is some progress and more people are concerned but please don't fool yourself.  Big brother is watching out for his self.  Big brother will just keep moving further away and will change the channel or gas will stay under $3 a gallon. Please don't wait until you can only find a polar bear in the zoo.

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Songbirds, Bees and Butterflies, going, going....

Just read a revealing and enlightening commentary on our society's disregard for the negative effects that industrialization has had on our environment.  

Commentary: Remembering Songbirds, Bees and Butterflies.

Will we really wake up one day from our partially self-induced delusional daze and realize that the essential and irreplaceable are gone?  Wondrous inhabitants of our shared planet becoming extinct within the blink of an eye after having been here for thousands of years.  

Partially self-induced unless you believe humankind is sub-consciously suicidal. Don't believe it's possible for "someone else" to manipulate hundreds of millions of people into being self destructive?  We are living it right now in Iraq. The cost will be permanent in terms of "lives" and dollars regardless of the outcome in Iraq and in our "battle" to save and then restore our environment.

The author, Dale Bryant, mentions the old wives' tale about the frog that won't notice he's in a pan of boiling water so long as the water is cool in the beginning and heats only gradually. That seems frightening true for many people when you examine the behavior of most of our society but there are some who have looked over the edge of the pot and can see the flames. We should listen to them when they tell us that there isn't much time left before the water starts to boil.

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We have poisoned breast milk

How many people know that women have poison in their breast milk?  Please be honest, no one can hear your answer unless you scream it from your rooftop like I just did, just tell the truth: Did you know that women have poison in their breast milk. 

Call me uniformed, naive, foolish, whatever,  but this morning I read an article stating how by banning certain substances that are used in manufacturing and agriculture the amount of poisons that are currently found in breast milk has been reduced.   So now we can really call ourselves members of a civilized society because we were able to reduce the amount of poison found in breast milk. 

So now I will say what is hopefully on everyone's mind who is reading this blog. 

What in God's name is poison doing in breast milk!!

Breast milk is arguably the most sacred substance on earth.  Without it life would not exist. (Except of course for artificial breast milk; but a discussion of that would bring us off topic, though not completely off topic when you really think about it.)  

Why did we do this and for those of us who weren't completely aware of this, why did we allow this to happen?  You have heard of mind over matter, well this is money over life.  Like in the movie "Damn Yankees" we have sold our soul to the devil.  Greed has ripped the humanity for ourselves and everything around us right out of our being. 

We don't own our lives, life is a gift to us as is the earth and everything on it.  

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Cap & Trade Bill, it passed but do you understand it?

The cap & trade bill passed on June 26th and  will have an enormous effect on our environment and economy. I have seen polls that say more than 50% of people in the US don't really understand it and so thought it would be very important to discuss it here.  

I found a debate transcribed on pbs.org that explains the bill and the possible results from both perspectives, pro and con, with clarity and sophistication and without too much political rhetoric.  I will present a slightly condensed version of the debate below. 

I am for the bill, as one would know if you had read my previous blogs,  and will insert my comments in "red".  

The debate is between Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the Institute for 21st Century Energy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress and is moderated by Judy Woodruff of PBS.

DANIEL WEISS: This bill is about two big things: first, shifting investments into clean-energy technologies of the future, wind and solar power and energy efficiency; second, it's about saving consumers money.

EPA just came out with a study earlier this week that said it would save the average household about $84 in utility bills every year, and so it's going to create jobs, and save people money, and, by the way, fight pollution.  

And "by the way, fight pollution", what do you mean by the way...that's the whole point!!!!  And what does pollution cost us?  How much money is poured into the health care system to pay for the effects of pollution?

JUDY WOODRUFF: Karen Harbert, you point out that you and the chamber want cleaner energy, but this is the wrong way to do it.

KAREN HARBERT, U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Well, we do think it's the wrong way to do it. We want to have a cleaner environment, but we also want to have a healthy economy.

And I'm afraid that this legislation will make it more expensive for businesses to do business here at home. It will make them less competitive overseas. And that's not really smart policy, and particularly not at this economic juncture in our... 

What about an environmental tax on imports whose manufacturing processes create more "pollution" than products made in the US produce.  Is Karen saying if others countries get to pollute then it's ok if we do? If US manufacturers are held to a higher environmental standard than manufacturers overseas then either don't bring the products in or charge them a pollution tax.

