Our World and Everything in It

.If you remember the Pig Poo Who Knew blog I did quite a while ago about the horrendous amount of pollution caused by industrialized farming, specifically Smithfield Foods, than you will want to see this. The Michigan Chapter of the Sierra Club has created a 24-minute documentary about an industrial farm in Michigan. The tape is in DVD or VHS format for only a $10.00 donation. I’ve sent for mine but am afraid to view it. What I wrote about in the Pig Poo blog was bad enough.  As a video, it might be too graphic. Not to mention suffering animals, which is something that is totally unnecessary and I don’t want to see. That’s the problem for most of us; we don’t want to see it. But it’s there. In the past 15 years it’s been discovered pigs are highly intelligent yet in that same time span our supposedly ethical society allows animal factories like these. It is a testament to our hypocrisy.

I received my energy bill for this past cold blast. I’m on an energy reserve system so I’m lucky. I said lucky not happy. I use MXenergy that locks in my rate at $.851 which is the rate after the @ and ccf amount.  This is the url http://www.gasgeorgia.com/mxenergy/plans-prices.html, if anyone is interested in locking in for the next 3 years at $1.19, which is higher than my .851, but I switched the end of summer 2005. I’m surprised the prices aren’t higher than the $1.19.  Prices change weekly, so 7 days from now it might change.

 
 A reminder also, this rate is  locked in during the summer which usually drops to a lower rate of $.30-$.40’s. So know this, you will be paying the higher rate of $1.19 instead of those low $.30’s. But then most of us don’t use much natural gas in the summer. If I can get my husband to put up a clothesline, I’ll have no problem drying my clothes that way. Whites get soooo bright dried in the sun, and that wonderful smell. I’ve always got something drying on my deck railing. I don’t turn the oven on in the summer either. The grill is king.  So it’s all about what individual needs are.  If the only gas you use is for heat, than go for it.  Your regular energy service will charge a fee to carry the stuff to you, but it’s small. If I had over 2000 sq. ft. to heat, I would definitely look into this plan.  I would manage to install a couple of solar panels inconspicuously somewhere on my roof to save on my electric bill also.  See Bob Vila’s site for a good explanation as to how these panels really work, http://www.bobvila.com/BVTV/Bob_Vila/Episode-0224.html. They work like the shingled panels I want to invent, darn it.

 
What the episode explains is that just two solar panels can cut your bills significantly. These aren’t big black panels that stand up like road signs.  They look a little like skylights now. My shingled panels would be a whole lot better but don’t exist yet.  Unused electricity from your energy provider is stored. The solar panel electricity is used first. Stored energy registers back as a credit and that little wheel on your meter goes in reverse. Imagine that, especially after this past cold snap.

 
If global warming continues there will be more and more erratic weather. Global warming doesn’t mean everyone everywhere is going to fry. Other places will freeze according to fluctuating jet streams. A jet stream dip allowed the past freeze to drift down from Canada on us. It’s better to be prepared. Keep your fingers crossed spring doesn’t show up looking good only to turn into a monster. Tornadoes are worse than snowstorm, or are they? What do you think? What would be worse, a tornado or hurricane?

DTE Energy had a good article in Monday, Feb. 19^th Business section of the Free Press. The title was DTE’s Monroe Plant gets pollution control. The subhead said upgrade would bring facility in line with EPA mandates.DTE is spending $1 billion for scrubbers to reduce sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and mercury emissions and one catalytic reduction unit in advance of the governments requiring one. This is a start only and quite frankly those scrubbers should have been there all along.

MAKE NO MISTAKE this catalytic reduction unit and all the scrubbers around do not reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions. Nowhere is CO2 mentioned. Only the above will be removed. So this is what $1 billion buys? Do not confuse this with gasification plants where all emissions are trapped and stored. It’s still not a very good system but better than this. This $1 billion project does nothing to help global warming, only mercury, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide emissions. So the purpose of the big article in the same paper with Al Gore on the front-page…SPIN.

It’s best to stay informed, so as not to fall for the semantics of perpetual polluters. $1 billion dollars toward a new hydrogen facility would be easier to stomach and should be our prerogative considering the cost will somehow be handed off to us. We’re back to the control factor and being at the mercy of Big Energy and their decision making process of which we will ultimately pay dearly.

