Our World and Everything in It

A report about the Colorado River and benzene was on BBC and I caught some of it, but the articles I found about it are extensive. BBC previewed a citizen singing a country song about poisoning his water with benzene. I guess people are just giving up the fight against big corporations taking over areas and punching holes in the ground for natural gas.

The article explains the process to obtain natural gas. I had no idea how toxic it is. “Each hydraulic fracturing attempt on a gas well uses about 1 million gal of fluid and most wells are “frac’ed” about 10 times, said hearing witness Theo Colborn, president of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange, a nonprofit group that focuses on health problems from low-dose chemical exposures. Many different chemicals—including surfactants, lubricants, foamers, plastics, biocides, antioxidants, acids, and alkalis—are employed for fracturing operations, she said. These chemicals are added to alter the underground strata to allow methane to escape up the well pipe, she said. Her group has identified 171 products used in Colorado containing altogether 245 different chemicals, 92% of which have adverse health effects, she explained. She went on to say the chemicals have multiple health effects as developmental toxicants and endocrine disruptors that have adverse affects on hormones in the body.

There are lots of side affects. “More than half the volatile chemicals on the list Colborn’s group has identified irritate the skin, eyes, nose, lungs, and stomach. Some affect the nervous system, causing headaches, blackouts, and memory loss, she explained. ‘About 55% can cause cardiovascular and kidney damage, and 35 are carcinogens,’ she noted.”

Meanwhile, another article discloses how badly this particular natural gas exploration is beating up an entire area as well as leaching dangerous chemicals into the Colorado River. The implications are bad considering the Colorado is the only water supply to the four fasting growing states in the southwest. All that population explosion is dependent on this river, which is bad enough, let alone contaminating it too.  “Green activists blame the Bush administration for opening the door too widely for energy companies, a charge backed up by a trail of executive orders and administrative actions, as well as the 2005 Energy Policy Act approved by a then-Republican-led Congress — all geared toward deriving more energy from public lands.”

 http://pubs.acs.org/cen/government/86/8606gov1.html

http://www.saveroanplateau.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=68&Itemid=36

After last month’s heating and electric bill, I posted a blog that I was going to make an effort to pay attention and see if I could lower my bill by $50.00. Didn’t happen, although the electric bill did come down $10.00, my overall bill remained the same $300.00 combined. Since the weather dipped to some pretty low numbers and we had several blustery days with wicked wind, maybe I didn’t do so badly? After all I don’t skimp on heat. I average between 70 and 72 degrees, and have a wall furnace in the back of the house that is always on half way. Relative to people who live in sheer frigidity, I’m doing rather well. 

The reason my bill didn’t climb with the dipping temperatures and windstorms is because of sun power.  I’ve made a concentrated effort to use the sun whenever it’s out, and despite a lot of snow here in Michigan, and that awful wind, it’s been sunny a lot. The sun is already hot. If you have any decent size windows facing south, open the window coverings and let it flow in. If your front door gets a shot of sunshine in the afternoon and has a storm door, open it. Then shut the thermostat off!

I cannot believe how my house stays heated long after the sun’s strength is gone. I found out because I forgot to turn the thermostat back on, more than once. I can open the drapes in my living room with 12 ft. of southern windows, and shut off my thermostat at 12:30 pm in the afternoon and not turn it back on until 5:30 pm at which time it still reads 70 degrees. My thermostat is off right now. It’s 5:00 pm. That’s around 5 hours of absolutely no gas use by the main furnace. I don’t turn up the heat from the wall unit in the back either. If I’m using the oven for cooking later, that’s an even greater bonus. When I’m done cooking and turn the oven off, I open the door a little. Why waste that heat? 

Open the front door too if it faces south. When I open mine, the heat hits me like a blast furnace. My cats sprawl their carcasses out full length in the little foyer. Now that’s some heat. Try it.  Use it!  It just bothers me a little at just how hot the sun really is, but then again, it’s March in Michigan and next week could sprout a 70-degree day.

If you normally keep your house lower than my average, you’ve got to see savings from turning off the heat for 5 hours, whenever it’s sunny. The reason I don’t just turn the thermostat down is because the northern portion of the house will cool down a little and still trip the thermostat. I also have room fans to circulate the heat down to the floor. Don’t forget to reverse the spin or the blades to keep your fans working for you in the winter, as well as, summer.

You’ve got nothing to lose by trying this, but a large heating bill.  If you’re away at work, get a programmable thermostat, open your window coverings before you leave and let the heat shut off around noon. You won’t know the difference when you get home. 