T

he issue of cost

JUDY WOODRUFF: Why do you think it's going to cost businesses more? The president today was arguing that ultimately Americans are going to pay less or, in the short term, Americans are going to pay less for energy.

KAREN HARBERT: Well, the reason the bill is 1,200 pages and growing as we speak is because it's very complex. And they're proposing a number of offsets to industries that are going to bear more costs. And if they're going to be bearing more costs, they're going to pass those costs onto the consumer.

American business is not in the business of philanthropy, and so they're going to have to have somebody pay for these things, so it's going to be the consumer and the taxpayer.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The consumer is the one who's going to pay the bill?

DANIEL WEISS: Well, I appreciate Karen's arguments, but the Congressional Budget Office and EPA said the cost is going to be small overall, about the price of a postage stamp for overall products costs. And for electricity, the average consumer is going to save money. So I'm going to listen to the CBO and EPA and their independent analyses of what this bill will do.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said that what this will do is this will actually jump-start our economy and help get the recovery going because it will stimulate investments in new industries.

JUDY WOODRUFF: How do you know that's wrong?

KAREN HARBERT: I don't know that mandates stimulate anything. Mandates are mandates to change behavior, and they're going to bring up costs for the business community to actually operate. If energy is going to be more expensive and products are going to be more expensive, that is, frankly, a cost that the consumer is going to bear.

So the cost of the postage stamp, though, is interesting. The Congressional Budget Office said, We didn't take into account what was going to happen after 2020.

2020 is when all the allocations aren't free any longer and there's real costs, so I'd like the CBO to actually do an analysis of the full bill and take into account some of the job losses that are going to go overseas.

DANIEL WEISS: Well, it's important to note, they also didn't take into account the savings from reducing the threat of global warming: fewer droughts, fewer floods, less smog, less tropical diseases. None of that's included.

Yes!!!!! Thank you. How much does a drought cost? What is the cost of smog? Those are the real costs!!!  The same can be said of toilet paper made from either virgin forests or post consumer paper, as I have said many times.  The price at the cash wrap is not the real cost. We have to think of our children and grand-children.  How much will a drought cost them.

Nor does it include energy efficiency. So the number is a conservative, cautious one that doesn't include many of the benefits of this bill.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, in other words, there are other savings in this bill that aren't even...

DANIEL WEISS: That's right, that no one calculated

How cap and trade would work

JUDY WOODRUFF: Let's talk just briefly about cap and trade. Most people still don't exactly understand how it would work. Explain how it would work and why you think it's positive.

DANIEL WEISS: A cap-and-trade system is a tried-and-true mechanism that we use right now to control the pollution that causes acid rain. What it does is, it puts a limit on pollution, and everybody has to have a permit for every ton of pollution they emit. The less you emit, the fewer permits you have to buy, and the more money you save. The more you emit, the more permits you have to have.

KAREN HARBERT: It's a very simple mechanism; that is without a doubt. But I don't understand why that takes 1,200 or 1,400 pages to explain it to the American public.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But is your disagreement that people don't understand it or that you think the way it works is not the way that will serve your interest, the interests of members of the Chamber of Commerce who you represent?

KAREN HARBERT: Well, quite frankly, we've seen it operate in Europe, and it caused price increases in Europe, it caused job-shedding in Europe, and we still haven't seen any environmental benefit from that. In fact, CO-2 has gone up in Europe.

So we have a living, breathing example right across the Atlantic Ocean. We should learn from that. We should do this smartly. It's not that we shouldn't do something; we just need to do it more smartly.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Dan Weiss, we heard the president say that this is going to create jobs. How can you be certain that it will do that?

DANIEL WEISS: Well, we did an economic model, done by the University of Massachusetts, that factored in all the provisions in this bill and calculated it will create at least 1.7 million new jobs. And these are jobs in things like manufacturing of steel, the construction industry, people going to work putting in new windows. These are jobs for the most part that can't be outsourced.

And, Karen, you'll be pleased to know that people are starting to catch on to cap and trade. The Washington Post just had a poll today that said more than half the people in the country support cap and trade as a way to reduce global warming pollution and about 75 percent support action now. So you'll be pleased to know the American people are catching on.