And as far as our illustrious EPA in this administration, get a load of this. It’s like something out of a soap opera.  Gale Norton was the head of the Department of the Interior, which oversees the EPA. Under Norton was Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles. Further down the line was Sue Ellen Wooldridge Deputy Chief of Staff to Norton. Here’s where the fun begins. Griles became a target for criminal prosecution in connection with corruption and lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He was the highest-ranking member of the administration to be targeted for corruption. He resigned and went to work for, of all things, Conoco Phillips as a lobbyist. Conoco Phillips is the third largest integrated energy company in the US and the fifth largest refiner in the world. Meanwhile, Norton promoted Sue Ellen to Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources despite the fact she was grilled about her relationship with Griles during the Interior’s investigation of him. Senator Ron Wyden asked her about this in writing. She didn’t answer the question honestly even when her new position would actually oversee the department’s ethics office watching Griles. For Pete’s sake, they live together in a condo in Virginia!
 
It gets better. An investigation by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee found another love nest between Griles and Wooldridge with a third party, Conoco Phillips. It seems Conoco Phillips VP Donald Duncan, Griles, and Woodridge chipped in together to buy a million dollar plus beach vacation house in South Carolina.  Duncan owns 50%, with Griles and Wooldridge pitching in 25% each. The house was purchased before Wooldridge allowed Conoco Phillips to postpone a half billion-dollar pollution cleanup. I wonder where that was?  This is the most unethical love triangle in government yet. Of course Wooldridge resigned last month. Gale Norton resigned last year I believe. I wouldn’t be surprised if they all turn up working for an oil company down the line. It would make an interesting research topic. It would be a who’s who as to former Bush administration officials now working for Big Oil after resigning their government positions on the heels of an investigation. I bet there would be more than a handful of names.

In view of this little soap opera, EPA mandates are questionable at best. This group of strange bedfellows appears to have compromised the very core of ethics within the EPA. DTE’s billion dollar plus investment to meet EPA standards loses a lot of water in this light. Add the fact that CO2 wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the cleanup, I have to ask what’s the real purpose if not to mislead us into thinking everything is clean and tidy.
 
 

 
I just wrote the blog “Cruisin” last week and this week Trafigura, a Swiss trading Company, paid $22 million in fines to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Africa for dumping 500 tons of oil based waste off their coastline. The ship was a Greek owned tanker under Panamanian flag. According to the N.Y. Times, the waste that was “a fuming mix of petrochemicals and caustic soda — that started out in the Mediterranean and ended up in Africa could have been safely disposed of earlier in its journey.” It went on to say “Without strict, and strictly enforced, international rules on waste disposal, dangerous cargoes will find the course of least resistance, least cost, and least regulation, scarring the lives of some of the world’s poorest, worst governed and most defenseless people.”

 
100 people died. 100,000 had to seek medical treatment. Trafigura had $28 billion in revenues last year. The ship traveled from the Mediterranean to Amsterdam to unload the waste safely and legally. However, the disposal company found much more toxic waste than originally estimated to do the job for $15,000. When the Dutch company wanted $300,000 instead for the cleanup, and there may have been as much money wasted in delays, the ship went off looking for a cheaper place to dump. So they went to Africa. $28 billion in revenues and $300,000 to $600,000 in cost was too much for 100 lives and 100,000 people made sick. Nice, real nice. Trafigura deserved the $22 million fine. Of course they point fingers at the government there. And the government claims they didn’t know how much toxic waste was really unloaded. The Abidjan government has fallen as a result of its protesting citizenship.

 
Africa appears to be the dumping ground for many things these days. Oil fields are ruining both the Niger Delta and Nigeria from the interior and now a tankard is caught dumping around the exterior. Poachers run rampant killing endangered animals for everything from Gorilla hands, to ivory tusks, to a “bushmeat” trade for chimpanzee steaks. I think the N.Y. Times should have included scarring some of the world’s most wild and beautiful land and animals, as well as, most defenseless people in its article.

 
This should make us pause to think how easy it is for one tanker to make 100,000 people sick. This was no virus. This was manmade. Yet so many of us are still resistant to the fact man pollutes enough to adversely affect our environment. The Abidjanians didn’t suffer and die from natural causes in this case. We should not be smug in thinking our government wouldn’t allow such a thing either. Would this be allowed for a price? We spew pollution into the air everyday for a price. We pollute our ground and water with chemical runoff for a price. Industrialized farming does it with animal waste for a price. I think some people think our environment is a giant composter. Put anything out there and it will miraculously turn it into something good and useful again.

It’s just not so.       

 
As citizens we should not be lead down the path of only one alternative energy plan. It will be as costly as oil. Ethanol is good as an interim, but it’s a fact that if we never export another kernel of corn, grow endless fields of it, we cannot produce enough to fuel ourselves.