I got my heating bill the other day, was going to blog about it, and have lost it. Does that mean I don’t have to pay it? I know. It was higher and I figure everyone else is suffering much, much worse. My bill combined with $78.00 for electric was $303.00, I think. That’s what they’re getting this month anyway, since I’ve lost the bill. I looked at my bill enough and compared it to last month’s bill that it’s pretty much memorized. There was a funny charge on there, one from 2005, and another just like it for 2006. They were small, like $1.46 or something but the 2006 charge wasn’t on last month’s bill. Are we going to find one for 2007 on the next? I don’t like when things just appear on my bill that weren’t there before.  It looks like something was passed back in 2004 or sooner that is just now showing up. Sneaky.

The total bill was $60.00 higher than last month, granted it has been cold, but we just had January thaw 3 weeks early. It lasted long enough for my Jack in the Pulpit plants to grow large and green in my flowerbeds. We found fruit trees budding. I think we just stopped paying attention to our habits relative to our bigger bill. Slip up a little and it shows big. We have a small gas wall unit in the back of the house. The main furnace and the wall unit should never be turned up at the same time. Since this last bill, if I’m home and it’s sunny, the main furnace gets shut off for at least 2 hours in the afternoon. The reason? I have twelve ft. of windows across my living room facing south, and the tree out front is a Maple, no leaves. If I open the blinds, I can feel the heat. I say utilize that sunshine, solar panels or not. I also turn the heat down when I use the oven. Don’t waste that toasty warmth when dinner is done; open the oven door until it cools down. Make sure and block drafts under doors. Clothes drapes and blinds at night or windy days. Reverse the blades on your overhead fans to keep heat from lingering around the ceiling.

Pay attention. I didn’t, and it showed up on my bill, and quickly. Take advantage of everything you can to lower your bill. Some energy companies are offering a choice to consumers to lock in a low rate over a few years. I just received an offer from IGS Energy to lock in a rate of 0.849 per CCF. CCF is the per unit cost of your gas bill.  Look at your bill. It should be way beyond point anything right now, more like 2.80. Ouch! I would say any other source that can guarantee a year round price of anything 0.9 or lower is a really good deal. I presently have MxEnergy and have one more year at 0.851 CCF. MichCon charges me a fee of course, something like 37.00 of my $225.00 gas bill went for carrier costs, but hey my bill is still lower than most. IGS is presently offering the lowest rate. If you sign up with MxEnergy now the cost per unit will be 1.069. Realize that the locked in price is year round. It will be above the going per unit rate for gas in the summer. That is why it’s important to keep that per unit cost under 0.9. If you pay too much for gas in the summer it offsets your savings for gas in the winter, the same for carrier charges. But, I think it’s a safe bet to say that over the duration of the next 3 years that 0.849 CCF will beat anything out there for wintertime rates.

I’ll  blog next month when I find out if paying attention pays off. Considering how cold this past week has been, I’d be happy to get another $300.00 bill. If I can actually lower it by paying better attention to our habits, and without suffering, it will be worth the effort.

I finally broke down and bought a new gas range and gas dryer today. I put it off because I have a habit of keeping things as long as they work well. Keep them looking nice and hey, they’re vintage. I also have a propensity for anthropomorphism, which is endowing inanimate objects with a human or animal persona. You know, fishermen refer to their boats as she and give them names. Ditto for vehicles. We can also get too attached to our homes, like they are part of the family or something, well, with feelings anyway.  For me, it is anything that has given me years of service that is still hanging in there. My range and dryer are 22 years old!  I haven’t named them but have had them an awfully long time. Of course each piece has had a minor repair or two through the years but nothing to speak of. Things were just made better back then.

I don’t like my new refrigerator, washer, or dishwasher as well as my old. Newer things are made so shabbily. There are all types of plastic parts on them that break. Even though there aren’t any kids running around my house, and I maintain things well, parts broke on my fridge the first year I owned it. And a funny thing happened to the washer. I bought a washer with a stainless drum inside, but on the outside of that is a plastic drum. It’s pretty thick plastic, but not thick enough. One of those studs used in a nail gun worked its way through one of those tiny drain holes in the stainless drum, then proceeded to score the spinning outer “plastic” drum enough times that water eventually poured out of the bottom during a rinse cycle.

Going to buy two new appliances because a good deal was to be had wasn’t a good motivator for me either. I will miss my old range and dryer, well not so much miss as feel bad they are going to be destroyed. They still work. If they didn’t work, it would be a whole different story. I thought about donating the appliances, but they are so old the trip would probably kill them.

I was assured at the store that the appliances that are hauled away are recycled. Good to know. I looked around and found that most major home appliances consist of about 75 percent steel. Scrap steel is needed to make new steel. Steel manufacturers count on recycled material as do copper, aluminum, and zinc manufacturers. So I’m helping the steel industry. Do we have a steel industry? I also found an old article that stated: “According to the Environmental Protection Agency, using recycled steel results in an 86% reduction in water pollution and a 97% reduction in mining wastes.” Who knew?