Unfortunately we won't really know if this works until implemented for a number of years. And, not to constantly repeat myself and bore you to death but all the costs need to be calculated including the environmental costs.

Effects on the U.S. economy

JUDY WOODRUFF: What about the jobs question, though, about whether jobs will be created and, if so, how many?

KAREN HARBERT: You know, there are as many analyses of this bill as there are flavors of ice cream. The National Black Chamber of Commerce also did an analysis and ran an economic model, and its conclusion was, after you take into account the green jobs that it may create, we're actually going to lose between 2.3 million and 2.7 million jobs.

So I think your question is a good one. How do we know? And what is the right answer? We need CBO and others to do a thorough economic analysis of whatever this bill is going to look like tonight.

Exactly, how do we know?  But if we wait until the Republicans implement a plan it will be too late.  The Bush II administration left us 16 years behind, 8 years destroying any legislation that could help the environment and/or the economy and another 8 years of wasted time that the economy and environment could be improving. 

JUDY WOODRUFF: Just quickly, Karen Harbert, the president also said that this legislation provides assistance to businesses and families to make the transition to cleaner energy. Do you buy that?

KAREN HARBERT: You know, I'm not sure that's good news that right now what we're proposing is that it's going to be -- the costs of complying with this regulation are going to be so high that now the taxpayer has to pay American business to stay in business. I'm not sure that really makes sense.

Why is the taxpayer paying American business to stay competitive? So it means that the regulatory scheme is too onerous and too expensive to just stay in business.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What about that argument?

DANIEL WEISS: Well, we've used this system before to reduce the sulfur emissions that cause acid rain, and it came in at one-quarter of the price that EPA predicted, not to mention the even more higher price that the utility industry predicted.

I don't know what she's talking about with taxes and people paying business and all that sort of thing.

What this bill does is, it provides a smooth economic transition for companies and families to move into a clean-energy future. As the president said, the country that controls the clean-energy technologies of the future are going to be the ones that dominate the world economy.

We're behind. We've spent eight years doing nothing. Germany leads in solar energy; China's going to be leading in wind. We need to catch up. And this bill will launch the investments that will do that.

Exactly!!

KAREN HARBERT: The American economy is actually number one in wind. We produce more wind than any other country in the world, and I hope that continues to grow.

But when you take wind and solar together in this country, they provide 1.3 percent of the nation's electricity. So we need to approach this thoughtfully, constructively, and don't rush it so that we bankrupt our economy.

Bankrupt our economy, that's so ironic that she would say that. Our economy is already bankrupted thanks to in large part the previous republican administration who's political philosophy is similar to hers.  The republicans screamed deregulation and it's screaming it now. Well what happens when you let these large corporations run amuck.  She is right, "American business is not in the business of philanthropy".  Most of them are in the business of short term profits.  And who pays for the mess they create?  We do, the consumers, the taxpayers.  We get to pay for cleaning up the mess now and we are sick and tired of it.  Lets keep them making a mess now so our children don't have to pay for it latter.

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I left my compost in San Francisco

If San Franciscans can do it we all can certainly do it. The city just pasted a resolution that asks, not really asks since a small fine will be imposed if someone doesn't comply by 2011, their citizens to put all their compost material into a third bin provided by the city.  

To dispel any notion that this is some sort of socialist plot to ask people to do something that is not for their individual short term gain and also that somehow is related to Obama's campaign promise to keep our the country's economy from collapsing, consider what happens to food scraps and plant clippings in our landfills. Methane.  Methane is very very bad stuff. It is 20 time worse of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.  Greenhouse gasses cause global warming which is suffocating our earth and really pissing off the polar bears and every other living organism, including humans, not to mention possibly eventually making our home, the earth,  no longer inhabitable.  This eventuality might sound a bit far fetched to you so please read my blog from the 20th of July which lists a few of the known effects of global warming.

The people and city of SF walk the talk.  They have 2020 as their goal for zero waste. Every city on the planet should have the same goal.  Reducing or eliminating methane is not the only benefit of eliminating landfills. 

A June 2008 report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group focused on environmentally sound community development, said a zero waste approach is one of the fastest, cheapest and most effective ways to protect the climate. Cutting waste sent to landfills and incinerators would be like closing 21 percent of U.S. coal-fired power plants, the report said.