 
The shift to ethanol is the narrow-minded attempt to produce an alternative energy source by an administration directly tied to oil. They only think in terms of energy as something that can run down a pipeline. Pipelines that connect us all for better control.

 
What’s the need to be connected this way? It’s just another type of monopoly by one side of the energy industry again. Control is the key word. I’m tired of it. Wait until we get our heating bills next month. Think control again. That word seems to be the driving force behind the Bush push to ethanol. Corn is just going to go up like gasoline when demand hits for something we already know we cannot possibly supply. Gas will fall and the administration will say we should use oil again. It’s the only viable source.

 
I answered a comment to someone about procrastination working against us. Not all energy companies are dragging their feet about change. They stand to do better than their competitors in the near future because of it. BP has invested in solar energy, bio-diesel fuels from soy and vegetable oils, and wind power.  GE and Dupont have also invested billions into the green.  Check out this website for alternatives http://www.solarenergy.com/. There’s good info there.

 
I ran across some simple solar power a few years back. I was looking for a no money source to heat my pool into October. I hate giving up summer. I found some ingenious systems that employ thermostats and valves. Everything runs on solar power. Since my pole barn sits next to the pool with a great big roof… There were none of the ugly black panels involved either. Check out some solar gadgets and a small, for home use, wind turbine (Japanese of all things) at this site http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/category/solar-powered-gear/.

 
My dream invention is solar shingles. The shingles would appear as normal but in panels of 4 x 4 sheets. There are new conductors out there. Italy has come up with organic conducting material from blueberries. Read about it on the solarenergy site.  It eliminates silicon altogether which is the expensive element that drives the cost up. And the panels are more flexible. So my dream shingles might be made of the stuff of blueberries. They would be wired from the back. The wiring goes through the roof to fuel cells in the attic. All my house wiring connects to the fuel cells. Each fuel cell runs a circuit. Of course my husband threw a wrench in my idea right from the start.  He asked about snow. Maybe the shingles would keep the snow melted? So the bugs aren’t out of it yet.  I’m no inventor. 

 
Imagine a house with wind turbine and solar power and no utility bill. There would be no fear of blackouts or grid problems. And every time we turn the lights on a billow of smoke from a stack somewhere would be a thing of the past. This is what strikes fear in the hearts of members of the oil and coal industry who haven’t bothered to branch into the green.Their logical push is to ethanol. Don’t let them hem us in on what should be a new and varied market.

 
Anyone else got a dream invention? You know, stuff you think up but never follow through. I bet there are a lot of would be inventors out there. I wish my dad were alive, he was one of those few who would give it a go.

With the world’s largest cruise liner, the Queen Mary II, parked on our west coast, and our temperatures dipping to below zero, many of us are thinking sea, sand, islands or maybe a cruise. There are 230 cruise ships operating worldwide. All of them run along coastal waters somewhere. They can carry as many as 5,000 passengers although most carry around 3,000.

 
I’ve been on two. One was 17 years ago through the Caribbean all the way to South American. The other, in 2000, was a small cruise ship referred to as a ferry through the Greek Islands. It’s about the only way anyone can see a group of islands at once. Even if you fly to a central location, you’ll still end up ferrying to the outer islands. If you’ve ever been on a cruise, you soon realize it is a small city. Somewhere along the line with all the people, all the food, all the drinks, you have to wonder where all the garbage goes. But after a few more cocktails you reassure yourself that there must be laws that hold all these ships accountable. And there is, well sort of.

 
We’ve seen investigations about people missing from cruise ships on TV lately, about viral outbreaks and the like. And we’ve witnessed very little accountability for those missing human beings, so garbage is a joke. Most of the ships are floating foreign countries. Making any of our laws stick requires the ship be at our shoreline, otherwise, oh well.

 
According to  http://www.surfrider.org/a-z/cruise.asp, “a 3,000-passenger cruise ship generates the following amounts of waste on a typical one-week voyage:

• 1 million gallons of “gray water” (from showers, sink, laundries).
  
• 210,000 gallons of sewage (black water).
  
• 25,000 gallons of oily bilge water
  
• Over 100 gallons of hazardous or toxic waste (film processing, paint, varnish)
  
• 50 tons of garbage and solid waste (food, packaging, plastic)
  
• Diesel exhaust emissions equivalent to thousands of automobiles
  

These ships take in large quantities of ballast water also, which is seawater pumped into the hulls of ships to ensure stability. This water is typically taken in at one port and then discharged at the ship’s destination, which can introduce invasive species (ZEBRA MUSSELS) and serious diseases into U.S. waters. A typical release of ballast water amounts to 1,000 metric tons.”
 