So my fear of filling a landfill with my old appliances is no longer relevant and I can think of all this as a rejuvenation process for them. Good then.  Out with the old, and in with the new. I cook every night.  I deserve a new stove. As for the dryer, I use it as little as possible. I hang my clothes out in the summer. But my winter dryer bill should surely drop. I made sure I purchased a dryer with moisture sensors so that it doesn’t stay on any longer than necessary. Oh, and I did get a good deal.
 

Over the weekend a discussion about prices of natural gas came up. Why is natural gas so high priced? It isn’t a petroleum by-product or anything. And we’re supposed to have plenty of the stuff. Well by time I looked everything up, it turns out we have a natural gas shortage on the way. Production of natural gas has been declining for a while. Hurricane Katrina didn’t help the offshore drilling for natural gas in the gulf either.

What I found while looking to find why natural gas prices are high is that most of our power plants are fueled with natural gas. So when we use electric, natural gas is used in massive amounts by that industry. An article in Rolling Stone about all types of fossil fuels stated: 

 American natural-gas production is also declining, at five percent a year, despite  frenetic new drilling, and disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the  acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for electric-power  generation. The result was that just about every power plant built after 1980 has to  run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate  matters, gas isn’t easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a  vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at  minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified)   at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to  site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe  targets for terrorism.

Not good. I also caught an article about Conoco Phillips being prepared to fund a new natural gas pipeline off the north slope of Alaska through Canada to us down here. It would cost over 30 billion dollars. But it wasn’t clear the route they plan to take and the environmental impact this pipeline would make. The article made it appear CP wasn’t concerned with government funding for the project, which usually means they can circumvent any major regulations, by the government.

The NRDC had an article particularly about any proposed pipelines for natural gas out of Alaska. Are they on their toes or what? Until everyone gets the details of just how Conoco Phillips plans on building this pipeline and through where, everyone needs to rethink yet another unrenewable fuel.

Despite everything I read, our demands are so high that if the energy source is not renewable on a mass scale, we are just buying ourselves a quick fix not a cure. Read all the articles below. They each give a perspective. I can see that there just may be an alternative in the mix that will keep the environment safe, offer a tremendous service that will give us enough natural gas until we come up with a permanent fix, not to mention a lot of jobs will be created for that pipeline. It’s little too early to tell if this is a good feasible idea.

I know I like to stay warm in the winter, and prefer gas because I live in the country. My mother always said to have a gas stove in the country. You will always have food and warmth if the power fails. We also have a wall unit with no electronics. If the pilot is on, I have heat even without electricity.  But I’m hoping that with so many incredible advances I’ve seen and read about, we might not need a pipeline anytime soon. I have to think that maybe by time that pipeline is finished, it could end up being an outmoded energy solution. What I do know is that we better get moving on something we can all live with well into the future.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7203633/the_long_emergency

http://www.nrdc.org/air/energy/rep/chap3.asp.

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/bus?guid=20071130/4750ea50_3ca6_1552620071201-448662628.
 

 I just read my National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) newsletter and thought I’d pass on some of the latest news. There is a new plan—again—to sell off some of our national parks. It seems the U.S. is shy of money, (the war), and this is one of the ways this administration plans on making up some of the deficit. So why not sell off some of our national heritage, and to who? … the wealthy of course. Some prime habitat in Greater Yellowstone for bears, elk, and wolves, part of the Greater Cumberland Plateau, all in all 270,000 acres of national forests over 35 states may be up for grabs.
 
     If we sell off all this forest land, continue to have the forest fires that seem to increase every year, strip mine for coal, extract oil from tar sands which also strip mines large swaths of land, and continue the urban sprawl, what do we expect will happen? There is an awful lot going on behind the scenes that everyone assumes has cleared up. Well guess again. The war in Iraq overshadows much.The arctic drilling is not a dead issue either.
 
The Bush administration is eyeballing the Beaufort Sea, a year round polar bear habitat just offshore of Alaska’s Arctic national Wildlife Refuge and Western Arctic Reserve. Does reserve mean anything anymore? I thought we were supposed to be getting past the idea of oil?  Not going to happen until we get an oilman out of office. We have a president that says we need to get away from our dependence on oil and the drills are literally poised to ruin pieces of pristine land everywhere.

Take the tar sands oil development, which is supposed to be one of the most destructive mining techniques of all. The process involves strip-mining large swaths of land and Bush is prepared to offer tens of thousands of acres of it near Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument and Glen Canyon wilderness. The terrain would be irreversibly altered forever.

To keep practice up for war games, the Navy plans on blasting thousands of square nautical miles with what is described as “ear-splitting” mid-frequency sound on sea mammals who are trying to survive in their ocean habitat that we are polluting with mercury and garbage from cruise ships to freighters. Coal mining threatens to strip the Rocky Mountain habitat of grizzly bears by taking 40 million tons of coal out of the Flathead River Valley by the Cline Mining Corporation. I’ve talked about the abuse of land from coal mining where mountaintops are literally removed. The plan will establish waste dumps and settling ponds right on top of the headwaters of the Flathead River in BC. It may be happening in Canada but the trouble is that it threatens wildlife downstream in Montana’s Glacier National Park and poisons the watershed region of the Flathead River.