By the city's count, it currently diverts 72 percent of its waste, best in the nation. If recyclables and compostables going into landfills were diverted, the city's recycling rate would jump to 90 percent.

Lets hear it for the people by the bay.

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Global Warming is Real

On July 17th I explained how deforestation contributes to global warming.  Some people don't believe that or at least have their doubts so I will present some indisputable facts and let you decide.

Every time we cut a tree down we release carbon into the environment and remove the ability of that tree to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.  Carbon is a greenhouse gas which means, along with other gases in the atmosphere, it forms a barrier and traps heat as it is radiated from the earth. The more heat that is trapped the hotter the earth gets. If we, humans, put more carbon into the atmosphere than would normally be there by burning fossil fuels and deforestation then the earth becomes hotter than it normally would be.  Please take a look at the following facts from National Geographic and other scientific organizations.

• Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

• The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850.

• The Arctic is feeling the effects the most. Average temperatures in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average, according to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report compiled between 2000 and 2004.

• Arctic ice is rapidly disappearing, and the region may have its first completelyice-free summer by 2040 or earlier. Polar bears and indigenous cultures are already suffering from the sea-ice loss.

• Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana's Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere, thaws also come a week earlier in spring and freezes begin a week later.

• Coral reefs, which are highly sensitive to small changes in water temperature, suffered the worst bleaching—or die-off in response to stress—ever recorded in 1998, with some areas seeing bleach rates of 70 percent. Experts expect these sorts of events to increase in frequency and intensity in the next 50 years as sea temperatures rise.

• An upsurge in the amount of extreme weather events, such as wildfires, heat waves, and strong tropical storms, is also attributed in part to climate change by some experts.

The report, based on the work of some 2,500 scientists in more than 130 countries, concluded that humans have caused all or most of the current planetary warming. Human-caused global warming is often called anthropogenic climate change.

• Industrialization, deforestation, and pollution have greatly increased atmospheric concentrations of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, all greenhouse gases that help trap heat near Earth's surface. (See an interactive feature on how global warming works.)

• Humans are pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere much faster than plants and oceans can absorb it.

• These gases persist in the atmosphere for years, meaning that even if such emissions were eliminated today, it would not immediately stop global warming.

• Some experts point out that natural cycles in Earth's orbit can alter the planet's exposure to sunlight, which may explain the current trend. Earth has indeed experienced warming and cooling cycles roughly every hundred thousand years due to these orbital shifts, but such changes have occurred over the span of several centuries. Today's changes have taken place over the past hundred years or less.

• Other recent research has suggested that the effects of variations in the sun's output are "negligible" as a factor in warming, but other, more complicated solar mechanisms could possibly play a role.

What's Going to Happen?

A follow-up report by the IPCC released in April 2007 warned that global warming could lead to large-scale food and water shortages and have catastrophic effects on wildlife.

• Sea level could rise between 7 and 23 inches (18 to 59 centimeters) by century's end, the IPCC's February 2007 report projects. Rises of just 4 inches (10 centimeters) could flood many South Seas islands and swamp large parts of Southeast Asia.

• Some hundred million people live within 3 feet (1 meter) of mean sea level, and much of the world's population is concentrated in vulnerable coastal cities. In the U.S., Louisiana and Florida are especially at risk.

• Glaciers around the world could melt, causing sea levels to rise while creating water shortages in regions dependent on runoff for fresh water.

• Strong hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, and other natural disasters may become commonplace in many parts of the world. The growth of deserts may also cause food shortages in many places.

• More than a million species face extinction from disappearing habitat, changing ecosystems, and acidifying oceans.

• The ocean's circulation system, known as the ocean conveyor belt, could be permanently altered, causing a mini-ice age in Western Europe and other rapid changes.

• At some point in the future, warming could become uncontrollable by creating a so-called positive feedback effect. Rising temperatures could release additional greenhouse gases by unlocking methane in permafrost and undersea deposits, freeing carbon trapped in sea ice, and causing increased evaporation of water.

Even if you only partially believed one the preceding facts how wrong could you be if you, as in all of you, took one tiny step to possibly decrease the rate at which global warming is proceeding.  

You don't even have to drive a little less this week but slow down, just ease your foot off the accelerator just a fraction of an inch and and burn a gallon less of some fossil fuel or buy some toilet paper made from post consumer paper and save some trees from being eliminated by deforestation.