Ships have marine sanitation devices to prevent raw sewage from release. Sewage is supposed to be treated first and cannot be dumped within 3 miles of a shoreline. Much of the other garbage is incinerated. The rule for dumping any garbage is 3 to 25 miles from shore not to include plastics, or hazardous waste. Everything is supposed to be recorded in a Garbage Record Book.
 
So far, Royal Caribbean was fined $33.5 million for bypassing the sanitation devices and dumping toxic waste.
Carnival was fined $18 million for repeated dumping and put on probation
Norwegian Cruise lines was fined $1 million and another $500,000 to environmental orgs. for falsifying records for dumping oily, toxic waste near Florida.
Carnival, Princess, Royal Caribbean, and Holland America were fined for discharge of ballast water at the shoreline of San Diego.
 
None of the above were fines for a one-time incident but multiple abuses over a course of years. The sad thing is it’s all preventable. The laws exist, the technology is there, but enforcement is weak. Whistleblowers have come forward in most of these cases. I think all of this can be rectified with bigger fines to be given to environmental organizations, and demand. The cruise industry is growing by 8% a year. Hit the cruise lines with a 2-month moratorium and watch them pay attention. Accountability lies in the demand/power of the people most of the time.

Am I the only one or does that little RSS feed that looks like a ticker tape along the bottom of the TV screen aggravate anyone else? I’m trying to listen and read at the same time. It looks like the new way to slip bad information in on us.

I’ve been gobbled by Google. I can’t believe it. I was doing a little research for my next blog. I wanted to give DTE the benefit of the doubt as to whether they trap their CO2 emissions (gasification process) from their plants. I searched Michigan coalburner info.  The second and third header under that search said My World and Everything In It. Well stupid me thinks, hmmm someone’s got the same title as me—until I read blogsmonroe.com. Holy cow, I’m listed in a Google search. Of course it’s the blog about “Who’s Stalling.” I think the politicians mentioned got the attention, not me. But I’ll take it. When I clicked on it, it brings up my web blog in general.

 
Back to DTE. Well so much for benefit of the doubt. I went to the homepage of their own website, clicked corporate, and clicked environment. http://www.dteenergy.com/environment/2004/pdfs/history.pdf#Carbon. It brought up a PDF file that states in a header “Carbon dioxide emissions are expected to increase somewhat over the next 15 years.” Somewhat? What’s somewhat? Their website had statistics. “In 2004, Edison power plants emitted 43 million tons of CO2—25% increase from 1974, but a 10% decrease from 1987.” They do employ a CO2 offset program that lowers emissions a little, but they don’t explain how it works. They are trying to eliminate other larger particles and SO2. They do not use the gasification process that traps all emissions and stores them. It is too expensive.

 
We are back to something Erich commented about in a blog, with which I agree. We will be charged for everything. We will suffer most of the inconvenience. My last blog addressed this. Why does the public always pay for bad decisions by corporations? Corporations should be held accountable. No, I don’t think we should ignore global warming. That’s not an answer. Gore’s movie isn’t called “An Inconvenient Truth” for nothing. The longer we procrastinate about change, the more we argue about whether or not it’s true, the more we are going to be inconvenienced. Our lives will be the most miserable as a result. The wealthy will suffer less no doubt. Get off your duff and start complaining to politicians. That’s how our country is supposed to work. Don’t be afraid to do it. Heck I’ll give you the number to Capitol Hill for Levin: 202-224-3121 and Dingell: 202-225-3121. Someone always answers. They take down everything you say. No muss. No fuss. The squeaky wheel thing works. It’s always worked. Whiners win if only to shut them up.

 
The biggest reason I was checking out our coalburners and general air pollution is because a new study by the New England Journal Of Medicine have published findings that women are more at risk from air born pollution than men. The results are higher rates of various cancers, emphysema, lung related diseases, etc. Women are 76% more likely to suffer heart attack or stroke than men from air born pollution. The magnitude of the findings is substantially higher than in prior studies. It was a long term study of 65,000 post menopausal women regardless of weight, smoking, cholesterol, or blood pressure. Women have smaller coronary arteries. They suffer greater risk. The study also measured areas of the country with the highest levels of air pollution. Detroit-Warren-Flint area is #6 of course. The report did state that instead of moving from the high pollution area; try to reduce risk factors we can control. Are they saying we have no choice about our air quality, that we just have to eat it.  That’s not the way it’s supposed to work in this country. That’s more like capitalism dictating to us.