And finally, the federal government threatens the revived wolf population again. I guess they think the wolves were only useful during the last election for scare tactics about terrorism and continuing the war that no one seems to want any longer. First we let wolves populate, and then brutally kill them off. To me it smells of canned hunts. There is no reason to attack wolves en masse this way. It was seen on TV that wolves are territorial. When a recording of another pack is aired via loudspeaker the experiment worked. Wolves that were predatory in that particular area stayed away. There are many humane ways to do business that this big moral society bypasses. If you really care about the wolves contact Governor “Butch” Otter of Idaho and tell him what you think of him. He wants to take the first shot at the wolves and to eliminate at least 75 percent of them. Ditto for the wolves in Yellowstone Park. Remember that big battle to allow them to come back. We did, and now those in power want to kill them off again. See what I mean about playing games with their lives. They were used for the last election, and now abused by the users.

I think we’re all feeling a little abused these days.

Eminent Domain is a well-known issue in Monroe County. Signs “No Eminent Domain” sprouted across lawns in Erie against the railroad. Michigan is one of nine states with ballot issues in the recent election that resulted in restricting eminent domain. We know the problem well. Eminent domain is a landowner’s worst nightmare next to Mother Nature. It strips a citizen of property rights in a blink much like a tornado that is seen and gone.

Frank Eathorne, a 3^rd generation rancher in Wyoming voted for Bush-Cheney and didn’t mind the big oil and gas boom that brought jobs and

royalties to the state. He figured it couldn’t be all that bad, until it hit home. Frank thought he owned 32,000 acres. Turns out he only owns the grass on top. The federal government owns most of what is beneath. Washington has no ethics where oil is concerned. Frank built a new home in a far corner of his property to get away from the noise of 40 oil wells, 80 miles of pipeline, and 3 railroad tracks.

Why should we care? Frank voted for the environmental grinches. The federal government is doing this everywhere though. In a year-end push, the Republican Congress is going to hit the floor in support of anything big energy. Our national parks and forests are up for grabs. “The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Forest Service have been selling long term leases of wild, pristine public lands to oil and gas companies determined to lock them up for development for decades,” Earthjustice Newsletter Dec. 2006. The federal government wants to poke around our public lands without review of consequences for the environment. Some examples:

• The BLM tried to lease the remaining 389,000 acres of previously protected land in Alaska. The entire Arctic coast in Alaska outside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would belong to oil and gas developers.

• Clinton’s Roadless Area Conservation Rule was tossed. It protected 50 million acres of wild national forests and grasslands from building roads, logging, and development. It was a powerful tool against developers. A federal court judge has only recently reinstated it.
• The Bush Administration has habitually tried to permit drilling in the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming
• The BLM is trying to open 90% of New Mexico’s Chihuahua Desert to drilling. It is a biologically diverse desert ecosystem and an energy developer’s land grab.
• In 2005, the Forest Service opened up 52,075 acres to new drilling in forests.

Closer to home, the AuSable River’s South Branch area is being threatened by Savoy Energy. Michigan’s Dept. of Environmental Quality approved a permit to drill near the secluded spot. The state owned 5,300 acres of wilderness surrounds miles of the AuSable’s South Branch. It is the Mason Tract and one of the greatest trout fishing areas in the lower 48. George W. Mason, an auto industrialist donated the land to preserve the experience of the river and the wild. The state owns the top land. The federal government own the subsurface mineral rights. This area is in trouble. A road was started, destroying the old forest area of the south branch. Earthjustice has halted the progress for now.

How do the feds get around drilling in areas that are protected? It’s called slant drilling. If they can’t legitimately let big energy drill somewhere, they lease the surrounding land to set up slant drills. They drill at an angle into the ground beneath the protected land. Los Padres National Forest has 20 such drills around one end of its perimeter. Some of the drills are positioned near sensitive habitats. One is near Lake Piru already listed as impaired by the EPA. It’s not just about a couple of drills.  As Frank found, there are also deep wells and miles of pipeline. Expanded oil drilling in Los Padres will also emit 12,179 more pounds of air pollutants per day.

This is an awful lot of activity on behalf of fossil fuels by the federal government. Aren’t we  repositioning ourselves for new sources of renewable energy? It looks like we’re hearing the old “fork tongue” again.  We need to voice our concerns to congress and push for alternatives. We need incentives for companies that think green. We need to stop the demand for fossil fuels that gives the wrong people power.  Our land has been high-jacked. The song says “This land is your land, this land is my land.” And I want it back!

 
 
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