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More on deforestation & global warming

Yesterday I wrote how deforestation contributes to global warming. This is a follow-up for yesterday's blog explaining in more detail how deforestation drastically increases global warming.  

It is vital to understand this since many companies make a very lot of money turning virgin forests into toilet paper and therefore will publish some very convincing PR to keep you using their unnecessary product when companies like Seventh Generation are producing an equally as good product not made from virgin forests. 

It is well known that the US and China are numbers 1 & 2 on the list of countries that emit the most carbon into the atmosphere. #3 on the list is a shock, Indonesia. Indonesia has very little industrialization compared to the US and China but it is #3 on the list because it has lost 40% of its forest since 1950.

Here is the scientific explanation from Roger D. Stone's article in the Washington Monthly on why Indonesia is #3 on the list: (please read this slowly and a couple of times until you understand this, its extremely important...you never know when there might be a pop quiz), Plants remove carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere and turn it, via photosynthesis, into organic matter: leaves, bark, roots, and so on. This "fixing" process is most intense in dense tropical forests, which cover only 7 percent of the earth’s dry land but store (in the plants themselves and in the rich soils below) about 45 percent of all terrestrial carbon. Chopping down the rainforests removes this carbon-absorbing buffer while releasing vast amounts of stored carbon into the air as the brush is burned off.  

So not only does deforestation remove carbon from the atmosphere but it releases stored carbon into the atmosphere.  One of my favorite analogies to this is the Bush II presidency. Not only do we have to make up for the 8 years he spent removing environmentally protective legislation but we have to make up for 8 years of the benefits those pieces of legislation would have provided for the environment. So we actually have 16 years of beneficial environmental work to make up.  The same goes for carbon: If we continue to practice deforestation we are crushing our atmosphere twice with one blow. 

The bottom line is: Use toilet paper and paper towels made from post-consumer paper!!!!!!  You have absolutely nothing to loose and everything to gain, as in "Saving our Atmosphere", not a bad return for such a simple act.

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Deforestation causes massive global warming pollution

"Deforestation causes more global warming pollution than all the combined emissions of cars, trucks, buses, airplanes and ships in the entire world." Allen Hershkowitz, Senior Scientist NDRC.

Please read the above sentence over again just to make sure it is absolutely crystal clear to you because when I first read this I didn't believe my eyes. I bet you one case of post-consumer toilet paper that if you asked 100 of your closest friends what causes more global warming pollution; deforestation or the combined emissions of cars, trucks, buses, airplanes and ships they would all say the combined emissions. 

The following forests are at risk because of a product you use for an average of 3 seconds: ancient forests, old growth forests, virgin forests, second growth forests, natural forests, high conservation value forests, temperate forests, tropical and sub-tropical forests and boreal forests.  Literally millions of acres destroyed in Brazil by cutting and conversion for the manufacture of pulp made into toilet paper and other tissue products by Kimberly Clark and Proctor & Gamble. 

Before you buy another roll of virgin toilet paper and paper towel please think about the real cost of what you are doing, not just the actual price you pay at the checkout stand, but the "earth cost". 

Antibiotics for healthy animals, another absurdity

"The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans. " New York Times, 7-14-09

Feeding antibiotics to healthy animals to encourage growth so the meat industry can make more money off of each animal.  But what about the customer's health?  What kind of insane customer service is that.  Possibly poisoning your customers so you can make more money in the short term.  Don't you want to keep your customers healthy and/or alive so they will come back and shop again.

(Not to try to convince you not to eat meat regardless but; FYI from John Hopkins University:  Cancer cells thrive in an acid environment. A meat-based diet is acidic and it is best to eat fish, and a little chicken rather than beef or pork. Meat also contains livestock antibiotics, growth hormones and parasites, which are all harmful, especially to people with cancer. )

Unfortunately this short term approach has been frequently used in many industries.  Convince customers they have to use their cleaning products if they really want their dishes, clothes, etc. really clean.  But don't tell them that what makes for clean dishes makes for dirty oceans. Maybe they should think long term as in longer life span and healthier happier lives. A novel approach for some, not for Seventh Generation who's been doing just this for decades.

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Simple Lifestyle Changes vs. Extravagant & Costly Ideas to Tackle Climate Change

A festival was held in Manchester UK this spring to provide a public forum where anyone could present their ingenious ideas to tackle climate change.  All ideas were given a forum, from incredibly sophisticated and expensive to simple and immediate. 

The professor who invented one of the first machines to harness wave energy proposed having a fleet of ships to spray seawater into the sky to increase cloud cover which could reduce the earth's temperature. 

Another free thinker proposed tipping large amounts of lime into the ocean. This, he claimed, would increase the sea's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as well as reduce the dangerous acidity which has also been a byproduct of decades of emissions. 

The idea I liked the best came from a psychotherapist who led "carbon conversations" to encourage people to change their high carbon lifestyle.  So very simple and inexpensive it seems literally insane for everyone on our planet not to engage in such discussions.  Multiply the carbon lifestyle changes of these few people by a billion or so and the reduction in global warming could be astronomical and immediate. 

Anyone care to help save a couple of million trees?  How about some toilet paper made from 80% post consumer paper?  It's really as simple as that.

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Corporate Transportation and Global Warming

Fascinating article in the NY Times discussing public transportation and how the poor planning and implementation of has significantly contributed to global warming.  

Unlike many cities in the US cities located in "third world" countries have taken it upon themselves to tackle the problems of global warming caused by corporate driven transportation systems.  The article describes how almost a decade ago the city of Bogota, Columbia built a Bus Rapid Transit system that has allowed the city to remove 7000 smaller buses from its roads reducing the use of bus fuel and the harmful exhaust by 59%.  

Versions of these systems are being planned or built in dozens of developing cities around the world — Mexico City, Cape Town, Jakarta, Indonesia, and Ahmedabad, India.  

And now for the startling fact:

Subways cost more than 30 times as much per mile to build than a B.R.T. system, and three times as much to maintain. And bus rapid transit systems can be built more quickly. “Almost all rapidly developing cities understand that they need a metro or something like it, and you can get a B.R.T. by 2010 or a metro by 2060,” said Walter Hook, executive director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, in New York.

Aren't taxpayers funding a subway system in Los Angeles?  How did that project get funded and who's benefiting from that?  We need to control our own destiny and take it away from people who are using our money to benefit themselves.

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We must do our part to make up for the irresponsibles.

What you don't know about could kill you.  

They were so many underhanded environmentally harmful actions taken by the powerful that we who care have no choice but to work harder to make up for their irresponsible actions.  The following story illustrates one of many behind the scenes actions taken by Bush II during his 8 years of anti-environmental policies. 

"A recent meeting was the latest action in a long-running campaign aimed at influencing environmental standards for perchlorate and implementing major new cleanups and liability costs for the military and its subsidiaries.  It all began in an obscure but powerful office established by the Bush-era Department of Defense."  Environmental Health News, 7-8-09

Ray Dubois, a Bush pentagon official from 2001 to 2004 created the Emerging Contaminates Directorate.  Basically this was a Bush Ploy to allow the Pentagon to influence the EPA.  Dubois wanted the EPA to get out of the Pentagon's way.  For example, allow Pentagon contractors to release a chemical called Perchlorate into the environment during manufacturing even though it could adversely effect human health.  

Hopefully Obama will remove the Emerging Contaminates Directorate.  But how many other similar departments were created during the Bush II years?  Can the present administration eliminate or even find them all.  

Sound hopeless, but only if we stand still.  You can rest when you, your children and their children are safe. 

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Climate Change Impact on Hunger

"Climate change's most savage impact on humanity in the near future is likely to be in the increase in hunger … the countries with existing problems in feeding their people are those most at risk from climate change," Oxfam International.  

Fortunately, my family, friends, and I have plenty to eat. I never have had to think about going without food. But, for many people hunger is just a normal way of life. If we all could put our wants and desire aside for just a brief period of time, we could help stop this unfortunate lifestyle. 

A simple way to contribute to helping those going without a meal and preventing climate change is to buy green friendly products. 

Important questions before you make a purchase:

 Did the manufacture of this product contribute to global warming?  

What is the real cost of the product, not just the actual purchase price but the global price? 

 Was the product manufactured, including all packaging, by using organically grown materials and/or with the highest post consumer material possible?  

Will any of the ingredients of the product cause environmental harm while they are being used or after their use? 

Help fight hunger by stopping global warming.

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